Tyranny in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  His expression changed. He rested the launching tube on his right shoulder.

  “Jesus, Barry. You’ve been at this too long. You’re getting a kick out of this.”

  “I’m killing an enemy of the Tri-State Coalition. It’s what I’m paid to do.”

  “Does General Raines pay you enough so that you like what we are doing?”

  “Yeah. But I’d do it for nothing. Since the war I haven’t had anybody to shoot at.”

  Brown squinted into the sights. The sounds of battle raged all around them.

  “There it is,” Brown said. “A Kiowa, and the jerk at the controls is flying a straight line at just the right altitude for me. He should grab his ankles, bend over, and kiss his ass good-bye.”

  “We don’t have much time,” Crisi reminded him. “Buddy said he’s calling in the Osprey to take us out of here. We’ve got less than fifteen minutes to do as much damage as we can before we pull back to the bridge.”

  “It won’t take me long,” Brown said, frozen next to the trunk of a coconut palm with the launcher held fast against his shoulder.

  He flipped the sight up on top of the long, tube-shaped rocket launcher, aimed, and grinned through gritted teeth as he pulled the triggering mechanism.

  A whooshing sound followed a trail of white vapor toward the tops of the trees.

  Crisi watched the helicopter without firing off any more Uzi rounds at the enemy. There was something about having Barry Brown standing behind her that made her nervous as hell. Brown was a psycho . . . a good soldier, but a crazy son of a bitch who enjoyed killing. She’d been on Special Ops missions with him before, and always felt unclean afterward, as if she’d swum in a swamp.

  The Kiowa’s pilot must have seen the vapor trail of the missile headed toward him, for he jerked the nose of the helicopter skyward, evidently trying to avoid the deadly rocket. It did him no good, for the chopper exploded, tilting at an odd angle when the Hellfire missile struck its underbelly. Fire and smoke engulfed the body of the aircraft just as it came apart in the air. The main rotor went straight up as it was torn from the driveshaft by the rocket, continuing to spin in the air like some child’s toy launched at a July Fourth picnic.

  “Adios, you dumb son of a bitch,” Brown said, his eyes glittering wildly as he loaded one more rocket into the tube. He chuckled. “It’s easy to kill a stupid son of a bitch at the controls of one of those old things.”

  Crisi felt gooseflesh pimple her skin. There were plenty of war-crazed mercenaries in Ben Raines’s army, but none any worse than Barry Brown. He made Anthony Perkins, the lead actor in the old movie Psycho, seem almost normal.

  The chopper began to spin crazily in a loose downward spiral, what was left of it, until it finally crashed on top of a squad of Mexican soldiers in the jungle below, causing inhuman screams of anguish and pain as a giant fireball ignited trees for hundreds of yards around.

  “I wonder if the pilot shit his pants,” Barry said while he watched huge clouds of oily smoke cascade toward the sky, ignoring the shouts and screams of dying men as if they meant nothing to him.

  A spray of AK-47 fire from the roadway sent Crisi and Barry ducking lower for cover.

  “They spotted you,” she said needlessly.

  “Give ’em a little dose of lead,” Brown replied, still watching the sky in spite of the bullets shredding jungle vines and leaves all around them. “I hear another big bird corning our way.”

  Crisi swallowed hard. It was one thing to be on a team with good professional soldiers. But when you had a killing psycho in your unit, everything changed. Some of these old warriors like Brown never left a battlefield in their minds . . . They were still fighting the conflict inside their heads, and nothing would change them.

  “It’s an old Huey . . . probably a UH-1,” Brown said. “Easiest damn ship to knock down there is. Slower than my granpaw’s piss on a cold morning.”

  “I’ll cover you,” Crisi said, just before another land mine went off near the highway. Seconds later a man was shrieking in agony.

  “I wonder if it blew his balls off,” Brown said, sighting into the rocket launcher. “Sure does sound to me like he’s in a lot of pain.”

  “Dear God,” Crisi whispered, suddenly feeling sick to her stomach. Barry Brown was a madman. She had a fleeting thought that if she ever became like that, she hoped someone would put a bullet in her brain.

