Dead in Their Tracks (A Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker Story Book 1) by JT Sawyer

tracks.
That’s what I’d do too if I were a searcher.”
    He chewed on his lower lip, mulling over
their options. “The thing is…if we take them out, that’s going to leave lots of
tracks and alert the other Neanderthals that two of their guys are missing when
they don’t radio in.”
    “Then why not wait until they’re done and
check back in then hit them on the road on their way back out?”
    He analyzed the ramifications of her plan
and studied the terrain ahead of them near the single dirt road that led up the
mesa. “Not a bad plan—pretty tactically sound and it puts the element of
surprise in our hands. Lord knows we could sure even the odds more with their
NVGs.”
    “Growing up in Israel, your mindset for
attacks and ambushes in daily life is a given, not like over here. Just walking
to school when I was a kid was exhausting because you’re scanning everyone
around you as a potential terrorist. It’s something you can never turn off.”
    Though Mitch had spent his adolescence on
his uncle’s working cattle ranch and had a much different childhood than Dev,
he knew the debilitating effects of PTSD. The daily hypervigilance that combat
provided was one you could never seem to shake once you returned to civilian
life. Your trust in your fellow man, outside of one’s tac-team, dwindled until
you saw everyone as a suspect in what felt like a conspiracy against your own
sanity.
    He pointed to a shadowy formation two
hundred yards away. “We can use that low outcropping of rocks to spring the
ambush.”
    She nodded and then followed him out from
behind the immense slab. They skulked around the waist-high stands of cactus
then darted between the lone mesquite trees until they were beside the
overgrown two-track that the jeep had driven in on. Unspooling the barbed wire
he had retrieved earlier, he handed her one end as they wound it at chest-level
between the tree trunks.
    “Won’t they see this? There’s not much to
conceal it,” she said.
    “Exactly—a good mantrap always operates on
two levels, with one serving as a decoy up high to draw visual attention from
the main trap on the ground or, in our case, our ambush location to their rear.
I want their NVGs to pick up the barbed wire about twenty feet away so they are
distracted from the chokepoint we just drew them into—that’s the place where
we’ll attack,” he said, pointing to a cluster of mesquite trees along a bend in
the road.”
    “I’m afraid that I’ve mostly done urban
ops over the years and don’t know all this hillbilly survival stuff.”
    “You mean redneck— hillbillies are
inbred country music-lovers back in the tick-infested mountains of Virginia and
other backwards eastern states. We westerners use the term redneck.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
    Mitch kept an eye on the distant outlines
of the shadowy figures near the windmill as he left Dev to finish securing the
barbed wire diversion. He moved along the side of the road, being careful to
step on rocks to obscure his boot prints. He moved to the curve in the road
which would help to block any disturbance once the men made the turn. Instead,
they would immediately be drawn to the barbed wire strung up at chest level and
provide the critical seconds for Mitch and Dev to strike.
    As he finished scrutinizing the ambush
location, he gritted his teeth for the attack that was about to come and hoped
that Dev was as fierce as she seemed. After she moved up to his location, he
heard the faint call of the men radioing in their position followed by the
sound of the jeep starting. He could see the vehicle undulating along the bumpy
two-track towards their location. Dev and Mitch crept into the shadows by the
mesquite grove ten feet from the chokepoint. Each of them readied their
firearms, their throats growing further parched, as if they’d just swallowed
hot coals.

 
    Chapter 17
    They needed to dispatch both guards just
after the tight bend in the road where the