Uncertain Justice

An image of the company commander ripping the Corporal's stripes off one sleeve while he did the same thing on the other arm flashed through his mind but he let it go for the time being. They had to find the fugitive and just hope it wasn't a body they came across instead.

They found only some disturbed shrubbery and pine needles near the tree stump where at least one round had struck. They hunted briefly but didn't find where the others had hit. The only tangible signs that Underwood had actually been there were some scuff marks in the dirt and a long pole as thick as a man's wrist set up with an evil-looking metal point.

Since the tracks showed Miles had come to the hollow from higher on the ridge and departed moving rapidly down slope, the guide didn't bother to backtrack the fugitive. They weren't terribly interested in where he'd come from, but where he was going was vitally important to them. They never found Underwood's string of horses just on the other side of the ridge.

Displaced undergrowth showed where the man had fled initially but that meager trail ended quickly. Two hours later, the group gave up the attempt to find Underwood when MacPherson lost his trail in a jumble of rocks less than a half mile from where they'd found the spear.

After casting about, trying to pick up the fugitive's trail, Cal had to admit the man had vanished. A thoughtful expression took up residence on MacPherson's sun-darkened features. None of the band that had ridden with Chief Joseph could have hidden their trail any better.

He took stock and didn't care for what he was saw. His ancestors would have said the man they were hunting had great power. He began to wonder if the money promised him by the special agent was really enough. It had seemed so at the time.

The thoughtful look was replaced by a frown that stayed on his face as they hiked back toward their camp. They'd left it only this morning to watch the valley for a fugitive fleeing prosecution.

§

The fugitive in question was quickly making his way behind the ridge from where the firing had come. Jogging where he found enough cover and keeping a good two miles between himself and the source of the gunfire, he rounded the south shoulder of the mountain well below the rim and began to swing back to the west and north.

Having made a big circle around the place from where someone had shot at him, he slowed, more careful than he'd been early in the day to stay concealed in trees, brush, and rocks. He was searching for tracks--somebody heading toward the far end of the bluff rising high to his right rear.

A few hours after the shots were fired at him, he found traces of four men moving in a group to the northeast ... in the direction of the bluff. Settling onto his haunches, he studied the marks made by the strangers.

Three sets of tracks he could identify immediately. The deep tread and heavy toe indentations marked the footwear as the familiar steel-toed combat boots Miles had worn most of his adult life. Two of those three men were reasonably comfortable and confident in the woods; the other was not--he stumbled occasionally on fallen branches or rocks and slipped on leaves scattered across the trails.

In particular, one of the men never made a mistake like that, he stepped over twigs and pebbles lightly and with a gait much like the one Miles had learned from Zeb and his friends in the ancient city. He wore comfortable well-worn boots that had seen a lot of use.

All four sets of tracks tended to stay on established game trails, no one tried moving cross-country.

Rising, Miles backtracked the footprints for a distance to see what more he could learn. His progress was slow, walking ten to twenty yards off the trail but he was in no hurry and he had no inclination to expose himself further.

He paralleled the trail, returning occasionally to make sure he hadn't lost the tracks. After another hour of painstaking progress, he found another set of tracks that split off this trail and took off to the north. Studying them, he noted the crumbled edges and smattering of dust in the sign. This set was a day or more older than the tracks he'd been following.

Going up the new trail for forty or fifty yards uphill, he found a number of clear prints of a boot with a cut mark on the inside right heel that belonged to the one in the group of four who wasn't wearing combat boots. This man had gone up the trail by himself once and come back down. Later he'd led the other three up there and come back down with them again. Miles retreated a few yards and sank to a knee beside a boulder screened on all sides by trees and tangled undergrowth to think.

The man who walked like an Indian had apparently scouted the ridge sometime in the past few days. Yesterday he'd taken the group north to one position and today he'd led them along the same game trail for a way before branching off to a more southerly destination where they'd shot at him.

It seemed to him the tracks were probably coming from a common source ... a permanent or semi-permanent campsite somewhere off to the west and probably around to the north around the shoulder of the mountain. The Indian had been searching for a place where the four of them ... where they could do what?

