by D. J. Molles
That didn’t mean that the attack on OP La Casa wasn’t a distraction from something larger. But Lee began to wrack his brain, trying to figure out what the endgame of this was. If it even was Nuevas Fronteras, what were they hoping to accomplish here?
No sooner had Tex hung up Lee’s satphone for the last time, than his own began to chirp a cheerily discordant tune. Tex opened the line and switched it to speakerphone, holding it over the center console so they could all hear.
“This is Captain Lehy. Go.”
Gunfire erupted over the speaker.
“Tex!” the voice on the other end was raised and strained, but not panicked. “You got an ETA?”
“Less than twenty out,” Tex said. “Where do you need us?”
“That depends on what you got.”
“Four vehicles. Squad of twenty.”
“You got heavy guns?”
“I got two fiddies.”
“Roger ‘at. I need ‘em in the first line of hills north of Caddo.” A brief pause as the speaker—Breckenridge, Lee assumed—fired off a volley of shots. Then there was the clatter and heavy breathing of running and repeated swearing.
Everyone in the truck sat tense and silent, listening.
Breckenridge came back: “We’re getting light contact right now, tailing us through Caddo. I think it’s recon. I got eyes in the hills and they’ve ID’d what looks like a larger force of technicals moving up seven-seventeen in pursuit. That’s the force that pushed us out of La Casa. If we can pin ‘em in the flats around Caddo, we can get enough time to get to the bunker and activate the bunker defenses. How copy?”
Tex had his eyes closed as though picturing the landscape from a map he had committed to memory. “Solid copy. Get your ass in those hills and take that high ground. Any ID on who’s coming after you?”
“No fucking clue. The technicals look like Nuevas Fronteras, so that’s my best guess.”
“What do you have on foot with you, and what do you have in the hills already?”
“I got a dozen guys that took the vehicles up into the hills. I got another two dozen on foot with me.”
Lee looked at Tex. “Can they mount a defense in Caddo to buy us time to get there?”
Tex opened his eyes. “Standby, Breck.” Then, to Lee, he shook his head. “Caddo’s not much bigger than Elbert. Just houses. They won’t be able to hold them there.” Tex’s eyes flicked to Julia, but he spoke to the satphone. “Breck, what’s your casualty situation looking like?”
“I lost ten getting out of La Casa. Packed a half-dozen wounded into the truck beds. I don’t know how they’re doing.”
“Alright, Breck, I got a good doc enroute to your boys in the hills. Stay on the line with me.”
To the background chatter of gunfire and distant shouts coming through the satphone, Tex began to coordinate, using their squad comms. Abe took charge of syncing their own squad comms to Tex’s, while Lee stayed glued to Tex and the satphone, listening for the ever-changing shift in real-time information.
A quarter of an hour evaporated in a flurry of developments that Lee could barely keep track of.
The fighting through Caddo reached a lull. Breckenridge’s men on the hillside no longer had visual contact with the larger force pursuing them northward. There was a brief respite in the gunfire and the possibility that the pursuit had ended.
Then it started up again. No less than ten technicals identified, plunging into Caddo from the south and east. A rough estimate of twenty attackers on foot. Then fifty. Then maybe a dozen. The numbers kept shifting back and forth.
Breckenridge’s base of fire from the hills north of Caddo sported only two light machine guns. At first it looked like they were going to barrage the technicals enough to push them back, but then the technicals returned fire with their own light machine guns and forced Breckenridge’s gunners to the far side of the hill to take cover.
By the time they were able to creep back up onto the ridge and get eyes on Caddo, the flats were swarming with attackers, and Breckenridge and a small fire team of five men were pinned in a ranch house at the base of the hills.
And then Tex and his convoy made its approach.
“Breck, we’re coming in now across Roger’s Lake, tell your boys not to fire, you copy?”
“Roger, relaying now. Tex, I need you to get some fucking guns on that hill so we can get out of here.”
