War to the Knife (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 9)

by Peter Nealen

  The children were crying, but they’d quieted a little after their mother had been struck down. They whimpered as they were hauled out onto the street, their arms held cruelly by Green Shirts who shoved them down into the gutter.

  Galvez finished his cigarette in silence as his men forced the storekeeper to his knees in front of him. He studied the man disinterestedly for a while, taking some pleasure in the fear manifest in the storekeeper’s wide, bloodshot eyes.

  “Please, Señor…” A rifle butt to the kidneys silenced the storekeeper. Galvez just watched, taking a final drag off the cigarette before dropping it to the street and crushing it out with his boot. Then he looked up and around at the surrounding houses. The windows were dark and empty. He knew that they were being watched, but none of the locals wanted to risk showing their faces.

  That would change.

  He picked up the bullhorn. It was a quiet, misty morning, the sun turning the humid air gold as it topped the ridge to the east. Lifting the megaphone, he triggered it with a faint squeal of feedback.

  “Everyone come out of your houses! Now!” He waited a moment, the hesitation on the street palpable. “If you do not, I will be forced to send my men to drag you out! Everyone will witness what happens here this morning! Anyone who resists will join this cringing running dog for the Capitalistas!”

  For a moment, he was met with silence and stillness, as fear battled with fear. Finally, though, Jimenez’s neighbors started to come out or come to their windows. Galvez swept the street with his eyes, deliberately making eye contact, as if to ensure that each man and woman knew that the right hand of the revolution had his eye on them, personally.

  “Today, you will witness the price of treason!” He could easily have made himself heard with only his voice, but he chose to use the megaphone, blasting the street with his amplified voice. “This rat, this worm, has sold out the revolution! He has bowed and scraped to the imperialists and the exploiters! He has betrayed you as he has betrayed the Leader, General Clemente!” He looked down at the weeping storeowner with undisguised contempt—contempt that he held toward the frightened faces in windows and doorways all around them, as well. “He has spied and reported to the Americans and their puppets in Bogota!”

  “No!” The storekeeper looked up at Galvez through his tears. “No, Señor, I have done nothing! I have only tried to run my store and feed my children!”

  Galvez spat in his face. “Run your store? Driving your neighbors to poverty, for what? And your filthy profits weren’t enough for you, were they? You had to communicate with the Army.” He bent low over the weeping man. “What did you tell them? Did you tell them how many of us are here? Where our supplies are kept? What did you tell them?”

  He knew he would get no answer from the terrified shopkeeper. There was no answer to give. The man had sent no messages, had no contacts in Bogota that Galvez knew of. The store had been chosen completely at random. It had looked clean and well-kept-up enough to make it a likely target. The somewhat better off were always the best targets for this sort of thing.

  Galvez needed an example. The storeowner and his family would provide as good a sacrificial victim as any. After what was about to happen on this street, any of the locals would be too afraid to take advantage of the lessened numbers as he pushed more of his Green Shirts out into the jungle to patrol the area.

  Vladimir Lenin, one of his heroes, had said it best. “The purpose of terror is to terrorize.”

  “Please,” The shopkeeper begged, sobbing. “We’ve done nothing…”

  Galvez kicked him in the face. He collapsed onto his back, still weeping.

  “Now watch what happens to traitors and capitalist exploiters!” Galvez motioned to the Green Shirts who held the wife.

  The violence that followed was not quick. The storeowner’s wife came out of her daze as the rifle butts broke her shins. Her screams echoed up and down the street as they systematically broke her bones, while her husband was held up by his hair and forced to watch. She fell silent again when her skull was cracked. The beating continued until no sign of life remained.

  The shopkeeper’s weeping hadn’t stopped through the entire ordeal. Galvez remained unmoved. He’d killed any sentimental part of his soul—which he would have denied existed in the first place—a long time ago.

  Still, while he had originally planned to kill the entire family, he’d eventually decided that the children would serve as a terrified reminder of what had happened here. The other families might have been able to put it out of their minds. But to leave the storeowner’s children alive, they would have to look at them and take care of them, making the deaths constantly present.

