The next several seconds were tense, as Eric well knew that gunner had their fate at his fingertips, but he could hear the boat still drawing closer, now at idle speed. Then, there was a man’s voice:
“Well hello, honey! What are you doing all alone out here on the river? Where did you come from?”
“I’m lost!” Cindy replied. “I’m looking for my uncle’s camp on the river, but it’s not where it’s supposed to be!”
“There are no camps on this part of the river,” the man replied, “where did you put in? How long have you been paddling?”
The voice was close, and Eric could feel the vibration from the engine in the water around him. It was time to leave the pirogue now, or he would be discovered. He took a deep breath and submerged, swimming three or four feet beneath the surface until he came into contact with the metal hull of the gunboat. When he’d planned this, he knew from seeing the boat up close that first time at Simmesport that the topsides of the vessel had a significant flare forward of amidships, more than enough to hide him from view as long as no one leaned over the rail and looked straight down. And Eric surfaced on the side opposite Cindy, knowing all eyes on deck would be upon her now.
He could hear at least two men talking to her now, and he hoped that meant the other man he’d seen was one of them and that the gunner had also left his station in order to get to the rail and get a better look at her. Any second now, there would be rifle shots from the woods, and if the team did their job, all the men would be down except for the helmsman in the pilothouse. Eric took another deep breath and was preparing to submerge again and swim to the stern for boarding when he heard a bullet impacting steel, followed immediately by a single rifle report from the riverbank. Someone on the deck above him cursed, and then Eric heard more shooting break out from the banks on both sides of the river. He could clearly hear incoming rounds striking both flesh and steel until all of it was drowned out by the staccato roar of the machine gun. They had failed to get the gunner, and now he was returning fire! Eric knew there wasn’t time to try and reach the stern as planned. He stretched one arm as high as he could possibly reach from the surface of the river and just managed to hook three fingers on the bottom edge of a deck scupper before the helmsman put the boat in reverse and backed away from the pirogue. Eric heard the machine gun rip through another 50 rounds or so, but had no way of knowing if the fire was directed at Cindy in the pirogue or out into the woods at the others, but he did know he had to shut it down fast. For the moment, whoever was left of the gunboat crew was unaware of his presence, and that was Eric’s only advantage. He pulled himself to a more secure position with both hands gripping the low steel bulwark and then worked his way aft hand over hand until he was behind the pilothouse. Then Eric swung his feet up out of the water and pulled himself the rest of the way on deck. A glance into the rear of the pilot house through the open back revealed a clear view of the helmsman, so Eric drew the Glock and fired five rounds into his back, dropping him where he stood at the controls. Eric knew the gunner may have heard the pistol shots, because he wasn’t firing at the same time, but if he did, he didn’t have time to react before the boat veered hard to port when the helmsman fell, and then plowed into the mud at the edge of the river. The sudden stop threw Eric into a bulkhead, causing him to drop his pistol and sending it bouncing across the deck and over the side. But though his blade was drawn and in hand the instant he regained his feet, Eric never got a chance to use it. As he started forward, looking for the gunner and any other crew members still alive aboard the vessel, two more shots rang out from the nearby woods on the side where the boat was aground, and he heard a body fall to the steel deck with a thud.
“It’s all clear, Eric!” Jonathan yelled from just 30 feet away. “I got that gunner and the rest are dead!”
Eric went immediately to the starboard rail, scanning the river for any sign of Cindy. He saw the pirogue upside down, but still afloat, apparently undamaged by gunfire. When he called out to her, Eric saw a hand reach up to the bottom of the hull, and then her head appeared as she swam out from under it and flipped it right side up.
“I’m okay!” She shouted back to him.
“Is anybody hit?” Eric called out to the teams on each bank.
“We’re all good!” Jonathan said.
“Good over here too!” Sam shouted, “but Steven nearly got us all killed, taking the first shot too soon and missing that gunner! That was damned close! Those .50 caliber rounds were cutting down trees over here!”
