Fortress Doctrine (Maelstrom Rising Book 5)

by Peter Nealen

  As he peered through his scope, watching a shadowy shape moving behind the mound, Hank suddenly had the terrible thought that they might not be fighting narcos. What if the federales heard about us, and decided to ambush a smaller convoy? Not that the federales were exactly clean, but they were an enemy that he’d hoped to avoid.

  There wasn’t time to worry about that, though. Once the bullets had started flying, the only things he could focus on were fire and maneuver until the threat was neutralized.

  Most of the trail vehicles had swerved off the road behind them, taking cover behind the cluster of adobes on the corner. Hank pointed and roared, “Base of fire there!” Most of the rest of the section were out of the vehicles and getting what cover they could alongside the road. Sporadic return fire was starting to reach out toward the ambush.

  A bullet spat grit in his face, and he fired a snap-shot back at the bushes before he shifted positions. They had to clear this ambush out, or they were in trouble. Even if the bad guys didn’t manage to finish them off, all it would take would be the federales showing up in force and their incursion was done.

  Rising to his feet, he circled around the back of LaForce’s truck, to where LaForce, Huntsman, and Bishop were crouched behind the corner of the house. Moffit was still up on the gun, yelling at Coffee to get him a clear line of fire.

  “You three are with me.” Hank peered around the corner. More fire was starting to come from Second Squad as they spread out along the cross-street, trying to form a base of fire and get an L-shape onto the ambush. They were starting to force the ambushers to adjust, so the fire coming at them there at the house was slackening slightly, allowing him to get a better view, if only for a moment.

  A couple of corrugated metal shacks stood in the center of the yard, with several more mounds of gravel and a couple of pickup trucks arranged haphazardly around them. The rest of the yard was shaded by bushes and trees, and even as he looked, he saw a man in jeans, a t-shirt, and a black tac vest, his face covered, dash from one of the shacks toward the bushes.

  Hank and Huntsman shot him at the same instant. The man was moving fast, but it was also less than seventy yards. The twin hammer blow smacked into him, and he collapsed, plowing face-first into the dirt.

  “They’re trying to flank us.” Huntsman’s observation was relatively deadpan, though he still had to raise his voice above the rattle of gunfire.

  “By twos. Over the fence and to that first pile of gravel.” Hank leaned out a bit farther, and his next shot spat bits of concrete into another shooter’s face near the shack, forcing the man to duck back. “GO!”

  Huntsman was up and moving. He practically flattened the wire fence as he went over it, then he was sprinting to cover, his legs pumping, his rifle pointed at the sky. It was a longer rush than most of them had trained for, but there simply wasn’t enough cover to make it any shorter. Hank stayed where he was, rotating around the corner as he looked for more targets, trying to kill or suppress any of the enemy who might be able to draw a bead on Huntsman or LaForce, who was right on the heavyset redhead’s heels. He was careful to stay high, keeping his muzzle in front of Bishop, who was on a low knee, doing the same.

  A crackle of rapid, suppressed gunfire announced that Huntsman and LaForce had reached cover and opened fire. In the same moment, a bullet smacked off the plaster within inches of his head, ricocheting off into the sky with an angry whine.

  He ducked back, dropping to the side prone before he shoved himself out of cover again, propelling himself past Bishop. The man in the black Kevlar helmet who had laid his black AK over the top of the stack of concrete bricks, sheltered from Second Squad by the shack, might not have been the one who’d just shot at him, but he shifted his aim and put a bullet just beneath the Kevlar’s rim anyway. He barely noticed that the man was wearing a skull-print balaclava before the corpse dropped out of sight.

  More fire smashed into the concrete bricks from off to the left, and he realized that LaForce was screaming, “Set!”

  “Bishop! On me!” He thumped the other man on the shoulder as he got up. Coffee had finally maneuvered the truck over to the other side of the house so that Moffit had a shot, and Moffit unleashed the Minimi, 5.56 fire raking the shack and punching holes through the sheet metal as if it were cardboard, as the two of them went over the fence.

