Hard Favored Rage

by Don Shift

  ***

  Charlie Team had staged in a cul-de-sac in an industrial area a mile north of the objectives. None of the drones had reconned this particular area. Huerta selected it because the cul-de-sac was hidden by a railroad right-of-way. The armored vehicles could roll right over the top of the low track base, over a narrow ditch, and across the road. It would take about a minute and a half to arrive at the objective.

  When the vehicles arrived at the cul-de-sac, Huerta realized that there was now a fence separating the street from the railroad. The satellite photos Hidalgo had were old and half-meter commercial resolution, not the four-inch resolution imagery he was used to from genuine spy satellites. Huerta and Sergeant Major Burke got out and examined the fence.

  “Major, it’s just cheap palisade fencing. It’s just bolted into those brackets on the pillars on each side. That footing in the middle is probably attached to a flat piece of concrete with masonry screws.”

  “We don’t have any tools.”

  “We don’t need any, sir. We’ll hook up a tow strap to the front of your vehicle and pull off that section. It’s twenty feet wide. We can just slide right through.”

  “Roger.”

  Two privates grabbed the strap and hooked both ends up. Burke gave the signal to the Stryker driver. The fence gave away as easily as he had predicted, but as the soldiers were lifting and carrying away the bent section, the explosion from Alpha’s door breach echoed across the plain.

  “We’re late. Hustle!” Huerta yelled.

  The men tossed the wreckage down and climbed in the back of their vehicle. Huerta’s Stryker was already leading the charge.

  “Grizzly Two-One, Six Actual. When they’re aboard, follow me,” Huerta ordered.

  “Roger Six.”

  The Stryker, an eight-wheeled behemoth, accelerated heavily, jumped the curb, and charged up the side of the low-grade of the railroad. There were three distinct, violent movements followed by a bounce as the vehicle cleared the grade and the tracks, then came down on the other side. A fourth bounce told Huerta the ditch was larger than expected.

  “Six to Grizzly. Are you across the tracks and are your vehicles okay?”

  He did not want a vehicle high-centered or disabled.

  “Two-One, we’re good.”

  “Three-Two, got hung up for a sec, but we’re over.”

  “Hooah. Follow me into the field, right flank, spacing fifty feet apart.”

  The Strykers charged into the night, the objective appearing in the black-and-white displays of their thermal sights.

  ***

  The men of Bravo heard nearly inaudible cracks from the house at Alpha. The suppressors were doing their job, aided by the thick blanket of humidity. No one stirred inside the trailers. Stackhouse maneuvered around until he had a good shot of the sentry manning the gates. The scent of marijuana and tobacco hung in the still air. The sentry was asleep, leaning back in a lawn chair swaddled in blankets. A lantern glowed weakly besides him. Stackhouse took off his night vision and looked through the optical sight. Without amplified lighting, the sentry was just barely visible.

  The explosives at Alpha detonated. Stackhouse had his finger on the trigger of his rifle and he involuntarily pulled it when the blast startled him. The sentry was shot through the heart.

  “Go!” Tejada yelled.

  A SWAT member ran past him with a battery-operated angle grinder and cut open the first fence, moving on to do the same to the second. Stackhouse’s “tool” man snipped the padlocks on the gates to allow his chalk in.

  A man without pants on burst out of a trailer, swaying with either the effects of alcohol, drugs, sleep, or a combination thereof. By now, everyone had transitioned to pistols because of the closer quarters and the risk of blue-on-blue friendly fire. All of them knew how tragically devastating a 5.56mm round could be to soft armor or in the wrong place. One of Tejada’s men shot the pants-less guy.

  Women began screaming in the trailers. “Sheriff’s Office!” Tejada yelled. “We are here with the Army to rescue you.” He repeated it twice, once in Spanish.

  Two-by-two, the men burst into each trailer, quickly performing a search in closets, bathrooms, and under bunks looking for men. The screaming women were told to get dressed, which took some convincing from Mika and Brooke who followed up behind. Dressed in camouflage and olive drab clothes, neither looked especially feminine. It was difficult persuading the women they were safe. Or almost safe.

