by Peter Nealen
But the miasma of destruction on the air didn’t mean that the residents of Lajitas were out of the woods. Not by a long shot.
As the defenders worked their way back toward town, Hank could hear more gunfire. Some ragged radio traffic crackled in his earpiece, but it was disjointed and uncoordinated.
He gritted his teeth as he clambered around the hill. They’d taken the short way back, once they were sure that the enemy was out of effective range.
“Everybody get off the net unless you’ve got traffic to send,” he snarled over the radio. “Mike Actual, Tango India Actual, SITREP?”
“We’ve started taking fire from across the river,” Grant reported. “Something heavy; probably a fifty. We’ve taken a couple of casualties; they’re shooting at anyone in the open.”
Hank grimaced. That meant that as soon as the attack had been turned back, the locals had decided that the threat was past, and they’d started moving around as if nothing had happened. It was clear enough to him and his Triarii—who had been in near-constant conflict with the SdA for months—that the bad guys weren’t just going to go away. Especially not when reports had a considerably larger force on the way.
“Keep everyone under cover.” He shouldn’t have needed to say that, but there it was. Training took time, and few of the locals had appreciated the Triarii’s presence enough to bother changing their thinking to adjust to the circumstances. “Make sure the local worthies understand that we are still under attack, and facing numbers that we are not going to be able to deal with head on until we get some reinforcements.”
The campsite was just ahead. They’d taken the quicker route, but had still endeavored to keep as much cover between them and the other side of the river as possible. Hank was still expecting that big column that West had reported.
“Gray Man, Tango India Six Four Actual.”
“Send it, Actual.” West, despite his protests, was up on the hill above the RV park with a sniper rifle. He hadn’t had a chance to use it yet, which was probably fueling his ire. Hank had stressed the need for at least one of them to stay back to coordinate things in town if they got flanked. Grant was good to go, but he still had a lot to learn.
“If you’ve got a relief up there, let them take over overwatch, and meet me at the command trailer. We’ve got another job to do, and it needs to be done quickly.”
***
Lazar Treviño’s door splintered as Fernandez hit it with the sledgehammer, swinging open with a bang. Hank rode the door, clearing the corner of the entryway with his eyes and muzzle in a split second before he swung back to the front. LaForce was right behind him, splitting off to the other side of the door.
The entryway was dark and still. Treviño hadn’t responded to calls to come out, either by radio or a megaphone from outside. His house was as dark as ever—not that many electric lights were working in Lajitas at the moment—but they’d seen movement inside. He was there. And he might not be alone
With the rest of the Triarii squad flowing in behind them, Hank and LaForce pushed deeper into the house. It was all too familiar at that point, after having gone in after the infiltrators the night before. The living room appeared to be clear, though Hank kept an eye on the couch set watching the rear glass doors. That wasn’t cover, particularly not against 7.62 rounds, but it could act as concealment, and the last thing he wanted was to get shot in the back by this little weasel.
He took the left-hand hallway, with Huntsman, Reisinger, Faris, and Vega behind him, while LaForce led the second element toward the opposite side of the house. Hank paused just shy of the hall, pointed to the couch, then popped the corner, pushing toward the first door while one of the men behind him crossed and checked that Treviño or one of his little cronies wasn’t hiding behind the couch.
Two doors faced each other across the hallway, with a third at the far end. All three were closed.
Hank paused just long enough to feel a knee bump him from behind. He tested the doorknob, keeping his muzzle just above it. Unlocked. Twisting the knob, he threw the door open and rode it to the wall, clearing the corner before sweeping eyes and weapon back across the room.
It appeared that Treviño was using the room as an office. A computer sat on a skeletonized desk, with a cheap office chair in front of it. A couple of shelves stood against the wall behind the chair, and several boxes were stacked under the window.
Hank turned back to the door and pointed across the hallway, but Faris and Vega had already cleared that room. That just left the one on the far end.
Before he could move, LaForce’s voice over the radio interrupted. “Actual, One-One. Jackpot.”
