by Peter Nealen
Carrington and Lovell went in through the flimsy door, hardly even slowing down to throw it open. It hadn’t been latched. Hank and Keith pushed to the far corner, careful to sweep the window with their muzzles at they went, while the Rodriguez brothers took the other corner, covering their six.
“Small house, clear.” Lovell didn’t have to raise his voice much. The window had been open. Then Hank and Keith were moving on the next, a white-walled house with a blue roof.
Hank didn’t pause as he moved past the first window, but just swept it with his muzzle, letting it go as soon as he saw Keith’s suppressor enter the field of fire, then moving on to the door. Trying to maintain a good tactical glide was all but impossible, given the hummocky, muddy ground, but he still placed each foot carefully, keeping his weapon as steady as possible.
Brule had just stepped out beside him, covering the far corner and the bushes beyond, so Hank moved to the door, yanked it open, and went in as soon as he felt Keith squeeze his shoulder.
The interior was simple, the walls dingy white plaster, the door frames and windows ever so slightly uneven. It looked like the inside of just about every Third World house he’d ever been in. The entryway was also empty, with a couple of chairs and a small table set up against one wall, and a ratty rug on the floor. Three doors led off the main room, two of them shut. The open one, at the back, led into what looked like the kitchen.
Hank moved quickly to the nearest room. He knew he should clear the most immediate threat, which was that open door, but he also didn’t want to leave a door behind him while he crossed the entire house. So, keeping one eye on that opening, he reached for the door handle. Bronsted was suddenly next to him, so he pushed the door open and went in.
It was a bedroom, and the family had all taken shelter in there, huddled on the floor and behind the bed. The father, a small, clean-shaven man, looked up at the gunmen in green, his eyes wide and frightened as he tried to shelter his wife and kids. Dark eyes peered up from behind him, as Hank and Bronsted raised their muzzles toward the ceiling.
“Bad guys?” Hank honestly didn’t know whether he could expect a poor Filipino in Puerto Princesa to speak English, or just Spanish and Tagalog. But whether the man understood the English words or not, he understood the question. He pointed to the east, as another burst of gunfire crackled and thundered somewhere to the north. Some of that sounded like 5.56 fire. Viper’s boys were getting some.
Hank nodded and thanked the man. “Gracias.” Then he and Bronsted turned toward the door, he called out, “Coming out,” and they flowed back into the main room as Hank made eye contact with Lovell, by the door.
Michaels and Carrington were coming out of the kitchen. From the looks of things, Lovell and one of the Rodriguez brothers had already cleared the other bedroom. They turned back to the door.
“Homeowner says there are bad guys east. Might be the next house, might be at the end of the block.” Hank kept his voice low and even, then nodded to Keith, who was holding on the door.
They moved out. Two down. A lot to go.
A renewed burst of gunfire sounded to the north and east. Hank knew a sustained firefight when he heard one, and so did everyone else. Navarro’s squad was already clearing the multi-unit, salmon-colored bungalow next door, so Hank and Lovell’s squad bounded past, then continued past the next metal-roofed house when they saw that LaForce’s squad was making entry.
That left a choice. A choice that was made easy as a long, stuttering burst of machinegun fire roared from the bigger house to the left. Hank thought it was a PKM, but there was something subtly different about the sound.
Still, whatever it was, going into a house with a belt fed inside was never a comfortable course of action. But it was the mission.
“Marco, Juan, get on that corner and cover us to the south.” Hank pointed at the right-hand house. “Everyone else, on me.” He keyed his radio as he held on the corner of the last house for a moment. There was a lot less concealment around those houses than it had looked like on the overheads. The trees formed a nearly impenetrable canopy, but the ground underneath was cleared, leaving open space for a gazebo, porches, and several tents that people had parked trucks under. “Viper, Tango India Six Four. We are moving on the large, brown and tan target house at the edge of the airport grounds. Tangos inside appear to be engaging police on the airport grounds.”