Lay up and watch over a stretch of the wilderness waiting for him to show? And then ambush him since he wasn't smart enough to stay in the cover God put out here to be used?

Miles brushed off Zeb's caustic remark for the moment. He could figure out what he should have done later. For the moment, he had questions of his own to ask and he was betting these four were the ones who owed him answers.

He listened to the forest until he knew the position of each animal within his hearing. Nothing indicated the presence of humans close by. He got to his feet and walked slowly along the trail. When he got back to the fork where the newer tracks led more to the east, he backtracked in the direction from which both sets had come.

Keeping well off the trail the tracks followed, Miles made his way through dense underbrush that kept his pace slow. Every so often, he went back to the trail to make sure he hadn't lost the tracks. He didn't have to get too close to them ... they were visible yards away.

Twice he had to walk a wide circle to find the trail when it wasn't where he expected it. On the second occasion, he left a tiny trace under a wild rose bush where his foot rested for a moment. He'd have been furious with himself if he'd known.

§

The big Lance Corporal was feeling very put upon. The other members of the mission were treating him like he was some kind of idiot. It wasn't fair, dammit! The Lieutenant had told him, word for word, they were going to reach out and 'touch' this dude.

What else could he have meant? Make a cell phone call?

Peterson could just see it coming--he would be blamed for everything that had gone wrong. Feeling sorry for himself ... and more than a little mad at the world ... he kept going when the rest of the men stopped for a breather. Gunny let him go. The boy had embarrassed himself and the Corps. Peterson knew that look on the older Marine's face well. He walked faster and was out of sight in a scant minute.

Winded, tired, and finally needing a break himself, he slowed as he walked along the trail. He stepped off the trail to get a drink of tepid water from his canteen and rest a moment in the shade. Dropping the canteen back in its pouch, he got on the trail again. He'd be glad to get to camp and get something to eat. Dammit all! The Lieutenant had told him!

Topping a rise, he looked up at a soft noise to find a tall man standing at the edge of the forest near the trail. The man pivoted to face Peterson squarely. It was the man he'd seen through his riflescope just before he'd fired.

Marines don't wait for events to unfold--they are taught aggressiveness in boot camp and it's reemphasized in every training cycle they go through. On occasion, it gets them into bad trouble. His temper boiling over, Peterson jerked the rifle off his shoulder and horsed the Barrett's muzzle around to fire.

§

The group of three men paused for another rest near the tiny, very delicate wild roses growing beside the trail. There weren't many of them left after the deer and bear ... and whatever else had used the trail stopped by for a treat.

Cal walked to the patch while they rested and idly picked a flower from one of the surviving bushes. When he moved the little shrub, he froze.

Pressed into the damp ground beside the stalk was a clear print, a vague shape of a man's foot. Dropping to his knees, he peered closely at the insubstantial trace and was suddenly sure. It had been made only a short time earlier by someone wearing moccasins.

"WALKER!" The urgency in the Indian's voice made the NCO straighten. He stepped to Cal's side.

"What is it?" He saw nothing that should have alarmed the guide.

"Someone was watching the trail from here. Someone who knows how to keep hidden--wearing moccasins, I think." They'd seen such tracks back where the fugitive had been shot at. They'd had time to get comfortable with the concept of a man wearing moccasins in these mountains.

The two men were suddenly uneasy. It hadn't occurred to the Marine the quarry might turn on the hunter and it had never been Cal's job to consider it. Special Agent Randall was frowning as he followed the conversation. They all turned to look down the trail where Peterson had disappeared. Walker cupped his mouth and inhaled to yell at Peterson to bring him back to the group.

The sound of gunfire cut him off and sent him scrambling for his M-4A1 rifle. He'd been using the carbine version of the old M-16 since the Corps had first begun issuing the newer combat rifle. At the moment, the collapsible stock was fully extended. The butt rested on an exposed root under a tree beside the trail.

