Peter looked at Chuck. “You and me. Irene, keep a sharp eye on your side. Sally, Larry, cover us from the second floor.”
Outside, Peter and Chuck dropped into one of their concealed bunkers by the house and waited. When they heard the two messengers coming up through the woods, Chuck called out the challenge, and got the correct counter in return. They still kept their weapons at the ready until their two visitors were close enough to recognize.
“What do you have?” Peter asked. One of the men handed over an envelope.
Peter stood shoulder to shoulder with Chuck so they could read it together.
Carter is likely to attack tonight. He was fighting south of town this afternoon, sent a messenger in from the west to offer a truce if we gave up Prange. I understand you may have your own concerns about your place with his men operating in the area, but I think we have a chance to put him down once and for all if he is making a full commitment on us, as I suspect. We could use a few more good hands.
Tom
“What do you think?” Chuck asked, pulling Peter just out of earshot of the two message runners.
“Honestly? I think the best thing we could do is burn this and not tell my mom about it.”
Chuck laughed. “Seriously, though.”
“Seriously,” Peter said. “I’m inclined to believe Grossman, that Carter’s going all in on the town. We’re a minor annoyance up here; Bowman is the prize for him. If there’s a chance to end him and his threat, I’m all for joining in.”
“Well, we know your mom is going to stay up here. Let’s say the same for Bill and Irene. I don’t think Sally would throw in. That would leave you, me, and maybe Larry to join in. Do you think the three of us could tip the scales enough to make it worth cutting the defense up here in half? Not to mention, if we all don’t make it back.”
Peter was surprised to hear Chuck arguing for caution. He certainly appreciated it, because he was ready to just throw all in, and it was good to have somebody near at hand to argue the other direction. He had just never suspected Chuck would be that voice. Still, he asked, “If Larry and I go down, you in?”
“I am,” Chuck said. “After what Prange and Carter and their thugs did to my family and my town? I’m not going to sit on the sidelines. Even if we can’t do much, I’m not going to do nothing.”
Peter nodded. The last time Chuck had gone along on a trip to Bowman, they’d visited his parents. Prange’s men had roughed them up pretty bad when they shut down the family bar. Both of them still had healing wounds on their faces, and Chuck’s mom still favored her left leg when she walked.
“Thank you,” he told Chuck, and went over to the messengers. “Let the old man know he’s got me and Chuck, maybe Larry. We’ll back up the guys at the east highway.”
23
One place where Carter had to give Grossman credit was that he didn’t have his people change shifts on a schedule. Not that it would have done much good to know that schedule, considering that all he had available for working timepieces were two old wind-up alarm clocks. With his forces divided up into three groups, that still would have left him with one group not knowing what time it was if he had hoped for a coordinated attack.
The other way in which Grossman was thwarting him was in having his work and guard crews stagger their changeovers. Carter couldn’t even go with something like a one-thousand count after the first shift change after sunset, if he could trust his people to count that high in the first place.
His two remaining options for coordinating the attack were either, “Wait for my whistle,” or “Wait for me to start shooting.” The townsfolk had captured both whistles and automatic rifles when they’d risen up and tossed the cartel out, meaning Carter didn’t have the advantages of unique-sounding signaling devices. He could still steal a page from Grossman’s book, though, and have his people wait for unique patterns.
He’d divvied up his men so that the bulk of them were with him, hidden along the riverbank, downstream from the bridge at the south of town. That was where the thickest woods came in almost closest to the town and provided the best cover. The west approach would have let him get even more people in a good position, but there was a group out that way that had already shot him up twice while he and Prange had been in command of the town. He knew that if he tried staging folks out there, they’d get lit up, and then the townsfolk would be able to come in on their backs.
“Heads up, boss,” one of his men said. Carter looked out from his hiding place in the undergrowth. Six men were walking out toward the bridge, carrying a mix of hunting rifles and the cartel’s M-16s.
“All right. We’re on deck. Let’s hope they cluster up to bullshit a bit,” Carter said.
As he’d hoped, the men all gathered together, the ones coming off shift and the ones going on, to talk. A few pointed out across the river while they spoke, but most of them had their attention on the conversation. “You all know what to do, work from the outside in,” he told his men.
Several of them, the ones who were the best shots, took aim. They’d earlier coordinated how they’d select targets from a group. When he saw that all of his sharpshooters were ready, he said, “On three…Two…One…Fire.”
Five rifles simultaneously cracked out single shots. A fraction of a second later, another slightly less coherent volley sounded, as the knot of townsfolk jerked and fell.
“Go! Go! Go!” Carter shouted. One of his men blasted out a long note from a whistle, followed by two short and another long. From the other two approaches into town, shots rang out and whistles repeated the pattern.
All of this was answered by gunfire at the bridges and a different set of whistle patterns from inside the town.
Carter followed his vanguard as they sprinted from the trees toward the bridge. A few of the guards were still moving, some crawling for cover, two making a desperate stand, firing from the prone where they lay. Bullets cut the air around the cartel force, but none of them went down.
