Since this had taken place within the jurisdiction Keith and Greg were sworn to protect and serve, the attack couldn’t be ignored. Eric couldn’t stand by while his brother took such a risk, and neither could their father, Bart, so the four of them went together to investigate. They came prepared for a fight, of course, and given their recent experiences, Eric and his companions had foreseen the possibility of an ambush. That was why they had parked out of sight of the first house in the area and made their final approach on foot. Eric had taken point after studying the ditch that bisected the open field between them and the house, and it was his initial move towards its cover that drew the first fire from the waiting gunmen.
As far as Eric could tell, all of the shooting was coming from the one house. The vehicles reported by the witness weren’t in sight, and nothing else was moving in the rest of the neighborhood. Even so, Eric knew it was possible the men in the house had companions nearby, and he had no desire to give them time to join the fight. That made it necessary to quickly flank and kill those inside so they could better assess the situation and determine what they were dealing with. It was the kind of work that was always risky, but unless they did it, there was no point in being there at all, and Eric was ready to proceed without hesitation. With the intel he already had, it was no stretch to assume that this raid was just the vanguard of what was coming. And from what he knew of that, he doubted this was another random gang of looters. It was far more likely the attackers were either C.R.I. mercs or hired enforcers from the cartels affiliated with them. He knew both organizations had joint plans to sweep into the area from Texas, and this raid likely meant the operation was now underway. Fighting them wasn’t part of Eric’s plan, but like so many times before, he was caught up in the action despite his resolve to leave war in his past. Eric had lost count of the firefights he’d been involved in since his return to his home country to find Megan. The United States was no longer united nor recognizable, and even though he’d found her, he still hadn’t managed to get his daughter to a place of real safety. Something was always blocking his path, and right now, it was this group of barricaded gunmen that Eric intended to eliminate in short order.
He couldn’t complete that job from where he was though, so as soon as the initial exchange of gunfire died down to sporadic shooting, Eric was moving forward. The narrow ditch was barely deep enough to conceal his approach if he remained completely prone as he slithered through the mud, but it was enough, and the best part was that it ran in the right direction, at an angle that would take him closer to his objective and allow him to set up a crossfire opposite Keith and Greg. Eric followed it for a good 200 feet until it ended at the confluence with a slightly deeper drainage ditch running parallel to the main road. A short crawl in the bottom of that one brought him to the entrance to a culvert that went under the road. It was the only reasonable route he could see from the cover of the woods where he’d left Keith and Greg. Everything else was a wide-open field between there and the house, but if this worked, he could close the gap and engage his targets from an unexpected direction.
The dark, concrete culvert was anything but inviting, but Eric was relieved to find that it was indeed big enough to squeeze through. Slimy with algae and stinking of stagnant water, the inside of the pipe was no doubt home to spiders and other unpleasant creatures, but at least he could see enough daylight streaming into it from the other end to assure him that it came out on the other side of the road. Eric pushed his rifle ahead of him and wormed into the opening on his elbows and knees without further hesitation. He’d crawled through tunnels fouler than this one in other lands, some of them actual sewers, and he was certainly no stranger to working in low visibility, claustrophobic spaces. The trick was to push the unpleasantness out of mind and focus solely on the task at hand; which was simply to reach the other end.
Even though the gunshots from outside were muffled while he was in the culvert, Eric could tell that Keith and Greg were keeping enough pressure on the occupants of the house to keep them inside. From in there, they could see nothing of the ditch or culvert, and if he timed his next move well, they wouldn’t see him leave it either. When he’d first noticed the ditch and contemplated its usefulness, Eric had noted an abandoned convenience store just across the road near the spot he would exit the culvert. The building had long since been looted and burned out, but that was irrelevant to Eric. What caught his eye was the standalone self-service car wash at the edge of the parking lot, just a short distance from the road. The low walls dividing the three separate bays were built of concrete block and brick veneer, and were oriented at the correct angle to provide good cover from the direction he could expect return fire once he engaged his adversaries from that quarter. It wasn’t perfect, but shooting from there would give him a line of fire that Eric hoped would enable him to take out some of the enemy while simultaneously creating a diversion that would let Keith work his way around to the opposite side. Bart and Greg would hold tight where they were and prevent anyone inside the house from trying to rush either Eric or Keith. It was a workable plan, especially if Eric could take out some of them before they realized what was happening.
When he emerged from the other end of the culvert, he brought his M4 back around to ready and grabbed the small handheld VHF radio clipped to his belt. These portable two-way units collected from their various boats were the only hand-held comms they had available, but they were fine for the purpose, as the marine band wasn’t likely to be monitored by land-based threats and it provided a wide selection of channels from which to choose. Eric had no intention of getting chatty regardless, and after checking that the unit was on the pre-agreed channel, he pressed the transmit button just long enough to give Keith the one-word signal that he was now in position on the other side of the road. The desired result was almost immediate. Keith and Greg switched from their sporadic semi-auto harassment fire to a more intense tempo of alternating three-round bursts. The purpose, of course, was to keep heads and eyes down and give Eric a chance to move, and that’s exactly what he did. The sprint from the ditch to the carwash was over in seconds, and he made it to the safety of its walls without drawing any fire. He knew Keith and Greg had seen him though, because as soon as he was in position, their firing ceased altogether. And that too was part of the plan. Eric hoped the shooters in the house would think those full-auto bursts were simply fired in frustration as the deputies called it off to fall back and withdraw from the fight. If the enemy fell for it, some of them might break cover and exit the house, giving Eric easy targets from his new, more advantageous angle.