  “Here it is,” Brown said, when the noises from the chopper were almost directly above the jungle canopy. “Watch this, baby doll. I’m gonna show you how to kill a stupid pilot and turn an old Huey into scrap metal,”

  The dark outline of a helicopter appeared over the treetops, its rotor swirling leaves and undergrowth below while the staccato of machine-gun fire moved along the Pan American Highway from the south. A lone figure could be seen in the open hatchway of the chopper, leaning over a fifty-caliber machine gun, looking for targets to kill.

  Brown fired a rocket. “It’s a heat-seeker,” he said with what might have been pride in his voice. “Watch this. See how quick it goes down.”

  Crisi didn’t want to watch what would happen next, but she was drawn to the missile’s vapor trail during a brief lull in the shooting.

  The missile headed straight for the helicopter’s big turbine exhaust pipe, darting into it like a mouse headed for home. The green-painted chopper came apart with a thunderous roar. Scraps of metal exploded outward in a huge fireball and then began falling toward the jungle, spinning a sparkling in late afternoon sunlight like confetti at a parade.

  “Got the bastard,” Brown said.

  Bits of the main rotor swirled into the treetops as flaming fuel fell like yellow rain on the Oaxaca forest, igniting the green palm leaves like old newspaper.

  “Ain’t that pretty?” Barry asked.

  “Beautiful,” Crisi replied, swallowing a mouthful of bitter bile.

  The regular rhythm of machine-gun fire came from all sides now. She knew if she didn’t get away from this creature, she was going to shoot him in the head.

  “It’s time to pull back for the bridge,” Crisi said, putting another clip into her Uzi. “We sure as hell don’t want to miss that Osprey.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Brown said in a distant voice, still watching the last pieces of the Huey crash into the jungle along the highway. “I could stay here the rest of my life and shoot down helicopters.”

  “You’ve only got two Hellfires left,” Crisi observed. “We need to start moving toward that bridge.”

  Brown stood up. “All right. I don’t hear any more birds,” he said, clearly disappointed.

  “Let’s go, Barry,” Crisi cried above the hammering of machine guns and the explosion of another Bouncing Betty somewhere to the south.

  “They must be low on helicopter fuel,” Brown said, scanning what he could see of the skies. “Otherwise, they’d have sent more than two birds for air cover at the front of this attack squad.”

  “Get down, Barry!” Crisi said. “They’re shooting at anything.”

  “Screw ’em,” Barry said, with a distant look in his deep blue eyes.

  Crisi was about to reach for Barry’s wrist when his body jerked backward.

  “Barry!” she yelled. “Get down!”

  Sergeant Barry Brown from Fort Worth, Texas, turned his back on Crisi. She saw a huge hole in the back of his camouflage shirt.

  “I’m shot!” Brown stammered. He began to sink to his knees next to the palm tree.

  A piece of flinty white bone jutted out of the hole in his back. Blood pumped from his wound, keeping time with the beat of his heart.

  “Oh, no,” Crisi sighed, watching Barry slump to the floor of the jungle with his rocket launcher pinned underneath him in a growing pool of blood.

  She crept over to him. “Barry? Can you hear me?”

  Brown’s eyes were glazed.

  “I can’t carry you all the way to the bridge,” Crisi said. “We don’t have any medics.”

&
nbsp; Brown’s lips moved, but no sound came from them.

  “Jesus, Barry. I told you to get down,” Crisi said, her eyes filling with tears. She didn’t like Barry Brown, but he was a member of her squad and she’d known him for years, since General Raines formed the Special Operations Brigade with a select group of soldiers.

  Off in the distance another series of explosions announced the ignition of more Bouncing Bettys.

  Crisi knew it was time to get the hell out of there before Comandante Perro Loco’s troops began scouring the jungle for the soldiers responsible for this ambush.

  She looked down at Barry. He was still alive.

  He turned distant eyes glazed with pain on her. “Don’t let them take me, Crisi,” he mumbled through lips covered with bloody foam. “You got to do it for me, girl, I can’t feel my arms.”

  She agreed. The only merciful thing to do was to end his suffering.

  Crisi drew her silenced Beretta, rolled him to the side where he wouldn’t see it coming, and quickly fired three bullets into Sergeant Barry Brown’s brain . . . She wouldn’t allow herself to think about what she was doing.

