Fortress Doctrine (Maelstrom Rising Book 5) Read online

  And the US Armed Forces’ capabilities had eroded even more since then.

  But he still thought that what was a sound strategic decision to focus on one problem at a time was a matter of entirely too much self-deception. Hell, the official statement that was still slowly making its way through half-destroyed lines of communication into the trouble areas was trying to separate the People’s Republic of China from the fighting on the West Coast—officially, it was being blamed on overzealous Chinese PMCs.

  That conveniently ignored the fact that there were no truly “private” Chinese companies, particularly not packing state-of-the-art People’s Liberation Army equipment.

  “What’s the plan, then?” If this got as bad as he thought it was going to, they were going to need the Guard.

  “State Guard is mobilizing, and they’ll fill the gap if it takes too long for the Nasty Girls to get unfucked.” Clearly, the Ranger pilot wasn’t too worried about radio procedures, but then, Hank had known few pilots who really were. “But I’m here to be your eyes and ears, and hopefully help you guys stay alive and in the fight until then.”

  “Roger that, glad to have you. What have you got?”

  “I’ve got some dust moving toward Terlingua from Santa Elena Canyon. From the size, I’m guessing about a dozen vehicles. They aren’t moving fast, but they’re moving.”

  “Roger that. Can you give them a pass and see what you can see?”

  “On the way.” The kid sounded downright eager as he banked the Cessna toward the east.

  Hank kept walking, heading toward the Humvee. “First Squad, this is Actual. Assemble on the trucks. Mike Actual, Tango India. Give me Bravo Squad. We’ve got some hunting to do.”

  ***

  It took a few minutes to get the two squads assembled. Grant had joined the militia’s “Bravo Squad,” geared up and loaded up, ready to go. But Hank held a hand up.

  “Not you, Grant. You need to stay here.”

  “The hell you say!” Grant exploded. “This is my best squad! I’m not letting them go without me!”

  “You have to.” Hank stepped closer, his voice low and even. “This ain’t about how good they are, or how good you are.”

  “It’s about the whole Treviño thing, isn’t it? Are you pissed at me because I disagreed?” Grant’s hawkish face was set and hard; he wasn’t going to back down, especially if he thought that Hank was picking on him over the difference of opinion on how to deal with Treviño and his accomplice.

  “This has got nothing to do with Treviño or anything else.” Hank bit back his own flash of temper. That this amateur whom he’d trained from next to nothing would accuse him of being that unprofessional… “I’m going after the bad guys before they can flank Cole and the rest up in Terlingua, and cut off our escape and support route. I need somebody I can trust back here, for when—not if—the bad guys try to make another push while we’re out dealing with the flankers.”

  Grant blinked, a little of the bulldog defiance flowed out of him. He looked down, and ducked his head a little, shamefaced. Hank put a hand on his shoulder before he could start to beat himself up too much.

  “You’re the militia commander here. Lajitas is your home, your base. I need somebody to organize the defense here, and West hasn’t worked with you guys. The time was always going to come when you had to do this on your own. It just got here earlier than you expected.” He grimaced. “Welcome to life after the lights went out.”

  Grant nodded. “I won’t let you down.”

  But Hank shook his head. “Don’t worry about letting me down. I’m not the one who’s really counting on you.” He pointed around at the rest of the town. “Your family and your neighbors are the ones who are really counting on you.” He clapped him on the shoulder again. “You’re a good man, Grant. You learn fast; I wouldn’t have tapped you to command the militia here otherwise. Get set in and get ready to get hit.”

  He glanced up and frowned, listening. Had that been an explosion? Grant looked a little confused, and tilted his head. Then Hank was sure of it. It was distant, and attenuated by the mountains and hills between them, but that had definitely been the krump of a mortar round impacting.

  “Actual, this is Five.” Spencer was still calm and collected, even though Hank could hear gunfire in the background. “We are taking mortar fire from the southeast, and our outpost on Study Butte just went silent. Requesting support.”

