The Jared Chronicles | Book 4 | The Devil's Bastion, page 30
part #4 of The Jared Chronicles Series
Jared pointed a finger in Cody’s direction. “Why don’t you take that rifle of yours and take Stephani’s place at the OP. You can reach out farther with that thing than she can with her rifle. Steph can come back and help lock this place down.” Jared gave John a sideways look for confirmation, to which John simply nodded his agreement.
Cody didn’t say a word, turning and leaving at a jog toward the OP. With nothing left for them to do at the cabins, Devon also left, leaving Jared and John standing in front of the remaining members of their little community. Crank tried to follow the departing teen, but Devon scolded the dog back toward the cabins, where John scooped him up, tossing Crank inside a cabin, where he would stay until Devon had been gone for a while.
“Essie,” Jared called out after the dog was secure.
Essie came out of her cabin, her rifle over her shoulder like a toy soldier. She walked up to Jared, staring expectantly into his eyes. “What?”
Jared reached a hand into his pocket and retrieved four fully loaded ten-round magazines for Essie’s rifle. Holding them out, he began going over the rules. “There are forty rounds here, after that you’ll have to reload. Safety on unless you’re going to fire the weapon; finger off the trigger unless you intend pulling it.”
Essie usually had something to say, and Jared was waiting for it, but today, Essie dutifully listened as she took the magazines from Jared, inserting one in the rifle’s magazine well and dropping the other three into her jacket pocket. Next, Jared handed Essie a small box containing two hundred and fifty additional rounds for the little rifle.
“If something happens and you end up burning through one or two of those magazines, take the time if you have it to reload them,” Jared admonished. “Don’t get caught with an empty rifle. Have Shannon help if you can’t do it yourself.”
Essie took the box of ammo and nodded her head in agreement. “I’ll take care of everyone here,” she said with an air of confidence in her voice that somehow didn’t fit her small stature.
Jared drew her to him, hugging her hard. “I know you will, Ess.”
Shannon came over and gave Jared a hug along with a light peck on the cheek. “Be careful, Jared. Things haven’t been going our way lately.” Shannon fretted, her face drawn from the stress of their predicament, which was obviously weighing heavily on her.
“We will, Shannon. John and I will be very careful,” Jared promised.
Jared pivoted on a heel, and without another utterance, he and John strode out of the cabin encampment, heading southwest in an attempt to put some distance between themselves and the rest of their group. John and Jared would circle around to the south and make their way back into the area, moving slowly and taking time to observe their way back into the Del Valle Reservoir territory.
Chapter 26
As Jared and John walked, their belief was that Josh thought his presence remained a secret, when, in fact, even Jared was now fairly sure someone was out there snooping about. Jared could feel an unrest, some sort of disturbance in the short-lived peace they’d had at the cabins. Jared hadn’t been the first to feel it, but after John brought it up, Jared knew immediately someone was out in the hills.
John felt Josh would work hard to stay undetected from anyone in or around the cabins, but John was of the opinion Josh wouldn’t worry about his six o’clock so much. John was convinced Josh would keep a quick-reaction force in the rear, waiting for his orders, while Josh tried to get lucky and eliminate John with a single well-placed shot from a scoped long rifle.
John’s approach to the Josh problem was intellectual at first, studying the battleground through a map in order to start their search where John thought Josh would try to make his shot from. John didn’t want to bother with any positions overlooking the cabins since his thought was Josh would have to find a position far too close due to the constraints of the steep terrain surrounding the cabins. John maintained Josh would try to make a shot when they were loading into the boats since the landscape lent itself to a much longer shot, which was safer for Josh.
For an hour Jared and John walked southwest on the paved road leading out the back side of their cabin encampment, then turned east and climbed down the steep embankment leading into the creek. At the bottom, they crossed the shallow stream and clawed their way up the other side. Jared was sweating, and his legs burned with every step as he followed John up what seemed like the face of a wall. Thirty minutes later, they both dropped to the ground atop the mountain on the east side of the little creek.
They sat breathing hard, their backs touching as each man scanned one hundred and eighty degrees, searching for any sign of a threat. After his breathing slowed, Jared hauled out a fresh or at least dry pair of socks. After changing his footwear, Jared drank some water and ate a handful of dried venison. John was doing much the same behind Jared as the men multitasked. The crinkle of paper told Jared John was consulting his map.
“What do you think?” Jared whispered.
John rolled over to his side, spreading the map on the grass between him and Jared. “If I’m wrong, then all this walking could be a waste of time, but if I’m right.” John held his palms out, facing up. “And I think I’m right on this one. Josh will want to engage from as far out as he can while still maintaining a range for a high-probability shot. A thousand-yard shot is not an easy shot, and I don’t care what some gun nut says, it is a fucking hard shot to make and even harder in a real-world environment.”
Jared had learned a little about bullet drop along with how to operate the windage on his rifle, but for the most part the weapon was zeroed at fifty yards, and he kept the windage knob locked in the center position. If he was shooting and the bullets were impacting in a place other than his target, Jared simply adjusted his aim on the fly, something John called Kentucky windage. The fact was, Jared largely didn’t understand long-range shooting nor most of the minutiae associated with it.