  Tejada realized after a few minutes that the Strykers were not advancing. There was commotion in the field from Charlie’s objective. Lots of banging, engines starting, and a few random shots. The sicarios were waking up.

  Huerta should have wasted them by now.

  ***

  Indistinct screams were coming from the harem trailers not far away from the house. Most of the shots there sounded like Stackhouse and Tejada’s SWAT guys. Further away, heavy gunfire echoed from across the field where Delta was hitting the barn and trailers. The hum of the approaching Strykers towards Objective Charlie was drowned out by the sounds of combat.

  With the house destroyed and no prisoners, it was time to re-deploy to help load the liberated women into the school bus to be transported to the hospital. David slipped in the wet grass and caused Sam to trip over him, spilling his precious intelligence that needed to be crammed back in the bag. “Go, go!” Sam yelled to Marco and Auggie. With the intel bagged again, they got up and ran out to the road, only to see that the van had disappeared into the dark.

  “Sam, they left us behind! I can’t believe it.” David grabbed his mic and started swearing into it. The apology from the driver was sincere, if laced with profanity. Washington came on the radio. “Church and Palmer, Alpha Lead. We can’t circle back, get up here, over.”

  “Copy Alpha Lead.”

  “How will you navigate?” David asked.

  “Towards the sound of gunfire,” Sam teased.

  “This is Palmer, I have a compass,” he radioed. “Can someone check the map and give me a bearing to Bravo from the southwest corner of the main house, over.”

  “This is Grizzly Six Actual, standby.” Major Huerta checked his map in his Stryker. “Palmer hold three-five-zero. Declination is one-two degrees. Your objective is two hundred yards north of your position. Be advised, shooting in less than one, over.”

  “Copy.”

  “Six out.”

  “They’re late, Sam said.”

  David dug a compass from his pocket.

  “Clever. Why you’d bring that in the first place?” Sam asked.

  “I was a Boy Scout. Always prepared. You never know when this might come in handy, even at home.”

  “Cool. Now we just have to hump it over a million strawberry furrows and shoot any gomers we come across.”

  Jogging across the field, several bullets flew by. They were not random shots. The delay of the Strykers arrival had given the time for the sicarios to wake up and start deploying into the field.

  “They can see us?!”

  “How?”

  “Thermal gear, FLIR or something. Must have ripped off a fire station.”

  David swore. “We’re sitting ducks then.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  There was a tinkling noise in the darkness, like little pieces of metal rubbing together. For the life of him, Sam couldn’t place the sound, maybe someone with a wallet chain. Why would someone be out hunting an enemy force while wearing a wallet chain? If the cartel guys were intelligent enough to use thermal scopes, they wouldn’t be rattling away like that. There was a faint whine. It was a dog.

  It happened fast. More tingling, louder and faster. There was the soft brush of the overgrown strawberries and weeds against fur. Panting. In the green glow of his goggles, Sam saw a black shape appear from the gloom. He rose up slightly and fired a shot. The dog collapsed a few feet in front of him. Sam heard a shot hit very close and dropped to his belly again. The dog made a sad, high-pitched
noise as the air left its lungs one last time. It must have been shot directly through the heart. At least it died quickly.

  There were hushed voices and feet started to run towards Sam and David. It was time for a gamble. Chances were that the men only had thermal scopes on their rifles, not goggles. It was possible they had a hand-held device, perhaps one stolen from a fire truck, but it was highly unlikely they were running while seeing everything in thermal infrared. At best, one had night vision goggles on and were at parity with Sam and David.

  “Turn off your goggles!” Sam ordered. “Bang out.” He removed a flashbang from his vest pouch, pulled the pin, and tossed it in the direction of the running men. Head down, ears covered, he waited. It seemed like forever for the blast to come. When it did, Sam rose up again, flipped on his goggles, and aimed his rifle towards the loud Spanish cursing. There were two men, one grabbing his face and the other turning in a circle, trying to get his bearings. Both Sam and David fired, killing the men.

