The Jared Chronicles | Book 4 | The Devil's Bastion, page 4
part #4 of The Jared Chronicles Series
A few hours later, Jared was resting his eyes while John kept a watch over their unwanted guests. Jared cast a glance in the direction of the Thackers’ ranch and wondered how everyone had slept the night prior. Everyone who stood watch would be missing a couple of hours of sleep, but they’d all become used to these smaller hardships. As Jared thought of all his friends far below him with these people hovering above them, it dawned on him. These soldiers would need to be relieved just like his friends in the house below relieved one another. That would be when he and John would follow the off-going shift away to wherever they were stationed.
“We need to move,” Jared said, beginning to gather his gear.
John grabbed his rifle and shot Jared a what the hell look.
Jared gave a quick shake of his head. “No. We have to get into a position so when their relief gets here, we can follow them. From here we’d either have to pass the finger or circle around, in which case we’d lose sight of the guys we want to follow. We know they’re going to leave to the northeast. It’s the only way in and out without being seen from the ranch.”
A smile crept into the corners of John’s mouth. “You’re right.” John chortled as he rolled over and began collecting his gear before crawling back out the way the two came in.
Jared slid into his own pack, grabbed his rifle, and stowed his binoculars before also crawling away from their hiding spot. Jared and John didn’t reach a suitable observation hide before the sun began withdrawing its illuminating rays of light. Soon it was dark, and both men pulled on the NVGs to assist in navigating the uneven terrain of the hilly countryside under a moonless night sky.
Jared and John kept to the back side of the hill the finger jutted from so there would be no chance their adversaries would see them unless they left their own position, walked to the top of the hill, and searched the land behind them. John doubted this, but remained vigilant nonetheless. He stopped every few minutes, moved extremely slowly, and even made note of the wind direction as he tried catching any sign of danger his other four senses hadn’t registered.
Jared scanned out in front of himself as they walked, but found himself glancing often in the direction of the finger, even though it was not visible to him. Jared was out in the night, armed, while others not friendly to him and his friends were not more than five hundred yards away. A twitch of his head failed to clear these thoughts as he carefully picked his way through the ground vegetation. He needed to keep tonight focused in the light of being a task and what it really was—a very dangerous game of cat and mouse. A game with no rules and, so far, no strategic plan on his part. He and John were winging it, which didn’t help the electric tingling he felt throughout his nervous system.
Jared and John moved for several hours, stopping, scanning, and listening until finally John announced in a hushed whisper they would bed down until morning. As the words spilled out of John’s mouth, Jared suddenly realized he was exhausted. He’d been up for twenty-four stressed and physically exerting hours, and as John mentioned rest, the fatigue struck Jared like a baseball bat. They settled in under a large old oak whose branches nearly touched the ground on one side.
“You rest first. I’ll wake you in a bit,” John murmured softly.
Jared and John had brought but one sleeping bag, which Jared had been carrying. He pulled it off the outside of his pack and worked his tired body into its chilled folds. The ground was spongy with the leaves of the giant oak, and as the sleeping bag warmed with his body heat, Jared fell asleep within minutes.
Jared thought John was messing with him when he tugged at Jared’s shoulder, telling him to take over. Confused and blinking the sleep from his eyes, Jared felt as though he’d just crawled into the sleeping bag. Slowly and very groggily, Jared extricated himself from the warmth of the sleeping bag, which John wasted no time climbing into himself. Jared knew John would be enjoying the warmth Jared himself had created during his seemingly abbreviated turn in the warmth of their single sleeping bag. With wakefulness fighting back his sleep stupor, Jared dug into his pack, retrieving the NVG and setting them atop his head before cinching down the chin strap.
He pulled the goggles over his eyes and switched the power on. The landscape in front of him lit up, bathed in a cool green glow. Nothing seemed to be moving as he swept his head from left to right and then back again. He’d worked long enough with John to know that if something were out there or had gone on while Jared slept, John would have passed the information on to him before falling asleep. Still, he performed a detailed search of their surroundings before relaxing slightly.
The air had a wet chill to it like many California nights did, even though it hadn’t rained in a few weeks. Fifty degrees didn’t always feel like fifty degrees for some reason. Jared shivered as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. He stood inside the branches of the great oak, leaning on one of the low-slung giant branches, using the thick stock of wood to steady his gaze. Jared couldn’t tell what time it was and figured he’d stand watch until the sun turned the blackness of night to the grayness of early morning.
Jared suffered in silence, making it a point to think about his tendency to remain mute when he was under pressure or agonizing physically. This helped him get through the few hours of cold misery until the first rays of light lanced across the countryside from the east. Jared removed the NVG and stowed them in his pack, exchanging them for the binoculars. The two men were still on the finger far below him, gathering up their gear as if they were getting ready to move out.
Jared studied the men’s movements a moment longer before rousting John from a deep slumber. “I think they’re getting ready to move,” Jared breathed through trembling lips.
