“On my way. Follow the ROEs. Shoot them if they go over the line. Jeff out.”
Jeff trotted to his OHV and raced up the hill.
“See how they’re taking cover. They keep moving, even though we’ve shot at them eight or ten times. I think we’ve hit two of them. Still, they keep coming.” Crandall pointed toward a clump of cover underneath the canopy of maples.
Jeff kept the binoculars glued to a spot where he had seen two men drop down behind a log and some bushes.
“Give me all their locations,” Jeff ordered.
“I think there are three where you’re looking behind that log. Two more are up that same canyon just a bit. One guy is in the bottom of that canyon behind a rock, and three or four more are on the side of the canyon we can’t see from here.”
“Okay,” Jeff said. “And where are your men?”
Crandall thought about that for a second. “Several of them have fired and moved, so I don’t know their exact locations. I have two in a hide above us on the ridge, and two more displaced down canyon to get a better shot at the guys we’re looking at right now. They should be popping over that ridge soon.”
Jeff ducked down into the sniper hide and keyed his radio. “Homestead. Send QRF One to Ridgeline Tango. We’re under attack. Please confirm.”
The radio came to life. “Homestead, confirming. Send QRF One to Ridgeline Tango. Position is active. Over.”
“Roger. Jeff out.” Jeff turned back to Crandall. “Crandall, call the team moving to the flank. I’m going to maneuver opposite their sector of fire down that other canyon and I don’t want them to shoot me. Okay? Can you make sure of that? It looks like none of the bad guys are wearing camo. It shouldn’t be hard to tell us apart.”
Everyone on duty for the Homestead wore multi-cam camouflage. Wearing a uniform, Jeff figured, would make folks fear them more and screw with them less. For whatever reason, Jason Ross had stocked up on old, used multi-cam before the stock market crash.
“Right. The trespassers are all wearing street clothes. They look like street thugs to me,” Crandall said. “What’re you going to do?”
Jeff grabbed his rifle, a Robinson Arms XCR-M .308 with a Trijicon ACOG scope. If he had to pick any rifle for this particular shoot-em-up, he would take this exact one. The big .308 bullet pulverized virtually anything other than vehicular armor, far superior in performance to the pencil-thin .223 bullet most guys used. While fighting overseas with the military issue M4 rifle, Jeff lost respect for the diminutive .223. Far too often, a branch would tap the bullet off its path and, even with a solid hit, targets often failed to realize they had been shot. With the burly .308 rifle round, targets not only knew they had been hit, but they knew better than to stand up again. More importantly, Jeff could pierce wood, trees, rock and even some concrete. For post-Apocalypse survival work, Jeff had no idea why so many guys choose the AR-15 rifle and its .223 round.
“I’m going to slide around the ridge and get a flank on these guys. Are you positive they’re all in this canyon?” Jeff asked.
“Sure as can be… But I can’t see into the next canyon.”
“Okay. Make sure our boys don’t shoot me.”
Crandall made the call and confirmed that Jeff would be on a ridge opposite his teams and to double-check their targets.
“Take it easy. And if it’s easy, take it twice.” Jeff waved and slid out of the sniper hide, double-timing it behind the ridge, making ground in leaps and bounds between clumps of maple trees. As soon as he was about half a mile from the hide, he slowed down. While everyone thought the entire opposing force was contained in the canyon, nobody could see down into the next canyon. Jeff would have to clear that one himself.
Jeff pulled his binos out of his chest rig and visually picked apart the mountainside for his next leapfrog. Since it faced the summer sun, most of the foliage was stumpy and thin, so Jeff would probably see someone hiding on the slope. It was possible someone might be hiding in the canopy in the bottom of the canyon.
Unlikely, he thought, but not impossible.
Even though he was pushing fifty, Jeff hadn’t let his cardio go downhill. Sure, he packed a bit of a beer belly, but he got away with it in a t-shirt because of his ape-sized upper body. Jeff ran the occasional endurance race along the Wasatch Front and he always did pretty well. If he paced himself, he could run all over this mountain. Very few men could do the same at any age.
Cashing in on his cardio, Jeff took the long route. He dropped down into the canyon bottom one over from the intruders and trotted along, rifle at the high-ready. If someone was waiting for him down in this dark mess, he would be running into an ambush. Still, when you flanked, you rolled the dice. You couldn’t flank all the way to the moon and back. You had to take your chances at some point.
As he guessed, nobody lay in ambush in this canyon. Setting a counter-flank so far from the enemy force would have required near-professional levels of military discipline, and there wasn’t anything about these guys that implied military discipline. Jeff worked his way half a mile down the canyon without a snag.
He stopped to catch his breath. He figured he was parallel to the bad guys. Ideally, he could scale this hillside and be above them, their flank exposed to his Robinson .308. The other team of snipers should be on the ridge directly across from him. Crandall and the third team would serve as a blocking force. If everything worked as planned, they would have the dirtbags in a pocket, surrounded, with all the high ground owned by Jeff’s men.
Jeff tried to remember, had anything like this ever gone exactly as planned? He could remember a few times… a few times out of a couple of hundred. He took a last drag from his camelback and sprinted up the sunward slope, knowing he had jack-shit for cover until he reached the top. Everything was going great until about three-quarters of the way up the slope.
“Thwack!” Something slapped the ground twenty feet to his right. “Bam, bam, bam, bam.” Somebody was shooting, dumping a mag on him.
Jeff’s legs pumped like a motorcycle engine, pounding up the hillside. He closed on the trees on the ridge, taking what seemed like an eternity to get there. Along the way, his adrenaline-drenched brain went into tactical mode. It wouldn’t make any sense to stop and return fire, especially since Jeff would have to find the shooter first and since the shooter, apparently, knew exactly where to find him. The shooting wasn’t coming from a rifle, thank God. The numb-nut shooter was trying to hit Jeff with a handgun from a long ways away. Still, Jeff didn’t want to get shot, even with a handgun.
Finally, Jeff made it to the ridge and dove into a thicket of oak brush. The guy must have changed mags because he started shooting again. None of the fire seemed effective; Jeff couldn’t even tell for sure what the guy was trying to hit.
“Booooom.” A single rifle shot rang out, but it came from the next canyon, probably his own team. The handgun fire ceased.
Jeff keyed his mic. “Report.”
“Crandall here. Our team on the far ridge thinks they downed the guy shooting at you.”
“Copy. Jeff out.”
Low-crawling through the oak brush, Jeff popped up with a hundred new scratches and a brand-new position. He scanned all possible shooting lanes and saw nothing.
Finally, after searching for a full minute, he spied a leg sticking straight up in the air, snagged on an oak limb. The enemy shooter must have been on the same ridge as Jeff. More likely than not, the dude had been dragging ass, unable to keep up with his buddies.
With his binos, Jeff checked to make sure the guy was truly out of the fight. All he could see was a blunt-nosed Nike shoe and black socks. The pants leg had slipped down, almost out of sight in the brush. Definitely not a hunter. More likely a gangbanger.