“Roger.” He still swung out into the hallway and pushed toward the last door. They had their target, but the entire house still needed to be cleared.
The far room was a laundry room. “Small room, small room.” He cleared it in a split second, turning back toward the hallway before any of the others could follow him in.
Letting his rifle hang on its sling, he keyed the radio. “North side clear.”
“Second floor clear.” Faris sounded a bit put out that LaForce had beaten him to the quarry.
“South side clear. Coming out with packages.” LaForce sounded almost gleeful.
Packages? Interesting. Hank knew that Treviño lived alone. If there was more than one package…
The Triarii consolidated in the living room. LaForce came out with Treviño, flex-cuffed and with LaForce’s thick arm levering his hands up uncomfortably, one hand gripping his shoulder hard enough to make him wince. Treviño’s head was bowed, as if he’d given up hope. That was an interesting sign all by itself. Hank had expected a lot more bluster.
The second man was considerably smaller than either Treviño or Evans, who was frog-marching him toward the door. Slightly built, with close-cropped hair, prominent ears, and a pencil mustache, he didn’t look like much at first glance. But Hank suspected, given the circumstances, that whoever he was, he was far more dangerous than he appeared.
West was outside with the cordon when the Triarii came out with their captives. Somewhere to the west, another distant boom rolled over the desert. The enemy was still taking potshots from across the river.
“Call Judge Kelly,” Hank said as they walked toward the trucks. “We need to get this handled.”
***
“This isn’t exactly the way things are usually done, Mr. Foss.” Judge Kelly sat at Bill and Nancy Cooper’s kitchen table, her fingers interlaced, and her brow furrowed. “In fact, it’s not the way things are done in Texas at all.”
“We’re not exactly in a position to get overly concerned with the legal niceties, Judge.” Hank was still wearing his vest, but his rifle and helmet were next to the door. “You’re a judge; we can get twelve jurors from the locals. We can even put Estevez on the jury. He sure won’t vote just to please us.”
She shook her head again. “Again, that’s not the way things are done. I’m a District Court judge. A felony case has to go through a Justice of the Peace, in a Probable Cause hearing. Then, if the JP decides it’s valid, it goes to a Grand Jury, and only then does it come to my desk. The Grand Jury might be waived in extremis, but not the Probable Cause hearing. That’s Texas law.”
“Come on, Judge!” Grant surged to his feet. Long and rangy, he looked like the cowboy he had been most of his life. “They’ve come at us with armored vehicles, and that sonofabitch let them in! He’s guilty as hell, and we could be overrun tomorrow! And you want to quibble about legal procedures?”
“Quibble?” Judge Kelly turned a glare on Grant that made even the outspoken cowboy sit down. “Quibble?!” Her lips thinned, and her eyes flashed. Hank didn’t think he’d ever seen an elderly woman quite so furious. She stabbed a finger at Grant. “You listen to me, William Grant. Those legal procedures are there for a reason: to make sure that an innocent man isn’t hanged or electrocuted by a lynch mob playing at being a justice system. This isn’t Hang ‘em High. And e
ven the judge in that movie wished he could have a Grand Jury to call on.”
She turned to Hank. “Now, I’m sure you’ve got the firepower to enforce just such a lynching if you want to. But it’ll tell me—and a lot of other people—that your ‘Triarii’ are just another violent mob. Or do you really believe all that about preserving law and order and whatever remains of the Republic?”
“We believe it,” Hank replied grimly.
“’But.’” She sneered. “I could almost hear it. ‘But…’ What?”
“No buts.” Hank steeled himself. He’d been about to say something about the extremity of their position, but he realized that the old woman was right. Yes, he was convinced that Treviño was a traitor, guilty as sin, and deserved to be hanged from the nearest lamppost, trees for the purpose being rather few and far between in that part of the country, but she was right. There were lines they couldn’t cross, and Colonel Santiago had made that clear from the beginning. They were fighting to preserve the remnant of the Republic, not burn it down and erect something else.
