Going Home (36 page)

I had a pile of wet clothes to deal with. Stuffing them into the drum liner, I rolled it up and stuffed it in the pack. From my clothes bag, I pulled out a pair of dry socks and put them on; then I stuck my feet in the cold, wet boots. Ah, this sucks! The helo came back around. It flew almost overhead, but I still couldn’t see it. If they had a FLIR on board, I was seriously hosed. Each time the bird came around, I would sit still and not move, hoping they wouldn’t find me.

The bird moved off again, and I started to think about what I may have done that could have turned them onto me. Then it hit me—the sliding down through the muck to get to the river. I was sure that left a hell of a trail. Maybe they would just think it’s a gator slide, and then that little voice popped into my head. “It ain’t always about you.” There’s a lot of truth in that. Why in the hell would they be looking for me? I’m nobody. Certainly they had bigger fish to fry.

After packing the sleeping bag and the rest of my gear, I pulled an MRE oatmeal raisin cookie out for breakfast. Shouldering the pack, I started to pick my way very slowly through the swamp. I didn’t want to get soaked again, so I was going slow; plus, I was eating a cookie and was damn hungry. The helo eventually moved off; I hoped that was good news. I crossed several small creeks; some of them I was able to step over, and some I crossed on downed cypress trees.

After about an hour of slow stumbling, I reached the edge of the swamp. I came out into a nice area mixed with oaks, pines, juniper, and palmetto. Peering into the woods, it appeared that it opened up a little ways ahead. This was less than ideal; I wanted to break out into the scrub and quickly put some distance between me and Uncle Sugar’s finest. The other side of the little hammock I was in butted up to a chop where the timber had been taken a year or two ago.

Some scrub was out there, but it was short. No way in hell I was going to try to cross this patch in the daylight. Instead I looked for a place to bed down till dark; I was tired as hell anyway. Finding a nice juniper tree, I crawled under it and laid the sleep mat out and pulled the woobie out too. Taking the wet clothes from the bag, I hung them in the branches of the tree to let them dry as much as possible. Using the pack as a pillow, it was time to snooze for a while.

Dale and Phil had been lifelong friends. They grew up in Dixie County, and neither one of them had ever been more than a hundred miles from it. When things went to shit, they naturally got together to take care of each other and their families. The problem with these two was that they always lived life just outside of the law.

Numerous arrests, none major, and the constant threat of jail kept them from turning into hard-core felons. Still, they were two of the most notorious poachers in Dixie County. Both of the FWC officers knew them by sight, boot track, and for one officer, smell. Dale never did let Phil live down getting caught and fined for turkey hunting on private land, when the game warden smelled his way to him and his can of sardines in hot sauce.

Dale was the brains of the operation, and Phil was his faithful understudy. Between the two of them, they poached more gators, deer, and turkeys, and snuck more submerged one-hundred-year-old cypress logs out of the Suwannee River valley than any other fifty men combined. They did it to feed their families and provide a little cash money to boot.

With the threat of the law now a mere memory, they decided to up their game. Spending so much time on the river, they knew it like the backs of their hands. In the days following the event, in the course of their regular work of poaching the river, they started to notice the boat traffic picking up. It was Dale’s idea to set up on the river and “tax” folks. They never cleaned anyone out, but Dale was the one who decide when sufficient tax had been paid.

Being as notorious as they were, most folks they stopped on the river handed over what they were told to. The fact that these folks also knew that Dale’s boy, Tim, was on the bank covering them with a rifle, not to mention the AK that Dale held on them, guaranteed no one would put up a fight.

The folks around the area were smart though and soon figured out that these two would-be pirates only operated during the day. So most everybody switched to night travel on the river. Dale was pretty sharp too and picked up on the change. So tonight they were sitting on the river, just around a bend down river from Fanning Springs. Phil had his pontoon boat anchored on one side of the river, and Dale was in his skiff, tied to the side of it.

They sat there drinking shine from pint mason jars, another one of their “cash money” sources. The standard procedure was to sit in the boats, getting slowly pickled, until they heard a boat coming; then Dale and his boy would take their boat out into the center of the river to stop whoever was coming, leaving Phil to cover them. Both of the boats had Q-Beams, and they used these to blind and intimidate the other boats.

Sarge sat on a cooler in front of the center console of his boat; Mike was driving. They all had on full battle rattle, body armor, sidearms, and enough mags for the M4s to break contact with almost any size force. Not to mention the FN Minimi SPW they captured from the DHS goons. The appearance of this particular weapon really bothered all of them. What in the hell were those guys doing with something like that? Basically a shortened M249 with a telescoping stock, Sarge fell in love immediately. Add in the eight hundred rounds those morons packed in and the guys almost saw Sarge’s O face.

Sarge twisted the top on one of the Sam Adams and turned it up, taking a long pull on the bottle.

“Hey, give me one of those,” Mike yelled above the outboard.

Sarge cocked his head to one side and yelled back, “You’re driving, dickhead; no.” Then he turned the bottle up, draining it. Tossing the bottle over his shoulder, Mike had to knock it out of the air to keep from getting hit by it. He saw Sarge’s shoulders bouncing up and down and knew he was laughing.

“Mean ole prick,” he said out loud.

Sarge cocked his head to one side. “What?”

“Nothing.” Mike shook his head.
How
in
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hell
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“How far we going?”

