Peter got a fresh magazine and resumed firing, his bowels threatening to open up, his teeth gritted tight until he heard Irene’s voice. “One up,” she said, deep pain coloring her voice. At least she was able to speak, and she hadn’t given a signal that her buddy was out.
“Good to go,” Peter called back, letting her know side number two of the house was still covered. The invaders were still gaining ground, though.
From the front of the house, there were two loud and very sharp bursts in rapid succession.
“Should we follow suit?” Bill asked.
“Not yet,” Peter said. Each of the bunkers had a knife switch in a small waterproof box. They were part of the innermost defensive measures for the property. Homebrewed claymore mines were set in front of each bunker, each with a concrete bolster behind it. They could be detonated from the little box in the bunker, or remotely from a bank inside the house. “They’re too scattered in front of us, not enough in the kill zone for us to risk ourselves.”
Bill fired off one round and dropped another empty clip. “Got it.”
Peter kept targeting muzzle flashes until it was time for him to reload. As he was pulling out a fresh magazine, one of the invaders had taken advantage of the pause from the right side of the bunker to make a run for it. Peter heard the footsteps but was helpless to do anything but shout a warning to Bill while trying to not rush himself and end up fumbling something. A man climbed right up the face of the bunker and aimed into it.
Seizing on a very slim opening, Peter grasped his magazine as tight as he could and hooked his right arm, sweeping the man’s leg. It disrupted the guy just enough that when he hit the trigger, the burst of full-automatic fire sent bullets spraying wildly as he fell. Bill, who had been directly in the man’s sights, wasn’t killed, but Peter heard the unmistakable smack of a round finding flesh. Bill yelped and clutched at his leg.
Peter followed up his initial attack on the invader by hauling him over the bunker wall and slamming his fist hard into the man’s face. He dropped his magazine and was reaching for his knife when he heard Larry shout, “Peter! Claymore!”
His body reacted faster than he could think. He instantly threw himself over Bill, curled up, and put his hands over his ears. A massive thud of pressure hit him, both from the air to his right and the ground beneath him. It was enough to almost knock his breath out. In the aftermath, he noticed the enemy next to him rolling to the side. Not knowing where his rifle or the magazine he’d been about to load into it had gone, Peter pulled the bayonet from its scabbard on his belt and buried it into the chest of the stunned man beside him.
“Can you move?” Peter asked Bill, as he desperately scrabbled about for his weapon. He found it and just pulled a fresh magazine from a pouch instead of wasting any more time looking for the one he’d dropped.
“Leg,” Bill said. “I can fight, but I’m not going anywhere.”
Peter assessed the state of the bunker. The concrete bolster had mostly done its job, directing the blast outward. The wall had been shortened by several inches, but it still provided decent cover.
“Good to go,” he yelled. It wasn’t completely accurate to signal two effective fighters in his position, but it at least let the others know the position was still defensible.
“One up,” Irene said, her voice showing more strain than the last time.
“Lucky thirteen,” Larry called out, relaying a message that the front yard was still being watched by somebody inside the house.
The west face was still unmanned, but nobody seemed to have come in from that way yet. As long as it stayed that way, Peter didn’t see any need to lose hope yet. The thought that two more recruits would be invaluable intruded as he tried to figure out how the enemy was faring. He acknowledged it and filed it for later.
“Need me to dress anything?” he asked Bill.
“Yeah. Let me reload. Right thigh, two hits.”
Peter put some rounds downrange while Bill popped in a fresh clip, then he pulled two field dressings out, feeling around for torn fabric to find where his buddy’s wounds were. There was a lot of blood, but nothing felt like it was spurting or flowing at an alarming rate. Bill kept up a steady pace of fire next to him, Irene and her buddy hadn’t slacked, and there were several cracks from the house.
By the time Peter finished tying off the first dressing, he realized there was a lot less noise than when he’d started. “Think they broke off?” he asked.
“That or they’re trying to lull us,” Bill said.
“Keep alert while I hit this second one.” The light from the firebombs, which had been helpful while he worked on the first wound, faded and died. When several minutes passed after the last of the flames flickered to nothing, the four defenders in the yard dared to pull back to the house to regroup.
20
Hank Carter looked at his crude, hand-drawn map. It had been traced from the original map that he and Prange had used when they’d made their first trip out to Bowman, overlaid with his notes on where he knew, or suspected, armed groups were claiming turf.
The newest addition to it was an indistinct rectangle drawn on a road that ran parallel to the highway between Bowman and Black River Falls. It fit the description of the little prepper pad he’d heard about from Jerry Grossman and his friend Rocky—north of the highway up on the ridgeline, not far from the intersection with another road that ran north to a series of summer homes and hunting cabins, including Jerry’s property.
A two-man scouting party had finally gotten sight of it the day before, and he’d sent a third of his crew out to rattle their cages overnight. From the temporary camp he’d set up, he had heard the sounds of distant gunfire and a few small explosions. It hadn’t been a long fight, but it sounded like it had been fierce. He was just waiting to see how things had gone.