  “We’re on the way. Be advised, we have Ranger air on station, an ISR bird, callsign Five Four One Seven. We’ll use him to bird dog the mortars, then see if we can move on any assault elements.” He was already circling his hand over his head and pointing to the vehicles, while the rest of First Squad scrambled to get in and get on the mounted machineguns. The militia weren’t quite as quick at figuring out who went where on the fly, but they were a damned sight better than a lot of so-called professionals Hank had seen over the years.

  “Roger.” Spencer was moving, judging by the background noise. “We’ve got the first row of strongpoints dug in and manned, but we’re a little thin on manpower up here. About a dozen people up and ran for it during the night.”

  As disappointing as it may have been, Hank couldn’t say he was surprised. He slammed the F350’s door and pointed toward the northeast as Reisinger gunned the engine. “Five Four One Seven, Tango India Actual. Need you to get eyes on the hills to the southeast of Terlingua; we’re looking for mortars. And watch yourself; they’re firing on the town, so the airspace ain’t exactly all that clear.”

  “Already in the vicinity, Tango India Actual. I’ve got two separate positions, on either side of the canyon immediately south of Terlingua.” The pilot paused. “Vicinity 346424 and 355423.”

  That was better than Hank was used to from a fixed-wing ISR platform, presumably using the Mark One Eyeball, but then, there were rumors that the Texas Rangers were running some seriously high-end tech along the border. All had been denied by the governor for years, but the rumors persisted, and the fact that a kid in a Cessna was reading off a six digit grid for a mortar position a few thousand feet below him suggested that they had persisted for a reason.

  He acknowledged quickly, his mind already racing as the convoy of six vehicles hit the highway and sped northeast. “Two elements; Bravo Squad, I want half of you with me, half with LaForce. We’ll take the far position; Element LaForce will take the near. We’ll turn off at Needle Peak Road and take it as far as we can.

  “We’ll have some nasty off-roading to do after that, close to about a klick, then we’ll dismount and proceed on foot.

  “This is why we get paid the big bucks.”

  ***

  They covered the ground to the end of Needle Peak Road quickly, kicking up a massive plume of dust as the F350 and its entourage of pickup trucks roared down the gravel road, but after that, it got rough.

  The desert was hardly flat; a three-thousand-foot ridge rose to the north, and a web of draws and arroyos threaded across the desert between them and the ridge. Sagebrush, cactus, and creosote bushes studded the rocky, sandy ground.

  With the vehicles in four-wheel-drive, they found an unimproved track leading off the road and toward the ridgeline. It still wasn’t easy going, as the track itself wasn’t remotely smooth, and their progress oon slowed to a crawl as they negotiated not only the bumps and fissures in the track itself, but the washes that slashed across it.

  Meanwhile, the thump of mortar fire continued, and Hank was sure that if not for the rumble of their diesels, they would have been able to hear small arms fire, as well. The Ranger Cessna had kept them up to date for a while, but had to pull off when he started to receive small arms fire from the ground.

  They were halfway through the fifth wash when things started to get iffy.

  Even in the passenger seat, Hank felt the Ford start to bog down. Reisinger cursed, jerking the wheel left and right to break the tires out of the soft sand that was giving way underneath them. Hank was glad that the truc
k was a thin-skin—he didn’t think that any of the up-armors had survived the last ten years—otherwise they probably wouldn’t have been able to break free.

  The engine revved as Reisinger stomped on the gas. If they slowed down much more, they’d be well and truly stuck, and it would take shovels and a couple of tow straps—presuming they could get the other trucks over; the walls of the wash got steeper on either side—to get it out.

  Reisinger wasn’t a newbie to off-roading. Skillfully twisting the wheels first to one side, then the other, while working the accelerator and the brake, he broke the F350 out of the sand and surged up onto the far bank.

