Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3]

by Parker, Brian

  Literally thousands of vantage points from above would keep their movements from being hidden, while snipers had innumerable places to hide. Side streets and alleys could hide entire companies of men to ambush them. A lot of older buildings were completely hidden from street view when newer ones had been built in front of them. They were only accessible through the lobby of the new building or through alleyways. Even worse, those older buildings often held passageways between one another underground, a leftover from the prohibition era and other times of strife. Those passageways could allow a small force to harass them throughout the city without the need to expose themselves as they moved from building-to-building. Urban fighting in New York City was a nightmare scenario and Grady hoped that it didn’t come down to that.

  But he was a realist, borne from decades of experience operating in the world’s shittiest of shitholes. He knew that it would come down to a fight. There were too few resources and too many assholes. He wished the boats hadn’t been abandoned and that they’d stuck with their original plan to take the Hudson all the way up past Manhattan. There was nothing they could do about it now, though. Leaving a third of their men behind wasn’t an option, so here they were, walking their way into an ambush.

  9

  * * *

  PIÑON, NEW MEXICO

  MARCH 4TH

  Clouds obscured any hint of moonlight and the last vestiges of daylight were fading fast in the desert as Sergeant Pollard’s small nine-man team bounded across the sand individually toward the town. The scrub brush and small depressions in the ground that he’d felt were sufficient when he’d taken Valencia and Cooper forward for a sneak peek seemed woefully inadequate to conceal them all now.

  Because the site was actively jamming radio signals, everything had to be done visually, which meant keeping everyone within sight of one another in the poor lighting. They were bunched up and their silhouettes were a machine gunner’s wet dream. Yelling would have gotten the attention of the defenders as sure as waving a giant sign above their heads that said, “Shoot me!”

  Miraculously, the entire team arrived at the edge of town without taking fire. Pollard was shocked that they hadn’t been noticed. The only thing he could figure out was that the town was lit up as bright as daylight and the darkness of the surrounding desert had hidden them. It was a terrible setup that practically invited the infected to swarm the Iranian site.

  As they got closer, Pollard could hear the sound of rhythmic muttering, raising and lowering in intensity in regular intervals. “What is that?” he whispered.

  “Sounds like they’re praying,” Cooper answered softly beside him.

  Sergeant Pollard held up a hand and went to the corner of the building he found himself behind. He took a half-step away from the building to make sure his weapon didn’t scrape against the stucco as he edged around the corner for a peek.

  Between the building and the missile launcher there were about twenty guys in uniform. All of them were on their knees facing the same direction. “Are you kidding me?” he muttered to himself as he ducked back around the corner.

  He waved Jacobson over from the opposite side of the building. When the specialist got there, he said, “They’re praying. About twenty of them. I didn’t see any security, just all of the guys doing their thing.”

  “So, we light ‘em up and blow the missile launcher, right?” Jacobson asked.

  “I think that violates the Geneva Convention or something,” Pollard stated.

  “Fuck that shit. Those fuckos don’t care about it, why should we?”

  Pollard considered it for a moment before answering. “No. We’re not going to kill people who are in the middle of praying, but we’ll take them prisoner.”

  “This is gonna go bad, Will.”

  “Don’t call me that, Brandon. It’s ‘sergeant’ now, and you’ll do what I say. We’re not going to kill people while they’re praying. It’s just not gonna happen, man. But we have an opportunity right now to round them up while they aren’t prepared.”

  Jacobson sneered, but kept his mouth shut. “Okay?” Pollard asked for clarification.

  “Yeah, fine. Let’s get it over with.”

  Pollard laid out his plan quickly to the group, then Jacobson’s team swarmed around one side of the building while he led the second team around the left. They charged across the small space, yelling to the prostrate men to keep their hands away from their weapons.

  The Iranians were confused and began to grab for weapons. Two of the men earned a butt-stroke to the side of the head for their troubles. That quelled any further resistance from the group as three of Sergeant Pollard’s infantrymen waded into them to snatch rifles from the enlisted men and sidearms from the officers. The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes.

  “Jacobson, I need your team to go clear that signal van and then the buildings here,” Pollard whispered harshly.

  “On it, Sergeant,” his friend answered, gesturing to the three people who made up his fire team to follow him.

  Pollard did a quick count and came up with fifteen. They’d captured fifteen of the fuckers in one go. It’d been a massive stroke of luck that they didn’t have to get in a firefight with them because they were outnumbered almost two-to-one. Those odds increased when you factored in that only five of his men, including himself, were infantrymen.

  One of the Iranians began speaking loudly to get his attention. “Do you speak English?” he asked.

  The man stared daggers at him before shaking his head. “I bet you do,” Pollard countered. “A lot of you people do because America is the best nation on the planet.”

  “No longer,” a different man said in heavily accented English. Pollard’s eyes shifted to him as he spoke again, this time in whatever gibberish the Iranians spoke. His words elicited a few chuckles from the men surrounding him.

  “Oh, you think that’s funny?” Will hissed. “It’s awful funny that we caught you with your pants down.”

