by Peter Nealen
He wasn’t inclined to go in that way. If he’d had his way, and a platoon of Rangers with him, he’d hit the wall with a Carl Gustaf and go in through the hole. But he didn’t have a Carl G, or a breaching charge, or even a satchel of C4 or Semtex. He didn’t even have any grenades. For whatever reason, the Green Shirts they’d looted after the killing out on the farm hadn’t had any explosives on them. It had seemed weird to him, but they had to make do with what they had, which wasn’t much.
Wade’s icy blue eyes scanned the street and the intersecting alleyways, looking for a solution. Going over was a possibility, but that barbed wire was going to present a problem, and without a serious base of fire to keep the bad guys inside pinned down, they’d get slaughtered as they climbed over.
Then his eyes lit on a big panel truck parked just down the street, before moving to the T-intersection almost directly across from the gate. He had an idea…
***
Flanagan was taking a somewhat different tack to Wade’s. He was still moving through the streets as quietly and stealthily as he could, but he only had Gomez, Curtis, and Hank with him. Pacheco and his handful of San Tabal police had split off early, rounding up more volunteers. They would stage around the plaza, waiting for the signal to move in.
Flanagan and his element would provide that signal. Mainly when the shooting started.
The mayor’s mansion and the central plaza were in the middle of the old part of town, most of which was surprisingly open, though not as affluent as some of the old colonial plantation towns. The buildings were mostly solid and well-built, but they were showing their age. The plaster was cracking or chipped off entirely, a few of the roofing tiles had fallen to the street. A few trees grew in pots on the sidewalk, but the place wasn’t exactly landscaped.
Somewhat to his surprise, given what Quintana and Lara had said about the Green Shirts’ terror campaign, Flanagan didn’t see bodies hanging from lampposts or lying in the streets. That must have happened elsewhere in the city.
It could be surprising, sometimes, how little it takes to terrorize a population that isn’t prepared to fight back.
The four Blackhearts had a straight shot at the low wall that surrounded the loading area at the back of the house, leading into the service entrance. Flanagan looked around at the others, who were all on security, watching the roofs and windows above as well as the alleyway behind them. “Ready?”
He got three nods. “Let’s go.”
Almost as one, the four of them got to their feet and dashed for the wall. Speed was now their security.
The wall itself only stood about four feet high, almost more of a fence than a wall. Rifles snapped to either side as they crossed the street on the way toward the rear of the mansion, but there was no opposition out on the streets.
Inside, however…
Glass shattered as gunfire roared out from the second floor. A voice was raised in alarm as bullets snapped over the Blackhearts’ heads, the shooter not quite leading them enough. The rounds kicked dirt and fragments of the pavement into the air behind them.
The four of them flattened themselves against the wall, weapons out and up, Curtis leaning out just far enough to return fire, smacking plaster, glass, and bits of window frame back in the shooter’s face. The incoming fire died away.
Flanagan had paused at the base of the wall for only a second. He popped up, cleared the loading area with his muzzle, and then vaulted the wall, almost kicking Hank in the head—the younger man had taken cover a little too close. Gomez was right behind him.
The two of them held on the service entrance and the single window next to it just long enough for Hank and Bianco to get over and join them. Then they were moving on the door.
The window was dark on the other side, but that didn’t mean much, so they were all careful not to silhouette themselves as they passed. That meant some creative movement, but they were at the door in a second. Curtis stepped out, kicked in the door, then turned out of the way as Gomez, Flanagan, and Hank rolled in.
They entered into a darkened kitchen, with a large storage room immediately off to the left. Both were currently deserted, but Flanagan could hear shouts and footsteps from upstairs. Between the fire from the window and the crash of the door getting kicked in, the Green Shirts in the house knew they had to counterattack quickly.
Flanagan and Hank had gone left, while Gomez had gone right, Curtis flowing in behind them to take up security on the door itself. His Negev would be of only limited use inside—they had no intention of just mowing down everyone in the house—but he couldn’t just stay outside, either.
Boots clattered on the stairs nearby, and Flanagan turned to train his weapon on the door as a silhouette with a rifle in his hands appeared in it.
The Green Shirt clearly hadn’t been trained. He came through the door alone, and with his rifle still pointed off to one side.
Better than if he just came in spraying, but too bad for him.
Flanagan and Gomez both shot the Green Shirt at almost the same moment. He stopped dead in his tracks as the 5.56 rounds tore through his torso, then Gomez’s follow up shot snapped his head back and he collapsed in the doorway.
If any more of his compatriots had been following him in, they changed their minds really quick. The door stayed open and empty, and the thunder of the reports had deadened the Blackhearts’ hearing enough that Flanagan couldn’t be sure if he heard movement on the other side or not.
He didn’t want to risk going through that doorway, though. If there were Green Shirts on the other side, they were probably crouched down as close to the near wall as possible, their weapons pointed right at the door.
Keeping his Galil trained on the open door for as long as he could, Flanagan turned and stepped through the door into the storage room, pivoting to clear the corner as he did so, then sweeping back as Hank followed him through. The shelves were stacked, and there were all too many hiding places where a Green Shirt could be crouched weapon pointed and waiting, but no targets immediately presented themselves.
With a nod to Hank, he started to move up, Galil held ready, careful to check each angle as he moved through the standing shelves, stacked with boxes of every foodstuff that had probably come into San Tabal since just before the coup. As per, the Communist revolutionaries would eat like kings, while the people they were supposedly “liberating” struggled and starved.
History might not quite repeat itself, but it sure comes close.
The two of them reached the end of the rows of shelves, and found another door leading deeper into the house. It was still closed, but they moved quickly toward it, Hank covering the door while Flanagan reached for the doorknob.
He wondered a little that no more Green Shirts had tried to make entry through that door to flank them. They had to know the layout of the mansion by then. While there hadn’t been much evidence that these thugs ever really trained or drilled, by the time they knew that the resistance was coming for them, they had to have figured out that some kind of preparation was needed.
But the answer reached his ears a moment later, as he grasped the doorknob and threw the door open. The sound was a bit muffled, but just then a storm of gunfire erupted out by the front, near the plaza.
The local volunteers had arrived and were attacking the mansion. Clemente was probably throwing every remaining Green Shirt he had at the front door.
Hank went through the door, going right. Flanagan went left.
The Green Shirts had fallen back to the corner of the hallway, all the way to the left, and barricaded on the corner itself. Muzzle flashes flickered in Flanagan’s face, but he was moving fast, dashing toward the corner and pivoting as he went, already answering the Green Shirts with a devastating storm of rapid fire, bullets chewing into the plaster and forcing them back, as he hoped that he was fast enough to keep Hank from getting shot in the back of the head.
***
Wade was starting to feel the urgency. He could hear the sho
oting down by the plaza and the mansion. Flanagan had already opened the ball. The Green Shirts in the police station were going to be even more alert now. But it had taken some time to get that big truck around the block and pointed at the gate. They’d taken some sporadic fire from the upper windows, but nothing accurate enough to worry about.
The Green Shirts knew what was coming. Or at least they thought they did.
Wade made sure the truck was aimed about as well as it could be, put it in gear and sent it surging toward the gate as he made himself as small as possible behind the engine block. If he’d had any other option, he’d have tried to wedge the accelerator and bail, but there wasn’t time, and there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t have swerved off course or simply stalled out. So, he was riding this train all the way to the end of the line.
Bullets smacked into the hood and the windshield. Glass rained down on him, and then the truck hit the gate.
The impact was brutal. Even braced as he was, he was thrown against the steering wheel as the shock slammed his teeth together painfully. For a moment, he couldn’t be sure if it had worked, or if he’d just put himself in the middle of a catastrophic vehicular accident for nothing.
But while he stomped on the gas and the engine roared, something creaked, groaned, then shrieked horribly and the truck suddenly surged forward, bouncing up and over as the gate was torn off its hinges and the bar holding it closed broke. The gate folded inward and the truck slanted upward as it went over the broken barrier, then one of the front tires dropped over the edge and stuck. More bullets poured into the front of the truck, but the engine block was absorbing most of the punishment. For the moment.
He kicked the driver’s side door open and bailed, dragging his Galil with him, hoping that Bianco hadn’t picked that side to lay down covering fire.
He hadn’t. The Negev opened up on the other side of the cab, hammering the front of the police station with bullets, as Wade dove for the dubious cover of one of the handful of green and white Toyota Hiluxes parked against the wall. He waited for more fire to reach out to punch through the flimsy body of the pickup, but Bianco was playing his Negev like a concert pianist, moving from window to window, putting a burst through each seemingly at random. He wasn’t wasting ammo on the wall. Every round was calculated to keep the Green Shirts’ heads down.
Taking a split second to catch his breath, Wade got his feet under him and checked that the rest of his assault force had come through the gate. Burgess and Jenkins had led their recruits along the wall, protected from the police station itself, while Wade and Bianco had gotten the truck ready. Now they were moving through the wrecked gateway, picking their way over the smashed, twisted ruin of the gate itself and squeezing between the wall—and the jagged remnants of the hinges—and the side of the truck. The truck itself had come to rest at a bit of an angle to the police station, so it provided some cover.
Wade got Jenkins’ attention. He’d have preferred Burgess, Flanagan, or Gomez, but Jenkins was there, and he’d have to do. “On me.” Getting to his feet, he sprinted across the dirt parking lot toward the front door.
Bianco saw him move and shifted fire to the windows on the right. Unfortunately, that meant that one of the Green Shirts on the left stuck his head up, saw the figures in tiger stripe cammies running toward the front door, and sprayed fire out through the shattered window.
Fortunately, he wasn’t exactly aiming, and his position wasn’t great, either. The muzzle climbed fast, the bullets quickly drilling holes in the sky. He stopped shooting altogether as Wade put a burst through the window on the move. It wasn’t accurate by any means, but it did what it was meant to do.
Then he was at the door. He didn’t bother trying to stack up, even though Jenkins was still a pace or two behind him. He just lowered his shoulder and hit it like a battering ram.
The realization that this could be a really bad idea if the door was barred or otherwise barricaded hit just before he did. But the Green Shirts had apparently been banking on terror, firepower, and the barred front gate to protect them. The door splintered and slammed inward.
Wade had overbalanced a little, and he went down on one shoulder as he went through the door. FuckfuckfuckfuckFUCK! He rolled to one side as he tried to kick his way out of the doorway, searching for targets and hoping he could kill them faster than they could turn to engage him.
A Green Shirt was crouched beneath the window right in front of him as he rolled to his right, trying to stay out of Bianco’s line of fire, and they locked eyes for a second. The Green Shirt looked older than Wade would have expected. He was a grizzled indio who might have been anywhere from his mid-forties to his early sixties. At a glance, Wade realized that the Green Shirt might have been doing this almost as long as he had.
But the Green Shirt was no Ranger. He had crouched down as far as he could get as Bianco’s machinegun fire scattered broken glass and smashed plaster over him, and his M16 was pointed at the ceiling.
Wade’s Galil was already pointed almost directly at his heart.
He hadn’t taken the selector off “A” when he’d gone through the door. The five-round burst tore the Green Shirt open from his belly button to his face, the last round punching through his eye and tearing out the back of his skull in a spray of red.
More gunfire thundered behind and above him, and brass rained down on his back where he lay on the floor.
Then he was rolling out of the way, onto his stomach, as more of the San Tabal irregulars flooded through the doorway, shooting at anything that moved.
***
Flanagan was committed, rounding the corner with his weapon up, dumping the last of his magazine into the three or four Green Shirts huddled behind the corner itself. Bullets thudded into flesh as his momentum carried him past the corner and up against the opposite wall. The Green Shirts tried to pivot to follow him, but the closest was already dying, and the other two couldn’t move fast enough, especially as the dying man slumped back against them.
With that short window of hesitation, Flanagan quickly hammered controlled pairs into each before finishing them off with headshots as they staggered back against the wall. The three of them slid down toward the floor in eerie synchronization, leaving a broad smear of red against the white plaster.
He shifted his eyes to check on Hank, only able to spare a glance. He was exposed as hell to the whole corridor, but it was otherwise empty for the moment.
The younger Brannigan was fine. He was still up, his rifle held ready, as Gomez moved to join Flanagan. “Junior, Gambler, bring it in.” They couldn’t afford to get separated at the moment.
Pacheco entered next at the head of a handful of San Tabal police. They took the other side of the corridor as the Blackhearts headed up the one Flanagan had covered.
***
By the time Wade had regained his feet, gunfire was thundering through the entire police station. It wasn’t a large building—the irregulars had moved fast. He could only imagine the pent-up bloodlust after being forced to cower at the feet of these Communist thugs for weeks. With Jenkins and Burgess in tow, Bianco holding on the door with a couple of the irregulars and Fuentes, he pushed toward the police commander’s office.
He remembered a time when he would have been worried about the locals just killing everyone inside. Not that he’d ever particularly cared on a personal level. But his position would have demanded that he keep the regulars and irregulars under his command under control. Now? Now the only reason he didn’t want the irregulars to slaughter every Green Shirt in the building was just because he wanted a few more to add to his tally.
The commander’s office was on the second floor. The ground floor had gone quiet—Green Shirt bodies were strewn on the floors of the offices and the jail post, along with several of the locals. The Green Shirts had gone down fighting, but they’d been killed, nevertheless. After what they’d done in San Tabal, there would be no quarter.
While the ground floor was quiet, gunf
ire thundered and roared upstairs. Somebody up there was putting up a hell of a fight. Pulverized concrete and plaster rained down from the impacts on the wall over the middle of the stairs.
Wade ducked under the shower of debris and slowed as he neared the top of the stairs. He didn’t want to go charging out into the open before he knew what he was facing. That was a good way to get shot. He was aggressive, not stupid.
The landing opened onto a T-shaped hallway that led to the commandant’s office. Given how small the station was, and the fact that the stairs only went up one flight, instead of turning and going up for two, with a landing halfway up, he found himself at the top of the stairs, and covered from the raging automatic gunfire pouring down the hallway and hammering into the rapidly eroding wall.
Burgess was with him as he moved to the corner, but both Blackhearts stayed back, out of the hallway. They didn’t have long to wait.
Wade hadn’t been entirely sure that there was only one shooter. But when the gunfire fell silent without being immediately picked up by a second shooter, he moved.
Barreling around the corner, Wade charged the commandant’s office. He heard Burgess curse behind him, but the former SEAL was right on his heels a moment later, as he went through the door like a freight train.
The Green Shirt was crouched behind the desk, cursing in Spanish as he tried to reload his AK. Wade had cleared his corner in an eyeblink—just in case—before pivoting back toward the desk and quickly stepping around. He locked eyes with the Green Shirt for a split second as his Galil came level. The man was still trying to get the mag locked in.
Wade shot him three times through the heart. The Galil’s reports were painfully loud in the small office, and the bullets smashed the man back against the commandant’s leather-upholstered chair. He stayed upright for a second before he crumpled, his head bouncing off the edge of the desk with a clunk.
The police station was clear.
***
Flanagan and the rest cleared the mansion room by room, careful to communicate with Pacheco as they moved. There was definitely some risk that they’d give their progress away to the enemy, but with the locals going the opposite direction through the house, they couldn’t afford to lose track of each other. That was a good way to get a friendly killed. Or a lot of friendlies.
