High Desert Vengeance (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 5)

by Peter Nealen

  “Good copy, Woodsrunner,” Brannigan’s voice crackled back, muted since Flanagan had kept the volume down. “Are you holding position?”

  “Negative,” Flanagan said. “We might have spotted the rescue objective. We’re going to take advantage of some chaos.”

  “Step carefully, Woodsrunner,” Brannigan admonished. “We don’t have quite all the tools that we’d like for this.”

  “Will do, Kodiak,” Flanagan said. “You’ve got more to worry about than we do.”

  “Good hunting, Woodsrunner,” was all Brannigan said in reply.

  “You too, Kodiak.” Flanagan shoved the radio back in his chest rig. “Let’s go, boys,” he said. “We’re only going to get one chance at this, so let’s not fuck it up.”

  ***

  Brannigan stuffed his own radio back in its pouch and looked around, grimacing. The vegetation in those hills rarely got taller than about chest height, and there was little in the way of constricting terrain. He could already see the dust clouds rising in the late morning sky as the vehicles Flanagan had described came down the dirt road from the hacienda. They had mere minutes. If that.

  The road ran straight down the valley, with a shallow arroyo on one side. Fortunately, they were on the arroyo side. They didn’t have machineguns, claymores, LAWs, or even grenades. All they had were their rifles.

  It was going to have to do.

  Scrambling down into the arroyo, he led the way to the roadside. The brush made for bad visibility, but there was nothing to do about it. They had limited options, and had to make the most of it. He crawled and clawed his way up the side of the arroyo until he could just see the road. Turning back, he pointed to the men following him and then up along the lip of the arroyo. “Spread out, at least five meters between each man. Make your shots count, boys.”

  He could hear the trucks coming now. Flattening himself into a cleft in the side of the arroyo, he deployed his OBR’s bipods and got behind the rifle as best he could, as the rest scattered along the little brush-choked streambed.

  It wasn’t the best L-shape he’d ever set up, but it was probably one of the hastiest. He was the cutoff position, such as it was. Which meant he had to kill the driver of the lead vehicle, or at least disable it.

  He was definitely going to have to make his shots count. As best he could in the awkward position, he got his bulk behind his rifle, loaded the bipods, and started lining the scope up down the road.

  They were coming.

  Chapter 20

  The lead vehicle was a jacked-up black pickup truck, with wide, outsized fender flares. It didn’t look like a working truck, despite the dust that was now coating its otherwise gleaming body. It was a playboy truck. Which fit, leading a bunch of narcos.

  It was coming on fast, kicking up a towering cloud of dust behind it. The rest of the column had to be cursing, but they were going to have a whole lot more to curse about in a few seconds.

  Brannigan couldn’t see the driver; there was too much glare and the inside of the cab was too dark; the side and rear windows must all have been tinted. But it wasn’t his first rodeo. He put his reticle roughly where he figured the driver had to be, and squeezed the trigger.

  The suppressed 7.62mm AR coughed once, twice, three times. Three white stars appeared in the glass, roughly where the driver’s head and upper torso should have been. He quickly shifted his aim to the engine block, putting another three rounds into the radiator as fast as he could squeeze the trigger, before the truck suddenly swerved drunkenly and plowed into the sagebrush alongside the road. It rolled and lurched over the brush for a few dozen yards before coming to a stop.

  More suppressed gunfire was hissing and snapping along the arroyo, as the rest of the Blackhearts pumped fire into the rest of the column. The dust was starting to clear; it quickly became apparent that the following drivers had quickly realized that something was wrong, and had braked hard as the lead truck had gone off the road.

  Brannigan took advantage of the better visibility and leveled his rifle at the windshield of the tricked-out Jeep in the number two spot. He shot the driver through the upper chest as he struggled to get out. The passenger was already dead, slumped against the driver, blood spattered on the windshield.

  Movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he swiveled back toward the black truck. Doors were opening, though on the other side. Apparently, the narcos weren’t stupid enough to get out on the contact side. Still…

  He pumped five rounds through each closed side door. What might have been a scream of pain replied to his fire.

  Truck doors make shitty cover, boys.

  Someone on the other side of the truck popped around the smoking hood suddenly. Brannigan just got a glimpse of a weapon muzzle before a storm of bullets started shredding the brush above his head, the snap and crack of the projectiles’ passage close enough to be almost physically painful.

  All down the line, gunfire started to roar and rattle, as the narcos responded to the ambush. The Blackhearts had gotten some good kills in at the start, but there were enough bad guys that they hadn’t been able to make a clean sweep in the first volley. Now it was going to be a different game.

  Getting as low in his little rut as he could, Brannigan swiveled his rifle, having to pull it back a little to clear a creosote bush, and returned fire at the man crouched in front of the truck’s hood. The man disappeared, though whether he’d been hit or not, Brannigan couldn’t tell.

  His bolt locked back on an empty magazine and he dropped below the lip of the arroyo to quickly reload.

  The volume of fire coming at them was intensifying. He had just sent the bolt home when heard Hancock’s voice suddenly raised. “Peel left!”

  Despite his place as leader and commander, Brannigan simply reacted. Hancock had the right of it; the element of surprise was lost now, and they needed to get out of their fixed position, before the narcos’ counterattack pinned them down. Vicious thugs they might be, but they still had Brannigan and his Blackhearts outnumbered and outgunned, and numbers have a quality all their own.

  He fired a rapid five shots at the black truck to discourage anyone who might be trying to shoot over, under, or around it, and then he was sliding down the side of the arroyo and fighting his way through the brush, running up the dry streambed toward the hills.

  Trying to bound straight back would only put them on higher, open ground, without useful cover. The arroyo was the only way to go.

  He was too far down from Jenkins to give him a thump to let him know that he was now the rightmost man in the fighting position, so he barked out, “Last man!” as he went by.

  A straight dash up that sandy wash was almost impossible. There was a lot of brush down there, growing and thriving on what water ran down it during the wet season. Since it was still winter, there was a little rivulet running down the middle, and the sand was damp. The bushes grabbed and scraped at him as he ran, pounding up the slope toward the end of the ambush.

  The valley was reverberating with the thunder of gunfire by then. He could almost hear a thin, angry voice screaming in Spanish, but it was still nearly drowned out by the rest of the noise.

  He saw and heard Santelli firing from the lip of the arroyo and stormed past, throwing himself on his belly a dozen meters to the shorter man’s left. He had to adjust to find a window through the brush to fire through.

  Almost as soon as he got eyes on a bright yellow Hummer, a roaring storm of 5.56 fire snapped and crackled overhead, clipping bits of vegetation off and forcing him to flatten himself closer to the dirt by sheer reflex, before he realized that it was aimed off to his right. Getting up on his elbows and bringing his OBR to bear, he searched for the muzzle blast.

  It wasn’t hard to spot. The shooter was back in the brush, down on his belly, but the weapon was kicking up a storm of dirt and grit in front of it. Aiming roughly at the center of that cloud of debris, Brannigan cranked off two more shots. The autofire stopped suddenl
y, as Jenkins scrambled past behind him, but another burst of fire blasted sand and dirt into his face as another one of the narco shooters fired at his own muzzle blast.

  He dropped down again and scuttled a couple of feet to his left before searching for that shooter, in time to see a short man with a shaved head start to run across the road toward the arroyo, a MAC-11 submachinegun in his hands. He threw himself on his side, pointing his rifle back down the road toward the charging sicario, and fired.

  He felt the crack of Jenkins’ bullet pass within a foot of his head as the former SEAL shot the attacking gangster at the same instant. Both bullets hammered into the man’s side and his feet seemed to slip out from under him. He collapsed in the road, squirming in the dust, his feet kicking helplessly, coughing blood out onto the grit.

