by Peter Nealen
Or, it had been in a cache of old military weapons that had been slated for DRMO, and had instead been diverted and buried for later.
“Spit it out.” He settled back against the sandbags.
“It’s just…’Donald Duck’ seems really random for a password.” Costa was still fairly hesitant. “Wouldn’t ‘Rio Grande’ or something work better down here?”
“And if you were one of the bad guys, how easy would it be to finish ‘Rio?’” Hank asked.
“Oh.” Costa sounded a little downcast, though Hank suspected that his tone was mainly because he’d just realized that he’d asked a dumb question.
“Yeah.” He shifted his position slightly; his knee was already starting to ache, having his boot up against one of the ammo cans. “’Donald Duck’ is even probably too easy, but the key is, it has to be something that the enemy isn’t going to easily guess, or easily pronounce.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” Costa still sounded a bit chagrined.
“That’s why we’re here,” Hank said. “Training and experience count for a lot.”
He was about to ask them to walk him through the turnover they’d gotten with the two-man team they’d relieved, but his radio squawked in his ear.
“Actual, this is Five.” He frowned. That sounded like gunfire in the background. “Be advised, we are taking effective small arms fire from the hills to the west. At least one belt-fed; we’re getting pinned down here.”
Hank didn’t hesitate. “Actual copies all. We’re on the way. Break, break. First Squad, this is Actual. Rally on the vehicles, time now.”
He turned to scramble out of the dugout, but paused to clap Peterkin on the shoulder. “You boys keep your eyes peeled. We could be in for a long night.” Then he hauled himself up, out from under the camouflage netting, heaving himself to his feet. Huntsman was still crouched on a knee outside, his head up, scanning the river through his old PVS-14s, his rifle resting on his raised thigh.
“Let’s go.” Hank didn’t pause, but started toward the road, stretching his legs out with each stride. Don’t run. Never run, until you have to. He knew that his boys, after everything they’d been through in Phoenix and San Diego, wouldn’t be bothered, but they had the locals to think about now. And seeing one of the Triarii running, as the distant echoes of gunfire rolled across the desert from ten miles away, might just start some of them panicking.
Huntsman kept up. The man was built like a fireplug, but he he’d always had the endurance of a much leaner man.
The two of them had been making the rounds on foot. Lajitas wasn’t that big, and they needed to save the fuel and the wear and tear on the vehicles for emergencies. Like this one.
They walked fast out of Estevez’s driveway, back onto the road, and headed up toward the hotel at a good clip. The sounds of gunfire were still distant, attenuated by the distance and the rocky hills between Lajitas and Terlingua, but it didn’t sound like anything was slowing down.
It took a few minutes to cover the distance. Most of the rest of the squad was already on the vehicles and getting ready to move when they got there.
“Ettiene!” Hank’s voice cracked across the courtyard. “Two minutes!”
“We’ll be ready in thirty seconds!” Ettiene LaForce could almost have been Huntsman’s twin, except that where Huntsman was a ginger, LaForce was dark, blunt-featured, and sported a thick, bristling handlebar mustache. LaForce had been a squad leader, back when the section had been at full strength. Now that they were down to what amounted to two thirteen-man squads, LaForce had become Hank’s right hand in First Squad.
They’d had to do a lot of restructuring after San Diego. Some still weren’t too happy about it.
“Mount up!” Hank suited actions to words as he clambered into the right seat in the old, beat-up F350 that had become his command vehicle. Bishop was already in the bed with a Mk 48, clamped into the removable gun mount that they’d jury-rigged in Tomas Zinni’s shop, up the road.
He pulled the door shut and his hand went to the PTT switch wired into his chest rig. It had two buttons: one for the section net, one for the militia net. “Mike Actual, Tango India Actual.” Getting the locals to use callsigns over the radio had been another uphill battle, won when he’d pointed out what the cartels could do with last names if they ever managed to listen in.
