by Peter Nealen
Some of that was a self-defense mechanism. I’d had far too much time to think on the drive south, and had found my mind going down some very, very dark paths. Burying myself in the preparations, planning, and reconnaissance had helped keep me focused and somewhat even-keeled.
It would have been a little worrying, if I’d let myself think about it. What the hell was I going to do when I didn’t have a mission to focus on and an enemy to hate?
I just told myself that the way the world was going, that eventuality wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon, and shoved it to the back of my mind. Again, probably not the healthiest coping mechanism, but after decades as a gunslinger, I didn’t really have much else.
The Salt Creek safe house wasn’t much to look at, which was why we’d picked it. None of us were staying there on a long-term basis; most of us had been sleeping in cars or in a trailer just outside of town for the last week. Bryan and Derek had each spent a couple nights sleeping in the open, as part of their bum disguises.
The white walls were as dingy as anything I’d seen in the Middle East, and the roof was sagging. It looked like the front porch was about to fall off the face of the house. The front yard was nothing but bare dirt with a bent, mangled cyclone fence around it.
Most of us had parked several blocks away, and worked our way in on foot. Jack and I had actually come in the back way, past piles of junk and beater cars, to jump the fence and enter through the back door, which was barely hanging on its hinges anymore.
Some of our safe houses in the Middle East and even Mexico had been turned into op centers, with maps, laptops, and tracking boards arranged in a central room. We weren’t playing this one that way. We wanted to be able to break contact and get the hell out of Dodge at a moment’s notice, without leaving anything behind. A large part of that was because none of us really wanted to cross swords with American law enforcement, and regardless of how evil the scumbags we were planning to put in the ground were, the cops were going to have to try to look into it.
So instead, we had a couple of tablets, notebooks, and reams of photos printed out at the local Kinkos spread out on the floor. All of it would be packed up and go with us when we left the safe house.
It was a dirty, grungy-looking bunch of peckerwoods that was gathered in the living room in the sickly light of a fluorescent Coleman lantern at midnight, and I’m including Ben, the sole black guy on the team, in that description. We called him “Carleton” for being “the whitest black man,” which never ceased to get a rise out of him, but when the dude dressed more cowboy than any of the rest of us and listened to bluegrass all the time, it was going to happen.
“All right,” I said, getting things going, “we’ve got four major targets. Any MS-13 that gets taken out in the process is an added bonus.” We had our target packages laid out on the floor in four vague groups. I pointed to the first one. “Here’s number one; Fat Boy. We don’t know for sure who this guy is, but Raoul’s fairly confident that a couple of his buddies are former Los Zetas shooters. They’ve networked with several of the local gangs, and recon has identified several possible spotter groups loitering around his safe house. At least one of those is going to need to get taken out before we make the main assault. Preferably, we’ll nail two of them; hitting one a couple minutes before the other should hopefully provide enough of a distraction to have everybody looking the wrong way when the real hit goes down.”
I pulled out the tablet with our overhead imagery on it, and got it centered on the target neighborhood. I pointed to the known spotter locations. “These kids are usually hanging out on these corners, and stay until about midnight. Groups of five or so. They do the usual gangbanger stuff, too, including intimidation, the occasional robbery, and drug dealing, but they’re definitely staying there as lookouts. This one on the north is probably going to be the easiest to hit first, so, Bryan, you’ve got that one. You’ve got the special present?”
Bryan nodded, lifting the ratty backpack packed with explosives and nails. “Right here,” he said. “And I’ve got the detonator, too, just to make sure none of you fuckers get any ideas.” It wasn’t much of a joke, but it got dark chuckles anyway. We were in that kind of mood.
“Just make sure you look pathetic enough that they can’t resist robbing you,” Ben said, “though that shouldn’t be too hard for you.” Bryan flipped him off.
The banter was a good sign. The rest of the team wasn’t any better balanced after what had happened than I was, and the drive south had been a quiet one, overshadowed by a simmering, murderous anger. The fact that we could still fuck with each other meant that we hadn’t gone all the way over the edge. Once things got quiet and the “dead face” started to be seen, then it would be time to worry.