  “See what happens to all spies, traitors, and wreckers!” The Green Shirts hauled the already broken man to his feet, while a third man prepared a noose at the end of an electrical cable, throwing the running end over the lamppost on the corner. The shopkeeper wept, his eyes still fixed on his wife’s corpse, as they dragged him under the lamppost and looped the noose around his neck.

  There was no short drop and broken neck for the storeowner. He was hauled, hand-over-hand, into the air, kicking and strangling. The Green Shirts hadn’t tied his hands, so he tried to haul himself up, scrabbling at the cable as it dug into his throat, but to no avail. He was not a particularly fit man, and even if he managed to pull himself up with sweaty hands on the slick cable, there was no way he would be able to do so indefinitely.

  They stood there, Galvez sweeping the bystanders with burning eyes, as the storeowner slowly strangled to death. The pained, gurgling sounds of his struggle slowly faded, until finally he hung, limp and lifeless, slowly swinging and rotating under the streetlight.

  The Green Shirts left him there, as they left his wife in the street, their children weeping in shock and horror at the murders, as Galvez climbed back into his truck and waved at the driver. There was work to be done.

  ***

  Flanagan thought he was getting more familiar with the terrain. He knew it was an illusion—he and Cruz hadn’t covered nearly enough of the ground around San Tabal for him to have truly learned it—but they were close enough to the Fuentes place that he thought he recognized a few landmarks, whenever they became visible through the mist and the trees. Which was not often.

  He was following Cruz again, though this time Gomez was taking up the rear. Wade and Burgess had both offered to come along, but there were still other preparations to make, and Flanagan had wanted to keep their footprint small, especially as they were on their way to one of the smaller farms, owned by a man named Otero. If this worked, they’d be heading back with new recruits, and he didn’t want to be trooping through the woods that close to San Tabal with a full squad or more.

  He also realized he was perhaps being over-optimistic. They didn’t even know if Otero had enough workers or sons to commit to the resistance. Or that he wasn’t so over-cowed by the Green Shirts—or even sympathetic—that he’d refuse to step up.

  Cruz halted, sinking to a knee just behind a fallen tree. Flanagan moved up to join him and Gomez settled in to watch their six a moment later.

  “We are about two hundred meters away from the edge of Otero’s fields.” Cruz kept his voice low. They couldn’t see more than a dozen yards in any direction, and that was only in certain places. “I think it would be best if we stay hidden until we can observe the situation before we move in and try to make contact.”

  “Agreed.” Flanagan had been on more than a few partisan linkups during this new career as a mercenary, to include their recent meeting with Cruz. Caution was always called for.

  With that settled, they waited a few more moments to listen and watch for the enemy before getting up and moving on.

  Movement in the jungle always takes longer than anywhere else. The limited visibility mandates a greater degree of caution, and the thickness of the vegetation is an obstacle as well. Not only that, but there are innumerable dangerous animals that must be watched for as we
ll as enemy fighters, and they could be above as well as in front, behind, or to either side. It takes longer to move when you’re trying to scan seven hundred twenty degrees.

  So, it took most of an hour and a half to cover that last two hundred meters to the Otero farm. Once again, they got low and stayed within the shadows of the treeline as they took in the farm and its surroundings.

  Otero was clearly a lot poorer than Fuentes. His fields were smaller, and his house was a tiny block of plastered concrete with a corrugated metal roof. A single, skinny cow cropped grass next to a lean-to shelter that looked like it was about ready to fall over.

  There was no one in sight.

  Flanagan frowned. “Something’s not right.”

  “What?” Cruz hadn’t noticed. Maybe it was Flanagan just being paranoid.

  “There’s no one outside. No one in the fields. No movement at all.” He watched the trees and the narrow road leading off down the hillside, disappearing around a turn and into the woods.

  “It’s the middle of the afternoon. This is usually siesta time. I’d be surprised if anyone was out working for another hour.”