  A single shot rang out from the direction of the signal van, followed by several others. Pollard jumped in spite of himself and turned to see what was going on. That’s when things went sideways.

  One of the Iranians pulled a grenade from somewhere and tossed it behind Pollard as they all dove to the ground. “Grenade!” he shouted, falling forward. He hoped his guys heard him and followed suit.

  The explosion was massive. His hearing was blown almost instantly as thousands of pellets of sand pelted him mercilessly. The exposed skin on his hands and neck felt as if a cheese grater had been dragged across it. His head swam and he couldn’t focus, but he knew he had to or else he was dead.

  A cloud of dust obscured everything around him as the wind blew the smoke and dirt lazily across the open space in front of the building. Pollard rolled awkwardly, bringing his rifle with him to aim where he thought the captives had been. There was movement in the dust cloud and then a flash of olive drab as an Iranian charged toward him. The man’s face was contorted in rage and his murderous scream sounded to Will like he was underwater listening to someone yell like they’d done as kids at the pool.

  The M-4 bucked slightly in his hands as a maroon spot blossomed on the Iranian’s thigh, one on his stomach, and another on his chest. The man continued to careen wildly beyond Will as he pushed himself to his feet. He staggered drunkenly toward the place where the men had knelt in prayer. He had to stop them from getting to their weapons. If they did…

  The thought stopped as another figure burst from the gloom, bowling into him and knocking him backward. The man’s iron grip fastened around his throat, cutting off the oxygen that he desperately needed. Pollard realized in a panic that he’d dropped his rifle in the scuffle. He struggled to pull the fingers from his neck with one hand while punching repeatedly into his attacker’s rib cage with the other. The blows were rewarded with grunts, but little else.

  His vision started to go dark at the edges and his mind screamed for him to do something else, that the punchi
ng wasn’t working. He brought both hands up, gouging at the Iranian’s eyes. His finger sank deep into a gooey substance that dripped down on him, but the man wouldn’t relent. The end was near for Pollard.

  Another explosion, this one wasn’t as loud, but it was so close that he felt the flash of heat across his face. The Iranian stopped struggling and the man’s dead weight bore down on Will. He pulled the fingers away and gulped air as the body was pushed off of him.

  The slightly smoking flash suppressor of a blurry M-4 materialized above him as he took in more oxygen and the face of Private Valencia, the electronic warfare nerd he’d been saddled with, came into view. “You okay, Sergeant?”

  He gestured weakly at the Iranian with a hole in the side of his head. “Thank you,” he croaked, his vocal cords strained from the struggle.

  “You’d’ve done the same for me.” The private bent over and handed Pollard his weapon. “Here.”

  The battle was over by the time Will had recovered enough to stand. Airman Cooper, the JTAC, had rallied the fire team in Pollard’s absence. The Iranians, unarmed except for that one grenade, had charged into a wall of lead. It had been a bloodbath. Fourteen bodies lay strewn about, including several who appeared to have taken the brunt of the grenade blast when it wasn’t thrown far enough

  Pollard did a quick count of his men. All three were up and miraculously unharmed. He looked back to the mass of bodies and saw one man still alive. He cowered on the ground behind the corpses of two of his comrades. Pollard staggered toward him, his equilibrium still off due to the explosion. He nudged the Iranian with the barrel of his M-4. “Which one are you?” he demanded. “You speak English?”

  The guy looked up at him, shaking his head violently. It wasn’t the officer who’d spoken earlier, that man lay to the side in a muddy puddle of blood-red sand with a gaping wound in his neck.

  “Fuck!” Will exclaimed. “What the fuck, man? That was the dumbest shit ever.” He fished around in his pocket for a moment and came out with a pack of cigarettes. He lit one with a shaky hand. After a deep drag, he continued, “We need to tie this fucker up so he doesn’t do the same damn thing.”

  “Bravo Team coming in hot!” a voice yelled from the direction of the commo van.

  “Stand down!” Will yelled. “They’re all dead.”

  Specialist Jacobson emerged from around the corner of a building, rifle at the ready. “You guys alright?”

  “Yeah,” Pollard answered, then coughed. The cigarette smoke burned the inside of his throat where he’d been strangled. “Fucker pulled a grenade.”

  Jacobson walked up slowly and jutted his chin out. “What about that one. Should we smoke him?”

  “No,” Will grunted in frustration. “We need to tie him up, but my previous order still stands. We’re not going to kill unarmed prisoners.”

  His longtime friend’s eyes went wide and he gestured with his head toward the pile of bodies. “What about these guys?”

  “That was different,” Pollard chuckled. “They attacked, we responded.”

  “Okay… Um, I have some five-fifty cord in my ruck. We can use that.”

  “Yeah. What about the signal van? Is that out of commission?”

  “There were two operators. We got into a firefight when they saw us. They’re dead, but we didn’t do anything with the equipment. Figured Valencia should look at it to make sure we turn it off or something.”

  “Good call. We’ll secure the area, then hit the van and the missiles. If there are any infected in the area, then they’ll be on their way after that grenade explosion.” He turned away from Jacobson to address the squad. “Okay, we need to check the buildings in this town, make sure there aren’t any more Iranians hiding out. And we need to figure out what happened to all the town’s people.”

