by Peter Nealen
When Fernandez, who had clearly heard the radio call, paused and looked back, he pointed to the target building. Continue on mission.
***
The sweep took until almost dawn. They found one desperate gunman holed up in an adobe outbuilding outside the Ocotillo. He’d tried to run for it, opening fire with a MAC-10 on the militia who had closed in on the outbuilding, and had been gunned down in the dirt just outside the door.
Now that Hank’s watch said that sunrise was less than two hours away, his eyes were gritty with fatigue and his very bones seemed to hurt. To make matters worse, the locals were starting to come out of their homes. And they weren’t happy.
“A wrecked truck in the lodge pond, bullet holes everywhere, dead bodies in the street…I thought you were supposed to be here to protect us!” Of course, it had to be Estevez. He was at the head of a knot of the local concerned citizens, gathered in the biggest building on the resort, which currently doubled as a community center. Most of the town, or at least representatives of most of the town, had descended on the place once the shooting had stopped. Hank was alone, except for Grant and a couple other militiamen; the rest of the squad—and their militia counterparts—were out on security. Hank wasn’t confident that they’d seen the last of the interlopers.
“And what the hell did you think we were doing?” Grant had clearly had enough, especially after the last night. He’d lost half a dozen friends in the fighting. Not a bad ratio, when one considered what they’d been up against, but still bad enough, given the size of Lajitas. “If we hadn’t been here, those thugs would have gone right through here like a fucking buzz saw!”
“If they hadn’t been here, and we’d minded our own business, they might have just driven through and left us alone!” Estevez countered, pointing at Hank. “We don’t have anything they want. They sure as hell aren’t interested in the golf course. They’re interested in the big cities.”
“And you don’t think that they might be interested in securing a permanent crossing point?” Grant’s voice was rising. Hank rubbed his eyes. He was going to have to intervene soon.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to. “Let’s everybody settle down a minute.” Cynthia Kelly’s voice was louder than her grandmotherly looks might have suggested. She was, after all, a District Court judge, who’d come down to Lajitas before things had gone pear-shaped, and had stayed once the lights had gone out. South Texas wasn’t the most dangerous place in the country at the moment, but for whatever reason, she hadn’t wanted to risk the trek back to Alpine. Instead, she’d become something of a pillar of the community in Lajitas, while living in the lodge.
“Whether or not they would have left us alone doesn’t matter,” she continued, stepping between Grant and Estevez. “Given the hardware they brought, I’m not convinced they would have. But it’s a moot point. What happened, happened, and we’re going to have to deal with the consequences.”
“If they leave, maybe we can convince them that we don’t want trouble.” One of Estevez’s cronies, a sallow-looking man named Martin, stabbed a finger at Hank as he spoke. Hank just folded his hands on his M5’s buttstock where it hung on its sling in front of his gear—he had taken his helmet off, but that was it—and glared at the man until he subsided a bit.
He couldn’t help but notice Treviño in the crowd behind Estevez. The man wasn’t talking, but he was there, watching Hank like a hawk.
Kelly tilted her head to one side, cocked an eyebrow, and pursed her lips, as if to say, purely by expression, what she thought of Martin’s general intelligence and upbringing. “I know you’re not dumb enough to believe that, Carl Martin,” she retorted. “Since when have the cartels played nice with anybody? And you know as well as I do that it’s only gotten worse down there over the last few years.”
Somewhat to Hank’s surprise, nobody disputed her assertion. Lajitas was, after all, the site of the “Voices from Both Sides” festival, which had featured people openly wading back and forth across the Rio Grande to protest closed borders. Such folks, in Hank’s experience, tended to dismiss the threat of the nastiest irregular war in the world as “xenophobic,” “racist,” or any one of a dozen dismissive buzzwords.
“Don’t forget what they did to the Doogans, either,” Grant snapped. “That was premeditated as hell.”
“You don’t know that!”