“So how close will this guy have to be?” Jared asked, scrutinizing the map.
“Between six and eight hundo.” John indicated, drawing his finger in an arc across the map in what he guesstimated was roughly the same distance to the east of where they’d launched the boats from the previous two mornings. “Once we get closer, I can narrow it down to where I would set up, which is where Josh will be—I hope,” John explained.
“Based on cover?” Jared queried.
“Yeah, he won’t lie out in the open. He’ll want an east escape plan in case his plan goes south, stuff like that.”
“When this is all over, you’re going to have to teach me some of this,” Jared said, shaking his head.
“Ha, after I teach Devon.” John chuckled.
Following their steep ascent out of the creek, a short break for water and consultation with the map, Jared and John continued through the countryside, trying as best they could to use the natural cover the terrain offered, and when this wasn’t possible, John and Jared used the vegetation to conceal their movement. The hills in northern California were a finicky thing, sometimes offering lush natural plants one moment and then wide-open grassy hills a squirrel couldn’t hide in.
In order to move forward in the direction of Josh’s would-be sniper position, it often required walking half a mile or more out of their way to be beneficial to their continuing unseen. Jared watched the backs of John’s legs as they walked, the rhythm of John’s gait helping to take Jared’s mind off his aching muscles. John, however, didn’t seem affected by the grueling hike even though he was carrying the same load out as Jared, plus the SEAL sniper rifle, which Jared had held in the past and knew was a heavy piece of equipment.
“Want me to carry the long gun?” Jared offered, then immediately wondered why he’d opened his mouth.
John stopped and unslung the rifle, handing it back to Jared, whose sour face brought a slight smile to John’s lips. “Didn’t think I’d take ya up?” He smirked.
“I liked the old John better,” Jared muttered, taking the rifle and heaving it onto his back.
“Yeah, I bet you do. Headstrong and stubborn worked before, not now,” John said, turning and moving out.
Over the course of the day, Jared and John took turns with the heavy sniper rifle, but whoever was carrying it brought up the rear so the lightest one had point. Much of their trek was spent pushing their way through heavily vegetated ground. Sometimes the brush was so thick, they crawled on hands and knees along trails made by coyotes or other wild animals using the brush to transition across the countryside.
Late in the afternoon, John halted deep in a ravine out of view from anyone not standing directly over the top of the two men. John pulled out the map, examining the details of the contour lines swirling about the map’s surface. John chewed on the inside of his mouth as his brain interpreted what his eyes were feeding it. Jared didn’t bother looking at the map as he kept a watchful eye on their surroundings. The closer they got to what they believed was a place someone intended on using to kill John, the higher level of vigilance both men practiced.
Jared marveled at how John didn’t seem bothered by the fact that a highly trained and dangerous man was hunting him—specifically. Jared was more than a little concerned, and he wasn’t even the primary target. There were parts of John’s personality Jared was jealous of and tried to emulate when he could, and there were other traits Jared would never entertain as using for his own. John’s calm under fire was a quality Jared wished he had more of. Jared briefly considered whether John was keeping everything bottled up and wasn’t as calm on the inside as he appeared on his exterior.
This thought bothered Jared more than he wanted to admit. Before the solar flare, Jared had worked for a boss named David, who conveyed the same calm exterior as John did in the face of a crisis, albeit the word crisis then didn’t carry the same weight as it currently did. Jared’s issue was David had died of a massive heart attack at the tender age of forty-eight years old. After David’s death, people who’d come up in the business with David described him as a human pressure cooker. Jared never saw that side of David, but the whole series of events was never forgotten.
Jared looked at his friend and wondered what was going through John’s shaggy head. Jared opened his mouth to speak, paused, thought about Claire, and finally spoke. “Hey, bro—you good?” Jared asked, trying to use John’s language of short clipped masculine talk, using words like bro and the final two-word question.
John looked up from the map, apparently puzzled by the out-of-the-blue question right in the middle of an important operation. “Where’d that come from?” John countered, failing to answer Jared’s inquiry.
“A dude is trying to kill you—you, not me, he’s intent on killing you and—well, you seem pretty unfazed by it all.”
John dropped the map, clasping his hands together, his fingers steepled and touching his upper lip as he studied Jared for a moment. “Jared, we’ve known each other for less than a year, but it has been under the harshest of conditions, and still you don’t know me?” John asked incredulously. “Since I was eighteen, people have been trying to kill me. I didn’t work in the regular world, so I got used to people wanting me dead. Overseas there were organizations who put up huge bounties on the heads of me and my mates—it was just something I got used to. We all sort of looked at it as a badge of honor—you know, we were such a valuable asset on the battlefield, our enemies were willing to pay for our removal.”
Jared sat back on his heels, listening to his friend’s explanation as to why John possessed a cool-under-fire persona. When John finished, Jared dipped his chin slightly. “I sure hope so, brother.”
