Since everybody in the car except Fremont knew that Baum was married, the detail was lightly passed over in a diplomatic silence.
“Anyway, these were taken yesterday at 1633 hours 19 seconds. Here’s the infrared readout from a quadrant that includes this place here.”
He tapped a glossy blue-tinted photo taken from fifty miles up and then magnified a thousand times. It showed a flat, pebbly terrain dotted with a few scrub bushes and a cleared area around a low flat bunkerlike building and two smaller outbuildings. A tiny meandering driveway led up to the main building. Long shadows were trailing eastward from the shrubs and buildings. Beside the main building was a pickup truck with a dim red oval on the hood. Another brighter red oval showed inside the main house, and a series of smaller red blobs in the larger of the two outbuildings.
“These are infrared readings from the sector. As you can see, it looks like the truck had been used a little while before, because the engine is still cooling off. Inside the house I figure that’s one man, or at least one man-shaped heat source. And I guess these other red returns are his dogs, penned up in the outbuilding. These other shots…”
He fanned out three more, in varying degrees of magnification, showing the house in straight black-and-white high-resolution shots.
“These give us a look at the immediate area, maybe a range field of five hundred yards. You can see a fork of the river here—”
“The Greybull,” said Fremont.
“Yes, the Greybull, running here in a diagonal across the top right sector. You can see by the shadows that the river has carved out a series of arroyos and one of them runs to within a hundred yards of the house. Since it’s in shadow, where the house is still lit up from the west there, I figure it’s deep enough to let us come in pretty close before we make our run.”
“Nice work,” said Dalton, grateful for any tactical data that would help him frame an assault plan that wouldn’t get them killed. Or, even worse, unthinkably worse, taken alive.
“Thanks,” said Baum. “What’ve we got in the way of arms?”
“Remington 308 bolt action with a Leupold and match-grade rounds with armor-piercing jackets. Colt Python with all the rounds. A 1911 Colt .45, ported and stabilized, and fifty rounds. And you?”
“I’ve got a scoped Barrett 50 and a big box of match-grade rounds. Del has an M249. We’ve both got Beretta nine-mils. And we brought along some shape charges and a couple of stun grenades.”
“You brought a Barrett?” asked Dalton.
Baum shrugged, gave him a sideways smile.
“I took a look at a map when we were back in Kansas. This is a flat and empty land, just like Mr. Fremont says. I figured we’d need a guy to stand off and punch a lot of heavy-caliber bullet holes in stuff.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Fremont, looking out at the broad flat plain and thinking about the way the changing light was lying.
They got within a quarter mile of Moot’s place by a little after two, bumping along a shallow depression that ran by the course of the Greybull River, and left the car at the last bend, covering it with fresh-cut brush and coarse river sand to hide the gleam of metal.
They held a brief counsel of war: Wait until twilight, until the shadows come out strong and a hard western light would lie right in Moot’s eyes. Nicky Baum, with the Barrett, would provide long-range covering fire, taking an OP on a little crest of rising land about two hundred yards to the west of Moot’s place, with a clear sight line to Moot’s front door, in the west so the setting sun wouldn’t blind him if he had to make a long, difficult shot in a tearing hurry.
Usually the long-range sniper would have a spotter, partly to tell him where his rounds were going, but also to cover his back, since the attention of a sniper was of necessity often a thousand yards away. But there was only one target, not multiples, so they decided against it. Which left Del Suarez, with the Remington bolt-action, free to work his way around to the rear of the house to take up a blocking post about fifty yards out, in a small stand of pine they had seen through the binoculars.
Fremont, with the SAW, would check out the smaller outbuilding and the privy, making sure no ambush was waiting for them, and then hold down the southern sector for Dalton’s final approach, taking a stand near a lone creosote shrub a hundred feet from Moot’s side wall.
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-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 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.”