Hunting Prey, Part 2 by Gary Reed About the Author Used by express permission of the author, to whom all ownership rights remain reserved.  No portion of this work may be reproduced without written consent of Gary Reed

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Part 2:

“Something’s wrong,” Kennison Dodge, the leader of Freedom Underground thought as the helicopter began its descent.  Looking out the window, he saw three oddly shaped bundles lying on the helipad.  As the helicopter descended more, he realized that the bundles were bodies.  A buzzard, perched on one of the bundles, spread its wings and took flight, rising on the wind created by the helicopter’s spinning blades.

“SHIT!” Dodge yelled, red fury pushing into his mind.

He ordered the twelve men in the helicopter to ready their weapons.  Even before the skids touched the ground, Dodge jumped from the helicopter.  The men followed.    As soon as they were out, Dodge ordered them to quickly search the area.  In seconds, he was at the door to the building, looking down at the corpse that stared up at him with open eyes.  Clotting blood oozed from the hole in the man’s throat.  His rage growing, Dodge stepped over the body.  He hurried to the room where the prisoner had been kept.  A powerful kick slammed the door to the prison room open.  A rapid glance showed him that the prisoner was gone and his bodyguard was sprawled on the floor in his underwear.  Rolling the body over with his booted foot, he saw that the man was dead.  He turned to the desk and noticed that the dead man’s gear was gone.

The radio on his hip crackled to life.  “Dodge, this is Anders, Over.”

Dodge slid the radio from its case on his belt.  Pressing the “push-to-talk” button, he growled into the radio, “Yeah, Dodge here.”

“The woods here at the north end of the compound is all chewed up by gunfire.  We also have spent casings, an empty clip and Psycho Muldoon with his head blown off.  We think he headed off in this direction.  We haven’t found any signs of any hits though...only our guys dead.”

Report back here and outfit the men for a long-term manhunt.  I want this man found.”

"Roger, Sir,” the radio crackled and was silent.

Gillette, you’re a dead man.  I will find you.  Then I will kill you.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

He set his first trap at 2:30 pm.  It used a low-hanging branch in the trail as a trigger.  To the branch, he ran a length of nearly-invisible fishing line around other branches to a hand grenade he slid into a hollow knothole in a tree trunk above the trail.  The grenade fit into the hollow loosely, but tightly enough to hold the spoon in place, thus keeping the grenade from arming.  Any movement of the branch beyond that caused by the wind would pull the grenade from the hollow and allow it to swing down into the trail at about chest level.   Leaving the pin in the grenade, Adam  gave the branch a tentative push, as if he were merely walking down the trail.  A second later, the grenade was swinging down in the trail a few feet behind him.  Smiling in grim satisfaction, Adam quickly rearmed the trap, this time pulling the pin of the grenade.  He then stepped back on the trail, making sure that his trap was invisible to all but the most careful bservation.  Satisfied, he erased all signs of his work and carefully slid past the branch.  Have one on me, Skinny.
 

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

In the bedlam of preparing to search for the prisoner, none of the equipment in the storage room was missed.  The man in charge of the supplies lay dead outside on the helipad, shot through the shoulder and back.  Members of Freedom Underground burst into the supply room and grabbed supplies, handing them through the door to others who were stuffing them into packs.  In another part of the compound, the armorer was handing out weapons and ammunition.  A few other men were policing up their dead comrades and burying them.  The men muttered about collecting payback for their dead.  They looked into the dead eyes of their friends and vowed revenge.

 Within minutes, all preparations were made and the twenty men of Freedom Underground stood on the helipad, looking to their leader, who stood in the open cargo door of the helicopter.

“Men, the man who is now on the run is a threat to our well-laid plans for our operation.  We must find him and bring him back here.  Alive if possible, dead only if absolutely necessary.  He will most likely be headed toward Rawlings to the south.  That’s the closest town.  He’ll probably head right to the police there.  Won’t he be in for a surprise there?” Dodge shouted to his men.  Those “Good Ol’ Boys” are in my pocket.

He smiled as his men cheered.

