Broken Borders, page 7
In a deep commanding voice, she yelled, “Stop!”
He did.
She said, “What are you doing here? This is private property! There are signs everywhere. Get the hell out of here, now!”
The hoodlum complied, but the other one, who was the shirtless one, covered with prison tattoos, walked toward her rapidly. Leaving the gate open, she wisely jumped in her car and roared up Boom’s driveway another third of a mile to the house.
Running in to the house, she approached Boom, eyes wide open in excitement. He thought she had been attacked by a bear or something.
“What’s wrong, Sally? What happened?” he tried to say calmly, so she would stay that way.
Sally said, “There are two guys at our front gate in an old white car. They came at me, and I—”
He interrupted. “Did they hurt you?”
“No, no,” she said rapidly. “I put my hand up and ordered them to get out of here. This was private property. The one guy headed back toward the car, but the other came at me. I jumped in the car and left the gate open. I’m afraid your horses will get out . . .”
He jumped up and ran to his gun cabinet, saying, “Screw the horses. We’ll catch ’em later. You did the right thing. Dial 911.”
He grabbed a .22 rifle, a .45 revolver, and shoved a bowie knife down the front of his pants and grabbed the phone. They answered on the first ring.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” the woman’s voice answered.
Boom’s adrenaline was pumping at full volume, but he tried to stay as calm as possible. This was hard to do, because his right foot kept wanting to start his body out that front door, while his left foot wanted to stay firmly planted and give full details about the situation.
As calmly but quickly as he could, he said, “This is Boom Kittinger,” and he gave his address, adding, “My sister was just confronted by two sleeze-bags at our front gate, and they have a beat-up old white car. I am heading down there now to hold them until a deputy arrives.”
The operator said, “Mr. Kittinger, please stay on the line with me. There are numerous deputies in the area and someone will be there right away. They could be very dangerous, please just stay—”
Boom interrupted. “Yeah, right. Gotta go.”
He ran to the door, yelling over his shoulder, “Lock the doors, Sis, and grab a pistol out of my gun cabinet. Stay close to the phone.”
Jumping in his car, he quickly roared back down the driveway, arriving at his front gate at the same time as a cruiser with two deputies pulled up to the gate. They happened to be within a quarter mile of his driveway when Boom called 911. More cruisers started appearing down the drive, too. The white car was deserted, with both doors standing open. He ran to it and looked at the ground at their tracks. One man had run to the left toward a nearby fertilizer company that was closed for the weekend. The other had very clearly walked backward along a deer trail running up a bushy gulch that ran all the way to the side of Boom’s house. The tracks went right into some thick brush where deer frequently bedded down.
Pointing, Boom told the deputies, “One went that way. The other walked backward to throw us off and is hiding in that brush.” Pointing again.
One of the deputies, a young one who Boom did not know, said, “No, look at his tracks. He came to the car.”
Inside, Boom was very frustrated, but used to such stupidity from his many years in SF. Again, he was being discounted, and this was a simple trail to read. He did not even want to explain that it was easy to tell that the guy walked backward by the way the dirt piled in the tracks, or by just asking, where did the person walk from and how did he get there? Or why wasn’t he still there if the tracks led to the car? Boom just bit his tongue, which he first learned to do quite often in Special Forces.
The deputies held, waiting for backup. Colorado Department of Corrections bloodhounds were then dispatched, with their handlers on the trail of the guy who ran toward the fertilizer company. They did not strike on the other trail. This deputy, who apparently was in some supervisory capacity, had sent them toward the fertilizer plant to the left, but ignored the other Boom warned about to the right. Boom even heard him say to others that both men took off toward the fertilizer plant.
Then the sheriff showed up with more deputies and knowing him, Boom ran up and explained the situation to him.
He said, “I don’t want to interrupt, Boom. I have a sergeant in charge and really don’t want to tell him what to do.”
Boom said, “Sheriff, your sergeant is an idiot. That trail goes into that thick brush and deer bed down there all the time. The guy’s tracks go backwards into the brush and do not come out. He is hiding in there. Right now.”
