Fortress Doctrine (Maelstrom Rising Book 5)

by Peter Nealen

  He kept his pace up as he moved, careful to maintain awareness of both the enemy’s position and the gun trucks’. Combat maneuver often boiled down to a game of angles, and he didn’t want to over-penetrate and put his squad into a position where they were aiming at each other.

  It didn’t take long. He found a draw leading down, partially sheltered from the enemy’s fallback position, and turned down it, getting lower as he went, weaving between the clumps of brush and prickly pear. He still couldn’t entirely avoid them in the dark; he winced as a spine went into his calf as he brushed past what he’d thought was sagebrush, but that clearly included some cactus.

  Another burst of gunfire hammered out ahead, answered by the throaty roar of one of the 7.62 machineguns. The bad guys were still kicking, and from the sounds of it, they weren’t happy that the tables had been turned so fast.

  Shouldn’t have fucked with Triarii, assholes.

  As he reached the bottom of the draw, instead of making the rest of the men behind him fan out, he turned right and started to move along the base of the slope behind him. LaForce followed, the rest of the maneuver element getting online without having to do anything but follow the man ahead.

  About fifty yards from the arroyo, Hank turned left and started to advance.

  He lowered himself to his belly after a couple paces and started to crawl. He wanted to finish this quickly, and that meant getting close.

  It took a couple of minutes to close the distance. Just short of the arroyo itself, he paused, reached down, and keyed his mike four times. Shift fire.

  Bishop and Coffee both opened up on the arroyo for a pair of long bursts, then ceased fire. And that was when Hank and the maneuver element struck.

  Gathering his feet under him, Hank heaved himself up onto a knee, his rifle already in his shoulder and canted, his eye finding the red dot through his 14s, looking for targets.

  Four men in jeans, t-shirts, and plate carriers were still hunkered in the arroyo, arguing in Spanish. Two more lay sprawled in the bottom, unmoving. Several wires led down from what had to have been IEDs emplaced on the road, and what looked very much like a Milkor grenade launcher lay in the dirt next to one of them.

  Hank put his red dot on the man farthest to the right and shot him twice, once center mass, the second time in the head. He must have been wearing plates; the first round slammed him into the dust with a gasp, before the second smacked the ball cap off his head and spattered dark fluid against the dirt and rocks underneath him.

  By the time he dragged his muzzle toward the next man, it had all been finished in a crackling storm of suppressed gunfire. The enemy hadn’t even gotten a shot off.

  The echoes died away, and Hank scanned the arroyo. A couple of the bad guys were still twitching, one still gasping out what was left of his life. From the sounds he was making, though, he didn’t have long.

  “One-Two, this is Actual.” He was scrambling down into the arroyo, keeping a very careful eye on the bodies, just in case. “We’ve got probable IEDs emplaced on the road. Go ahead and fall back about five hundred; we’re going to clear them out the old-fashioned way.”

  “Roger that. We’ll be on the other side of the high ground.” Faris had been one of Hank’s problem children when he’d been a squad leader; he’d been generally lazy, conceited, and far too quick to take failures out on his subordinates. Strangely, after San Diego, he’d been a lot more reliable, and hadn’t even bitched too much about being taken off the squad leader slot.

  At least, not when Hank had been within earshot.

  Hank crouched down in the arroyo as the rest of the maneuver element took up security positions. Two belt-feds lay atop three ammo crates, and four sets of wires led down to what looked like homemade clackers, rather than the cell phones that he’d half expected. Granted, cell service down by the border was spotty, at best, since the attacks on the grid, so the clackers were probably more reliable.

  “One-Two, make sure you’re carefully checking your surroundings before you stop.” He gathered up the clackers, peering down the road. “We don’t know how many IEDs they might have buried and daisy-chained.” He thought a moment before Faris answered, then turned to LaForce. “Etienne, take Taylor and Evans and sweep this side of the road back to where that first belt-fed opened up. Just in case.”