Eric spotted movement through the open blinds of a side window and centered the red dot of his Aimpoint on a man who was pacing back and forth inside, waving a pistol in one hand while apparently in conversation with someone else in the same room that Eric couldn’t see. Eric could have taken him out then and there, but he wanted to wait for an opportunity to get more than just one of them when he gave away his position with gunfire. And although his focus was primarily on that first house, Eric was also paying attention to the adjacent homes and lawns and the vacant lots between them, as he knew the men inside were part of a larger group that could still be in the vicinity or could return at any moment. A quick scan from his new position revealed no live threats that he could see, but Eric was anxious to clear the house quickly, before that changed, and a moment later, he got his opportunity.
The man in the window was still exposed, oblivious to the fact that he was as good as dead as long as he remained there. But a new movement near the back of the house drew Eric’s attention there, where he spotted two men crouching behind the big azalea bushes that formed a dense hedgerow leading out to the perimeter of the property. Eric smiled, knowing the two had slipped out the back door and were now planning to use the cover of the vegetation to keep themselves out of sight of the road and field out front while circling around to the wooded area from where the deputies had been firing. And while it was true that the b
ushes hid them from view in that direction, and from Bart’s riflescope, they couldn’t possibly know that they were just as exposed to Eric’s new position as their companion in the window. Eric was prone behind one end of the carwash wall, the forward rail of his rifle braced against the brick as he swept the muzzle back in line with the window. The second the dot was on target; Eric squeezed off his first round.
The man inside wasn’t wearing obvious body armor and Eric’s first round through the glass would have been enough to drop him in his tracks, but since he was aiming center of mass rather than taking a head shot, Eric made it a fast double-tap just to be sure. Then he shifted his focus back to the two behind the bushes, cutting them down with several rounds of rapid semi-auto fire as they scrambled to find hard cover in a place where only barely adequate concealment could be had. Both were out of the fight before they could discern where the shooting was coming from, and Eric withdrew behind the wall momentarily to wait and see if anyone remaining in the house had pinpointed his location. The answer came in the form of a sustained full auto burst at the unmistakable rate of fire of an AK-47. The heavy steel-jacketed bullets chewed away chunks of brick from the front of the wall that shielded him and ricocheted across the empty parking lot, some of them slamming into the metal siding of the abandoned convenience store.
Eric was safe where he was for the moment and decided not to move again until Keith was in place to turn on some heat from the other side. Eric grabbed the radio and cranked the volume to ten, placing it on the concrete beside him as he waited on his brother’s signal. If he had brought along a grenade launcher, he could finish this business then and there, but while they still had a couple of them in their arsenal, they were unfortunately both aboard the Miss Anita, anchored miles away at the dead lake where they’d hidden her. There had been no time to go by there on the way here, so all he could do was wait for Keith to either get a clear shot from the opposite side or create enough of a distraction to allow him to leave cover and make a dash for his side of the house. Whatever it took, they would finish the job, but Eric knew that what happened here today was about to change everything, and he just had to shake his head at the thought. Sometimes it seemed as if the entire universe was conspiring against any possibility that he would ever leave behind this line of work he’d apparently been born for.
* * *
If not for an abrupt interruption that very morning, Eric might have had Dreamtime off the bottom of the bayou behind Keith’s property by the end of the day. He’d nearly wrapped up the underwater prep work the day before by securing in and around the submerged hull all of the inner tubes and other inflatable devices he and Keith had been able to scrounge from nearby St. Martinville and the surrounding area. There was no way of knowing if these would be enough to create positive buoyancy until they were all fully inflated, but Eric hoped to gain enough lift to allow them to begin pumping the vessel dry. It was the end of the first phase of the salvage operation, after days of preparation and gathering what they needed.
Most of that work involved feeling for all the through-hull hoses Daniel had sliced in two and closing the seacocks they were attached to, as well as making sure there were no other breaches or openings in the hull below the waterline. None of this was easy, of course, working in muddy brown water where the visibility was practically zero. Eric did it all by feel, knowing full well what he was getting into from the moment he determined the cause of the sinking. He was the only experienced diver in the group, so it took much longer than he would have liked, but Eric insisted on working alone.
“You know I’m a good swimmer, dude!” Jonathan had argued. “You saw it when we ran aground down at the mouth of the river and I helped you set those anchors.”
“Working underwater out in an open river is one thing; entering a submerged structure is another thing altogether. All it takes is one wrong move to hit your head on something, or to get a hand or foot hung up somewhere, and it’s all over, kid. There’s nothing more dangerous than diving in an overhead environment, much less free diving in one with zero visibility.”
