Pat and Sheila, who had been involved in continuous conversation for the four-hour trip, drove up the dirt road onto the gravel lot, but were in no hurry to get inside.
“Even my sunglasses don’t help in this blasted sun,” Pat complained, lifting her hand to help shade her eyes. Sheila had not even worn sunglasses, and she was struggling to see. Pat finally parked around the corner of the building about one hundred feet from Raymond’s old van.
“Let’s don’t park too close to something that looks and smells as bad as that old hunting and fishing van!” The two women giggled as they started to exit the truck.
The dome light in the van on the road came on just as Pat and Sheila stepped out of Pat’s truck, and they immediately ducked behind the shiny new Ford. “We got company, Raymond!” Pat screamed to warn the men inside that they were being watched.
In the waning light, Pat checked out the van’s occupants and, in the dim light provided when the door was opened, she was pretty sure they carried rifles. That wasn’t a good omen. All farmers and ranchers out here had a rifle or two in their trucks, but they only pulled them out when they intended to use them. Because the van was parked off to the side of the road in the dusk instead of in the parking lot, she decided they were up to no good.
J.P. and Raymond carried pistols in side holsters, but that was it. J.P. was unarmed. They had to get back to the van to get bigger and better firepower.
When two of the men on the road started shooting at the building, Sam fired through the window and Raymond stood in the doorway and emptied two magazines across the parking lot in the general direction of the van.
“Just keep ’em pinned down,” J.P. yelled. “We don’t have to hit anyone or anything in particular; just keep those guys’ heads down. I’m going to get our stuff out of the van!”
It had gotten darker, and they had no idea who they were shooting at or where they were exactly, but they needed their rifles, night vision scopes, monoculars, and ammo.
In the minute or so it took Sam and Raymond to fire those thirty or forty rounds, J.P. scurried to the van and retrieved their night vision gear, four rifles, and at least a thousand rounds of ammo from the van. As they hunkered down behind the wall, Sam laughed and said he had never seen J.P. move so fast in his life.
Raymond and J.P. put on night vision goggles, and Sam had a night vision scope on his 7 mm mag hunting rifle. Sam had also brought a new toy, his infrared monocular, or “FLIR.” It was intended to let a hunter see an animal through heavy brush because of the body’s heat differential from its surroundings, and here it would let them see the bad guys, even when they were inside their vehicle.
One by one, everyone on the team tried to get a connection on their cellphones to call for help, but nothing went through. They were on their own.