  ***

  At Bravo, the women were all frightened. Many seemed to be drifting between fright and indifference. Tejada assumed that many were under the influence of something, whether voluntarily or involuntarily he did not know. Mika and Brooke had done well enough to convince the women to get dressed and outside their trailers. There were twenty-one of them in total, including Rosie, and many of them kept going back in the trailers to hide every time they were marshalled outside to wait to move.

  Sporadic gunfire began from the west.

  “It’s the sicarios!” someone yelled.

  “Is it aimed fire?” Tejada asked. “Are they shooting at us?”

  No one answered, but one SWAT member let off a full magazine into the distance.

  “Stop that! Shoot only at targets you can see or muzzle flashes.”

  Brooke called out for help. “Captain, I need some help getting the women out of the trailers. I need more guys to—to—to herd them together and keep them from running off.”

  Tejada watched as Stackhouse led one scared woman by the arm back to the cluster of her blanket-clad companions.

  “Mika and I will never be able to move all twenty-one of them by ourselves across the field,” Brooke said.

  Thankfully, Alpha had radioed it was done with its task. “We need more bodies up here!” Tejada called into his radio.

  “Coming!” Mr. Sibley replied.

  Neither Stackhouse nor Tejada heard the chatter of Sam and David over the radio. Instead, Bravo was too busy trying to keep the women together and fend off the arriving sicario hordes. At least the confusion and disarray had split the bad guys amongst Alpha, Bravo, and Delta’s attacks. Most of the incoming gunfire was unaimed. A few rounds were going high through the trailers as the tendency at night is to aim and miss high. Mika and Brooke had gotten the women low to the ground.

  Now would be a good time, Huerta, Tejada thought. At that moment, there were multiple loud pops from the Strykers’ guns and the sicario trailers began to explode.

  ***

  Tracers suddenly cut through the fog as explosions echoed through the night. David and Sam face-planted in the dirt and began to crawl. High explosive incendiary rounds and 40mm grenades were blowing the sicarios’ trailers to bits. Red laser beams of machine gun tracers suddenly cut them off. What sounded like a swarm of angry bees passed overhead.

  “We’re in their field of fire!” David said.

  “Grizzly Six, Church. We’re in your line of fire.”

  The machine gun tracers winging by stopped.

  “Church, Grizzly Two-One. Sicarios are in the fields and we are picking them off with machine gun and thermal. Multiple foot mobiles between your position and Bravo. Can you get to cover or to the trailers at Bravo, interrogative? Over.”

  “Not fast, Two-One.”

  Tejada jumped on the radio net. “Grizzly Six, Bravo One Actual. They’re engaging us from the west. Can you pick them off one-by-one with your thermal?”

  “Bravo One Actual, Six, negative. We can’t make precise shots under the conditions at this distance and we’ve got friendlies behind them.”

  Sam keyed the mic. “Six, Bravo One, Church. We’ll draw them off you.” He turned to David. “Hope you’re okay with that.”

  David replied by mag dumping 30 rounds at some dark shapes a hundred feet out. AK-47 fire came back at them en mass.

  Tejada got back on the radio. The women were evacuated from the trailers and both cartel men at Bravo were dead, but they were pinned down by sicario gunfire. A flanking movement was beginning, putting Bravo in serious trouble that Sam and David could do nothing to stop. “Grizzly, we need fire support now!”

  “Dave, forgive me,” Sam said. “Grizzly, Church. We are under cover. Weapons free.”

  “Grizzly Six, roger Church.” A burst of four 30mm shells exploded a hundred feet away. “Head for the ditch!” Sam ordered as .50 caliber tracers zipped past like something out of Star Wars.

  “And then what?” David asked.

  “Emergency rally point.”

  David realized there wasn’t much more to it; belly crawl for one hundred yards, then run down a water filled ditch in the dark and shoot anyone who got in their way. He was having trouble with his rifle. The sheriff’s academy never taught him how to cradle his rifle and crawl through the mud, so he dragged it along with him, fouling the barrel with mud. An AR-15 was far more mud resistant than it got credit for, but mud in a barrel would take any gun down. Several times during their crawl, when David’s rifle got hung up, Sam went too fast and got kicked in the face by his partner’s boots. Neither man noticed when the shooting stopped.

