Hair of the Dog by Gordon Carroll (reading strategies book TXT) 📗

plan was simple. Kill the dogs with suppressed fire and make their way into the house. Kill the man, Gil Mason, and place the drop guns and a few red bandannas to make it look like a gang attack in retaliation and get them the flip out of Dodge. Easy-peasy. Only Van knew that sometimes things didn’t go the way you expected them too, hence the goggles already in place. He scanned the countryside as they progressed and was the only one to see the hot outlines of the men off to the side of the road a good distance from the house at the top.

Speaking through his helmet mic, he ordered his driver to stop and for the first car to keep going to the target location. His group would exit and neutralized the threat. Van didn’t know if this was Mason or a dad and son out walking their dog from a nearby house, but it didn’t matter. There could be no witnesses.

Hudson was first out. He was an arrogant kid with a badly scarred, acne-cratered face, but he was a good shot with good tactics. Parks and Stanson were right behind him when Van heard Hudson’s first shot followed quickly by three more.

By their instant reactions, Van thought both targets had been hit, but then saw them disappearing behind trees. The SUV in front of them suddenly swerved to the side and slipped out of view. Van heard the crash, even over the gunfire, and figured that fire team was out of the fight.

Like he thought a moment ago, things didn’t always go according to plan.

29

Bullets pelted the trees and brush around us and I dove for the largest trunk I could see, just as big divots were torn from the bark. Larkin made it to a ditch just behind him and Max vanished like the shape shifter he is.

They were pros, these guys, no simple band of gang-banger street thugs. Their rifles were suppressed, keeping the clatter down to a dull roar, and they had to have been using FLEER or some other type of night vision in order to spot us the way they did. What they didn’t know was that this was my mountain and that I had night vision of my own.

I sighted in on the lead SUV and put a round through the driver’s forehead. The vehicle swerved sharply to the right and went straight over the cliff, hitting about thirty feet down and bursting into flames before tumbling the rest of the way until it crushed up against a big boulder.

About a million slugs smacked into my tree and I went down to the prone position, spotting three men advancing from the road. Two others had already made it to the trees. I figured them for body armor, so I aimed low for the pelvic girdle and cranked off three fast shots. My first round struck home and the guy whirled and fell, screaming like he’d just been shot, but trees or something must have deflected the other two bullets because his buddies returned fire hard and fast. I found the reticle of my scope just in time to see a kneeling soldier behind a tree. I put a round through his face and saw a man next to him sighting in on me. A bright green blur shot from the trees and took the target at the throat. He went down and was lost behind a screen of bushes.

A sharp chunk of tree exploded next to my face, blinding me for a second, followed by a barrage of fully automatic gunfire that made me keep my head down. As soon as it stopped, I re-sighted in that area and saw Jerome Larkin grab the guy’s gun and shoot him, the weapon still on full auto. The bad guy danced a strange jig before falling without a sound.

Dirt exploded next to me and the tree splintered. It was time to move.

Van Blake moved into the draw thirty yards to the west of the drop-off where the lead SUV had disappeared. He almost fell at the abrupt change in terrain, but being an old pro, stayed on his feet. Suppressed gunfire sounded all around him, and for a second, it was like the old days back in the sand pit with his fellow soldiers taking on the towel heads. He was innocent back then, before his screw ups, and the booze, and the drugs, and all the death. Those early days were good days. He was a knight in shining armor, avenging his country’s virtue at having been violated by these ancient enemies. But somewhere along the line, he’d allowed himself to be compromised. It started with little things — insubordination, drinking, slacking — and then escalated quickly into theft and assault. Until one black night, when he was so boozed up that he botched a raid, and two of his once-buddies were seriously injured. And that was that. He could have done time in the stockade, but because he had been a good soldier once, the Army let him out with a dishonorable. Saving him jail time, but leaving him with the guilt and the memories and the bad habits that had gotten him into trouble in the first place. He’d come to terms with a lot of the past since then; gotten out of the drugs and most of the booze. The one thing he’d lost, and somehow never been able to reclaim, haunted him from time to time…his honor. But the pay helped make up for it. Van was a good leader, tactically sound and immensely competent. He’d only lost two men in all the years he’d been a mercenary and that had been on a hairy mission in deep Africa, going against high odds. He no longer felt like a shining knight, that was true, but he had three houses on two continents and the biggest high resolution TVs money could buy. And nobody in