“Just drive, Junior. And don’t start the ‘are we there yet’ shit.” Sarge opened himself another beer. Mike just shook his head.

They continued down the river—the three boats in single file, blacked out, no running lights. Twenty-five miles was a long way on the water, and they soon settled down for the ride. Since all the guys had NVGs, they didn’t need to use any lights, but no one else on the river had them. They picked up on the first boat they encountered long before they got to it. Their spotlight shining around alerted the guys to their location.

As they approached a bend, Mike slowed the boat. The other two came up on either side of them. “We’ll go around the bend. If it’s clear, I’ll shine my laser up in the air. If it ain’t, you’ll know,” Sarge said. The guys all nodded, and the lead boat pulled away. Sarge stood up and stepped to the bow of the boat, the SPW at the ready.

As they came around the corner, they spotted the boat immediately but were not detected by it. Mike was cruising rather slowly up the river; it looked like the other boat was engaged in froggin’ or looking for gators. Sarge watched the boat for a minute through the NVG; a small family was on the boat—man, woman, and a child. The cough of a small voice drifted across the river.

“I don’t think they’re anything to be worried about,” Mike said.

“Probably not, but let’s say hi,” Sarge replied. Flipping the NVG up and putting a hand to his mouth, he called out, “Hello, the boat!” The spotlight swung around, shining across the river and settling on their boat. Sarge waved at the boat as Mike steered toward it. The other boat turned out toward the river, stopping rather far away. Mike reached down and hit the switch for the IR laser on his M4; it was tucked into a handrail on the side of the console, muzzle up.

As Mike motored closer to the other boat, a man’s voice called out, “That’s far enough.” He still had the spotlight on, pointing it into the river, and they clearly saw him pick up his shotgun. The woman and child were sitting on the bow of the boat.

Sarge raised his hands. “We don’t mean no harm there, friend. Just wanted to see how things were on the river.”

With Sarge’s hands in plain view. The man came a little closer. “Just out trying to scrounge some dinner,” he offered.

“Why so late or early?—depending on how you look at it,” Sarge asked.

“I don’t like to come out during the day, wanted to get the boy out of the house for a bit. Plus he’s a good frogger,” he said, nodding and smiling at the little boy, whose face lit up with his father’s praise.

“Any trouble out here?” Sarge asked.

“No, not really. But then we stay close to home,” the man replied.

“Probably a good idea,” Sarge said.

The boats were drifting closer, and the guy seemed to relax a bit. When he heard the other boats coming, he stiffened and looked at Sarge with fright on his face and then at his family. Sarge raised his hands again. “Don’t worry; they’re with us.” The little boy coughed a raspy cough.

“Is the little man sick?” Sarge asked.

“It’s just a little cold,” the woman answered.

The other two boats came alongside Sarge’s boat. “Hey, Doc, you got anything to give to a little frogger with a cough?”

“I think I can find him something,” Ronnie answered and started to dig around his bag. Putting the boat in gear, he eased up to the other boat. The man caught the gunwale and held onto it. Ronnie handed over some cough drops and a small bottle of Vick’s. “Give him one of these and rub this on his chest at night to help break that stuff up,” Ronnie said, handing them to the woman. She took them.

“Thank you so much. We don’t have anything for him,” she said.

“You guys in the army?” the man asked.

“Not anymore,” Sarge answered. “And if you see any of them, I suggest you stay away. Ronnie, give ’em a case of MREs.” Ronnie handed the case over to the man.

“Hey, thanks a lot. We sure can use this. Fish is getting old,” he said, smiling to his wife, who smiled back.

“You guys be safe,” Sarge said with a nod.

“You too. Thanks a lot,” the man said with a wave.

Sarge nodded to Mike, who put the boat in gear, dropped his NVGs, and headed down the river. The other boats fell in line. Sarge plopped back down on the cooler. Cruising down the river, they encountered a couple more boats, using the same procedure to approach them. All the folks were in roughly the same situation, hungry and afraid. Sarge doled out a little more charity, and Ronnie applied a clean dressing to the arm of a guy who was bit by the four-foot gator he had wrestled into his boat. He needed antibiotics, but they had precious few of them and didn’t offer any.

Rounding another bend in the river, they were met by the twin beams of spotlights from either side of the river. The lights instantly shut the NVGs down, and the guys had to flip them up. Thinking it was an ambush, all the three boats were pushed to full throttle. A shot from the boat that moved to the center of the river was answered by a long burst from the SPW in Sarge’s hands. Ronnie and Ted were both firing at it with one hand and steering with the other. Ted was firing at the boat on the side of the river.

The spotlight in the center of the river fell into the water. The guys let up as they came abreast of the boat, since there was no return fire. The spotlight off to the side was shining straight up. Ted broke off and went toward it. Coming up to the pontoon boat, he saw a man lying on the deck in a fetal position. “Show me your fuckin’ hands!” Ted screamed. The man rolled onto his back with hands out; he had pissed his pants and looked terrified.

As Sarge’s boat approached the other one, he and Mike were both at the ready. The white fiberglass interior of the boat was full of blood; it was splattered all over it. A body lay on its side on the deck. Another figure was lying on the opposite side, with his hands over his head. “Show me your hands, asshole, or I’ll fuckin’ smoke your ass!” Sarge yelled out. A boy about sixteen rolled over. Blood was splattered across his face.