Breckenridge’s voice still had not reached the point of panic, but there was a discernible note of anxiety to it now that hadn’t been there before.
Lee understood. He’d been pinned down himself, and very recently. It was not a good feeling.
“I’m working on it,” Tex replied. “You gotta stay alive for ten more minutes, Breck. Ten minutes.”
The first inkling that Lee had of the hills came when the giant, black humps of them suddenly rose up from the flat landscape and blotted out the deep navy sky. Thompson was still driving at breakneck speeds—hadn’t let up since they’d left the cabin. The roads were dirt, and narrow, and pitted, so that the truck rumbled violently over them and Lee felt the backend loosening and skidding when they took turns.
A narrow road appeared to their right, nothing more than twin ruts created by tires. Thompson swerved onto it, and the road tilted upward, and then they were roaring up into the hills.
Abe rolled down his window, and Lee did the same, and through the buffeting of the cool night air, they heard the rattle of machine gun fire, closer and closer.
“Julia,” Tex said. “I’m dropping you up top to work on the wounded. Lee and Abe, I want you with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going down the hill to get Breck out of that house.”
Lee glanced at Julia, feeling his stomach sink at the prospect of dropping her alone. Julia seemed to know without words what Lee’s concern was, and she met his gaze and gave him a small nod of assurance. She knew what her job was. She didn’t care.
Or at least she acted like she didn’t.
“Alright,” Lee nodded. “We’re with you.”
A glimmer of taillights ahead of them drew Lee’s eyes. The details of the hilltop were concealed by the darkness. In the flash of their own headlights, and the strobing of nearby machine gun fire, Lee saw the scraggly trunks and branches of scrubby trees.
They pulled to a stop in a wash of dust that chased over them. A dozen yards ahead, in a small, flat area run through with a flurry of tire tracks, a small, red pickup with an M240 bolted to it edged back and forth while the gunner on the back yelled at the driver and let out bursts of fire.
They were trying to position themselves so that the gunner had a line of sight on the small town below them, but the truck itself was hidden as much as possible by the horizon line of the hill.
On the “safe” side of the hill, a collection of chemlights danced back and forth in the darkness. Some of them were red, some of them were green. It was a triage station—green if you were injured; red if you were about to die.
Julia had already fixated on them.
The second that Tex’s pickup truck rocked to a stop, she elbowed Abe out of the way. He opened his door and slid out and Julia squeezed around him and headed to the wounded without another word to Lee or anyone else in the pickup.
Lee flew out of the pickup truck and into the sounds of battle that he knew so well. The chatter of machine guns punched at his eardrums, the shouted communications, the snap of incoming rounds over their heads, and the terrible, warbling moan of ricochets, smacking the stony earth around them and scattering off into the night in every direction.
Lee hunched, though they were on the far side of the hill from the incoming fire. He heard the bullets thrash through tree branches over his head, but he didn’t think any of them could strike him.
Deuce scrambled his front paws onto the top of the truck bed, making to jump out.
“No!” Lee commanded. “You stay!”
There was too much going on.
Lee would not be able to keep track of the dog in all of this.
Deuce whimpered and moaned about it, but stayed put.
Abe, Lee, and Tex converged at the front of the pickup truck, where a soldier ran to meet them.
“Where’s Breck?” Tex demanded as soon as the soldier was close enough to hear him.
The soldier’s face looked young in the blaze of light from the truck’s headlights. He seemed urgent, but calm. He shook his head. “Breck’s pinned down, sir. He’s got three wounded and not enough hands to move ‘em. They’re stuck in a ranch house, right at the base of the hill.”
“Shit. What about everyone else?”
“Everyone else has already come up over the top and is on their way to the bunker.”
