An Undeclared War (Countdown to Armageddon Book 4)

by Darrell Maloney

  But not today. He and Joyce had bonded during the previous months. And he now considered her a second mom.

  He rested his rifle on the ledge of the firing port in the general direction he knew the man was. Then he took a deep breath and rose, placing his eye on the scope and acquiring his target.

  Jordan’s bullet flew true, tearing apart the man’s heart and killing him instantly.

  And Jordan felt no hint of remorse.

  Sara, on the other hand, went numb. She considered herself Jordan’s wife. There was no preacher around to make it official, but they bore a child together and shared the same bed. So it was about as official as it was going to be.

  Sara watched the shooting unfold on the surveillance monitors. She knew her husband had just taken his first life. But instead of being horrified, she was supremely proud of him. Because she felt the same way he did.

  That bastard might well have been the one who killed Joyce.

  Sara could see the invading force on camera for the first time. Until the three men broke free from the tree line, they’d done an excellent job of staying behind cover.

  Now, though, she was finally able to lend a hand.

  By watching the surveillance monitors, she could plainly see the two men against the house.

  “Jordan, the other two are directly below your window. They probably sense that you can’t get enough angle to shoot at them. They are just standing below the window, looking up at your location. They appear to be arguing.”

  Jordan didn’t know what to do. But Tom did.

  Tom took two shots at the spot in the shrubs where he’d seen the sun reflected off of something. Then he put his rifle down and scampered into the bedroom with Jordan.

  Without so much as a word, Tom drew his handgun from his hip holster and stretched his entire arm through the firing port, through the broken window and the window frame. Then he pointed it straight down toward the ground below and emptied the magazine.

  He was shooting blindly, but fairly effectively under the circumstances.

  His third shot caught one of the men dead center on top of his head, traveled downward through the man’s neck, through his heart, and lodged in his abdomen.

  He never knew what hit him.

  Sara was back on the radio.

  “You got one of them. The other one is running, along the side of the fence toward the pond. He’s holding his arm. I think you may have gotten him too.”

  Tom didn’t wait for an attaboy. He ran back out of the room in a flash and back to his own battle station, leaving Jordan a hell of a story to tell his grandchildren some day.

  -6-

  In the speeding patrol car, just a few minutes away now, the four reinforcements were frantic. It had been over an hour since the battle began.

  And they were painfully aware that a lot of death and misery can happen in an hour.

  John had had them open up the gun cases from his closet, to find they contained what looked very similar to the AR-15s each of them carried.

  “Those aren’t fancy. But they’re a lot more deadly. They just look like generic versions of the ARs, without the pretty stocks and handgrips. But they’re actually military M-16s.”

  Scott smiled.

  “Does that mean they’re fully automatic?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what it means.”

  “Where the hell did you get them?”

  “In the early days of the blackout, I took them off of some looters who were dragging them out of the National Guard armory. I could have turned them into the police armory for safekeeping until somebody from the Army came by to claim them. But then I thought they might come in handy for Hannah and I when we had to fight off looters. I figured these types of weapons were already on the streets. And the best way to fight fire is with fire.”

  “How do we switch them?”

  “Look at the fire selector switch. Your AR has only two options: safe and fire.

  “The M-16 has three options: safe, fire and auto. On auto, it will continue to fire as long as you hold the trigger.

  “Be careful, though. Only fire in short bursts. Three or four rounds. That’ll be enough to sweep your target area if you miss on your first shot. But it won’t run you out of ammo. If you hold that trigger down too long it’ll empty your whole magazine.”

  “Now lift up the sponge liners in the back of the gun cases. One of them has an added bonus.”

  Robbie and Randy did as instructed. Scott, in the front passenger seat looking over his shoulder, couldn’t see what Robbie and Randy were looking at. But he could tell they were impressed.

  Randy let out a slow whistle. Robbie merely said, “Holy shit.”

  Scott asked, “What? What is it?”

  Robbie held up one of four hand grenades.

  “Also taken from the looters at the National Guard armory. I kept them because you never know when something like that might come in handy. Have any of you guys ever used one of those before?”

  John checked his rear view mirror to see the back seat passengers shaking their heads.

  Scott said, “No, but I can’t think of a better time to learn.”

  “Sorry, Scott,” John said. “I hate to pull rank on you, but that’s a big negative. These things are nothing to mess around with. If you hold it too long or throw it wrong, you or the good guys die. I used those in my Marine Corps days. It’s been awhile, but I doubt they’ve changed much.”

  Scott keyed his microphone and said, “Joyce, Linda, Tom, this is Scott. Do you read me?”

  He paused, but heard only static.

  “If you can read me, we’re on our way. Hang in there.”

  As they were hauling ass out of San Antonio, Scott had replaced the batteries in the radio he had with him when he left the compound months before. Under ideal conditions, the radio was supposed to have a range of about twenty miles or so.

  But he couldn’t wait that long. About thirty miles out, he started calling over the radio every couple of minutes.

  He hoped the silence didn’t mean everyone was dead or captured.

