Fortress Doctrine (Maelstrom Rising Book 5) Read online

  Alice Morgan, Bob’s wife, was holding the light. Iron-haired, weathered and tanned, she was every bit as no-nonsense as her husband. Hank would have accepted her help in the middle of a firefight, and then quietly stood and listened as she critiqued his performance afterward. She was hard as nails and Hank respected the hell out of her.

  And right then, he didn’t want to face her. He had to force himself to cross the few yards to the circle of light that bathed the wounded girl.

  Doc Travis didn’t look up at the crunch of Hank’s boots on the desert floor. Alice did, but the hard, accusatory expression he’d more than half expected didn’t cross her face.

  “Hank.” Her voice was gentle, almost motherly—also unexpected, after what had happened. “What are you doing up?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he muttered. He squatted down next to Travis. “Need some help, Doc?”

  Travis shook his head, his eyes still on his patient as he started to tape the dressing in place. “It’s just a dressing change, Hank.”

  “If you’re going back out there in a few hours, you need to sleep.” Hank glanced up at Alice’s disapproving stare, but didn’t comment on the fact that she knew he was planning to reconnoiter Lajitas after midnight. Alice was one of those ladies who generally knew everything going on around her, often without anyone knowing quite how she knew. “How long have you been up?”

  “I lost track.” He didn’t even attempt to calculate it.

  “You should know better.” She looked down at Travis. “Shane, can you handle things from here?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Travis didn’t look up from his patient; he was tying off the dressing. He could do that in his sleep, never mind in the dark.

  Alice turned off the light and shoved it in her pocket. “Come on, Hank, let’s go for a walk.”

  He might have objected, but the truth was he was wandering aimlessly to kill time and try to distract himself from his own thoughts, so he really didn’t have an excuse. If he’d been a bit more on the ball mentally, he might have excused himself as checking on security, but he really was tired, even though he hadn’t slept.

  Alice led the way, heading toward the simple overhang shelter that her husband had had built near the southern side of the bowl. Their boots crunched softly on the desert shingle. The night was otherwise quiet. The coyotes weren’t making their presence known—it was almost as if they sensed what was happening in the Big Bend and wanted to lay low. Even the wind was still.

  “Talk to me, Hank.”

  “What do you want me to say, Alice?” He stopped walking, and she turned to face him. “I’ve got a lot on my mind. It doesn’t change the facts of the situation.”

  “You’re beating yourself up over Will, aren’t you?” He couldn’t see much of her expression in the dark, but her eyes glinted faintly in the starlight. She put her hands on her hips. “I expected better of you, Hank Foss.”

  She stepped closer and stuck a finger in his face. He probably wouldn’t have taken that from anyone but Alice Morgan.

  “Now you listen to me. You weren’t there, you weren’t giving Will his orders. You were reacting to another immediate threat. Now, I don’t know what was going through Will’s head there at the end, and neither do you. But it was his command, his show, and he made the call that he did. Whether you trained him or not, that doesn’t make you responsible for his actions. That’s all on him.

  “I didn’t expect you to be the kind to fall to pieces over some casualties. I know you’ve lost men before—you don’t talk much about what happened before you came here to Texas, but I can put a few things together. Did you really think that we could face down the cartels and not lose people?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Then what’s eating you?” She stood there, a full head shorter than he, her hands on her hips, and stared him down, daring him to cross her.

  He looked up at the dark bulks of the hills around them. “I just keep imagining what went wrong, trying to think of something that I might have done differently. We knew they were going to come back. We knew.”

  “Of course we did.” Her voice was as hard and even as ever. “And what did you do about it?”

  “Booby trapped the crossings, set in hardpoints with egress routes, and, I thought, trained the militia how to fall back while taking bites out of the enemy.”

  “All of which happened. But there were only so many of us, and a lot of them, and they had a lot more firepower than we did. I think you’ll find some wrecks in the ford, where your booby traps did their work. So, again, what’s the problem?”

  He looked her in the eye as best he could. “The problem, Alice, is that despite all that, I’m in overall command. Grant acknowledged that, publicly. That makes it all fall on my shoulders, like it or not.” He shrugged. “I’m only so good at handling that burden. I was a Gunny, not an officer. It catches up with you after a while.” He gusted a sigh.

  “Yeah, I knew that we were going to lose people. Hell, we already did. The Doogans were casualties as much as anyone else. But sometimes you can’t help but think about it, especially when it’s dark and you’ve got nothing else to think about.”