  “Roger that,” both men echoed at almost the same time, LaForce in person, Faris over the radio. LaForce and the two men mentioned got up and started to carefully move down the arroyo, toward where the high ground met the side of the road. Hank waited, listening and watching the desert. The gunfire off to the north seemed to have died down; a few pot-shots still rang out, but they might just be militia shooting at shadows. The attack seemed to have pulled off.

  He wondered at that. Was all of this set up just to try to draw one squad into an ambush?

  If so, he suspected that they’d need to get back to Lajitas posthaste. Nobody would set up this elaborate a feint if they didn’t have some kind of follow-up in mind.

  “Actual, One-One. We’re clear. Give us a minute to get some cover.” LaForce clearly wasn’t eager to be anywhere near the road.

  Before Hank could reply, his radio crackled with a different voice. “Tango India Six Four, this is Mike Actual!” Grant’s voice was distorted, with a lot of rasping background noise, but none of that could disguise the gunfire in the background. “We’re under attack! We need you back here now!”

  Dammit. I fucking knew it. “This is Actual. Everybody get flat, now. Going loud in five seconds.” He gathered up the clackers and took his own advice, hugging the inside of the arroyo wall before he started mashing the clackers shut.

  The night erupted with a series of catastrophic booms, lighting up the desert with brilliant flashes before the clouds of dirt and smoke rained debris down on the road. The concussions were painful even from behind cover.

  “One-Two, Actual. Get up here.” He stood up as the last of the pulverized rocks pattered down out of the night sky. “And pick One-One up on the way. We don’t have any time to fuck around.”

  Chapter 3

  Hank could already tell that things were going badly.

  Fire glowed orange somewhere down by the river, and long, wild bursts of gunfire rattled in the dark. He couldn’t see much, but he signaled Reisinger to slow down and pull off to the side before they entered the town.

  They wouldn’t do anyone any good charging into the middle of a firefight and getting shot to ribbons because they didn’t know what was going on.

  “Mike Actual, Tango India Actual. SITREP.” He knew that Grant was probably not in the best position to give him a detailed rundown, but he was confident that he’d trained the militia leader well enough that he’d at least be able to give a down and dirty SALUTE report, even if he wasn’t thinking specifically about the Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, and Equipment format.

  “They overran the Doogan place before we knew what was happening. Then they attacked the hotel, just before a line of trucks started coming across the river!” Grant wasn’t exactly calmly giving the information over the radio, but under the circumstances, Hank didn’t figure he could expect anything else. Especially if the bad guys had just pulled another flanking maneuver, while the Triarii were away.

  This was turning into one hell of an interesting night.

  “Shit. Turn around.” If the fight was centered on the lodge, he definitely didn’t want to drive into the middle of town, on the main road. “Go back to Comanche Mesa. We’ll push up the ridge, then dismount by the Hermann place and work our way around the hill behind the Doogan house. Vics will stay on the road and wait for my call to move up.”

  Reisinger was already turning the vehicle around. He was still driving well enough, though Hank was keeping an eye on him. He’d taken a good hit, though it appeared that his helmet had absorbed most of it, and at an angle that hadn’t dumped more than a fraction of the bullet’s energy into his head and neck. He was still going to h
ave a splitting headache, and his ear was still bleeding.

  More gunfire echoed up the valley as Reisinger stomped on the gas, barely slowing to make the turn onto Comanche Mesa. Fortunately, Bishop had seen it coming and was used to Reisinger’s driving; he held on and braced himself, his boots practically touching either side of the bed.

  Then they were tearing up the road, kicking up a cloud of dust behind them. It hadn’t rained for a while; the Big Bend area didn’t get more than around half an inch of precipitation per month in the winter. If it had been daylight, they would have definitely announced their presence just from the dust plume.

  The road dipped toward a valley between two hills, and the still-darkened house where John and Wendy Hermann lived. John was coming out with shotgun in hand as the gun trucks pulled up.

  “John, get inside,” Hank barked as he dismounted the F350. “Wendy needs you to watch our backs, not go right into the middle of this.”

