Drawing the Line Read online

  The rancher and his hands were out working; we’d seen them a couple of times as we patrolled. But Alek was inside, coordinating as much as he could, when he wasn’t kicking somebody off a patrol or a guard post so that he could do something. The big Samoan had retired from the Marine Recon and Special Operations community after twenty-four years, and he’d been an ops chief for a lot of the final years of his career, but he still couldn’t stand just sitting on his hands on the radio. He had to get out every now and then.

  As Hank and I walked in, sweaty and covered in a thin layer of dust, Alek was on the phone. “I know that, Tom,” he was saying. “But we’ve got to make a bid anyway. The only way we’re going to be able to hire more gunfighters is if we have work. And while this job is something, it’s not enough, and besides, it’s going to be over in another six days.” He paused. “I hear you.” Another pause. “Yeah, I know. And I don’t want to be anything like those clowns, either. But the margin’s getting real thin.” He nodded, and ran a big hand over his face, though Tom couldn’t see him. Tom was the only former officer in the company, a retired Army Colonel who had done just about everything he could in the Army, though he’d loved the infantry more than anything. I wasn’t sure about him; most of us had had enough bad experiences with officers that we were leery. But Alek knew him from somewhere, and said that he was a good administrator, who could easily switch gears to cold-eyed skull-taker. I trusted Alek, so I was taking him at his word at the moment, though Tom was going to have to prove himself before I entirely opened up to him.

  “Alright, Tom,” Alek said. “I’ve got to get back to it here. It looks like Jeff and Hank have something to tell me. Keep me posted.” He waited a second, then ended the call. “What’s happening, gunfighters?” he asked.

  I told him about the intruders. He listened intently, as I went into as much detail as I could recall, with Hank backing me up and occasionally inserting extra details that I’d missed, or simply hadn’t seen from where I’d been. Alek’s eyes narrowed as he listened, though he was soon staring off into space, putting the picture together in his own mind as I talked.

  When I finished, he refocused on me. “What do you think?” he asked. I knew the man well enough that, despite his size and sort of gung-ho mannerisms, he was a shrewd thinker, and probably already had a workable theory in his own head. But he wanted to hear my take.

  “I think they were a probe,” I said. “Testing the waters. There have to be cartel spotters all over these hills; they wouldn’t be able to do half the shit they’ve done in the last couple of years otherwise. That’s got to be why the Border Patrol was never able to do shit, and got their asses handed to them when they tried. These guys must have gotten wind that we were patrolling Lopez’ ranch, and wanted to see what we were made of. Or just confirm that we had patrols out, and could find and intercept them.”

  “Interesting theory,” he said, crossing his arms. “But what if they were just trying to get through, hit a rendezvous somewhere? That might explain why they didn’t have weapons; it would be a lot easier to get clear of the law without guns.”

  Hank shook his head. “Since when have the cartels thought that way?” he asked. “They’re savages. Cutting heads off and rolling them into dance clubs, grinding human corpses up and putting them in their tamales. Besides, they all but own this part of Arizona. Why would they need to play at subterfuge, when they could just come in and hit us?”

  “Some of them have been pretty clever,” Alek said. “Sure, a lot of them are just vicious pieces of shit who get off on torturing and murdering people. But a lot of the cartels wouldn’t have lasted as long as they have without having some big brains running the show. Maybe these clowns were just the sacrificial lambs.”

  He stood up and stretched. “Either way, we can’t just assume that they were just passing through. We’ll have to increase security. Three-man patrols might be coming up here.”

  I nodded. “I think it’s a good idea. They might not have had weapons, but I could tell they wanted ‘em. They wanted my guts for garters.”

  “Well, boys,” Alek said, “there might not be any more call for bitching about boredom, pretty soon.”

  With that, Hank and I headed for our trailer. We’d need some rest.

  My eyes jerked open, and I lay in the darkness, listening. My hearing wasn’t what it used to be, but with some concentration, I could often pick out pretty minute sounds. And I thought that I might have just heard shots.

