All afternoon they listened to the bleat of horns from the woods. Some kind of jungle telegraph was heating up. Or maybe the skinnies were just bored off their ass waiting on the sun to go down and the hunt to begin again.
“Sounds like a soccer crowd in Somalia,” Chaz said.
“Skinnies are skinnies no matter where you go,” Renzi said.
“That’s racist, dickhead,” Chaz said.
“Fuck you, Reverend Sharpton. Far as we know those monkey motherfuckers down there are white,” Renzi said.
Chaz had to laugh at that.
Jimbo raised up on his elbows to look over the open sights to find the copse of clumpy bushes. He dropped his eye to the scope cup and scanned over with the 30x. The stand of brush popped close, filling the lens. There was movement there. Two, maybe three, skinnies watching the mesa from what they believed was a concealed position.
“Easy-peasy,” Jimbo muttered and let his breath out.
The first heavy round exploded the head of a skinny. Jimbo pulled the bolt back, jacked a new round, and returned his eye to the scope. The second round took another skinny center mass as the sound of the first rifle shot reached them. A third skinny was up and running for the trees.
“He’s gonna make that gully,” Hammond said, watching the show through binoculars.
“Bullshit.” Jimbo slid the bolt home and settled the posts on the back of the skinny who was bobbing in and out of view as he pelted over the rough ground for cover. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the shape vanished from his view.
“Nice,” Hammond hissed. “Dead before he hit the ground. Took him somewhere between thoracic three and four.”
“That’s pretty specific, Lee.” Jimbo turned on his back and rested his head on a rolled-up towel.
“I was living with a chiropractor a year ago,” Hammond said as he continued to scan the open ground before the tree line. “She sure straightened my bone.”
“What made you come on a clusterfuck like this? I can’t believe you didn’t think Chaz was punking you. A time machine, goddamn,” Jimbo said. He was getting his mind off his still throbbing head. The pain in his jaw radiated right around to the back of his skull.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Hammond said. “You were working border patrol on the reservation, right?”
“You mean ‘catch and release.’”
“That bad?”
“Same shit every day. Same faces every day. A guy likes to think he’s making a difference. But the rules were written to protect the lawbreakers and lawmakers. Fuck the law enforcers.”
“The rules of engagement,” Hammond said and took his eye from the scope. “That’s what I like about this gig.”
“There’s no rules of engagement here.” Jimbo opened his eyes and turned to Hammond.
“Exactly,” Hammond said without a change of expression.
“You seeing this?” Chaz said and handed the 30x binoculars over to Dwayne.
Dwayne glassed the trees below and could see the smoke of a fire rising from the position where the village lay.
“Look out along the shoreline,” Chaz said and placed a hand on the back of Dwayne’s head to shift his vision.
“Shit-damn,” Dwayne hissed. There were more smoke columns coming from all along the trees at the edge of the sea. It looked like miles of signal fires.
“Reinforcements,” Chaz said.
“More like a goddamned surge,” Dwayne said and scanned the trees, listening to the growing number of hunting horns.
Dwayne tapped Caroline’s shoulder gently. She opened her eyes with an effort and slowly sat up. He was offering her a bottle of water.
“You need to drink some more water,” he said and crouched by her.
“How long did I sleep?” she said and took a swallow. The shadows were longer and stretched behind them. She turned to where the field would appear when it opened. Just sunbaked rock and dry grass.
“Not long enough,” Dwayne said. “But you need to hydrate and try to eat something.”
“I just collapsed.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” He laughed. “You napped right through Jimbo firing his cannon downrange all afternoon. Didn’t move a muscle.”
“You watched me sleep?” she said with a wry expression.
“I checked on you.”
“I look like hell,” she said. “I itch like hell. All I wanted a few hours ago was a drink of clean water. Now I’d kill for a shower.”
“You may have to,” he stood and looked west. “They’ll be coming once it’s dark. If we’re still here, it’s going to be a long night. Those skinnies own the night. Nocturnal hunters.”
“Skinnies?”
“Our hungry little friends,” Dwayne said. “Army slang. Goes back to Somalia when the Rangers were in Mogadishu. The locals were skinnies.”
“Why do you have to call them anything?” she said.
“You have to call them something,” he said. “In your head.”
“Well, I guess I’ve been thinking of them as aborigines. Though that’s not strictly accurate. They’re hominids of some kind.”
“Well, ‘skinnies’ is shorter.”
“But doesn’t that demean them? Make you superior to them?”
“They have a name for people who can kill total strangers without reducing them to less-than-human status,” Dwayne said.
“What’s that?”
“Psychotics.” He stood to go.
“You’re all Army?” she asked in order to keep him there by her. She didn’t want him to walk away.
“All Rangers. Ex-Rangers. This is our kind of action. Rough country. Outnumbered.”
“How in God’s name did my brother find you guys?”
“Friend of a friend.” Dwayne smiled. “He’s a very dedicated brother.”
“Yeah,” she said and tipped the bottle. “Let’s hope he dedicated his ass to getting the back door open again.”
He shook a pair of white pills into the palm of his hand from a small plastic vial.
“Take these,” he said and took her hand to drop the pills into her palm.
“What are they? Salt?
“Amphetamines,” Dwayne said. “Like I told you, it’s going to be a long night.”
He watched to make sure she swallowed them and returned to his position along the mesa ledge.
19
Night Falls
The blare of the horns increased as the sun
