by Peter Nealen
Wallace didn’t answer right away. He knew what that meant, every bit as much as Hank did. “The powers that be aren’t going to want to hear that. Or, they’ll have some explanation, like ‘It’s just a Triad.’”
“It probably is a Triad. But didn’t one of the Hong Kong Triads swear allegiance to the PRC a while back?” Hank had been doing some reading—when he could—since going up against a “Private Military/Security Company” in San Diego, that had been armed with top-of-the-line People’s Liberation Army equipment.
“Yes, Sun Yee On, back in 1997, when Hong Kong got turned over to the PRC.” Apparently, Wallace had been studying, too. “Interesting. The pattern’s becoming clearer.” The radio fell silent as Wallace mused. “Can you trust your militia to hold things together while you’re gone, especially after they lost their own commander?”
In other words, can you trust them to secure their position and protect the civvies, instead of running for it or doing something dumb?
“Grant might be gone, but I think that Bob Morgan’s started quietly taking his place. They’ll be all right.” I hope.
“In that case, if you’ve got targets—and taking those targets out might relieve some of the pressure—by all means, take ‘em. Just… Foss?
“Don’t do anything stupid, yourself.”
“Roger that, Actual.”
He signed off, putting the handset back, and then sat in the Humvee for a second. Damn, he was tired.
Things had to get done, though. Then he could sleep.
And face the nightmares when they came.
***
“West said you wanted to talk to me, Hank.” Bob Morgan sounded almost as tired as Hank felt, and given the fact that he was at least fifteen years Hank’s senior—and Hank wasn’t exactly a spring chicken anymore—that was a little concerning. If he was going to be running things in Hank’s absence, and with Grant dead, he needed to be on his toes.
“Yeah.” They were under the overhang, with one of the cache containers, still covered in dust, open and being unloaded on the concrete, under several red lens flashlights that had been lashed to the support columns. “You seem to be the man in charge, these days.”
Morgan ran a calloused hand through thinning white hair. “Not sure I’d go that far. A few of the ‘townspeople’ still think their shit don’t stink, and Mendoza and I have never gotten along.” Carlos Mendoza was the rancher to the east. He’d showed up a few hours before with a few of his hands to lend some assistance. Hank didn’t know details, but he knew there’d been some land and water rights disputes between the two of them over the years.
“You’re something of a powerhouse around here.” Hank straightened from his ruck, which was about half repacked. Morgan looked down into it under the red light, a faint frown on his face. “Hell, we’re on your ranch right now. Judge Kelly grabbed you when she needed somebody to talk sense into people after that fiasco yesterday. They’ll listen to you. Probably more than some of them listened to Grant.”
Morgan squinted at him. “So, where will you be, while I’m here being a pillar of the community?”
Hank pointed off to the southwest. “Over there.”
Morgan nodded. “Figured. I never read you as a guy who’d cut and run.” He eyed Hank critically. “You sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew?”
“Maybe I am. But I don’t think they’re ready for this. They’ve had us on the defensive since this kicked off. They’re cocky. Yesterday, as bad as it sucked, will only make them cockier. And I intend to tear them apart for it.”
Morgan was still watching him, his face stony. “Some of my boys will probably want to go with you.”
But Hank shook his head. “We don’t have the numbers. With the losses the militia took when the Vengadores and Soldados took the crossing, your hands are going to have to fill in the blanks to keep these people up here safe, and keep tabs on those assholes down below.” He frowned. “And I mean keep tabs. With my section gone, I don’t think there’s enough manpower or firepower left—until the reinforcements get here, anyway—to hold this position if you poke the bear hard enough that he comes looking.”
“There are reinforcements coming?” The fact that Morgan hadn’t seen fit to address the part about not engaging the enemy was a little concerning.
Hank nodded. “Should be a couple Triarii sections on the way with some air support, and the State Guard might be here in a day or two.”
Morgan’s eyebrows went up. It was almost a worried expression. “Is that a problem?” Hank asked.
Morgan shrugged slightly. “Depends. The State Guard is… Well, they’re not exactly the most consistent when it comes to training or equipment. They’re all unpaid volunteers. Hell, most Texans don’t even know they exist. Depending on who’s coming, we could get highly motivated studs who bought all their own top-end gear and weapons, and paid for top-tier training, or…”
Hank nodded his understanding. “Or you get a bunch of guys who like to play at dressing up as the Army every once in a while.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I expect that an all-volunteer unit that just rogered up to come to the border in the middle of a bloody narco incursion is probably going to be one of the good ones.” Hank crouched down next to his ruck again. “And if they’re not, then use ‘em as speed bumps while you consolidate your position here.”
Morgan tilted his head slightly as he looked down at Hank. “I think that’s the most cold-blooded thing I’ve ever heard you say. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not objecting. Just a little surprising, is all.”
“It’s war. Sometimes that’s the nature of the beast.” He glanced up at the rancher. “If they don’t have the stones to bring their A-game, then they’re going to be more of a hindrance than a help. Your responsibility is to your people. They want to play; they take the risks and play by the rules we set.”
“They might not like that.”
