by Peter Nealen
Brannigan moved carefully to peer out the window over Wade’s shoulder. “I see him.”
“Looks important, don’t he?” Wade was clearly sighting in on the figure. “Just saw him giving somebody orders.”
“Think you can hit him from here?”
Wade snorted. “Easy shot.” His finger tightened on the trigger. Unfortunately, right then the man pivoted on his heel and stalked out of sight behind the gun truck. “Fuck.”
“Don’t sweat it.” Brannigan turned away as another shot snapped through the east window to smack more plaster off the west wall. “That’s getting a little annoying.”
“They’re trying to draw us out.” Flanagan was set in on that window, standing well back in the shadows. “Some of them might just be idiots shooting for the sake of shooting, but I think they’re trying to draw fire.”
“What good does that do them?” Curtis patted his Negev, though he only had one drum left for it.
“Gets us to waste ammo. Gets us engaged in one direction so that they can rush us from another. Keeps us pinned down and occupied while they go get mortars or RPGs to flatten the house.” Flanagan shrugged without taking his eyes off the jungle outside the window. “Take your pick.”
“Fuck that.” Wade fired. Even without looking, Brannigan knew that another Green Shirt had just taken a bullet. The big Ranger was pissed, and he was on the hunt. He’d killed at least two more in the last half hour, until they’d learned that standing in the open wasn’t a good idea. Even the man that Wade had just spotted, clearly a commander, had still been behind the truck, only his head and shoulders visible.
That Wade had still been more than willing to chance the shot wasn’t a sign of desperation. It was rage. None of the Blackhearts liked being pinned down, but Wade took it as a personal affront. He was out for blood.
“If we just sit here trying to whittle them down one by one, we’ll be here until next week.” Burgess shifted his position, squinting as he eyed the trees below, on the west side of the ragged, battered, bloodstained cornfield. “In the meantime, they bottle us up so they can bring in those mortars or RPGs.” He spared a glance at Brannigan. “We’ve got to try something else.”
Brannigan mused on it, rubbing his chin. At times like this, he really missed Roger Hancock. Flanagan was a good tactician, as was Wade. But Roger had had a flair for it. And Flanagan was taciturn enough that he was less likely to have a burst of brilliance and just drive ahead with it, the way Hancock might have.
Again, that was nothing against Joe Flanagan. The man was solid—Brannigan wouldn’t have chosen him as Hancock’s successor otherwise. But his style was just different, and right then, Brannigan wanted to have Hancock with them.
But Roger Hancock was in a shallow grave in the Altiplano, and would never proffer an unorthodox solution again.
“All right.” He couldn’t say it was genius, but it might work. “They think they’ve got us cornered.”
“Uh, they do have us cornered, Colonel.”
“Shut up, Kevin. So far as they know, we’re just mercs. They’ve got to know that we’re not locals at this point.” Brannigan scratched the stubble on his chin as he thought. “We need to make them think that we’ve bolted, that either the locals abandoned us, or we abandoned the locals.” He looked up at the ceiling. It had been a long day, with a lot of fighting, and he was tired. His brain wasn’t quite firing on all cylinders. He glanced over at Pacheco. “Who are they going to be more likely to want dead first?”
Pacheco snorted. “Probably you. They’ll figure that with you out of the picture, they can deal with the people of San Tabal at their leisure.”
Brannigan frowned. That complicated things a little. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do…”
***
Galvez paced restlessly. Sporadic gunfire continued to echo across the valley, but his Green Shirts were slow getting into position. And Lorenzo still wasn’t back with his cannon fodder. He chewed the inside of his cheek as his impatient rage mounted.
“Commandante!” He didn’t know the young Green Shirt’s name, but Galvez swung on the man abruptly, making the skinny former ELN recruit stagger back a half step.
“What?”
The boy—he couldn’t be much older than sixteen or seventeen—gulped. “Some of them are trying to run, Commandante.” He pointed up toward the farmhouse, where some commotion had broken out.
Galvez hurried around the back of the gun truck, careful to stay in some cover, just in case. Sure enough, there was some shooting going on up there, and a voice was raised, bellowing in English.
“You pussy sons of bitches! Get your asses back here!” Another burst of fire rattled out, aimed up toward the top of the ridge, away from most of the Green Shirts.
Are the Americans and the locals fighting each other? He hardly dared think it, but a wolfish grin split his features as he watched what was happening. The farmers are leaving the Americans to their fate. Perfect. I might not even need Lorenzo’s hostages.
“Fuck!” The rage in the American’s voice was palpable.
You shouldn’t have crossed me. Now I’m going to kill you and drag your corpses by their heels through the streets of San Tabal.
All thought of his plan to draw the Americans out and make them waste their ammunition supplies vanished in a wave of eagerness and bloodlust. “Suppressing fire! Get in there and finish them off!”
***
Brannigan paused as he topped the ridge, panting and soaked in sweat. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep—they hadn’t eaten or had much water in a while, either.
He turned back, peering through the trees, then scanned the slope below them. The sun was up, but the vegetation was still thick enough that it was hard to see more than a couple of yards. Flanagan and Wade joined him.
“Curtis missed his calling. He should be an actor.” Wade sank to a knee, bracing his other foot against a tree. The slope was fairly steep there. “Think we’re far enough outside the cordon?”
“We’ll see.” Brannigan kept it short. “Keep low. Move fast.”
Flanagan nodded and turned east, paralleling the ridgeline above and slipping through the vegetation as quickly and quietly as the terrain allowed.
***
Curtis turned back down the slope, leaning into his Negev and sighting through the open door. Down in the prone, he found himself in a similar situation to the one Wade had faced earlier. The angle of the terraces and the slope meant that he didn’t have a great shot.
“That was convincing.” Pacheco was on the other side of the door, barricaded on the jamb and watching the Green Shirts moving down below.
“Well, I can’t say I’m all that happy about being the sacrificial lamb.” Curtis grimaced and got up on a knee, jamming one of the Negev’s bipods against the doorjamb to brace the gun. Now he could see the enemy. Which meant he could hit the enemy. “Just ‘cause I’m short. Fuckers.”
“It does mean that we have a machinegun here in the house, so I am not going to complain.” Pacheco craned his neck to see a little better, and then ducked as a renewed storm of machinegun fire hammered the house from below. “Especially since they haven’t hesitated to take advantage of the situation we just played out for them.” He looked over his shoulder, and Curtis followed his gaze. They had about half a dozen men with rifles, with about three magazines left for each.
Hurry up, Colonel.
***
Flanagan had gotten about fifty yards before he had to stop, freezing in place and slowly easing himself down to the ground. He couldn’t see the enemy yet, but he could hear low voices speaking Spanish and the crunch of footsteps in the undergrowth.
There hadn’t been time to warn the others, but Brannigan had still been within line of sight, so Flanagan had to trust that they’d taken cover as well. He peered over his rifle’s sights as he listened to the Green Shirts get closer.
He had no doubt that these were, in fact, Green Shirts. After what had alrea
dy happened on the other side of the ridge, there was no way that any of the locals would be stupid enough to get this close to Galán’s farm before things quieted down.
Flanagan had seen some pretty insane things in warzones over the years, but it still seemed unlikely.
Ideally, they would have kept pushing, getting more distance from the farmhouse before circling around to hit the Green Shirts from the flank. But their allies—not to mention Curtis—didn’t have that kind of time. And the deception had required the enemy to see them running, so there was no hiding the fact that they’d escaped.
The footsteps were getting closer. Flanagan gritted his teeth. Over years of combat tours and dozens of firefights, he’d never set a rifle to “auto.” Aimed fire was his preferred method of engagement. But as the Green Shirts closed the distance and he still couldn’t see them, he knew he was going to have to break his own rule.
Flipping the selector to “A,” he leveled the rifle at about knee height. The Green Shirts were only a handful of yards away.