“Copy, Six Four. We will instruct the police to shift fire.” A moment later, one side of the firefight started to die down, only for the belt fed inside to pick up its fire.
“On me,” Hank repeated, and then he was sprinting for the house.
Just before he reached the door, he momentarily wished that he’d brought some flashbangs, or really any kind of concussion charge. But he hadn’t, so speed was going to have to be security.
With Carrington, Lovell, Brule, and Michaels on his heels, he dashed across the gap, under the covered veranda, and hit the door running.
It had been left open, after apparently having been kicked in. The door itself swung on its hinges and the doorjamb was splintered. The man of the house lay just inside the door, on his back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, his white shirt stained red while more blood ran out onto the floor underneath him in a spreading crimson pool. A faint whimper came from the room off to the right, suggesting that the kids, at least, were alive.
Hank went right, Carrington went left, and then the squad, minus the Rodriguez brothers, was flooding the house.
With the entryway cleared, Hank moved up to the first bedroom door, where the whimpering was coming from, even as blasts of gunfire came from the far side of the house. The entryway seemed to open on two enclosed rooms to the left, one to the right, and a large, L-shaped living room in the back.
A suppressed M5 hammered behind him as he went through the door, spotting the huddle of woman and kids on the bed, pausing a half a heartbeat to make sure none of them had a weapon, then sweeping through to clear the corner before sweeping back. No one else in the room. Just the civvies. Three kids, two still crying, the oldest now dry-eyed but with that thousand-yard-stare that would never really go away. The mother looking even more shell-shocked than the kids. But the NPA hadn’t left anyone to watch them.
Amateurs.
Still, Hank put a finger up to his lips and motioned for the mother to get down on the floor. Things were already getting loud, and he didn’t expect that the walls were going to stop bullets, especially not if that asshole with the PKM, or whatever it was, decided to clear the house by fire.
Then he and Michaels were moving out, hooking toward the main room.
He’d gotten one step out into the hall when Lovell grabbed him and dragged him onto the floor. At the same moment, bullets tore through the plaster overhead, tracking devastation across the wall. There were green tracers in that long burst, too. Some weirdly detached part of his mind observed the flashes of green light as they punched through the white plaster, scattering bits of debris over them.
Someone hadn’t moved fast enough. He heard a grunt and a thud, but he couldn’t afford to look back. If they didn’t do something about that belt fed, everyone in that house was going to be a corpse in seconds.
Shoving Lovell off him, Hank pivoted on the hardwood floor, put his boots against the wall, and shoved himself across the hallway. Unfortunately, there was carpet about halfway across, and he bound up, but not before he got a shot at the machinegunner.
The man wasn’t exactly aiming, but was holding onto the carrying handle off to one side while he fired the machinegun from the hip. He had to lean back quite a distance to handle the weight, and the recoil was steadily driving him backwards, the muzzle climbing toward the ceiling.
He couldn’t bring the muzzle back toward Hank fast enough, even if he’d seen the man in green pop out in a side prone on the floor, his rifle already in his shoulder, searching for the red dot to put it on the terrorist’s chest.
Two whacks silenced the machinegun,
and the young man in the black shirt, wearing a dark green patrol cap and an old-school Y-harness, crashed onto his back, his eyes already going glassy as the last breath from his destroyed lungs rattled from his throat. The first round had torn his heart in half. He was already dead before he hit the floor.
Hank started to get to his feet, but Bronsted and Keith charged past him, guns up and barking. A moment later, as Hank finally got up, Keith barked, “Clear!”
Then a renewed storm of gunfire hit the back of the house. Coming from the airport.
Bronsted took a round to the face and dropped like a rock, blood and brains spattering on the floor as he fell. Keith hit the deck as more broken glass and shattered plaster rained down on him.
Hank was about to get up and return fire when the shooting abruptly stopped. His radio crackled in his ear. “Six Four, Six Four, Viper!”
“This is Six Four.” He was crawling toward Bronsted, but he could tell it was too late. The bullet had gone in just underneath his helmet, just at the top of his ear, and come out the other side in almost the same spot. He was still shaking and twitching, but Hank knew death spasms when he saw them.