Movement at the door caught his eye. Evans was waving at him. He tapped Grant, inclined his head toward the door, and started to circle around the crowd. He got more than a few looks, not all of them friendly, but not all hostile, either.
No one commented on his departure, either. It seemed that even Estevez’s crowd weren’t all that eager to cross the hatchet-faced man with the battle rifle, who’d killed his fair share of sicarios—presuming that was who they were—that night.
He joined Evans. “Is our guest talking?”
“Nah.” Evans was one of Hank’s new guys, but he wasn’t new to the profession. A head shorter than Hank, built like a fireplug, his scarred, craggy face made him look a decade older, even though Hank was pretty sure they were about the same age. A former Army Infantryman, he’d taken to Triarii methods like a duck to water. “He’s scared shitless, but I think he’s more scared of them than he is of us.” He shook his head. “No, I came to get you to tell you that we’ve reestablished contact with the Rangers. McCall’s on the horn.”
“Are they coming?” He didn’t wait around, but started toward the door, Evans falling in behind him.
“Doesn’t sound like it. I think you’d better talk to McCall, but it doesn’t sound good. We weren’t the only ones to get hit last night.
“We might be on our own for a bit.”
Chapter 5
The Triarii headquarters in town consisted of three trailers and several tents, set up in the Maverick Ranch RV Park, up the hill from the cemetery. It was austere, to say the least, but that was something that Hank and the rest had gotten used to.
“Austere” was going to define regular life for a lot of people for the foreseeable future.
Hank trudged up the hill toward the trailers. He could have taken one of the gun trucks, but they were trying to conserve fuel, and he’d always maintained a certain amount of contempt for people who had to drive everywhere, even to go a hundred yards, anyway.
Right then, though, after a night’s worth of fighting and room-clearing, following a full day of training, he wouldn’t have minded so much.
It was a struggle not to drag his feet as he stepped up into the trailer that served as their Section TOC. Not that it was occupied much; there weren’t enough of them to have a TOC watch, and Hank would be damned if he ever sat back in a trailer listening to a radio and making little marks on a map while his boys were out in combat, or even on patrol.
But it was where the radios were kept, along with the big-picture maps, and where a lot of the planning and briefing happened. It was more of a miniature briefing room than a TOC.
Why am I thinking about this crap? Get on the radio, find out if and when the Ranger Border Recon boys are coming back, and then see if you can rack out. The thought of how long it might be before that was possible elicited a wordless, soundless snarl.
He slumped into the chair by the radio. It wasn’t one of the old PRC-150s that the Triarii had used a lot; those hadn’t proved compatible with the Texas Rangers’ equipment. This was a much newer IC-705 ham radio set. He picked up the handset and keyed it.
“Five Two Seven Three, this is Tango India Six Four. Send it.” He’d dealt with Adrian McCall extensively over the last few weeks, enough for some familiarity to form.
“I hear you’ve had some action down that way, Six Four.” McCall was a younger man, but somehow always seemed to be trying to channel Jeff Bridges in his “Texan Old Man” phase, even over the radio.
“That’s putting it mildly. Heavy small arms fire was directed against the squad up in Terlingua, but it was a diversion to get the rest of us out of L
ajitas and into an ambush, while a reinforced platoon or so came across the river here with gun trucks.” Hank didn’t have to try to sound gravelly; fatigue alone was doing that. “There were advance elements already in town, too; one family that joined the militia got slaughtered in their home before things kicked off.”
“Sounds like a familiar song, I’m afraid.” McCall had dropped the Rooster Cogburn impression as he got serious. “I’m sorry to say it, but we won’t have much of any help to send you anytime soon, whether it’s Rangers or State Troopers. Lajitas wasn’t the only trouble spot last night. What’s your situation right now?”
