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“…States Army base located in Natchez Trace State Park calling the individual Clinton Baxter.”

Oh. Shit. Earl, what have you done?

“Regarding the group sent to Natchez Trace on Twenty Five June Two Thousand Twelve, led by one Earl Brent Hanson.  Request contact on simplex CB channel 39 upon receipt or duplex CB channels 33-36 after Twenty Eight June.”

 “Bad news, boss, they used Earl’s middle name,” one of the gathered hangers on said.  “Nobody but the law and your momma uses your middle name, man.”

Clint glared at the speaker, whose name he couldn’t come up with at the moment.  “Thank you so
very
much for that enlightening insight into human nature.”

“On the plus side,” Coop replied, trying to draw Clint’s ire his way.  “They didn’t use
your
middle name.”

 “That’s only a plus if you don’t factor in that I don’t
have
a middle name,” Clint replied.  “I can’t even say it’s a long story, because it’s not.  My mom named me after the neighborhood she grew up near in Brooklyn.  My dad was nowhere to be found and she’d either exhausted her full store of imagination on my first name or realized ‘Hill’ would have been worse than no middle name at all.”

When nobody said anything Clint snorted.  “Oh come on people, you act like you’ve never met anyone without a middle name before!”

“Well, actually, no I haven’t.” Coop was the only one to reply.  “The closest I can come is an old girlfriend’s grandfather.  He didn’t have a first or middle name, just two initials.  His legal name was W. D. Miller.”

Clint shook his head and tried to get back on topic.  “The point is that we seemed to have sent a raid against the United States Army.”  The radio crackled as the message started over.  It was apparently recorded and broadcasting about every two minutes.

Clint either ignored or missed Cooper’s raised eyebrows at the use of ‘we’.

“I need to think and I can’t do it standing here with that running every few minutes.  Coop, turn it down some and have someone else man the radio for a while.  Grab Tony and meet me over at my rig.”

…

Clint had given up trying to pace inside the trailer as a lost cause, it was just too short and too narrow.  He’d smacked his knuckles a couple of times turning around and instead of throwing a punch through the paperboard siding and ruining something that he couldn’t easily replace he’d decided that he’d do his pacing outside.  Tony and Coop showed up after Clint had made a couple of passes back and forth in front of the trailer and stood waiting to be noticed.

“How long ago did you first pick up the broadcast?” Clint asked when he noticed Cooper and Tony.

“About three minutes before I called you,” Coop replied.  “We were channel hopping and jumped in at ‘request contact’ the first time.  Once we’d heard it all the way through we called you.”

“How long had you been off of 19?”

“Four, maybe five minutes tops,” Tony said.

Clint sighed. “That means they just started transmitting, which means they’ve been thinking about it,” Clint trailed off.

“Come again?” Tony asked.

“Earl took that group out of here over twenty-four hours ago.  He was supposed to radio in after three hours which means that the U.S. Army has had the entire group in their care for at least twenty-one hours.  Do you sincerely think that whoever is in charge over there just now had the bright idea to transmit a meeting request after a day?”

Clint went back to pacing while he talked.  “I don’t think so.  They wanted us to stew about our missing people.  I know I have been.”  Clint was scowling again when he looked up and in the direction of the squad car which he couldn’t see through his trailer.  “And as much as I hate to admit it, Kenny’s right.  The only people who use your middle name are ‘the law and your momma’ and both of them only when you’re in trouble.  Hell, even I didn’t know Earl’s middle name.”

Tony and Coop looked at each other.

“What?” Clint asked.

Neither former policeman answered right away.

“I said
what
and it wasn’t in the rhetorical sense.  One of you knowing something may be bad news, both of you knowing something and not wanting to share it sounds a lot like ‘no good can come of this’.  Spill it, like
now
.”

“We actually both knew Earl’s middle name already.  He’s kinda got a rap sheet,” Coop replied.

Clint controlled his temper and kept it to making a fist that cracked the knuckles of his right hand.  “Is it Brent?”

“Yeah,” Tony answered.

