Black Autumn

by Jeff Kirkham

  The battle lulled again as the surviving Latinos took cover in the homes, controlling houses on both sides of the boulevard now. The gangbanger army, burrowed into the McMansions on both sides of Vista View Boulevard, turned their attention to QRF One on top of the bluff. The Latinos with scoped hunting rifles found places within the homes where they could shoot from concealment—windows, door frames and fences—and they started firing carefully at the elevated shooting positions of QRF One. Tim lost two of his men to head shots before radioing Jeff.

  “Jeff, this is Tim. Over.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’re taking casualties from the road. I’ve lost two men in the last five minutes. They’re shooting from those homes in front of you with big rifles. It’s a pretty even fight and they have a lot more men than I do. What are your orders?”

  Jeff could no longer force his enemies into the funnel of death up the boulevard. Now they would be fighting house to house, and Jeff knew his forces couldn’t sustain a war of attrition.

  The low rattle of the two remaining armored vehicles forced Jeff’s hand. “All units. This is Jeff. Pull back to barricade three. Repeat. Pull back to barricade three. And, for the love of God, where’s my fifty-caliber?”

  “Jeff. This is Winslow. I’m moving into position over barricade three. ETA three minutes. I had to get the fifty from the top of the ridge. Almost in position.”

  “Do me a favor,” Jeff radioed back. “Be a damned Marine and kill those two tanks, please.”

  “Roger that.” Winslow signed off.

  • • •

  A thick column of inky smoke rose behind the screen of McMansions up the road and around the corner from Francisco. He tore at his hair, anxious to know what had happened around the bend. He had sent in his ultimate weapons—two of his four pieces of armor—and the black smoke worried him to distraction.

  He tried to contact Crudo and his other lieutenants over their radios. He had more than five hundred men stacked half-way up the hill, infuriatingly inactive, waiting to advance. Francisco had no idea what was holding them up.

  His forces had definitely taken ground. They had fought through the barricade at the bottom of the hill, but something had brought them to a halt half-way up the mountainside and Francisco couldn’t see what it was. As if to punctuate his frustration, the sun peeked over the mountaintop and stabbed Francisco’s eyes. The harsh sunlight blotted out the softness of the fall morning, as if to say the honeymoon was over for Francisco and his men. The Latino army would fight it out in full daylight, and to Francisco, the harsh sunlight felt like a message: the easy victory had eluded him again. Now he found himself in a serious fight.

  How was he supposed to succeed without knowing what was happening? How could he lead his men in battle without any reliable way of commanding them?

  Finally, the radio squawked “Francisco. This is Crudo. Both tanks are on fire. We’re in the homes now and the gringos are retreating. Send more men. Most of my men up here are dead.”

  Francisco’s eyes flared, and he tore at his hair with ferocity. He couldn’t imagine how four hundred men could be “mostly dead.” And how did the tanks catch on fire? He felt like he was suffocating from lack of information. How was he supposed to use the two remaining tanks if he didn’t know how to keep them from catching fire?

  “Crudo. How did they catch fire?”

  Crudo answered, but the first half of what he said came through clipped. It sounded like, “trash bags and gasoline,” which made no sense whatsoever.

  “What?” Francisco pleaded into the radio. “How did they catch fire?”

  Crudo replied, but his words were drowned out by the rumble of the two front-end loaders driving past him.

  “¡Hijo de puta!” Francisco screamed at the radio. He came close to throwing it, but thought better of it at the last second.

  Francisco grabbed his megaphone and screamed at the hundreds of men crouched in the middle of the boulevard. “Move up, cabrones! Move up!”

  • • •

  Alec had assigned Jesse and Victor to Jason’s “special purpose” element. Since he had missed much of QRF Two’s training, Jason couldn’t be integrated into the main force of the team. Instead, Alec ordered Jason and his two friends to execute a wide flank, where they wouldn’t need to coordinate so closely with the rest of the team. Jason’s radio was tuned to Alec’s command frequency rather than the team frequency. This would de-conflict any mistakes Jason might make on the radio.