  Covered by the machinegun fire, Hank and Bishop sprinted toward the nearest stand of trees, running past Huntsman and LaForce. And just as they reached the trees, two more sicarios did the same.

  For a split second, the masked men in black stared at the masked men in tan. Then they started to raise their “goat horns,” black-furniture AKMs with extended magazines, fingers already tightening on triggers.

  Both Triarii had already been up on their guns, though. Before the first AK could come level, Hank had already slammed a hammer pair into the first man’s chest, just above his magazine pouches. Bishop smashed the second man off his feet with a Mozambique, the three shots so close together that they sounded almost like one single, ripping noise.

  Hank stayed on target as his opponent fell backward, his finger still resting on the trigger until he was sure that the shot through the man’s heart and lungs had finished him. He was twitching, but it was little more than a death spasm.

  It wasn’t compassion that kept him from firing that finishing shot. It was simple ammunition conservation.

  Then the two of them were hustling past the corpses, turning toward the shed, moving from tree to tree, guns up and on the hunt. Huntsman and LaForce sprinted to the trees and fell in behind them as Moffit kept raking the enemy’s cover with long bursts of machinegun fire.

  They were past the trees in a moment, and Hank threw himself flat as another wild burst of AK fire ripped over his head, smashing bark and splinters off the tree trunk next to him. He hit hard, nearly knocking the wind out of himself, and hammered several unaimed shots toward the shed from his side as he tried to get out of the line of fire.

  Bishop had barely cleared the tree, and pumped three more rounds toward the shed. The fire slackened slightly as the shooter ducked away from the fire, and Hank, gasping some air back into his lungs, scrambled to get in a better shooting position, searching for targets over his scope.

  There. He and Bishop might both have been shooting half blind, but one or another of them had gotten close enough to drive the man in gray urban camouflage and another black Kevlar helmet down behind one of the pickups. He was already coming around the side with his rifle, though, when Hank hastily snatched his rifle to his shoulder, hammering a pair into his dark silhouette.

  The man fell back, landed on his ass, struggled to get up for a moment, and then just sat there against the shed, shuddering and spasming, little mewling coughs coming from his throat as he spat blood down his front.

  Huntsman and LaForce ran past the two of them, sprinting toward another pile of junk and old cable spools, diving down behind them as another shooter, who was hunkered down behind the back of the shed to try to avoid the machinegun fire, sprayed a short burst at them. More bullets cracked through the air and smacked fountains of dirt and bits of metal and wood into the air.

  Unfortunately for the man behind the shed, Hank had a pretty clear view of him, and the most readily available target was his head. A single round blew a chunk of the back of his skull out, and the ruin of his head bounced as it hit the ground.

  Moffit fired another burst, then ceased fire. Only then did Hank realize that most of the shooting had died down. A single, wild burst rattled on the far side of the shed, answered by another couple of suppressed cracks, and then the yard went quiet.

  Cautiously, he got to his feet, his rifle at the ready, and started to move forward. It still hurt to breathe; he’d taken more of a hit than he’d thought when he’d dropped. He forced himself to keep his breathing as even as he could; in the middle of a firefight, discomfort becomes little more than an unnecessary distraction.

  Bishop quickly c
aught up with him and they swept toward the shed, carefully clearing the dead space behind each vehicle and the heaps of junk around the perimeter. Huntsman and LaForce joined them, leapfrogging across the yard and past the shed.

  Hank thought he saw movement off in the bushes and trees beyond the shed, and swiveled toward it, his rifle rising to bring his scope to his eye. He caught a glimpse of a black-clad form running behind the next house back. The bad guys were running for it.

  He advanced on the man he’d shot in the head, while Huntsman and Bishop moved to security positions around the shed, kneeling behind a couple more piles of gravel.

  The dead man was also dressed in a black shirt, black tac vest, and grayscale urban camouflage. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, but he had the same black and white skull bandana over his face when Hank turned him over with a boot.

  “Doesn’t look like Vengadores, huh?” LaForce was looking down at the body, his balaclava pulled down and stroking his mustache.

