Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  I was about to kick the wrecked door in when Eric came around the corner, posted up on the porch, facing back the way he’d come, and bellowed, “SET!”

  I hesitated. If the flankers had run into stiff enough resistance that they had to fall back, we didn’t have time to sweep the house. We had precisely enough time to fall back to the van and make ourselves scarce. If this went Blackhawk Down, we were fucked. We couldn’t count on any friendlies in the East Side of Pueblo, and we’d deliberately made sure that law enforcement was a long way away—not that we were going to be seen as law-abiding citizens ourselves at that point.

  Jack and Larry came pounding down the side of the house, even as Eric opened fire with a staccato series of controlled pairs. Yep, it was time to go. I rolled away from the door, yanked a frag off my chest rig, donkey-kicked the door in as I pulled the pin, and tossed the frag inside for good measure before slapping Ben on the shoulder and pointing to the van. “Get in!” I roared. “Go!”

  Fortunately, I’d chucked that frag in pretty hard. The building wasn’t exactly all that solid to begin with; otherwise hosing it down with machine gun fire would have been pointless. As the explosion blew out the remains of the windows and doors, frag whistled through several of the bullet holes and punched some new ones of its own. I felt a hot sting on the side of my neck, as a bit of notched wire came through the wall and scored me. If I’d had the mental energy or time to think about how close I’d just come to blowing us all to bits, I might have gotten the shakes. That probably hadn’t been a terribly good idea. It had been born of haste, hate, and frustration.

  Ben was already flying off the porch toward the open side door of the van, on Jack’s and Larry’s heels. I followed, hoping that I wasn’t bleeding anywhere else, and that I hadn’t fragged Eric with that damned grenade. He seemed to be doing all right. I angled out onto the street behind the van, dropped to a knee where I could shoot past Eric while giving him a clear lane to the van, and lifted my rifle.

  There were a few gangbangers back there, mostly spraying and praying around corners, none of them apparently willing to expose themselves more than absolutely necessary. I thought I could see a few dark lumps on the ground that might have explained their reticence. I cranked off three shots at the nearest muzzle flash I could see, then yelled at Eric, “Turn and go!”

  He didn’t move right away, and I was drawing a breath to repeat myself when he glanced back, saw me in place, then turned and sprinted for the van. I saw another head and what looked like a weapon appear down the alley, and shot at it. The head vanished.

  The van rocked as Eric got in, and then Larry was leaning out of the open rear door and yelling at me. “Get in, get in, get in!”

  There wasn’t any more fire coming from behind the house by then, so I got up off the asphalt and sprinted for the front. My rifle banged off the door frame as I piled into the passenger seat, and I had to wrestle with it a second to make sure I could close the door, but Nick was already rolling before I even got the door slammed shut.

  “That was interesting,” Jack said as we careened away from the target, rapidly leaving the neighborhood behind. “Did one of us toss that frag, or did they have grenades, too?”

  “I did,” I replied ruefully. “I wanted to make sure of anybody left in the house, since we weren’t going to be able to sweep it. Should have thought that one through a little more.”

  “No, it was good,” he said. “We were taking a lot more fire before that went off. I think you scared ‘em.”

  “Hell, it scared the shit out of me,” Eric said. He didn’t sound nearly as ambivalent about it as Jack had. “Dude, it was a stick house!”

  “I know, it was stupid,” I replied. “It won’t happen again.”

  “It might have to,” Nick said suddenly as he checked the rear-view mirrors again. “Let’s face it, if we’re going to make this work, we’re going to have to be crazier and more dangerous than the sons of bitches that we’re killing. If we want to be safe, we need to head back to Wyoming and dig in. And even then, I don’t think anybody in this van thinks that’s going to work for long.”

  His words kind of hung in the air as we rounded another corner and kept going into the dark.

