The Jared Chronicles | Book 4 | The Devil's Bastion, page 35
part #4 of The Jared Chronicles Series
Walking back to the group Jared held at bay, John grabbed one of the M4s off the Humvee’s hood. “On your feet, gents,” John ordered.
When the men were on their feet, John tossed the inert rifle to Dane. “We’re going to take a little walk and reunite you fellas with the other three, then you’re all going to get the fuck out of here, and if I ever run across any of you and you aren’t doing the right thing, I will shoot you on the spot. I’ll give you the bolt when we get your buddies ready to go. You get five rounds so maybe you can shoot something on your way to wherever it is you’re going.”
John motioned the men toward the dirt road, then followed them as they made the short walk to where Chris and the other two soldiers were tied to the sapling. John pulled a folding Emerson knife from a pocket and tossed it to Dane.
“Cut ’em loose, fold it, and toss it back,” John said.
When Chris and the other two soldiers were free, they stood rubbing their sore wrists, their faces conveying their curiosity about what all the shooting had been about and where the other five soldiers were. Although curious, the soldiers knew the answer, but it was human nature to need to hear it.
John read their minds. “You’re down five—their choice,” John said, directing his comment at Chris. “You guys have a single rifle there, and I’ll give you five rounds to hunt with. I wouldn’t suggest going back to Carnegie.”
Dane’s mouthed moved, but no words came, so Chris spoke up. “What are we supposed to do with five rounds?” he challenged.
John tilted his head to the side. “Not my problem, man, but if I were you, I’d use those rounds to kill something you can eat. Make your own way like we are, and if our paths cross again—” John gave the soldiers a purse-lipped shrug “—I’m inclined to forget all of this just as long as you aren’t in the company of Carnegie or Josh.”
“We need the bolt for this rifle,” Dane pointed out.
“You’ll get it after you tend to your dead. Jared and I are leaving—with the bolt. When we feel we’re a safe distance out, I’ll build a fire and leave the bolt next to it—follow the smoke, fellas,” John concluded.
Back at the trailer, Jared stood guard as the soldiers began digging graves for their fallen brothers. John loaded all the radios and as much gear, including rifle magazines and ammunition, as he could reasonably carry in his pack. When John could fit no more in his pack, he traded duties with Jared so Jared could pack the rest of the equipment in his own pack. Having no more room inside their packs, John and Jared strapped the M4s to the outside of their rucks.
Ready to depart, Jared and John hefted their now much heavier packs onto their shoulders before tightening the straps and giving their shoulders several shrugs in order to position the packs into the most comfortable spot.
“Remember, boys, we aren’t the enemy. We see you again, and maybe we trade and act civilized toward one another,” John suggested.
“Help people; that’s how you’ll survive,” Jared added.
“He ain’t lying,” John added as he tossed Dane the rifle magazine containing five rounds as promised.
Together Jared and John turned and hiked out of the area, heading north first, in case the soldiers didn’t take their advice and reconnected with Josh somehow. If this happened, the soldiers wouldn’t have a good idea where Jared and John went. As promised, John stopped and built a small fire, got it going so the coals were nice and red hot before pouring a small amount of water over its top. The water caused a significant amount of white smoke John felt would be enough to signal the soldiers. John added a few more pieces a dry timber, then dropped a nice green branch on top of the fire. Before leaving, John fished a bolt carrier group out of his pack and placed it on a rock next to the fire.
“Let’s go,” John murmured almost under his breath. He was suddenly exhausted from the day’s events, both physically and emotionally.
Jared followed John as the two reversed their course, circling back to the south, careful to avoid any contact with the soldiers, who would by now be making their way toward the fire in hopes of recovering the coveted bolt carrier group.
“Hey, John, why did we leave the Humvee for them?” Jared asked as if the thought just came to him.
“They are walking, brother; I disabled that beast so we could come back after this is all over and use it.” John preened, a proud grin spread across his bearded face.
Chapter 30
Josh didn’t wait long to move from his initial hide site after sending the soldiers out of the area. If Buckley was out there looking for him, and Josh felt sure he was, then Josh needed to move before he was discovered and shot. Josh moved slowly, staying low, stopping to use his binoculars nearly every ten yards. The smoke at his soldiers’ location had not been accounted for, and when it happened, Josh went from feeling like he controlled the battlefield to a sense that the odds had shifted in John Buckley’s favor.
Josh spent the first hour moving so carefully he covered less than a hundred yards. At the top of the hour, Josh checked in with the soldiers, who were still moving to their alternate position. With nothing new to report, the exchange was brief. Josh rested in a depression just below a sort of ridgeline along a series of peaks and saddles with a wide view of the southern end of the reservoir.
Movement far below him brought the binoculars racing up to his eyes. A figure skulked through a thick patch of scrub brush, disappearing for a few seconds before reappearing in Josh’s optics again. Josh’s first thought was the figure had to be John Buckley until further examination of the person’s movement caused Josh to rethink that conclusion. Josh could see the person below Josh wasn’t out for a Sunday afternoon walk, by the way it ducked walked, crawled, and made frequent stops to look around, but the rifle in the figure’s hands appeared smaller than what Josh carried.