If we were weeks away from help, it might be one thing. But West says help’s less than twenty-four hours away. There’s no reason we can’t sit on ‘em that long.
“I concede the point, Judge.” He stood up. “My apologies. I’ll just plead ignorance of the finer points of what Will calls ‘legal procedures.’ I’m a shooter, not a lawyer or even a cop. If you say we can’t do it, then we’ll hold ‘em until the Rangers can collect ‘em.”
“I can’t believe this.” Grant still wasn’t backing down, though he was being slightly more polite. “We know he’s guilty! Arturo watched them walk out of his rental cabin!” He pointed at Hank. “Your buddy West saw him meet with ‘em on the road, and escort them in!”
“And can you prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he wasn’t coerced?” Kelly had settled down a bit, herself, and was now speaking in a somewhat more matronly tone. “Do you know every factor in his life? If he has any family on the other side of the line, who might have a knife to their throats?” She watched Grant carefully as the words penetrated. “These are questions that have to be asked. What if he does have family being held hostage?” She looked at Hank. “I’m sure you’ve been places where that was standard procedure for the bad guys.”
Hank nodded gravely. He’d seen it all too often, usually in the case of suicide bombers.
Kelly stood up. “So, boys, I suggest you put the ropes away and concentrate on what’s more pressing.” She stared Hank in the eye. “Do you think that they’re done trying to push through the town?”
“No, I don’t. I think they want control of this crossing, though I don’t know why. They’ve made two tries already, they’ve got some serious numbers and hardware, and they’ve come at us twice after getting their teeth kicked in. Even if they could push elsewhere, I think it’s a matter of honor, now.”
She nodded with a sigh. “Seen that all too often with the gangs and the cartels. If they attack you and you draw blood instead of surrendering or lying down and dying, they take it as an affront.” She sighed again. “Why here?”
Hank shrugged. “Maybe we’ll find out from Treviño’s buddy.” When she looked at him sharply, he held up his hands. “We’re just talking, Judge. Nobody’s pulled out the bucket and towel.” Yet.
She stepped closer, looking up at him and fixing his eyes with hers. “Go do what you can to defend us. Just promise me one thing. Promise me you won’t let those men be lynched. Prove to me that you and your organization really stand for what you say you do.”
He met her gaze without blinking. “Trust me, Judge.”
She nodded. “I will, this time. Don’t disappoint me.”
Grant looked like he wanted to say something, but Hank shot him a basilisk stare, and he subsided. The two men excused themselves and left.
Bill Cooper was waiting by the door. “Not sure I agree with all that,” he muttered. “Desperate times.”
“And yet, desperate measures have a way of backfiring in the long run, Bill.” Hank was increasingly certain that Judge Kelly’s call had been the right one, the more he thought about it. As emotionally satisfying as hanging Treviño might be, he wasn’t sure he wanted that on his conscience. Especially after she’d pointed out the possibility that he might have been coerced. “Believe me; I’ve seen it often enough.”
Grant was quiet as they got back in the F350 outside, and Reisinger drove them back up toward the RV park, doing his best to avoid open ground with line of sight to the hills on the far side of the Rio Grande. The .50 caliber potshots had become more sporadic over the last hour, but they hadn’t stopped altogether.
They reached the command trailer without getting blasted, and West was waiting at the door.
“Well, we might have a clue about what’s going on.” He was leaning against the door frame, his arms crossed.
“Did Treviño talk?” Hank stepped into the trailer, West turning to follow and closing the door behind him.
“Sang like a canary.” West slumped down in a chair. “He’s convinced we’re going to hang him in the next few hours.” He looked up at Hank and raised an eyebrow. “Are we going to hang him?”
Hank shook his head. “The Judge won’t go along with it, and she made a pretty good case. We’re not a lynch mob.”
West shrugged. “All the same to me, really. Not sure how most of the militia will take it.”
“They’re good dudes. They’ll do what’s right.”
Another shrug. “They’re your boys. I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, turns out that his little houseguest is none other than Marco ‘El Navaja’ Casales.”
