by Peter Nealen
The presence of the two groups, apparently working together to escort a motley collection of what appeared to be petroleum tankers, was made even more curious by their obvious mutual hostility. They didn’t like each other, and Hank had observed at least three more confrontations during the day, mostly defused by men riding in what looked like brand-new 2nd Generation Cybertrucks. They were well-armed, toting Mexican Army FX-05 rifles, though they weren’t wearing camouflage like the Vengadores. The black and red armbands might identify them as Soldados, though Hank hadn’t seen any of the SdA with that sort of high-end gear before.
The men with the Cybertrucks and the FX-05s were his targets now. And they appeared to have set up shop in the La Cuesta Suites.
Side by side with Moffit, staying low, Hank worked his way toward the back of the hotel. They had streamlined their gear as much as possible; low-profile chest rigs carried mags, a minimalist personal first aid kit, and radios, which were currently turned off. They wore helmets solely to mount the night vision that would give them something of an advantage—and allow them to spot IR lasers if the enemy was also using NVGs. Hank had seen the SdA or their mercenaries using PVS-14s or 7s for a while, so it was a concern.
Anything else had been left behind.
As the brush thinned, and they neared the dirt road that ran around the back of the hotel, they both got down on their bellies and crawled, moving slowly and carefully. The voices inside were clear and loud, when they could be heard over the music that was playing, and it made Hank tense as his heart rate skyrocketed, and he breathed slowly and carefully to try to stay calm.
There had been a time when he wouldn’t have even attempted something like this. While he’d never been in a reconnaissance unit, he’d always been a student of light infantry tactics, and understanding reconnaissance techniques, especially once he’d become a platoon sergeant, had been necessary so that he could understand what was possible to ask for and what wasn’t.
To get so close that they could hear the enemy’s conversation had been a strict non-starter. Standoff was the Recon Marine’s friend. And that had been the way that he’d approached matters for a long time, even when he’d had his squads doing some of their own low-key recon patrols.
The Triarii had changed that. Some of it was because of their circumstances, and the necessity to do more with considerably fewer resources. Some of it had come out of his own study and experimentation, due to that requirement.
They reached the edge of the road and paused, watching and listening. They were still in deep shadow, though the windows, partially obscured by the trees that grew right next to the walls, were lit from inside. The music was louder, and so were the voices, though the latter were still too muffled and covered by the narcocorridos to make out more than the occasional word.
Hank waited for a few moments, lying perfectly still in the bunchgrass at the edge of the road. Then, carefully and calmly, he got his feet under him, never moving so quickly that he might draw attention. Moffit did the same beside him. Together, staying low, they started across the road, placing each step slowly and with extreme care, their boots rolling slightly before putting their weight down. No gravel crunched; they made almost no noise.
Any sound they might have made was easily masked by the music and the raised voices from inside.
Remaining crouched, they worked their way to either side of the window, making sure to stay out of the dim light. Hank straightened to lessen the effort as he put his back to the wall, peering slowly over his shoulder until he could just get one eye into position to look inside.
Two men wearing armbands stood next to a table in the middle of the room. One, long-haired and wearing a short, black jacket, had a rifle slung in front of him. The other, with his back turned to the window, had a shaved head and wore a dark blue collared shirt. Hank didn’t see a weapon on him, but from the way the man with the rifle stood, he suspected that this guy was calling the shots, which probably meant he had a pistol in his belt.
The two of them were facing one of the Vengadores, clad in that camouflage pseudo-uniform, his face still covered by a balaclava, but without his plate carrier or weapon. And he was not happy.
“…because we brought the firepower that sent the gringos running for the hills! What did your little Soldados do, except come along afterward and try to take credit? After they fucked it up the first time?” Hank was having a little difficulty making out some of the rapid-fire, pissed-off Spanish, but he could get the gist.
“We are the ones who put all of this together,” was the icy-cold answer. “We talked to the Chales. We made the deals. We got the sicarios in to start killing the gringos before the first trucks got within fifteen miles of the river.” The bald man leaned back and crossed his arms. Hank couldn’t see his face, but from his tone he could almost see the sneer. “When the Vengadores are good for more than stealing Army equipment and blowing stuff up, then they might get more of a cut.”
Hank glanced across the window at Moffit, wondering if the other man had caught the reference to Chales. Moffit didn’t react, though; he was probably having more trouble following the Spanish.
He took a deep breath, turning his attention back inside. They were right on target. Those two in the armbands were the ones he wanted.
And if he could get the Vengadores and Soldados to start killing each other in the process, so much the better.
The plan had been to stay soft until either chance contact or they found a useful target. The rest of the squad would orient off the initial attack. And it looked like they had a target.
Hank would have given his eyeteeth for a concussion charge right then. Nothing with a lot of frag, but enough to knock them around a bit and disorient them. But they had what they had.
He moved back, angling away from the window, just far enough that he could bring his rifle to bear without revealing himself in the light spilling from the pane. He wanted the two Soldados alive, so he put the red dot on the Vengador’s chest.
Too bad for you, bud.