“Let’s find him before he gets there though.  It will not do to have him talk to anyone else.  I’m sending Anders ahead to Rawlings to notify the police and report to me if Gillette shows up there.  Crowe, you go with him.  The rest of you will go with me to find Gillette.  We’ll be looking for clues that will tell us where he has been and where he’s going.  We’ll spread out.  If you find anything report it at once.  Let’s move out!”

The group broke into smaller units of four men each.  They spread out, nearly fifty yards between groups.  The groups moved in a triangle formation, a man on point, the other three in support behind him.

Dodge stood over the shredded log, staring down at the ground.  Several brass casing glinted in the afternoon sunlight, winking at him from the fallen leaves.  His eyes traveled up a line of disturbed leaves.  I have your trail now, Gillette.  I’ll track you down and gut you.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

4:30.  Time to get ready to pull my vanishing act.

Gillette stood near what would be too small to be called a river, but too large to be a creek.  The stream ran in a southern route, spanning about ten or fifteen feet wide.  The water was fast, but not too swift for wading.  If he waded downstream, he would mask his path and be able to come out near the southern town of Rawlings.  As he surveyed the stream, a large trout sucked in a floating fly. If I only had a fly rod, a #10 Royal Coachman and no crazy wackos with automatic weapons on my ass, this’d be living!

Suddenly, cracking the silence of the forest like a thunderclap, an explosion from Gillette’s back-trail signaled the presence of pursuers.  Gillette gave a smirk of satisfaction as he heard ripples of automatic fire immediately following the explosion. A little wired, are we?  Or undisciplined?

Gillette raised a canteen to his lips and took a sip.  He raised it in mock salute toward the sound of the explosion and his far off pursuers.  Well Skinny, welcome to The ‘Nam.   The prey slid the canteen back into its pouch on his belt.  He stepped into the river and began to wade upstream.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Kent Saylor, the middle man of the group’s only three-man team, looked at his watch.  It read 4:28.  It would be getting dark soon.  He wondered what Dodge would do then.  Would they camp, or would they beat around the woods in the dark?  He shifted his grip on his rifle and pushed the questions to the back of his mind.  Dodge gives the orders.  He knows the plans. He’ll tell us what to do.

Saylor looked to his right, seeing that Krieder, the squad leader was coming close to whisper a question.  A glance about fifteen feet ahead showed Granger, the point man sliding through the brush, his eyes keeping track of the trail ahead of him.  Saylor turned his head to see what his squad leader wanted when something flickered in his peripheral vision.  His eyes darted toward the motion. What the...?

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Delta Squad’s leader, Robert Krieder’s last vision was of the sudden flash and shock wave, eclipsed by the rag doll ahead of him that had once been Kent Saylor.  In vivid slow motion, he watched Saylor’s body fold into itself as it absorbed the majority of the grenade blast and the shrapnel.  The blast spun the body around to face Krieder, the force sending it toward him like an apparition.  The entire front of Saylor’s body was a mass of gore, blood and burnt flesh.

Krieder saw this entire scene in the fractions of a second before some of the shrapnel that missed the hapless Saylor tore into his face, eyes and chest.  He felt the metal’s jagged, burning edges slicing and burning through his flesh and eyes.  He thought they were tearing straight into his brain.  He then felt himself fall to the ground and realized that the deafening sound in his ears was his own screaming.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

CRUMP!

Wally Granger felt the concussion from the grenade and heard shrapnel crackling through the brush behind him.  He felt several pieces tear into the flesh of his back and legs.  The force knocked him forward as did the hot steel striking his body.  As he hit the ground, he heard himself yell.  On reflex, he squeezed the trigger on his Uzi 9mm submachine gun, spraying the woods ahead of him. That was a grenade!  The bastard’s close enough to throw grenades.

Within seconds, Granger’s Uzi was empty.  Fighting pain, he dropped the magazine from the grip of the Uzi and slid another in its place.  The woods around him had erupted into gunfire, quickly silencing as the other men realized there was no return fire.  The silencing of the gunfire allowed the agonizing scream of a wounded man tear through the quiet woods.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

“CEASE FIRE!  CEASE FIRE!  GODDAMMIT, CEASE FIRE!”  Dodge was screaming over the gunfire ripping through the woods around him.

