by Peter Nealen
Ben didn't get up, but crawled forward. We were close enough that moving upright, even in a crouch, was risking compromise. So we low-crawled toward the fence. Ben stopped after only about two meters, and I shimmied up next to him to hold security while he breached the fence.
It was a chain-link cyclone fence. Climbing it was out of the question; too visible and too noisy. We may as well light everything up right there. The alternative was still risky, but less likely to expose us too early.
I got right up next to Ben, to where we were almost touching. I wanted to flip my NVGs up; my neck was already complaining at being cocked back far enough to peer through them while staying prone. But doing so would cede what little visibility I had. While I got into position, my rifle pointed in the direction the rovers had gone, Ben dug his multi-tool out of his kit and went to work on the fence.
This was the part that had me nervous. If the wire parted too hard, it would shake the whole fence and probably make noise, alerting the guards that there was somebody fucking around on the perimeter. So I was hoping that Ben would be able to get the hole cut, large enough for even Little Bob to get through, without causing too much noise or movement.
He was being careful, slowly clamping the multi-tool's wire cutter down on the strands of the fence, trying not to torque it too much. The first half dozen strands were through without any difficulty. Then the next one broke with an audible snap and the fence rattled. Fuck. Ben froze, and I waited, silent, tense, hardly daring to breathe. I strained my ears for the sound of footsteps, voices, brush hitting gear or weapons, anything that would indicate that the guards had heard it. I didn't dare call either Nick or Derek to ask if they saw any new activity. I had to trust that they would let us know as soon as they saw anything.
Silence. The faint desert breeze whispered through the mesquite, but there was nothing else.
Neither of us moved for another couple of minutes, though it felt far longer than that. Then, with a faint sigh that I could barely hear, Ben got back to work on the fence.
There weren't any more close calls. He got through the rest of the fence wires without much noise or movement, though it was taking longer and longer by the time he got close to the end. I think his wire cutter was getting dull.
Finally, he started carefully easing the half-circle of wire weave away from the fence, taking especial care to avoid snagging the ends of any of the wire strands on the fence as he did so. He rolled onto one side to slowly and gently place the cut section of fence behind him, under a mesquite bush. Then, slowly pulling his rifle up from where he'd laid it on the ground, he started to squirm through the hole.
It was big enough, though just barely. Little Bob was going to have to take some extra time to get through. I waited until Ben was through, clear, and on a low knee on the far side, his rifle trained toward the house and the guards before I started to crawl through.
It was a bitch. After tapping my helmet or NVGs against the wire a couple of times, I stifled a curse and pulled the helmet off, pushing it ahead of me while I wormed through the hole in the wire. Helmets with NVG mounts tend to lend themselves to fighting upright or on a knee; in the prone they cause problems.
It was a slow, painstaking process to get everyone through the fence and spread out in the last clump of brush before the generally open field leading up to the house. We stayed as silent as possible. Coordination was going to be on Nick and Derek.
“Hillbilly, Hippie,” Derek sent. “I've got the two on the roof.”
“Key-Lock has the porch,” Nick added. “You and your element have the rovers, Hillbilly. Execute on you.” We were the only ones who would be able to tell when we had shots at all four rovers, so that gave us the trigger.
By that time, we were all in the prone and on line, most of us facing the casa except for Little Bob, who was watching the single adobe behind us. We had crept up to the very edge of the brush, giving everyone a clear view of the field, the house, and its bordering trees.
The house was a one-story, T-shaped affair, with trees planted in a box around it. Right away, I could see two of the rovers, presumably the same two who had passed by us just before Ben cut the fence, walking toward us along the entrance road. The other two were down at the far end, loitering by the corner of the house.
Decision time. If we engaged right away, we could get all four. Assuming we hit both of the two at the corner before they ducked around it. I didn't dare talk to coordinate who took which target. Once the first shot went, we'd have to move quickly to clean up anyone who didn't take a bullet in the first fusillade.
I'd kept my dominant eye closed for the last couple of minutes. It wasn't going to be perfect, but it would help. I had tried peering through the scope with my NVGs, and it was doable, but my shooting position in the prone was terrible. I carefully eased my NVGs up, settled my cheek on my buttstock, and opened my eye.. It was better dark-adjusted than the eye that had been staring through a green-lit tube, anyway. The guards were silhouettes against the hazy lights of Guadalupe in the background. I had to adjust a little to put the red-lit center crosshair on the first one's head. At just over a hundred meters, it was an easy shot. Relatively easy, anyway.
“Five,” I whispered. To my right and left, Ben and Bryan took up the count. “Four. Three. Two.” My trigger broke on, “One.” Across the line, there was a ragged, ripping series of muffled whacks. Everyone was running suppressed, which was part of why Derek was up the hill on a bolt gun. We didn't have a suppressor for that AR.
My target's head snapped to one side as my bullet hit him just below the temple, and he dropped straight down. His companion staggered into the wall, and slid down to the ground. I traversed toward the other two as a series of loud, supersonic cracks went by overhead. “Roof clear,” Derek called.