  There was more screaming in Spanish, and for a moment, everything seemed to go quiet. Brannigan didn’t have a target. The man lying in the road had gone still.

  This ain’t good. He didn’t think that the enemy had been driven off. There were too many of them, and they’d responded to quickly for him to imagine that they’d been stampeded.

  A moment later, a renewed storm of gunfire erupted from across the road. Muzzle flashes were all but invisible in the light of day, but the thunderous roar of the fire and the ripping noise of the bullets going overhead, tearing through vegetation and smacking into the dirt at the edge of the arroyo was enough to drive any of the Blackhearts down into cover.

  “Get low and fall back!” Brannigan bellowed. This was going to last just long enough for the enemy to rush them. And outnumbered as they were, if this turned into a close-range slugging match in the ditch, it was going to be over quickly.

  And he didn’t think the Blackhearts were going to come out on top.

  He stayed where he was, as Santelli, then Curtis and Javakhishvili, and finally Hancock rushed past, bent almost double to stay below the line of fire. He kept below the edge of the arroyo, his rifle held ready to bring it to bear quickly.

  The fire tapered off, and he eased one eye and his muzzle out of cover, just in time to see four sicarios running forward, firing from the hip. He shot one in the chest, and he staggered and fell on his face. The other three slowed, but drove him back behind cover with long bursts of submachinegun and rifle fire.

  It was time to go. Sliding back down into the wash, he fired the last rounds in the mag up at the road, just to give them pause, then turned and raced, bent over, up the arroyo, stripping the empty magazine out and jamming in a fresh one as he went.

  This was going to get hairy.

  ***

  Flanagan heard the gunfire start when they were about halfway down to the hacienda. He had to force himself not to let the sudden surge of adrenaline affect his movement. This wasn’t a race to contact, even though time was of the essence. This was a stalk, plain and simple.

  And there was a sentry far too close for him to get careless now.

  They hadn’t noticed the sentries earlier. Not that they were well-camouflaged; the guy in front of him was wearing a checked flannel and a white straw cowboy hat. But he’d been disguised by a fold in the ground, and now Flanagan had just spotted him, barely fifty yards away, and right between them and the hacienda.

  He’d frozen as soon as he’d seen the cowboy hat, but the sentry was walking uphill now, trying to get a better look at the firefight happening down in the valley. And if he kept coming, he was going to walk within an arm’s length of Flanagan himself.

  Flanagan briefly thought about the fixed-blade knife on his hip, but dismissed it. His camouflage wasn’t bad, but he was hardly the Invisible Man. The only reason this kid hadn’t spotted him yet was because he wasn’t looking. He should have been on the alert because of the gunfire down below, but apparently, he wasn’t that experienced. Or well trained.

  A knife kill might take him down with a minimum of noise. But it was a chancy thing, especially given the big PSG-1 in his hands. Most people couldn’t engage well at close range with a sniper rifle, but Flanagan knew that that was largely a matter of mental conditioning, and that all that kid needed was a split second and a lucky shot.

  Never bring a knife to a gunfight.

  He knew that as soon as he dropped the sentry, all hell was going to break loose. The gunfire down in the valley hadn’t stopped, but was getting a bit more sporadic; either Brannigan and the rest were breaking contact, or they had been more successful than he could have hoped. But even the racket down there wasn’t going to cover the noise of a gunshot up here. Not even a suppressed gunshot.

  He flexed his fingers around the OBR, which was already halfway in his shoulder anyway. His eyes flicked down to the hacienda, then at the hills around it. There were still three men visible on the roof, rifles in their hands, and four more out front, looking down the valley after the departed column that Brannigan had just ambushed. They seemed to be talking excitedly, and no wonder.

  Wade was just to his left, Gomez to his right, and Bianco taking up the rear. They were still high enough that he could look down into most of the two courtyards of the hacienda. Most importantly, he could see the door that they’d fingered as the prison where the hostages were probably being kept. There was still a guard standing outside it, though he was looking toward the northwest, toward the noise, and it looked like he might be yelling at the guys on the roof to tell him what was going on.

