The Echelon Vendetta (40 page)

A hundred feet, because that was the outside limit of the SAW’s effective combat range, and not too close to the solitary creosote bush, of course, because bitter experience has taught the infantry soldier that any bush or rock that looks like good cover to you will also look like good cover to your enemy, and will either be booby-

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trapped or so well sighted-in with aiming sticks that the defender could drill out the location with full-auto rounds even in the pitch-blind dark.

Dalton would be the entry man, with the Python and the .45. He would clear the other outbuilding and then, carrying the shaped charges, make the final dash across the front yard. Suarez and Baum, as the snipers, would use whatever suppressing fire was necessary to cover Dalton’s final approach to the house, then Fremont would come up on the run—again, covered by the snipers—when Dalton was ready to go through the door.

They all had com sets, wound packs with morphine in case things went bad, and canteens filled to the brim so they wouldn’t make noise. They calculated three hours for Suarez and Baum to get into position—easily that long, since the idea was to get into place without being seen. Once there, they’d check in on the com sets.

They all shook hands, wished one another luck; Baum and Suarez moved out with hardly a rustle of gravel, disappearing into the low brush in a few seconds, leaving Fremont and Dalton to wait the long wait in the stony arroyo near the Greybull River.

While they waited, watching the light change slowly on the land, Fremont and Dalton talked quietly of various things, places they had seen, men and women they had known, talked of Guam and the Horn and Stallworth’s obsessive love of orchids, about this never-ending war, a few wry reflections on how things were better when it was just the Russians they had to worry about. The quiet talk flowed easily on, both men thinking of the coming action and wondering whether their theoretical tactics would withstand a bench test out in the mortal world.

As it usually happens to men facing a fight, the talk ran to other memories of combat, either declared or covert, that they had experienced, which, naturally enough, brought them around eventually

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to the here and the now, and Fremont asked Dalton if he thought that Baum’s Barrett 50 was the right weapon for suppressing fire.

“Great question. My platoon sergeant when we were in the Horn had a list he called ‘The Rules of Combat.’ The first rule was that the single most dangerous thing in a combat zone was an officer with a map. Today, that would be me. Number two was ‘No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy,’ which is about to be proved again. And number three, to answer your specific question, was that suppressing fire only works when it’s used on abandoned positions.”

“That has been my experience,” said Fremont, laughing. He was a man whose natural state was reasonably sunny, and he looked around the valley with real appreciation of the present beauty it was offering.

He looked up as a flight of birds passed over, a thousand feet up, black chevrons against the fading light—they might be swifts or swallows—and in the west an orange fireball sun was sinking through a gray storm squall high over the Beartooth, while a delicate pink afterglow was slipping away into the east, chased by a violet dusk.

The cold had been building since late afternoon, a damp, biting chill with the smell of dry pine and wood smoke inside it. In the far distance a coyote sang a solitary song for no reason other than to let the rest of the world know he was still in business. Fremont breathed it all in and said, “Lovely country, isn’t it? A man with a good heart could be real happy in this valley.”

“There is an hour,” said Micah, pausing to call the memory up complete. “There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life, could he but find it.”

“That’s right. That’s very damn right. That yours?”

“No. George Herbert.”

“Walker Bush?” he asked, with some disbelief.

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“No. Not that one...”

His voice trailed off then, and in his mind Dalton went far away to a long-ago summer afternoon in Cortona: Fremont let the silence run. The day was dying fast now and long blue shadows were creeping out from the cottonwoods. A few pale stars glittered in a cloudless arc of deep blue. The comfortable silence spooled out until the com set crackled once, and Dalton touched his throat mike.

“Nicky?”

“I’m in, Micah. I’ve got the house in my scope. Nothing moving. No lights. Truck’s right where it was in the satellite shots. No heat signature on the truck. One heat signature in the house but from this angle I can’t say where. I can hear a dog barking but I can’t see him.”

“Del?”

“Just digging in. Okay. I’m set. I’ve got my shot. Let’s go.”

“We’re moving.”

“Come ahead,” said Baum. “I got you in the palm of my hand.”

Dalton signaled to Fremont, who got up into a crouch, his lean face lit by the setting sun, making his right eye gleam like a shard of bottle glass, the left side of his face in darkness. He hadn’t shaved in two days and his hollow cheek was covered with short white stubble. He looked tired and old and Dalton felt a rush of affection for him.

“Willard...”

“Yessir?”

“Why don’t you just stay—”

Fremont’s thin face hardened up and his one sunlit eye glittered.

“Moot Gibson killed my best friend. The man needs to die.”

His hard look softened, and he smiled at Dalton. “Know what a friend of mine named Pascal once said? He said that the sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. If Moot had managed just that one little thing, sit quiet

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in his room, then Al would still be alive and Pete would still be running packhorses up to Medicine Wheel and Moot Gibson wouldn’t be going to die today. But he didn’t. So let’s go.”

THEY HAD A LOT
of ground to cross and they crossed it at a flat-out dash, Fremont veering south, heading for the outcrop by the creosote bush, moving well for a man his age, the SAW at the ready, his boots heavy on the stony ground, Dalton running lightly, his eyes searching the terrain as he moved up toward the little collection of buildings. As he closed in on the house, he instinctively tightened up in the expectation of a round singing past his ear followed by the harsh crack of the weapon, but no shot came.

He reached the side of the larger outbuilding and rested for a moment there, sheltered from the fire line of the main house. Through the thin wooden walls of the shed he could hear the sound of a large dog growling and barking. He watched as Fremont, bent low, slipped into cover behind the rocky outcrop, vanishing from sight.