The sheriff smiled condescendingly.
Boom knew he could never serve as a deputy or a police officer anywhere, because he would end up shooting a boss.
Frustrated, Boom resorted to his old SF sanity-sustainer, humor.
Smiling, he said, “Sheriff, that thicket is on my property, so I can say or do whatever I want? Can’t I?”
The sheriff nodded.
Moving away with his .22 rifle at port arms in front of him, Boom walked down from his driveway to a spot about twenty feet above the brushy thicket. He had already learned from the deputies that the two were Smith’s sons, or at least the car would make it seem so.
The first punk, Andrew Smith, who ran toward the fertilizer company, was picked up by the bloodhounds and then tackled by a gung-ho sheriff ’s deputy who chased him into a semitrailer full of white powdered fertilizer. The man was cuffed, and the two came back up the hill to the cruisers by Boom’s front gate, looking like cousins of Casper. The Department of Corrections officers and deputies howled with laughter and teased the deputy who was covered with the white powder.
Boom knew the two younger brothers were frequently together, so he reasoned the one in the thicket had to be Derek. He yelled out, “Derek Smith, I know you are in the thick brush right below me here! You have a bunch of cops here who care about your Constitutional rights, but I sure as hell don’t! I care about my family and property, and you have threatened our safety! Here’s the deal! I will give you exactly one minute to surrender to them, or I will begin shooting bullets through my thicket here, and you will be deader than shit!”
He heard chuckles from two deputies, who headed toward the heavy bushes finally, as a pair of arms came out of the brush! A minute later, Derek was in cuffs.
Boom was angry because the sanctity of his home had been threatened, but more importantly, they had scared his sister and his adrenaline was still going full tilt with battle lust. As they had both men lying handcuffed across the hood of a cruiser, Boom’s anger kept building, and he walked up and dropped his baseball hat down in front of their faces. It was white and had a green beret on it and dagger behind the beret. It read: “Special Forces Association.”
Boom said, “You two are real geniuses. Of all the places you pick in this county to attack, you pick my place. Spread it around in the jail, and with your daddy, if anybody else comes here again, I’ll call the coroner, not the sheriff.”
He knew the law didn’t intimidate them at all, so Boom decided that maybe they could be intimidated by him instead. So he added, “Now, when you punks get out, if you want to get revenge on me, you know where I live, and my name is Boom Kittinger. Hell, bring your buddies. I’ll kill them, too.”
While deputies chuckled again, the sheriff, grinning, gently grabbed Boom’s upper arm and led him away from the two hoodlums.
Two weeks later, Bobby and his family showed up for a visit. Bobby was a young teenager. Sally and Boom were leading young Bobby, now in middle school, for a horse-back ride through the trees and up and down ridges. Bobby had come to Colorado just one day before and had no experience riding horses. Boom had him riding good old dependable Prince, the three-decades-old sorrel gelding that Boom always put guests on who had not ridden much, if ever. Boom called him his “dude horse.” In fact, Prince was going on thirty-seven years of age (which is like Dick Clark’s age, in horse years) and still loved to have children on his back. Boom was in the front on his big paint, and Sally followed about fifty feet behind him on her Appaloosa, with Bobby close behind her on old Prince.
Where Boom lived was at the boundary between the fringes of civilization at the outskirts of town and the wilderness of the San Isabel National Forest. People would sometimes come into the area to fire weapons, ride dirt bikes, or just hike, because of the proximity to town. Riding around the rugged mountain ranch, mainly in the trees, most of the time they were blocked from view from Boom’s house.
Bobby’s mom, Bonnie, was having fun working in the flower garden behind Boom’s house. Bonnie was in the terraced lower garden about twenty feet below the house, and bending over to pick some mums, when she heard what she thought was a hummingbird, or large bee dive-bombing her, but dirt kicked up from the ground a few feet to her left. She looked around puzzled, and bent over again, when the same thing happened. She also heard a gunshot afterward coming from a long finger of a ridgeline, which paralleled the one Boom’s house was on. The ridgeline was wooded and about seven hundred feet away. It dawned on Bonnie that someone was shooting at her.