“To be honest, the only thing that bothers me is thinking of killing Josh—I deployed with that guy three times. We hit doors, got in gunfights, kidnapped high-value targets, and basically flew around with our hair on fire. Back home we didn’t really see each other, but the time you spend fighting overseas is the stuff that binds guys together for life,” John finished, shaking his head almost sadly. “Friendships forged in the crucible of adversity are life binding, and, well…” John paused a second. “It doesn’t seem like an easy thing to break.” John breathed softly, his eyes a little vacant as he spoke.
“He’s the one who changed everything; just remember that. You are the same guy you’ve always been,” Jared confirmed.
John looked up, holding Jared’s gaze for a second before giving a small shake of his head and returning to the map. When John was sure he had the territory on the map they’d be traveling through over the next couple of hours committed to memory, he stowed the navigational aid in his cargo pocket and got to his feet. Jared was carrying the Mk 13, so John took the lead, heading up and out of the ravine.
A little over an hour before nightfall, John dropped to his hands and knees and began crawling forward. Jared also dropped to his hands and knees, not needing to be told. There was a light breeze, and the grass was nearly knee high even as it bent slightly, yielding to the forces of nature. John moved carefully on his belly to the crest of the hill they were ascending and drew the binoculars to his eyes. Jared shimmied his way up next to John, pulling the Mk 13 up between the two.
Jared and John spent the following hour glassing the countryside below their position in an overall fruitless effort that revealed nothing in the way of Josh’s whereabouts.
“He has two hide spots from what I can see from up here,” John suddenly announced in a hushed voice. “One of ’em will put him about six hundred yards out from the boats, and the other—” John paused as if to think as he swept his binoculars to his right “—a thousand—maybe eleven hundred. Both have good escape routes, so tomorrow when the sun starts up, we’re going to focus on the six-hundred-yard spot.”
“Where is it?” Jared inquired, hating the need to ask. He’d become used to hearing the distance terminology and even worked a few times with John on estimating range with no range estimation nannies like John enjoyed built into his optics. Jared was fairly comfortable with it all out to about three or four hundred yards. Past four or five hundred yards, everything looked like a thousand yards to Jared. John had originally showed Jared a couple of simple methods to use when estimating distance in the field, and Jared had practiced them, just not enough to become proficient.
John showed Jared one way in which Jared used his arm outstretched, thumb up, pointing at a targeted distance, after which Jared was to use one eye and then the other eye to sight in on his thumb. The exercise burned far too much time, and still Jared hadn’t fully understood what he was doing, so John transitioned to ranging an object and telling Jared the exact range so Jared could get used to what different trees, animals and other objects looked like at different intervals. This seemed to suit Jared much better, so John stuck with this teaching method.
“Down on that knoll just past the guardhouse there at the park entrance. If Josh really wants some standoff, then he’ll do it back up the road and on the other side.” John swung his pointing finger to the east, where there was another rolling hill four or five hundred yards behind the first knoll he’d pointed at.
Devon passed the OP, not bothering to interact with its occupants as he hurried to get free of the camping area. To Devon, the worst part of any mission John sent him on was getting out of the populated setting and into the countryside, where he could melt into the landscape and become the wraith he was. If Devon were to analyze his situation and how he felt in different settings, he would have laughed out loud. He truly felt more comfortable moving under the cover of darkness than walking about in broad daylight.
Devon experienced no fear of the dark as most people did, instead embracing its welcoming cloak of invisibility. He heard things at night far better than during the day, his ears somehow compensating for his eyes’ diminished abilities. Although his movement was held to a snail’s pace, Devon didn’t mind. He had not been an impatient person before the solar flare and hadn’t become one since the event. Creeping about the woods slowly and quietly was a must, especially with a dangerous man in possession of a scoped rifle lurking about. Devon shivered at the thought that maybe Barry had told the soldiers it had been he who shot the sniper on the hill a few months before.
John told Devon he’d shot one of the most dangerous men in the region and lived to talk about it. The man had been Josh, and Devon had failed to kill the man, only managing to put two holes in Josh’s backside. Devon shook the thoughts of Josh from his head and continued north into a large parking lot that skirted the Del Valle Reservoir’s western shoreline. Stopping, Devon took a moment to scan the lot for any sign of a threat. Devon didn’t expect trouble on this side of the reservoir, but carelessness could land him in an early grave.
Following a fruitless search of the parking lot and overgrown picnic area, Devon set out across the parking lot to the west, crossing the flat paved lot and continuing up into the tree-lined mountain. Devon would move through the trees high above the reservoir rather than stroll along the water’s edge, where his options for escape would be dramatically limited in the event he was contacted by Josh or the soldiers.
It took Devon most of the day to reach the far end of the reservoir. By the time Devon stopped high above the reservoir’s dam at the northernmost point of the reservoir, he was hungry and needed water. He took a few minutes to eat a couple of handfuls of trail mix and drink an entire bottle of water before getting back behind his binoculars in an attempt to plot his course across what appeared to be some very open area.