Under different circumstances, what he was about to do would be considered murder. So far, everyone the Triarii had killed on the US side of the Rio Grande had been actively shooting at them, or otherwise trying to kill them. This wasn’t the same as being a serving Marine in a declared war or “peacekeeping operation.” Even in the latter, depending on the command, he’d probably find himself in trouble for shooting an unsuspecting bad guy from ambush.
And yet, at the same time, it really was the same. Whether the Feds wanted to admit it or not, this was a war, and the Triarii on the ground didn’t have the option of playing nice. It was a foreign invasion of US soil, at its base level. To treat it any other way would be suicide.
The shot broke with a harsh crack, the bullet punching through the window and spiderwebbing the glass. The Vengador staggered, looking down at the spreading red stain on his chest before his knees gave way and he fell on his face.
Hank hadn’t dared risk a headshot, even at that range. Shooting through glass always deflects the bullet, and just where it gets deflected isn’t always that predictable. He’d gotten lucky that the round had apparently gone right through the narco’s heart.
The two Soldados stared in shock for a split second. Then the bald man surged to his feet, kicking the chair back and turning toward the window, reaching for the pistol he was appendix carrying, while the long-haired guy with the rifle pivoted toward him.
But Hank and Moffit were already in position, rifles leveled, and Hank punched out the rest of the glass with his suppressor. “No te muevas!” Hank snapped.
Both men hesitated. The bald one had his hand on the butt of his pistol, but it was still in his belt, pointed at his junk. The one with the rifle had it partway raised, but it was still offline, while Moffit had him dead to rights.
There was a lot of muffled yelling from outside the door. Whoever was out there had heard the shot. Then all hell broke loose.
Gunfire erupted do
wn by the golf course. The door flew open and two more Soldados burst in, both carrying short-barreled rifles. And the long-haired sicario with the FX-05 made his decision, and started to snap the rifle up, his finger already tightening on the trigger.
Moffit fired, the suppressor coughing with a hard crack, his shot unhindered by the glass since Hank had busted the window out. The Soldado’s head snapped back with a spray of gore and bloody hair, and he collapsed. In the same moment, Hank shot the first of the Soldados who had just entered, blasting him back into his buddy, before shifting his muzzle back toward the bald guy, who had just snatched his hand away from his pistol as if the weapon had burned him.
“Take the gun out with two fingers, drop it on the floor, then come to the window,” Hank instructed. “Do it now, or I’m going to kill you.”
The man’s black eyes were fixed on Hank, who stood where he would present only a dim silhouette in the dark, at most. The clearest part of him that the man would be able to see was the rifle that had just snatched away two lives.
Shouting had broken out in the hallway behind him, and a moment later, more shots were fired. The Soldado who had been slammed back against the doorframe when his buddy’s collapsing corpse had fallen on him was knocked halfway around as a bullet from out of the hallway smashed through his exposed shoulder, and he fell into the room, screaming, a chunk of bloody meat missing from his shoulder.
The bald man hadn’t flinched. He carefully did as Hank had told him, pulling the pistol out of the inside the waistband holster with two fingers, and letting it fall to the floor. He kept the other hand out where it was plainly visible. There was still no fear in his expression, and he was staring hard into the dark as if he was trying to make out Hank’s face.
If you think you’re going to have the opportunity to take revenge for this ever again, you’ve got another think coming, asshole. He had no intention of letting this man go.
“Come to the window.”
The man complied, even as the firefight behind him got more intense. Meanwhile, the gunfire off to the southeast was picking up, too.
Hank stepped out a little farther into the window, stepping back to put a little more distance between them, then nodded to Moffit.
Moffit wasn’t a big man, but he was strong. His rifle slung on his back, he snatched the Soldado by the neck and just about flipped him over the windowsill, using his own bodyweight to lever the man out of the room. He was on his prisoner in an eyeblink, twisting his hands behind his back even as he dropped a knee into the center of his back, driving the wind out of him. In a flash, he’d flex-cuffed the Soldado and was hauling his head back, quickly and efficiently tying a gag in his mouth.
The last thing they wanted was this bastard yelling while they exfil’ed.
LaForce and Taylor loomed out of the brush behind them, moving up to the windows to cover. “The rest are covering the corners or on overwatch,” LaForce told Hank, as the two of them kept their rifles trained on the window and backed across the road, covering Moffit as he dragged their prisoner along. The Soldado was starting to struggle as he realized that the situation was a lot farther out of his control than he’d thought. Moffit, however, wasn’t having any of it, and a painful joint lock forced him to subside.
Then they were across the road and back in the darkness of the low ground, moving slowly and carefully as all hell broke loose in Lajitas. The narcocorrido music had stopped. Shouts and curses in Spanish were punctuated by long bursts of gunfire. A boom down by the river rolled out before a growing orange glow brightened as something burned fiercely on the other side of the golf course.
Hank pointed Moffit back toward the hills. If the noises were anything to go by, they’d accomplished their mission for the night. The Vengadores and Soldados, already hostile to each other, were at each other’s throats. Shooting the Vengador meeting with the two SdA bigshots had apparently convinced the Vengadores that the Soldados were double-crossing them, and the Soldados seeing one of their bigshots get wasted as soon as they came through the door must have convinced them that it was the other way around.