“Porch clear,” Nick said a moment later. Four rapid, muffled whacks sounded just as I got my crosshair on the last of the rovers, who had started to run for the house as soon as his buddy had fallen. He seemed to trip and fall, his face plowing into the dust. He didn't move after that.
I scrambled to get my feet under me, hearing the noise of the rest of the assault element around me doing the same. Then we were sprinting toward the house and the porch where the two door guards lay slumped against the wall.
I hadn't gotten five strides before the door burst open and another guard stepped through, seeing the corpses on the porch and further out by the road. He yelled and started to raise his rifle.
Now, I've seen video of guys in Delta knocking down targets at a dead run. I'm not that good. Never have been, probably never will be. I slowed my sprint to a glide, leveling my own rifle, praying I could get a shot off before he did...and another shot split the air above me, smashing into him just above his plates. He fell on his ass, then collapsed in the doorway.
Ben beat me to the door, then had to drop flat as a storm of rifle fire ripped out through the doorway. None of us were directly lined up with the door, fortunately, and we spread out from that fatal funnel as fast as we could, most of us skidding up against the adobe wall, trying to avoid windows as much as the door.
We couldn't just frag every room, even if we had enough frags, which we didn't. We needed Ernesto alive. That door was also a non-starter. I backed up from behind Ben, and checked the window closest to me, doing a quick peek at the corner to see if it opened on an empty room or if it was going to be just as exposed to the gunmen who were spraying rounds out the door. The room was dark, and apparently empty. The window frame appeared to be wood, rather than metal, so I smashed it in with my rifle buttstock and clambered through, with Little Bob close behind me.
The room was empty, except for a couple of chairs, a table up against the wall, and an expensive-looking plasma screen TV on the wall. The door was shut, and so far nobody had busted through it, suggesting that they were deafened enough by their suppressive fire through the door that they didn't yet know we were inside.
I went to the door, Little Bob mo
ving with me, as Bryan came through behind us. “Eric and Jim are on the far side of that door,” he hissed. There was a burst of gunfire as somebody started to move into the doorway, indicating that whoever was covering the door hadn't dumped all their ammo, and was just waiting for somebody to try something stupid.
“Then we flank these fuckers and clear the doorway,” I replied, reaching for the door handle. Little Bob was right behind me, ready to follow.
I yanked the door open and charged through, my rifle slipping into my shoulder as I went. I was vaguely aware of Little Bob swinging through the door in the other direction, covering my back, and then Bryan was behind me, his OBR leveled over my shoulder.
That part of the house was a long hallway, with rooms opening on either side. As we came out of the door, there were two more guards coming out of one of the rooms down the hall. Bryan and I opened fire at almost the same time.
They were fast. One of them fired at the same time we did. I felt a savage impact in my front plate that almost knocked the wind out of me. I gasped, but kept following my target to the floor, pumping two more rounds into him before shifting to the second, who had gotten tangled up behind the others and didn't have a shot. I put a bullet through his teeth at the same time Bryan shot him, and he crashed backwards onto the floor.
Some of the shooting from the entry hallway had slacked off as the shooters who were pouring fire through the open door realized there was someone on their flank. At the same time, Little Bob started shooting behind me, cranking shots up the hallway as fast as he could squeeze the trigger. We were not in a good place.
I started driving forward, aiming to clear out the shooters in the entryway, when something bounced off the wall in the entryway ahead of me, then hit the floor and rolled into the hallway in front of me.
I got the full impact of the flashbang when it went off a split second later. The overpressure slapped me in the face, the noise deafened me, and the flash and cloud of smoke was blinding. The center of my field of view turned purple and green, even as the smoke of the detonation filled the hallway.
Jim and Eric came through the doorway shooting, and I barely had the presence of mind to hold back and croak, “Blue, blue!” as they cut down the similarly blinded, disoriented guards in the opposite entryway.
The fire in the opposite direction had died down; whoever had opened the door had decided discretion was the better part of valor when facing Little Bob's withering fire. Bryan was now holding on the door along with Little Bob, as the big man reloaded.
This was not a good situation. There was a single door at the end of the hall, that seemed to open on a large, central room. And that door was open, with, I was sure, every remaining gunman in the place aimed in on it.
I grabbed Little Bob by the shoulder. “You guys hold down this door; we're going to go back outside and use another entrance.” He just nodded, aiming in on the door while moving toward the room we'd come in through. Hanging out in a hallway is never a good idea. As he went, he reached out and grabbed Bryan's kit, pulling him along with him.
Still blinking the fucked up blind spot out of my vision, I led Jim, Eric, and Ben back out the entryway. I was reasonably certain our target was in that big cross of the T. It might not have been the most systematic clear, but we knew there was a threat there, and I wanted to deal with it. Maybe I was getting sucked into a fight, but as long as Bryan and Little Bob held firm in that room, they should be well strongpointed. Hitting the bad guys from another angle was, at the time, the best option I could think of. For sure, charging through that door was a bad idea.
Five more shots cracked down from the hill. “Hillbilly, Key-Lock,” Nick sent, sounding like he'd been trying to call me on the radio for a while. That flashbang had done a number on me. “They're trying to break out to the vehicles.” That made sense. Get the principal out while pinning down the assault force. “I've dropped two and disabled one vic.”