  Jesus, Jason thought, making radios work is a bitch.

  QRF Two had been assigned to the southern flank of the blocking force. Jeff had taken a big risk, placing one-third of his best assaulters in a position to block the enemy from climbing straight up a mountainside. In all likelihood, no enemy would do that. The risk to the Homestead forces, if anyone did happen to climb straight up the mountain, would be astronomical. Even a small flanking force coming up the mountainside could cut Homestead QRF Two, and then Jeff’s main force, to ribbons, firing on them from the side. Jeff couldn’t risk a flank, so he had sent Alec’s QRF to counter-flank, which meant some of his best shooters might end up sitting on the sidelines for the entire battle.

  Alec had assigned Jason’s three-man contingent to conduct an even deeper counter-flank by sending them farther to the south. More of a recon element, Jason, Jesse and their buddy Vic would sound the alarm if the enemy tried to come at them from the deep south. If QRF Two was an insurance policy, then Jason’s team was an insurance policy on top of the insurance policy.

  On one hand, it seemed like a waste of good shooters to Jason. He wanted to fight, and there was no doubt; he was a good shooter. On the other hand, Jeff and Alec knew exactly what they were doing, so Jason didn’t waste time worrying about it.

  Jason’s three-man team spread out on the lip of a precipitous drop in the mountain. They could see all the way to the bottom, but the dried grass looked deep, and the folds in the terrain could easily hide an enemy force. From where they sat, they could hear the battle raging on the boulevard five hundred yards to their north—thousands of rounds being fired in waves like pounding surf.

  Jason tried to imagine why the gunfire wasn’t sustained, and why it would crescendo then diminish, almost coming to a silence. Then the gunfire would rise again in a mysterious rhythm that sent chills down his spine. His friends were dying. His precious daughter fought for her life in the middle of that orchestra of death.

  While his mind stressed over the battle just a quarter-mile away, Jason’s eye caught slight movement below his position on the face of the drop-off. He snatched his binoculars from a pouch in his vest and zoomed in on the area. His blood chilled and his ears began to ring as he squinted through the binos at an undeniable shape: the top of a man’s shaved head.

  The fight was coming. Jason keyed his radio. “Alec. This is Jason. Over.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I have an unknown number of enemy coming up the mountainside. Will advise.”

  “Copy,” Alec replied. “Unknown enemy force approaching your position. Over.” Alec clicked off, probably jumping to another radio frequency to let Jeff know about the imminent flank.

  Jason didn’t bother to radio Jesse and Vic. They were close enough to each other to whisper. “Jesse. Enemy below. Get ready. Pass it along to Vic.”

  Jesse’s eyes went wide, and he reflexively checked the chamber of his assault rifle and peeked up and over the berm. He turned to Vic, whispering loudly. A moment later, all hell broke loose. Nearly a hundred men appeared from behind tall grass down the hill, leaping up from cover. But they didn’t charge. Instead, they began a guttural shout in unison, stomping their feet, pounding their chests and shouting at Jason and his men.

  “Oh, fuck,” Jason muttered to himself. He knew exactly what this was. These hundred men, a football field away, downhill from his little defensive position, were either Tongans or Samoans. He peered through his binos and could see they were all shirtless
in the frigid October morning air, most with elaborate tattoos. Some of them carried war clubs in addition to their guns.

  The scene made no sense to the three gunmen at the top of the hill. How was it they were facing a vicious horde of shirtless Polynesians in the middle of Utah in the middle of the fall?

  What sprung to mind was the battle of the Island of Lanai. Jason had hunted mouflon sheep on the island once, and the guide had showed him a deep canyon where the men of King Kamehameha fought straight up a grassy cliff to defeat the defenders of the island. The two cliffy mountainsides looked almost identical: Lanai and Oakwood, Utah. Kamehameha had crushed the defenders despite the steep climb.