  Flanagan frowned. He hadn’t thought of that. They hadn’t had a chance to slow down enough since they’d gotten in country. He’d forgotten about the generally different schedules in Latin America.

  Cruz was probably right. But something had his hackles up. And Flanagan had learned long before to pay attention when he got the heebie-jeebies.

  “Let’s move carefully. Cruz, you’re on point. Mario, stay here for the moment, until we get to the house and I signal that it’s all clear.” Flanagan wanted some overwatch set in before he crossed that open field to the house, which was out in the middle of the cleared ground, unlike Fuentes’s house, which had been surrounded by shade trees.

  Gomez faded into the brush, bracing his Galil against a tree and going completely still. Flanagan nodded to Cruz, who stepped out into the fields and started toward the farmhouse.

  Flanagan let him get a few yards away before following. He took one step out of the trees and froze.

  Six Green Shirts, talking and bitching in Spanish, one of them trying to shake leaves out of his collar, had just stepped out of the woods on the far side of the field.

  Cruz was already halfway to the house—the fields weren’t all that big, at least not on this side of the farm. He froze for a second, then tried to dash for the house.

  Unfortunately, the sudden movement drew one of the Green Shirts’ eye. He shouted, lifting his AK-47 and opening fire.

  It wasn’t a good shot. He wasn’t even aiming, really. He’d just pointed and mashed the trigger, the rifle already on full auto. The Kalashnikov chattered, the muzzle climbing as the long burst forced it up and back, until the Green Shirt was drilling holes in the sky, spewing little more than flame and noise.

  Flanagan had thrown himself flat in the dirt, getting down among the seedlings that had just started coming up out of the soil, yanking his own Galil to his shoulder and searching for the sights. A bullet cracked overhead and one of the Green Shirts dropped. Gomez was doing work.

  Cruz was still moving, rushing toward the house, but there was something a little wrong with his stride. Flanagan didn’t have time to worry about it, but found one of the Green Shirts that was advancing across the field, firing from the hip. The kid—he looked like he was about seventeen—was getting his ass kicked by the recoil, but he was still holding the trigger down, even as the M16 bounced and jumped in his hands.

  Flanagan resisted the urgency that clawed at him as bullets snapped overhead and smacked plaster off the farmhouse. He let his breath out as the Galil’s sights settled, and he shot the kid twice in the chest.

  Suppressive fire only works if it’s close enough to force the enemy to keep his head down. Volume of fire can’t always make up for poor marksmanship.

  The Green Shirt stopped dead in his tracks, the twin hammer blows to his chest halting his forward progress even before it penetrated to his brain that he was dead. The M16 slid out of suddenly nerveless hands as he fell over onto his back, staring sightlessly at the sky.

  Flanagan had already shifted targets as soon as he’d been sure that the shot was good. His next pair were a little high, the follow-up shot climbing to smash the second Green Shirt’s collarbone, but that one was already choking on his own blood, as the first bullet had pulped a lung. Pink foam frothed out of his mouth and nose as he collapsed, his fall pushing the muzzle of his AK into the damp earth.

  Gomez had already killed another one. The last two turned and ran back into the woods.

  Flanagan was up and moving. He dashed forward a few steps before dropping to an almost perfect kneeling position, letting his breath out again before he got a single shot off. One of the Green Shirts had already disappeared into the jungle, but his shot took the second one high in the back. The man’s back arched as he was jerked up on his toes by the impact, and he stumbled a little farther on before he collapsed against a tree, sliding down the rough bark and leaving blood and skin behind. It didn’t matter much to him. He would be dead in the next few seconds.

  Then Flanagan was running, passing the bodies, one of which was still twitching, and plunging into the woods after the sole survivor. They couldn’t afford to let word of this fight get back to Clemente.

  The jungle was thick, the density of the undergrowth made worse by how close some of the trees were. The Green Shirt was thrashing through the vegetation ahead of him, making enough noise to follow easily.