And yes, there’s a difference between “dead face” and “game face.” I’d been around long enough to recognize it, though I probably wasn’t so well qualified as to judge properly which one I was wearing.
“All right, knock it off,” I said. It might have been a good sign, but we needed to get this brief done and scatter before too many people noticed that there was a light on in this house. “Coordination is going to suck, since we can’t be on comms all the time. A vagrant on a cell phone…well, it’s not impossible these days, but it’s still a possible compromise that we can’t really risk. So, Bryan, you’ll stay out of sight until we’ve confirmed that the target is there. I’ll contact you by cell, then you can move on your targets.” He nodded, his game face back on.
“Derek is going to be Drive-by Bum. He’ll be with the main strike force until it’s time to move. Again, as far as coordination goes, once I’ve given Bryan the go-ahead, Derek will close on his target group. Going hot is on Bryan. Once he gets ‘mugged,’ he’ll run away and clack off the backpack. We’ll be close enough to hear it. The boom is your go signal, Derek.” The hatchet-faced, dark-haired, former SF guy nodded. Derek was our resident computer geek, but he wasn’t your ordinary pencil-necked, soft-as-baby-shit image of a geek. The guy was just as much of a killer as any of the rest of us; he wouldn’t have been on a team if he wasn’t. That didn’t stop him from being the team’s resident oddball, but for once he didn’t decide to add one of his quips in the middle of the brief.
I traced the road up to the house we’d fingered as Fat Boy’s safe house. “Once we’ve got our hole, we roll up and execute. The plan is still to make it look like a drive-by, though we won’t be fucking around; no 9mms on this job.” More nods. We already had the two M60E4s loaded in the van. “At the risk of making it look more professional, Larry, Eric, and Jack will be flankers. As soon as we pull up, you guys are going to bail out and sprint your asses off to the back of the house to make sure we get any squirters.
“Nobody gets out of that fucking house alive,” I stressed. I didn’t need to reiterate it, either. There was a deadly glint in every eye that was looking back at me.
These assholes had fucked with the wrong guys.
“After the initial fires, we’ll have no more than five minutes to sweep the house and clean up anybody still breathing,” I went on. “There won’t be any SSE; at this point I don’t give a shit about additional intel, and we don’t want to get caught in Blackhawk Down in Pueblo at one in the morning. We’ll sweep the house, make sure the job’s done, and get the fuck out. Questions?” Nobody raised a hand. We had, after all, been hashing out the vague outline of this plan all the way south from The Ranch. We’d just needed the specifics to fill in the blanks.
“While the East Side is apparently a no-go zone for the cops, we don’t want to take chances on crossing them. I don’t want any dead cops on our hands. So, Derek’s going to set up a rash of 911 calls to draw just about every cop in the city off to the west.”
“Already done,” Derek put in. “It’s just waiting for me to send the command. And there might be a couple other nasty little surprises built in.” He grinned evilly, though when I raised an eyebrow at him—the “extra surprises” had not been in
the plan—he spread his hands innocently. “Nothing too destructive,” he said, “but they need to stay tied up for a while. I’ve got a couple contingencies worked up for it. Their comms are going to be fucked for a while, and I’ve got several bots that should have them chasing ‘assault in progress’ for a couple of hours.”
“At least until they figure out that they’re chasing ghosts, while there’s audible gunfire and explosions coming from the East Side,” Eric pointed out, rubbing his shaved head.
“But there’s always gunfire coming from the East Side,” Derek pointed out. As if to punctuate his statement, we heard three pistol shots in the distance. “The cops are already wary about investigating any of it. If they do come in after us, they’ll be inclined to come in force, and that’s going to take time to organize. All I’ve got to buy us is a few minutes.”
“Fine,” I said. “It sounds like a good idea. We’ll roll with it.” I’d learned a while ago to let Derek do his magic when it came to computers. I wasn’t a Luddite, but I wasn’t any kind of code geek, either. Derek knew that sorcery and I didn’t. I deferred to his expertise. “Make sure you take one of Logan’s party favors,” I added, “just in case you’ve got to drop it and run.”