  “Doesn’t look that way.” Hank looked around at the bodies. “La Linea, maybe?”

  “Or just regular Juarez Cartel. None of them can be all that happy about having upstarts like the SdA and Vengadores running around their turf.” LaForce moved to another body and crouched over it, then picked up the AKM and started pulling magazines out of the man’s vest. “May as well take the weapons and ammo. We might need ‘em.”

  “Good call.” Hank had just knelt to take the first man’s weapon when more movement caught his eye, across the street, shielded from most of Second Squad.

  He snapped his rifle up, putting his eye to the scope, but only got the barest glimpse before the figure was gone.

  But what he’d seen brought a frown to his face. The figure had been dressed in black, but with a full-face skull mask. But it hadn’t looked like the standard Halloween skull mask that a lot of the narcos used. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something about the stylized death’s head that looked familiar. Familiar, and somehow more disturbing than the usual Santa Muerte imagery the cartels revered.

  He lowered the rifle. The town had gone silent, except for the distant barking of a dog. The narco survivors had fled, and the federales hadn’t made an appearance yet. He slung the AKM and started collecting the dead man’s mags, stuffing them into his cargo pockets.

  “Make it fast. We need to get the hell away from here.”

  ***

  A few minutes later, with the extra weapons and ammo in the cabs of the vehicles, they were speeding down the highway, leaving the buzzards circling over the south side of Potrero de Llano.

  Chapter 21

  The lights of Camargo glittered in the desert night. Hank watched it from the ridge to the northeast, the lights all turned to points of brilliant green in his NVGs. The vehicles sat below him, their lights off, partially sheltered from the road by the shoulder of the hills.

  It was a good vantage point, just off the cut that Highway 67 had pushed through the ridgeline. He couldn’t see much detail, but that wasn’t why they were there.

  Darkness had fallen about an hour before they’d reached the cut. So far, they had been fortunate enough not to encounter any other convoys on the 67. Hank didn’t know if that was because the convoys were using a different route, or if they’d just pushed hard enough—and taken enough losses thanks to the Triarii and the Texan militia—that they were getting strung out.

  Either way, they hadn’t had another encounter since Potrero de Llano. And he was thankful for that fact.

  Still, he, Spencer, and West had agreed that they needed to take a little time to rest and reset before they ventured into the city. And any observations they could make about traffic in and out would be helpful, as well.

  He watched the lights and the few cars and trucks moving on the 45, as Spencer came up to join him.

  “How the hell did we ever get into this position?” he muttered.

  Spencer stepped up beside him, turning to watch the city. “We parked the vehicles at the base of the hill and walked.”

  Hank rolled his head over to glower at his assistant section lead, who only grinned, his teeth standing out brightly in the darkness.

  “You thought that up way too fast. How did you figure I was going to ask that particular rhetorical question now?”

  Spencer shrugged. “I’ve been holding onto the idea for that joke for, hell… I don’t know. A couple years, now?”

  Hank shook his head, turning his attention back to Camargo itself. “Seriously, though. We were supposed to be a straight-leg infantry section, doing some basic counter-insurgency stuff. Sure, it was Stateside counter-insurgency, and we had a lot more leeway to do it our way than we ever did in the mil, but it was still nothing too far outside our wheelhouse as regular infantrymen.”

  He waved at their surroundings. “Now, here we are, doing some friggin’ SOG stuff, almost three hundred miles inside Mexico. How the fuck did this happen?”

  Spencer sobered. “The war happened, brother.” He looked north. “We got used to even our wars being inside certain right and left lateral limits. It allowed for a lot of specialization. Now? Half the country’s not convinced we’re even at war, and the other half can’t figure out who or how to fight. We’re the little Dutch boy with his thumb in the dike. And that means we gotta do what the mission calls for. Ain’t no Grex Luporum Team out here to do this, so it falls to us.” He grinned again. “I guess this special ops shit ain’t so tough, is it?”