Either way, they’d been hurt. It didn’t liberate Lajitas, but it should slow the bad guys down.
Single file, Moffit keeping their prisoner bent double with an arm through his bound hands and on the back of his neck, the Triarii crept through the brush, heading deeper into the darkness. Hank hoped that Spencer hadn’t gotten into too much trouble, but he hadn’t heard their prearranged trouble signal yet.
At the opening to the draw that led farther back into the hills, Hank paused and looked back. IR lasers flashed in the town, and a few more muzzle flashes flickered, but someone had gotten on a bullhorn and was yelling in Spanish. He couldn’t understand all of it, but he understood enough. Somebody had figured out that they’d been infiltrated and were under attack, and was trying to end the internecine firefight.
He was already wracking his brain for the next step as they faded into the shadows of the draw.
Chapter 14
The clouds hid the predawn light in the eastern sky. Smoke rose over Lajitas, hanging above the tiny town in the still, cool air, as a few sporadic gunshots still sounded, despite the continued haranguing from one of the megaphone-equipped Cybertrucks as it cruised up and down the 170.
Hank watched from the shoulder of a hilltop to the north, glowering.
“Well, it was a good plan.” Spencer lay in the dirt next to him, peering through binoculars at the town. “I wouldn’t have expected these animals to be so mission-focused that they’d get their shit together this quick.”
Hank didn’t have much to say, as he watched another group of three tanker trucks, escorted by another Mad Max up-armor and two F250 gun trucks, trundled up from the river and onto Highway 170. At the same time, another group was heading the other way.
He looked over his shoulder. Much of the Lajitas militia had filtered down out of the hills during the last few hours and were staged down the slope from where he and Spencer perched. That was by design; Hank had hoped that inciting a firefight between the Vengadores and Soldados would result in an opening they could exploit.
But that opening hadn’t presented itself. The SdA cadre coordinating this operation had acted too fast. Which was both surprising and concerning.
What they’d seen of the SdA in Arizona and California had been an undisciplined rabble, thugs using so-called activism as the cover for violence, murder, robbery, etc. This was different. And Hank could still hear their prisoner mentioning Chales.
Chales was a Mexican slang term, one he had heard a time or two before. It was a not-entirely complimentary term for Chinese.
He was about to pull off, call the whole unit back to the Echo Site, reset, get comms with Wallace and the Rangers, and try to figure out their next move, when movement caught his eye.
The loudspeaker was braying from the Cybertruck as four people were dragged out onto the highway between the La Cuesta Suites and the bigger resort complex. Hank put his eye to his scope and cranked up the magnification. He cursed.
Two men and two women were thrown out onto the pavement by their red-and-black armband wearing captors. Unlike the bodies that had been left to line the highway before, they were still dressed, though they had been blindfolded, their hands bound behind their backs.
Hank twisted around and found one of the militiamen, Garza. “Get that .300 up here.” He knew what was coming next, and he wasn’t confident enough to take the shot with his 7.62x51 battle rifle, as accurate as it might be. Garza’s .300 WinMag could punch a lot harder, a lot farther out.
Garza scrambled up to the crest, bent low and carrying the long rifle under his arm. He got flat and deployed the bipods, settling in behind the rifle and putting his eye to the scope. Garza was a short, slightly pudgy man, who’d been working as a ranch hand all his life, but his hobby had been long-range shooting for years. If anybody could make that shot, and then repeat it rapidly multiple times, it was Garza. Hell, Hank t
rusted Garza as a sniper more than any of his own section, and he had a couple of trained Army and Marine snipers.
Garza took in the scene through the scope. “Oh, fuck.” When Hank got back behind his scope and got back on target, he had to agree.
Two men had walked out of the La Cuesta Suites with claw hammers in their hands. This wasn’t going to be either quick or clean.
He scanned the crowd gathering near the center of the little town. Even the convoys had stopped, the drivers popping out of open doors to watch, some getting out of their vehicles and sauntering down the shoulder to get a better view.
The voice over the megaphone was distorted by distance and echoes, but Hank could get the gist. Especially when the big TV camera came out. This wasn’t going to be a grainy cell phone video; it was going to eventually be spread around—in those places where the internet still existed—in high definition.
“Hold your fire,” he hissed at Garza, whose finger was already resting on the trigger. “Wait until they’re about to get started. Otherwise they might still kill the hostages.” Which might happen, anyway. The Triarii and the militia were too far away to get to them with any kind of speed, and all it would take would be one pissed-off thug to turn an automatic weapon on them as soon as the would-be executioners dropped.
Hank tried not to think that those four people down there were already dead. He was pretty sure one of them was Estevez—the build was about right, and the man hadn’t showed at the Echo Site—but as much as he disliked the man, he couldn’t just blithely assent to his death. There had to be something he could do.
He keyed his radio. “This is Actual. I want every gun up on this ridge five seconds ago. Move.”
Maybe, just maybe, with enough firepower they could cover an escape once Garza dropped the vatos with claw hammers.