  The violent war cry was coming to an end and, Jason had to admit, it scared him shitless. With a final pound on the chest and a stomp, the islanders launched up the hillside with a roar. Jason and his buddies began firing, wildly at first, but then slowing into a rhythm. They had to make the most of the seconds it would take for the attackers to charge the hill.

  Why didn’t we just shoot them while they were doing their Haka? Jason wondered as he picked another target and squeezed off a three-round burst. The target went down and Jason moved on, methodically putting bullets into men.

  Jason would shoot a man, knowing he had made a good shot, and the guy would keep coming anyway. As this happened over and over, Jason knew they were losing the battle. His damned AR-15 was punching pencil-sized holes in gorilla-sized men. As one might expect, the fast-and-tiny holes delivered by his rifle were failing to drop pumped-up Polynesians. Every target required three, six or ten rounds before the man would fall. At this rate, they would run out of rounds before stopping the assault.

  Jason swapped his fourth mag when the first screaming man reached him. With a palm smack to the slide release, Jason ran the bolt into the battery, whipped the sight into position and snapped a shot into the man’s forehead. The tattooed Tongan paused mid-step and arced over backward, rolling back down the hill.

  Jason moved onto another target, a huge man closing on him, and began firing into his torso. After placing four quick rounds into his chest, Jason’s AR-15 jammed. In a flash, he ran his malfunction drill—slap, rack, squeeze—but nothing happened. Trying to stay calm, Jason flipped the gun sideways and glanced into the ejection port. He saw a tangle of brass and dropped the useless rifle, going for his handgun.

  The huge man was on him, bleeding from four holes, but still very much alive. Jason’s Glock came up just as the man’s battle club came down, crushing Jason’s bump helmet and knocking him sideways into a rock. The combination of impact from the club and from the rock made Jason’s world go wobbly. The last thing he saw before darkness descended was the AR-15 lying on the ground in front of his face.

  • • •

  Jeff had located the third barricade around a bend in the road. This next defensive section wasn’t nearly as good as the first two. There were homes on both sides of the street and that would give the enemy the cover of McMansions on both sides, allowing them to suppress for one another. Still, the Latino army wouldn’t be able to circle around behind them. The tiered levels of the gravel quarry continued to provide Jeff’s men with a significant defensive advantage. The enemy couldn’t flank. They had to come straight up the road. The boulevard continued to funnel the attackers into a fighting front less than forty yards across, allowing only a few dozen Latino guns to join the battle at a time.

  Jeff moved QRF One up to the next road, allowing them to fire down from the homes over the section of road. The tactical situation wasn’t as golden as the fatal funnel they’d had in front of the first two barricades, but it was still a decisive advantage.

  QRF One redeployed and rearmed from ammo stores they had pre-positioned. They moved up one street and then into the backyards and back windows of the homes on the bluff above the road, giving them a similar elevation advantage to the one they’d had before.

  “In position, Jeff,” Tim called over the command frequency.

  “Roger. Here comes the armor.” The two front-end loaders turned up another switchback in the boulevard. Whoever commanded them had learned from the last two. Rather than letting the armor get in front of the troops, they held the tanks back and used them as shooting platforms and cover for the middle of the street. The gasoline-and-garbage bag trick wouldn’t work twice. Anyone trying to make a run on the armored vehicles would be cut down before they could get half-way to the tanks. Jeff wished they had more fifty-caliber rifles. As it was, he would be betting everything on Winslow and his Barrett.

  • • •

  Emily Ross deployed to the battle with her unit, QRF Three. She didn’t know for sure how many men she had just killed from the bluff, but it had been a lot. She could see the scope picture in her mind’s eye, then the crack of the rifle. She had placed the crosshairs and pressed the trigger, and men had disappeared. She didn’t know how many.

  She moved like a ghost, in a listless state. Some part of her mind struggled to deal with the death she had dealt and with the last horrifying thirty minutes, when in any given instant a bullet might pass through her own head.