Additionally, the way in which the figure moved was off somehow, not moving as Josh would have expected John to move. It wasn’t that the figure wasn’t doing everything Josh himself would have done moving through the same area as the figure below him was, the movement was just—adolescent, Josh thought suddenly. Yes, it was a kid down there with what was probably a .22-caliber rifle.
Josh lowered the ten-power binoculars and pulled the rifle scope to his eye, dialing the power all the way to its maximum magnification. Josh’s field of view was radically reduced, and it took a few seconds of twisting the magnification knob back and forth to locate and zero in on the teenager below him. Josh had the range at a little over eight hundred yards, not an easy shot, but also not all that difficult either.
Josh studied the figure as it moved haltingly across the landscape below, and then it struck him like a lightning bolt—this had to be one of John’s people and not just one of them, but the one who’d shot him in the ass with a small-caliber round several months before. Josh’s hand flew to the bullet drop compensator and cranked hard, turning the knob to his eight-hundred-yard dope. Josh cranked the magnification bezel back down to ten power and swept the optic across the trees and other vegetation in search of any indication of wind direction and speed, all the while wishing he had a Kestrel weather meter to assist in killing this kid.
The wind didn’t appear to be a factor and was mostly swirling at speeds below three miles per hour as far as Josh could tell. While Josh searched for wind indicators, the figure dropped over a small hill and vanished from Josh’s view. Josh wasn’t too worried, figuring the teen would present himself again when he climbed the next set of rolling hills. Josh ranged several places he guessed the teen would show himself at, then sat back behind the rifle and waited.
After ten minutes, Josh switched back to his binoculars, sweeping the optics left, then right, and then out farther than he felt the teen could have gone in such a short amount of time. When after thirty minutes, the teen failed to present him with a target, Josh decided to stalk the area he’d last seen the elusive subject.
Stalking eight hundred yards in a basic Marine scout sniper school can take nearly three hours depending on the terrain. The three hours is enough time for most students to cover the distance, but they do it with no fear of being killed while in transit. Their only concern is being spotted by the instructors searching the designated stalk location for careless PIGs, which is what all sniper students are referred to prior to graduating the class.
Once a Marine has successfully completed the Marine Corps Scout Sniper school, he is awarded a 7.62X51bullet, called a HOG’s tooth. From that day on the Marine is referred to as a HOG. In Josh’s situation, he worried about the teen very little and more about John. Josh was eight, maybe nine hundred yards outside the teen’s rifle’s range, but John’s rifle would have a much longer capability, so Josh took his time moving down toward the reservoir.
The competitive side of Josh reveled in the game of hide-and-seek, battling with the more mature side of him that kept his movements slow and stealthy. At the top of the hour, Josh paused to radio the soldiers. The task interfered with his movement, but he also didn’t want to miss any vital intel the soldiers might run across. Once the soldiers were safely out of the area, Josh would make the comm checks every three hours, giving him more time to move about without worrying about checking in every sixty minutes.
The checks went on for a couple of hours as Josh continued moving in the direction he’d last seen the teen. Three hours later, Josh radioed the soldiers and was told they’d found a suitable spot to hole up. Josh announced the extension of time between radio calls, and the two parties signed off. Now Josh could focus a solid three hours on locating the elusive kid he’d seen a few hours prior. Try as he might, Josh was never able to reacquire the teen he’d spotted moving like a great cat through the hills. The last place Josh saw the teen had been near the south end of the reservoir, which made sense to him based on Josh’s examination of his map. Josh saw the campsite across the bridge and guessed John had chosen that spot as a base due the natural barriers the creek and reservoir offered in the way of protection and choke points.
Well, thought Josh, he’d go down there and see what there was to see. Maybe his plan of hunting Buckley had to be altered. Josh would go down and see if he could bring Buckley to him instead of searching all over God’s green earth for a man who wished not to be found. Josh would stalk down into the hills on the east side of the bridge where he could better evaluate his standing on the battlefield. If he was able to locate John’s friends, he’d consider what to do next at that time.
Three hours after the last comms check, Josh flipped the radio on and made a call to the soldiers. When no answer came, he waited a full minute and made the call again, but still no answer came. Josh made call after call for ten additional minutes before switching the radio off and sitting back to contemplate this new communications impasse. Josh ran through several plausible scenarios that would have resulted in the soldiers failing to monitor their radio during a designated check-in time.
One possible case was John was responsible for lighting the fire and had then followed the soldiers out of the area and somehow incapacitated them all, which Josh felt was thin considering the number of able-bodied personnel at John’s disposal. Even John would find it difficult to neutralize twelve heavily armed soldiers. Josh had seen the one teen, so that removed one body, leaving John with two maybe three people to engage twelve heavily armed soldiers.
Another possibility, and Josh grew angry merely at the thought of it, was mutiny. The soldiers could have taken the Humvee and left him out here. Driven off to their families or wherever mutineers go after selling out their brothers in arms. Josh discarded the idea of battery failure since there were twelve radios and only one was used every time the soldiers checked in. Battery life would be an issue on Josh’s end long before the soldiers experienced any dead batteries.