Hank paused for a second. He’d certainly seen that kind of problem before, though it had most often been a case of AOR turnover with an oncoming unit, a unit that had just finished its workup, and didn’t have the recent experience that his own did. One in particular had wanted to do things their way and had brushed off the turnover.
They’d paid for it in blood.
He stood and put his hand on Morgan’s shoulder. “Then you make them understand what the situation is, and what’s at stake.” He sighed. “This was supposed to be Grant’s responsibility. We weren’t going to stay here forever, as it was. But Grant got himself killed, and now it seems to have devolved on you.” If Morgan had just been a rancher, he’d have hesitated a lot more, but he’d gotten to know the man well enough to know that he’d kicked around a lot of trouble spots with quite a few Marine Expeditionary Units in his day. “So, you make sure that they don’t steamroll you into doing something stupid.”
Morgan chuckled. “The day that some State Guardsman in weird gray cammies can steamroll me or Alice into doing anything will be the day the buzzards are circling over my corpse.”
Hank clapped him on the shoulder with a dry chuckle that he really didn’t feel like. “You should only have to deal with them for a short time, anyway. There’ll be National Guard and Triarii here soon.”
“Sooner the better.” He looked down at Hank’s ruck. “What exactly are you planning on doing?”
“Going into the lion’s den,” was all Hank said in reply.
Chapter 17
They’d gotten a spatter of rain after midnight, but all it had done was raise the humidity enough that their trousers didn’t dry completely after crossing the Rio Grande. Now, a couple hours later, they were still damp and gritty, chafing a little as they trudged across the desert in the dark.
Moffit was back on point. Without anyone saying anything, he’d taken that position as his own lately. He was good at it, too, moving carefully and quietly, picking the best route across the rough ground to give them
as much cover and concealment as possible as they penetrated deeper into Mexico.
Now they were moving up onto the bluffs just south of their crossing point, almost three miles due west of Lajitas itself. Hank was hoping to get a better view of the main road that ran from Manuel Benavides toward Lajitas.
Moffit slowed as they got closer to the crest of the hill. The high ground fell away in front of them, the bluffs leading down to a dry wash that fed into the Rio Grande during the wet season. Beyond lay the road. Hank had his reasons for wanting to get eyes on the main avenue of approach to the crossing from the Mexican side.
When Moffit turned back and signaled that they were close, Hank acknowledged and called a halt. Ordinarily, that might mean drawing the entire section into a square or circular perimeter, but he’d tried something else instead. They halted where they were, and each man found cover and got down, alternating the direction they faced. Effectively, he now had a skirmisher formation covering their entire elongated perimeter.
He dropped his ruck and moved up to join Moffit. A tap on the other man’s shoulder strap told him to do the same. Then, together, the two of them moved up toward the edge of the bluffs.
They stayed low, despite the cover of darkness. The cloud cover made the blackness even deeper on the ground. But given everything else, Hank was no longer willing to bet that the cartels didn’t have thermals or similar long-range night vision capability. Better to be slow and careful than to get complacent and end up getting compromised and killed in the process.
By the time they crept up to the edge of the bluffs, they were down on their bellies. Hank had brought a pair of thermal binoculars, along with a precious set of batteries, that he only inserted once they reached their observation point.
He flipped up his NVGs and put the binoculars to his eyes, scanning the desert below them.
The road was hard to spot at first; it was just a dirt track through the sagebrush, cactus, and creosote bushes, so it didn’t retain heat the way a paved road would. But the enemy obliged them soon enough.
Headlights were moving slowly through the dark, coming over a rise almost due south of their perch. He turned the thermals that way, but at that distance, the vehicles were little more than white blobs of heat. Still, judging by their number and how close they were driving, he suspected they were another group of either Soldados or Vengadores, escorting another batch of tankers toward the West Texas oilfields.
The magnitude of the theft was as staggering as the logistics of the operation that had been put together to facilitate it. He was increasingly convinced, too, given the references to Los Chales, that it hadn’t been the cartels’ idea.
This wasn’t just a smash and grab. This was a strategic attack on the United States, using criminal proxies. When he’d been a Lance Corporal, that would have seemed unbelievable.
Now? With what he knew? It had been happening for years, just nowhere near this magnitude or audacity.
He watched the headlights silently, tracking them as they trundled across the desert, occasionally dipping into lower ground or going around a hill. As he watched, he started to work out which vehicles were probably which.
Three gun trucks up front, two behind. Four tankers. At least, those four look big enough to be oil tankers. How much can one of those carry? It wasn’t relevant to the problem at hand, so he put the question out of his mind. Still, how many tankers were coming and going, and how often, was an interesting question.
The minutes passed slowly as he watched, Moffit holding security for him. Finally, he thought he saw their spot. Right there. A nice little S-curve, right between hills too steep for the vehicles to maneuver over. Perfect.
He stashed the binoculars and started to move back from the edge. Long way to go and a lot to do before dawn.
***
It took longer than he’d hoped to get to the road. And then they had to go to ground, staying low and flat in the cover of the terrain as yet another convoy rolled past. Hank took up a risky position on the high ground, overlooking the little canyon he’d picked for an ambush spot.