This served to get John out of the sleeping bag twice as fast as Jared had come out when he’d been awakened earlier that morning. “Pack your gear,” John said, wiping a glistening patch of saliva from his beard. John had really been sleeping and now scrambled to get all his systems online in short order after hearing Jared’s report.
Within thirty seconds, both Jared and John were packed and ready to move, albeit John was still half asleep and wiping at his mouth and nose while taking deep breaths of the cold morning air in through his nose, then exhaling out his mouth, trying to shed the dullness he felt in his head. After a couple of deep breaths, John crawled out of their observation position, with Jared’s face only a few feet from the soles of John’s shoes. The two men crawled until they were sure they wouldn’t be seen by the men below them, then got to their feet and moved north.
During one of their security stops, John grabbed Jared, pulling him close. “They have to have a rally point or pickup spot, and it can’t be far,” John whispered.
Jared nodded wordlessly, searching the hilly countryside for any sign of people or vehicles. Within minutes, they were moving again, the tallish grass rustling against their pant legs as they crept forward. Over the next hour, Jared and John made their way north before transitioning to the east in an attempt to intersect the path taken by the men watching the Thacker ranch.
John hoped to find signs of the men’s travels, then follow their path back toward the northeast. Both Jared and John were convinced the men were being ferried into the area via some sort of vehicle. This meant the men would have to leg it out of the uneven terrain of the hills to a suitable spot they could get a vehicle into. There were no roads up where Jared and John were, and both men agreed it would have taken a special off-road-type vehicle to access the area. Being that there was a significant shortage of vehicles nowadays, they searched in the direction where the flatlands to the east met the eastern edges of the hills.
The fresh new stalks of wild oat could be seen blanketing the land for as far as Jared could see. This was broken only by the scrub oaks and a smattering of wild thistles with their yellow tops. Occasionally, Jared could see where deer had lain by the vegetation’s slightly different color caused by its altered angle. A swath of lighter green under an oak told Jared deer or wild pigs had used the area, but what Jared and John searched for was a straight line of the different shade of green. Animals seemed to pass through the greenery of the landscape without disturbing it much, while men were much more apt to leave a semipermanent mark on the land’s face.
Another thirty minutes and Jared spotted an inconsistency in the disjointed beauty of the surroundings, a slight incongruence to the sun-dappled surfaces his eyes were drinking in. Jared gave a low hiss, stopping John. Pointing off to their left, Jared lifted his chin in the direction of the discrepancy in the landscape. John studied the area Jared had indicated, then sank to a knee and pulled out his binoculars. Jared moved to John’s side and sank to a knee as well.
“Got to be them,” Jared said quietly.
John nodded his head as he swept the binoculars back in the direction the soldiers were watching the Thacker ranch from. Part of John wanted to just sneak in and kill the two men, set up an ambush, and kill whoever came to relieve them. The problem with that course of action was he didn’t know anything about how these men were operating. They might have radio check-in times, and if a comms check were missed, a sizable force could be sent out to see what had happened. In that case, John and Jared would be badly outnumbered and outgunned.
No, violence was not the answer—at least not yet. John had been on a couple of missions in his prior life, ferried into countries the United States had no agreements with. He’d been stripped of anything a foreign government could parade before the press to identify the mission as a United States-backed operation. Those operations had never been direct-action endeavors, and all of them, John had volunteered for. The men who participated in these operations understood, as well as any man could, that if they were captured, they would suffer greatly before they were killed.
When their captors realized their prisoners could not be exploited through the media, they would suck every bit of intelligence they could from the poor soul before selling him to the Chinese or Russians. He’d never be seen or heard from again, and his very existence wouldn’t be known to even his own government. The United States intelligence community wouldn’t lift a finger, because doing so would be tantamount to admitting the captured man was theirs.
All the other operations John had been part of seemed like a dream, with all the support elements involved. Now, he felt as though he might have taken for granted all the assets at his disposal during his tenure in the Special Missions Unit. His current life found him in the same predicament he’d been in only those couple of nerve-racking times. No support, no intelligence sources, no nothing, other than his wit along with whatever friend or friends he was joined by at the time.
“Wish we could just shwack these sons of bitches,” John whispered.
Jared knelt, pulling at a tuft of beard, his eyes telling John the man was in deep thought. Slowly, Jared’s face scrunched as he squinted at John. “No, we can’t smack anyone this close to the ranch.”
“Shwack,” John corrected.
“What?”
“I said shwack, not smack.”
Jared’s face relaxed as he gave a little shake of his head. “Whatever, shwack. We can’t sack, smack, or shwack anyone near the ranch. If we can figure out how they’re getting in and out of here, I think we should hit them closer to the base so they think it’s someone else in the area, leave this little two-man team alone. This will cause confusion both here with the two men watching the ranch and the folks back at the base. No one will know what happened.”
John thought about what Jared was saying, mulling over all the possibilities associated with both options. John had to agree with hitting the soldiers as far from the ranch as possible in order to avoid suspicion since he and all the folks at the Thacker ranch would be no match for a full-scale invasion on the part of Carnegie’s troops. The only reason John could think Carnegie hadn’t molested them to date was because the good colonel either didn’t have the troops to spare because of things he was doing out in Stockton, or he didn’t feel comfortable acting with the limited intelligence he had.
