Fortress Doctrine (Maelstrom Rising Book 5)

by Peter Nealen

  Maybe.

  He ignored the rustle and rattle of movement as Triarii and militia alike clambered up the hill to join them, the Triarii spreading out and finding firing positions with considerably less noise and fanfare than the militia. Hank sometimes forgot that while his men were considered “basic” infantry in the organization, he’d trained them to a razor’s edge that would rival the Grex Luporum special operations teams. Aaron Chang had commented on that after San Diego, but Hank hadn’t really thought much about it. He just wanted his boys to stay alive while hurting the enemy as badly as possible.

  The megaphone was blaring with the narcos’ bombastic declarations. Hank tuned the profane rant out as best he could. He already knew what the bastards were saying, even without listening.

  The combined force of Vengadores and Soldados had been defied. Worse, they’d been tricked into fighting each other. So now the little people were going to pay the price.

  He couldn’t see the faces of the men with the claw hammers where they stood over their victims. But he could read their body language. One of them, the skinnier one, was almost quivering, he was so eager. The other was relaxed. Hank could picture his face. He imagined the man just looked bored.

  Years—decades, even—of bloody violence had deadened those men’s souls. They didn’t even see their victims as people anymore.

  Hank was a killer. He’d put a lot of people in the dirt. But he hoped he still knew right from wrong. A killer he might be, but he hoped never to turn into a murderer, a soulless monster like those two down there.

  He could still tell the difference.

  Down below, the first claw hammer rose above a woman’s legs. Hank drew in a breath to give the execute order.

  Then everything went sideways.

  Shots rang out down below. Two of the Vengadores fell, and a third, a black-clad Soldado, followed.

  Three slender forms dashed out from behind the fence that surrounded the tiny auto shop across the road from the cemetery, barely two hundred fifty yards from where the execution was about to take place. Even from that distance, through an eight-power scope, Hank could tell that one of them was Arturo. The other two had to be the Samson brothers, the young man’s closest friends near his own age since the Doogans had been murdered.

  Fuck!

  “Do it!”

  Garza’s Bergara rifle mounted an AAC Titan suppressor, so the report was more of a loud pop than the boom it would have been otherwise. The rack of the bolt almost made more noise.

  There was too much going on to see it all happening at once. Hank’s scope was still pointed at Arturo and his friends when he gave the go order. He didn’t see the 220-grain bullet smash through the first executioner’s scapula and blast the pulped remnants of his heart and lungs out through a massive exit hole in his ribcage. Nor did he see the second round take the other in the mid-back, blowing apart his spine before ripping his guts out.

  Instead, all he saw in those crucial few seconds, was Arturo and his friends running forward as one of the gun trucks, a dump truck with an M2 mounted in the bucket, still on the highway and behind their position, opened fire on them.

  The .50 cal gunner hadn’t even had to swivel his mount very far. He just leaned to the left and held down the butterfly triggers. A thumping burst of ten or twenty 647-grain projectiles smashed into and through the boys. At that range, even though the burst was spread out across about ten yards, they took enough hits that they were practically blown apart. They tumbled to the dirt like rag dolls in a welter of blood and pulped tissue.

  Hank felt himself go cold. A heavy, empty feeling in his chest threatened to overwhelm him for a second.

  He’d lost men before. Men. Young men, to be sure, but they had still been grown. Trained. Prepared for what they’d gone into.

  Arturo had been a kid. A kid who’d looked up to him, wanted to be like him. And try as he might, he hadn’t done enough to prepare him, to keep him out of harm’s way. And now he couldn’t, not anymore.

  But even as his brain threatened to go into lock, Garza’s next shot snapped him out of it. They were in contact, there were still civvies in danger whom they might be able to get out, and he couldn’t afford to crumble.

  “Open fire!” He shifted his sights slightly, lifting from the smashed and bloody corpses sprawled in their own fluids in the ditch next to the road that led up toward the RV park, and slammed three suppressed shots at the .50 cal gunner who had just killed Arturo and his friends. The first round missed, sparking off the steel in front. The second hit, and the third went high. The gunner flinched and sank down behind the gun in the dump truck’s bucket.