Hank frowned, searching his memory. “The Vengadores en los Sombres guy? The one who skinned that Mexican Marine colonel alive a few months back?”
“In the flesh, if Treviño’s telling the truth.” West threw an arm over the chair’s back. “It explains the heavy hardware. The Vengadores seem to have inherited CJNG’s taste for paramilitary operations. And they’ve brought in a lot of Army defectors. Sort of a discount cross between CJNG and Los Zetas.”
“Well, most of them were CJNG, before La Comadreja staged his little failed coup.” The Vengadores en los Sombres had split off from the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion in the aftermath of a power struggle that had almost unseated that cartel’s leader, “El Mencho.” “Still doesn’t explain why they’ve got such a burr under their saddle about Lajitas. And why everybody and their mother’s dog is coming out of the woodwork to draw resources away from here.”
West shrugged again. “If we survive the next day or two, maybe we’ll find out. I’d say we should probably focus on the here and now.”
“Agreed.” Hank didn’t like looking too far ahead. He’d known too many who’d gotten caught in that trap, and either fallen into analysis paralysis or simply got focused on the wrong thing, usually to their unit’s detriment.
That usually meant body bags getting filled, too.
He glanced at his watch. “It’s getting late; I would have expected them to try something else by now.”
“Six Four Actual, Six Four Five.” The radio hadn’t been turned down, and it was loud enough that West jumped a little.
Spoke too soon. He crossed to the ham rig and picked up the handset. “Send it.”
“We just got probed again, and we’re seeing movement in the hills around us.” Spencer still sounded calm and collected, his drawl slow and even. “I think they might be coming after us next.”
Chapter 10
As Hank stepped out of the trailer, his hand already on the PTT to call assembly, but thinking about just what shape the next move needed to take, the growl of a piston engine overhead drew his eye. He squinted up at the brassy afternoon sky, searching for the plane.
He spotted it after a moment, a high-wing Cessna, approaching from the northwest, flying just inside the border. On a hunch, he reached down and switched his radio to the air net that he’d gotten from the Ranger Recon Team
that had passed through a few days before.
He caught the tail end of a transmission. “… station, this is Five Four One Seven. I say again, any Tango India or Mike station vicinity of Lajitas, this is Five Four One Seven.”
“Five Four One Seven, this is Tango India Six Four. Send it.”
“Good to hear that you boys are still kicking down there.” The Cessna’s pilot—clearly a Texas Ranger from his callsign—sounded awfully young. “I’m seeing some burning vehicles; those yours, or the bad guys’?”
“Those are the bad guys.” Hank kept watching the plane. “Are you passing through, or establishing ISR?” Having an Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance bird overhead was always useful.
“I’ve got two hours of loiter time to provide ISR.” The kid sounded cheerful as hell, despite what was going on. “The hope is that you boys can put up enough of a fight to buy time to get the Guard mobilized, though we’re running into some snags there.”
“Don’t tell me. Let me guess.” Hank sighed. “The National Guard commanders are getting caught between reality and their directives from Washington.”
“They are, indeed. Officially, there’s a twelve-mile no-man’s land on this side of the border. DC doesn’t want anybody doing anything that might provoke war with Mexico.”
Hank just shook his head. He’d heard about such conflicting pronouncements coming from the White House. The less said about the circus on Capitol Hill, the better. Congress had been a noisy, wildly hypocritical, deadlocked Thunderdome for almost as long as he could remember, which had only further enabled the chaos that had directly led to the Triarii’s formation in the first place.
He got it, somewhat. With more than half the country’s power grid down, and entire major cities—not to mention whole counties in some states—effectively in a state of open insurgency, what was left of the responsible government in Washington DC didn’t want to risk a multi-front war. Already committed in Europe—it was hard to ignore a direct conventional attack on American peacekeepers by the European Defense Corps—anything else threatened an already tenuous strategic situation. The idea that the US could fight one major war and two smaller ones, all at the same time, had been shown to be wishful thinking back during the Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom days.