He moved around to the side of the outbuilding and found a small quarter-glass window. He braced himself and smashed the pane with the butt of his Colt. From the interior of the cabin came the hysterical howl of a badly frightened dog, but no rounds whacked through the walls and into his cringing belly.

He risked a quick look and saw a large pen, in the middle of which was chained a large shepherd cross, her muzzle covered with bloody foam, her eyes wide and the whites showing as she howled her fear and her rage at the timbers of the roof.

Around her were the bodies of three other big dogs, all of them horribly torn and bloody. There was nothing else in the shed but a few tools and some sacks of animal feed. He slipped back to the edge of the building and pulled in a long breath, letting it out through his nose,

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willing himself into stillness. The moment hung there, suspended, and on the chill air he could smell the sharp tang of wood smoke.

A thin blue wisp was rising up from the chimney stack, slipping away on the wind. The setting sun lay full on the front door and the two shuttered windows, a flat shadowless look, giving it an ominous air.

He had a hundred feet of ground to cross and every foot of it was wide open. If Moot Gibson was waiting for Dalton to cross that ground, the chances were very good that Dalton had just begun to count off the last sixty seconds of his life on this earth.

He knew that as soon as Moot fired, Nicky Baum’s Barrett 50 would blow a football-size hole in whatever place the round had come from, but until Dalton moved and until Moot fired, Baum would have nothing to shoot at, and since the whole idea was to try to take Moot Gibson alive, and that first shot could very easily be the one that blew Dalton’s brains out the back of his head, the tactical problems were huge. Dalton understood only too well that he really did not want to try to cross that last fifty feet.

Not at all.

There had to be a better way. Maybe they could try talking him out? Yes. That’s the ticket. It sure as hell worked with Saddam Hussein. Reason with him. Think like the United Nations.

Just ask him real nice if would please pretty please—

Dalton cleared the corner in a convulsive leap and raced across the ground, his eyes fixed on the gun ports, braced to take a round in the head, thinking
not in the face not in the face,
as combat soldiers often do, cutting cards with death.

He slammed up against the wall beside the heavily barred door, dropped into a crouch with the Colt at the ready, and clicked twice on his com set mike. In a moment Fremont came lurching around the corner with his SAW, grinning at Dalton.

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He crossed to the far side of the door and held his hand up, shaped a fist, his face running with sweat. Dalton nodded, reached up, slapped a shape charge against the upper hinge and another against the lower hinge. They both turned away as Dalton clicked the trigger: two massive deafening cracks and the door blew into pieces.

Before the smoke had cleared, before the sound had stopped echoing from the distant mountains, they were through the door, Dalton going left with his Colt up, Fremont going right, covering the room with the SAW. They were in.

There was no one there.

“NICKY.”

“I’m here, Micah.” “We’re in. We’ve cleared the whole house. He’s not here.” “I see you. Willard says there’s a storm cellar—” “Already cleared it. The place is empty.” “Is it mined?” “If it was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” “You want me to come in?” “No. Hold your position. If you see anyone coming, let us know.

Del, you there?” “I am. Nothing moving in my sector. I might have a scorpion up

my pant leg. Other than that, I’m fine. Want me to come in?” “Yes. Come up. We still have to safe the outbuildings.” Suarez was with them in forty-five seconds, panting heavily, his

lean Latin face gritty with dust.

“You and Willard check out the other buildings for IEDs. And there’s at least one dog alive in that wooden shed there. She’s out of her head and if you have to you put her down.”

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“Is it the wolf dog?” asked Fremont.

“Looks like it.”

“That’s Irene,” he said, looking at Delroy Suarez. “I’ll see to her. You check the other building. You going back in there, Micah?”

“Yes.”

“Moot had a thing about his personal effects. If you’re going to turn over his drawers and things, watch out for blades and fishhooks.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nope.”

The men moved off to secure the shed and the equipment shack. Dalton stopped in the doorway to raise a hand and wave to Nicky Baum, who very likely had his crosshairs centered on Dalton’s forehead right now. Thinking about trigger pull, resistance factors, and every harsh thing he had ever said to Nicky Baum, he turned away and stepped back through the open door into Moot Gibson’s home.

He had been expecting one of those serial-killer nest scenes, a squalid ruin with the look of a crack house, the walls covered with newspaper clippings, scrawled obscenities, filth-strewn floors, all the outward signs of Moot Gibson’s slow descent into savagery and madness. Instead, after he had moved through the place again and opened up all the steel shutters, he found himself in a crisp, clean, sparsely furnished four-room home that looked as if it had been decorated by Shakers; simple wooden walls, a spotless hardwood floor with a few colorful Navajo rugs here and there, a few pieces of simple pine furniture; in the dining room, a long trestle table gleaming in the half-light from the setting sun.

In the kitchen, a galley fit for a wooden sailboat, with a row of copper pots—graduated and gleaming—hanging over a center island, a small icebox in the corner, and by the sink a stack of neatly folded dishcloths and a fresh square of Sunlight soap.

In the bedroom, a single hard cot dressed barracks-style with a taut white sheet folded down over two soft Navajo blankets, and un

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der the bed three pairs of black combat boots, each one polished to a dazzling shine and the laces squared away. On the far side of the room, a tall dresser made of rosewood, as polished as every other wooden surface in the home, and on top of the dresser a standing mirror shaped like a gothic window, two bottles of Old Spice cologne, and next to the mirror what looked like a framed piece of ancient antelope or deer hide, butternut brown, into which had been burned— branded—the same familiar drawing that he suspected he would find in this place: