Fortress Doctrine (Maelstrom Rising Book 5)

by Peter Nealen

  Huck chuckled without much humor. “Oh, it’ll fly. At least, it will if the governor has anything to say about it. She’s pissed.”

  “All right, then.” Wallace leaned on the administrator’s desk. “We’re going to have to shuffle the task organization a bit if we have to spread the Rangers out among the operational elements. So, Hank, I’m going to need you to split by squads again…”

  Chapter 35

  Ranger Pete Baldwin was waiting in his truck, pulled over on the side of Highway 115 just south of Wink. Hank waved toward the vehicle, and Huntsman pulled up behind the lifted F250.

  When Huntsman stopped, the other Triarii vehicles arranged themselves in a herringbone formation around them. They weren’t gun trucks—the necessities of stealth had precluded that—but with the windows rolled down, the Triarii inside could easily engage in multiple directions. Not that they had too much to worry about out there—there was nothing but table-flat ground and sagebrush for miles. They’d spot anyone coming long before they were within small arms range.

  Hank swung out of the truck, as Huck pulled up alongside and joined him. The two of them moved up to Baldwin’s truck.

  Baldwin had his window rolled down and was still watching the road toward Wink. He was an older man. Hank would have guessed late forties, early fifties, with a receding hairline and a chest that was starting to slip toward his belt buckle. But while he might not have appeared to be the epitome of meat eater at first glance, when he looked over at Hank, his eyes carried a lot of years of hard living and the scars of bad things seen and never forgotten.

  “You boys are right on time.” Baldwin took a deep drag off his cigarette.

  “Didn’t seem like we had time to dawdle.” Hank scanned the horizon. “Any updates?”

  “Yep.” Baldwin himself was still staring out his windshield. “We’ve got a couple of complications.”

  When he didn’t seem to be immediately forthcoming on the details, Hank prodded him. “Okay, most serious complication first.”

  “They’ve beefed up security on the target sites since your hits in Mexico.” He glanced narrowly at Hank. “I’m guessing that was you guys?”

  “Yeah, that was us.”

  Baldwin almost looked impressed. “Well, they’ve got what looks like fifteen to thirty men on each gate, regular drone sweeps, ten to fifteen-man patrols on the perimeter, and their offices have at least another ten to fifteen on site. All armed to the teeth, too. To make matters worse, they’ve been sending out two to three vehicles to set up snap checkpoints on the roads around the pumping stations.” He grimaced around the cigarette. “That’s pissing a lot of people off, especially the Sheriff, but they’ve got belt-fed machineguns, and they’ve got everyone outgunned, for the moment.” He glanced over at Hank and Huck. “I hope you guys have some serious firepower.”

  “We’ll have enough.” Though Hank said it with a certain confidence, he wasn’t sure he felt it. Their numbers weren’t quite what he would have wanted, given the strength of the opposition.

  He turned and waved Spencer up. “Pete Baldwin, this is Cole Spencer. He’s going to be leading the squad that’ll be your deputies.”

  Baldwin glanced over at Spencer and stuck out a hand. Spencer shook it, and Baldwin looked satisfied. “That’s not the only complication.”

  Hank raised an eyebrow. “What else?”

  “Turns out that our little friends over there weren’t satisfied with just sitting on their hands and waiting for us to make a move. There’s another convoy coming; a big one. It ain’t coming from the south, though; it’s coming from New Mexico.”

  “How big?” Hank didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Judging by the drone footage, something like fifteen gun trucks, and twenty-five to thirty tankers.”

  Spencer let out a low whistle. “Not fucking around, are they?”

  Baldwin just shook his head, his face still composed. “Nope. I think they’re bound and determined to get through no matter what.”

  “They know we’re moving on ‘em.” Huck spat and looked over at Hank. “How much you want to bet that one of them Feds leaked it?”

  Hank shook his head. “No bet.” The truth was, he didn’t doubt it was possible, but he didn’t want to think in those terms. The situation was bad enough without the Federal government leaking plans to the cartels and the Chinese out of spite.