“We’ve secured the town and have gun trucks on overwatch above the crossing.” He wasn’t even trying to pretend that they were in anything but an infantry role at the moment. Any “community security organizing” pretense had been shed pretty quickly, anyway. “We’re expecting them back, though. That was a major push, and more sophisticated than most of the cartel and SdA probes we’ve seen so far.” The Soldados de Aztlan had become one of the biggest and most active enemy organizations along the Mexican border, ranging from California all the way to the Gulf Coast. Hank didn’t think that they were nearly as numerous as they wanted people to think; he suspected that the cells in Texas were a lot like the Islamic State, back in the day. Lots of little groups of disaffected, violent assholes claiming to be a part of the big, bad terror org that everyone was scared of, but not nearly the overarching organization that the likes of Jose Ravela Muñoz or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi had wanted the world to imagine.
The fact that Muñoz was suspected to be a narco trafficker turned revolutionary to save his own hide further suggested that he had a lot of enemies on the south side of the border. Enemies he’d rather stay far away from.
“Well, you boys weren’t alone last night.” McCall was dead serious. “They hit the border crossings at Presidio, Del Rio, and Eagle Pass, too. Hard to say about El Paso; Cuidad Juarez hasn’t been this bad since the oughts, so I think a nuke would have to go off in El Paso before it would rise above the background noise.
“Not only that, but there were several more bombings and a rash of shootings in Marfa, Fort Stockton, Pecos, Laredo, and here in Alpine. Whatever’s going on, it’s coordinated.”
“I didn’t think that it could be anything else, given the hardware they brought across here. Pretty sure we killed a Mexican Army Hummer last night.”
“Sounds about right.” McCall didn’t even sound surprised. “Presidio got rocketed. Like poor man’s Katyushas, or something like that. Last night was a serious push, and now everybody’s freaked. Any reinforcements we’ve got have been diverted to Presidio and Del Rio, and the Sheriff’s staying right here in Alpine, trying to get things sorted. One of his deputies got killed last night, which puts him down to six.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Hank admitted. “They were planning on taking the town, but that’s not all. You don’t roll that heavy to take a flyspeck town like this. They were going to secure the crossing and roll north.”
“You might be right.” McCall sounded apologetic, but Hank could already hear his response coming a mile away. “But there’s nothing and no one to send. With bombs and shootings going off in major cities, we are out of resources. You’re going to have to either hold your own, or cut your losses and come back to Alpine.”
Hank was tired enough that he seriously considered it. Another attack like the night before, and they’d either be wiped out or cut off. Then they’d be wiped out.
But as he laboriously thought it over, forcing his tired mind to process, he knew that doing that meant abandoning the people who weren’t going to leave Lajitas. And while it might not be his home, he understood, and wasn’t sure he could live with himself if he left them to the tender mercies of some very pissed off sicarios who had just had their teeth knocked in, and were looking to restore some wounded machismo.
“We’ll stay.” He wasn’t worried about bringing it to the rest of the section. They all knew. Even Faris, bitch and moan as he might, wouldn’t cut and run when the chips were down.
They’d all learned that about themselves in San Diego.
“Though some explosives would be nice.”
McCall snorted. Since he’d had to key the mic for it to come across, Hank was pretty sure that the Ranger had meant him to hear it, too. “I’m sure they would. But even if I could get the go-ahead, right now there’s no way to get them to you. Everything’s tied up right now, and everyone and their mother is running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
“We’ll make do.” Hank had a few ideas on that, but even then, the number of chemicals useable for explosives in Lajitas were going to be limited. There were cleaning materials in the lodge, the resort, and the Ocotillo, but they probably wouldn’t be enough. They’d have to get old-school.
Which presented a whole different set of problems. Which he was about to have to go deal with before their vicious little buddies came back. “Well, then, we’ll maintain contact until you can get us some relief.” Or we get overrun, whichever comes first.
“Good luck.” It was all McCall could tell him, and he knew that it had to grate on the Ranger, for all his flippancy. Texas Rangers had a reputation to uphold, and leaving matters to an outside organization—never mind just how many of the Triarii were Texans—had to stick in his craw. But their numbers were limited, and there just weren’t enough people in the Big Bend area for that to change anytime soon.
