Something that Jericho couldn’t think about in the middle of a goddamn combat situation! Shit, he was losing it.
He sped up a little, heard Meeks grunting in exertion, heard Kayla’s breathing, heavy but controlled. It was important for him to keep his mind on the job for their sakes as much as his own.
So he got his brain working, let his awareness spread as it always did in combat, no focus, only a blur of everything. No time to study any details when all he needed was the general classification of dangerous or not dangerous.
They moved fast along the ridge for a few hundred yards before Jericho started angling down. There was still sporadic fire from below, and he checked his watch. Less than thirty minutes since the call had come in. Not enough time to get a helicopter to them, apparently, but it must have felt like a damn lifetime for the agents below. Maybe literally their lifetime.
Jericho dropped low and let himself skid down the slope, sending duff and pebbles tumbling below. He had a better view now, and could see how the situation was laid out. The road was narrow, with a slope up on one side, a slope down on the other. Three cube vans blocked the road in one direction, and about a hundred yards in the other direction there were the original two fed sedans, shot up almost beyond recognition, and behind that a stream of cruisers, sedans, and ambulances. The problem was that the terrain was so linear. There was no room for law enforcement to spread out and put their greater numbers to work. At least, there was no room for that on the lower level. But Jericho’s team was up high.
They worked forward, worked sideways, and then he found it. The spot wasn’t perfect; there were a couple of trees obscuring parts of the militia line. But it was good. Definitely good enough.
“Rifles shoot, handgun covers shooters,” he hissed to the other two. He didn’t care who did which job, but the division of labor was common sense. They were about two hundred yards from the militia, well beyond the effective range of a sidearm. He was tempted to break out the grenade launcher, but something in him just couldn’t do it. Grenades were for Afghanistan, not for the United States. Not for Mosely.
“Trade,” Kayla said, and he heard her and Meeks shuffling around as he found a good firing position. Kayla wasn’t a great shot, but she was fine, and he had the feeling she might be taking the gun as a way to take the responsibility; Meeks was still looking pretty shaky after the previous engagement. He might not be ready to pull the trigger again, and Kayla probably wanted to spare him from making the decision.
And Kay was solid. Gray-faced and wide-eyed, but Jay knew to his core that she wouldn’t let it slow her down.
“Okay,” he said quietly as she settled beside him. “I’ve spotted seven perps. If they stay under cover, we just observe, but as soon as one of them pops up to fire, we take him out. If two come up at the same time, you take the one on the left. If more than two, you start left and work in, I’ll start right and do the same.”
Her nod was jerky, but clear.
They didn’t have to wait long. There was a signal from one of the militia members, and all of them rose at once, practically brazen from Jericho’s perspective, poking their guns around the vehicles they were using for cover—
Jericho’s shot came a fraction of a second before Kay’s. Two men fell, and the others stood frozen, confused. Jericho’s second shot found its target, and he was lined up for his third before Kay fired. By then, the militia was moving, scrambling, and Kay’s bullet hit the side of the van where a perp had been a second earlier. They were yelling as they crowded inside the vans, hoping for whatever shelter could be offered by a bit of sheet metal, and Jericho didn’t want to think about them in there, sitting in the dark, waiting for the bullets that would pierce the metal, then their bodies.
Jericho needed direction. He wasn’t a leader, wasn’t good at being in charge. He’d risk his own life, but hated the idea of risking someone else’s. “Disable the vans, or let them get away?” he asked Kay.
She didn’t answer for a full breath, out and in, and then said, “Fuck. No, the bastards shot federal agents. It’d be easier to let them disengage, but then they’d be out there.”
So she took her aim and Jericho took his. They focused on the tires and the engine block, creating explosive destruction that would have been fun if he hadn’t been far too aware of the human lives protected by the thin van walls.
When all the tires were flat and the engines steaming, Jericho checked his ammo and passed an extra clip to Kay while keeping his eyes on the scene below. “Okay. I think I can hear the helicopters. We can give cover so the ambulances can make it in and pick up our guys.” He saw her grim nod out of his peripheral vision. “So, essentially, our work here is done. Would now be a good time for us to talk about my resignation?”
The cleanup hadn’t gone as tidily as Jericho might have wished, but within a couple of hours the remaining militia members at the ambush site had been teargassed out of their vans, disarmed by a flown-in special team complete with gas masks and full-body armor, and then cuffed and transported.
Of course, there was still a lot of reporting and paperwork to go through once they were back at the station. There was always paperwork. The crime scene investigators took the M4 Jericho had used in order to do ballistic tests. They also took his sidearm, even though he hadn’t fired it. Being unarmed left him feeling a bit naked and unbalanced. Hell, maybe that had been their goal.
The feds were in charge of the whole show, so Jericho spent most of his time answering their questions and repeatedly walking them through his team’s actions on the hillside. The agents were more respectful than he was used to, almost friendly. Amazing how people’s attitudes changed when you helped them rescue their colleagues from insane militiamen.
“What was their goal?” he asked when the last round of activity had died down and it was his turn to ask some questions. It was pushing midnight, and the feds had taped off a couple hundred acres of mountain land as a crime scene. Montgomery and Hockley were sitting with Jericho and Kayla, since the FBI didn’t seem to want DEA help any more than they’d wanted the sheriff’s department to be involved. And it had been kind of sweet to see Hockley and Kay give each other a quick, worried once-over, each ensuring the other’s health without making a big scene about it. Kayla had told Jericho that Hockley was an ex-lover, but maybe she’d been playing up the ex. Regardless, they were cute, and it was tempting to comment on it. Then Jericho thought back to the mess on the mountain and his mood darkened.
“They couldn’t have seen that going down differently, could they?” Jericho asked the little band. “The militia. I mean, they did some damage, sure, but even if they’d won that fight, they had to know the federal government wasn’t going to walk away and let it go. Why the hell did they start this?”
The others didn’t seem to have any better answers than Jericho did, and the four of them sat quietly for a while. Jericho was summoning some final energy reserve to get him off his chair and home when there was a shuffling sound on the stairs and everyone in the office turned to see Wade Granger’s head appear. He froze as soon as he saw Jericho, five or six steps from the top, and his face was—damn, it was prime Wade, with about a dozen different emotions playing across it simultaneously. But this time, the emotions seemed genuine, and if that was true, if Wade was stretched so far that he was showing that kind of vulnerability in the damn sheriff’s office—
Jericho stood up slowly, and Wade was gone. His footsteps were audible, not running but almost, as he left. Jericho stared after him.
“Did you not call him?” Kayla asked, her voice hushed in disbelief. “He would have heard about all this—and you didn’t call him to say you were okay?”
“I—” Jericho had no idea what to say, and of course it wasn’t Kay he should be saying it to anyway. “Shit.”
He moved fast, to the stairs in two long strides, descending in a sort of controlled fall, and then across the lobby and out the front doors without paying any attention to who else was there, who was seeing him. No one else mattered.
Once outside, Jericho scanned the parking lot desperately. He dug in his pocket for his phone, then saw the shadows move and an interior light switch on as someone opened the door of a pickup at the far end of the parking lot.
“Wade,” Jericho yelled, loud enough he’d certainly been heard. But Wade didn’t turn, didn’t respond in any way; he just stood there staring into the truck.
Jericho broke into a jog, only slowing when he was a couple of steps away. “Wade,” he said cautiously. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”
