He and the other guard in the front of the van carried on a light conversation about what they were going to do over the upcoming holiday.  Ed Stevens’s family always went all-out for Thanksgiving and he was excited. 

Sitting in the back were two more guards, JD, and another prisoner.  They were being transferred to federal custody by a Maryland Corrections Department detail. 

In addition to the van there were escort sedans in front and behind.  Altogether, there were eight corrections officers in three vehicles to transport JD and the other inmate to federal authorities.  JD figured out that he was going to stand trial for shooting up a military installation. 

“Leader, this is Bird Dog, I have the target and escorts four hundred yards from the zone,” a man wearing camo gear, holding binoculars said from his perch above the road as the van passed. 

“Roger that, Bird Dog.  This is Leader.  Hunting Pack, get ready to intercept.  Remember, they are just doing their job.  Let’s try to make sure they go home to their families in one piece.  They might be shooting to kill, but we’re better than they are at their game.  Leader out.”

Twenty seconds later the right front tire of the transport van exploded.  Bird Dog had hit it with a .308 round from his sniper rifle.  A moment later the rear tire on the passenger side of the van blew from a second shot. 

“Transport Seventeen to base, I think we’re under attack, just before Mount Collier.  Repeat, we’ve been hit by someone,” the driver shouted excitedly into the microphone hanging from the dash. 

“Ten-four, Seventeen.  Dispatching local units to assist,” the dispatcher replied before inquiring further what type of emergency they were having.

A tear gas cannister tore through the passenger side window of the transport van.  The car following them slammed into their rear end, and the lead car slid off the road, but he couldn’t see why, he assumed they had also been hit with something else. 

Struggling for breath, the two men in the front of the van exited the vehicle.  Falling to their hands and knees, they could barely see and were clutching at their faces, choking.  Through the tears and smoke, Stevens, who’d driven similar transport vans for decades, saw what looked like a SWAT team or military assault squad come up out of the woods alongside of the road.  They were wearing camo battle fatigues and gas masks.  All were carrying rifles.  He heard the shouts but couldn’t understand them as he struggled to catch his breath. 

There was the muffled sound of suppressed gunfire.  Stevens wondered why it sounded different than normal.  He was pretty sure they were carrying M-4 military assault weapons.  He owned one and often took it to the range, and knew the 5.56mm round had a distinctive sound, and these didn’t sound like that or any other similar round he could identify.

As the guard tried to get up to return fire, he was hit in the back of the thigh by something.  Just before passing out, he saw one of the prisoners… he thought it was Ross, the guy that shot the Senator, being led away, still cuffed, with something covering his head. 

***

To JD, it felt like a SpecOps breach.  Had he been ordered to take a hostage out of a vehicle, he would have run the op similarly.  The guards in the back couldn’t do anything except watch as JD was dragged from the van.  Then the guards followed, gasping for breath.  The other prisoner was still locked in the van pleading for them to free him between coughs. 

“I didn’t do it.  What’s going on?” JD yelled, the gas mask his captors had put over his face, muffling the sound.  A few moments before, the van had rocked… later he found out that was when the tires were blown out… and then swerved to the side of the road.  A few scant moments after that, the side of the van was breached by a spike and tear gas was pumped into the space.  Then the rear doors were blown. 

“Shut up, Kracken,” the voice said, dragging him along the rough ground at almost a running pace.  He was having a hard time maintaining his balance with his hands cuffed, but the men at his sides were keeping him upright if he stumbled. 

“Who are you?”

“Shut up, JD,” the other man said, more quietly. 

After a few minutes of running, JD gasping for breath in the heavy mask, the  group slowed and emerged onto a two-track road.  There were a bunch of various, mostly older four-wheel-drive SUVs parked along the road.  The men went to the backs of different vehicles and started changing clothes into hunting gear.  As they got changed over, some of the men were collecting the combat rifles while others unloaded hunting rifles from a locker in the back of a lifted Suburban.  One of the captors freed JD’s hands from the cuffs and pulled off the gas mask.

“Put these on,” Colonel Gilson said as he tossed a new set of hunting camos and a blaze orange vest to JD.

“Sir?”

“You’re riding with me in that old Jeep over there… the one with no doors.  We’ll talk after we get going.  Move it, Soldier.”

JD swapped the orange prison jumpsuit for the camo coveralls, jacket and orange vest the Colonel had tossed to him.  He pulled the orange and camo cap low over his eyes and climbed into the old, lifted Wrangler.  He was pulling on the seatbelt as Colonel Gilson deftly jumped and twisted into the driver’s seat.  It only took a second for him to pull down his seat belt and latch it in one, smooth motion.  The old rig fired as soon as the key turned.  Gilson dropped the shifter into first gear and maneuvered around the few other vehicles that were in the way, heading deeper into the woods on the two-track.  It was almost dark, so as the forest enveloped them, he switched on all his auxiliary lights, turning everything around them into day. 

“Probably wondering exactly what the hell is going on, I’d guess,” he said over the noise of the Jeep scrambling along the bumpy road. 

“Yes, Sir.  I must say that I am.  What’s the deal?” JD asked.

“I got an answer as to why you’d been mustered out.  You were being set up for the murder of the Senator.  Apparently, the operation has been in play for a while.  I have a source that picked up the intel on it.  I can’t go into who or how… but it was a VERY elaborate set-up.  Wait until we get back to our ops base and I’ll show you what we picked up.”