  Eventually, they sprinted low across the dirt road and did a nosedive into the ditch.

  “My rifle is fouled up,” David admitted.

  Sam reached out and took it. There was mud all over it; the muzzle had a clump stuck to it that needed to be knocked off, mud was impacted into the open dust cover against the bolt carrier, and the sight was mud-caked as well. “Well, you finally found a scenario where back-up iron sights are mandatory. I can’t believe how much mud you got on this thing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. Won’t do much good anyhow now.” Even if the lenses of the sight weren’t impossibly dirty, the visibility was so low that point shooting would work just fine. “Just don’t shoot that thing unless it’s an emergency or else it might blow up. Use your pistol.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Ready to move?” Both men were sore and breathing heavily, to make it worse, something burned under Sam’s left arm.

  “I guess.” They set off running, crouched low and splashing through the stale runoff with Sam in the lead this time. Somewhere in the fields they heard a truck engine but kept moving anyway as it could be cartel men trying to escape or hunt them down. The two of them could make the mile run in about ten minutes. Mud went everywhere. This was a run through ankle- and knee-deep muck, not a careful wade. Splashed gunk covered them head to toe. They tripped and fell often, even their goggles becoming mud-coated and useless.

  Halfway, Sam ran headfirst into a steel pipe that crossed the ditch. Being blind, he never saw it. Since his face was parallel to the ground, the crown of his helmet took most of the blow. Worst of all, the empty pipe rang like a bell, echoing across the fields.

  “Partner, are you okay?” David asked.

  Sam picked himself up and sat against the wall of the ditch, laying his rifle in his lap. Wincing from the pain, it took him a few seconds to answer. “I guess. Head hurts, dizzy, seeing stars.” He held both sides of his head.

  David put the involuntary respite to good use. He took off his helmet, filled up his mouth with water from his Camelback hose, and spit the water over his goggles, repeating these three more times until they were functional again.

  An engine revved as the vehicle in the fields lost traction. It stopped and several doors opened and slammed closed. Inaccurate machine gunfire fell in the area missing the truck.
Excited voices were yelling in Spanish. Men splashed down into the ditch. They were very close.

  “Come on Sam, we gotta move.”

  “In a sec.”

  “No dude, now.” David grabbed Sam’s arm and pulled him upright.

  “Trade me guns,” Sam said.

  “Okay, let’s go.” David guided Sam underneath the pipe and led him by the hand down the ditch. Sam didn’t know how long it was until they were shoving aside some sort of shrub.

  “Okay buddy, duck. We’re going underground.”

  They followed a concrete square culvert for about forty feet as it ran under something. It opened up behind an automotive salvage yard. Gunfire boomed in the culvert and bullets narrowly missed them on both sides. Sam needed no help or encouragement to scramble up out of the ditch. David led him through a gap in the chain-link fence and they took cover behind a car.

  “Thermal imaging can’t see through the window glass. We’re safe as long as they don’t flank us or shoot through the car.”

  “Now where?” The rally point was a trucking company yard at the end of the block. The Bearcat was to drive by and pick up anyone who got separated.

  “Get out to the street, then run for the truck yard. We’ll have to cross the businesses on this side of the block and then the ditch again.”

  Sam couldn’t think very well at the moment. “How deep is the ditch?”

  “Not sure. It’s got sloped concrete sides here, I think. If not, we can find a place to climb up. Or just get far enough away from these guys and start screaming for a pickup wherever we are.”

  “Have you heard anything on the radio?”

  “Yeah, they’re gonna be here in like ten minutes. Your earpiece in?”

  “Yeah.” Sam reach for his radio and felt it had separated into three parts. “Radio got hit by a ricochet, I think.”

  “Lucky shot.”

  Sam didn’t feel lucky. When he felt the pain in his arm, he figured he landed on a sprinkler head or tore a muscle. The dull, burning pain was either a bullet or radio fragment that went under his arm outside his armor. No wonder it hurt to lift his arm up. “Tell them to pick us up here. We’ll turn on our strobes and they can shoot anything that isn’t flashing infrared.”