“There are lessons to be learned, but we did it! Now we’ve got to get this boat out of the mud and get out of here. If that crew was in radio contact with their base or if they miss a scheduled call, someone may come looking for them. We need to get back to your camp and get your people ready to move! And I need to get this boat downriver to St. Martin Parish!”
Seventeen
“YOU DID WHAT YOU had to do, son,” Bart told Keith as the two of them walked out into the woods at the edge of the campfire light to talk about the events of the day. “Those men volunteered to go with you because they wanted to do something. Nobody forced them to go; I know you sure didn’t, and their wives wanted to get involved just as much as they did, so it wasn’t like they didn’t know the risks too.”
Keith knew his dad was right, but this was still one of the worst days he’d had since that horrendous day when he’d been too late to get to Lynn and found her dead on that bridge. Bart had been through a lot today too, and things could have turned out a whole lot worse for him and everyone else aboard the Miss Anita if not for the drill he’d had them run simply to pass the time and kill the boredom. And without Shauna’s extreme bravery and determination, they would have nowhere to go other than the camp they’d made there in the woods, because the trawler and all their possessions would be gone. As it was, the boat was a mess, especially on deck where the hand grenade had exploded and killed the two Mexicans. Bart and Greg had gone aboard to inspect it and said the actual damage wasn’t too bad, but the blood and gore would take some doing to clean up and would have to wait until morning. The other dead cartel men were in the water nearby too, and then of course there was the matter of giving Joe a proper burial and doing what they could to help Diane get through the shock and disbelief that Keith knew was only the beginning for her. Right now, he was leaving that up to Becca and Ronnie. Ronnie and Willis had arrived at the lake an hour or so after the grenade went off, and by then Keith and the others had built a fire and made the decision to spend the night ashore.
The surviving Mexican prisoner that jumped overboard was still handcuffed, now with his hands in front of him around a small tree where he could lie down, but from which he could not escape. Keith had lots of questions for him but wasn’t in the mood to deal with him tonight. The only thing he learned was that the man’s name was Enrique Valverde, and he got that through Vicky, the one person in the group who was reasonably fluent in Spanish.
“If you’ll help me tomorrow, I’d appreciate it,” Keith told her. “I want to find out where he and his friends came from, and why they came up the river. I want to know who they’re working for and everything else he can tell us.”
“What will you do with him after that? Greg says the jail has been shut down for months.”
“It has. We certainly don’t have the manpower or the facilities to deal with prisoners.”
“So, you’ll just let him go?”
“I didn’t say that. I just said we can’t handle prisoners right now. What happens to him after he talks depends on what he says. Have you got a problem with that? You don’t have to ask those questions if it bothers you.”
“It doesn’t bother me. I know what those men would have done to us if they’d caught us unprepared. And I know they are probably somehow connected to the same men who just killed Diane’s husband. I will do my best to get him to talk to me.”
“Good. He’ll talk, because we’ll provide the needed incentive if he doesn’t�
��” Keith said.
* * *
Pushing the gunboat out of the mud didn’t prove too difficult for the ambush team, due to the shallow-draft and the shape of the hull. Eric inspected it and determined that there was no damage done by the grounding. The equipment on board included a dozen boxes of 100-round belts for the M2, as well as the unexpected find of a M249 SAW and two brand-new select-fire Army-issue Colt M4s with cases of 5.56 ammo and mags to support them. Eric also found unmounted M203 grenade launchers for each of the two rifles, but no rounds for those were on the boat. None of the dead crewmen carried any form of I.D. on them, nor could Eric find any other documentation aboard to give him a clue of who the men were or whether they were active or former military. He knew they were one or the other, rather than civilians, but he didn’t recognize any of them from his prior contact with the men at the Simmesport post. He rolled them over the side into the river and went back into the pilothouse to turn the two-way radio off. He had no use for it now, but he figured he would later, especially after Bart got ahold of it.