She scrambled up to the house and ran up to Bobby’s dad, who was on crutches from ACL surgery, saying, “Honey, somebody just shot at me twice from that hill!”
Honey was the actual nickname that everybody called Ted Samuels by.
Honey hobbled to the gun cabinet, grabbed Boom’s 7-by- 50 binoculars and a Winchester Model 94 rifle, and ran out onto the back deck to spot and warn Boom. He told Bonnie to call 911.
At that time, out of sight of the house, Boom, Bobby, and Sally emerged from trees in the small valley the sniper had fired across and headed across, to one of the natural springs on the property where deer, elk, bears, and lions often watered. The spring was a couple hundred feet or so up the side of the small mountain, with a small creek running down the ridge and across the valley.
As Boom led the way, they approached the spring, and suddenly Eagle, his horse, stopped instantly, stuck his forelegs out, locking them tight, ears forward and nostrils flaring in panic. He stopped so fast, Boom actually moaned in pain as his groin struck the saddle horn.
Alerted, he patted the horse’s neck and softly said, “Easy, boy. What’s wrong, Eagle?”
Boom strained to spot a lion or bear at the spring above him, which was his initial thought.
Totally shook up, Eagle bounced around a little stiff-legged, and flinched to the right just a little, and just then, a loud crack went by Boom’s left ear, within an inch or so, and then he immediately heard the whoomp sound of the rifle’s muzzle report. He even felt the power of the bullet passing so close to his ear, and he saw the muzzle flash next to a large oak tree just above the spring. Then movement. The bullet just missed Sally, scaring her to death, and the next thing Boom knew, docile old Prince was dancing wildly in total panic, with Bobby grabbing a hold of the saddle horn and hanging on for dear life. A second shot made a loud bang, and Boom knew automatically from experience that the sniper was shooting away from them, probably over his shoulder, as he ran. Boom had been shot at enough times to know that bang-whump double sound you hear when you are being shot at, and he never enjoyed the noise.
Quickly turning his head, Boom yelled, “Get out of here now and call 911!”
Sally stared at him with a wild-eyed, shocked, and colorless expression on her face and yelled, “What’s happening?”
He knew she knew what had just happened but was in shock, as he hollered back, “We’re being shot at! Go! Now!”
Turning his head to the sniper’s position, which was just above the spring, maybe seventy feet above him and to his front, he scoured the vegetation for the sniper, who was none other than his illustrious neighbor Tom Smith himself. Boom saw movement as the sniper bolted away through the trees, but Tom was wearing camouflage. His mind automatically catalogued the second rifle report as an approximate thirty-caliber. He was furious. The shooter was on Boom’s property, and he felt violated, totally violated. Whenever Boom helped teach women sexual assault prevention at the various martial arts school he trained at over the years, one technique he would teach them was to use very foul language to upset and unbalance a potential attacker, plus using the loud foul language would bolster the woman’s self-confidence. This is what he immediately thought of, because Boom had not carried a gun with him, like he normally did in the mountains. He yanked his sheath knife from its holster on his right hip and put the spurs to Eagle, heading him at the sniper’s position. Maybe it was because he was still on active duty then as a master sergeant (and would become a sergeant major before retirement) and was always carrying guns on MTTs (Mobile Training Teams) and various deployments around the world, and he just wanted to relax.
Boom screamed at the top of his lungs, “Come on, motherfucker, shoot me! Shoot me, you fucking pussy! I’m going to cut your fucking balls off!”
There was no courage involved in this, as far as he was concerned. After years in Special Forces and teaching the martial arts, his immediate instincts took over and he felt the only solution was to attack and try to unnerve his opponent. To him then, running would be making him a sitting duck, and he would easily get shot in the back. While Eagle lunged up the steep mountainside, Boom yanked his other knife from its sheath attached to the back girth strap on his saddle. Scared, Eagle balked, and Boom, very much in shape from his constant training, finally jumped down and led him by the reins, running up the ridge toward the sniper’s position. But Smith was gone, running through the trees along the mountain.
