“You. Stop talking,” Valentine ordered.
Reaper grinned, gesturing with his stubby shotgun. “Then let’s go.” The bravado was forced. The kid was tough, but he wasn’t a warrior like the rest of us, but God bless his techno-geek soul, he was ready. “Let’s smoke these fags.”
Hawk adjusted his old South African army vest. “Yep.” Then he spat on the ground.
Valentine raised an eyebrow. “Smoke these fags?” he asked, looking at me incredulously. “What have you been
The five of us climbed the sagebrush-and-scrub-tree hill. The sun was rapidly setting. I suggested we track farther to one side so that we could attack out of the sun. Valentine didn’t seem to care one way or the other, Bob and Hawk thought it was a good idea, and Reaper was used to following my orders.
We picked our frequencies and checked the radios on the walk in, and they worked fine. We had no plan and no intel. Our group had never worked together before, and there wasn’t a lot of trust.
“So why do you guys use those old Belgian rifles?” Reaper asked Hawk and Valentine at one point, displaying his ignorance. “Those are the same kind as those rusty poacher guns from all over Africa, right? Why don’t you get something
Hawk grunted. “They’re all over Africa because they still work, kid. Besides, you can dress ’em up if you want. Look at his,” he said, indicating Valentine’s railed-up FAL. “You can bolt ten pounds of crap on it if you want.” Valentine’s rifle was fitted with a Tijicon scope and had a flashlight bolted to the hand guards. It looked heavy, but he didn’t seem to mind. “And it’s at least a manly thirty caliber, unlike Lorenzo’s pussy twenty-two.”
I paid Hawk’s opinions on terminal ballistics no mind. I’d lost track of how many people I’d killed with a short-barreled 5.56 over the years. I preferred lots of little bullets to a few big ones, but then again, anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting five to seven times.
“M-16s are poodle shooters,” Hawk said. “That’s all they’re good for.”
“I’m pretty good with a FAL,” Valentine answered Reaper, not looking up from the trail through the sagebrush.
“How good is pretty good?” Reaper asked. The kid just didn’t know when to quit.
“Look,” Valentine said levelly, pointing the knife-edge of his hand at Reaper. “This isn’t a
Reaper seemed taken aback by Valentine’s harsh words. “Okay, okay! Sorry. I miss a lot. That’s why Lorenzo makes me use the shotgun.”
“Super,” Valentine muttered. “You know, we really ought to be quiet.”
“Kid’s right. Quiet down. They might have sentries posted at the top of the hill,” Hawk suggested.
“They won’t,” Bob replied. “They’ve been operating above the law so long, they think they’re untouchable. The idea of us coming to them will never even enter their minds.”
“I hope you’re right,” Hawk muttered.
After half an hour of walking, we hunkered down in the rocks overlooking the old prison work camp. It looked like a ghost town out of an old western movie. There were several wooden buildings, in two horizontal rows heading away from us, paint long since peeled, signs long since faded. One larger building was directly below us, newer, built out of cinder blocks; it looked like it had been a truck stop or some sort of garage back in the days before the freeway bypassed this little settlement. Fence posts stuck out of the ground like random teeth in a broken jaw, the barbed wire mostly rusted away.
There were several vehicles parked on the broken asphalt around the garage, new vehicles, black sedans, a Chevy passenger van, and another G-ride Suburban. There were a couple of men standing around the cars, smoking, talking, long guns visible slung from their backs.
“Damn, there’s a lot of them,” I said.
Bob extended the bipod legs on his sniper rifle and hunkered down, scanning through his scope. “I’ve got three in the parking lot. At least one moving inside the garage.” After a moment he stopped, then cranked up the magnification. “Hector, take a look at the window on the left.”
“Hector?” Reaper laughed. “Your real name is Hector?”
“Shut it . . .
“Yeah? Well, what the fuck kind of name is
“It’s French,” he replied, looking through the scope on his rifle. He then turned to my teammate. “You know that’s not actually my name, right? Just like you. Reaper isn’t your real name.
I shushed Reaper before he could retort. Bob moved aside and I got behind the Remington. It took a moment to find the right window on 14X magnification. The glass was gray with filth and hard to see through. “That’s her.” Jill was slumped in a chair, long black hair obscuring her face. Seeing her there filled me with fresh anger.
The terrain leading up to that window was rough enough that it gave me an idea. I didn’t want to endanger the lives of these men any more than I had to. I moved into a crouch and examined each of them in the fading light. “Okay. Here’s the plan. I’ll sneak up on that building, break in, and secure Jill. If everything works out, I can get her out of there before they ever even know we were here.”
“That’s just stupid,” Bob said. “There’s no way you could sneak in there under their noses.”
Reaper just looked at him and grinned. “Dude, you have
Hawk reached over and tapped Valentine on the arm, gesturing down the hillside. “Check out that ravine,” he said. He’d always had a good eye for terrain.
Valentine nodded. “While you’re crawling through the weeds, we’ll take Marilyn Manson here and head down that way. It’ll put us closer so we can back you up if this all goes to shit.” He looked to Bob. “You good enough with that rifle to give us some cover?”
My brother nodded. Before I had dropped off the grid, Bob had already been a champion rifle competitor. When we were teenagers, I had spent my free time boosting cars, while he had shot coyotes for the local farmers. Bob was better than me at most things, and shooting was probably toward the top of that list, and that was before he had joined the Army and become some sort of Green Beret or something.
“He’ll do fine. We all will.” This was it. This wasn’t a heist, it wasn’t a job. These men were here to help me. This was a rescue mission. I’d led many crews, but usually for money. I didn’t know how to motivate people with pure intentions. Awkwardly, I put my hand out, palm down. “Thanks, guys.”
Reaper enthusiastically put his on top of mine. “Anytime, chief!”
It took a moment before Bob followed suit. “No problem, bro.”
Valentine looked at us incredulously. “Are you guys for real?”
“I’m not really good at saying thank you, okay?”
Valentine glanced over at Hawk, who just shrugged, then back at us. “You guys are so
Reaper yanked his hand back, embarrassed. Okay, so maybe it was corny. I took one last look at my friends —and Valentine—nodded, and disappeared into the weeds.