  He probably wasn’t dead, but at least he was hurt, and he was off the gun. Hank lifted his head off his rifle and took stock.

  A thunderous fusillade of fire poured down off the hillside, over the RV park. The Triarii were all running suppressed, but few of the militia were, and the roar of gunfire echoed off the hills and the desert. Some of the militia were shooting 5.56, too, which was hardly going to be effective at over eight hundred yards.

  He got back on his scope, finding another pair of Vengadores running toward the prisoners. He thumped three more rounds at them. None hit, but they scrambled for cover.

  Turning his attention to the four on the ground, he tried to will them to their feet. Come on. Run for it!

  But they were frozen where they were, blind and terrified. And if there were any more inside…

  “Cole, set the base of fire here and keep it up.” He scrambled back from the edge, tearing his eyes away from the carnage below. “LaForce! You, Moffit, Taylor, Bishop, Huntsman, Faris, with me!” Turning, he started to plummet down the slope, angling along the ridgeline toward the southeast.

  They might not have the numbers to retake the town and secure the crossing, but a rescue mission might be another matter.

  The seven Triarii pelted down the hill, dust rising from their boots, but Hank wasn’t too worried about stealth right at the moment. That had already been blown when they’d opened fire.

  He hooked around the shoulder of the hill and headed toward the RV park. There was a lot of open ground, but there was also a fair bit of microterrain they could use. And they’d have to use all of it to get close enough.

  A shallow arroyo led down toward the RV park, cutting through the short cliff that rose on two sides of the roughly square lot. He took that low ground, bent over to avoid presenting a target, even though the lay of the land meant that they had already been mostly behind cover as soon as they’d gotten to the base of the hill.

  He came out onto the flats, right across from one of the handful of trailers still parked in the lot. He thought it was Garza’s trailer, actually.

  Hank dashed to the corner of the trailer and set in, easing his rifle around the corner and scanning above the scope. Despite the earlier altercation they’d watched around the Triarii’s command trailers, the park appeared to be deserted.

  Probably all down by the road to watch the murders.

  LaForce joined him, and then he waved the rest forward to the next bit of cover.

  They leapfrogged across the lot, as more 7.62 and .300 WinMag fire cracked overhead, reaching out to slam into dirt, walls, and pavement downrange. Hank didn’t have eyes on the enemy at that point, but the return fire was ragged and sporadic enough that he could figure most of the bad guys had dived for cover shortly after Garza had killed the two would-be executioners with the claw hammers.

  But he knew it couldn’t last. The Triarii had shock on their side for the moment, but it would wear off.

  And even as they neared the low ground between the RV park and the hotel, it did.

  Multiple roaring, thundering bursts of heavy machinegun fire hammered the ridgeline from the highway. The flashing explosions of the heavy rounds’ impacts made the crest of the ridge momentarily disappear in a storm of flying dust and grit, and the covering fire slackened. Hank suddenly felt very lonely and very exposed as h
e dashed to the buildings that stood just inside the entrance to the park. From the way the rest of his assault team dove for cover, he wasn’t alone.

  He still kept moving, though, driven on by the need to try to get the rest of the hostages out, as well as his own coldly burning rage. He plunged through the brush on the side of the road, a good ten yards in front of the rest, surging up the hill toward the hotel, even as the fire from the ridge started to pick up again.

  But it still wasn’t enough. The return fire redoubled in response, and while it might not have been that accurate, suppressive fire didn’t have to be. By the time Hank got to the top of the next rise, the cover fire from above had all but ceased.

  He crouched below the crest as LaForce forged up the slope and slumped down next to him, panting, sweat and dust in his goatee despite the morning chill. “If we go up there right now, we’re fucked, boss.”

  Hank nodded absently, though he was peering just over the crest, trying to see the hostages and get eyes on the hotel at the same time. He gritted his teeth.