  We picked Derek up about half a mile away; he’d made good time once he’d done his bit. Nick pulled over just as Derek shuffled out of the shadows of some trees in an overgrown yard, and Ben hauled him in through the side door. I don’t think Nick had actually brought the van to a complete stop before the door was sliding shut and we were rolling again.

  “Head to Bryan’s RV,” I said quietly. Nick didn’t ask questions, but just nodded. It was still quite possible that we were wasting our time; Bryan’s part obviously had not gone according to plan. It was entirely possible that the gangbangers had shot him, then accidentally set off the backpack while searching his corpse. On the other hand, he might have been shot, crawled away, then detonated the pack. If he was alive, he might not have been able to make it to the RV. But we weren’t going to bail on him. If there was a chance that he was still alive and at large, we were going to be there to pick him up.

  It was a winding, roundabout route to get to the next RV. We were steering well clear of the target area; that place was almost guaranteed to be crawling with bad guys by then, and quite possibly cops. There was no way the local PD could ignore the explosions. Or at least, that was what I thought.

  Nobody said much. There didn’t seem to be much to talk about. I’d owned up to my own fuckup with the frag, and the rest of the team seemed satisfied. After all, we knew each other, and had trusted each other with our lives in some pretty hairy places for a long time now. “I fucked up, won’t happen again,” was generally accepted, so long as it really didn’t happen again.

  The silence was also fueled by uncertainty. We’d already lost Jim. Little Bob was in the hospital and in a bad way. None of us wanted to have to either bury Bryan or leave him to be buried by somebody else.

  It wasn’t as if we hadn’t lost people before. The list was not short. Of the original team that had gone into Djibouti, what felt like forever ago, Alek, Larry, Nick, and I were just about the only ones left. Several had gone in the ground in East Africa, more in Iraq.

  And the butcher’s bill just kept getting longer.

  The rendezvous was at a park; it was a good place to loiter if you were trying to look like a bum. There were quite a few huddled lumps of rags and dirty coats at the bases of trees and lying on park benches in the light of the van’s headlights, which, by some miracle, hadn’t been broken by gunfire.

  One of those lumps moved as Nick turned the turn signal on for exactly three blinks. The lump stood up and strode toward the van. Even before seeing his face, I recognized Bryan with a surge of relief. He was alive, and, judging by the way he was moving, he wasn’t hurt.

  Ben hauled the side door open again, and Bryan piled in, his lanky frame only adding to the crowding in the back.

  “Well, that sure was fun,” he said sarcastically as the door slid shut and Nick started to roll out of the parking lot. “Holy shit.”

  “What the hell happened?” I asked. “The boom was late, then we heard shooting and figured you’d gotten smoked.”

  “I almost did,” he answered, reaching out to brace himself against the sides of the van as Nick turned us out of the parking lot. Bryan’s callsign wasn’t “Albatross” for nothing. “Those motherfuckers really didn’t want to play according to the script. They were acting more like guys on security than gangbangers just loitering around the street looking for trouble.

  “The first time I went past, they watched me but didn’t say anything. Didn’t yell, didn’t try to stop me, didn’t even act curious. Which, of course, kinda fucked the entire plan. So, I went around the block and tried again, this time getting farther out into the street so I’d pass closer. I figured if worst came to worst, I’d toss the pack at their feet and run. Maybe I could get far enough away and set it off before they
came after me.” When I turned around in my seat to raise a skeptical eyebrow, he just shrugged. “Hey, it was a thought. I’m not saying it was a good thought, but it was a thought.”

  “Tonight seems to be the night for that,” Eric commented. Bryan shot him a quizzical glance, but then shrugged again and continued his story.

  “Anyway, the second time around they must have gotten suspicious, because one of them yelled at me. They all pulled guns and started toward me. I thought this was a good sign, at first; I figured they might rough me up a little, take the pack, then shove me away and tell me to get lost. Instead, they start pointing their guns at me, and telling me to get on my knees.