“Sonofa…ok, the next time one of you two thinks of something like this, something that might be, oh I don’t know, IMPORTANT!  Let me know ahead of time.”

“You got it boss, sorry.  For what it’s worth, I don’t recognize anyone else in the group as having a prior history.”  Tony was the junior of the two and was taking the rebuke harder than Coop.

“I think I recognize one but if so it’s minor and really nothing to worry about,” Cooper added, letting Tony’s apology apply to both of them.

“It’s water under the bridge now.  What matters is getting them back, if we can.”

…

“Why are we screwing around, Top?” Halstead asked as he walked into the command tent.

“You want the short answer or the long answer?” Mallory replied.

“Will I like either one?”

“Probably not.”

“Well then I’d just as soon have an actual explanation for our little Charlie Foxtrot in the making if you’re willing to give it because I’m pretty sure the short answer is ‘I said so’.”

“Have a seat.”  Mallory gestured to a folding chair across from her ‘desk’ and once she wasn’t looking up at her potentially insubordinate subordinate she continued.  “We know who he is, we know where he is, we know how many people are there, and we have a fairly good idea of what resources they have at their disposal.  What we don’t know is what is going on in his head,” Mallory tapped her own head to make the point.

“Ramirez already suggested going in and laying waste to the place in the middle of the night.  He made the same suggestion as soon as we actually had a place to lay waste to.”  In a slightly softer tone she went on, “That man, I swear sometimes I think he would try the patience of Job.”

“I’m with you, on both counts,” Halstead agreed with a small smile.

“We aren’t going to go in and play tornado to their little trailer park though.  There are those who feel that the ability to make ethical and moral decisions is a luxury available only to those blessed with a stable, civilized society.”  Mallory paused for a second to let that sink in but continued before Halstead could interrupt or respond.  “We may not have the same level of stability that we had a month ago but I’ll be
damned
if we don’t still have a civilized society.”  Mallory’s fist came down on her desk at damned and it made Halstead jump because it had come out of nowhere.

“We could have killed every last one of the raiders yesterday with no warning whatsoever.  One second they’re sneaking up on us, the next people are literally dying left and right, and then it’s over.  Clint would never have known what happened.  We send out a
real
scouting party, find his group, and wham, done.”

Halstead wasn’t stunned, but he was silent.  Mallory leaned forward with both arms on her desk, “I won’t invoke the almighty Murphy and his immutable law and say we wouldn’t have suffered any casualties but I’d have been very surprised if we’d had anyone so much as injured on our side.”

“Sergeant, you and I both know that this was probably at least partially a mistake on Clint’s part.  You don’t have to agree with me openly or out loud but think about it.”  Mallory waited to see how Halstead reacted before she went on.  He had the good grace to nod.  “Nobody attacks a military base using forty-one civilians unless they have bombs strapped to their chests.  It wasn’t a feint--unless the other group got lost and this lot was kept completely in the dark about being the bait.”

“You’re keeping things close to the vest, though.  Do you have a plan or are you playing it by ear?” Halstead asked.

“Yes,” Mallory replied.  “I’m not really keeping it close but I’m sure it looks like it from where you’re sitting.  I wasn’t kidding yesterday about not running this whole deal like a military dictatorship.  Not now, not ever.”

Mallory leaned back in her chair and tried to stretch away some of the tension that had been growing for the last week and a half.  Two seconds can only do so much though and she had to get back to the task at hand.  “I have some general ideas of how to handle this but it depends on how Clint reacts to the situation.  You aren’t here to pick my brain, though you clearly have something you’d like to say--more than one something unless I’ve completely missed my guess.  Permission granted to speak freely Sergeant, just not too freely.”

Halstead took a breath to cover the second it took to gather his thoughts and then started with the most troubling aspect of this whole incident.  “Top, what are we going to do with the thirty-three people we have here right now who weren’t here yesterday morning?  Are they prisoners and if so by what authority do we hold them?  Is it a military matter or a civilian matter?  How long do we hold them?  Do we or can we even let them go?  If we let them go, who do we release them to and under what conditions?  That doesn’t even get into the eight we have in body bags in one of the empty refrigeration trucks because we couldn’t let them sit out in the sun for a day.”