  Of course, it didn’t have to be “The Federal Government.” There’d certainly been enough shenanigans over the last few years to make certain people and cliques operating within the Federal bureaucracy against the law and the national interest to be more than a possibility. It was a large part of what had led to the current state of affairs.

  That very lawlessness was a large part of why there was such an organization as the Triarii in the first place. When a government becomes so absorbed in infighting and petty politics that it no longer fulfills its most basic functions, such as enforcing law and order and ensuring national security, then people have the choice of turning to crime—since why not, if it pays?—or step up and fill the void before everything slid into the abyss.

  “Where are they?” The more he thought about it, the worse the situation looked. And when Baldwin answered, it didn’t make him feel any better.

  Baldwin looked at his watch. “They should be passing through Orla right now. Which puts them less than sixty miles out. Worse, they’re already within the National Guard lines. Everybody was so worried about the Mexican border that we weren’t ready for this kind of an end run.”

  “Shit.” Spencer had made the same calculations as Hank. That convoy would be on top of them in less than an hour.

  “If we move fast and secure the office, we might be able to force them to stand down, then hold the pumping station against the convoy.” Huck was trying to be upbeat, but he didn’t sound hopeful.

  But Hank was already shaking his head before Huck had finished. “No. If they don’t stand down, then we’ll get caught between a hammer and anvil. I don’t expect we can take the pumping station and secure it fast enough to hold it. There just aren’t enough of us.” He thought for a second, then turned to Huck. “Can we get some explosives? Or can we get clearance for some air support?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, if you can get cruise missiles, we’ll use ‘em. Somebody might chew me out later, but screw ‘em.” Huck had his thumbs hooked in his belt. He spat again. “Results matter more than niceties right now.”

  Hank started back to the truck. “Let’s get moving. We’ll need to get eyes on before we can call for fire.”

  He just hoped that Wallace could get some Longswords or Vipers up in time.

  ***

  “There they are. Moving slower than we thought.” Hank stood in the bed of the truck, his elbows on the roof, bracing the binoculars as he watched the convoy moving along Highway 302.

  The gun trucks in the lead were the same sort of murdered-out, all-black Chevys that they’d seen in Camargo, just with belt-fed machineguns openly mounted in the beds. The Xolotl Cartel appeared to have taken over the partnership with the Chinese completely.

  He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. If Xolotl’s skull-faced killers had only targeted the Soldados and the Vengadores, then the Chinese wouldn’t have any reason not to go with the winners. They didn’t have any particular emotional attachment to their proxies.

  They were Communists, after all. Using people and discarding them was kind of what they did.

  “So, do we have to try to stop them and challenge them or something? This being a law enforcement operation and everything?” He didn’t take his eyes away from the binoculars as he asked the question.

  “Hell no.” Huck spat again. “We’re back to the Frank Hamer days, brother. I ain’t worried about getting sued at this point. Besides, if we tried to roadblock ‘em, they’d just chew us up with those machineguns.” He chuckled. “I ain’t inclined to risk that. We can deal with any fallout later; the governor�
��s got our backs.”

  Hank nodded. There wasn’t much time to lose. It had taken half an hour to get into position on one of the roads between oil rigs about a thousand yards south of the highway. It wasn’t outside machinegun range, but they had only so many options, given the flatness of the terrain and the short timeline. The convoy was only about half an hour from its objective.

  He finally set down the binoculars and picked up the handset. He’d moved the radio out of the cab to where he could reach it easily. “Rapier One Three, Tango India Six Four. Requesting immediate air. Friendlies positioned fifteen kilometers northeast of BP Freddy, vehicles in the open, marked by blue smoke.” Even as he spoke, Huck popped a smoke grenade and tossed it onto the road behind them. The wind was blowing out of the north; Hank’s view wouldn’t be obscured by the smoke.

  “Targets are nine hundred meters north of our position, technicals and tanker trucks on the highway, moving west to east. Attack over my right shoulder, egress to the west. Targets have heavy machineguns mounted.”

  “Attack over your right shoulder, egress to the west, heavy machineguns mounted, roger.” Rapier One Three sounded awfully young, but the Triarii had been drawing pilots from all over, and more than a few had only gotten out of the military recently.