  “Needless to say, I thought that this wasn’t good, but since they were all watching me, I just cowered and did what I was told.

  “Fortunately, one of them got kinda impatient. He yelled at me to toss my pack, so I did. I gave it a pretty good swing, too. By then I kind of figured that they were going to search me a little more thoroughly, and since I didn’t want them to find my gun or the detonator, while the pack was in the air, I drew down and started shooting.”

  “You mean the shots we heard were yours?” Nick asked.

  “Best damned shooting I’ve ever done,” Bryan said. “I’m still not sure how I pulled it off. Four shots, four kills—or at least all four of them were down in the street and not shooting me in the face. I booked it out of there and hit the detonator once I was far enough away. Then I E&E’d for the rendezvous point and hunkered down until you guys showed up.”

  There were some muttered comments, but nothing of real operational significance. I think at that point, it was really starting to sink in to all of us that we were flying by the seat of our pants more than normal on this op. It was somewhat sobering, offering to put a chill dash of reality on the flames of rage and vengeance. We’d dodged a bullet twice that night, and the night wasn’t over. We were going to have to calm down and start stepping more carefully if we wanted to get through this alive.

  “All right,” I said, loudly enough to be heard in the back. “I know I don’t really have to go over this, but we’re not going to have a lot of time once we get clear, so I’ll hit it anyway, to make sure we don’t skip anything. Once we stop, the van gets sanitized, weapons and gear gets put out of sight, everybody gets changed over, and we split back into buddy pairs and get out to our surveillance points as quickly as possible. We just kicked the hornet’s nest, and we need to see as much of the reaction as we can before we can properly plan our next moves. Nick and I will handle ditching the van, then we’ll get out to our spot. Any questions?”

  There were none. We’d already gone over the details in the initial planning, even before meeting up for the brief earlier that night. Nick pulled up to the old, ramshackle abandoned house that we’d picked out as the refit area, and we piled out and got to work.

  Only a few, hectic minutes later, Nick was back behind the wheel of the van, heading southwest on the 78. I was following in the beater Jeep Cherokee that we’d be using for the rest of the night. He kept driving until we were far enough out into the desert that ours were the only two pairs of headlights in sight, then he pulled over to the side of the road, parked, and shut off the engine. I pulled up behind him, dousing my headlights as I did, just as he got out of the driver’s seat, chucked the keys off into the desert, and jogged back to the Jeep. He climbed in, shucking the black nitrile gloves off his hands as he did so and tossing them in the back seat.

  “We’ll have to dispose of those, too, you know,” I said as I pulled a U-turn and headed back into town.

  “I’d be more concerned with the duffel bags full of guns, ammo, and explosives in the back,” Nick pointed out, “than with a pair of black rubber gloves lying on a black carpet.”

  “I guess you’ve got a point,” I replied. “Especially in Colorado.” Most of our long guns and all of our mags were illegal in that state, which was part of why we had our base of operations in Wyoming, not Colorado. That alone was a good reason to avoid getting pulled over, though we had a short window of time to get to our position across town.

  We’d just offed a cartel rep in the middle of what should have been relatively safe territory. There were two possibilities as to what would happen next. Either they would tighten security and start to watch each other more closely, in which case we would watch and take notes, tailoring our plans to deal with the rest of them accordingly, or they would run like rabbits, in which case we were going to have to move fast to make sure we got a few more of them before they disappeared.

  Either way, one thing was certain. One dead Fat Boy was not enough of a message.

  You kill Praetorians, you pay the bill, and that price tag is pretty fucking high.

  Chapter 6

  Twelve hours later, aching with fatigue and sleep-deprivation, we pulled off and headed to another one of the myriad abandoned houses that we’d picked out as safe havens elsewhere in the city.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” I said, looking around at the weary, grimy faces gathered in the shadowed living room. At least, I thought it was supposed to have been a living room. It was just an empty space covered in dust and debris at that point. We were keeping well back from the broken front windows to avoid being easily spotted from the street. “Nobody saw any police response at all?” I looked at Derek. “I know you were monitoring their comm freqs. Even the IED wasn’t enough to stir ‘em?”