Halstead held up his hand when it looked like Mallory was about to begin answering some of those questions.  “I’m not quite finished.” At her nod he went on, “We’re in the woods and we simply cannot secure the perimeter of this base like it should be secured, not like a real base.  With the number of people here, the mix of military and civvies, and the likelihood that we are going to become more and more town-like, we just don’t have the trained bodies.  I guess I’m done for now.”

“Good, because I was starting to lose track.”  That earned a grin.  “Our guests are weighing heavily on my mind.  I don’t know if they’re exactly prisoners or even enemy combatants at this point.  It depends almost entirely on the reasoning behind their being here in the first place.  Let me finish, we’re discussing this but that doesn’t mean we get to interrupt each other.”

Halstead relaxed as he’d been about to protest the disposition of the captured party members.  “Some things appear to be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.  Point,” Mallory held up a finger, “the group was most likely a raiding party and not doing scouting or recon.  Point,” another finger, “they were too heavily and similarly armed to have had
all
of those rifles until after the event and in fact we know that at least three of them still had pawn shop price tags on them.  Point,” finger, “unlike us they were willing to shoot first and ask questions later.  With absolutely no idea of the tactical situation, nine of their party opened fire.  Dumb, dangerous, and frankly a little bit mean if you ask me.”

Mallory put her hand down, “I’m going to quit counting on my fingers now because you’re a smart kid and at some point if I’m not careful I’m going to give you the bird.  The point I was making is that they aren’t prisoners or enemy combatants in the classical sense of the terms but they don’t strike me as innocent either.  Rules have changed a bit, I understand that, but this group appears to have already resorted to wholesale theft of firearms, ammunition, vehicles, trailers, food, water, and fuel.”

“We need to talk to Clint first; we need to see how he couches this.  How does he justify what he’s doing and what he’s done?  Does he look at us and accuse us of doing the exact same thing but on a bigger scale?  Does he claim that the ends justify the means or that the old rules don’t apply anymore because they can’t?  We need to know what we’re dealing with and more than that,” Mallory paused and not just for dramatic effect but because once she said it out loud it always seemed more real, “we are going to have to choose our battles.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be the last bastion of hope and freedom and all that?”

“Yes, but we’re also supposed to be realistic in the expectations we have of ourselves.  We have
very
limited resources at our disposal with which to be that last bastion.  There’s a difference between guarding the gate and going out in search of the dragon.”

Halstead was silent for several seconds and when he replied he seemed more his old self.  “Point made, Top.  I’m still mad about being caught off guard.  I want to be able to put this to bed but I’m being active stupid.”

…

“Now that’s just active stupid, Coop!” Clint yelled.

“Why?”

“You really want
all
the reasons, fine.” Clint turned on Cooper.  “First of all it’s not just my word against his; it’s my word against theirs.  Forty-one people to one.  They were all volunteers and as a group they all heard me talking to Earl.  Next, some of those people still have family back here.  Do you
really
think they’re just going to sit idly by while I hang their husbands or wives out to dry?  C, or Three, or whatever I’m using to keep track of this list of stupidity, it’s the
U.S. ARMY!
  Maybe I should have listed that as the first, last, and only reason because that
should
have been enough.”

“But they wouldn’t be expecting it…”

“They wouldn’t, huh?  Really?  And how long did you serve in the military?  How many times have you been on a military installation after an incident that caused a heightened state of alert?  Exactly what in your past gives you
any
reason to think that or qualifies you to make that determination?” Clint spat.

“I haven’t but what makes
you
so sure that they will?  What makes you the expert?”  Cooper shot back with just as much fire and a touch of challenge.

 “Fourteen months in the Army before an…unfortunate incident put an end to that.  I was in Ranger School.  I’ve been on a base during a heightened state of alert, several times.  They
will
be expecting it.”