“This is Mike Actual.” Will Grant’s drawl still sounded faintly lackadaisical over the radio, even with the gunfire sounding off to the north.
“Tango India Two is under fire; we are moving north to support them. Mike security will be on their own while we’re gone.” Hank had developed a fair bit of trust in Grant’s capabilities over the last few weeks; the man might sound like he didn’t give a damn, but he was conscientious, hard-working, and had grasped the basics of light infantry tactics faster than some of the militiamen who had prided themselves on being Afghanistan, Syria, or Kosovo vets.
“Roger that.” Grant didn’t sound particularly disturbed. “You need any of us to go along?”
“Negative.” Hank had always planned on keeping his squads as the primary react forces. His boys had a lot more training and experience than the militiamen. “Just make sure your boys are staying alert; this might not be the only attack tonight.”
He almost didn’t hear the footsteps running up to the side of the cab until a head loomed in his window.
“Hank! Take me with you!” The speaker was short and skinny, his hair longish, his voice still relatively high-pitched. “I can fight!”
“No.” Hank stared at the boy. “I told you already, Arturo. You want to help, you stay up in your eagle’s nest and watch and report.”
“But…”
“The answer is no. Now get clear; we’re rolling.” He pointed forward, and Reisinger stepped on the gas, starting the truck toward the road. Arturo jumped back, standing at the side of the parking lot, his hands down by his side, dejected.
The three vehicles, two pickups and an old but well-maintained surplus HMMWV, roared out onto Highway 170, heading northeast toward Terlingua.
“Sooner or later, the kid’s going to need to get his feet wet, Hank.” Reisinger didn’t often voice his opinion on how Hank ran the section, but he’d been increasingly thoughtful since San Diego. A lot of them had been; the events of the last few months had a way of making a man think about what’s to come.
“He’s fourteen.” While he recognized that Reisinger was being more thoughtful about things, he wasn’t in the mood to discuss this. Particularly not on their way to a firefight, at almost nine o’clock at night.
“Lots of fourteen-year-old boys had to grow up and be men back in the day.” Reisinger was concentrating on the road while he talked, which was good. The PVS-14s weren’t great for depth perception, and driving while blacked out and wearing them was tricky.
“That was back in the day. And he hasn’t got the training. Like I told him, if he wants to help out, he needs to stay out of trouble and keep an eye out.” Hank kept his voice even, though he was starting to get angry about it.
Arturo had showed up in town shortly before the Triarii. His parents had been green-card holders working one of the ranches up north, but had fallen afoul of one or another of the cartels that were trying to establish routes across the ranch itself. Both were dead. Arturo had run away and ended up in Lajitas.
Once the Triarii had showed up and started organizing the local militia to defend the village and the river crossing, Arturo had started following Hank around. Hank had given him a job as a lookout, mainly to keep him out of his hair. But he’d also noticed that the kid was skin and bones and seemed to sleep wherever he could find some shelter for the night. So, he’d grudgingly taken it upon himself to make sure that Arturo got some food, water, and always had a place to sleep.
He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but he’d be damned if he’d let the kid become another bullet sponge—which was exactly what he’d be if he tried to fight without a lot more training t
han he had.
Reisinger subsided. He might have a point, but he knew better than to argue with his Section Leader while they were en route to a fight.
The three vehicles raced up the highway, the black bulk of the hills falling away as the road threaded through the flatter, tortuous terrain of the desert.
Hank scanned the desert as they went around the curve and headed toward the tiny airport that served the Lajitas resort. He was pretty sure that the golfers weren’t the only ones who used it—and anyone there right at the moment was probably not a tourist.
But the airport was dark and still as the patrol sped past. Wherever the bad guys had come from, it wasn’t from there.
Hank kept his eyes peeled, staring hard through his NVGs as he scanned the road and the surrounding desert, tensing up a little as they plunged into a curve partially occluded by a cut through a low, rocky hill.
He saw movement ahead, just before a brilliant, flickering muzzle flash erupted just around the side of the hill, tracers reaching toward the windshield.