The convoy might have been a regular military convoy from a distance. Up close, there were some differences.
Narcocorridos blared from speakers in the back of one of the trucks. The gunners weren’t alternately oriented; in fact, most of their belt-fed machineguns were pointed at the sky, while they sang along or chatted loudly with the men in the cabs. A couple of the trucks were lit up with running lights.
They obviously think that they’ve got nothing to worry about on this side of the border. They’ll find out how wrong they are soon. Well, maybe not this bunch.
Spencer had crept up next to him. “Not sure about this plan, boss.” His whisper was barely audible over the narcocorridos, even at that distance.
“We’ve got two hundred miles to go to Camargo, and I’d rather do it with some kind of useful camouflage.” Hank didn’t take his eyes off the kill zone. “This many of us in regular civilian trucks would draw attention. In cartel gun trucks that are already running around with absolute impunity?”
“It ain’t that.” Spencer was peering over a rock. “I’d just be a lot happier with the plan if we still had a few of those EFPs left.”
“Well, wish in one hand, shit in the other…”
“And see which one fills up first, I know.” Spencer spat a thin stream of dip spit into the sand. He had to be hurting even more than Hank if he’d thrown in a dip on the move. The supply had been getting low enough that those Triarii who used had taken to re-dipping a lot.
Hank was glad that was a habit he’d dodged in the Marine Corps. He still wasn’t quite sure how he’d made it twenty years in the infantry without picking up a tobacco addiction, but somehow, he had.
He watched the convoy go around the next bend and disappear into the dark, the faint, weirdly cheerful strains of a song about skinning a rival alive still floating on the night air. Then he started to pick himself up off the ground.
“Time to go to work.”
***
It took longer for the next convoy to show up. Plenty of time for the Triarii to prepare their greeting.
The eastern sky was getting light again before the next group appeared. Traffic seemed to slow down after dark; maybe because the bad guys wanted to party after dark, maybe because they didn’t have enough NVGs to be confident making the crossing in the middle of the night.
The snaking line of four trucks full of gunmen and six tankers rumbled into the canyon and almost didn’t stop in time. Given the fact that the row of rocks laid across the road would probably have broken an axle, even if the overloaded F250 in the lead had managed to clear a particularly sharp and tall one with its bumper, it was probably just as well for them that they did.
Hank watched from under the sandy-colored, lightweight camouflage net he’d thrown over himself. They’d lucked out a little. Only one of the escort trucks had a heavy gun mounted. The other three just had beds packed with five or six shooters apiece.
Too easy.
They were playing music, like the last group, but the song was something different. It took Hank a moment to recognize it as “Carabina 30-30,” a song from a late ‘40s movie turned revolutionary ballad, which fit with the red-and-black Aztlan flags flying from each of the escort trucks. The Soldados were getting more brazen.
The driver of the lead vehicle stomped on the brake, coming to a lurching halt just short of the line of rocks. There wasn’t a good way around them, either. The Triarii had made sure of that. His passengers in the bed were thrown forward in a heap of cursing humanity, some of them clearly landing on weapons and elbows, and the Spanish curses were audible even over the music.
The other vehicles were following too close, and there was almost a pileup in the canyon, several of the trucks nearly going off the road as they tried to avoid slamming into the vehicles ahead of them. More curses and yells added to the general cacophony, made even worse as Hank and the others rose up f
rom their hiding places, leveled their weapons, and opened fire.
Hank was glad that there weren’t any up-armors in this bunch. He’d had a plan to deal with them, derived from the section’s actions in Phoenix, just before they’d been tapped to head into California. But better to have nothing but soft-skins to work with.
Bullets chopped into the men in the backs of the trucks before they even knew what was happening. The suppressed rifles weren’t silent, but it was next to impossible to see where the shots were coming from in the predawn dimness.
Hank had picked out the one machinegunner, standing behind an FN Minimi, and his first shot broke with his reticle just above the cummerbund of the man’s plate carrier. He didn’t think that they’d be wearing side plates, but it never hurt to be careful, and at that range, he could be a bit more precise with his shots.
The bullet tore through just under the gunner’s armpit, spattering red against the white rim of the truck bed, and the man went down, blood spraying from his mouth, his finger convulsively closing on the Minimi’s trigger, sending a spray of 5.56 chattering into the sky as he went down and dragged the gun with him. The burst ended quickly as death overtook him, most of his lungs having been shredded by the bullet, and his hand fell away from the gun, leaving it dangling on its pintle mount.
Hank left the cab untouched. They didn’t want to put too many holes in the vehicles.
The rear vehicle was starting to move, trying to back out of the kill zone. But Bishop had dismounted one of the Mk 48s, and opened fire on the truck, raking it with a series of long bursts that tore through tires, punched bloody holes in the shooters in the back, shattered glass, and slammed through the hood and into the engine. The 7.62mm bullets might not do catastrophic damage, but they weren’t going to do anything good to the engine, either. He focused his fire on the cab, the bullets punching puckered holes through sheet metal and fiberglass, making the entire vehicle rock as what was left of the side window and a good chunk of the windshield fell away in a tinkling cascade, and the truck stopped moving.