  A moment later, I was sure of it. It was faint, but the muted pop, pop, pop in the distance was unmistakable. Somebody out there was shooting, and that was far too high a volume of fire to be somebody out coyote plinking.

  I sat up in bed. It was really little more than a cot, the folding bed built into the trailer’s couch. Hank was already upright, his bald head cocked, and Nick was stirring on his air mattress on the floor.

  “Was that what I think it was?” Nick asked.

  “Pretty sure,” I replied, reaching for the radio, which had been turned down. The site security guys, Larry and Colton at this time of night, had a bullhorn to call the alert. If we’d left the radios on in the trailers, no one would have slept.

  Hank was pulling his trousers on already when the door shook under the impact of a massive fist. “Tim and Rod just got hit,” Larry called out from outside. “Rise and shine, we’ve got bad guys in the hills.”

  I was already pulling my chest rig on over my t-shirt. My rifle was on the bed next to me. Nick was pulling his boots on.

  Hank beat both of us out of the trailer by seconds, his ACE 53 held muzzle up as he ran to his four-wheeler. I was stuffing my earpiece into my ear as I followed, my SOCOM 16 slung in front of me. Nick was right on my heels. Alek was astride his four-wheeler, already waiting, at the gate.

  More shooting echoed through the night. It was still faint; they had to be most of a mile away. We were going to have to move quick if we were going to have any hope of intervening in time to help.

  Our three ATVs roared to life almost as one. We’d all made sure we’d refueled them before going down for the night, so that wasn’t a worry. The radio was quiet; Tim and Rod had to be concentrating on fighting rather than talking.

  As soon as he saw that we were good to go, Alek cranked on his ATV’s throttle and led the way into the dark.

  The moon was down, so it was really dark. Unfortunately, we hadn’t been able to afford to equip everyone in the company with night vision yet, though a few of us had our own personal NVGs. They tended to vary wildly in quality, depending on how much ready cash each shooter had had to spend. I had managed to get my hands on a set of PVS-14s, though they’d cost an arm and a leg. I pulled the old halo mount that had been sitting in my gear pile from the Marine Corps over my head, clipped the NVGs on, and followed Alek.

  In moments, we were away from the lights of the ranch house and roaring through the blackness of the desert hills. The NVGs weren’t all that good for picking out detail, not with so little ambient light to work with, and at the speeds we were going, so it was a rough ride. We all bounced over rocks and even a few fallen branches under the mesquites as we went, often with tooth-jarring impact. At least once, I thought that I might have actually chipped a tooth, as I hit a rock and my jaws smacked together with an audible clop. That hurt.

  But Tim and Rod were out there, still taking fire from the sounds of it, and we had to get there.

  Not ten minutes after we’d left, we topped a final ridge, and were able to look down at the muzzle flashes. Tim had triggered an IR strobe so that anyone with NVGs could home in on them. I picked it out first, a brilliant flash in the grass. Then I tracked over to a parked four-wheeler, then another one. Then I saw the flash as somebody fired from somewhere nearby, aiming toward a dark line of mesquites uphill to the southeast.

  It wasn’t the easiest matter to look through the scope with the NVGs on; I’d have preferred a laser, but we still hadn’t managed to
afford any. But after some jockeying, and getting into a downright uncomfortable position behind the gun, I was able to make out the scope picture in the green of my 14s.

  There still wasn’t much to see. A muzzle flashed, once, but it was so dark under the trees that I could barely make out movement. I fired at the flash, anyway. It hadn’t been anywhere near the vicinity of the ATVs and the strobe, so I was pretty certain that it was a bad guy, rather than Tim or Rod. The muzzle flash disappeared.

  A shot snapped past overhead, but way too far off target to be much of a threat. It was still a good idea to get down, and we all did, getting in a rough skirmish line in the prone, looking for targets.

  No one down there showed themselves, though, and the shooting had died down to a few sporadic shots. Then a quick succession of about ten shots hammered out of the trees, apparently aimed at Tim and Rod, and we all responded with a roar of gunfire that rolled thunder across the ridgeline, seemingly louder than ever in the quiet of the desert night.

