Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

Most sniper teams had a shooter and a tracker. The two of them were adept at either role, but Danny’s instincts in competition and field drills were unmatched. Cameron typically relied on Danny’s call and, in this instance, Danny wanted point with Cameron watching his back. Danny needed to get close enough to hear the radio chatter. He was within two hundred yards of the jeeps and the men by the fire now and edging steadily closer. Cameron saw Danny check his watch. It had been eighty-two minutes since they’d left. In less than half an hour, the rest of the group would be here.

Danny counted four jeeps, two on each side of the road, and eleven men. Seven soldiers stood around the fire, two were in the jeep with the radio, and two more were in another jeep. Danny raised his hand and indicated the number eleven. He saw a rock inches to his right light up for a split second with a laser dot. Message delivered and confirmed. Eleven it is . Had it been to his left it would have meant Cameron had counted a different number. This meant the same thing to both of them. This was only a small patrol. There was no sign of Captain Eddie, but these were clearly men from the same army, all dressed in the same red uniforms. Danny took that to mean every road probably had a similar roadblock east of them, blocking all the passages south. Who knew how many more of these groups were scattered along the way? If Danny and Cameron could take these guys out, we might be able to pass by and get away again. But eleven on two was not going to be easy.

Danny and Cameron had to wait for the next radio communication, clear the men in the jeeps first, and then keep the rest of the soldiers away from the radios. If they attacked too early, others would likely be alerted by this patrol’s lack of response and be on the way before the rest of us could get to them. If Danny and Cameron waited too long, we all would be picked up by the radar and called in, and soldiers would be on the way before we even made it there. Danny checked his watch again. Ninety-three minutes. There had been no radio communication in the nine minutes since he’d taken up his current position. Hopefully that meant they were only checking in every half hour.

Danny and Cameron, each had a ten-bullet magazine in their R11 and another clip at their side, ready for a quick switch. They had to make every shot count, and the four men in the jeep would have to go down fast. A Marine sniper is trained to hit their target center mass, middle of the chest, for the quickest kill. The four men in the jeep didn’t afford them that opportunity, with only their heads visible. Those four shots were going to be testy. Danny made another quick scan of the area around them. His two years of training had prepared him for a lot, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready for this. War? In America? No one had even considered this. He guessed for his first fight it was better to be on land he knew, rather than in some other country where the enemy would have the home field advantage. But Danny hadn’t gone through Special Ops training to hurt people. He’d done it to protect people. He’d joined the Marines to challenge himself and to get away from all the personal pain at home. His dad had let him down. He’d let his mom down. He needed to focus on a cause bigger than himself. He wanted to make a difference.

Lying here trying to decide which oblivious person he was going to kill first—even if they would gladly trade places and take him out—wasn’t something he had ever wanted to do. Another glance at his watch. Ninety-seven minutes. Come on, radio .

Up on the rock ledge, Cameron continued to watch, waiting for Danny to indicate his first target. At ninety-eight minutes, Danny signaled him to take out the driver and passenger of the second truck first. He then tapped his watch and held up two fingers. Another red dot flashed beside him. Two minutes . When the radio crackled at ninety-nine minutes, the voice was unmistakable, Captain Eddie. “Anything?”

So these were his men, after all.

“No sir.” The reply. “Nothing. Is quiet.”

“Good. Thirty minutes. Yeah?” Eddie again.

“Yes sir.” The soldier hung up.

There was a moment of silence. Followed by four quick consecutive kill shots.

It took a few seconds for the men around the campfire to react to the popping sound of the bullets piercing the windshield glass, and the first one who responded went down a split second later. Danny and Cameron each took out two more before they could find shelter. The last two took off running towards a line of boulders. Cameron got one of the runners. The other made it to the rocks. Cameron kept him pinned down while Danny went for the jeeps. As he opened the driver-side door, the window exploded beside him, spreading shards of glass across the side of his face. Danny dove down and rolled under the jeep. There was someone else out there.

From his perch, Cameron heard the shot and knew instantly it was a big gun, probably .50 caliber, and not his or Danny’s. He worried how far the sound had carried in the night air and tried to locate the source. It seemed to come from his left and likely from the east side of the road, since the boys had approached from the west. Apparently, the patrol had a scout out there, presumably with a sniper rifle. Danny was a sitting duck, fortunate that first shot had missed.

Cameron switched his line of vision from the man hiding behind the rocks to the direction of the shot. He found the soldier just as he was raising a flare gun and pierced his heart with a bullet as he pulled the trigger. The flare fired as he fell forward. Fortunately, it never climbed more than thirty feet off the ground, rocketing through the darkness over the jeeps and disappearing into a valley west of the highway. Rolling out from under the jeep and disabling all but one of the radios, Danny swung out wide around the fire. Cameron returned his focus to the remaining soldier, pinning him down with a few close shots, while Danny crawled up behind him. Cameron then descended from his position and ran towards the road. He had seen us coming and needed to cut us off until Danny could complete the task.

Danny jumped the man from behind and sat on his chest, knife to his throat, interrogating him for a quick minute. When he got all he could, he slit his throat. The soldier provided nothing useful. Danny didn’t believe for a second there were thousands of troops nearby, or that they were already coming this way. The gunshot and the flare could have raised the alarm, but they hadn’t heard a single sound on the radio since. If other patrols had heard or seen the action, someone would have checked in. Danny ran back to the fire and put it out. He collected the soldiers’ weapons, a radio, and two crates of explosives from the jeeps. We loaded those supplies into our trucks and took off south at 3:14 a.m. We didn’t have time to go back for the bikes. If we were lucky, we’d have a fifteen-minute head start before the captain checked in again. We had to fly.

We were five miles from the south end of Camp Crook Road when Captain Eddie called in. A minute later, after no response, we knew he was rushing west. We heard him give several orders to other troops to follow suit. At that point, we tossed the radio, knowing he’d soon be tracking it. We anticipated he’d go to his downed men at the jeeps first before chasing us south. If we were right, at best, that was going to give us an hour lead.

We stopped at a small bridge north of Camp Crook Road, and Wes wired it with explosives. He and Cameron ran a trip wire across the middle that would blow up the bridge upon any significant impact. It cost us twelve valuable minutes, but if that slowed them at all, it would be worth it.

We had no way of knowing while Captain Eddie had ordered all of his men to the site we’d just come from, he had also tracked all of the radios. He had picked up one signal at the end of Camp Creek Road and he, his brother, and the twenty men with them had broken off from the others and were cutting diagonally towards us. They were less than twenty miles behind us when we started driving again, and they were closing fast.