Now, it was the time to go easy. First, Boom mounted up and galloped back along the six-inch-wide trail across the face of the mountain, not a recommended exercise for Eastern horses that are used to green pastures. He ran out on a piñon-covered ridge directly across from his back deck. Honey spotted him from inside the house and dashed out. Sally was directly across the valley leading Bobby and his horse up through the trees.
Honey yelled at Boom at the same time that Boom yelled at Sally.
Pointing at the ridgeline beyond Boom, Honey yelled, “Somebody shot at Bonnie, twice!”
Simultaneously, Boom screamed at Sally, his voice echoing across the mountain valley, “Don’t walk! Run!”
Boom looked over at Honey, yelling, “We were shot at, too! Call 911! Take care of them!”
The old Green Beret, leaning on a crutch, raised the rifle in agreement and hobbled inside, as Boom wheeled Eagle and tore back across the suicide path along the mountain. He knew all would be totally safe with Honey Samuels until the sheriff got there.
In some places, the deer trail was only wide enough for his horse’s hooves, and to his left, it went straight down a hundred feet or more, with dozens of trees along the way waiting to knock him out of the saddle.
The tree the sniper hid behind was a large oak and was along the trail fifty feet from the spring. Arriving, Boom jumped out of the saddle and led his horse, looking for sign. He found where the man had knelt behind the tree and fired at him, but Smith was at least smart enough to grab his brass, the spent shell casings. Boom felt very blessed and protected by God, because if the man was smart enough to police his shells, he should have been more careful to nail Boom with his second shot. Boom could tell he was right-handed, because he had knelt on his left knee on the left side of the tree, apparently bracing the rifle against the side of the oak. Boom had already figured he was one of the Smiths and remembered the oldest son was a lefty.
He followed the man’s trail across the face of the mountain. He wore size-nine-and-a-half-or-ten boots, with hardly any tread, and Boom guessed that they might have been old-style army combat boots. He knew Smith had been in the army years earlier. As usual, in this type of tracking, he watched the ground, and his gaze would sweep left and right in front of him, moving out in ten-meter arcs, so he would not run into an ambush. Up close, he would also watch each branch overhanging the trail for threads, strands of hair, or any other useful evidence. Being on the side of a steep mountainside, Boom also had to keep looking up above him, which most animals and people did not do. Now he didn’t want to gallop, or he could easily end up being bushwhacked. If he were the sniper, Boom figured, he would have run a short distance and would have set up a hasty ambush for himself, and would have simply shot Boom point-blank out of the saddle. Apparently, Boom must have given the shooter too much credit, for the man’s tracks showed him that his mind was telling him, “Feet, don’t fail me now!”
It didn’t take Boom very long to reach the ridgeline where the bushwhacker had knelt down to shoot at Bonnie. He tracked the guy for some time, and finally saw what he was looking for. Tom Smith had been running directly away from his own home, but now started a slow circle back toward his house. That told Boom what he wanted to know for sure. Now he could carry out his plan of action, certain it had been Tom Smith. The sniper had run through and fallen in an area of wet gray clay. Boom slipped in it, too and was covered with gray clay. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and white cowboy hat, so he decided to cover his face, T-shirt, and the white parts of his horse’s legs and chest in dark gray clay, and tied his cowboy hat behind the saddle. Being a target was one thing, a bull’s-eye something else, though.
He mounted up, and went on another fifteen or twenty minutes in thich trees switchbacking back and forth up a steep ridge, then down the other side, and back up another; then he smoked his horse’s heels along another narrow deer and elk trail for two miles. He knew the trail where Tom Smith would surely come hotfooting through.
Boom jumped down and tied his horse, climbed over a small ridge and down to the trail. He had to work quickly. He had his lasso from his saddle, and the clear monofilament line from the telescoping fishing rod he carried in his saddlebags. Boom made it out to Colorado to this ranch he inherited every chance he got, and loved to take his horse up to high mountain lakes above timberline and go fishing for rainbows and cutthroat trout, the best eating around.