“Don't knock all the vehicles out,” I told him, as the four of us moved quickly but carefully around the corner, weapons up and in the hunt. “We might need 'em.”
Another shot echoed off the hillside. “Might not have that much choice,” he replied. They're trying to push around the east side, where I don't have eyes on.” Well, fuck. We might have been able to push over the bodies and through the far entryway to cut them off there. Too late, now.
We were pieing off the windows as we went by, covering each with at least two rifle muzzles at a time. Jim, who was in the lead, picked up the pace at Nick's update, but we still didn't dare try to push it too fast, lest we get shot in the back from a window.
There was a wide picture window at the center of the T. The room inside was dark, but it was a large great room, with the central door opening onto the hallway. I could see just enough to make out two gunmen, kitted up but without helmets, kneeling against the wall, their boxy, unfamiliar rifles pointed at the door. Jim halted at the edge of the window, crouching down and waiting until I was right on him, at which point we both rose up and opened fire, the suppressed rounds shattering the glass and hammering both of the shooters we could see to the floor. Eric and Ben bounded past us as we fired, sweeping around to cover the rest of the room. Both fired at the same time, though I couldn't see their target. Then they were holding on the far side of the window, Eric still aiming into the room and Ben covering the corner beyond. Jim and I sprinted for the corner.
As we reached it, gunfire exploded from around the side of the house. None of it was aimed at us, but Nick called out on the radio, “They're trying to suppress us, but they still don't have our location picked out. They're hitting about two hundred yards to our right.”
That was still plenty close enough. Time to finish this. I paused just long enough to feel Jim right behind me, and then I was moving around the corner. My head was aching from the flashbang, my vision was still a little screwy, and my ears were ringing, but there was work to be done, so I gritted my teeth and fought through it.
We had really taken a chunk out of Ernesto's security. There were about five of them left, three crouched by the corner of the building, shooting up at where they thought Nick and Jack were, and two more flanking Ernesto, watching the side door. They reacted as we came around the corner, but not fast enough. They were the first to drop, as Ben leaned out and popped the first one while Jim and I went wide, “running the rabbit.” I lined up the second on the move and dumped three rounds into him, tracking up from his plate into his face, as fast as I could squeeze the trigger. He fell onto Ernesto, his rifle clattering to the ground in front of him. I raced forward to kick it out of Ernesto's reach, even as Jim and Ben opened fire on the other three, cutting them down as they tried to turn to face us.
I slung my rifle around to my back and drew my pistol as I grabbed Ernesto by the hair and wrenched his head up. “Hey, Ernesto,” I rasped. “We got off on the wrong foot. Shall we try again?”
Chapter 10
With Ernesto secured, we did a second, more thorough clear of the house, while the overwatch elements held in place and covered the approaches.
We had, in fact, killed the entirety of the security detachment. There had been twenty-two of them; surprise was the only reason we'd managed to pull that off without any of us winding up in the dirt. It still hadn't gone exactly smoothly, as my ringing ears, aching head, and sore ribs attested. I couldn't dwell on the pain, though. There was still work to do.
Little Bob had taken control of Ernesto, with Ben supporting him. They were on the far side of the house from Guadalupe and the road, near the window to the great room. Eric and Bryan held security in the direction of the town, while Jim and I hastily tore the inside of the house apart, looking for anything that might be of intelligence value.
It felt a little weird. We weren't looking for information on some shadowy jihadist with sixteen kunyahs. The target was a known, legitimate businessman, and we'd just killed twenty-two men to get at him. And we were just getting started.
We found several cell phones and a laptop. Jim tore through the laptop, looking for anything useful. “About five hundred gigs of porn, but that's it,” he said, as he straightened up and slapped it closed. “I don't think this was a work computer.”
“This whole place looks like it was a rest area or meeting place more than an ops center,” I said, looking around the great room. There had been a safe that had been unlocked, but all that was in it was a bunch of cash, some gold, and a handful of bearer bonds. No thumb drives, no documents, nothing. There were weapons and ammo aplenty, but no drugs, no sand tables, nothing that looked like it was geared toward the running of a criminal network. It had to have had some kind of significance, though; I doubted that Ernesto necessarily merited a full platoon of security all by himself.
I picked up one of the guards' rifles. I didn't recognize it; it kind of looked like a dark green cross between a G36 and a SCAR. “You seen these rifles before?” I asked Jim.
He studied it. “I think that's an FX-05,” he said. “It's supposed to be the new standard Mexican infantry rifle, but even the Marines haven't completely switched over yet.”
“But these fuckers had 'em,” I commented, stripping out the mag and tossing the rifle on the guard's corpse. “Says something about their connections, doesn't it?”
He nodded, as he rifled through a handful of BluRay cases on the couch. Again, it looked like mostly porn. “One more reason to finish up and get the fuck out of here,” he said. “If they're connected enough to have top-of-the-line infantry weapons ahead of the military...”
“They're connected enough to have a QRF on the way shortly,” I finished for him. “I know.” I glanced out the window at Ben and Little Bob. “Can you finish this up? I need to go have a word with our little buddy.”