“Are you all right? Some of the putanginang police thought they saw movement, so they opened fire again.” Viper was breathing hard into the mic, but the raw fury in his voice was palpable.
“They got one of us.” Hank got up carefully, unable to keep the bitterness out of his own transmission. “House is clear.”
Viper didn’t respond immediately. Maybe he was cussing and just didn’t want to put it on the air. That Tagalog swear word had already been a break in radio protocol.
“This is Seven Two. Second strongpoint is clear.” Chan had moved fast, too.
“All Triarii elements, hold your positions.” Viper’s professionalism had reasserted itself. “We will finish the clear of the airport. Medical assistance is inbound from your rear. Don’t shoot them, please.”
“This is Tango Charlie Six,” Vetter broke in. “We won’t. Good hunting, Viper.”
Hank turned then, toward where he’d heard the grunt and the thud. To his relief, Thomas wasn’t dead, but he was hurt bad. Michaels had his plate carrier pulled aside and had cut his shirt open, revealing what looked like a nasty through-and-through just below his ribs. Thomas was shaking, his teeth gritted, as he held a blood-slathered hand to the wound, even as Michaels ripped a chest seal open.
“Move your hand, bro.” Michaels couldn’t quite get the leverage to pry Thomas’s hand away while he was holding the chest seal with one hand, and Thomas was lost enough in his world of pain that he probably hadn’t quite registered what Michaels had said, or what he was trying to do. So, Lovell stepped over, gently pulling Thomas’s hand aside while Michaels wiped as much of the blood away as he could with a piece of gauze and then stuck the chest seal in place over the nearly-matching bullet holes.
Hank moved to the shattered windows, where Brule and Keith were holding security. Bronsted lay where he’d fallen, almost on top of one of the NPA terrorists, who had died with his AK pointed the wrong direction.
The machinegunner lay on his back, half on top of the third man, that one’s M16A2 lying on the floor off to one side. The belt fed gunner had apparently fallen backward onto his comrade, knocking that one’s aim off until Keith and Bronsted could get around the corner and kill him.
It hadn’t been a PKM, Hank saw with some mild bemusement, knowing that his mind was trying to focus on little details rather than face the fact that yet another one of his section was lying dead at his feet. The NPA soldier had been shooting a Chinese Type 67. He wondered if it had come ashore on one of the PAFMM “fishing vessels,” or if it had been part of some earlier cache. He was sure the Chinese hadn’t just recently started to support the NPA. That wasn’t how Communist insurgencies stayed alive.
A sharp whump sounded out by the airport. Hank looked out the window to see smoke rolling from an outbuilding, and Viper’s camouflage-clad killers flowing inside before it began to settle. Several quick, hard reports of gunfire sounded, then silence.
“Hello! Medical!” A small Filipino woman in an EMT uniform was peering into the front door with some trepidation. Two bigger forms in green loomed behind her: Vetter and another of his section Hank didn’t know.
“Friendlies.” Vetter didn’t raise his voice, but it carried anyway.
“Bring it in.” Hank’s own voice sounded like a croak in his ears.
Vetter looked around at the carnage as he and his other shooter came in. “Rough day. Chan lost one, too. Booby trap.”
“Who?” Hank was a little surprised how calm he was about it. He didn’t even really feel anything about Bronsted, though he knew he probably would later.
And that “later” was going to be a bitch.
“Quinn.” Hank nodded grimly. He hadn’t known Quinn well, but he’d been a good shooter.
Vetter sighed. There was more anger than melancholy in the sound. “Well, we’ve seen the first phase of their response. I doubt it’s going to get any better.” He looked around the room again as the EMTs tried to get Thomas onto a stretcher. “Brace yourselves. Here’s where that whole ‘guerrilla war’ thing really gets nasty.”
Chapter 32
They’d barely gotten back aboard and out to sea again, restocked thanks to Benavides’s logistics network and the funding that was still coming from the States—for now; there were mutterings about the Federal government causing problems again—when the other shoe dropped.