Everywhere he looked, he saw his men on the ground, firing into the thick woods.  He now saw what old veterans had called a “mad minute”, the very beginning of a firefight where all hell breaks loose and every man pours as much firepower into as large an area possible.  Sometimes, the veterans told him, this was a controlled, disciplined action.  Most of the time though, they also told him, it was sheer uncontrolled panic.  As much as he wanted the case to be the former, he knew it to be the latter.

When the firing stopped, the screams reached him.  He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up as the sounds of the screams went into his ears, through his brain and straight into his veins where they chilled them and clenched his heart.  A shiver ran down his body.  He clenched his eyes shut as if that would stop the sound.  He snapped them open and turned to the man on the ground to his right.

“Come on!” he ordered.

Dodge jumped up and sprinted toward the screams, keeping low and dodging between cover just in case Gillette just might have them under fire.  The other man, Bravo Squad leader, Eric Caldwell followed close on the heels of his commander.   Dodge broke through the brush separating him from the source of the screams.  The scene beyond stopped him short.  Caldwell literally plowed into his commander’s back.  The two men stumbled forward onto the scene.

The vegetation had been blasted away in a twenty foot wide circle.  Nearly the entire area was glistening with blood from the shattered, bloody remains of Kent Saylor.  What remained was hard to believe to have once been human.   The screams came from Robert Krieder, who writhed on the ground, bloody hands over his face clawing at the burnt, bloody gobbets of flesh that had once been his eyes.

“Check for others,” Dodge ordered Caldwell, who nodded and went forward.

    Dodge knelt by the writhing man and began to speak to him.

“Krieder!  It’s Dodge.  I’m here.”

Krieder’s screaming subsided, “Dodge?” he rasped through a mouth full of blood from his slashed face.

“Yeah.”

“It burns.  It feels like the shit’s burning through into my brain.”

“You’ll make it, Buddy.  We’ll get this bastard.  You’ll be fine.  We’ll get you all fixed up when we get you back,”  Dodge said, talking over the sound of steel coming clear of a nylon holster and a safety clicking off.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Eric Caldwell had found Wally Granger and was helping him back to the scene.  Granger could walk stiffly for the grenade fragments had not cut too deeply or hit anything vital.  As they emerged from the brush their eyes grew wide with the scene.

“You’ll be OK in a month or two.”  Dodge was saying.

What caused their disbelief was that Dodge had his Beretta pointing at Krieder’s head. They saw Dodge’s finger tightening on the trigger and knew what was going to happen.  Still, they flinched as if startled at the muzzle flash and the report.  Krieder’s body jerked to stiffness, then limp.   Dodge clicked the safety on and looked up at the two men.  He stood and slid the Beretta back into the holster at his side.

“Can’t have any blind, shot up men slowing us down.  Don’t have time to deal with him now.”

Dodge turned and stalked back toward where the other squads were.  Caldwell looked at Granger.

“Can you make it home?”

It would be slow.  It would be painful.  But...he had seen the alternative.

“Yeah, I’ll make it home.”

Caldwell turned and followed Dodge back to his squad. God damn.  Not a bit of pity in his eyes.  If he had said “he was suffering” it might have been more acceptable.  Who the hell knows?

Suddenly, the leader and his cause didn’t look so good after all.  He caught up to Dodge.

“Dodge?”

The leader of Freedom Underground turned, his merciless eyes boring into Caldwell.  “Yeah?”

“Wally’s hit pretty bad in the back and legs.  I’ll take him back to the compound and patch him up.”

Dodge looked like he was about to protest.  Then he read something in the eyes of Eric Caldwell.  A look that if he didn’t let this man go, he might find a gun to his head one night.

Eric looked deep into the eyes of the leader of Freedom Underground.  That’s right.  Your cause is nothing to me anymore.  I see you as you are Kennison Dodge.  I see you as the tyrannical, evil creature you say you are fighting against in the U.S Government.  You are against any government that you are not the head of.  You are a hypocrite Dodge.

“Very well.  Take him back.” Dodge said.

Caldwell turned and quickly caught up to Granger, who was hobbling back the trail they had been following.

“Let’s get you home Wally.”
 

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