“You want to become an American operator? Shoot bad guys? Be very good soldier?”
“Ahh.” Pacheco lit up. “Navy SEAL. Best soldier. Charlie Sheen.”
Chad tossed his head back and laughed. “Yeah, Charlie Sheen… I make you like Charlie Sheen today. Okay?” He could see this made no sense to the boy, but the kid looked game for anything.
“I’m a Navy SEAL,” Chad said, louder than necessary.
Pacheco’s expression morphed into disbelief. “You are no Navy SEAL. ¿De veres? For real?”
Chad laughed again. “I am a Navy SEAL.” He flexed his biceps. “See. Badass.”
Pacheco chuckled and pretended to believe him. “Okay. You are Navy SEAL. Maybe.”
Chad went through a mental inventory of everything he used to teach in BUD/S—the Navy SEAL selection course. But BUD/S wasn’t really training. It had been selection. Selection found guys with the “right stuff” to be SEALs, not to train them per se. He supposed he had already completed the selection process by running this kid over in the first place.
Now that he thought about it, what he really needed right now was a sniper. Maybe he would train Pacheco on that first.
Chad dug out the 30-06 and set aside some shells.
“You learn to shoot with these.” Chad held up the shells. “You shoot rifle before?”
Pacheco shook his head.
“I teach you.”
They shot most of the shells in the box, leaving only six rounds. Pacheco took to shooting like a woman, and Chad had taught many women. Women had no ego tied up in the process, unlike men. They listened to every bit of instruction and applied that instruction relentlessly.
Ninety-nine percent of accuracy, especially with a long rifle, boiled down to trigger squeeze. If the shooter achieved a surprise break—where the pressure increased incrementally on the trigger until the gun fired—then the shot would be good. If the shooter “mashed” the trigger, like snapping his fingers, the shot would go wide of the target every time.
Pacheco picked up right away on shooting dead calm. He was a natural at controlling the aggression response that often proceeded trigger mash. The boy performed so well Chad kept moving the target farther and farther, picking out distant rocks for Pacheco to bust. Before they knew it, they had blown through most of their ammo.
The last watermelon-sized boulder “killed” by Pacheco was almost five hundred yards away. Secretly, Chad had doubts he could make the shot himself.
Chad clapped with exuberance. “Muy bueno, amigo! You are a sniper.”
Pacheco’s grin looked like it might break his face.
“I think you like to shoot, huh?”
“Yes. Shooting is good.”
“You ready for a fight? With the rifle?”
“I help you fight. With this.” Pacheco held up the 30-06.
We’ll see, Chad thought. Busting rocks is a lot different than busting men. Anyone can kill a rock.
Around 2:00 a.m., Chad and Pacheco parked alongside the road, and jogged the last mile to the bridge with the roadblock. They had taken plenty of time to discuss the plan beforehand, not moving out until Chad was convinced Pacheco understood exactly what he was supposed to do.
They could see the floodlight illuminating the barricade and could hear the generator humming. Without any further instruction, Pacheco broke right and slid down the embankment, wading into the deep grass. He set a course toward the Medicine Bow River several hundred yards downstream from the bridge.
Chad carefully picked apart the roadblock with his NVGs. Nothing had changed from the night before. A jumble of beat-up trucks, parked ass to nose, blocked all four lanes of the freeway in two rows, creating a gap in between. In the gap, the country boys had lined up a row of plastic camping chairs, each with its own cooler. Three of the chairs were occupied by the graveyard shift, young lads who had no doubt drawn the short straws of dark and cold night duty.
Good. Chad hoped they were comfy in those chairs.
Behind the chairs and coolers, they had parked a Chevy Blazer off the side of the road. The vehicle must have been used to shuttle back and forth between town and the roadblock. All three men sat in the lawn chairs, talking smack and telling tales, probably trying to stay awake.
Their operational procedure, apparently, was to wait until a car came into view, then step up to the barricade. Until such time, they defaulted to country-time lawn chair routine: sitting around with guns slung across their laps, downing Pabst Blue Ribbon.
The bridge made a perfect chokepoint. Nobody could drive around the roadblock. The Medicine Bow River presented an absolute barrier to vehicles.
However, as Chad thought about it from the perspective of an assaulter, the bridge made the guards sitting ducks. The guards couldn’t counter-flank. In a fight, the local yokels would have to win a head-on gunfight against an approaching enemy. While the guards could hide behind the old pickup trucks, those approaching could hide behind their own cars, too, evening the odds. The guards had only one direction to retreat, and that would leave them running down the middle of an open road, tucking tail back to the Chevy Blazer.
The most lethal disadvantage of their roadblock was the same for any roadblock: it inspired false confidence. Anyone willing to swim the Medicine Bow River could come up behind the guards and slit their throats. They were betting their lives on human nature, that an opponent would take the lazy path.
Little did the local boys know they would be squaring off with one-and-a-half Navy SEALs. Navy SEALs didn’t mind getting wet, so long as they got to kill or screw someone afterward.
Liking what he saw at the barricade, Chad committed to the assault, breaking to the left and sliding down the embankment. Before slipping into the river, Chad pulled a pair of Ziploc bags out of his pocket and sealed up his Rob Leatham 1911 handgun and five magazines. He felt confident the water wouldn’t screw up the ammo and he knew it wouldn’t hurt the gun, but a gunfight was the wrong time to find out your ammo sucked.
He wore his bump helmet, and he had clipped his NVGs to it. He had swum a cumulative total of about fifty miles in his life doing the Navy SEAL sidestroke, and there was zero chance Chad would get his helmet and NVGs wet while crossing.
The Medicine Bow ran smooth, brown and calm, and Chad made short work of paddling across. He swam directly under the trestles of the bridge, completely hidden from sight.
On the other side of the interstate, Pacheco crossed the same river, but Chad wasn’t worried. He had made the boy test-swim the river a couple of times that day, just to make sure he wouldn’t drown. Pacheco did fine. He had given the boy double garbage bags to seal up his rifle and the ammo, mostly worried about the optic getting wet.
Chad climbed onto a boulder, unwrapped his handgun, and returned the mags to his now-soaked chest rig. Not wanting to jinx the mission by littering, Chad folded up the Ziplocs and tucked them into an empty mag pouch.
The embankment under the bridge was all sharp boulders, and he quietly climbed up, waiting just below the guardrail. The plan was for Chad to spring into action as soon as Pacheco gave the signal.
Several minutes later, right on cue, the floodlight exploded in a shower of glass. The light winked out. A half-second later, the 30-06 boomed.
Chad sprinted for the Chevy Blazer.
The local boys sprang to their feet with the explosion. They jumped behind the old trucks, pointing their guns up the interstate, the opposite direction from Chad.
Chad reached the Blazer and crouched behind the front wheel, unnoticed by the local boys. He smiled big, getting that rush when he “back-doored” someone and they didn’t know it yet. The boys had their backs to him. His only concern was that Pacheco might shoot him accidentally—or the even less likely possibility that the shitkickers had some kind of overwatch guy with a long rifle covering the roadblock from a distance.