Either way, the men’s presence at the ranch was telling in that it showed Carnegie was still interested in paying John back for his departure a few months ago. Both men’s thoughts were interrupted by the rumble of a vehicle in the distance. Instinctively, Jared and John dropped flat in the tall grass as their collective minds registered the threat.
“Watch our backs. Those guys at the OP may be heading out to meet these new dudes,” John hissed in a tension-filled voice.
Jared reoriented himself so he could see in the direction the men at the OP would come if they were to walk out to meet this new presence. The sound of the vehicle seemed to be quite a distance from Jared and John, but one couldn’t be sure, judging sound and distance in the new and absolute quietness of the world after the solar flare.
John guesstimated the new threat was possibly a quarter mile out to the northeast and sounded like a gas-powered truck more than the diesel-powered Humvees. John remembered the fellas at the Stockton base workshop had always been tinkering with vehicles, trying to resurrect different pieces of machinery. They’d probably got some old truck running, and in the absence of the majority of Carnegie’s Humvees—thanks to John and the SEALs—he’d probably been forced to commission some old farm trucks taken from the surrounding properties.
The sound of the vehicle grew louder for a few minutes before dropping off as if it parked, the sound stopping altogether. John didn’t have to tell Jared to get ready for anything as they waited to see what or who would come strolling through the hills. They didn’t have long to wait as four uniformed and heavily armed soldiers came into view, using the discolored trail Jared had spotted earlier.
The men were less than a hundred yards from Jared and John, but thankfully seemed to be on a Sunday-after-church walk, weapons hanging loosely from their slings, heads down as if winded from the uphill hike. The man in front appeared to know where he was going, while the man at the back of the line hadn’t taken a single look over his shoulder.
“They have radios,” John muttered in a soft voice. “They called and got the all clear before heading in, or they’d be a little more careful than they’re being,” he finished.
This made sense to Jared, who remained watchful in the direction of the hostile OP. Jared and John were slightly uphill as the men passed below them, continuing on toward the other two men at the OP. John slowly pulled his binoculars to his face and scanned the men’s faces. He didn’t expect to see Josh in this group, based on the careless manner in which they were trudging through the hills, but he had to make sure.
John breathed a sigh of relief when all he saw were the sweat-slicked faces of strangers below him. Jared and John waited, barely breathing, while the men picked their way along the slope below. Within a couple of minutes, the four men had disappeared over a small rise, dropping down its back side toward the two spies on the finger.
“Let’s go,” John said as soon as the men were out of sight. “Watch our six, but let’s hurry. I want to check out their vehicle as long as no one is there.”
Jared got to his feet and followed John at a brisk pace, staying above the trail used by the four men, but keeping it in their line of sight. They didn’t have far to go before they spotted an old white Ford pickup truck parked below them on an overgrown dirt road. Jared faced back the way they’d come while John took out his binoculars and studied the truck for a full minute. When Jared heard John returning the optics to his pack, he caught John’s eye. John gave him a head wag toward the truck, and away they went, guns up, stepping carefully, attempting to sidle up with as close to a silent approach as they possibly could.
Chapter 4
John reached the truck first and thrust the muzzle of his suppressed rifle at the window as he cleared the vehicle’s interior. Other than some trash, the vehicle stood empty, the keys gone and no other sign it had been recently occupied other than the ticking of its cooling engine. Jared saw John heading for the vehicle’s cab and automatically broke to the right, eyeing the inside of the truck’s bed, which was also empty.
The windows were up, and the driver’s side door was locked, so John moved around the front of the truck to check the accessibility of the passenger-side door. Dismayed to find both doors locked, John was about to say something to Jared when he saw Jared’s eyes widen slightly. They were on opposite sides of the truck, facing one another, which gave John a sickening feeling, knowing something was behind him.
Jared’s rifle clanged against the side of the truck as he tried bringing the weapon into action, but was too close the vehicle, causing him to swing the weapon out and to the side in order to clear the vehicle. While he was doing this, John began to turn when he heard a voice.
“Hey, what are you guys doing?” came the almost curious voice behind John.
As John spun, he found himself face-to-face with a soldier he hadn’t seen earlier. The newest soldier stood not more than ten yards from John, his curious face beginning to transform as his brain registered two armed strangers in front of him. The soldier had been relieving himself down the hill in some bushes when John had performed his search of the area, but was now back, wondering where these two civilians had come from.
As John’s face came into the soldier’s view, his lips parted as his jaw dropped. Standing before him was the vaunted John Buckley, the man Carnegie had them searching for, the man he’d been briefed on by Talley as being probably the most dangerous man in the area and an enemy of all personnel from the Stockton base. The soldier was so thoroughly shaken by the sight of John, he never once thought of the elevated position killing Buckley would have placed him in back at the base; instead, he knew he was in grave danger and would likely not be making it back for dinner, even though the soldier grasped his rifle in an attempt to save his own life.
