by Peter Nealen
But those three were far from cover, and the shooters from the SUVs were already maneuvering on them.
Hank wrenched the wheel over, bouncing off the service road and angling out into the desert toward the oil rigs dipping their heads ceaselessly. They needed to get an angle on those two vehicles and the hostile shooters, and fast.
The SUVs worried him. They looked the same as the ones that they’d shot up just outside the office, and those had been armored. He really wished they had some RPGs or AT-4s.
Fortunately, their hasty camouflage job worked again. One of the mounted machineguns on the Dillon Aero mount swung toward them as Hank slowed, about to bail because this vehicle wasn’t armored, and they’d do better on their feet, but the gunner hesitated, unsure. Which was when Huntsman leaned out the passenger side window as Hank skidded to a stop and hammered four rounds at the gunner.
Only one hit, but it bought them the seconds they needed.
The four of them bailed out, slamming the doors open and dashing away from the vehicle before throwing themselves flat. Rifle shots snapped overhead, and Hank landed hard, almost knocking the wind out of himself. He’d overestimated his leap out of the truck.
He’d also put himself in a spot with plenty of concealment and zero cover. He was behind a clump of creosote bushes, couldn’t see anything, and really didn’t feel like getting up on a knee in the same spot he’d thrown himself prone was a good idea.
They also needed to watch their fire, that close to the pumping station. A misplaced bullet could do a whole lot of damage. He didn’t think that it would result in a Hollywood fireball, but it could put the station out of action, which would be the same as doing the enemy’s work for them.
Black smoke was already rising from somewhere off to the northeast, so not every element had done as well so far.
Low crawling as fast as he could, he got some distance from the truck, though the stiff and unyielding brush constrained his movement somewhat. The machinegunner had opened fire, and impacts were kicking up geysers of grit and debris uncomfortably close to him; in fact, he was pretty sure that if he’d held his previous position, he’d have been turned into hamburger already.
His knees and elbows ached as he paused, gathering his legs under him while still staying as low as possible. This sucked. He felt as exposed as a bug on a plate. But it was better to stay low and maneuver than try to stay on a thin-skinned vehicle and fight from there, especially with belt-feds in the mix.
Even as he thought it, Reisinger opened up with the Mk 48. And the incoming machinegun fire immediately slackened.
Hank heaved himself up onto one knee, snapping his rifle up to his shoulder and searching for targets.
Before he could even look at the SUVs, he was confronted by one of the green-and-khaki-clad shooters, barely fifteen yards away. The flanking group had been moving while they’d been under fire from the belt-fed, and a couple of them had closed a lot more of the distance than Hank had expected.
They didn’t seem to have expected the Triarii to have crawled as far as they had, though. The Chinese kid in a poorly-fitting plate carrier stared at him wide-eyed for a second, even as his reticle settled right on the young man’s upper chest.
The two of them froze for a split second. Then the Chinese soldier dressed up as a PMC operator snapped his own weapon toward Hank.
Both men fired at almost the same time.
Hank felt a vicious burn along his shoulder, even as his own bullet tore through the young man’s collarbone, just above his plate carrier. It swung the man halfway around and he stumbled, as Hank’s follow-up shot smacked into his plate, then the third ripped through his side and he dropped, twitching and letting out a gurgling scream.
Only then, as he sprinted forward and threw himself flat again did Hank see that Reisinger hadn’t just been trying to suppress the ARI machinegunner; he’d aimed that burst well. The gunner hadn’t fallen all the way back down inside the vehicle, but was slumped halfway out of the turret mount.
More rifle fire cracked over his head, but he quickly shimmied between the brush. Reisinger was running the Mk 48 like a virtuoso, and soon Hank had more of a plan in his head.
“Reisinger! Hold the base of fire! Faris, Huntsman, on me!” He was risking his own position by yelling, but it wasn’t like there were many places to hide on that table-flat Texas ground.
He could hear shouting, though he couldn’t make out words, or even what language they were in. The suppressive fire from the second machinegun redoubled, and Hank had to bury his face in the dirt, desperately trying to make himself as small and flat as possible as a storm of bullets ripped through the air overhead so close that he could feel their passage. He couldn’t move. They were shooting just over his head, but if he moved, they’d be able to adjust and kill him. There was no cover.
More gunfire roared and thundered, sounding much closer. He thought he heard engines and wheels crunching on the ground, and a shadow moved nearby as the suppressive fire suddenly ceased.
He picked his head up to see that a massive, lifted RAM 3500 with a huge steel bumper and what looked an awful lot like a homemade armor kit bolted around its cab had pulled up next to him, a local man leaning out of the passenger side window with a SCAR-L, dumping the mag toward the SUVs.
Hank hauled himself up to a knee, to see both of the ARI vehicles retreating up the road. The first had already turned around; even as he watched, the second pulled a Y-turn and raced after it, back along the gravel service road. More gunfire followed the two vehicles, but they were soon almost out of sight, dwindling to specks in the West Texas countryside.
He wanted to hope it was over. But he knew better.