  “We saw a burnt-out building on the far side of the commo van. You can’t see it from here. If we don’t find anybody alive, I bet they put them in there and burned it down.”

  “Okay. Take your team and check it out. We’ve got this guy. Make it quick, though. If there are any infected in the area, they’ll be making a beeline for our location.”

  “Roger, Sergeant,” Jacobson said, pointing to his three guys.

  “Cooper,” Will said as he watched the team move quickly toward the commo van that blocked the view of the church.

  “Yes, Sergeant?” the airman asked.

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  “You watch our friend here,” Pollard directed. “We’ll see about tying him up as soon as we can, but we need to make sure he doesn’t have any buddies hiding out somewhere.”

  “Got it.”

  Pollard led his remaining two guys through the two small buildings flanking the missile site. Besides the sleeping area where several sleeping bags, blankets, and pillows were piled up, they found a few books written in what he could only assume was Persian and a couple of radios. It wasn’t much, but that was all the intelligence items they saw. No laptops, no cellular phones, nothing.

  “That’s weird,” Valencia muttered in response to the lack of communications devices.

  “Right?” he replied. “How were they supposed to communicate over really long distances?”

  “I mean, they could use a retrans site, but that could only be, like, five-to-ten miles away at most,” the squad’s communications expert stated.

  Pollard nodded. A retransmission site would be placed near the end of the Iranian radios’ max range, passing the signal through their own radios on to the next site, and so on until it finally reached the desired recipient. He didn’t know how many retrans sites could be strung together without loss of signal clarity, but it probably wasn’t more than two or three.

  “So, these guys’ headquarters element is probably only fifteen or twenty miles away at most. Maybe closer. Is that what you’re telling me, Private Valencia?”

  “Roger, Sergeant.”

  “We need to blow that van and the missiles, then get the fuck out of here.”

  “That’s probably the best move,” the private agreed.

  Pollard regarded him for a second before saying, “No shit. That’s why I just said it, dickhole.”

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” he replied, ducking his head.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Pollard called out to the next room where his other two guys were poking through the sleeping area for intel. “We need to get the fuck out of here and back into the desert before more of these dudes show up.”

  Jacobson was already back by the time they emerged into the light. “Found a bunch of bodies in the church,” he confirmed.

  Pollard nodded tersely. “Fine. We need to exfil this site. They didn’t have any long-range radio equipment inside, which means—”

  “They’re in contact with a supporting element not far away,” Jacobson answered.

  “Yup. You guys blow that jammer van, we’ll take care of the missiles. I want no more than a five-minute timer and everyone moving into the desert before this turns into a party.”

  “Which one do you want me to wire first, Sergeant?” Specialist Tate, the engineer with the explosives asked.

  “The van,” Pollard answered immediately. That was their primary mission. “But give me a brick and I’ll get it set up on the missiles. All you’ve gotta do is attach the timer and the fuse.”

  “Got it,” Tate answered, dropping his rucksack and pulling out a plastic-wrapped block of C-4 explosive. He tossed it to Pollard and then ran toward the van.

  Four minutes later, the squad was jogging into the desert with their prisoner in tow. Three minutes after that, the first of the explosives blew, lighting up the early evening sky and finally providing the illumination they’d been missing.

  10

  * * *

  NEAR LIBERAL, KANSAS

  MARCH 5TH

  “Oh, thank God. He’s coming to!”

  Vern’s eyes fluttered as Sidney rushed into the room from where she’d been watching out
the window for more troops. Katie turned to her with tears in her eyes. “He’s awake.”

  “Good morning, Vern. Have a nice nap?”

  “No. I died,” he replied, bewildered. “I felt myself die. I was going Home. Now I wake up back in this place.”

  “They ransacked your farm a few weeks ago, Vern. There’s no going back home.”

  “No, girl,” he said, then coughed and held his right arm awkwardly against his chest. “I meant home to Heaven, to be with my Sarah.”

  “Not yet, you crazy old coot,” Sidney reproached. “There’s still a lot of work to do here on Earth.”

  “What happened?” Vern asked.

  “We think you had a heart attack, Grandpa,” Katie said. “You got that trapdoor open and then collapsed.” Her hand covered her mouth and then slid upward to cover her eyes as she slid her fingers into her hair. “You were so pale…”

  Vern reached out weakly for his granddaughter. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.” He searched the room quickly. “Where’s Sally?”

  “She’s safe,” Sidney assured him. “We’re all safe, for now.”

  “What about them Iranians? They know we’re here.” Vern gestured toward the windows. “What’s to stop them from just coming back?”

  “We loaded up the bodies into their trucks and then Sally and I drove them about six or seven miles away. We even dropped the grenades on the engines like you taught us, so they can’t reuse the vehicles.”

  “Good job. That might buy us a couple of days—how long’s it been?”

  “It was yesterday,” Katie replied, grasping the old man’s hand in her own. “You’ve been asleep since yesterday.”