The Beginning The security situation on the Arizona-Mexico border has gotten bad…very bad. The Border Patrol is all but helpless, as narcos, terrorists, and common…
Peter Nealen - Veteran and Author
Month: July 2017
Chapter 3
It was a long drive back to Ray’s place, and we were tired. Fighting a demonic manifestation in a Bed and Breakfast can really take it out of you. We stopped several times to rest along the way. Eryn and I could switch off driving, but Kolya and Father Ignacio didn’t have that luxury. At least Father Ignacio could go a lot farther on a single tank of gas, riding that Harley of his.
Paul wasn’t helping much; according to Kolya, he was spending most of the drive sleeping, when he wasn’t staring blankly out the window. None of us necessarily blamed him; the first brush with the powers of the Abyss can be pretty traumatic. He’d need time.
It was well after dark by the time we pulled in. Ray’s house, a long, one-story, hewn-log building that he’d built himself, was dark, at least at first. As the gravel crunched under our wheels, a light flickered to life in the window. Either Magnus had heard us coming and woken Ray up, or he’d somehow known we’d be pulling in right at that moment.
If it hadn’t been for the earpiece, I never would have heard the radio over the snarl of the four-wheeler’s engine.
“Hillbilly, this is Plug,” Hank called.
I eased off the throttle and took one hand off the handlebars to key the radio. “Send it, Plug.”
“Can you push up to the top of that ridgeline just to the east of you and take a look to the south?” he asked. “Tell me what you see.”
“Sure thing,” I answered. It wasn’t like we had a set patrol route, or even any particular need to be anywhere. So far, this job had consisted of little more than long hours just hot-wheeling around the hills of southern Arizona on four-wheelers and the occasional pickup truck.
I gunned the engine and sent the sturdy little ATV surging up between the mesquites and the creosote bushes toward the ridge that Hank had indicated. It wasn’t a long climb, but it was steep and rocky, with plenty more sagebrush and creosote bushes that I had to weave around. But it still only took a couple of minutes to reach the top.
Halting my ATV, I stood on the running boards and pulled my binos out of the saddlebags. As I lifted them to my eyes and scanned the open ground to the south, I quickly saw what Hank had been talking about.
There were four figures trotting through the grass and brush in the next draw over. They were moving pretty quickly, and heading generally north. Given that Hank and I were the only ones out on patrol at the time, and all of Manuel Lopez’s ranch hands were either working around the house and barns, or watching the herds to the east of us, that kind of narrowed things down.
“Plug, Hillbilly,” I sent, keeping the binos trained on the four. “I do believe we have some uninvited visitors.”
“That’s what I saw, too,” he replied. “Just wanted to corroborate it. Meet you down below, and we’ll go say howdy?”
“Sure,” I answered. I wasn’t going to complain about actually having some work to do.
The truth be told, even though we were all experienced warfighters, with years of work in the military and some in the contracting world, we had perhaps been a touch naïve when we’d started up our little company. After all, we owned Praetorian Security, and we knew the score better than any of the soft-clothed financiers who owned most of the rest of the PMSCs out there. We could determine our own equipment, pick our own jobs, and find the jobs that would keep us in the thick of it, in the shit.
We were finding out the hard way that those kinds of jobs were few and far between, and often involved a lot more shady business to get than we’d necessarily expected. Most of the time, they were either outright illegal, or in some kind of gray area that tended to get all kinds of scrutiny, so the clients who had those sorts of jobs didn’t tend to be very forthcoming about them. We’d set up our little private Special Operations company, only to find that we didn’t immediately have clients running to our doorstep.
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The woman was in the lead, two steps ahead of the man. She was also half a head taller than he was, with a narrow, severe sort of face, blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail behind her head. She looked around at us rather imperiously, her mouth pressed into a thin line.
“Who are you people?” she asked. Her voice was clipped and slightly nasal. And her tone immediately set my teeth on edge.
“Who wants to know?” I replied, shifting my Winchester to the crook of my arm as I folded my arms in front of me. I could see the badge on her belt and the big yellow letters “FBI” on her blue windbreaker. But her attitude put my back up, especially coming after what we’d just done.
“I’m Special Agent Trudeau, and this is Special Agent Miller,” she replied, in the same clipped, arrogant tone of voice. “Now, tell me who you are.”
“Lady, unless you’ve got a warrant, which the good police chief over there might object to, given what just happened, I suggest you get a lot more polite in the next five seconds, or you can pound sand,” I told her.
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Today, 241 years ago, our forefathers signed their names to the Declaration of Independence, in so doing establishing a state of war between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain.