“This real Army shit really sucks,” one of his men said, spooning instant coffee into a canteen. The men were still wearing their camouflage uniforms, but more for the concealment in the woods than to give the impression they were soldiers. Carter’s plan was now far enough along that they were no longer operating under any pretenses for anybody they encountered. He figured word about what had gone down in Bowman had spread enough that any people he came across outside of town, whether they’d be welcoming to government troops or not, were going to just light him up first, check to see if he was legit later.
“Just do your job and keep from getting killed today, and tomorrow night you’ll be sleeping in a real bed,” Carter said.
“Preferably with something young, pretty, and utterly terrified,” his man said. A couple other guys responded with slimy leers and some commentary that made him uncomfortable. He wasn’t really surprised by their behavior. He’d recruited heavily from the least savory men the cartel had, the ones that he knew would do what had to be done to help him keep his promise to scrub Bowman right off the map. He was a little taken aback at just how much their intentions for the town’s women disturbed him.
He knew he couldn’t show any weakness or hesitation with the kinds of men he had with him, so instead of silencing them, he found an excuse to take care of some business outside of earshot.
According to his map, there was a track running up a hillside south of town that looked like it might provide a great vantage point on the place. It was supposedly called Barker Road, but that knowledge was less than useless, with all of the street signs having been pulled up. From where he was, he could see what appeared to be the right hill with his binoculars. Unfortunately, he had no idea of exactly what lay between his camp and that hill. His task for the day was to find out, ideally without being found out himself.
“Hey. Incoming,” somebody said.
Carter looked up and saw a small knot of his men coming through a clearing toward him. A quick count yielded a very disappointing number of people returning.
“Well?” he asked.
The leader of the raid dropped his rifle and a backpack on the ground,
shaking his head. “They’re tight. Talk in code, full blackout at night, traps and alarms, work well together. Got some IEDs, too. Took out some of us with those.”
“How many did you lose?” Carter asked.
“Four. This distraction of yours had better work.”
Carter knew his man wasn’t upset about the loss of his men, but about the arithmetic. The guy was emotionless and distant, unconcerned with other people, which made him a useful leader for certain types of work. He could care less about the number of people he’d lost the night before. The loss of trigger pullers before going into a situation where they were outnumbered already was what concerned him. “It’ll work. Mayor’s in tight with those guys you hit last night. He’s going to have his attention up there for the next couple of days. What was your tally?”
“Two wounded, by the sound of it. None of theirs dead on the field when we left, don’t know if they’ve made the night or not.”
“Odds always favor the defender,” Carter said, with a deep sigh. The yokels he was dealing with were turning out to be surprisingly resourceful. “Give me some good news. How’d the toys work out?”
“Great, actually. Threw three, no duds,” his man said.
“Think they’d knock down a house?”
“Oh, yeah. Fuel didn’t scatter too thin and burned a decent while.”
Carter smiled at that. Incendiaries were a good part of his strategy for dealing with Bowman. He knew that the hydrants were working, but there were no fire engines. Any firefighting would have to be done by people hauling hoses by hand, under fire.
The particular devices his men had tested out the night before were made from aluminum water bottles that had been filled with a mixture of gasoline and cooking oil, then sealed off with a bit of bicycle inner tube—valve stem still attached—and slightly pressurized. Crude fins had been attached to them, to make sure they landed on detonators based on repurposed .22 cartridges.
The hope was that once houses started burning down, it would distract people from fighting him to fighting the fires, and mess with people’s morale. The advantage of a dug-in, fortified enemy also relied on them staying dug in. Once their homes started burning, they’d be driven out into the open.
“Can we get a little bit of downtime before we move?” Carter’s man asked. “We ate while we walked, but most of us are running on two or three hours of sleep since yesterday. We’re much more likely to cover ground quietly if we’re not passing out while we walk.”
“Yeah, you’re fine. We’re staying here for the day, so go ahead and get some rest.”
Carter left his overnight raiders and grabbed his recon crew. He showed them all the hill they were going for, and they all shared a few pairs of good binoculars to look over the terrain they’d be covering to get there.
“Don’t see any houses,” one said.
“The way that ribbon of trees twists, probably a stream or something we could follow,” another added.
One of Carter’s guys was the one who’d been making cold coffee in his canteen. “Ready to do some of the interesting real Army shit?” Carter asked.
“The interesting stuff is getting with the bangy bang, not playing sneaky sneak in a creeky creek,” the man said.
“If you want to just sit here with your thumb up your ass, that’s an option, too,” Carter told him.
“Yeah, fine. Let’s get it on, then.”
The next two hours passed in uncomfortable silence. Once they were on the move, trying to go cross-country through completely unknown territory, the ever-present sense of being observed and targeted increased immeasurably. Some of his men had worked the pot farms or cooking ops in the northwoods and were decently proficient at getting through the underbrush quietly. Carter was not one of them, being a born and bred city boy. For as much as he was self-conscious about the noise he was making, one of his men was even worse. Not only did he not have the practice or instinct for getting around in the woods, he was exceptionally clumsy on the uneven ground. More than once, Carter found himself wondering whether to tell him to try and find his way back to camp before he got them killed or to just strangle him.