Pulling the stock firmly back into his shoulder to control the recoil, he opened fire. The Galil shredded the vegetation in front of him with a chattering, rattling roar, slightly higher-pitched and faster than an AK.
Bullets chopped into flesh and bone, barely three yards away. Screams erupted, nearly drowned out by the rifle’s reports, and at least one body went tumbling down the hill. Flanagan caught a glimpse of the falling man as he ceased fire, the body fetching up against a tree trunk with a sickening crunch.
At least one was still moaning and screaming in pain just ahead. Flanagan rose to a knee as Brannigan moved past him, a little higher up the hillside. The terrain was pretty restrictive, which meant that this fight was going to get really interesting, really fast.
Brannigan fired a burst of his own at something or someone ahead in the trees Flanagan couldn’t see. He tried to dash forward, but almost lost his footing as the rock underfoot rolled away down the slope as he put his boot on it with the next step.
I hate the jungle. He caught himself, keeping his rifle up and ready, and scrambled a little higher, his muzzle tracking in on the groans.
Three bodies were crumpled on the hillside just ahead, two obviously dead and the third not long for the world. The screams and moans were fading, and the dying man’s breathing was getting faster and shallower as he bled out. Flanagan moved close enough to kick the M16 away from the man’s limp hands, but the dying man didn’t even seem to notice. He let out a last, gurgling rattle of breath, and died.
But then something else moved up ahead, thrashing through the brush.
Flanagan hesitated just long enough to confirm that it wasn’t Brannigan. The big man was still up above him, braced against a tree, searching for targets over his sights. Whoever was out there was not a friendly, and was coming closer.
As much as he hated engaging what he couldn’t see, the rules of jungle warfare were unforgiving. He leveled his Galil and ripped off the last of the magazine, holding the barrel down as he pinned the trigger to the rear. The muzzle flash flickered and stuttered as he raked the hillside with 5.56 fire, shredding more vegetation, spitting splinters and bits of bark off tree boles, and tearing holes through the next couple of Green Shirts who were rushing toward the screams.
The rifle clicked. Like the Kalashnikov it was partially based on, the Galil didn’t have a bolt hold-open. He ripped the mag out, let it fall, and rocked in another, racking the bolt as Brannigan opened fire up above him, and Burgess pushed up downhill to his right.
Flanagan kept moving. The hillside was almost too steep to move from tree to tree, but he did the best he could.
He found the bodies in another few steps. They must have been moving close to each other. He’d taken both with one burst. One lay with puckered, red-soaked holes in his shirt tracking from his armpit up to his clavicle. The other had taken the last of the rounds through the throat and face.
Both were still twitching, but they weren’t breathing anymore.
Gunfire roared and thundered on the other side of the ridge, but the Blackhearts didn’t encounter any more Green Shirts as they swept along the military crest. It seemed like Curtis and their local allies were keeping the enemy’s attention.
Now they just had to move fast enough to keep their friends from being slaughtered. The weight of numbers was still on the Green Shirts’ side.
They pushed another hundred yards before turning back up toward the top of the ridgeline. It took longer than it felt like it should—the terrain and the jungle were implacable enemies. But by the time they came over the ridge, they were clear of the beaten zone centered on the beleaguered house.
The jungle was a hell of an obstacle, but in this case, it also worked in their favor. Brannigan signaled to spread out, and a ragged skirmish line with Bianco at the far left—closest to the house—descended toward the enemy that was pouring fire at their friends, still concealed and undetected.
The Blackhearts held their fire at first, as they got closer and closer. It wasn’t hard to find the Green Shirts—they were advancing toward the house, standing up and pouring fire into the rapidly-disintegrating cinderblock. The noise alone was enough to guide the mercenaries in.
Finally, Brannigan passed the nod. Bianco opened up first. The others joined in a split second later.
It wasn’t a Mad Minute. They didn’t have the ammo for that. It was more like a Mad Ten Seconds. But that ten seconds of hell did the trick.