  LaForce was right. Even if he’d brought the whole section and the militia down, the odds were bad.

  Bad enough for them. Worse for the hostages.

  And then, even as he craned his head for a better view, it all got so much worse.

  He could just see where the two dead Soldados lay, next to the still-prone hostages. He couldn’t tell if any of the civilians had been hit or not; none of them were moving, and they were still flat on the ground. But before he could yell at them to get up and run toward his voice, they ran out of time.

  The dump truck had rolled forward, even as the wounded .50 cal gunner got back up and engaged the Triarii and militia up on the ridgeline. It had closed the distance to where Hank could see it clearly, now, heading toward the hotel.

  And straight toward the hostages.

  He pivoted, bringing his rifle to bear and hammering three shots at the passenger side window. But either it had been reinforced, or he just had a bad angle. The dump truck kept going. The hood had been hastily armored with sheet steel, and the rounds he aimed at the engine didn’t seem to be doing anything. He shifted his aim toward the tires.

  Bullets punched through the rubber, and the front right tire collapsed. But the driver just floored it, and the dump truck surged forward on the rim.

  There was too much gunfire, not to mention the roar of engines, to hear the screams as Estevez went under the front wheels. Mercifully, the screaming probably didn’t last long. The dump truck was heavy enough that it barely bounced as it rolled over all four hostages before coming to a stop.

  The gunner seemed to have realized that the fire that had just shot out the tires wasn’t coming from the high ground off to the northeast, but much closer. He pivoted the Ma Deuce toward the low ground, searching for the Triarii.

  Hank and LaForce both shot him through the face at the same instant. His skull split like a crushed grape, he fell out of sight in the bucket, the spray of carnage from the back of his head spattering across the metal as he dropped.

  A long, ferocious burst of automatic gunfire sounded, somewhere nearby. It took Hank a moment to realize that the noise was coming from inside the hotel.

  He almost lost it then. He knew, deep down in his gut, just what that sound had been.

  It had been the sound of any remaining hostages being chopped down by automatic gunfire.

  It had been the sound of failure.

  He gritted his teeth against the hate. They still had living people to protect. “Fall back,” he rasped. “Down the low ground, back into the draw.

  “We lost this one.”

  Chapter 15

  It was late in the afternoon by the time everyone had straggled back into the Echo Site. Word of what had happened down in Lajitas had spread fast; the sense of gloom and despair on the air was palpable.

  Hank knew that he had to do something, say something. He was in a leadership position; it was his responsibility.

  But the horror they’d witnessed had hit him as hard as any of them. Maybe harder. He didn’t know how many others had seen Arturo and the Samson brothers get chopped to pieces by heavy machinegun fire. And he hadn’t brought it up. He didn’t want to. He knew that it was going to come back to haunt him sooner or later. Arturo’s absence would be noted. Margaret Radcliffe was only a couple hundred yards away, trying to comfort and help the shell-shocked and grieving militia. She hadn’t noticed yet, but he knew that she would, as sure as the sunrise.

  He couldn’t deal with the questions. Couldn’t deal with the reality. He had gotten the section reset, using the caches they’d put in place at the Echo Site weeks before to top off water, ammo, and batteries. He’d made sure that security was set, both for the Site and for their prisoner, who was being kept in a hole in the wash, away from the rest. Especially after what had happened, Hank didn’t want any of the militia to see him. They might do what he desperately wanted to do before they could get any useful information out of him.

  He went through the priorities of work in a haze, his body and his voice doing the work while his mind was far, far away. It felt like every time he blinked, he saw that nightmarish scene replay itself, in vivid, living color. Not the hostages getting run over; as bad as that had been, the final nail in the coffin of his failure, it was nothing compared to seeing those kids get shot to pieces. Especially Arturo.

