Shallow Creek

A glance in his rear mirror showed nothing but a giant cloud of dust pouring up into the sky.  Brendan winced at the thought of some deputy getting smart and deciding to check out his trail, but he’d deal with that if it happened.  Force Recon trained him to adapt and react quickly to volatile situations, so it was time to put that education to task.

The edge of the field approached quickly, and Brendan’s aim proved true as the break in the fence appeared to his right.  He slowed the truck and carefully maneuvered out onto the trail that would lead to the highway.  The cloud behind him settled to a lower altitude as he shot down the gravelly road, and he caught a glimpse of the side of the truck in the side mirror.  Kim’s mom was going to be pissed; mud caked every inch of her truck in grime, but hey, weren’t trucks meant for this sort of stuff?

At the highway, Brendan yielded to a couple of big rigs and then darted out in front of a slow-moving RV piloted by a guy who looked like he had one foot in the grave already.  Brendan threw a friendly wave in his rearview as he jetted down the highway, but he doubted the old man could see half that far.

Brendan had a couple of hours to kill before he reached the turnoff towards the old cabin he’d vacationed in as a kid.  He settled in for a long ride without much to see, but noted the adequate level of his gas tank and the excessive pressure in his bladder.  It had been a long day so far, and an opportunity to use the men’s room hadn’t exactly presented itself.

With the lives of two federal agents on the line, that need would have to wait as long as possible, so he focused on the empty landscape surrounding him instead of on the nagging call of nature.  As much as Kim’s mom would kill him, Brendan wasn’t above pissing inside her truck if that made the difference between Spee living and dying.

In the Marines, he’d rarely known exactly what was going to happen during a mission, despite the best intel available.  Some of the brass claimed a full-blown firefight as evidence that a mission was a complete failure, regardless of the outcome.  That applied better with the Army, where they decimated their targets with Apaches and M1 Abrams before the Bradleys rolled in with the ground-pounders.  If the enemy still had numbers to fight back at that point, something had gone tango uniform on the op.

Force Recon played by a different set of rules.  Even compared to the other branches’ Special Forces units, Force Recon did some crazy ops, and not always intentionally.  Delta got into some heavy shit, but they also spent a lot of time going native and subverting the enemy from within.  The SEALS were primarily a search and rescue unit, despite a few high-profile encounters that received a lot of publicity.  Brendan meant them no disrespect, but rarely did any of those groups dip in behind enemy lines with the expressed purpose to blow some shit up.

The formation of MARSOC, the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, had pulled a lot of the guys out of Force Recon who specialized in direct action, but more than one of Brendan’s green ops had turned black at the drop of a hat, or the drop of an artillery shell.  Either way, if some unlucky son of a bitch discovered them on deep recon, the team went weapons hot without hesitation, and the op adopted a no-holds-barred philosophy.

Now Brendan barreled into unknown enemy territory with no eyes on potential hostiles and no backup ready to save his ass should he encounter heavy resistance.  On top of that, he had no gun, no knife, no camouflage, and no explosives.

In fairness, that probably evened the odds a little for the bad guys.

Chapter 45

Cigarette smoke marred the clean, natural air of the dry forest.  Brendan slowly lowered his body to the ground, only barely disturbing the carpet of leaves.  After a few painfully slow movements, Brendan spotted the lone sentry pulling a fresh cigarette from a white and red package.  Judging from the amateur mistake of smoking while on guard duty, Brendan fancied his chances against his prey.

The man wore what could only be described as lumberjack apparel: big boots, big hat, flannel shirt, and the prerequisite bushy beard.  He leaned lazily against a tree marking one side of presumably the only driveway leading up to the cabin, which looked to be a step up from the cabin Brendan had shared with his brother growing up.  Brendan had left his borrowed truck well back and carefully navigated his way through prickly bushes and treacherous poison ivy.  He’d spotted and avoided plenty of it as he’d wrestled to his current hiding spot, on the edge of the parking area for the cabin, but he knew the three-leaved bastards weren’t always easy to see, so more than likely his bare arms would develop a hellish rash in a few days.