“Already planning on it,” he replied. Logan Try was our aging, thoroughly cantankerous gear guy. He hadn’t deployed since East Africa, but had instead ensconced himself in the machine shop in another of the Ranch’s outbuildings. He’d sent a duffel bag full of scratch-built 9mm bullet-hose submachine guns with us. They were of considerably higher quality than most of the homemade firearms that cropped up on gun blogs every once in a while, and more durable than the polymer 3D printed jobs. They were also completely without serial numbers, and completely untraceable if we had to dump them.
“All right,” I said, checking my watch. “I’ve got 2320. Let’s aim for Time on Target of 0100. Final go time is situation dependent.” I looked around the dim room. “Last chance. Did I forget anything?”
A few guys shook their heads. We gathered up what we’d brought and slipped out in ones and twos, careful to leave the house looking as dilapidated and abandoned as it had been when we’d arrived.
Even with the back seats all stripped out, the van was crowded. None of us were especially small guys, and we’d brought a lot of firepower. And since the flanker team was poised to go out the back doors as soon as we stopped, they weren’t exactly sitting comfortably. They were all crouched in the back, weapons held ready, holding on to the walls as best they could as the van swayed down the street. Ben was braced across from the sliding door, one of the 60s across his knees. Nick was driving, and I was in the right seat. I’d considered using one of Logan’s toys, but had stuck with my SOCOM 16. Derek had one of the cheap little bullet hoses because he was closing to bad-breath distance with his targets, and might have to break off in a hurry and try to blend back in with the underbelly of Pueblo. I had wheels, and was probably going to be shooting through walls and windows. I wanted a rifle.
We were waiting in the shadows, under a burned-out streetlight, a few blocks from the target house. We could actually see Derek’s targets, a group of four vatos lounging under another streetlight on the corner a couple blocks ahead. Derek was already out and shuffling toward them. I’d just gotten off the phone with Bryan, and we were going hot.
At least, we were supposed to be. Derek had needed to slow his roll, stumbling and sitting down in the gutter for a moment, because the expected boom hadn’t come yet.
Then we heard a series of four loud pops to the north. Nick and I looked at each other. That wasn’t good.
Chapter 5
The sound of pistol shots could only mean that things had just gone very, very bad. Of course, being the East Side, we heard sporadic gunfire all the time. If I had been inclined to wishful thinking, I might have been able to put it down to just another couple of gangbangers removing themselves from the gene pool. But the timing, the direction, and the fact that the explosion we’d been waiting to hear hadn’t gone off yet, disinclined me to such hopes. Bryan was probably dead, and our first diversion was a bust.
Strangely enough, I didn’t feel the surge of rage and frustration that I probably should have. I was in the zone, game face on, and I just did what came naturally anymore when things inevitably fell apart.
I attacked.
“Go, go, go!” I yelled out the window. Derek was close enough that he surged to his feet, though he had the presence of mind to lend the movement a drunken sway. He didn’t rush the gangbangers down the street, either, though they turned toward us, having heard my shout without necessarily understanding what I’d said, or even where the sound had come from.
Nick started slow-rolling the van, keeping us to just under a walking pace, creeping up to our imaginary line of departure. He kept the lights off; we didn’t want to otherwise draw attention to ourselves until either Derek dealt with the pickets or we had to intervene.
Derek was doing a workman’s job of looking and acting like one of the numerous derelicts wandering the streets of Pueblo, keeping his head bowed as he shuffled and swayed like he was crazy, smashed, high, or some combination of the three.
He’d almost made it another block, eliciting only the vaguest interest from the gangbangers, before a bone-rattling explosion rocked the night. A bright flash lit the sky to the north, and all four gangsters suddenly turned to look.
Derek didn’t waste any time. He suddenly abandoned his addled shuffle and sprinted forward, bringing his weapon out of his jacket as he went.