  She slipped away from the tree and made her way toward the bridge where the Tri-State Osprey would pick them up and get them out of southern Mexico.

  At least for now, the Mad Dog’s assault on Mexico City had been halted.

  It was an odd sight, an airplane with engines that tilted upward, the Boeing/Bell V-22 Osprey, a VSTOL, vertical-takeoff-and-landing plane for combat search and rescue.

  The sweet sound of the tilt-rotor, hybrid fixed-wing aircraft filled Crisi’s ears as it came down on a stretch of old asphalt highway north of the bridge.

  A demolitions team was set to blow the bridge after they took off.

  Buddy Raines came over to Crisi.

  “The only team member we can’t account for is Sergeant Brown,” he said.

  “He’s dead,” Crisi told him. “Took a bullet in the chest and it broke his spine.”

  “I don’t suppose one casualty is all that bad,” Buddy said as he gazed south along the empty highway. “It could have been a helluva lot worse.”

  She left out the rest, that she had killed Sergeant Brown to spare him any more suffering. She felt sure there was nothing else she could have done.

  The Osprey settled onto the roadway.

  “Get aboard that V-22, Corporal Casper,” Buddy said. “We need to get the hell out of here and pick up Harley Reno’s team before they’re cut off.”

  “Yessir,” she mumbled, stumbling toward the plane, shutting everything else from her mind.

  She was, after all, a soldier.

  FORTY-ONE

  Harley Reno had shown Ben Raines’s team how to plant the Bouncing Bettys and Claymore mines so they’d do the most damage.

  “You bury them in a large pattern like this,” he said, drawing a > in the caliche with a stick. “That way, the entire column is inside the pattern before the point man sets off the top mine. When it explodes, the men in line behind him will scatter to the sides, causing them to set off the other mines alongside the trail.”

  “In other words,” Coop said, “You get more bang for your buck.”

  Harley nodded. “Exactly. Now, in about twenty-four hours, they’re gonna run into the stuff Buddy Raines and his men set out. When that happens, a lot of the more undisciplined troops will turn around and run like hell for the rear lines to get out of danger. That’s where we come in. We’re gonna be waitin’ for ’em with mines and machine guns.”

  Coop shook his head. “The poor bastards will feel like rats in a trap.”

  “Yeah,” Hammer Hammerick said, his voice and face showing no sympathy, “war is hell, ain’t it?”

  Within twenty-four hours, Harley and his team had planted several hundred mines. The Bouncing Bettys, which were primarily antipersonnel mines, were buried alongside the Pan American Highway, where troops were likely to be walking. The older Claymore mines, used for vehicles and APCs, were dug into the road itself to catch any HumVees or jeeps or APCs heading back southward.

  After planting the mines, Harley had the team dig in, placing them along a ragged line stretching across the highway just north of a wooden bridge over a deep canyon. He’d rigged the bridge with explosives.

  “Once we’ve done as much damage as we can, or if the numbers become too overwhelming, we’ll retreat back across the bridge and blow it. That should slow ’em down enough for us to get airlifted out of here.”

  Coop noticed Anna watching Harley with adoring eyes as he spoke. Well, he thought, he couldn’t blame her too much. The man certainly knew his stuff.

  By midafternoon the next day, they began to hear distant explosions from the area where Buddy and his team had been dropped off. Soon, several helicopters came roaring overhead, heading for the area to give tactical air support.

  Harley walked along the line of his troops. “I figure in about three, four hours we’ll start seeing the first of the troops as they decide it’s too hot up there and head back here. If you can stand another MRE, it’s time to eat it. You’re gonna need some carbos in your body when the fightin’ gets goin’.”

  General Juan Dominguez was riding in an open-topped HumVee about fifty yards back from the head of his column of troops when the first mines went off. He could see the Bouncing Betty throw its tomato-sized can five feet in the air before it exploded, cutting four men almost in half with its load of razor-sharp shrapnel.

  “Vamos! Rapido!” he screamed. “Let’s get the hell out of here . . . now!”