When they had retrieved the two John boats from the woods, Eric took the helm of their newly captured prize and with Jonathan and Sam riding in the pilothouse with him, they returned to the spot on the riverbank adjacent to the hidden camp. One of the guys that had been in on the shooting team ran to tell the others, and a few minutes later, the entire group was crowded together on the bank, admiring the sleek gunboat and listening to Sam tell the tale of how they’d taken it. Eric knew the success of this mission, providing evidence of his leadership capabilities, had won them over. These folks were tired of being frightened refugees. They wanted their old lives back, and while he couldn’t promise them that, he could show them how to fight for it.
“We’ve got room for three or four to ride on ahead with us if anyone is interested,” Eric said, after plans to break camp and move to St. Martin Parish were finalized.
“I’ll go!” Hal shouted.
“We will too!” Cindy said, pulling her husband forward by the hand.
Steven started to object, but Cindy cut him off. She had her mind made up, and after her bravery today, no one, not even her husband was going to override her decision.
“That’s sounds good to me,” Sam said. “It’ll take the rest of us until at least tomorrow to break down everything and get packed.”
“Not a problem,” Eric said. “We’ll refuel the boat at my brother’s place on the way back up and meet you the day after tomorrow to escort you back to our base of operations.”
Despite Steven’s screw up of the ambush that could have gotten several of them killed, including Eric and Cindy, Eric was feeling pretty good about his new recruits. In addition to the guys that had participated in the operation to capture the gunboat, there were another half dozen able-bodied men in the camp, as well as some hard-working women and older children and teens who seemed to be doing their part without complaining. Keith would be pleased with his contribution to the militia, Eric was sure, and he was looking forward to seeing how many fighting men his brother and father had also managed to round up in his absence.
“I call gunner!” Jonathan said, as they pulled away from the bank and waved good-by to their new friends.
“Maybe later, kid. But we’re not gonna burn through what little ammo we’ve got training you to run it now. I doubt we’ll run into trouble on the way back anyway, but if we do, you can do the driving and I’ll do the shooting.”
“Whatever dude. I just wanna try it, that’s all.”
“I’m sure you’ll get your chance.”
Eric hoped the trip back down to St. Martin Parish would be uneventful, and as it turned out, it was—until he turned on the boat’s VHF after they passed under I-10 and tried to call both Keith and the Miss Anita.
“That’s odd that no one is answering,” He told Jonathan and Hal. “Take the wheel, Jonathan, and take it on down to the lake at reduced speed. I’m going forward to watch from there.”
When they reached the cutoff and Jonathan slowed and turned in, Eric saw immediately that the Miss Anita was gone! He knew Keith and Bart planned to relocate everyone to a different area to set up the militia base camp, but the last conversation about the trawler left him with the impression that they would probably leave it anchored where it was. For some reason they had apparently changed their mind though, and Eric wondered if it was because Keith had found a base camp location with sufficient water depth to accommodate the vessel. If so, he didn’t know where that would be, or where to look. He could turn around and go back up the bayou to Keith’s property, but he didn’t see why they would take it there, where it would be accessible by road. The only other place he could think to look for them was down at Becca and Ronnie’s place, where he’d made the arrangement with Becca to use Ronnie’s boat. He didn’t know if Ronnie or anyone else would be there, and if they were, Eric wasn’t looking forward to telling this man he’d never met that his boat had been destroyed. He knew he would have to do it at some point though, so he took the helm from Jonathan and headed back out onto the river to go and see if anyone was at home.
Eric spotted the Miss Anita rafted up alongside a slightly smaller trawler with the name Smug Pelican on its stern and knew that Ronnie and Joe must have made it in from the Gulf. As he pulled the gunboat around past them, looking for a place to tie up, he spotted Keith’s sheriff’s patrol vessel there as well, but there was no one in sight on the dock or near the small camp house where he’d met Becca before. Jonathan helped him tie up, and Eric asked Hal, Cindy and Steven to wait on the boat while they went to check things out. When they did, it was immediately obvious everyone had gone somewhere by way of the road, as there were no vehicles parked on the property at all.