He covered the ground quickly; Derek was no slouch when it came to cardio. Lean and hungry-looking, he ran a lot, and it paid off. Before the confused gangbangers knew it, the bum who had been swaying and staggering along the sidewalk far enough away to not even be worth picking on was right on top of them, pointing what looked like a pipe with a handgrip at them.
In fact, that was essentially what it was. Logan hadn’t wasted time or materials making the little subguns aesthetically pleasing. They were essentially mutant crosses between Uzis and Sten guns, only slightly longer to allow for the integral suppressors.
Those suppressors were good, too. Almost good enough to mourn ditching them, though Logan would just look at you funny and say it wouldn’t be that hard to make new ones if you said so.
There was hardly any noise as Derek brought the little bullet hose to bear and opened fire. We just watched the four young men stagger under the impacts of the bullets, dark fluid splashing from exit wounds as they fell to the street beneath the streetlight.
It was a fast, professional shooting, as much as it might have looked at first blush like a gangland spray and pray. Derek had punched the gun out to the end of its sling and held it tightly controlled, sweeping the stream of bullets across the targets’ centers of mass. All four had taken at least two to three fatal hits in a single burst.
Nick didn’t wait to admire Derek’s shooting. He just floored the accelerator, threatening to throw the flanker team in the back against the rear doors, and sent us roaring down the street toward the target house. I heard Ben rack the 60’s charging handle, getting ready to lay the hate, and I brought my rifle up to my lap.
We could see the front door of the target house already. There were a couple of people out on the porch, looking in the direction of the explosion. Not only that, but there were several other faces peering through nearby windows and doors, trying to see what had blown up. We might have woken a few people up with our diversion, which meant more witnesses. But it had had the desired effect of drawing attention away from the strike team, at least for the moment. We’d hopefully sowed enough chaos that we could get in and out without too much interference. Nobody was going to know what the hell was going on for a few minutes, anyway.
Nick braked smoothly just short of the house. I didn’t even have to say anything. Larry threw the rear doors open, and he, Eric, and Jack were gone.
Ben had rigged a strap so that he could release th
e latch on the sliding door and pull it open without having to get up out of his shooting position. I heard the door roll back as we came parallel with the front of the target house.
I’d already had my window down; I didn’t feel like eating a bunch of broken glass if we took any return fire, and it made this part that much easier. I lifted my rifle and pointed it out the open window, even as Ben cut loose.
Even with the door open and the windows down, that 60 in the confines of the van was loud. It wasn’t just the stuttering roar of the gun, either; the muzzle blast was still inside the van. The brake was right behind my seat, so I was getting the brunt of it around the seat back.
I got just enough of a glimpse of the two guys on the porch in the light of the flickering orange streetlamp to recognize at least one of them as one of Fat Boy’s security detachment. Then they went down in a welter of blood as Ben hosed the house down at over five hundred rounds per minute.
I added pairs of shots to the quickly-shattered windows, but there really wasn’t much my rifle could do that the pig wasn’t already doing. The M60E4 had been made famous a few years back by an internet video in which eight hundred rounds were linked together and fired off on a single trigger pull. That’s a lot of lead. We didn’t have that long a belt, but I knew that Ben had linked quite a few boxes together; he didn’t want to waste time reloading. The E4’s barrel could take it.
If Larry, Eric, and Jack were engaging anyone on the far side of the house, I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear anything but the ravening, thumping roar of that machine gun behind me. Then, after just over a minute, the pig fell silent.
“I’m out!” Ben yelled, tossing the 60 to one side. I threw my door open and followed my SOCOM 16 out, with Ben following, grabbing his own FAL off the floor.
Even as we vaulted onto the porch, passing the bullet-splintered porch posts and facing the smashed, bullet-riddled door that was now hanging off its hinges, I heard shooting from around back. Most of it was still muted in my rattled hearing, which wasn’t what it used to be anyway, but I could still pick out the heavier booms of our 7.62 rifles opposed by the lighter pops and cracks of smaller caliber carbines and pistols.