  “Good readback, go ahead and push.”

  “Pushing.”

  Hank glanced over his shoulder, but the two AH-1Z Vipers weren’t visible yet. He thought he might be able to just hear the faint growl of their rotors, but it was still hard to tell; the whisper of the slight breeze blowing across the West Texas landscape was almost too loud.

  “Visual.” The Vipers had picked up the blue smoke.

  “Tally.” They’d picked up the convoy, which was almost abreast of the Triarii vehicles by now.

  Hank picked up the handset again. “Continue.” He definitely could hear the snarl of rotors now, and a glance over his shoulder picked up the tiny black dots of the pair of attack helicopters, coming in low and fast.

  “In.” He could hear the eagerness in Rapier One Three’s voice now. The pilot could see the prey, and Viper pilots were nothing if not aggressive. It had been true in the Marine Corps, and seemed to have carried over to the Triarii.

  “Cleared hot.” Hank put his eyes back to the binoculars and watched the convoy.

  The gunners had heard the rotors, too, and were swiveling their weapons toward the sky, searching for threats. Unfortunately for them, they were far too late.

  The wasp-like attack helicopters came roaring in at barely two hundred feet, the lead bird banking to line up on the highway. The chin-mounted cannon spat puffs of smoke, and a moment later the rat-tat-tat reports reached the Triarii’s trucks.

  The 20mm cannon rounds punched through the lead gun trucks with catastrophic impacts. Dust, smoke, sparks, and fire flew as the technicals were blasted to scrap, turning anyone riding them into pulped and bloodied meat in an eyeblink.

  The path of destruction blasted up the highway, carving a swath through the convoy, leaving smashed and burning vehicles and shattered bodies in their wake. The rear vehicles tried to pull off the highway, scattering onto the shoulder, but the fence to the north held them off.

  And there really was nowhere to go, anyway.

  Rapier One Three pulled off, clearing the way for his Dash Two. The second bird came in fast, so low that his rotors were below the tops of the plumes of black smoke billowing up from the lead vehicles, which now had almost completely blocked the highway.

  The second Viper’s cannon stuttered and rattled, impacts tracking up the side of the highway before smashing through one of the rear gun trucks. Hank thought he saw the cartel gunner who had been trying to bring his M2 .50 caliber machinegun to bear get hit. He was cut in half with a spray of blood and pulverized tissue just before the truck disappeared in a cloud of dust, smoke, and debris.

  Both helicopters were pulling off. Hank thought he’d heard a single burst of return fire, quickly silenced by the Vipers’ cannons. The bulk of the convoy was in flames. There was some movement as the handful of survivors staggered away from the wreckage, but from where Hank sat, it didn’t look like any of them were going anywhere for a while.

  “Egressing west,” Rapier One Three called.

  “Roger that.” Hank peered through the binoculars. “Every gun truck and about half of the tankers within my line of sight appear to be destroyed and on fire. Can you see better from up there?” It wasn’t quite standard procedure to ask the pilots for their own damage assessment, but the smoke was getting thicker.

  “Wait one.” In the distance, he could see the two helos banking around, getting a better view of the destruction on the ground. “Affirm. We have three more technicals destroyed on the north side of the highway; you might not be able to see them from your position. You want us to make another pass?” Once again, there was that Viper pilot aggressiveness in play.

  “If you’ve got the munitions.” Hank wasn’t going to tell them to go home with extra ordnance. They weren’t going to be able to call for close air support when they moved on the pumping station, after all. Wallace was already worried enough that the Chinese might just set the station on fire rather than give it up.

  “That we do. Coming around to the east again.”

  The two helos emerged from behind the smoke plumes, still flying low, off to the north. They started to bank around to line up on the highway again, and Hank turned his gaze on the targets, to see a few figures trying to make a run for it into the low scrub brush on either side of the highway.

  A part of Hank’s mind wanted to pursue them, to make a clean sweep. But time was slipping away, and they had bigger fish to fry. It would take a lot for the battered survivors of the convoy to form any sort of coherent fighting force anytime soon, even if the Vipers didn’t come back around for another run.