The two men spoke a little more as they made their way back to their base of operations, a cabin that belonged to another member of the Colonel’s vast network of friends and contacts. 

***

Christi pulled back on to the main road just as the black van went out of sight around the bend.  She hammered the gas pedal on the old Taurus, the front tires spinning, looking for traction on the gravel.  By the time she approached the bend the van had disappeared, it was gone.  There was the main road and several dirt roads going off into the woods on either side.  She elected to take the main road and see if she could catch the van.  Otherwise, she would double back and start looking on side roads. 

A couple of miles up the road, she hadn’t seen the van yet.  She thought to herself that they had to have jumped off the main road onto one of the dirt roads she’d passed.  She had been going fast enough that she should have picked up a visual of them, unless they’d done otherwise. 

She doubled back and turned right on the first dirt road she’d passed.  It looked like this was the most parallel to the main road and the dirt looked like it had been disturbed since the last rain.  If the Russians were doing anything along the main road, this might have been where they went.  If they were just running, it wouldn’t matter. 

It was getting darker, and she knew that the chances of her finding anything dropped with every minute that passed.  At this point, she might even stumble into their operational zone… and if they were true to form, they would kill her for being there, just to make sure there were no witnesses.  She cut her lights and pulled to the side of the road.  Even though time was of the essence, she needed to think. 

Christi grabbed her Sig, stepped from the vehicle and tucked it into the back of her waistband.  She walked the short distance to the meandering creek and sat on a small rock outcropping.  She was angry, scared and frustrated.  She knew that the Chugunov brothers would be hunting for Jason, and she had lost them.  They were in her sights… now they were gone, and she didn’t have a clue as to where they went. 

A few minutes later she heard the sound of an engine over the sound of the babbling creek.  She dashed up to the road and looked both ways.  Deeper into the woods she could see a slight glow along the road.  There was no way she could get in the car and move it before the vehicle got to her location, but she could get off the road. 

She turned and ran back toward the creek.  She stepped into the cold water and was across in two strides.  She ducked behind some shrubs along the bank opposite the road.  She saw an old Jeep Wrangler with two men in it rumble by.  They were dressed in hunting camos and wearing orange hunting vests… just a couple of hunters returning from a day of hunting, she thought to herself. 

As she got ready to walk back to the car, she thought she could hear another engine approaching.  She decided to remain hunkered down behind the bush until everything cleared. 

An older Suburban on giant tires stopped right by her car.  The man in the driver’s seat dropped out and pulled a handgun from a holster concealed at the small of his back.  He went to the car and looked through the windows, shining a flashlight into the car.  There was nothing suspicious, so he returned toward the big SUV.  Another man dropped from the passenger side and Christi could hear him tell the first man that he needed to take a leak. 

As Christi sat in her blind, the second man approached within thirty feet of her.  He called back to his companion, “That was messed up, man.  That has to be the weirdest op I’ve ever run.”

“No injuries and we got Kracken… didn’t kill any of the guards, either.  I just wonder what Big Bird is gonna do from here, though,” came the reply from the driver. 

“No doubt, Hammer.  Kracken is in a heap of trouble and can’t show his face anywhere.”

“Come on, Dude.  We gotta RTB.  How long does it take you to piss?”

The man called Hammer zipped up his fly and jogged back toward the Suburban.  As the driver fired the big vehicle up, he swung back into the passenger seat.  The truck started to roll away before the door was even closed. 

Christi emerged from her spot. 

“Kracken is Jason’s ‘in-op’ name,” she said to herself, “and they have him.”  She knew these men had taken him… and she assumed they were friendly but couldn’t be certain. 

She emerged from her cover, quickly splashed across the creek and headed back to the car.  She jumped in and fired it up.  Soon she was speeding along the two-track with her headlights off, trying to get the tail of the big truck in her sights.  She slammed into every bump in the road, barely able to see in front of her. 

She was concentrating so hard on the road in front of her that she didn’t notice the lights in the distance behind her until she was almost to the main road.  That was when she slammed on the brakes and slid to a stop right behind the stopped Suburban, its lights off and its three occupants all standing facing her… armed.  Then she saw the lights in the mirror from the following vehicle, a late model Dodge four by four. 

“Step from the vehicle, hands out and up,” the Suburban driver said to her.

Christi took a moment and centered herself.  She swallowed and opened the door.  She put her hands in the air between the top of the door and the roof, then stepped out of the Taurus.  She felt a sting in the back of her thigh before everything started fading to black. 

One of the men quickly moved forward to check her pulse and make sure she was only knocked out by the dart.  Another man went to the car to make sure there were no other occupants.  He saw the keys hanging in the ignition.  He popped the trunk.  Inside her found a hunting rifle with a scope.  He knew it was strictly civilian kit, but she also didn’t have any hunting gear.  “I think she needs to come with us.  Hunting rifle and ammo… loaded… but no other gear to be hunting, and the Sig on the seat.  She looks dressed to hide in the dark, too.”  The driver of the Suburban agreed.  Then man with Christi gently lifted her and carried her to the Suburban.  He set her on the back seat and secured her hands.  One of the men from the following vehicle hopped into the Taurus and fired it up.  He would be following the other two rigs.