They had heard that the Carcass Canyon wilderness was said to be beautiful in November. There just hadn’t been a November this wet in decades. 600 mile to get there in the brothers ’84 CJ-7 Jeep with the windshield wipers not getting a single break from the rain.
Everything was wet. Their packs were wet, their tarp and tent was wet. All their clothing was wet, their socks laid out on the jeep’s defroster, attempting to dry out. All the gear is is one state or another of dampness.
There wasn’t anything around either. The last real town, or what someone with a sick sense of humor would call a town was two days back. It was nothing more than a dot on the map with some historic old hotel (only walls were still standing as the roof was long gone and a stunted willow-tree occupied the inside), a tiny one room “general” store and one half-way working gas pump. They had grabbed what supplies they could, filled the jeep and the spare Jerry cans and headed of into the raining night.
Nothing else on the map for gas or supplies for miles!
They had awoke this particular morning to the promise of only a cloudy day. But as the brothers continued to follow the right hand ridge of the canyon rain began to fall not long into the morning. It just made every muddier! Soon they were slipping and sliding their way in the jeep, inch by careful inch down the canyon. Red clay was sticking to everything.
By noon the rain had reduced to a steady drizzle. But potholes were everywhere.
By 5:00 pm Barrett and Rick figured the had reached their next point to head east again and planned to get down to the river below and cross up into the next ridge where they had figured they would find a road and ultimately their target. Unfortunately, when they got to the edge of the canyon there was no way down! All they could see was a 400’ wall down to the river for miles in both direct. So the scouting began as the cloudy skies begin to darken.
Barrett, driving, found a ‘sand slide’ that seemed to match up with a point of the wet map. It looked tricky but they trusted the jeep’s ability to get them down over the slick rock. It was a long slide down the red sandstone-dune to a ridge that a cut into a steep wall at the bottom like a knife slicing into an overripe animal carcass.
It was promising until they slipped.
The jeep’s wheels slipped a bit too much to the right and the vehicular equivalent splitting wooden log with a sledgehammer happened. The jeep plummeted 15’ feet, wrenching the front axle, smoke billowing up from under the hood.
The two brothers were in the middle of some forgotten canyon deep in the desert of enemy territory, wet and stuck and out of luck!
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Barett eased himself out of the jeep slowly making sure not to shift things around. The wet red rock sandstone forced him to duck walk across the cliff edge to the front of the jeep.
“This is a total Cluster failure” Barett yelled over the pounding rain back to Rick.
“Front end is totally wrecked, tie rods are all twisted up, Radiator has a dent with a leak in it, I don’t think we are going anywhere in this.”
Rick leaned out the door and yelled back.
“What options do we have?”
“It’s repairable if we could get it back to a shop, but out here, we are going to need a damn heavy lift helicopter to get it safely out from this spot. Time to pack up what we can carry and get hoofing it.”
“Shit, that’s going to delay things.”
“Yep. The worst thing is once the rain clears this thing will be a total giveaway from the air, or the closest 100 miles, that we were here. We may need to cover this up, to hide our trail.”
Rick eased out of the jeep, after pulling his gun out from the back cargo area, force of habit he told himself.
They pulled the warn winch loose and strung it around a large boulder, and pulled the jeep back up on the trail. Then after some pushing and shoving they managed to get it pointed backwards straight down the rock face.
The Clouds parted for a brief pause as the dark clouds swirled in the angry sky, and they could see that another sixty feet down the trail they could have made the soft sand and gravel of an old river bed.
Hooking up the winch to another large boulder they eased the jeep backwards down the cliff face after removing all the essential gear into their hiking backpacks. The Warn winch whined and groaned under the strain but did its job.
Barett grabbed his pack and the Daniel Defense AR-10 the Quartermaster at the PCS internal Secret Service had given him. The gun was a customized civilian version, serial numbers ground off, he had run 100 rounds through it at the range fine tuning it himself before leaving on the mission.
Rick stood looking down at the Jeep suspended by its front end just feet from the dry sandy river bed.
“What now
“Let’s cut her loose, cover it up as best as possible then booby trap the site. Just in case. Then let’s start running, we have six hours to cover 28 miles of some rough country.”
“That’s going to suck a duck.”
“Yep”
Rick flipped the lever on the winch and the jeep dropped the last few feet, bounced on its tail then rolled on to its roof and settled in the wet sand and rock, unceremoniously.
The brothers slid down the rock face and went to work, throwing branches and dirt over the undercarriage. While Barrett was cutting down some larger branches from a few juniper trees Rick set the explosives up. Two grenades under each of the full jerry cans of gas, when moved they and gas would make a nice black cloud of smoke.
“we should be able to see this, and hear it from a fair distance, at least giving us a heads up.”
“Best we can do with what we have. “
Ten days earlier Rick and Barett had been pulled from their military unit, and assigned to the PCS Secret Service. Utah and Dave had been pulled 5 days before that, so they thought they were going to meet up. Not so on this detail, they had been sheep dipped, all their gear and weapons were local bought, retail, civilian items. The PCS Secret Service was more like the Israeli IDF or the old USA CIA and FBI put together. They were assigned to do some dirty work for them, then if they survived be dropped back into their unit when the detail was done. They had spent more time on PCS SS assignments then their own unit over the last six months.
Everything seemed like a normal detail, until they had been on site for a few days, then things started getting weird.
Barett stared at the sky, as the rain started coming down in torrents on them. They had been practically running for the last hour straight after leaving the jeep and had just sat down to take a break and check the map. Hole in the rock was to be an extraction point, somewhere down there was a small inflatable raft with a motor that could get them over to Bull Frog Marina. That was contingency plan number three. It was now plan A, Barett had a shot to take, and they were running out of time.
Rick turned his eyes to the sky and opened his mouth.
Back from the direction they came a distant pop and crack echoed down the canyons.
“Looks like someone found the jeep?”
“Yep, let’s double the pace.”
They both stood back up, stretched and started running across the open sandy dirt to a cliff face on the right.
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