Chapter 2
The fact that the Triarii trucks were running blacked out probably saved their lives.
Most of the stream of fire went high, bullets cracking over Bishop’s head, though a few smacked into the hood, front fender, and frame with earsplitting bangs. Two rounds punched through the windshield, spiderwebbing the glass.
A hammer blow hit Reisinger in the helmet. He almost lost control of the vehicle as his head was smacked partway around, throwing his NVGs off. “Fuck!”
The bellow was the only way Hank knew that his driver was still alive. He’d heard the impact and seen Reisinger’s head jerk under the blow, but unless they dealt with that belt-fed, they were all dead.
Bishop hadn’t waited, but immediately opened fire. The Mk 48 roared for a second, before Reisinger jerked the wheel as he got hit, throwing Bishop’s aim off. Shell casings rattled off the truck’s roof as it swerved hard to the right.
Hank reached out to grab the wheel, more afraid of a rollover than getting shot. But Reisinger was still holding onto the wheel, and rapidly getting control again, though he was still swerving toward the right-hand shoulder. He was clearly not happy. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!”
Reisinger braked hard, just as Bishop opened fire again. The second vehicle, a RAM 2500 with another gun mount in the back, pulled up next to them, as Hank piled out, scrambling into the lower ground and brush at the base of the cut.
He almost bit it as he ran down into the ditch, trying to stay as low as possible. Bishop and Coffee were both laying hate, their machineguns alternating bursts, the muzzle flashes flickering in the dark as they raked the enemy position with streams of fire. The incoming fire had slackened considerably.
Hank, along with most of the rest of his section, had his rifle suppressed. It had taken some still-illegal machine shop work, but after San Diego, he’d been determined to make it happen. He still didn’t have the materials or the know-how to replicate the fancy machinegun suppressors that the Grex Luporum Teams got, but just having the rifles suppressed helped. Especially if they were on NVGs and the bad guys weren’t.
With Bishop and Coffee up on the guns, the drivers couldn’t bail. They did, however, pop the doors just far enough open to brace their rifles and open fire.
As the bulk of the rest of the squad joined him in the brush, Hank looked for their ambushers, but the low ground, the brush, and the curve of the high ground to his right had put them out of sight.
He almost got up to move up the ditch, but he hadn’t survived as long as he had by going “hey-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle.”
Craning his head to look up through his 14s, he gritted his teeth. This was going to suck.
“Faris, stay here with Fernandez, Moffit, and Vega. The rest of you, on me.” Slinging his rifle on his back and cinching the sling down, he started to scramble up the steep slope of the cut.
The first part of the slope wasn’t bad. But it got steadily steeper toward the top, to the point that he was almost on his belly while still standing up. The loose dirt and rocks tried to slip and slide out from under his boots, and defied his efforts to crawl up with his gloved hands. The others were having almost as rough a time.
Every time he reached higher, the loose earth slipped a little more. He was panting and sweating already by the time he finally got a hand on the flats, and even then, he could feel himself slipping off. He lunged forward, scrabbling for something, anything, he could use to drag himself up off the slope.
His fingers grabbed a rock, and he clamped down on it, pulling himself up. The rock started to move, and he felt his left boot, lower down, start to slide again. He threw himself up and forward, almost managing to hook his knee over the lip of the clifftop. But while he missed, he’d gotten high enough that his chest rig hooked, momentarily holding him in place. He grunted, crawling forward even as the lip of dirt holding him up started to crumble under him.
He low crawled forward, slithering onto the desert floor on top of the tableland on his belly, before rolling onto his side and pulling his rifle around. The others were crawling up onto the flats behind him, LaForce already getting up on a knee.
Hank followed suit, though he stayed as low as he could, raising himself up just high enough to see over the sagebrush and creosote bushes. A small cluster of buildings lay just ahead, a house, barn, and outbuildings. If he was remembering right, that would be the Barrios place.