“Thanks. We’ll need it. Tango India Six Four, out.”
***
As much as he desperately wanted to go horizontal and pass out, Hank knew that he couldn’t afford to, at least not until they were better prepared for a follow-on attack. He levered himself painfully to his feet. “One-One, Actual.”
“Send it.” To LaForce’s credit, he still managed to sound somewhat chipper. He was probably the most motivated of the entire section, except maybe Vega, and the harder things got, it seemed, the more intense he became.
“Fifty percent. I want half the squad down in the next five minutes. Have the rest meet up here in ten, once security’s set in on the crossings, and overwatch up on the hills.”
“Roger this.” Hank frowned. LaForce must really be tired; he was laying on the “jaunty” even thicker than usual. “We’ll be up there in ten.”
Hank thought a second, then keyed the mic again. “Make sure that Grant’s doing the same thing for the militia, and then have him join us. We’ve got a lot of work to do in the next few hours.”
He got another acknowledgement, then turned and stepped out of the trailer, squinting at the sunrise for a moment before turning his back on it and starting to trudge up the hill immediately west of the RV park.
It was tougher going than it should have been, but he reminded himself that he’d been up for over twenty-four hours so far, with at least another…six or so to go. If he’d been a younger man, he might have groaned at the thought. He’d gotten past that phase a long time before, though.
Reaching the top, sweating and breathing hard despite the early morning chill, he found the overwatch position set on the next hilltop over and studied it as best he could with his naked eyes. No movement, which could be good or bad. He’d have to check and make sure that the militia had reoccupied it; he was pretty sure that they’d fallen back once the fighting in town had started up.
Something else he’d have to have words with Grant about. They had yet to do a thorough hot wash of the action, but it had become apparent that the militia had consolidated a bit too much, when the defense plan had been designed for more dispersed positions, all with overlapping and interlocking fields of fire.
Don’t matter that much. The whole plan’s about to get revamped.
Turning toward the river, he studied the banks and the golf course, thinking over their resources. He could think of all sorts of things he’d do with concertina wire, mines, machinegun pits, and concrete jersey barriers. But he had l
ittle to none of those things at the moment, and few options for field expedients.
Got to make do. So, what do we have?
His eyes narrowed as he thought. A moment later, he turned and headed back down the hill. He needed to make a few more radio calls.
***
Two hours later, Lajitas was a swarming hive of activity.
Bobcats were moving dirt and rocks into strategically-placed mounds or digging trenches. In other places, men with shovels were doing much the same.
“Actual, this is Overwatch North. There’s a truck coming in on the 170. Looks like Morgan’s big flatbed with a bunch of wire spools on the back.”
Hank was still wearing his gear, though he’d doffed his helmet. He put down the shovel and keyed his radio. “Roger. Just in time.” Bob Morgan owned the ranch immediately to the north, and had agreed to send over all the barbed wire he had. It wasn’t a lot, relatively speaking, but it would help, particularly at the choke points that they were building with dirt berms.
Unfortunately, as he handed off the shovel and turned to go meet Bob, he saw a delegation coming toward him from the old hotel, with some equally unfortunately familiar faces among its number.
“What is it, Estevez? I’ve got a lot of work to do. Work that I can’t help but notice you’re not helping with.” He knew he’d never been particularly diplomatic; it was part of why he’d retired as a Gunnery Sergeant, rather than a Master Sergeant or Master Guns. But having been awake for over a day, with a couple of intense firefights thrown in for good measure, was not helping his temper any.
It was probably a good thing that it was the middle of winter; if it had been over a hundred degrees, he could only imagine how vicious his temperament might have been.
“You’re doing an awful lot without consulting anyone, Foss.” Estevez halted several paces away—quite noticeably and deliberately out of arm’s reach—and folded his arms. “This isn’t your town. I thought you came here to consult and advise.”