“We lost contact with the Amerlin, the Outcast, and the Clairvoyant last night.” Smythe had left Dunlap at the helm and had just come down to the command center. “Happened all at once, too, no warning, no distress calls.”
Hank nodded. He was dead tired after the firefight in Puerto Princesa, and the after action following. Puerto Princesa hadn’t been the only target. The NPA had struck every town and settlement on the island, it seemed. Most of the attacks had been little more than drive-by shootings or bombings, but the message had been pretty clear to anyone paying attention: the NPA’s Chinese sponsors were not happy with the Philippines.
“We just got the report down here, too.” Chan was still reading, though there wasn’t much detail to be had.
Vetter was still on the radio. “We’re trying to see if we had a long-range drone in the area that might have gotten some footage. But it’s not looking likely.”
“Where were they, exactly?” Hank was looking at the charts. Exact location data hadn’t been included in the reports.
“They were somewhere between Bittern Reef and Pearson Reef, shadowing and harassing some of the shipping bound for Johnson South Reef that got past the Malaysian pirates.” Vetter sounded almost as tired as Hank felt. “They had their transponders off for obvious reasons, so we don’t have exact location information. Especially if they got hit by jammers before they got taken off the board, which seems likely. There would have been something to tell us what was happening, otherwise.”
Hank studied the chart, gauging distance and time. “Even if we floored it, we wouldn’t get out there for almost two days.” It was over three hundred seventy-five nautical miles from where they were motoring out into the Sulu Sea.
“I know. And we can’t afford to floor it, either. That would just be a target indicator if the ChiComs are watching, which I’m almost entirely sure they are at this point.”
Hank rubbed his eyes. Vetter was right. If any ostensibly civilian vessels suddenly went full speed toward the kill zone, that would tell any analyst watching what was happening.
“We may as well paint a bullseye on our decks.” Chan straightened from reading the reports. “So, what do we do?”
“We keep doing what we’ve been doing.” Vetter wasn’t going to let this stampede him. “We’re still getting indicators that more PLAN vessels are moving down into the islands, though the Shandong is still holding off to the north, between the Spratlys and the Paracels. They’re taking security more serio
usly, too, since Hank and Michael wreaked havoc on Gaven Reef. The ships aren’t sailing solo, and they’ve got top cover at all times, be it drones, helicopters, or combat air patrols off the Shandong or one of the artificial island airstrips. So, the job’s getting harder. And we’ve got another limiting factor.
“The USS Lake Erie just passed between Lawak Island and West York Island. She is officially on the board now. And we have to keep well clear of her. The Willy Weasel is shadowing her, and Ben will keep us up to date on her position, course, and speed, but no Triarii vessels are to get within fifty nautical miles of her.”
“Why? Shouldn’t it be a good thing that there’s a US Navy ship in the area?” Smythe looked around the compartment. “We’re all American-flag ships, and we do have a Letter of Marque and Reprisal, don’t we?”
Hank and Chan shared a grim look. “Yes, the Triarii received the first issued Letter of Marque and Reprisal from the US Congress since the Second World War. However, that letter was issued against the European Defense Council, not the People’s Republic of China.” His words hung in the air for a moment.
“What?” Apparently, Smythe hadn’t read all the fine print. “But I read the reports from the West Coast and the Southwest. How could anyone read that and not see that the Chinese had at least as much to do with the attacks as the Euros?”
“Politics and money, Captain Smythe.” Vetter was blunt. “I don’t think you realize just how deep the CCP have their claws in Washington and Wall Street. The EDC presented enough of an open threat, mainly after the attacks in Slovakia, that they couldn’t turn a blind eye. The Chinese were subtle enough—and their on-the-ground forces deniable enough—that they could deflect blame, and there were far too many people in high places who were either eager to make that deflection and avoid more trouble with Beijing, or take the money that would amount to the same thing. So, we’re out here on our own.”