“Keep anybody at that bar pinned down!” Carter told two of his men, pointing at a low building called The Duck Blind. He knew that place was going to be trouble, because Grossman had launched his rebellion that had tossed the cartel out of Bowman from there.
“Got it, boss!”
To his left, Carter saw one of his men stop and take careful aim. He took two clean shots, and the wounded townsmen who’d been firing from the ground stopped moving. The rest of his force continued moving, steady and unafraid. They had caught their enemies out in the open, seized the advantage, and knew that this first small battle belonged to them.
These were the men he wished that Prange had gotten for his initial mission to set up an outpost in Bowman. They were the ones that he should have deployed a few days earlier when he saw locals out working in a field. These were the hard and cold ones, the best that he had. The ones he’d kept carefully in reserve until he knew it was time to make the decisive strike.
Guns from two of the nearest houses opened up. Carter’s men spread out and went for what cover they could find. There were a couple hundred feet of open land between the bridge and the nearest of them.
Of that first row of houses, most were pockmarked with bullet holes, and had windows covered over with plywood or tarps. More reminders of Grossman’s attack that had dislodged the cartel.
“You all know what to do,” Carter shouted, then took a quick walk to a tree. He turned to look at the men he’d left behind to watch The Duck Blind. “Pull back to the trenches. See if you can sort their mines and traps.”
Carter drained an M-16 magazine in short bursts at the bar to cover his two guys, while the rest of his force leapfrogged, fire and run, fire and run, toward the houses that gunshots were coming from.
“Give ’em a taste?” one of the men asked, reaching back to tap the heavy ruck on his back.
“Not yet. Let’s hold that surprise in reserve a little longer.”
Gunfire finally broke out behind Carter, single shots from
what sounded like large-bore rifles. A quick glance showed that the bar didn’t have line of sight on him, so he put his attention back to his assault force. They were covering ground without taking any losses. It seemed like his guys had pegged which rooms the defenders were firing from and were managing to keep the people inside buttoned down without having to waste a lot of ammunition.
He knew that was going to be key to doing what he had to do. Being outnumbered as bad as they were, his men had to make their shots count. Random spray and pray wasn’t going to cut it, or they’d very shortly be down to throwing rocks while they retreated.
His first men had gotten to one of the offending houses. “Smoke ’em out, old school!” he shouted. In response, he saw one of his men pull a highway flare out of a cargo pocket and light the fuse. He smashed a window with his rifle butt, looked around, and tossed the flare in. A second man gestured up and down the row of houses.
“Do it!” Carter shouted.
More men pulled flares and started busting windows. The distraction worked, and the defensive firing from the first house slowed down a lot. One of Carter’s men had kept an eye on the window he’d thrown the flare through and suddenly fired a burst into it. The people in the second defended home seemed to have figured out what was going on, and they slowed their gunfire as well. Carter figured they were moving from the second floor down to the first.
It gave his crew plenty of time to get closer and start torching more houses.
“Yo, boss!” The signalman waved to get his attention. “West side wants to know about the firebombs.”
“Not yet,” Carter said.
The signaler whistled out a series of blasts.
“What’s the general mood?” Carter asked, when his man finished.
“All moving forward, nobody asking for help or cover.”
“Good. Let’s move up.”
There was a sudden increase in gunfire as Carter and his whistle man trotted forward. It seemed like some of the folks inside of burning houses were abandoning them. His men were coming around to the front side of the line of houses, starting to engage with people in homes across the street. He saw one of his guys being dragged back from the firing line by a buddy, blood clearly flowing freely from some wound.
The buddy dropped the wounded man and went back to the fight. A third one of Carter’s men ran along the back edge of the houses. He had a different backpack than the rest, smaller but stuffed. It was one of two guys he had with good first-aid skills.
“Nope,” the ersatz medic said, shaking his head, as Carter got up to him. He uncapped a pre-filled syringe and plugged it into the guy’s arm. It was heroin. Not enough for a straight-up overdose, probably, but easily enough to send the kid off for a decent swim.
One of the good features of his team’s first-aid guy was that he had no sentimentality at all. He wasn’t going to waste time trying to save one guy if there were three others he could patch up and throw back into action. He’d barely pulled the syringe out of the wounded man when he ran back up toward the fighting, ready to take care of the next guy that needed it.
“Hey,” Carter said to his whistle man. “Time to start lighting the place up. Let the other teams know.” He rolled his wounded guy over and reached into his ruck to grab one of the incendiary bombs that his crew had tried out on that home up on the ridgeline the night before.
Carter pulled the ribbon to pop out the bomb’s rudimentary safety, wound up, and threw it like a football. It shattered the window of a house across the street, the detonator popping when it broke through the glass. There was an immediate flash, followed by a satisfying whooshing noise when the thick, flammable goo inside lit up. “One in that blue house,” he called out. A couple seconds later, another bomb hit and burst. It had missed the window, but the payload had spread nicely on the building’s wood siding and started burning. “Let’s soften this block up for a bit, then move on.”
