The Bonner Incident: Joshua's War by Thomas A Watson, Michael L Rider

Leary started as he heard another ‘Slap’ and saw the next man grab his chest.
    ‘Boom’ echoed down the valley from the far away gunshot. “Kneel down where you’re standing!” Leary shouted ducking in the ferns. “Don’t move or you’ll step on a trap! I’m going to get the others out and we are leaving!”
    “Fuck you!” the last man shouted and took off running back down the valley.
    Leary could hear the man running through the ferns. “Ugh,” the man cried out as Leary heard the ‘slap’ of the bullet hitting the man.
    “Stay down!” Leary bellowed. “He’s a long way off! Does everyone understand?”
    “Yeah,” the other man not hit or in a trap shouted back. “I think Glen was shot!”
    “Was that the idiot who ran?” Leary asked pulling out a stick buried in the loam that covered the ground. A loud plea for help sounded out from Glen.
    “I’m shot Reggie! Help me!”
    “Hey, he was a friend!” the man shouted at him. “Hold on Glen, we’re coming!”
    “He’s still an idiot!” Leary said using the stick to probe the ground as he crawled over to the second man. “You see? We didn’t get shot because we got out of his line of fire.”
    A long pause filled the quiet as the man thought about it. “You need me to do anything?” the man finally asked and heard the metal snap of a trap snapping closed. “Hey ah…Leary, you okay?” he shouted.
    “Yeah, I’m good, just found another trap,” Leary called back. “Just stay there until I get the others freed because we’re going to have to help them out of here.”
    Freeing the man who’d gone to look for a stick to pry the first trap open on the point man, Leary crawled back to the one behind him who’d stepped into a trap and sprang another on. Getting closer, Leary saw a trap snapped shut on the man’s forearm. “Now you understand why I said to stay still,” Leary said moving over and undoing the wire holding the screws on.
    “Sorry, I panicked. Name’s Reggie,” the man grunted. “They allow these things to be sold?”
    “Yeah, Reggie, you can buy them in a lot of places” Leary said, prying the one on the man’s forearm open and he pulled his hand out. Letting the trap go, Leary started working on the one on his leg. “I never thought these Conibear traps could be used on a human though.”
    With the three freed from traps, Leary led them in a crawl to the ones who had been shot. He looked at the two Homeland agents, seeing both were dead and realized they had been hit by the same bullet. They both had tactical vests on, but didn’t have the armor plates in them. Unzipping the vests, he patted their chests and found they’d both had on bullet proof vests. Rolling the second one on his side, Leary saw the bullet hadn’t come out of the back of the vest.
    Reggie and the others looked on as Leary crawled to the next man, who was the one shot after the Homeland agents. He was FBI and he was wearing a tactical vest with plates, but the bullet had passed through the front and out the back.
    “I only heard one shot,” Reggie said as Leary moved to the next man shot and found him dead as well. “How could he hit five people with one shot?”
    “Those Homeland jerks were hit by the same bullet,” Leary said crawling past the next shot man, seeing he was dead also. “They were standing one behind the other and the rifle that killed them didn’t have a silencer on it. The others were shot with a rifle that had a silencer.”
    “We still should have heard it,” Reggie said as Leary started crawling back to Glen who had tried to run away.
    “Reggie, you do realize that Mr. Anderson was almost a mile away, right? From the time those Homeland morons were hit till we heard the report was close to three, maybe four seconds.”
    “You said we didn’t have to worry about that slope,” Tony, the point man who stepped in the first trap, shouted.
    Probing the ground as he crawled, a loud snap went off making the group