Eric wasn’t exaggerating the danger. Even with his vast experience, the risk of working by feel inside the boat with only the air he could hold in his lungs was considerable, despite the fact that the schooner was only under a few feet of water. Eric had lost a close friend to a recreational cave diving accident many years prior; a friend who’d also been a fellow SEAL team member who knew exactly what he was doing, yet still made a fatal mistake. It was just all too easy to drown inside an enclosed space where one couldn’t simply head for the surface in an emergency.
The underwater work was a challenge, but Eric Branson knew the interior of the schooner intimately after making the Gulf passage and living aboard her for days at a time. He already knew the through hull fittings were the most likely intrusion points whether the sinking was accidental or deliberate, because the heavy welded aluminum hull was unlikely to be damaged while lying alongside a dock in a calm bayou. After confirming the sinking was indeed an act of sabotage, he knew Daniel would have done anything in his power to destroy the boat if he had the means, and as it was, cutting the hoses had been enough to put Dreamtime on the bottom and seriously screw up Eric’s plans. Daniel had been thorough and had gotten them all. And to make it worse, each of them was cleanly-severed a few inches from the seacock it connected to, just far enough that there wasn’t enough slack to simply reconnect them. This wasn’t as big an issue as the idiot had probably hoped though, because Eric already knew there was enough spare hose of the required sizes stored in the bottom of one of the under-bunk lockers. Replacing them all was still an aggravation, but that could wait until later, after the hull was afloat and pumped dry.
The bigger aggravation was that it had taken them days after Daniel’s cowardly act just to get to this stage because of the difficulty of procuring all the things they needed. Daniel had stolen Greg’s patrol truck and left Lynn’s Jeep with two shot-out tires. But despite his anger, Eric had to smile at the man’s incompetence at even something so simple as disabling a vehicle. Daniel apparently didn’t notice the spare wheel mounted prominently on the rear gate, nor did he think to diversify the damage to other systems by putting a few rounds through the radiator or fuel tank. The second flat did buy him enough time to put some miles behind him and probably reach the state line though, which was likely all he was thinking of. Daniel didn’t know it, but Eric had little interest in pursuing him, despite the theft of the gold. He knew full well it would be hard to restrain himself if he laid hands on the man after what he’d done to Dreamtime and hurting him or worse wouldn’t sit well with Shauna, not to mention his kid, Andrew. Besides, Daniel would fall into the hands of C.R.I. contractors as soon as he reached Texas, and Eric knew he would be searched when he encountered the first checkpoint there. He would be relieved of the stolen patrol truck and weapons, along with the little stash of gold. It sucked to lose so much of his dwindling supply of that valuable commodity, but Eric knew any hope of retrieving it was probably futile. He was done with fighting and wanted no part of what was happening in Texas. He knew it would soon be happening here too and getting out before it did was the best and only option, as far as Eric Branson was concerned. But he still hadn’t convinced his younger brother of that truth.
“The United States as we knew it no longer exists,” Eric told him, during one of their many discussions on the topic since he’d returned from out West. He knew it was hard for his brother to fathom, and Eric could scarcely believe he was uttering those words himself. But he’d seen enough in the course of this career to recognize the collapse of a nation when he saw it. The country he and Keith had served wasn’t coming back, at least not in the form they remembered.
“You may be right, but I’d rather go down fighting for it than run away to someplace else. And I’m pretty sure Dad feels the same way.”
“I understand, Keith. You lost your wife, your brother-in-law, your boss and most of your friend
s in the department. But staying here to die isn’t the only option. Maybe it’s better to live to fight another day, when the odds are better.”
“And it’s because of all I lost that I have nothing left to lose, Eric. I understand your position. You’ve got a daughter, and now it appears you have your wife back as well. I’m no longer responsible for anyone, and neither is Dad. I wish he would go with you, but I can’t tell him what to do any more than you can.”
“But you know he wouldn’t stay here if you didn’t. If he didn’t want to stay and try to defend the life he made for himself on the Caloosahatchee, he damned sure doesn’t have anything to fight for here, other than you.”
Eric knew this had pissed Keith off, because the conversation ended then and there, and it hadn’t come up again since. Further discussion could wait until the schooner was raised and ready to sail, so Eric had turned his attention to that. He needed Keith’s help and arguing with his brother wasn’t going to make the job any easier. In the days that followed, Keith and Greg did what they could to help when they weren’t making their rounds to check on their nearest neighbors. It was impossible for the two of them to patrol the entire parish though, so the first word that trouble had arrived was brought to their attention by an elderly fisherman named Henri Broussard, who lived a bit farther west in a small community just off the interstate. Henri arrived around mid-morning in his outboard skiff, the worry and terror written on his face as he began telling his story the moment he cut power to the motor.
“I had just set out walking to the bayou when they rolled in,” Henri said. That was right at first light, and if I’d left a few minutes later I would’ve been caught in the middle of it. But if I’d left sooner, I would have already been on the bayou and wouldn’t have known what happened.” Henri went on to describe the scene he’d witnessed, clearly feeling bad that he couldn’t help his neighbors and friends.
Feral Nation - Defiance (Feral Nation Series Book 8) Page 3