  No. He wouldn’t allow his mind to go there. It meant he was still out of range, and that’s all it meant.

  Robbie said, “We need a game plan before we go charging in there like gangbusters. If they don’t know we’re coming, your people might mistake us for the bad guys.”

  “Joyce, Linda, Tom, this is Scott. Do you read me?”

  Suddenly, everyone in the house heard Sara say over the radio, “Scott, I can hear you. Where are you?”

  “Sara, is that you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sara, what’s going on?”

  “They’re shooting at us. They’re all over the place. We’re shooting back, and we’ve shot some of them. But there are still more out there.”

  He could sense the panic in her voice.

  “You’re doing good, honey. Are you watching the monitors and sharing what you see?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes or so. There are four of us, and we’ve got some heavy firepower. Joyce, Linda, Tom, which direction do we approach from?”

  There was no answer.

  Scott didn’t realize that he was barely in range, and none of the others could hear him with the stubby antennas on their handheld radios. The base station that Sara monitored, however, was linked via coaxial cable with the array of antennas on the ham radio tower.

  Scott tried again.

  “Joyce, Linda, Tom, from which direction do we approach?”

  Still nothing.

  Sara said, “I guess I’m the only one who can hear you. Tom and Linda, Scott is coming with reinforcements. He wants to know which direction to come from.”

  Suddenly, the one-sided conversation the others had been listening to made sense.

  And luckily, Scott didn’t think to ask young Sara why she didn’t call out to Joyce as well as the others.

  Tom quickly got on his radio
and shouted, “Tell them to come from the north, through my place. Tell them there’s a break in the fence where they made entry.”

  Sara relayed the message, word for word, to Scott.

  Tom went on, “Tell them to watch out for a pit filled with punji sticks, and to be careful in case they left someone guarding my place.”

  Tom had trouble hiding the jubilation in his voice.

  What a difference a few minutes can make.

  Tom continued to watch the stand of shrubs where he’d seen the flash of light a few minutes before. He’d taken four blind shots into the area, but there was no movement there now.

  Either he’d been very lucky and shot the men who were hiding there, or they’d scattered at his first shot.

  Between the two possibilities, he considered the second the more likely.

  Linda and Hannah, at the front of the house, had their hands full. Linda was holding her own against two men who kept moving back and forth behind the tree line, taking a shot, then crawling to a new location. She’d come close a couple of times, but had missed because they were moving too fast to line up a good shot.

  Tom heard the shots coming from Linda’s position and called out, “Linda, do you need any help over there?”

  “No. I’m keeping them in the woods. And I’ll get the bastards eventually.”

  Linda, like everyone else, was furious.

  Hannah got on her radio. “Linda and I are running out of ammo. Does anybody have any to spare?”

  Jordan called out, “I’m down to my last two magazines.”

  Tom was being more judicious with his shots.

  “I’ve got three extra mags. Zachary, are things still quiet at the back of the house?”

  “Yes. I’m on my way.”

  Zachary ran to Tom’s location first and without a word took the three magazines Tom handed to him. Zachary was surprised by how heavy the ninety rounds were. He took them into the bedroom at the front of the house where Linda and Hannah were huddled behind the plywood barricade.

  He froze in the doorway at the sight of Joyce’s body, laying on the floor between Hannah and his mom. She looked almost serene and peaceful. Were it not for the ugly red hole in the top right side of her forehead, it would have been easy to think she was merely napping.

  Tom’s voice on the radio brought him back into focus.

  “Zachary, gather everybody’s empties and run them down to Sara. Sara, can you reload them from the box of ammo next to the desk?”

  “Yes.”

  Zachary did as instructed and Scott, listening to the mayhem, began to get an ominous feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Everyone involved in the firefight had either spoken on the radio, or were addressed by name.

  Except his fiancé, Joyce.

  John, in the driver’s seat beside him, seemed to read his mind.

  “Hang in there, buddy. Everybody’s coming through this just fine.”

  And John felt just a little bit ashamed that he felt a rush of relief when he heard his wife Hannah’s voice on the radio a few seconds before.

  Both men, as well as their two friends in the back seat, hoped that their mounting suspicions were unfounded.

  Scott keyed his mike again.

  “I don’t know if you can hear me now, we’re about four, maybe five minutes away. Hang in there.”

  This time the signal was stronger. Everyone was able to make out Scott’s words through the heavy static.

  The cavalry was almost there.

  -7-

  From Tony Pike’s point of view, things couldn’t have gone more wrong. He’d gathered plenty of additional bodies to go with him, with the promise every man would share equally in the women and the livestock.

  He’d made sure they were well armed and carried plenty of ammunition. He made sure the druggies weren’t high and the drunks were sober.

  He’d thought he’d be smarter this time by attacking during the daytime. Their previous excursions onto the property had been at night, when it had been pitch black. He figured that attacking in daylight was bold enough to catch them with their pants down.

  Hell, he expected most of them to be asleep, so they could be up during the hours of darkness to fend them off again.