Tex turned and caught the eyes of his soldiers from the other trucks in his convoy that were gathering around him. “If you don’t have a gun on your truck, hit the trails and pick up any of our boys that are on foot. Get everyone you can to the bunker. If you got a gun, get in position and lay some hate down on that town. Breck and five others are pinned down. I’m gonna ID what building he’s in and we’re gonna get him out of there.”
Tex didn’t wait for affirmation. He turned and looked at Lee and Abe, and they were with him, ready and willing, so he turned to the soldier that had given him the sitrep and nodded to the other side of the hill. “You got comms with Breck? He’s not answering the satphone.”
The soldier nodded, then touched a PTT hooked to his chest rig. “Williams to Breckenridge. How copy?” Williams listened for a moment, then nodded to Tex. “I got him.”
“Tell him to answer his fucking satphone.”
Williams relayed the message. Listened. “He said it got dropped and now it won’t turn on.”
“Dammit.” Tex put a hand on Williams’s shoulder. “You’re gonna have to be my radioman then. You got a good spot to overlook Caddo?”
Williams nodded. “Come with me. Stay low.”
Williams headed off into the darkness, with Tex, Lee, and Abe following in a line. The closer they got to the crest of the hill, the lower they crept, until they were crawling on all fours, and then on their bellies.
The gunfire from below became more audible. The snap and crackle of bullets whipping through the trees above them became more pronounced. Closer.
A handful of large projectiles struck a tree trunk just above Lee’s prone body. He felt splinters of wood stinging the back of his head and neck and he pressed his face into the dirt with a quiet curse.
The tracer fire moved on.
His heart beating hard, not only from exertion, but from the closeness of the fire, Lee pulled his head up and saw that he trailed Tex by a few yards now. He gulped air and clawed forward faster, tasting the dust of the sandy ground on his tongue.
Tex came to a stop.
Lee looked back and saw Abe slithering into position nearly on top of him.
They were now in a shallow depression—almost a foxhole. Between them and the whining bullets coming at them was a large, circular chunk of earth. Lee realized it was a root ball. One of the trees had fallen over, creating the depression that they were now sitting in, and the root ball that now provided them with cover.
Williams had squirmed up so that his back was to the root ball. He hiked a thumb behind him. “Straight down that way is Caddo.”
There was enough cover that Lee was able to sidle up onto his knees. “Can Breck identify the house that he’s in?”
Williams relayed the question and waited, flinching once or twice as a round smacked the root ball and sent clumps of dirt skittering over their heads.
In the midst of this, Lee became aware of a howl, and for a slender second, his heart jumped into his throat, thinking, primals!
But right about that time, his brain went back ten years and connected that sound to something else that Lee was horribly familiar with. The howl terminated in a crashing boom, and a sudden flash of menacing orange light that lit all of their faces for a moment.
Lee snapped his head around, in time to see the fireball disappear into the blackness of night, leaving behind an afterimage in his eyes.
“Motherfucker,” was all that Lee commented. He didn’t need to say anything else. They all knew what an RPG looked and sounded like.
Tex looked pissed. He keyed his own comms. “Menendez! ID who the fuck just shot that shit at us and splatter his ass!”
Lee heard Menendez grunt out a reply over his own earpiece.
Williams leaned forward, smacking Tex on the chest to get his attention. “Breck says he’s gonna strobe a window with his weaponlight.”
As one, Tex, Abe, and Lee all sidled up to the big root ball and stuck just enough of their heads over it that they could see down into the inky blackness below them. Lee couldn’t tell the difference between the hillside and the tiny town that lay in the flats. There were headlights below him—the technicals that had been reported—and that gave him a sense of distance, but he couldn’t see any of the structures or the shape of the land that was spread out in front of him.
A string of tracer fire jumped out from one of the technicals, crawling towards them through the night, like a multi-jointed worm, and then whipping over their heads and to the left.
An answering string of tracers lanced out from Tex’s boys on the hilltop and Lee watched the rounds spark and smash the vehicle that had delivered the previous volley.
Tracers work both ways, as the adage goes.