  “I’ll be damned if I sit and wait for those cocksuckers to come kick in our door!” John Hermann wasn’t exactly the type one would have expected to go running toward a fight. In his seventies, portly and balding, he was a retired tech executive from California, whose arrival in Texas had been met with some hostility and skepticism by a number of the locals, especially the ranchers.

  “That’s why we’re here.” The truth was, Hank didn’t want Hermann getting underfoot; he was eager to hold the line, but hadn’t participated in much militia training, and when he had joined in, he hadn’t been good at it. “Stay here and make sure nobody comes in on our flank.” He was reasonably sure, as the rest of the squad, minus the drivers and gunners, got out and spread out into a wedge pointed toward the next hill, that that wouldn’t happen, but you never could tell. The desert was wide, and the main ford at Lajitas wasn’t the only way across the Rio Grande thereabouts.

  Hermann looked like he was going to argue the point, but finally harrumphed and headed back toward the house. Hank moved up behind LaForce, who was taking point again. Ettiene LaForce had a very take-charge sort of personality, and if he wasn’t going to be a squad leader—having separate squad leaders when the section was broken down into two squads working dispersed between two small towns had become somewhat redundant—he was more than willing to walk point.

  “Let’s go.” There wasn’t time to waste; the gunfire over by the lodge was getting more intense. The bad guys had come heavy. The militia didn’t have the belt-fed machineguns that the Triarii did, so the long bursts of automatic fire had to be from the enemy.

  Instead of pushing straight toward the fight in the middle of town, LaForce made his way around the side of the hill ahead, following the curve of the road. If the bad guys had flanked the defenses and taken out the outpost on the Doogan place, then that needed to be cleared first.

  Only a few yards along, they turned and started to climb the hill. It was easier going than trying to get up the much steeper cliff on the side of the highway, but the slope and the footing in the sandy, rocky soil still slowed them down, each man leaning into the hillside to balance the weight of his weapon and gear as he struggled up, trying to crane his neck to see the crest ahead through NVGs.

  They slowed even more as they got on top of the hill. There was little to no cover; the Doogans’ “yard” was little more than a narrow strip of landscaping around the house, surrounded by the desert.

  Hank signaled LaForce to halt and get down while he scanned the house. It was dark and still. That didn’t bode well for the Doogans. The family had built and manned the outpost themselves, Keith Doogan and his sons taking shifts on watch during the night, occasionally with assistance from a few of the boys’ friends, none of whom were formal members of the local militia.

  That had always made him a bit suspicious, and now he had a sinking feeling that he might not have been suspicious enough.

  The sounds of the firefight up by the lodge urged him to hurry, but he ignored it. Staying low, he started to crawl toward the house.

  Running across open ground at a prepared position might sometimes work against booger-eaters who can’t shoot, but it can also be suicidal. Hank hadn’t trained his boys to be suicidal. And he was determined to lead by example.

  It took a little bit more time to crawl to the landscaping, but not all that much. They’d practiced, after all, and made the militia practice with them. Cover is better than body armor. That was a maxim that Hank had drilled into his Marines, and he’d brought it over to the Triarii.

  Careful to keep his suppressor out of the dirt, Hank covered the ground between the crest of the hill and the landscaping behind the Doogan place quickly. He paused every few seconds to scan the windows and door for movement, listening past the rasp of his own breath and the hammering reports of gunfire on the other side of the hill. Still nothing.

  Reaching the edge of the landscaping, he picked himself up off the ground, his rifle leveled at the door. When LaForce and Huntsman joined him, he moved to the door itself, practically duck-walking to keep from silhouetting himself in the window.

  The door was still shut, and didn’t appear to have been breached. That only raised his hackles even more.

  It was unlocked, fortunately. He carefully swung it open as he rose to his feet and followed his rifle muzzle into the entryway.

  The interior was dark, but there was enough ambient light coming in the windows that he could see well enough through his PVS-14s.

  That made the dark lump of a body in the middle of the floor easy enough to see.

  He slowed as he neared the corpse, while LaForce and Huntsman pushed past him, covering down on the corners leading into the great room. He crouched down and looked closer.

  Keith Doogan’s throat had been slashed to the bone, almost decapitating him. He’d struggled, but it hadn’t lasted long; the massive splash of arterial spray across the Navajo-style rug in the middle of the entryway meant that he’d bled out within moments.

  There was nothing he could do for the old man. He rose and joined LaForce as the rest of the maneuver element came in the door behind him. Together, they started to sweep to the right.

  It didn’t take too long to find the rest of the family. Michael Doogan had died on watch, at the sliding glass doors that faced south. He was still sitting at the short dresser they’d set up just inside, filled with sandbags to act as a rampart without looking like one. His head lolled back behind him, his throat an open, bloody obscenity, gore splashed across the woodwork and the glass.

  Andrea Doogan lay in the doorway to the master bedroom, the front of her pajamas a slashed, blood-soaked ruin. None of the Triarii wanted to count, but she must have been stabbed a couple dozen times.

  Both of the youngest Doogans, Chris and Kim, were in their beds. They’d been all but hacked to pieces.

  There was no sign of the boys’ friends. Nor were any of the rifles still in the house.

  “Those motherfuckers.” LaForce’s voice was thick with rage.

  “Bury it deep for now,” Hank growled. “We’ve still got work to do.”

  The house was clear, aside from the bodies. “Next house.” They must have cleared this place and pushed in. All knife work here. Which meant they wanted to make sure nobody got in their way before they went loud.

  The Triarii slipped out the way they’d come, getting low and circling around the corner of the house to move toward the next, the Grau house. One of the benefits of working with a small local militia in such a small town was, the entire squad knew who everyone was, and where everyone lived.

  That didn’t necessarily equate to liking them all, but that was a minor problem at the moment.

  The Grau house was set slightly farther back from the golf course, another twenty yards or so farther away from the river. The Graus also kept a large dog, who started barking its head off as soon as LaForce started to get close.

  The dog had barely started barking when a shotgun blast ripped through the night, blasting grit into the air a few feet
in front of LaForce.

  Half a dozen suppressed rifle muzzles snapped toward the source of the fire, but Hank hissed, “Hold your fire!” Meanwhile, he stopped in place and sank to the ground. LaForce had already hit the dirt, and the rest of the element did the same.

  He started to crawl forward, but stopped as he saw movement on the porch. Whoever had fired that shotgun was coming out, around the back side of the house…

  He recognized Stella Grau, mainly by her hair. She was fully dressed, and handling the full-length trap gun well, but her readiness would be cold comfort if she accidentally shot one of the Triarii.

  Or deliberately—there had been some friction with the Graus over the last few weeks. He didn’t think she’d take it out on them; the arguments had been mostly about the necessity or desirability of turning their houses into strongpoints. The Graus hadn’t liked the idea, Stella most vocally.

  But Hank didn’t think that was why she’d shot at them. She was probably just wired way too tight, given the shooting down in town, and when her dog had started up, she’d simply reacted.

  “Mrs. Grau! It’s Hank Foss! Hold your fire!” He didn’t get up yet. Let her calm down first.

  For that matter, what’s she doing out here? Where’s Leonard?

  She swung the shotgun toward his voice, but he was down in the low ground, and while he didn’t have a lot of cover, he was low enough and it was dark enough that she couldn’t see him. Or any of the rest of them, for that matter.

  “Come out here where I can see you!” She sounded hoarse and scared.

  “Are you all right? Where’s Leonard?” He needed to get through to her; he didn’t trust her not to take a shot at him as soon as he got up.

  “He went to go help once the shooting started.” She still wasn’t lowering the shotgun. “Nobody’s coming in to get me or Ace while he’s away.”

  “We’re not coming to get you, Mrs. Grau.” He had to risk it. He slowly stood, keeping his weapon pointed at the dirt, gritting his teeth to bite back his rage at the delay. He wasn’t unhappy that the Graus hadn’t been massacred like the Doogans, but all the same, there was a fight going on at the lodge, and those boys—whom he’d trained—weren’t that well-prepared for it. In fact, from the sounds of things, and the sporadic calls over the radio, they were losing.