He finally got his party to a gravel track heading up a hill, and hoped it was the right one. It felt like it took them way longer than he’d hoped, but without any sort of timepiece, he had no way of quantifying that impression. The sun seemed farther along in the sky than he thought he’d want it, but that was the only measurement he could come up with.
The little group took a sit-down off the road to grab some food and a bit of rest before they started the climb. They were a little over halfway up when there was a sudden break in the trees and brush on the downhill side. It looked like the result of a small landslide some years ago, where a big tree had outgrown the soil supporting it and uprooted itself.
“Now, this is what I’m talking about,” Carter said, looking over the whole of Bowman spread out in front of him.
“Damn,” one of his men said. “If we had some RPGs or could build a cannon or something, we could make it rain.”
“They’re definitely taking things seriously,” another said, binoculars already up to his eyes. “Road we took in and out is blocked and they’ve got themselves dug in tight.”
Carter grabbed his own field glasses and checked the three roads going into town. “No way we’re getting a truck in on any of them,” he said. “Riverbanks on the west are way too steep. What do you guys think of the east side? See anywhere we could drive across?”
“Maybe,” one of his guys said. “There’s a blue house kind of on its own just past the burnt-out store. Look a little up from it.”
Carter found the landmark and followed the course of the waterway near it. The town-side bank was cut back and paved over with a concrete apron to make a boat launch.
“Deep enough to put a boat in is too deep for a truck?” one of his men asked.
“Not necessarily,” another said. “Look around there at where bushes and trees start. I think we’re at low water now, and our truck has good clearance. I’ll bet we could get the beast across there.”
Carter spent a good amount of time looking at that spot of river. It looked promising, until he reminded himself that his men had been getting kicked around by people who had built up good defenses. If he and his guys could see the potential river crossing, at least one person down in town would have figured it out, too.
“Nah. These guys are too smart to leave an approach like that unguarded and untrapped. Let’s keep looking.”
21
Tom Grossman was starting the afternoon in his office feeling a tremendous need to be productive. Ever since Father Keller had sentenced Prange to death, Grossman had been going out of his way to find important things to do. The sentence was the right thing for the town and its people, but it still weighed heavily on Grossman that he now had to figure out how to get it done. That task was written in his small pocket notebook that was sitting on a side table. Every time he glanced over, he could see it sitting there, silently demanding his attention.
Instead of dealing with that, he put his eyes on his desk. Most of it was taken up with his map of Bowman and its immediate environment. To the left of the map was a small stack of contracts allowing the town to temporarily annex plots of property beyond its limits. Each contract had been laboriously handwritten by the town’s small corps of scribes that Cathy Berkman kept in the conference room down the hall.
To the right of the map was another small booklet of plat maps for the corner of the county Bowman was in, which laid out the actual boundaries of who owned what. Grossman would have liked to have handed the task of marrying up contracts, plats, and his map all together, but the only person other than himself he trusted to be fastidious enough was Berkman, and he already had her working on so many things already.
Two contracts in, and he felt the work was going along easier than he’d expected. It was providing him with the distraction he needed to put himself into the right
mindset to deal with the small notebook. So, when somebody came rapidly walking down the hall to his office, he sighed and whispered, “It figures…” to himself.
One of the town’s new deputies knocked on his door jamb. “Hey. We need you up on the roof.”
The only decent thing Carter had done for Bowman was set up the roof of the town hall as a sort of fortified command center. He’d set up sandbags around the full perimeter of the roof, set up a few nice sniper nests, and built elevated observation platforms.
As soon as Grossman got up onto the roof, he knew exactly why he’d been called up. Gunfire was audible, directly to the south of town and clearly not a hunting party. Like the battle to retake the town, there was an interplay between some weapons firing single shots, some on full automatic. “There are definitely some M-16s in that fight,” he said, remembering the sound very well from his days in the Army.
“And I hate to say it,” Vic Davis added, “but we know at least one group that’s armed with those.”
“Any chance it’s some of your people that got into a scrap?” Grossman asked. The town had captured over a dozen of the weapons from Prange’s dead and wounded.
“Not likely. I don’t have anybody working across the river over there, and I’ve given them orders to not rock and roll unless absolutely necessary.”
“Well, ‘absolutely necessary’ is going to mean very different things to us up here and somebody down there being shot at,” Grossman said. He walked up to somebody on one of the platforms who had a large pair of binoculars up to his face. “See anything?”
The man with the binocs shook his head. “It’s decently heavy brush over there. I’m not seeing anything.”
As the battle went on, Grossman tried to guess how many weapons might’ve been at play. In addition to the M-16s, there were at least three different types of other rifles, and probably a shotgun as well. He also guessed that the full-auto team had a clear advantage in numbers. Unless the folks with hunting rifles were being extremely disciplined with their fire, they were getting swamped. “I don’t think this is going to take much longer.”
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