  Flanagan didn’t really like the jungle—he was far more at home in the high alpine woods back home. But he was good in the bush, whatever form that bush took. He knew better than to try to crash through the bushes—instead he sort of “swam” through the vegetation, ducking and weaving around the thickest branches, picking his footing as carefully as he could without slowing down too much.

  He wasn’t running, but he was catching up with the fleeing Green Shirt quickly.

  In a moment, he caught a glimpse of the other man, just as the Green Shirt glanced over his shoulder, his eyes widening as he realized that he hadn’t escaped after all. He tried to run faster, but only succeeded in tripping over a tree root and going sprawling. He rolled onto his back, scrambling to bring his shorty AR pistol around.

  Flanagan was almost on top of him. He realized that a prisoner might be useful, but after a split second he knew he was just a little bit too far away. The Green Shirt got his hand on his AR’s pistol grip and snatched it up, whipping the muzzle toward Flanagan’s face as his finger tightened on the trigger, his teeth bared and a curse in Spanish on his lips.

  Flanagan snapped his own rifle to his shoulder and double-tapped the Green Shirt from six feet away. He didn’t even bother to use the sights. The first bullet was slightly low, punching into the man’s solar plexus. The second one hit just above his sternum. The man grunted and jerked under the sharp blows as the bullets tore through his vitals, but he wasn’t out of the fight yet. His finger yanked spasmodically at the trigger, even though he only had one hand on the weapon, and it wasn’t quite pointed at his target yet. A burst of three rounds ripped past Flanagan’s ear and almost tore the AR out of the Green Shirt’s grip.

  Flanagan had barely let the trigger reset from his second shot as he found the sights, put the front sight on the bridge of the Green Shirt’s nose, and squeezed the trigger.

  The single shot echoed through the jungle with a deafening finality as the Green Shirt’s head bounced, blood spattering from the bullet hole and covering his suddenly fixed and staring eyes.

  Flanagan lowered his rifle, his heart thumping and his breath rasping in his suddenly dry throat. He scanned the woods one last time before he turned back toward the farm. They’d have to move fast, now. There was no telling how far the sounds of the firefight had traveled.

  There was one thing for certain, though. Someone would know that Clemente and his Green Shirts no longer held uncontested control of these hi
lls.

  Chapter 12

  Flanagan came out of the trees to see Gomez crouched by the house and several of the farmer’s family emerging into the open. He frowned as he took in the scene. Something was wrong.

  Gomez didn’t relax as Flanagan came closer, but Gomez wasn’t the laid-back type, anyway. There was always a coiled-spring readiness about the man. He was a killer to his bones, and he carried himself accordingly.

  Cruz was next to him. He was slumped against the farmhouse wall, his head bowed to his chest. He wasn’t moving. Flanagan made sure Gomez was covering security, then bent to check on Cruz.

  Their primary contact was dead. He’d taken a bullet to the leg, which was completely soaked in blood. He’d taken a hit that had clipped his femoral, and he’d bled out in the next couple of minutes.

  Flanagan looked down at the body for a long moment. This was bad. Without Cruz, this whole op could easily fall apart.

  A small, wiry man with a machete in his hand came around the corner from the front door. Flanagan hadn’t seen a photo yet, but this had to be Otero. He stood up and stepped back, his hand still on his Galil, just in case. Cruz had been relatively certain of Otero’s reaction, but Cruz was dead.

  “Mario.” Flanagan didn’t trust his own meager Spanish in this situation. Gomez rose and turned toward Otero, who was staring at Cruz’s body. Several children peeked around the corner, and Otero barked at them. They vanished.

  Flanagan took over security while Gomez spoke to Otero. Flanagan couldn’t quite follow the conversation—both men were talking too fast, and with contrasting accents. They might speak the same language generally, but there were distinct differences between the Spanish spoken in Colombia and that spoken in the American Southwest.

  He scanned the woods, careful not to get too sucked into one particular sector. Otero’s kids—skinny, dirty, and clearly as scared as they were curious—kept peeking around the corner, but this time their father was too absorbed in the conversation with Gomez to yell at them.