  She had been drenched in adrenaline for almost an hour. She had always been good at compartmentalizing, but the battle overwhelmed her ability to control her emotions. Her fingers tingled, as though from lack of oxygen, and she couldn’t feel her toes. Worse, she couldn’t shake the urge to sob. Reloading her magazines required a massive amount of willpower, just to force her fingers to perform the simple function of snapping .223 rounds into the mouth of each mag.

  Press, snap, slide. She willed her fingers to do their job.

  “We’re moving out,” Josh shouted. “We’re the blocking force on the west side of the street. We need to make sure nobody climbs the bluff. We gotta move. They could already be climbing up on us.”

  Emily finished her last mag and ran to catch up with her unit. She was supposed to be the corpsman in the group—providing medical care when needed—but all she had done so far was kill people. Considering the size of the enemy they faced, medical treatment was the least of their concerns. The Homestead fought against total extermination.

  As the team fanned out and took up their blocking positions, Emily slipped into rearguard, the position she had been assigned in training. She set up her rifle in a second-story window in what was previously a child’s bedroom, covering a sector that might expose her team to a flanking action through the long row of homes.

  Ten minutes after she had settled in, she saw a glimmer of movement in a backyard three houses down. Her adrenaline rose again, making her dizzy. All the families in this neighborhood had evacuated an hour earlier. She had no immediate backup, and the movement she had seen could only be one thing: the enemy.

  “Josh. This is Emily. We have movement behind us. Repeat. We’re being flanked down the row of houses behind us to the north.”

  “Copy, Emily. I’m sending help. Hold them up until we arrive.”

  “Roger,” Emily squeaked, her throat constricting.

  From the child’s room, there were many ways an attacker could get around her; she had tons of blind spots. She would have to head downstairs into the backyard or risk being surrounded.

  Emily ran down the stairs and slowed once she hit the main floor. Gently sliding the glass door open, she slipped into the backyard, scanning with her M4 rifle at the ready.

  The backyard offered an open shooting lane that ran the width of the property. In order to pass by, the gangbangers would have to cross the gap. Emily found cover behind an air conditioning unit, crouched and waited.

  Moments later, the vinyl fence shuddered.

  • • •

  Gabriel and his team moved carefully from yard to yard. It had taken them almost an hour to circle around the battlefield and climb the bluff. Now they were moving toward what he believed was the enemy’s rear. So far none of his men had fired a shot.

  He came to a white vinyl fence, the fifth one they had crossed, and
he climbed on top of a doghouse and took a quick peek. He saw nothing in the next yard, so he slung his rifle and vaulted the fence, landing in a crouch.

  He pulled his rifle around to his grip and placed his finger on the trigger in readiness. Just then, a girl in camouflage leaned around a gray metal box, pointing her rifle at his chest.

  He paused, cocking his head at the sight. The last thing Gabriel saw was her long blonde hair swinging around her shoulder.

  • • •

  Emily opened fire on the man, shooting holes in his chest, shoulder and gut. He slumped backward, sprawling on the lawn.

  Instantly, bullets punched through the vinyl fence, the enemy team firing blindly into her yard. Emily balled up behind the air conditioner as bullets slammed into the stucco wall behind her, stinging her head and neck with chunks of rubble. Assault rifle fire erupted from the other side of the yard, and Emily heard her own team joining the fight.

  “Emily, moving up,” somebody shouted, probably Josh.

  “Here,” she shouted, leaning out from around the air conditioner and returning fire through the fence.

  Three members of her team bounded up to her, fanned out around the house and pressed their attack. After trading fire and enveloping the enemy position, Josh moved to Emily and smacked her on the shoulder.

  “Last man.”

  “Moving,” Emily shouted and moved forward, now on auto-pilot, following her training and moving around the fence, working from cover to cover around the next house.

  Within a few minutes, her team wiped out the flanking force. Bodies of young Hispanic men lay cast around the yards, pools and play sets of the luxury homes, caught up in a gunfight they were ill-prepared to win.

  As soon as the rifle fire died down, Emily checked in over the radio and headed back to the man she had first shot.