“What now?” Jonathan asked.
“I guess we wait. But I want to go aboard the Miss Anita while we’re here and grab another shirt. I’ll be right back.”
Eric hadn’t given the trawler more than a passing glance when they pulled in, because it was obvious the boat was unoccupied, and he’d been expecting to find everyone ashore. But when he stepped aboard now, he was shocked to see the damage that a closer look revealed. Chipped paint and conical dings indicating bullet impacts were everywhere on the sides of the main cabin and pilothouse. But worse than that was the jagged hole in the steel work deck. A large area of paint had been stripped away from the deck and nearby bulwarks and bulkheads by what could only be shrapnel, and Eric knew immediately that a grenade had exploded there. He rushed down below into the crew quarters but found no additional damage there, nor anyone inside. When he went to the engine room, however, beneath the damaged area of the deck, he was stopped short by the sight of a thin, Latino-looking stranger sitting on a work stool, his right wrist handcuffed to a support rail. The man looked dazed and confused, but when he saw he was no longer alone, he also looked frightened. Eric knew at a glance that Keith or Greg must have handcuffed him there, and that he was probably in some way responsible for the damage he’d seen up on deck. Eric squatted down in front of him to ask him about it directly, but even as the man was shaking his head and saying no habla Engles, Jonathan yelled out from the dock:
“They’re back, Eric! Keith and the rest of them are back!”
* * *
“Getting the gunboat and finding that many volunteers in one place was worth it, Eric,” Keith said, as they talked later that evening. “You can’t be everywhere at once, just like I can’t. I had to learn that lesson a long time ago.”
“I know you’re right,” Eric said. I just hate it for Diane. She went through so much already the day I met her. Losing her husband on top of that is rough.”
Eric had learned when they all returned to Becca and Ronnie’s place that they just finished burying Joe in the shade of an ancient live oak on his own property, just a mile away. Joe had volunteered to get involved in the fight, and unfortunately, he’d paid the ultimate price. When Eric heard how it happened, he said it could have happened to a
ny of them, regardless of training or experience.
“We’ll do the best we can to get everyone ready, but there will be more casualties if we continue this fight, and I want everyone to understand that,” Eric had said when he called a meeting of all that were there later that afternoon, after introducing Hal, Cindy and Steven. “What happened at that boat ramp and up there at the lake where the cartel guys tried to take the Miss Anita is just the beginning,” Eric went on. “All of you that were involved did outstanding jobs, especially considering that you had no time to plan in advance and that you were working in a reactive, rather than a proactive manner.
“In the future, we will improve our strategy and tactics and by doing so, also improve our odds of success and survival. The first priority, as you all know, is to relocate and establish a secure camp in an inaccessible location. We will do that and then set up a perimeter with round the clock security, and then we will focus on building our numbers and on training and mission preparation.
“Future operations against C.R.I. and the Fronteras Cartel and whatever other enemy we may be facing will mostly consist of coordinated attacks conducted by separate three-man fire teams and individual or paired sniper and spotter teams. The goal will be to inflict enemy casualties that create fear and disrupt their operations while posing the least amount of risk to us. Snipers will be instructed to fire only once, so that they are difficult to pinpoint, whether they hit or miss their targets, and the direct-action teams will only be used in locations and situations where they have the element of surprise in their favor and a high probability of success.
“For the most part, we will rely on stealth and the cover of darkness for insertion and extraction, but with the addition of that Army gunboat to our fleet, we have the means to use the river overtly and to aggressively engage enemy targets we may encounter there.”
Feral Nation - Defiance (Feral Nation Series Book 8) Page 17