Grabbing the weapon off the ground as he passed, the Marine dove off the open trail and into the brush. He yanked the charging handle in mid air and slapped the bolt catch release when he landed to send the bolt forward and load a round into the firing chamber.

By the time he was set, he realized the firing was a few hundred yards away and no threat to the three of them. There had been a flurry of shots from the Barrett rifle but only a couple shots Gunny could identify as being from another weapon. The sharper crack had sounded like a pistol rather than a long gun.

Getting to his feet, Walker trotted down the hill with his rifle at the ready. He wasn't happy about advancing into a situation where he didn't know where the good guys were and whether the bad guys were waiting on him, but he didn't have much choice. There was no one else around to do the job.

§

He'd found another trail that branched off the main one to the northeast. This one had also been used by four or more men walking with each other sometime over the past few days. The tracks said they'd gone up that way and then come back down sometime later. Miles was sure he still had the right group. Crossing the main trail to get south of it again, he was looking north from where the group had apparently come when the sound of a boot scraping the surface of the trail in the opposite direction caught him by surprise. He whirled to face the threat.

He'd checked the trail before he stepped anywhere near it but hadn't seen the Marine. Peterson taking his break in a low place. The light wind that bumped tree limbs together and rustled leaves in the underbrush was more than enough to drown out the Lance Corporals footsteps until he was right on top of the fugitive.

As Miles watched, the big man in camouflage BDUs stopped dead in the trail and set himself to open fire without pausing an instant. Miles wrenched his pistol out of the holster and thumbed back the hammer while bringing the weapon up to fire.

Miles was moving fast, but the soldier up the trail had the advantage of seeing the fugitive before Miles had become aware of the Marine's presence. On the other hand, Peterson was mad and in a hurry. It cost him.

When he fired, the big bullet blasted into a sapling a foot to Miles' left, splintering the trunk and passing through three more trees before it finally came to rest, burying itself deep inside a fourth. The deafening blast sent nearby birds and animals scurrying for the sky or burrows.

With a familiar weapon and settling instinctively into a stable shooting stance, Miles squeezed off his first shot ... aiming for the middle of the target as he'd been trained in countless combat arms courses. The bullet flashed across the intervening forest floor and slammed into the steel plate in the body armor covering the Marine's middle chest. The Kevlar and steel stopped the slug from penetrating, but the blow still hurt. A second round quickly followed the first, striking high on the Marine's right chest with enough force to cause a severe bruise though, again, there was no penetration.

The shock of the blows triggered a number of trained reflexes in Peterson's mind. He slid his right foot back a precise eighteen inches and turned forty-five degrees away from his target. Bringing up his left hand to support the rifle, he settled into the firing position his basic training instructors had drilled into him day after hot, dusty day on the firing range.

Seeing his target ready to shoot again, Miles squeezed the trigger a third time and stepped quickly to his right off the trail and into a stand of young aspens. This time, with the Marine's body turning to the right, Miles' slug ripped a bloody slash on the young Marine's left underarm and tore into his armpit through the armhole in the Kevlar vest.

The bullet smashed a rib that deflected the round into the pectoral muscles and slanting upward to the collarbone. Breaking the collarbone on impact, it glanced off and slid across the front of his chest following the curve of his ribs.

Once past the sternum, the deformed projectile dug into the chest cavity and turned upward to smash into the big bones of the right shoulder, wrecking the joint and knocking Peterson's upper body around to the right with the force of the blow.

Its energy nearly spent and tumbling badly now, the bullet exited the man's upper back just behind the right arm, pushing tissue, blood, and bone fragments ahead of it to spray over green leaves and flowers behind him. The spent slug fell a few yards away beside the gnarled roots of a tall spruce.

His right arm hanging limply at his side from the ruined shoulder, Peterson grabbed for it with his left hand. The broken left collarbone stabbed into soft tissue and he dropped that arm back to his side too. It was too much. He crumpled and fell to his knees, jarring the wounds and sending more pain signals to an already overloaded brain.

His universe shrinking to an all-consuming agony, he passed quickly into shock. Lance Corporal Peterson slumped forward and dropped unconscious to the ground.