“Alright,” Tex called out. “Tell him to send it.”
The three of them waited in tense silence, staring down into the blackness below, flinching despite themselves as they watched the tracers hurtle back and forth, and feared the invisible non-tracers that struck around them.
The land was pitch black, and the sky was navy blue with sparkling stars.
And then, down at the very bottom of their field of view, and all the way to the left, nearly blocked by the curvature of the hillside, they saw the window of a house light up and strobe.
“Okay,” Tex said, as they all pulled their heads back into cover. “Tell him we got a visual. Tell him we need five minutes, but we’re gonna get him out of there.”
In the span of the next five minutes, another three RPGs impacted the top of the hill.
The four men found themselves prone again, slithering their way downhill through the trees.
They’d all wanted to take the truck.
But they’d all admitted it was too big a target.
Breck had one other soldier besides himself, and then three wounded. Between Williams, Tex, Lee, and Abe, they figured they could get everyone up the hill.
They could also get their asses shot up, both in the coming and going, but the other alternative was to abandon the wounded men, and not a single one of them was willing to do that. The option hadn’t even been voiced.
The only thing they had going for them was that Breck hadn’t fired a shot from the house where he hid. The attackers in Caddo were not focusing on Breck’s hideout, too concerned with the machine gun fire they were getting from the top of the hill.
Which left the eastern side of the hill ignored.
And it was down this side of the hill that Lee snaked his way.
They moved diagonal to the chattering of the enemy fire, so that it was to their right as they crawled. After a few minutes, they managed to put a horizon of hillside between them and the town of Caddo. They stood and picked up the pace, plunging down the hillside in great galloping strides.
The moon shown brighter on this side of the hill, and Lee was able to make out where to put his feet as the four of them descended. It took them less than a minute to reach the bottom.
Lee took a position about a pace off of a thick tree trunk. He went to one knee, propping his rifle on the other and taking a moment to catch his breath. He scanned, saw the edge of the house where Breck hid. Everything else around them was flatness. Pastureland that stretched like an alien landscape in the moo
nlight.
Another RPG ripped through the air and detonated low on the hillside.
Lee squinted out to what he could see of Caddo beyond the side of the hill. The technicals had taken up positions, using the existing structures as cover. But they weren’t pushing the hill. They’d bogged down.
Lee heard Tex’s whisper from the shadowy woods beside him: “Tell him we’re coming in. Right now. Eastern side of the building.” A pause. “Moving!”
Lee pulled his rifle tighter into his shoulder and sighted out into the flatness beyond the target house where all was still. “Move!”
There was the shuffle and tramp of feet.
Williams and Tex sprinted past, hugging the curvature of the hillside as they approached the target house. Williams took the eastern corner, addressing the pastureland that Lee was now scanning. Tex took the right, scanning deeper into Caddo.
Lee and Abe didn’t wait for commands. The second they saw Williams and Tex settle into coverage, they pushed out of their spots and ran the last fifty yards to the side of the house.
As they stumbled to a stop outside the target house, the back door swung open. A stocky soldier with a radio headset and no helmet, flattened himself against the door and motioned for them to get inside.
The four newcomers tumbled into the house and the man that Lee assumed to be Breckenridge wasted no time. He gave Tex a hearty slap on the back as he pushed him into what looked like a living room. There were no lights—not even chemlights—but the moonglow through a window showed Lee three prone forms, and one other that had taken up a position near the front door.
“How are they?” Tex murmured.
“They need medical attention,” Breck answered. He took an additional step into the room so he hovered over the three wounded soldiers on the ground, all of which appeared to be conscious, and struggling with pain, but otherwise composed. “You guys ready to get out of here?”
They mumbled affirmatives. Quiet, but eager.
Tex pointed to Breck and his man covering the front window. “You two take up coverage for us. We’ll grab the wounded. We’re going around to the eastern side of the hill, and then straight up.”
