“This is Jeff. Report in, all teams.”
“This is Crandall. All enemy in approximately the same positions as before.”
“This is Wali. I’m on the ridge across from Jeff. Just killed that gangster with the pistol. I’ve got four guys in the bottom and one on the north-facing slope. Maybe two. All tangos are within our boundary now.”
“This is Ron. I’m not seeing anything else.”
“Jeff. Copy. All teams: begin firing on all targets of opportunity. Unless they fly a white flag or run outside the boundary, keep up fire.”
Almost immediately, the big rifle across from him boomed and the team reported another hit.
Jeff worked his way along the ridge, looking for a window that would give him a shot at the intruders. He stopped every ten feet and scanned through the tangle of trees with his binoculars, trying to pick out targets. With the last shot from his men, he noticed bad guys scurrying about. Firing straight through the trees, Jeff hammered their positions with the .308.
“This is Crandall. I’ve got two targets down and out on the south-facing hillside at the canyon bottom, over.”
Jeff slid up and down the ridge, firing on even the slightest suggestion of a hoodie or baseball cap. Gun fire popped now and then as his men chipped away at the enemy force.
A short while later, the QRF showed up and joined the shooting. Jeff deployed them down both sides of the canyon. Over the course of two hours, fire slowed. Jeff counted nine reported hits plus the hand gunner who had tried to shoot him earlier, making a total of ten bad guys dead or wounded. Now came the part he hated most: digging supposedly dead enemies out of their holes.
While they had counted their hits, that didn’t mean targets hadn’t been overlooked or were wounded but still fighting. Men didn’t fall down and vanish when shot. They did all kinds of unpredictable shit, and Jeff could hear at least two men moaning down in the forest. Walking around like Roman conquerors would get one of his men shot.
Jeff had a strong suspicion this fight had been a deliberate probe. He couldn’t let bad guys walk away with any information, or their next fight might not be so easy. Jeff picked his way down the ridge, scanning through the trees for new targets. He found a man lying still, some hundred fifty yards away, probably dead. He put two more rounds in him. Jeff found a gap in the forest a quarter mile below the battlefield. He would post up here to see if someone tried to slip out the backdoor.
“Everyone. This is Jeff. I have the canyon bottled up below. Wali, stay on overwatch. Ron, maintain the defensive perimeter. Look for other threats. Crandall, split the QRF and send the teams down the canyon, staying high on the side walls so they have high ground. Shoot anything that looks like a tango, dead or alive. Copy?”
The teams checked in. After ten minutes or so, Jeff could see one of his QRF guys—the one across from his ridge—moving down the side of the canyon.
“QRF, go slower,” Jeff radioed.
The QRFs had been pulled from his best men—former military or men with a lot of firearms training. Jeff had trained and selected most of them himself. The idea was to assign trained hunters to handle the defensive perimeter, like long shooters or expert hunters who could glass an area properly. Then they would fill out those ranks with new trainees.
But, if a battle touched off, Jeff could call in one or more of his three QRFs. These were his most fit and experienced troops, and he felt confident they would clean house against all but the most dedicated military opponents. The QRF guys clearing the forest were doing a hard job and taking considerable risk, but they were also the guys most likely to survive hard-core fighting.
Another hour on the mountain ticked by with periodic shots from his men. When the QRF reached Jeff’s position, they turned around and ran a grid pattern back up, policing up all the dead bodies and their equipment. There were ten enemy, and they were definitely Hispanic street punks.
Given the steep slope, it would take them all night to carry the dead men back up to the ridge where the OHVs could haul the bodies out. Dusk sat on the horizon. Carrying ten bodies up the hill would draw down their defenses for an unacceptably long time.
Jeff gathered the QRF. “We’re not taking any of these assholes out of here. They’re not worth the haul. Drag them down to the barbed wire and lean them up against fence posts. Maybe that’ll send other intruders a message. Gather any equipment and round up all weapons and ammo. Get going. I want to be out of here before dark.”
As gruesome as it was, Jeff would rather leave the dead bodies. If he took them down to the Homestead for a proper burial, it would ignite another shit storm. Half of these dead guys had crapped themselves, and the other half were so full of holes they looked and smelled like road kill.
The good folks down at the Homestead had probably already heard about the battle, but knowing about something and seeing something were two very different experiences, and Jeff didn’t need to borrow trouble.
“Jeff,” one of the guys from the QRF ran up to him holding a radio, “this came off that dead guy over there.” He pointed back over his shoulder.
Jeff looked closely at the hand-held radio. It looked almost exactly like the radios he and his men carried. He didn’t know much about ham radio, but he could tell the difference between a ham radio and the kind of radio you buy at Walmart. This radio definitely wasn’t of the Walmart variety.
“Son of a bitch,” Jeff swore. “This is not good news.”
Highway 80 (West)
Rawlins, Wyoming
Chad lay in a sand trap in the dark of night, dreaming about golf. Since leaving the SEALs, he had toyed with the idea of spending the rest of his days in pastel polo shirts, with an extra thirty pounds around his middle, driving a golf cart, puttering away at golf.
He looked back at the Rawlins town barricade, a hundred yards from the golf course. As usual, his mind wandered.
He had done the hard-core thing in the Navy and, frankly, he had had his fill. He got the t-shirt and got out. If he never felt cold, wet or uncomfortable again in his life, that would be just fine with him. But then the collapse came and screwed up his plans of sucking off the tit of civilization, playing endless rounds of golf.
After an hour of recon, he had reached the same conclusion he’d reached four other times at four other roadblocks: this was another dumb roadblock with the same ole rednecks. Robbing this roadblock would be like taking candy from a baby. Again.
He and Pacheco were on a roll. They had become a regular Bonnie and Clyde, except Pacheco was a baby-faced Honduran instead of a cigar-smoking hot chick. Chad figured he could easily pass for a handsome Clyde Barrow.
In the last forty-eight hours, they’d heisted four roadblocks and amassed a small fortune in post-Apocalyptic trade goods. He and Pacheco had been able to back-door every barricade, taking the guards by surprise and stealing back everything the roadblock had stolen from other travelers.
Only once had they discovered a roadblock with a rifle overwatch near the town of Saratoga. In that case, they had ambushed the overwatch guy first, tied him up, then knocked over the barricade. It had proved even easier to take a roadblock with overwatch because the guards had been particularly over-confident.
This roadblock beside the golf course didn’t have any high ground for miles, so Chad set Pacheco up in the sand trap, which had the advantage of being comfortable, and Chad had learned never to underestimate comfort when it came to warfighting.
With a sigh, Chad got out of the sand and jogged away from Pacheco, making a big dogleg to get far behind the roadblock before approaching. He didn’t want to give away Pacheco’s position. After running the mile loop, he walked straight up the highway behind the guards.