Chapter 11 - The Rat in the Corner
The rain started at sixteen-hundred hours—a cold, driving deluge that blew in from the northern Pacific, turning the dirt tracks of Camp Pendleton’s northern training area into rivers of yellow mud.
The tactical utility vehicle—a militarized Polaris MRZR Hayes had pulled from the reconnaissance motor pool without asking anyone for a signature—bounced violently through the ruts of Range Road 4.
Hayes was behind the wheel, his face covered in greasepaint, his teeth clenched around the stub of an unlit cigar. I sat in the passenger seat, an M4A1 carbine resting across my knees, the selector switch on safe, the optics covered with rubber storm caps.
In the back, secured by a four-point nylon harness that supported his chest and kept the weight off his broken front leg, sat Bruno. He wore his old Kevlar assault vest, the rain beading on the waterproof fabric, his black muzzle raised to the wind, testing the wet air for the scent of sulfur, diesel, and copper.
"Range Two-Fourteen is three hundred meters past that crest," Hayes shouted over the roar of the Polaris’s turbocharged engine. "The old bunker is an artillery observation post built in forty-four. Three feet of reinforced concrete, one entrance facing north, two observation slits looking south over the impact valley."
"Visibility?" I asked.
"Fifty yards at best with this rain," Hayes said, shifting into low gear as the vehicle began to climb the steep, gravel-strewn ridge. "If Vance has eyes on the road, he’ll see our headlights."
"Kill the lights," I ordered.
Hayes slapped the toggle switch. The Polaris plunged into the gray murk of the storm, navigated only by the faint green phosphor glow of the dashboard compass and Hayes’s thirty years of muscle memory on these hills.
We crested the ridge.
Below us, nestled in a natural bowl of scrub oak and shattered granite boulders, sat the bunker. It looked like an ancient gray turtle half-buried in the mud. A commercial white delivery van was backed up to the steel entrance door, its hazard lights blinking rhythmically through the sheets of rain.
Two men in dark, waterproof jackets were loading green wooden crates into the rear doors of the van. Both carried short-barreled automatic shotguns slung across their chests.
"I see two targets at the vehicle," Hayes muttered, cutting the engine and letting the Polaris coast to a stop behind a cluster of coastal sagebrush fifty yards up-slope. "No sign of Denise."
"She’ll be inside," I said, checking the chamber of my carbine with a quiet, metallic *clack*. "They won't keep her in the rain; she’s their only ticket through the gate."
I reached into the back and unclipped Bruno’s transit harness, attaching the short, three-foot tactical lead to the D-ring on his assault vest.
"Bruno," I whispered.
The dog’s ears flattened slightly. He looked up at me through the rain, his breath coming in short, hot plumes of steam.
"Point," I commanded softly.
Bruno didn't try to leap from the vehicle. He lowered himself carefully onto his three good limbs, using his left shoulder to brace his weight, and slid smoothly into the wet grass beside my boots. Despite the heavy fiberglass cast wrapped in waterproof green duct tape, he moved with the silence of a hunting cat, his belly low to the mud, his eyes fixed on the blinking orange lights of the delivery van.
"Hayes," I said, keeping my voice beneath the sound of the wind. "You take the high side of the draw. Cover the entrance with the rifle. If anyone comes out that door with a weapon raised, take them down."
"Understood, General," Hayes said, slipping his own carbine from the scabbard. "And Denise?"
"I’m going through the observation slit," I said.
Hayes looked at the bunker, then at me. "The slit is twelve inches wide, Victoria. You’ll have to drop your armor."
"Then I’ll drop my armor," I said.
I unbuckled my tactical vest, laying the heavy ceramic plates on the floorboard of the Polaris, keeping only my belt, my service pistol, and my combat knife.
"Bruno, stay with me," I murmured.
We moved through the scrub oak like two shadows detached from the gray afternoon. The mud was cold, soaking through my utility trousers, but Bruno didn't make a sound. He navigated the rocks with three legs, his balance so instinctive that he didn't even displace a single stone as we circled the rear of the bunker.
Through the narrow concrete observation slit, five feet above the ground, I could hear voices.
"...tell you the kid cracked!" a man was screaming—a voice with the rough, cigarette-scarred gravel of Marcus Vance. "Conrad Mercer can't do shit for us now! The whole division is locked down! We take the van through the fence at Area Sixty-Four, drop the merchandise at the boat ramp, and leave the woman in the ditch!"
"And if she talks?" another voice asked.
"She won't talk," Vance snarled. "Dead meat doesn't give depositions."
I looked down at Bruno.
His ruff was raised, a line of stiff black hair running from his neck down his spine. He had heard the tone. He knew what was waiting on the other side of that three feet of concrete.
"Bruno," I whispered, resting my hand on his head. "Sangin."
It was the command for silent breach.
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The dog didn't bark. He simply gathered his eighty-pound frame beneath him, his good front leg digging deep into the California mud, ready to explode through the dark.
***