  It took a few minutes to get the rest of the vehicles across. Hank kept his face impassive, but his fist was clenched so tight that he was sure his knuckles were white as a sheet inside his hard-knuckle glove. The mortars were still falling, and he could hear Spencer calling coordination over the radio and directing the militia medic to get to casualties. Not only were the mortars falling, but under cover of the indirect fire, the sicarios and mareros were pressing the fight on the ground.

  Once they were back on somewhat firmer ground, the convoy of gun trucks headed almost due north, making for the shoulder of the ridge ahead. The ground was getting rougher, but the drivers pressed on—the militia’s drivers were just as well-versed in off road driving as the Triarii were. Some of them were actually quite a bit better at it; they’d been four-wheeling since they were kids.

  As they came alongside the shoulder of the ridgeline, the groups split, LaForce leading the way up the draw and onto the shelf just below the crest of the ridgeline. Hank and his element kept going north, driving toward the same road, but heading up onto the tableland to the northeast.

  They bounced and creaked their way up onto the road and then floored it, heading toward the cluster of houses up on the higher ground. The plumes of dust were unavoidable; it was still daylight, and time was of the essence. Desert warfare makes concealment difficult when rolling mechanized, but there are always tradeoffs.

  They were still below the crest of the high ground when they came to a stop. Two figures with rifles came out of the nearest house, and Hank tensed for a moment, as Bishop swiveled the Mk 48 to cover them.

  But they waved, one of them letting his AR hang on its sling so he could use both hands. Hank squinted, and recognized one of the Terlingua residents, a retired game warden named Sample.

  He kicked his door open and bailed out, running to Sample and the young man next to him, who was decked out in desert tiger stripes, a low-profile chest rig, helmet, and what looked like a high-end, but short-barreled, AR-15 with a low-power variable optic mounted. The younger man wasn’t looking at them, but had taken a knee at the corner of the house, watching toward the mortar position with his scope.

  Hank knelt next to Sample. “What are you doing out here, Miguel?” Sample was hardly a spring chicken; his gut was getting more pronounced and his thinning hair was snow white.

  “Those pendejos are dropping mortars on my town,” the old man snarled. “You think I’m going to sit in my rocking chair and cower? Fuck that. I was about to start shooting at them myself, but Jose convinced me to wait for you when we saw your dust.” He jerked a thumb at the younger man. “We heard you on the radio, so we knew you were coming.”

  Hank nodded. Sample was the type to have a militia radio, even though he wasn’t technically a part of the militia. “Well, you’ll get your chance here shortly.” He looked back and pointed at the vehicles. “Bishop’s in charge of the base of fire; he’s the bald dude with the blond beard on the machinegun in the green F350. When I call, he’s going to move up and take that mortar position under fire across the canyon.” A steep-sided arroyo cut through the desert between the house and the mortar. That was going to be the big check; he had a good idea where they could cross without needing to climb nearly vertical cliffs, but if he knew it was there, he had to assume that the enemy did, too. The amount of military training that the cartels and the gangs had started to amass was getting serious.

  And this bunch was acting like a military unit, not a gang.

  Sample nodded. “I’m in no shape to go running through canyons or climbing cliffs.” He must have been thinking along the same lines as Hank. Hank had no idea what military experience Sample had, if any. But given that in Texas even the game wardens had to do tours on the border, he’d probably learned basic infantry tactics out of sheer necessity.

  Hank clapped him on the shoulder. “Stay in cover until Bishop and the others move up. Let’s not start the music early.” He looked back at the rest of the maneuver element, which was out of the vehicles and standing by. He pointed. “Moffit, you’ve got point. Move out.”

  Moffit led the way, angling away from the mortars at first. They needed to keep as much terrain between them and the enemy as possible for as long as possible.

  They still moved fast. They had to slow down some on the steeper portions, as Moffit led the way down into a draw that dropped into the canyon, but they still moved at a jog when possible. With the terrain masking their movement, and time being short, they made tracks as quickly as they could. It got even easier once they dropped down into the canyon, though they still slowed a little, just enough to keep weapons up on the tops of the canyon walls, carefully scanning for the enemy. They were down on the low ground without much of any other cover, at least for a couple hundred yards, and if the bad guys happened to look over the edge, they’d be in a world of hurt.