The entire skirmish line opened up on the Green Shirts’ flank from about ten yards away, pouring a total of a couple hundred rounds into the remaining fifteen or so Green Shirts that had just reached the edge of the cleared yard around the house. Muzzle blasts spat thin smoke and flame and bullets turned leaves into flying green confetti before smashing through guts, ribs, lungs, hearts, throats, and skulls. Galvez’s assault force was torn to bloody, rapidly cooling meat in a matter of seconds, the bodies collapsing and falling on top of each other as bullets passed through one man and into another.
Then they drove past the bodies and through the jungle, staying clear of the open ground, Javakhishvili, Brannigan, and Jenkins reloading as they went.
They continued to sweep down the east side, staying in the jungle. Ahead, Flanagan thought he heard someone thrashing through the brush, but the sounds were receding, not advancing.
The fire from the base of the hill, on the road, had slackened somewhat, possibly due to shock as the Green Shirts on the gun trucks realized that their maneuver element had just been wiped out in a handful of seconds. Either that, or at least two of their up-guns had gone dry at the same time, and they were reloading.
The downhill slope helped the rapidity of the Blackhearts’ advance, to the point that Hank and Jenkins both started to outrun the rest of the skirmish line and had to dial it back.
Brannigan signaled again, pointing to the southeast. They needed to move to the right a little farther. They wouldn’t do anything for their besieged comrades if they got flanked. So, they pushed out farther, making damned good and sure they were outside of any cordon the Green Shirts had gotten in place before sunrise.
The jungle, of course, fought them every step of the way. And the terrain wasn’t great, either. Soon Flanagan noticed that they were getting crowded back toward the west and the cornfields, by a combination of thicker and thicker vegetation and the increasingly broken terrain. Galán’s farm was apparently bordered on the east by a sharp finger with an even deeper draw on the other side. And that finger was a tangled mess of vines, undergrowth, and tight stands of trees.
Of course, that probably meant that the Green Shirts hadn’t penetrated far to the east, either.
He heard voices ahead, but it took a second to realize that one of them was someone down on the road yelling at the half-dozen men in the jungle, much closer and driving uphill. That realization hit almost at the same time he came out of some denser undergrowth and almost ran into the Green Shirt out on their l
eft flank.
Fortunately, Flanagan was already on the hunt, his rifle held ready and off safe. The Green Shirt was puffing, his G3 held in slack hands, his head down as he struggled through the vegetation and up the hill.
He never had a chance.
Flanagan had left his Galil’s selector on “A,” just because of the short sightlines and the need for a glorified brush-cutter in close-in jungle combat. But with his muzzle barely three feet from his opponent, all it took was a single stroke of the trigger. The shot was deafeningly loud—not because it was any louder than the rest of the firefight that had gone down already, but simply because nobody had been expecting it right then and there.
And it cored out the Green Shirt’s heart. He crumpled where he was as Flanagan shifted toward the dim figure just beyond him, letting rip with another long, roaring burst into the weeds.
He’d moved out to the flank, probing the bush along the steep finger to their right, so he was on the outer flank. And when he opened fire, the rest of the Blackhearts did, too. More bullets swept through the jungle in a scythe of death that tore through flesh as easily as vegetation.
Bianco held his fire. He was waiting for more important targets. And this little skirmish was over quickly.
“Up!” Brannigan had just reloaded, but that wasn’t the only reason he called out. They had to push. Speed and ferocious violence were their only hope at this point. Flanagan drove forward, still careful to watch his flank and any bit of cover he could see ahead of him, while maintaining the line with Gomez on his left.
They swept down through the last bit of jungle and burst out onto the road with a stuttering storm of gunfire. Three more Green Shirts went down, sprawled in their own blood on the road.
Two more had ducked behind the rear gun truck and tried to return fire, but they were shooting blind around the taillight and over the bed, while the gunner tried to swivel around to bring his M60 to bear. Bianco was ahead of him though, and blasted him onto his ass in the bed, his torso ripped open and blood splashed against the shattered glass of the truck’s rear window.