  He wasn’t the kid’s father. But he had to face the fact that he’d become the closest thing the teenage boy had had to a father, at least for the last couple of months. He’d made sure the orphan had chow, a place to sleep, some rudimentary training and discipline, and a purpose. And along the way, he’d found that the kid looked up to him as somebody he wanted to be like. That, he realized bitterly, now that it was too late, was why Arturo had always wanted to come with them. Sure, he was a boy becoming a young man, and adventure and excitement were part of it, but not all.

  And along with those responsibilities had come the responsibility to protect the kid. And he’d failed.

  He realized that he was sitting in the passenger seat of the F350, the radio handset in his hand, staring at nothing. He blinked and looked down at the radio, knowing he had to contact Wallace, but suddenly terribly exhausted. It was an exhaustion that went deeper than his bones; he was tired clear down to his soul.

  Raised voices drew his eyes toward the local encampment. Several of those who had backed Estevez in several meetings were confronting Bob Morgan and Judge Kelly.

  “We had to know this would happen! We’re not the Army! Every other little town that has fought these people has suffered the same fucking thing!” Hank recognized one of Estevez’s closest friends, a woman named Maria Gomez. He looked up in time to see her stab a finger toward the Triarii’s little corner of the Site. “We listened to them, and now everyone we left back in Lajitas is dead! This is their fault, and I can’t believe you are siding with them!”

  “You’re a smart girl, Maria,” Alice Morgan said sharply. She was standing in the bed of the Morgans’ truck. “Too smart to actually think that just bowing down to these animals would be a good idea.”

  “None of this had to happen!” Gomez shrieked.

  “No, it didn’t.” Judge Kelly’s voice cracked over her. “They didn’t need to come across our border, into your town, and try to force their will on us. Don’t forget who started this.”

  “It blows my mind,” Bob Morgan said, his voice loud enough to carry, though his tone was still mild and calm, “that somebody who came all the way to the border, has lived here for over a year, while we’ve tried to stop the cartels from using our land as a transit point for hitmen and drugs, can still be so damned naïve as to think that somehow it’s our fault those people died.” He spat. “I would have thought that some exposure to the real world might have made some people wake up, especially once they couldn’t keep their nose buried in their phone anymore. Guess I was wrong.”

  “It’s just drugs!” Hank didn’
t recognize the voice this time. “It’s not worth people dying over!”

  “Leaving aside just how stupid that sounds— ‘It’s just poison!’—it really isn’t ‘just’ drugs.” Judge Kelly was not happy. “Ask Marsha Thompson.”

  Some of the noise died down at that. Marsha Thompson had been rescued by a Triarii patrol a few weeks before, when some of Morgan’s hands had reported armed men in a pair of pickups crossing the Morgan ranch. Ordinarily, Morgan’s own ranch hands would have handled it, but the Triarii had been in a better position, and better armed. They’d killed several of the mareros and rescued the brutalized young woman, who would carry the scars of her ordeal for the rest of her life.

  “Y’all need to get over this idea that’s been stamped into your heads that fighting back against evil is somehow wrong.” Kelly had her hands on her hips. “Now, I know I’m a judge, and there’s a right and a wrong way to fight back. I’ve pushed back against Foss when he had some, shall we say, ‘summary’ ideas. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. This is war, and it isn’t one we started. So, get off your damned high horse and start thinking like a Texan, for crying out loud.”

  “Well, less profane than I might have been, but I’ve got to hand it to her.” Spencer leaned against the door frame. He peered in the door at Hank and nodded at the handset. “You going to use that, or just stare at it?”

  Hank looked over at him with heavy-lidded eyes. “You know, you’re awfully transparent when you’re trying to subtly check up on me.”

  Spencer snorted softly but didn’t contradict him. “I saw what happened.”

  Hank looked down at the dash. “Wasn’t sure if I was the only one.”

  Spencer shook his head. “No, you weren’t.” He paused for a moment, looked down at the dirt, then looked back up at Hank. “It’s not your fault, Hank.”

  “The hell it ain’t.” His hand clenched around the handset. “That boy looked up to me like the father he didn’t have, and now he’s dead. Shouldn’t work that way.”