  They came up on the far side, about another three hundred yards short of the house that stood across from Sample’s place. That put them about fifty yards from the mortar. Away from the rumble of engines, they could hear the thunks of the mortar firing, as well as the more distant crackle of small arms fire.

  Hank still wasn’t sure what the objective here was, but these narcos sure as hell wanted total control of the Lajitas crossing.

  Moffit got to the shoulder of another hill just below the crest of the high ground, about fifty yards below the house, and paused, getting down on a knee. Hank moved up to join him, then signaled the rest of his mixed element of Triarii and militia to spread out in a V formation, the open end facing the mortar.

  Then they rose and carefully glided forward, still covered by the slope ahead of them. They’d have to get low as they neared the crest, but for the moment, they were clear.

  At least, Hank planned on getting low before the final push. But the terrain turned out to be slightly deceptive, and suddenly Evans and a militiaman named Anderson snapped their rifles to their shoulders and opened fire, Anderson’s AR-15 barking more loudly than Evans’ suppressed M5E1.

  Hank and Moffit didn’t hesitate, but surged forward, running as fast as they could up the hill. The mortar had fallen silent, and for a moment the only gunfire they could hear was Anderson’s and Evans’. But that wasn’t going to last.

  The militiamen were lagging behind as the two of them struggled up the hill. The slope was hardly sheer, but it was still steep enough that running up it with gear, ammo, and weapons had both of them panting by the time they got far enough over the crest to see where the mortar position had been.

  The mortar and the truck that had brought it in were still there, another crate of 60mm rounds on the tailgate. One of the truck’s windows was spiderwebbed around a pair of bullet holes, and blood was splashed on the door. A body was slumped on the ground next to the wheel.

  Evans was advancing more slowly, his rifle leveled. There was no sign of any more of the bad guys.

  “Watch the right.” Evans didn’t look over as he called out the warning. “They ran that way as soon as we shot the first guy.”

  Hank slowed and looked back, signaling to the militiamen on the right flank of the V to spread out more and circle around the house. They straggled along the hillside; they still had some work to do on movement, but they were getting better, and as long as they didn’t expose themselves prematurely, Hank was pretty sure they’d be a
ll right.

  He and Moffit, meanwhile, pushed toward the vehicle, rifles still at the low ready, scanning for any sign of the enemy. They might have run, but Hank had trained the militia enough in this desert to know that a man who went flat in the creosote bushes and sagebrush might well vanish from sight.

  Evans was moving up toward the hood, while Hank and Moffit circled around the tailgate.

  They came around the ends of the truck, only to see dust rising from the draw just a few yards in front of it. The cartel mortarmen had fled, throwing themselves into the draw and scrambling down toward the canyon.

  Hank glanced back toward Sample’s house across the way. They’d moved too fast; the gun trucks were just then coming into view. He let his rifle hang, though he stepped back behind the truck first, and keyed his radio.

  “One-Four, Actual. Keep your eyes out for squirters; they went down into the draw directly in front of us.”

  “Roger that.” Bishop sounded slightly distracted. “Did you hear Mike Actual on the radio a minute ago?”

  Hank frowned. “No, we didn’t hear shit.”

  “Wait one. Let me use the truck radio.” With the ridge between them and Lajitas, comms could get messy. The personal radios might not have enough juice.

  “Mike Actual, Tango India Six Four.” At least Bishop wasn’t using his full personal callsign. That would have been a little long. Hank was starting to consider individualized callsigns for the squad members, like the Grex Luporum teams used, but that might just sow more confusion when talking to the militia, who would have a whole new set of nicknames to get used to.

  He signaled the rest to set in security around the mortar and the truck—he wasn’t going to go chasing the bad guys down into a canyon—and pointed Evans toward the tube. Evans nodded, and started breaking it down.