“You’ve got their range now, dude,” Dan said. T.K. fired twice more before he found his mark. The third man, who had still not yet determined where the shots were coming from, was hit in the head. The bullet entered just above his left eye socket and removed the top and back of his skull. T.K. changed magazines and resettled his cheek.
The last bandit, who was shaking uncontrollably, spotted a puff of dust kicked up by the McMillan’s muzzle blast. He yelled out loud to his now dead companions, “I don’t frippin’ believe it. He’s a mile away! Nobody can shoot that far!” The man began to crawl through the dust toward the barricade as quickly as possible. T.K. fired again, and missed. On his next shot, he hit the man in the lower abdomen, eviscerating him. “I’m hit! I’m hit!” he yelled, but there was no one alive to hear him. The man thrashed on the ground for twenty seconds, with his life ebbing out of his belly.
T.K. changed magazines again and cycled the bolt. He fired once more at each body to insure that they were dead. Now confident of the wind and range, he hit his targets with each shot. “They’re deader ’n doornails now,” T.K. delivered. He removed the partly empty magazine from the rifle and inserted a full one. Glancing down at the ground, he wondered about the large pieces of shiny brass that were scattered out to the right of the rifle. He abstractly wondered in a more extended tactical shooting situation, what would be more noticeable: the brass itself, or his movement in crawling to pick it up. He shrugged his shoulders and decided that it was by now an academic question.
Dan Fong lowered his Steiner binoculars and reached over to slap T.K. on the shoulder. “That’s the most incredible shooting I’ve seen in my life.”
“I guess those guys didn’t know who they were messing with,” Kevin muttered.
Fong smiled, and putting on an exaggerated accent said, “Old Chinese proverb: You may rob a man by the darkness of the new moon. But in the light of day, the payback is a bitch!”
After he had picked up his fired brass and walked down the hill, T.K. opened an ammunition can and reloaded the two depleted magazines for the McMillan. He warned, “Well, there’s no use in going over there to check the damage. Besides, they might have a backup man hidden behind the barricade or in the rocks that we didn’t see. Something like that could ruin your whole day.”
Kevin stroked the stubble on his chin. “I agree. Let’s get out of here. We’ll let the buzzards handle the funeral, and let God sort ’em out.” They spent a few minutes examining their road map for an alternate route around the ambush site. The detour would cost them nearly an hour and two extra gallons of gasoline.
Before departing, Dan Fong examined his Hardcorps vest and his flesh beneath it. “Stopped it cold. Looks like a little 110-grain soft nose slug from that M1 Carbine. Check out how you can see the weave of the Kevlar imprinted on the mushroomed out bullet. Cooool! I’m going to keep this as a souvenir.”
“How’s your shoulder, Fong man?” Kevin asked.
Holding the palm of his hand to a spot beneath his collarbone, Fong worked his arm in a circular motion. He proclaimed, “It’ll probably be black and blue and sore as heck in the morning.”
Putting on his Monty Python accent, T.K. said, “Classic blunt trauma.”
They all laughed, as Dan put his vest and DPM shirt back on.
As they drove away, Kevin started the three singing repeatedly in chorus, “Reach out, reach out and touch some one. Reach out, reach out and just say… die.”
They traveled without incident for the next five hours. Ten miles northwest of Portage, Utah, the trio encountered another ambush. The ambush was set up in a better location than the one that they had encountered earlier in the day. It was positioned just around a sharp bend in the road, so that Kevin had little time to react before reaching the obstruction. A stout barricade made of a double thickness of railroad ties blocked the entire road. It extended from the nearly vertical cut on the left side of the road to a steep dropoff of more than forty feet down to an old railroad bed to the right. With no other option, Kevin slammed on the brakes. They came to a full stop less than forty feet away from the ambushers.
Behind the barricade, nine men with rifles opened fire without warning. As quickly as possible, Kevin put the Bronco in reverse and hit the gas. Meanwhile, Dan and T.K. were firing rapidly at the bandits manning the ambush. T.K. was shooting his AR-15 in rapid double taps, with his forearms leaning up against the black padded dashboard. Dan was firing his HK91 from the backseat in a low staccato. The rifle’s muzzle was almost directly between the heads of the two in the front seats. The sound of the muzzle blast in their ears was deafening. Dan saw three of the men behind the barricade get hit and go down.
After they had backed up fifty feet, Dan saw T.K.’s head snap backward violently. Soon after, he slumped forward over his rifle, with a tremendous gout of blood pouring from his face and beneath the back of his helmet. Just then, Dan felt a heavy blow to his own chest.
Once the Bronco had backed up behind the bend and out of sight of the ambush, Kevin again hit the brakes, and turned the rig around. He then drove at high speed for three miles before finding a spot on a side road that looked fairly secure where they could stop. By then, Dan had regained his composure.
After feeling around under his fatigue shirt, he found that his vest had stopped a large caliber soft nosed rifle bullet. He leaned forward to check on Kennedy’s condition. Checking for a pulse and finding none, Dan was sure he was dead.
Examining T.K.’s body, they found that a bullet had hit him in the right eye, just below the lip of his helmet. The bullet passed all the way through Tom’s head, exiting through a hole roughly two inches in diameter. They concluded that he had died almost instantly. Both men were still shaking as they checked for other damage. To their surprise, there wasn’t much. The roll cage had been hit in three places and one bullet passed through the upper portion of the radiator. After it went through the radiator, it glanced off the top of the engine block, just to the right of the water pump, and then went almost vertically through the Bronco’s hood, leaving an oblong jagged hole. Luckily, it did not penetrate the block.
With Fong on security, Kevin attempted to repair the pierced radiator. Rummaging through the tool kit, Kevin found a quarter-inch diameter carriage bolt that was four inches long. By cutting some rubber gaskets out of a piece of scrap truck tire inner-tube material, he was able to make a plug that passed completely through the radiator. He then applied a heavy coat of blue RTV silicone sealant to the gaskets and around the bolt. The inner-tube gaskets were positioned on both sides of the radiator, held in place by two large washers and a wing nut. Working rapidly, the repair took less than five minutes.
After waiting half an hour to let the silicone cure, with both men standing guard, Kevin refilled the radiator from one of their tan plastic five-gallon G.I. water containers. Lendel then replaced the radiator cap and started the engine.
Kevin told Dan, “It still leaks about a drop every two or three seconds under full pressure, but that’s negligible, considering the extra water we have on board. We’ll just check every hour of driving. It should get us where we need to go. If the leak gets any worse, we can always loosen the radiator cap and run with the system unpressurized.” Fong grunted in agreement.
After staring at each other for a few moments, Dan pulled out two ponchos from one of the backpacks. “Let’s get his body wrapped up,” he said sharply.
It was then that Dan noticed that Kevin’s helmet had a large gash running along one side. “Dude. I think you’d better look at your helmet.” Kevin took off his “Fritz” helmet to find that it had deflected a bullet that under other circumstances probably would have left him just as dead as T.K.