  I pumped five rounds into likely shadows under the trees, including one spot where I knew I’d seen a muzzle flash, then held my fire and looked for a response, be it movement or another flash.

  Nothing. If there was anyone still down there, they weren’t shooting anymore.

  Next to me, Alek got on the radio. “Grouper or Chico, this is Coconut.”

  There was a long pause, and I started to fear the worst. I still didn’t know Rod that well, but I’d worked with Tim on the first contract job I’d done out of the Marine Corps, a static security gig in Afghanistan. It had been a shitty job, but Tim and I had gotten along well enough that I’d called him up when Alek, Nick, Larry, and I had decided to start our own company.

  “Coconut, Chico,” Rod replied. “We’re still in one piece, but we’re not in a good position to move.”

  “Roger,” Alek called. “I’ve got four shooters; I’ll leave two on overwatch, and take two down to move on the flank, make sure we’ve cleared these punks out so you can move.”

  “Good copy,” Rod answered. “We’ll keep the trees covered. Good to know you’re up there on our six; it was starting to feel a bit exposed down here.”

  I could imagine. They were not in a good place, not with high ground on two sides.

  Alek looked over at me and pointed. It would be him and me. I nodded, exaggerating the movement slightly to make sure it was visible in the dark, and slipped back from the edge of the slope, moving around Nick, who was still down in the prone, his rifle trained on the trees where the shooting had come from.

  Alek and I cat-footed it through the bushes, keeping low and moving from shadow to shadow where it was possible. There were places where we just had to dash across small open areas, but I was hoping that the bad guys didn’t have NVGs, or if they did, they didn’t have good ones. So far in my career, few of the irregular forces that I’d gone up against had had such equipment, and I was fairly sure that a bunch of Mexican narcos trying to slip across the line probably didn’t, either. I’d been wrong before, but neither of us particularly wanted to crawl, if only because of the scorpions and rattlesnakes that we knew were in those hills.

  We moved pretty far up the draw, almost another five hundred yards, before we started down the slope to cross to the next ridgeline. The mesquites were thicker there, and we had more shadow to move through, so we could pick up the pace a little. Of course, that also meant that our NVGs had less light to work with, so we had to move a little more carefully to avoid stumbling on rocks or tree roots that we couldn’t see.

  There still wasn’t any shooting going on. The bad guys, if they were still there, were holding their fire, and our Praetorians weren’t going to shoot if they didn’t know they had a target. We’d selected for a certain competency level coupled with a commensurate maturity level, and now it was paying off.

  Of course, it was also one of the reasons why we had so few shooters, but you can have quantity or quality, but rarely both.

  I was staying slightly in front, with Alek behind me and to my left. We could turn and engage in almost every direction, though we were set up to engage uphill and forward most easily. He was keeping about ten paces behind me; close enough that we could see each other and pass hand and arm signals, but far enough apart that it would be next to impossible to hit us both at once.

  The IR strobe was still blinking, ahead and to my right. It was providing me with a good reference point, a visual flag that told me roughly where the opposition should have been set up. I still only spared an occasional glance at it, if only to make sure I didn’t wander in front of the rest of the team’s muzzles without knowing it. I kept most of my concentration ahead of me, in the darkness under the mesquites.

  So far, I hadn’t seen shit. No movement, no targets, nothing. It was almost starting to look as if our new friends had fucked off as soon as we’d started bringing some serious firepower on them.

  The strobe got closer on my right flank, and something rolled under my foot. It didn’t feel like a rock. Crouching, carefully scanning the dark trees around me, I reached down and felt it. It was a shell casing. Still warm, too.

  So, one of the bad guys had been near here. I caught a faint gleam of starlight off another case, ahead of me. But there was no sign of a bad guy or his weapon. Nor was there anything ahead, or as far as I could see up the ridge, through the trees. I stayed there, crouched and motionless, just looking and listening.

