The Big Blue Sky: Thirty-six

The wind had come up with a vengeance. It howled off the lake, driven beneath deepening clouds, whipping leaves and branches against the two men crouched in the brush opposite the small house on Grand Island. Their MP-4 Assault rifles covered the small white house, ready as the third man returned from reconnoitering the seemingly deserted place. He dipped back into the brush beside his comrades and gave a satisfied grin. The men wore tan canvas clothing, camouflage hunting pants, black gloves and dark ski caps, nothing that would distinguish them from the weekend hunters that flocked to the area each autumn, except these men were not hunting deer.

They relied fully upon the good government training of their former military careers. There was, however, a fundamental difference. There was a vast philosophical difference between the military and the business of war. Not that the former could not be perverted, if wielded imprudently, but among the ranks of paid for soldiers, in which finance not freedom was paramount, military discipline became blunted. Camaraderie was not expressed beneath a flag and history and shared community, but through something that needed to be invented and manufactured, and which at its very core was corrupted by money and greed.

“He’s inside,” said the third man, in hushed tones. “He’s waiting in the front room, set up on the floor in the north east corner. He’s prone behind a leather chair with a blanket over him. Looks like he’s got a twelve gauge with a pretty narrow kill zone. I’ll breach the back door and throw a flash bang. You two enter the front door and take him out. Clear?”

The two men nodded and waited for their comrade to cross to the side of the house. As he moved cautiously around to the back they slipped across the yard to the front step. Through a rip in a window shade they could see the figure on the floor. The head and shoulders were hidden from view behind the brown leather chair. The shotgun barrel extended out from the chair, the twin barrels propped upon a hand full of stacked books. The figure’s short legs extended along the floor in a pair of faded brown corduroy slacks, protruding from beneath a thin black and red checkered fleece throw, where they ending in a pair of big rubber galoshes.

Upon closer inspection something about the figure just wasn’t right. It took a moment to sink in for the two men. The galoshes on one foot were cocked at an unnatural angle. The toe of the other was bent under the rubber boot in such a way that the toes would have to have been broken completely. The arch of the figure’s back was far too severe. It was then they noticed the gas canisters near the fireplace, the nozzles opened completely.

“Smell gas?” one of the men breathed in deeply, catching just a whiff of the sickly sweet aroma of propane gas.

They shared a fatal glance and realized they were absolutely helpless. They had been led into a trap and had taken the bait fully. At that moment the man at the rear door slammed through the door, flinging a flash bang grenade into the house in the very same motion. It was barely out of his hand, momentum still carrying him across the small kitchen when he too smelled the gas. It was too late. The grenade exploded, and with it the house, disintegrating in a massive fireball. It thundered across the bay and turned heads five miles away.