Warfighting was a fastidious mistress and one that wasn’t all that kind to those participants who demanded hard intelligence before they would make a decision. Those men and women either died in battle or got others killed by their inability to remain fluid by taking appropriate action based on bits of incomplete information. The talent was akin to being able to look at half the pieces to a puzzle and know what the final product would look like.
No one in battle ever got foolproof and complete intelligence; it just wasn’t a part of war. If somehow someone did receive perfect intelligence on an enemy, the moment they acted on the information, the enemy would adjust, making their perfect information useless or at the very least incomplete, bringing them back to square one. Josh would proceed as if the worst had happened, whether it be the soldiers were all dead or they deserted, it mattered not to him. They were no longer at his disposal unless somehow they popped back up on the radio, but until then Josh was solo and would operate accordingly.
Josh thought about an old-timer who’d told him and a bunch of fresh-faced Special Missions chaps that decisions on the battlefield had to be made, no matter what. The guy went on to say that if someone made a decision prior to having seventy percent of the information they needed, they ran the risk of being uninformed. Conversely if someone waited until they had acquired ninety percent of the information required, their actions would come too late in the fight. The old-timer’s message was clear that wartime decision-making was not an exact science, but if an operator were able to make those decisions as close to that seventy percent mark as possible, they’d have the best chance at success.
Josh took another moment to drink and eat two crackers from an MRE before continuing southwest, wondering what percentage he was even at. He estimated he was close to two hundred yards from where he’d watched the teen last, which served to slow his movement out of concern for being spotted. If John’s little band of shit heads was camped out in the site across the bridge, they would have lookouts, and they would be more familiar with the terrain than Josh was, having never visited the area prior to now.
This bit of unfamiliarity didn’t bother Josh since most of the times he’d flown, swam, parachuted, or walked into an AO, or area of operation, it was the first time he’d visited said AO. That didn’t mean he wasn’t careful and fully aware of all the liability that accompanied working in places he’d only seen on a map and in satellite photographs. Many times, Josh had studied maps along with high-definition photographs of an area, only to find nothing was as it seemed once he and his mates arrived on the ground.
Josh would take it nice and slow, checking all the boxes so to speak, as he moved closer to what he felt was going to be a campsite filled with women and children. When Josh came into view of the guardhouse located at the entrance to the Del Valle Regional Park, he stopped and consulted his map, deciding he’d cross the road and move to a small hilltop, where he felt confident he would enjoy a clear panorama of not only the bridge, but the creek, reservoir and surrounding terrain as well.
After Devon set the fire, he moved quicker than he normally would have, trying to put a safe distance between himself and the soldiers, who he was sure were already alerted to the presence of the smoke and therefore to his being close by. Devon put a fair amount of distance between himself and the fire he’d started, moving until he was sure he’d not be molested by the soldiers. Devon slowed his pace when he was nearly a mile from the soldiers and began taking all his usual precautions. Although Devon was being careful, something nagged at the back of Devon’s brain as he slithered through the brush, giving him the unnerving feeling someone was staring at him.
Devon could not make sense of the sensation he was being watched as he tried harder to melt into the land and become a wraith moving unseen and more like an apparition instead of a living, breathing human. The tickle at the back of Devon’s neck, no more invasive than a whisper telling him to go to ground, had grown so strong by the time he neared the bridge, Devon slid down a ravine and just waited, curling himself into a ball under a thicket of inhospitable brush.
When nothing appeared and the feeling of being watched evaporated slightly, Devon crawled on his belly down the ravine to the edge of the creek, where he crossed quickly before slipping into the tall brush along the creek’s edge. Devon wasn’t one to call out or whistle before entering the camp like John or Jared would do. Devon alternatively just appeared, seemingly out of thin air. Even Crank rarely heard Devon’s return to the community.
When Devon was within fifty yards of the cabins, he held up, searching for any of his friends. He found no one outside, but wasn’t overly concerned after John had suggested everyone stay inside and out of sight until his and Jared’s return. After several minutes, Devon made his way into the camp and knocked on Shannon’s door, knowing she was the most likely one to be in camp.
“Who’s there?” came Shannon’s tense response to Devon’s knock.
“Devon,” he responded in a hushed voice.
The door creaked open, revealing an armed Shannon peering over the top of her rifle. Essie was nowhere to be seen as Shannon pulled the door fully open when she saw Devon’s disheveled figure framed in the doorway.
“Where’s Ess?” Devon asked, not knowing what else to say.
“Get in here,” Shannon ordered, ignoring Devon’s question.
Once Devon was inside the cabin, Essie popped out from the back side of the bed, dragging her rifle up with her.
“Hey, Devon,” Essie said cheerily.
Devon smiled and sat on the edge of the bed.
“They’re out there,” he announced in a quiet voice.
Shannon’s eyes narrowed. “Who is where, Devon?”
“Soldiers. Twelve of ’em, up the road a couple of miles,” Devon clarified.
“You saw them?” Shannon pressed the teen.
“Yeah, all of them. They didn’t see me though,” Devon said, rocking back and forth, his hands over his kneecaps.
“Did you see Jared out there?” Shannon questioned, continuing her quest for information.