Raising the muzzle into the air, Miles dodged further off the trail to his right. Stopping to kneel behind a thick oak, he brought the weapon back down in a firing position on the other side of the trunk.

He waited. A part of his mind marveled that he felt no fear. His breathing and pulse were steady. He was just going about business the best way he could.

When the echoes from the heavy firing died away, screeching calls from disturbed wildlife rose from all sides to fill the silence. There was no movement up the trail. Standing up, Miles threw a last look where the shooter had been; he was down, laying motionless near the trail.

The fugitive turned and jogged downhill at an angle away from the trail. He wasn't in much of a hurry. He was tired of running.

A few hundred yards from the trail, he walked out of the undergrowth through a small clearing and into deeper brush. When a ravine presented itself, he changed course to the northwest and picked his way carefully along the rocky bottom. Minutes later he scrambled out of the ravine and up a gentle rise to a jumbled mass of half-buried boulders. The little hill was covered with scrub brush and stunted trees pushing up through cracks in the rock.

Well hidden, he stopped in the gathering shadows and found a place between two boulders where he could watch his back trail. He could see a wide swath of the more open ground to his front and no one could approach from behind without making a lot of noise. He opened his canteen for a long drink.

After a while, it was clear there were no pursuers. Mildly disappointed, he pulled venison jerky from his pack and chewed them slowly. Other than his jaw grinding rhythmically as he labored through the dried meat, he was still.

When he wiped a hand over his face, he was surprised to discover a number of splinters in the skin near his right temple and ear from the tree stump struck by the ambusher's first round. Dispassionately, he extracted the splinters and swabbed the puncture marks with the tiny vial of alcohol from his first-aid kit. Dabbing the cuts with a pinch of Neosporin, he forgot them. They weren't important.

Thumbing the latch that held the cylinder aligned in the pistol, he rotated it out, pressed the ejector rod with his forefinger, and pulled out the three spent shells. He reloaded with fresh cartridges and buried the used brass beneath a rock, replacing the stone exactly as it had been before he dug. The leather bag of extra ammunition rattled faintly so he stuffed it full of green grass and weeds. He shook it to make sure the shells were well padded now and tucked it away in one of the large pockets in his pants for the next reload.

When darkness came, it was almost total but the moon rose early this evening and in another hour he would be able to see. He wasn't through with the four men who had ambushed him. One had been dealt with--three remained. His eyes roamed over the terrain as he sat cross-legged in the deepening shadow. Detached, his fury rigidly controlled, he waited silently.

An hour later he stood, careful to keep below the level of the boulders while he worked the kinks out. Circling around to the west before moving back north, he slipped back to the game trail the ambushers had been using.

§

Moving cautiously along the trail, Gunnery Sergeant Walker held his rifle ready to open fire on the first target that presented itself. He didn't like this one bit. He'd much rather be approaching the site from where the shots had come by circling through the woods to right or left instead of advancing down the center of the path but he didn't have much choice. The FBI agent had an old style M-16 and the Indian carried a pistol, but neither of them had any training in infantry tactics and besides, he needed to get to Peterson as quick as he could.

When he saw the BDU-clad body lying to the side of the path, he stopped and sank to one knee in the cover of a big tree. Carefully he scanned everything in front of him, searching for whoever had fired. He could find nothing.

Hearing a faint noise behind him, he wheeled. The stock of the M-4A1 was tucked under his arm and the selector on automatic. The FBI agent and the mission's guide stumbled to a halt, waiting until they were sure Walker recognized them before they advanced. Gunny swiveled back around to cover the fallen Corporal.

His two companions crept up beside him, the FBI agent holding his rifle to his shoulder with some small appearance of competency but the guide's pistol was still in his holster. Probably the best thing that he could do, Walker thought. He didn't need a civilian waving a gun around. He motioned the two closer.

"Peterson's on the other side of that group of pines ... see him?" He was whispering, though he wasn't sure it was doing any good to keep quiet. "I'm gonna go check on him ... you two stay back and cover me. One of you watch to either side of the trail, okay?"