  Hank snorted. “Like hell. We’ve done recon as needed before, but I’d usually rather not be this far out without support.” He glanced up at the sky. An airplane was passing overhead in the distance, and he felt his whole body clench, just a little. “No air, no medevac, no QRF… nothing.”

  Spencer clapped him on the shoulder. “Probably shouldn’t have joined a paramilitary outfit that by necessity operated in the gray areas, if not outright outside the law, then, buddy. We were always going to be short on support.”

  “You’re being awfully cheerful about this.” Hank pointed at Camargo. “How the hell are we supposed to find the coordinators in there, take ‘em out, and then get clear and back to Texas, with three hundred miles between us and any friendlies?”

  Spencer got serious again, folding his arms over his chest and staring down at the city. “Well, I was a Ranger, and when it comes to Special Forces type stuff—I mean the real-deal, Unconventional Warfare stuff, not the CIF door-kicking—we’re good at smashing everything and killing people.

  “But, if I were to think about it, since we’re this far into enemy territory, the best bet would probably be following the UW model, winning over some local support, and helping them against a mutual enemy.” He shrugged. “I mean, when you think about it, that’s essentially what we’ve been doing for the last couple months.”

  “Makes sense.” Hank shook his head bemusedly. “Except there’s one small detail missing. Who do we contact, how do we know they’re not going to sell us out at the first opportunity—either to the narcos or the federales—and even if they’re not dirty, how do we convince them that we’ve got mutual enemies? That’s the part we didn’t have to worry about as much in Texas. It was easy enough to bridge the gap with those folks—even the squishy ones who didn’t want to believe that anything had changed from when they could play that ‘Voices from Both Sides’ kumbaya bullshit. We’ve got zero contacts, here, and even less of an idea about the atmospherics.” He glanced down at the trucks. “Some of the militia back in Lajitas and Terlingua might have family here in Chihuahua, but we didn’t bring any of them, and even if we had, the odds that that family is in Camargo are even longer.”

  When Spencer didn’t answer right away, Hank turned to see what had distracted him. He was watching a slow-moving convoy, with two pickups and three tankers, followed by another pickup, come out of the cut below them.

  “Well, we could follow them into town and see where they’re going.” Spencer was already starting down the hills
ide in front of them, and Hank wasn’t far behind. “If Camargo is the epicenter of this op, we might be able to roll in and take a look around, just being disguised as Soldados.”

  Hank could think of a million ways that could go wrong. He was sure he was missing a few, and that Spencer had probably thought of them. But it was probably their best bet at the moment.

  They’d have to move quickly. They couldn’t just join the convoy, but they might well slip into town while those who had either been threatened or paid to look the other way were still averting their eyes.

  ***

  They stayed blacked out until they reached the intersection where Highway 67 ended as it joined the 69. Only then did Hank let LaForce and Coffee turn on the lead vehicle’s lights. The rest followed on NVGs until they got closer to town. He didn’t want to spook their cover. The other convoy looked like one of the SdA convoys; the vehicles weren’t professionally painted and had less armor. And the Triarii were riding captured SdA vehicles. But anyone with an ounce of situational awareness would be wary about a second convoy just suddenly popping into existence behind them.

  As they went around the wide curve that turned the highway toward the dry Rio Parral, Hank motioned to Vega, who flipped on the headlights. Let the bad guys think that some farmer’s kid had decided to go into town and had just turned off the dirt road behind them.

  It was a stretch, if the bad guys up ahead were paying attention, but there was no sign that anyone in the SdA convoy ahead of them had noticed anything. Hank hoped that meant that they were comfortable, that they thought they were on safe ground. If they were, they might not be looking for threats.

  Of course, Cuidad Camargo was a bigger town than Manuel Benavides. There were bound to be Policia or federales, or both, in there. The next hour could get interesting.

  The convoy continued blithely into town, crossing the Rio Parral over a very low, narrow, rough bridge, the concrete curbs at the edges crumbling. A glance at the darkened riverbed below didn’t show the gleam of water in Hank’s NVGs; the river was probably dry as a bone this time of year.