24
Tom Grossman was already headed toward the stairway to the roof when the messenger came barreling down it.
“Gunfire at all three bridges!”
“Got it,” he said. Between a pleasantly warm evening and his suspicions that Carter was going to make his move, he’d been working with his office window open. The sudden clatter of weapons and unfamiliar whistle signals made it clear that it was either the big one or a very intensive diversion.
When he got to the roof, he went straight for the central viewing platform. Somebody stepped aside from the big pair of binoculars so he could take a look.
“Has anybody gotten eyes on Carter yet?” Grossman asked.
“No. Too many people moving too fast, and the east bridge is the only one we can see from up here.”
“I want to know the second somebody positively IDs him. If you’ve got a clear shot, take it first, then tell me.” Grossman tried to identify where the most intense fighting was going on, assuming Carter would be with his main force, but there was too much fighting for him to narrow anything down. “Anything from The Duck Blind?”
While two of the three bridges in town were obscured by buildings from the roof of the town hall, The Duck Blind was clearly visible. It also had a commanding view of the southern bridge into town.
Somebody said from behind the scope of a long rifle, “I see sporadic muzzle flashes, but not people. I think they’re defending.”
“If they start messaging, speak up.”
A young woman with three whistles on lanyards around her neck tapped Grossman. “Southern bridge has been overrun,” she said. “Enemy across it and advancing on the houses there. Western bridge requesting help. I’ve signaled reserves to back up both.”
Grossman turned to look toward the eastern bridge. The force there seemed to be holding so far. He could see the invaders on the far side of the river attempting coordinated fire-and-maneuver advances, but not making any headway yet.
They were also staying off the bridge itself, where the traps were set. Whether the defense was keeping them too pinned down or they had been doing enough recon to know the danger wasn’t clear from what he could see.
Grossman noticed Vic Davis behind him. “I think that’s a diversion,” he said, pointing toward the east. “If they’ve swamped the south already, I would vote for that as the main thrust.”
Davis looked through his own field glasses. “Assuming he’s doing diversions and a main attack, and not just making an even split of his forces.”
“If his ultimate goal is to get at Prange, he’s going to need to make a solid, fast drive in. If I needed to do that, I’d throw distractions up to keep the defense evenly distributed to let my extraction team punch through.”
“I wouldn’t assume he’d take the same approach you would. You went to different schools to learn how to fight,” Davis said. “But I’m also not discounting the possibility that his taught him the same tactics yours did.”
The messenger spoke up again. “Houses on fire to the south and west.” She looked at a sheet of paper. “I’m dispatching backups with fire extinguishers to see if they can get close enough to contain things.”
“Crap,” Grossman said. “How are they starting them?”
“I don’t know. Our vocab isn’t that granular.” The messenger turned away from Grossman and started blasting out a message on one of the whistles. She swapped for a second and it sounded like she was sending the same message again.
“We really need to teach these guys Morse code,” Davis said.
“Wouldn’t hurt,” the messenger said. “We’re limited in what we can say with this, but we can say it a lot faster.”
Grossman realized that in the time he’d been up top, the woman had twice moved people in response to messages she’d received. One of the many things he’d been doing over the past few days was coming up with a set of protocols for his signal team to use in case the town was invaded in earnest. The woman standing in front of him with her page of codes was doing exactly what he’d trained her to do.
“East is breaking!” somebody shouted from the wall of sandbags at the edge of the roof. Grossman lifted the binocs and found the bridge. There were yellow flames and black smoke rising from one of the trenches guarding the bridge. It looked like the other trench had been flanked, and that Carter’s men were cleaning up.
“Calling a rally to the backup point,” the signalwoman said, grabbing the blue whistle.
“That’s not a simple Molotov that did that,” Davis said.
Grossman kept his eyes on the scene. He had to agree. The flames were the wrong color for either gasoline or high-potency liquor, there was too much black smoke, and area covered just didn’t seem right for a simple broken glass bottle. It covered too wide of an area, as if the fuel had been spread by a small explosion or burst.
“Things aren’t looking good south or west, either,” somebody said. “Multiple plumes of heavy smoke coming from the south, one from the west.”
Grossman started scanning the rest of the town. There were two houses to the south that had clearly caught fire, and a couple other smaller columns of dark smoke rising into the sky. “Can you call everybody back to the second line and tell them to keep the invaders away from the next blocks of houses at all costs?” he asked the messenger.
“I can pull the lines back and call them to stand firm.”
“You’re learning Morse tomorrow. You and your whole crew.”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said, swapping whistles and consulting her page of codes.
“You!” Grossman said, pointing to one of the new police deputies who’d been designated as a driver for the captured cargo truck. “We’re going to lead from the front for a bit.”
“Is that a good idea?” Davis asked.
“Better than staying up here. You, you,” Grossman said, pointing out a couple other men. “You’re my security.” He turned to the messenger. “Where’s the next closest whistleblower?”
Age of Survival Series | Book 3 | Age of Revival Page 15