Five trucks full of locals had joined them, along with a lot of guns. The man with the SCAR was a good fifty or sixty pounds overweight, and was breathing heavily through his mouth as he got down out of the up-armored RAM, but Hank had to admire his guts, nevertheless.
“That’s right!” The big man had an enormous dip in, and spat a stream of brown juice on the ground as he flipped the bird toward the retreating vehicles. “Showed those bastards!”
“Maybe.” Hank keyed his radio. “One-One, Actual. Status?”
“Still got ‘em mostly bottled up. We’ve got some, uh… other deputies coming to help out.” Hank could hear Huck’s bullhorn in the background. “Here’s Huck.” There was a pause. “Oh, shit. Something’s on fire.”
Hank could already hear sirens. Not police sirens. When he looked back, he saw red and white flashing lights; the Sheriff’s deputy had brought the fire department. Probably smart, given the nature of the target.
“Reisinger! Stay here and set a base of fire on that road with Rodriguez. Huntsman, Faris, Evans, with me.” Hank started to trudge toward the maze of piping ahead, on the other side of the burning, smashed truck that Rodriguez and Evans had been using for some meager cover. He reloaded as he walked; he’d had one round left in the gun.
The rest spread out in a wide wedge behind him. Faris looked a little uncertain as to just what they were doing, but Hank wasn’t so optimistic that he thought they could drive one patrol away and be done. He wanted to make damned good and sure that nobody had slipped into that installation with an incendiary while they’d been pinned down.
Of course, it would have been a difficult task for the enemy for the same reason that the Triarii couldn’t just walk in. There was an eight-foot cyclone fence around the place, and they had to go around to the east side to find the gate. He didn’t think that they’d gotten that far, but he wanted to be sure.
The gate was locked. He was about to smash the lock when he stopped.
What the hell is that buzzing sound?
His blood ran cold as he recognized it. “Drones incoming!” He’d seen what damage drones could do in San Diego. He dreaded the thought of what they could do to a petroleum pumping station, especially when he and his men were standing right in the middle of it.
“Find ‘em and
shoot ‘em down before they can torch the pumping station!” Hank was already searching the sky, scanning just above his sights. Huntsman had stepped back from the fence and was doing the same.
Huntsman and Evans fired at almost the same time. Hank saw a dark speck in the sky above, snapped his rifle to his shoulder, and saw an eight-rotor drone, a small, cylindrical payload underneath. And it didn’t look like a camera.
He fired, hoping he was leading it enough, but missed. His follow up shot looked like it broke one of the rotors, and the drone wobbled, but kept coming.
Then a shotgun blast shattered most of the rest of the rotors, and sent the drone spiraling toward the ground, short of the station.
“Knew I kept this in the truck for a reason.” Another one of the locals, a tall, white-haired man with a long beard, had an old Remington shotgun in his hands. “Didn’t know if bird shot would do the trick, though.”
Hank was already scanning for more drones. “Fuck, I wish we had one of those drone guns.” He pivoted, tried to gauge the distance from the one coming almost straight on, and fired. To his relief, that round hit, shattering the central body and sending the drone plummeting to the ground in three pieces.
More of the locals were catching on, and in the next moment, a veritable wall of bullets and shotgun pellets tore through the air in front of the oncoming front of drones. The small, mostly plastic craft weren’t particularly durable, and while it might take a few shots to actually hit one, once hit, they tended to go down.
They were definitely carrying incendiaries; a few small fires were burning out in the brush, but the sage wasn’t particularly quick to burn, and they weren’t spreading very fast. A fire truck was already starting to ease out to deal with the flames, but they were waved back by some of the shooters.
The shooting died down. Hank scanned the sky, but couldn’t see any more drones, nor could he hear the buzz of their rotors. Clear. For now.
He changed channels on his radio and keyed it, hoping he could reach the repeater. “Tango Charlie Two Bravos, Tango India Six Four.”
Silence.
He tried again, keeping his eyes on the sky. Around him, the locals were starting to go back to their trucks, most of them apparently deciding that the fight was over for now.
Still silence.
“Tango Charlie Two Bravos, Tango India Six Four.”
“Send it, Six Four. And make it quick.” Wallace sounded harried, as well as faint and laced with static.
“I need helos. Two Seventies. We’ve got a drone control center out here somewhere, and they’ve already tried to set the pumping station on fire.”
There was another pause. “I can get you some in about thirty mikes.”
Hank cursed, without keying the radio.
“Send your coordinates again.” Wallace was tracking about a dozen different threads; Hank was sure that he wouldn’t have been able to remember exactly where every section or team was if he was in Wallace’s shoes.
Hank, however, had already memorized the coordinates of a possible landing zone before they’d even moved on Wink. He rattled the numbers off.
“Copy all. Stand by and do what you can to keep that station secure. We didn’t get to the Keystone Gas Plant in time; it’s already burning.”
“Roger that.” Hank turned back toward the pumping station.
Thirty minutes could turn out to be an eternity. They’d stopped the first wave of drones, but how many more could the enemy throw at the station in half an hour?
The more they sent, the greater the odds that one would get through. The fact that few of the Texans and Triarii would probably survive the pumping station going up seemed like a small thing compared to the loss that mission failure would entail.