  He shook his head. “They were aware of it. Several calls came in, from locals and police units. But there was no response from dispatch except to say, ‘Yeah, we know.’” He shrugged. “They knew that the wild goose chases I had them on were probably connected to it, too, judging by a couple of the responses to the bots’ 911 calls. But they still didn’t lift a finger to go into the East Side.”

  “That is very interesting,” I mused, scratching my beard as I stared at the map.

  “I guess the East Side is more of a ‘no-go’ zone than we thought,” Eric said. “Just like down by the border.”

  “It’s more than that,” Jack said. “It’s parallel governance, just judging by what we saw last night.”

  I had to nod. Parallel governance was an old concept, though it had really only started getting called that, occasionally substituted with “shadow governance,” in the aftermath of the COIN wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was essentially a situation where an irregular force established its own, parallel set of laws and public services, in direct opposition to the local, legitimate government’s institutions. We’d seen a lot of it in the Middle East. Hell, we’d been part of it in Basra, before the alliance of militias that we’d helped to push out the Iranian-backed Provincial Police Force had turned on us.

  Jack was right. What we’d seen the night before, in the aftermath of the hit, had been textbook parallel governance. Groups of gangbangers had descended on the target shortly after we’d gotten clear, and immediately taken control of the scene before starting to patrol the neighborhoods and search nearby houses and people, looking for us. It had been characteristically brutal and sloppy, as one might expect from MS-13, but it had been crudely professional all the same.

  “It might explain why the cartel reps came here,” Larry suggested. “If MS-13 has firm enough control of the East Side, the underground had to know that it was a good place to go if you wanted to contract them in the States, especially with the target sitting only a couple hundred miles due north.”

  “Makes me wonder how long they’ve been in control here,” Nick muttered. “If they’ve got the cops scared enough not to risk crossing them at all.”

  “Doesn’t need to have been that long,” I mused. “Look at what happened down south after Gila Bend.” A very well-known—one might almost say “infamous” in certain circles—sheriff had been gruesomely murdered in the town of Gila Bend, after which local law enforcement in Arizona generally stayed out of the cartels’ way south of Phoenix. “First, they start pushing other gangs, then they
start offering protection to locals against them. Then they start enforcing their own taxes and tariffs on the locals. Kill a couple cops who get nosy, along with a few locals who might stand up to them. For all we know, they deliberately staged it so that the locals called the cops, then had to watch the cops get murdered, before they killed the locals who called. I’d be willing to bet that with as much anti-cop sentiment as there is floating around, the local PD decided it was better not to risk new riots over dead gangbangers and stay out. The locals might not like having MS-13 run the show, but they’d prefer that to getting gruesomely murdered for talking to the cops.”

  “That would explain why we got fuck-all for intel when we first got here,” Jack said. “They’re de facto loyal to the gangs because they don’t want to rock the boat, so they’re not going to talk to a bunch of outsiders asking questions.”

  “Well, that means one thing,” Bryan said. “We shouldn’t have to worry about the local cops getting in the way. Open season, motherfuckers.”

  “Not for a while, anyway,” I said. “But I’d be hesitant to put too much faith in that. Bombs going off or no, last night could be put down as an isolated incident. Once we start really stacking bodies, that could very well change. Remember, we found out the hard way that there are never only one or two factions at work once this shit starts hitting the fan. We leave enough corpses in the streets, the Feds might get involved. Then it’s going to be a different ballgame.”

  “Getting back to the more immediate stuff,” Ben said. “It does look like the targets just hunkered down and didn’t try to run. They must be relying on MS-13 pretty heavily for their security. We saw some extra firepower out on the porch where White Jacket’s staying, but he didn’t go anywhere.”