  I still couldn’t see anything, but after a moment I could hear something. There was some rustling up-slope, like movement, and I thought I heard a hiss, like an indrawn, pained breath through clenched teeth. So, we might well have hit somebody. Good.

  I keyed my radio. “This is Hillbilly,” I sent, my voice hushed, barely above a whisper. “We’re on the edge of their ambush position. We’ve got spent brass, but no bodies. Some movement above.”

  I got clicks of broken squelch in acknowledgement. Nobody wanted to do a lot of talking, now that things had gotten quiet. It might invite another gunshot.

  I looked back at Alek and pointed uphill, where I heard the movement. Then I curved my hand, indicating that I thought we should work our way uphill, and somewhat back the way we came, to flank them. He paused for a moment, then nodded. I turned back and started up, still slipping between the shadows under the mesquites. I kept having to turn my head to angle my NVGs uphill, in the direction of the noises, and back down toward my feet. I didn’t want to stumble on something I couldn’t see in the dark.

  That was easier said than done, of course, especially in a night that black. A rock rolled under my boot, and I stumbled, going to a knee with a hiss, managing to catch myself with one outstretched hand. I immediately regretted not wearing gloves; the vegetation in that part of Arizona is not exactly soft and springy. I didn’t spike myself on a cactus, but it still hurt, and it felt like a spine of something went through my pantleg and stabbed me in the knee. At least I kept my muzzle out of the dirt.

  I paused for a long moment after that, watching and waiting for the shot aimed at the noise and movement I’d just made, but nothing happened. I couldn’t hear the movement up above anymore, either.

  Cautiously, I got back to my feet and continued to climb. The hillside was getting steeper, the grass was slick under my boots, and the rocks were getting more frequent and looser. I stepped on a mesquite root wrong in the dark, and had to bite back a curse as I almost turned my ankle. Once again, a hand against the rough bark of the mesquite forestalled a fall.

  Just short of the crest of the ridgeline, I stopped and scanned above me. I was in just the right spot, and low enough to the ground, that anyone who might be standing above me would be skylined. There might not be a lot of light to work with, but a silhouette against a clear sky will still show up, even to the naked eye.

  The ridgeline was empty and still. I still couldn’t hear anyone else moving, except for a very faint rustle behind me as Alek shifted his weight.

 
I moved my scan downward, looking for any movement. It was too dark to see detail, but if the narcos—since I was pretty sure that was who we were dealing with—were still moving, I should be able to pick that up.

  But they must have fucked off in one hell of a hurry. Either that, or they had gone to ground in the bush, because the hillside was as still as the grave. There wasn’t even much wind at that hour to stir the trees and the grass. As near as I could tell, at least without exposing myself and risking getting my head blown off, they had made it over the ridgeline and away.

  “Plug, Hillbilly,” I sent, again just barely vocalizing over the radio. I’d be hard to hear past about ten feet. “Did you see anyone crest the ridge?”

  “Negative,” Hank replied. “But there’s a spot about a hundred yards down from you where there’s a draw, full of trees. They might have headed for that.”

  “Roger,” I responded, then looked back at Alek. He circled his hand above his head, so I turned and made my way as carefully and quietly as I could to join him, taking a knee under another tree.

  “What’s the call, boss?” I asked. I was all about pushing the pursuit, but I also realized that our assets and capabilities were somewhat limited right at the moment.

  He was still scanning our surroundings, and after the initial contact, I was doing the same thing. We might be Stateside, but we were also doing what we’d done in some very, very dangerous places, and with live weapons. Old habits die hard, especially when those habits have kept you alive in places where it ain’t exactly easy.

  “As much as we might want to keep pushing, pursuit under these conditions might just lead us into another ambush,” he said. “It’s what I’d do.”

  I had to nod at that. I would, too. Take fire from a bigger element of the enemy, break contact, and then set up another terrain feature over and be ready to shoot them to shit when or if they came after you. It smacked of greater tactical sophistication than I generally gave cartel bully-boys credit for, but it also never paid to underestimate an enemy, especially one who’s ambushed you once already.