  It didn’t work out that way. He was hoping to get all of his men into position, scattered in the heavy brush on three sides of the house and along the fence line, before the shooting even started.

  He’d even briefed his men, “Don’t go doing anything stupid, like firing before we’re all ready. Once we’re in position, I’ll fire the first shot. That’ll be everybody’s cue to open up on all the upstairs windows.”

  From the beginning, his plan fell apart. They had been spotted by a sentry on the north side of the house.

  It had been that sentry who’d fired the first shot.

  Then all hell broke loose. Marut had gone down with the first shot, with a wound in the knee that almost took his leg off. Most of the others had no discipline at all. Instead of making their way to their planned positions, they scattered in all directions.

  Pike had even seen one stupid bastard cut and run full speed back from where they’d come. Pike had watched him as he dove headlong into the pit the old man from the compound had dug, obviously not knowing it was full of punji sticks.

  He hoped the deserter was dying a slow and miserable death.

  The rest of his men were all over the place. Most of them were dead. From his vantage point on the front of the house, hidden in heavy brush, Pike was periodically able to peek out. He’d seen a leg sticking out from behind a dead mesquite tree that hadn’t moved in ten minutes. Over by the fence he could see a body face down in the dirt.

  Behind the Bobcat was O’Hara, half his head gone, his dead face leaning against the side of the machine’s body as though giving it a macabre kiss.

  The worst error he’d made was assuming the house wouldn’t be fortified. He thought it would be a piece of cake, killing the men inside, just by focusing their fire on the upstairs windows where the shots were coming from.

  After all, how long could a shooter in the window come under fire before his luck ran out and he caught a bullet?

  It wasn’t until the shooting started, and the first few shots shattered the windows, that they could see the thick barrier of plywood inside them.

  The plywood was pockmarked with dozens of bullet holes now. But still the rifles came peeking through the firing ports every few seconds to rain more death down upon them.

  “Shit!” he’d heard Gonzalez shout a few minutes before. “How thick is that wood, anyway?”

  They had no way of knowing, but the five sheets of half inch plywood was doing a very effective job of catching their bullets. It would continue to do so for a long time to come. It took a lot of gunfire to shred two and a half inches of plywood.

  They also didn’t know, had no way of knowing, that several of their shots did indeed penetrate the house through the firing ports. All of them lodged harmlessly in the ceilings of the upstairs bedrooms.

  All of them except for one, which tragically ended Joyce’s life.

  Despite the chaos, though, Pike knew he wasn’t the only one left alive. There were periodic gunshots coming from the south side of the house, in the woods to his left. He saw at least one of his men along the north side of the high back fence. He knew that Gonzalez was in the brush about forty yards to his left.

  It wasn’t over yet.

  But it soon would be.

  He’d been spotted, and a bullet whizzed over his head.

  “Oh, crap!” he said as he low-crawled twenty yards farther south, in the general direction of Gonzalez.

  “Gonzalez, you there?”

  “I’m here, you son of a bitch. You said this was going to be easy. I ought to shoot you my own damn self.”

  “Let’s try this. Pick a window. As soon as we see a rifle come out of it we’ll both unload at the same time. One of the bullets is sure to hit ‘em. We can
pick them off one at a time, instead of sitting down here waiting to die.”

  By now it was apparent to Gonzalez that Pike wasn’t the tactical genius he thought he was. But he had no plan that was any better. And they were presently pinned down. So Pike’s idea was better than nothing.

  From their positions they could see the windows on both the north and east sides of the house. They were twenty yards apart, so their bullets would fly from two different angles. But that was probably a good thing. Bullets coming from two different directions would have a better chance of hitting their targets.

  “Okay. Which window you aiming for?”

  “First window on the right side of the house.”

  “Okay.”

  Tom had backed away from the firing port, in the shadows of the room. He couldn’t be seen from the outside, he hoped, while he scanned the area outside through his rifle scope looking for movement.

  Finally, a hundred yards northeast of the house, he thought he caught a patch of blue in the thick shrubbery.

  A pair of blue jeans, perhaps?

  He moved back to the firing port and placed the barrel of his rifle into the port. His intent was to rise up and aim his sight in the general area of his target, then disappear for a few seconds before rising again, sighting in, and firing.

  But he didn’t have time to do that. As soon as the barrel of his AR-15 went through the firing port, he was subjected to a barrage of bullets. He kept his position, ducking down below the port, hearing and feeling the bullets striking the outside of the plywood barricade inches from his face. One bullet came into the house and shattered the globe on the ceiling fan, spraying shards of glass all over the room.

  In the other bedroom, on the east side of the house, Linda was able to see smoke and movement coming from the same stand of brush Tom had sighted. Now she, too, knew where some of the aggressors were hiding.

  After firing fifteen rounds into Tom’s window, Pike and Gonzalez held their fire. Surely one of their shots had found its target.

  “Okay. Now to the other side of the house. First window.”

  “Got it.”

  Linda didn’t know what she was in for when she rested the barrel of her own weapon on the bottom of the shooting port. She was in the process of raising up to find a target through the scope when her weapon exploded in front of her.