  His driver jerked the steering wheel of the HumVee to the side and moved the vehicle off the road in a sweeping U-turn. The right front tire rolled over a Claymore mine that’d been set off from the road for just such a reaction.

  The front of the HumVee was lifted off the ground and blasted to pieces in a giant fireball that consumed Dominguez before he knew what had happened. All the men in his car were killed, along with fifteen troops that’d been walking alongside it.

  Men began screaming, both in pain and fear, and hundreds of troops and vehicles turned around and began running for their lives back the way they’d come. Some dropped their weapons in fear, others running off the road into the nearby jungle, hoping for safety there.

  When he was radioed the news of Dominguez’s death and the trap set up ahead of his troops, General Jaime Pena called for a general retreat until he could call in air support to destroy the ambushers.

  He watched in horror as the first two helicopters on the scene were shot out of the sky by GTA missiles. Grabbing the radio, he shouted angrily, “Goddammit, send me some pilots who have combat experience. We’re blocked here until you get me some help!”

  The air traffic controller at the Villahermosa base they’d taken over said he’d send some Apaches right away. “They won’t be so easy to kill,” the man said.

  General Pena told his squad commanders to pull the men back five miles or so until the Apaches arrived.

  Hammer Hammerick climbed down from the tree he’d been in, watching the horizon through his binoculars. “They’re on the way, Harley,” he said, putting the binoculars in a leather case and picking up his Mini-Uzi. “Looks like the dance is about to begin.”

  Harley nodded, his lips pulled back in a savage grin. “Good. Let’s see if we can’t strike up the band.”

  Within a half hour, the advance troops and jeeps and APCs reached the line of mines the team had planted. Explosions began to blossom along the Pan American Highway like deadly flowers, sowing seeds of death and destruction among the scattering troops. Vehicles could be seen lifted and blown into scrap metal along with bodies tossed in the air and torn apart like rag dolls.

  When the screaming, running, shouting men neared Harley’s line of defense, he stood up from behind a fallen log and held his Uzi out in front of him. It began to jump and chatter in his hands, spewing 9mm messengers of death among the running men.

  The rest of his team followed sui
t, not bothering to aim, just spraying the Uzis back and forth like garden hoses into the mass of soldiers racing toward them.

  The line of advancing men stopped under the onslaught, some dropping to the ground and returning fire, others turning tail and running back the way they came into the certain death of the Bouncing Bettys.

  Explosions and fireballs and gunfire mixed with the screaming, shrieking, and shouting of men wounded and dying to produce an almost unbelievable din of destruction.

  The smell of cordite, gunpowder, blood, and excrement wafted on the air like some malevolent fog to burn the noses and eyes of Harley’s team, until they were forced to begin to draw back from the carnage.

  “Pull back to the bridge!” Harley shouted as he bent and opened the box at his feet.

  As Coop and Jersey and Corrie and Anna began to withdraw, Goop looked back over his shoulder to see Hammer standing next to Harley, his Uzi bucking and jumping in his hands as he ejected clip after clip and continued firing into the crowd of men still coming at them.

  Suddenly an armored half-track with a fifty-caliber machine gun on its turret pushed through the soldiers, bearing down on Harley and Hammer.

  Coop grabbed Corrie by the shoulder. “Get on the horn and get that Osprey down here as fast as they can make it. We don’t have much longer.”

  “What are you gonna do?” she asked as she unlimbered her radio set.

  “I’m gonna join the party. It looks like the last dance is about to begin.”

  He ran back to stand next to Harley and Hammer just as Harley pulled out his M-60 machine gun and draped a cartridge belt over his shoulder.

  Harley jacked the loading lever back and held the large gun at waist level, aiming it at the half-track that was bearing down on them.

  As the 9mm shells from Coop’s and Hammer’s Uzis bounced harmlessly off the half-inch armor plate of the big vehicle, and its fifty-caliber machine gun began to target them, chewing large chunks of wood out of the trees around them, Harley let go with the M-60.

  After the silenced firing of the Uzis, the explosion of the M-60 was deafening. Harley’s arm muscles bulged as they tried to control the recoil of the big gun. It jumped and bucked and shook as it pumped hundreds of shells per minute at the half-track.