As the rest of his maneuver element joined him, he started moving forward, staying low, his rifle at the low ready. He hadn’t seen any silhouettes, and the Barrios place was quiet, dark, and still, but it didn’t pay to take chances when you’re on open, flat ground without any appreciable cover for over a hundred yards.
The Triarii spread out, angling toward the Barrios place to form an echelon facing the low ground where the ambushers’ belt fed had been set up. The gunfire below had died down; the bad guys must have fallen back in the teeth of the withering fire Bishop and Coffee had laid down. Hank was still inclined to sweep through the ambush from the flank rather than try to drop back and push through the killzone.
Another gunshot rang out, answered immediately by a pair of nearly-simultaneous ten-round bursts. The echoes rolled across the desert as the Triarii descended the slight rise from the Barrios place toward the next cliff, around the corner from the killzone.
They got lower as they moved forward, until they were crawling the last few yards to the edge of the cliff that bordered the finger they’d climbed. Hank could already see part of the shallow arroyo to the right of the road, where the enemy was hustling away under cover, bent low to avoid the gunners’ notice.
If they had really been fleeing, he might have let them go. But they weren’t.
Whoever had set this up had known what they were about. It was a long way to see on the old PVS-14s, but he could just make out the backup positions they’d dug in another couple hundred yards down the road. The initial ambush had only been the first step.
Getting flat, he angled his M5, finding the offset red dot in his NVGs. It was a hell of a long shot for a red dot, but as long as he could see the targets—and he had the dot dialed way down for just this purpose; it wouldn’t eclipse their silhouettes in its bloom—he had a chance to hit them.
Bracing his elbow to steady the rifle, he let out a breath, his finger tightening on the trigger, the break coming just as his lungs emptied and stayed that way for a split second.
The shot cracked out across the desert, followed shortly by another three as fast as he could re-stabilize the sight. He had a MAWL laser mounted on the rifle’s forearm, but it was getting to the point that he couldn’t be sure the bad guys didn’t have night vision, in which case that laser would just point right back at his position.
To his right and left, a ragged fusillade tore out across the desert, the suppressors deadening what would have been the echoing booms to a ripping series of harsh cracks. Several of the dim figu
res in the distance dropped.
“One-Two, Actual, move up.” He had to take his hand off the rifle, momentarily silencing his own fire, so he could key the radio. “Bad guys are moving to fallback positions about two hundred yards further up the road.”
“Roger.” He couldn’t hear over the suppressed gunfire, but a moment later, he could see the two gun trucks rolling forward on the highway, Bishop and Coffee still leaning into their guns, searching for targets.
Bishop opened fire first, spotting movement. His Mk 48 roared in the night, hammering the lip of the arroyo. Though the bad guys were small, dark, indistinct shapes in the dim, green-tinted image in front of Hank’s eye, he could see two more drop. The rest were hunkering down.
He scrambled up onto his feet. “Flank right.” The rest of his element ceased fire and started to follow suit, as he headed around the top of the high ground, following the contours of the tableland, falling back to put most of the slight rise at the crest between him and the bad guys. He shuffled his feet slightly as he went; it was too late and too cold for rattlesnakes, but he really didn’t want to get stung by a scorpion in the dark in the middle of a firefight.
The rest of the element fell in behind him, in more or less a ranger file. He kept looking over his shoulder at the Barrios place, just in case. It would be too easy to get overly focused on the bad guys down in the arroyo and lose track of their surroundings. It didn’t appear that the enemy had any flankers out, but they’d planned ahead enough to have an ambush waiting for the convoy after they’d hit the squad at Terlingua.
These guys ain’t amateurs. They’re dangerous.
He could still hear alternating bursts of gunfire. With the initial contact shock over, both Bishop and Coffee had gotten a lot more cautious; their bursts were shorter and farther apart. They were only shooting when they had targets, keeping the bad guys pinned in their holes.
They only had so much ammo in Lajitas, and resupply could only be expected about once a month.