Gritting his teeth, he started figuring out a defensive plan.
***
It wasn’t thirty minutes before the birds got there, fortunately. It was more like twenty.
The enemy had still sent two more waves of drones at them. The last surviving eight-rotor had penetrated the perimeter and started to make its dive on one of the big storage tanks, before one of the fire trucks had knocked it out of the air with the fire hose.
The two SH-70s circled overhead, as Hank called the LZ report and guided them in. They settled side by side in a whirling cloud of dust, as the Triarii raced toward them, into the teeth of the brownout kicked up by the rotor wash.
Hank spat dirt just before he piled into the lead helo. The crew chief grabbed him and yelled into his ear. “We think we saw your drone base on the way in.” He pointed north. “They’re up north, on a few pivot fields in the middle of the desert. Good news is, the National Guard sweep’s not far away.”
That was something. The Guard had spread out along a front that stretched from Presidio to the New Mexico border, and was sweeping toward Odessa. The old Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles of the 112th Cavalry Regiment were forging across the oil fields along the New Mexico border, and they should be nearly within range of their quarry already.
In his exhaustion, Hank was briefly tempted to just leave the enemy to the Cav. But he was already committed, and Huck, Deputy Foy, and the locals were pretty well-versed in counter-drone defenses. Besides, they could probably get there by air before the Guard could hope to get there on the ground.
Looking across through the haze of flying dust, he saw LaForce, in the other bird, give him a thumbs up. He checked that he had his element aboard the first, then returned it, and yelled to the crew chief. “We’re all up! Let’s go!”
The crew chief gave him a return thumbs up by way of reply and spoke into the bird’s intercom. A moment later, the rotors were biting the air and they surged up into the sky.
They raced out over the West Texas desert, nothing but flat scrub land and oil rigs as far as the eye could see. The pilots stayed relatively low, the ground beneath them quickly turning into a blur.
Hank fought his way forward to the cockpit. “Keep us up to start with. I want eyes on before we insert.”
“Roger that. Two minutes.” The pilot gave him a thumbs up without taking his eyes off the windshield or the controls.
Hank returned the signal and dragged himself back to the open door. The crew chief was on the Mk 48 mounted in the doorway; unfortunately, these SH-70s only had a single door gun, which presented some limitations.
The two birds came in from the west, Hank’s bird pulling ahead. That gave the door gunners the best angle, and Hank dragged himself into a seat just inside, a few feet from the door gunner, belting himself in and bracing his rifle against the door.
He’d never done much shooting from a helicopter before Phoenix, but he was more than willing to give it the old college try.
There was definitely a camp of sorts set up between the two pairs of pivot fields, which were now barren and brown, almost three months after harvest. Three trailers were set up in a U-shape, with several armored SUVs arranged in a defensive ring around them. A flatbed sat at the open end of the U, and even as they watched, they could see more drones being prepped for launch on the back.
“Take us in closer!”
They were starting to move in, Hank on his scope and trying to get a shot at the drones, when all hell broke loose.
Two of the SUVs opened their Dillon Aero turrets, and this time, they had the miniguns mounted. Hank could almost hear the crew chief start swearing, opening fire on the vehicles even as the pilot veered off, hard, banking away and diving toward the deck, leveling off at less than fifty feet as he raced away from the threat.
Hank would have lost his rifle in the sudden bank if it hadn’t been slung around his body.
“Take us back around! We’ve got to nail those drones!” He had visions of getting this close, only to have the pumping station go up anyway.
But the pilot had another idea. The two SH-70s turned and headed back south, getting out of sight of the camp before turning back north, skimming over the desert at about seventy-five feet. “
We’re going to open fire as soon as we’ve got eyes on!” the crew chief yelled. “We get one shot, then veer off!”
Fuck! But it was better than nothing. And trying to go in against those miniguns on foot, on ground as flat as a pancake, would only get them carved into mincemeat.
He wished he’d tried something else, had a better plan, but this was what they had.
They came in fast and low, the pilot hooking east for a split second before swinging west to present the door gun. And Hank’s rifle.
He and the crew chief opened fire at the same time. He hadn’t had time to tell the other man to aim at the flatbed, but he hadn’t needed to. Both of them raked the vehicle, the crew chief leaning into the gun as he held down the trigger, Hank clamping the forearm of his rifle as best he could to the door as he mag-dumped into the men prepping the drones.
Four of them fell like ninepins. Another dove for cover. Bullets smacked off the vehicle itself, hopefully wrecking a few drones. Hank was hoping they’d hit something volatile, but no fireballs bloomed. Then they were pulling away, and the Dash Two bird was making its pass.
Only this time, a line of tracers reached out and touched the second helo’s tail.
The bird almost immediately started to spin out of control, spiraling toward the ground. Fortunately or unfortunately, they only had seventy-five feet to fall.
With a crash, the helicopter hit, the impact cushioned by the autorotate. Hank gritted his teeth, fighting to maintain his composure. Not another half a squad…
“One-One, Actual.” His voice felt like it was getting snatched away by the wind. “One-One, this is Actual, status?” He looked over at the crew chief. “Put us the fuck down!”