  The sentry in the cowboy hat was getting closer. He was out of time.

  He could just see the movement out of the corner of his eye as Wade reached the same conclusion and raised his own rifle. Flanagan beat him by a half a second.

  The OBR cracked. The kid was so close that the scope would have been a hindrance; Flanagan used the offset irons. He still saw the dark spot blossom on the sentry’s chest as the white cowboy hat flew off his head and the PSG-1 slipped out of his hands. He fell backward, out of sight in the brush.

  He wasn’t dead, though. Through the muted deadness in his ears from the rifle’s report, Flanagan could hear him wheeze, then start crying, a horrible gurgling noise of fear and pain. He was dying, but not quickly. Flanagan must have missed his heart and shot him through the lung.

  Gomez was suddenly beside him, moving up. Suddenly concerned about what the other man was going to do, Flanagan moved forward with him.

  He wasn’t sure if he was worried about Gomez slitting the kid’s throat or not. He’d been a lot of places where you couldn’t trust a wounded man until you put another bullet in him, just to make sure. Hell, he’d had to shoot that Nork on the Chinese border when the man had pulled a pistol, even while he was bleeding to death from his femoral artery. Sometimes there wasn’t any other choice.

  A glance down at the hacienda confirmed that the shot had been heard. A suppressor reduced the noise of a gunshot, but it was still a gunshot. Even though they were still several hundred yards away, he could see that several of the guards had turned their faces toward the hillside. There was no mistaking the fact that the sound of that shot hadn’t come from the fight down in the valley, despite the rolling thunder of gunfire still echoing up from the road.

  Gomez still got to the dying sentry before he did. He crouched on a knee next to the young man, who was lying on his back, half-propped up by a patch of prickly pear cactus, blood frothing from his mouth and his eyes staring at the clear sky above, sobbing and choking at the same time.

  But Gomez just took the PSG-1 and tossed it back in the brush, away from the dying man. Pitiless black eyes looked him over one more time, then turned back to the hacienda.

  Flanagan wasn’t sure what was colder: killing him, or leaving him to die that way.

  Three of the guards were starting to move toward four-wheelers that were parked outside the main hall of the hacienda, guns in their hands. One of them had something in his hand, held to his mouth. A radio crackled nearby; the sentry had had comms. The words were in Spanish, but the hail was easy enough to recognize. Sooner or later, if they hadn’t fi
gured it out already, they were going to know that their sentry was dead, and that the ambushers on the road weren’t the only threat.

  One by one, the four-wheelers growled to life, and the three men started up the hill, weaving through the brush. The slope and the undergrowth were going to slow them down, but they’d still be far too close, far too quickly.

  He barely needed to glance at the men to his right and left. Surprise and stealth were gone now. He shouldered his rifle and laid his reticle on the man in the center.

  The riders were moving enough, and still just far enough away, that it wasn’t going to be an easy shot. But it still wasn’t as hard as some of those that Flanagan had taken in his day. He squeezed the trigger.

  All three OBRs coughed almost simultaneously, their reports blending into a single, ragged, echoing crack.

  Two of the oncoming guards tumbled off their ATVs, disappearing into the sagebrush. The third looked like he’d avoided the bullet, but even as all three rifles turned toward him, he slumped over the handlebars, and the ATV slowed and came to a stop. He continued to bend, until he was lying over the top of the still-rumbling four-wheeler. He wasn’t moving.

  The remaining guards were suddenly moving, the ones on the ground scrambling for cover while the ones on the roof started firing up at the hillside. It wasn’t aimed fire, but bullets still started to crack by uncomfortably close, and one snapped through the creosote bush only a few feet from Flanagan. Diving to his belly, he quickly wormed his way downhill and several yards to his left, trying to put some distance between himself and his last position. Given how ragged the fire coming from the hacienda was, he could just as easily catch a lucky—or unlucky—shot, but moving was always better than staying put in a gunfight.