  The helos lined up and roared in. Cannons spat destruction, kicking up big gouts of dust and debris as they hammered what was left of the convoy. Hank saw another black-clad killer just come apart as a pair of the 20mm rounds smacked into his back as he ran. What was left of him spattered to the ground in an arc in front of him.

  Then the pair of Vipers were pulling off again. “Egressing west. Any more targets?”

  “Negative, Rapier One Three. Thanks for the support. We need to pull off and go deal with some other business.”

  “Roger that. We’ll RTB and stand by for any further support requests. You boys have a good day, hear?”

  I hope so. This next part was going to be complicated, especially with the towers of black smoke rising above the horizon from the wreckage of the convoy.

  The enemy would know they were coming. Only some careful obfuscation and delicate role-playing was going to preserve any sense of surprise.

  And even then, Hank figured there was a fifty-fifty chance that it would all go south in the first thirty seconds. And with nothing but thin-skinned vehicles and zero cover…

  The next hour was going to be interesting, to say the least.

  Chapter 36

  “Here goes nothing.”

  The three pickups, all white and each bearing a reasonable facsimile of the ARI Risk Management logo on their doors, were tearing up the road toward the Wink pumping station gate. They were moving fast enough to make it look like they were running for shelter, backed by the towering plumes of smoke behind them.

  He honestly didn’t expect the paper-thin façade to last more than a few seconds once they got close. They hadn’t had time or resources to completely mimic ARI; they were all still in their tans, chest rigs, and carrying their standard weapons. So, they really couldn’t expect the trucks to do more than get them inside the gate.

  Hopefully. They’d find out in about ten seconds.

  There were four vehicles parked at the gate; two were Nissan Titans with Mk 46 light machineguns mounted on post mounts in the beds, the machineguns manned and pointed out at the road. The other two, behind them, were SUVs. About hal
f a dozen men were visible, four on the ground, two on the guns in the beds. And all eyes were now turned toward the three vehicles wearing their company’s livery and roaring up the road toward them.

  Huntsman stomped on the brake right in front of the gate. The guards out there were already on alert, their weapons up and pointed at the truck, one of them yelling at them to stop.

  These guys are Anglos. Not Chinese. Figures. They’ll be keeping the PLA types out of sight, use them for patrols or react forces. Got to keep the round-eyes guessing.

  Hank stuck his head out of the window. If he’d paused to think about the risk he was running, he might not have done it, but he was in a thin-skinned vehicle anyway, so it wasn’t as if the windshield was going to protect him from bullets in the first place.

  “We need to move! They’re coming! They hit us up north!” He was spitballing; he had no idea what kind of challenge and pass the ARI shooters might have set up, and the odds that just yelling, “They’re coming for us!” would work seemed pretty long.

  But to his minor amazement it worked, if only for a few seconds. Most of the gate guards, who’d already been staring at the smoke to the northeast, froze for a second, and one of them hit the control that started the gate moving.

  A figure popped out from behind one of the SUVs stationed at the gate, yelling and waving his arms. But he was just barely too late.

  Huntsman gunned the engine, sending the pickup surging through the gap already opened in the gateway and between the two gun trucks, where they couldn’t engage without the risk of friendly fire. But it put Hank and Huntsman in a position where they didn’t have to worry so much about blue on blue.

  Hank had already held his rifle choked up in his hands, just below the dash. Now, with the window already rolled down, he just had to shoulder it and open fire.

  The man who’d opened the gate died first, the tip of Hank’s suppressor only a couple of yards from his chest. The rifle coughed, bucking in Hank’s grip since he’d still had it somewhat retracted when he pulled the trigger. The gate guards were all wearing body armor, though. The man staggered back a step, clutching his chest, but the hammer blow of the bullet to his front plate had been hard enough that he simply didn’t have nearly enough time to recover before Hank had his rifle in his shoulder and had twitched the muzzle up high enough to blow his brains out before shifting to the machinegunner, who still hadn’t quite figured out what was going on.