Angie dropped to a crouch, and Mac did too, dropping the pack and pulling it after him. Someone fired a shot, and it whipped past him. Not close, but he didn’t want the next one coming closer either.
“Sit rep?” Mac asked, and from the blank look on Mark’s face, he deduced that this was one of the few employees of Bryson’s who wasn’t a veteran. “Can you give me a report on the situation?” he expanded.
Mark sighed. “We took fire,” he said simply. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on. This was not planned. And those are real bullets. Cleve said he’d go for help. I take it he made it since you’re here?”
Mac shook his head. “No, we were attacked, too,” Mac said. “We made it back to camp, and Rand sent us out. We found Cleve. He didn’t make it.”
Mark swallowed hard. He looked as if he wanted to cry, but he choked it back and nodded. “So, we have four customers with us. Two have bullet wounds. We turned off the trail too early, got into this ravine. No biggie, it just meant a harder hike to the target, right? And then they started shooting at us. We retreated back this far, but we’re trapped. Any real movement, and they fire off a shot. Like they did at you.”
Angie opened up the pack, handed out water and sandwiches. She made Mac take a sandwich. Handed him more Mountain Dew. He drank about a third of a can, offered her a sip. “Sugar and caffeine,” he said. “Good for what ails you.”
“Extreme fatigue?” she said with an attempt at a smile. “It might at that.”
Mark looked in the pack, found the med kit, and pulled it out. He seemed to know what he was doing with it, and Mac turned to consider their location. He looked at the tree that had taken the shot, and backtracked to where the shooter had to be.
We’re fish in a barrel. So, this fishy has to evolve and seek higher ground. Getting a bit punch drunk when you make bad jokes to yourself, he thought with amusement.
The problem was the shooter was across the ravine. That was a long shot. Well, he didn’t really want to hit the target anyway.
“One shooter? Or more?” he asked.
“There were more,” one of the men said. Mark was tying a bandage around his arm. “First was this mass of shots coming from multiple directions. We didn’t know which way to go. But since then there’s been just the one, I think. He’s perched up there. If we look like we’re moving out, he fires. Occasionally he fires just because he’s bored.”
“So, either he’s got a bunch of ammo with him, or he doesn’t care if he runs out,” Mac said. He thought about that. “How long ‘til dark?”
Mark glanced at his watch. “Dusk in about an hour. Dark not long after that.”
“OK, so here’s the deal,” Mac said. “That’s one of Norton’s deputy reserves out there. We can’t shoot back. If we kill law enforcement, they’ve every right to return fire and wipe us out. To be honest, now that they’ve killed someone, they’re going to have to kill us all anyway. They may not have figured that out yet.”
The men nodded. They were too tired to argue, he thought. The adrenaline was long gone. “So, Mark? Norton has got to have a camp, somewhere. A base of operations. Where?”
Mark rocked back on his haunches and considered that. He’d put a tourniquet on the man with the leg wound. “Probably where we usually camp. You know we were told to move our base farther back? Ken said he was told to do it because there were hikers complaining to the rangers about all the gunfire. Made sense, Ken doesn’t like all the weapons fire either. But the trips pay well. Anyway, so we set up a new site. But Norton isn’t skilled enough to set up a camp out of nothing. He’d use the site he knows. And there’s porta-potty and a generator still there, I think.”
He thought about it and nodded to himself. Mac showed him the map. “Where?”
Mark looked at it. “This is our camp,” Mark said. “These are the three routes we planned out. We’re the middle one, you all were on the southern one. Ken took the northern one. The other campsite is just south of the southern route.” He pointed at a spot on the map.
Mac studied it. “So, if we’d stayed on the main trail this morning we would have hit the old camp.”
Mark nodded.
“How far from here?” Mac asked.
“Depends. If you backtrack this trail and turn south here,” he said, pointing at a spot on the map, “you’ll hit the trail you took this morning, and you can follow it right into the camp. Probably take you an hour-and-a-half, maybe two hours. But it requires some overland hiking, breaking trail. If you go all the way back to camp and then set back out again? You’re looking at maybe three hours, but you won’t get lost either.”
Mac looked at the map. “And if I go through here?” he said, drawing pretty much a straight line from where they were to the old campsite.
“Probably an hour,” Mark said, but he shook his head. “You’d have to break trail the whole way and navigate solely by compass.”
“I was recon,” Mac said briefly. “The compass isn’t the problem; it’s the terrain. And I’m a whole lot more familiar with the terrain now than I was 24 hours ago.”
Angie grinned at him. He couldn’t help smiling back.
“So, tell me if I went straight through, how steep? Are there ravines I’d need to go around? What’s it like?”
“Not bad, really,” Mark said slowly, tracing the route with his finger, as if that helped him visualize the countryside. “No real inclines. This is the only ravine to speak of. But it’s dense undergrowth, man, and you can’t get any