  “Except that right now, you can’t afford it.” Alice folded her arms. “Look, Bob and I have lived out here all our lives. We’ve learned a thing or two about fighting; no matter what those ‘Voices from Both Sides’ idiots might think, we’ve had to fight off narcos and worse, living out here. Add in running a ranch in the desert, and you’ve got to learn the fine art of balancing things out.” She tilted her head to one side. “Should I have Shane give you a sleeping pill? Because it’s not just you who can’t afford to be dead tired right now. As you said, a lot of us are counting on you, too.”

  Hank shook his head. “I don’t do well with sleeping pills. Either they don’t work at all, or I’m dead to the world for the next eighteen hours. There’s no in-between, and there needs to be.” He stifled a yawn. His eyes hurt. Just walking and talking with Alice seemed to have reasserted his fatigue. “I’ll do what I can.”

  She put a hand on his arm, once again the motherly type instead of the hard-nosed battleax she could be. “If you’ve got to push things back a little, do it. You won’t do anyone any good if you start making mistakes because you’re dead tired.”

  “Believe me, I’ve operated on a lot less sleep.” Except you’re not getting any younger, and this profession has a way of catching up with you. “And we’ve only got so much darkness to work with.” He squeezed her hand for a moment. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Just be safe.”

  He shook his head. “No such thing, these days. Just got to be deadlier than the other guy.”

  ***

  Three hours later, Huntsman was shaking him awake. “It’s time.”

  He’d hoped that the glorified cat nap would just recharge his batteries a bit, but he felt like he’d been hit by a truck. Everything ached, his head felt like it was two sizes too big for his skull, and his eyes seemed to grate in their sockets. He put out a hand, and felt his rifle next to him, the sling still looped around his shoulder. It was an old, old habit.

  “Right.” He sat up, feeling more than a bit like Dracula in one of the old black-and-white horror movies. “I’m up.” He looked around for a second, noticing that the rest of the recon team—Huntsman, Moffit, Taylor, and Reisinger—were already up. “Was I the last one to get woken up?”

  Huntsman looked a little shamefaced. “Alice insisted. Nobody had the balls to say otherwise.”

  Hank squinted around him in the light of the red lens flashlights and headlamps that the others were using to check their weapons and gear. Arturo was up, rolling up his ranger roll and putting it into his pack.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” If the question was a bit more of an abrupt and impatient growl than was merited, Hank’s patience was at a low ebb, made worse by his exhaustion.

  “I’m coming with you.” Arturo was staring at him a little like
a deer in the headlights, his eyes glinting in the red light.

  “The hell you are.” Hank reached for his boots. “This ain’t your usual scouting op. Go back to bed.”

  “I can help!” But Arturo had let his hands fall to his sides, the ranger roll only half packed. This wasn’t the first time this argument had played out, and as stubborn as the kid was, he had yet to see Hank change his mind when he said “No.”

  “Answer’s still no.” He started lacing his boots, ignoring the boy’s crestfallen expression. “This is a job for shooters, not halcones. I haven’t trained you with the squad, so you’re staying here.” It was a simple, and true, explanation, though it wasn’t the entire explanation.

  Huntsman hadn’t moved very far, and looked up at the exchange. “Settle down, Arturo. This isn’t an all hands op. Sit down and do what your Dad tells you.”

  Arturo slumped, while Hank turned his glare on Huntsman, but the ginger powerlifter just looked back at him with a half-grin and a shrug.

  Hank grumbled a little as he heaved himself to his feet. “Well, let’s get geared up. We step off in ten.”

  ***

  Even after getting dropped off by a gun truck three klicks away, it was rough going through the brush and hills. The sun was turning the eastern sky a pale pink by the time they reached their perch on the shoulders of Lajitas Mesa, overlooking the town. Leaving Moffit and Reisinger on rear security, Hank, Taylor, and Huntsman crawled up into a little cleft on the shoulder of a ridge, overlooking the RV park.

  “Oh, hell.”

  They couldn’t see all of the town, but they could see enough.

  Two of the houses visible in the narrow window they had to work with had been burned to the ground. Several Mad Max up-armors were parked on the side of Highway 170, their mounted machineguns oriented outward. One of them bore the green and tan digital camouflage that Hank had started to associate with the Vengadores, after seeing some of the intel on them. One of the others, however, clearly wasn’t a Vengadores truck. A red flag with a stylized black eagle in the center flew from its tailgate. Hank recognized that symbol. The Soldados de Aztlan hadn’t flown that flag much in Arizona or California, but they hadn’t disguised the emblem, either.

  But the emblems and the fact that somehow the Vengadores and Soldados were working together were only details. Even the continued flow of up-armored vehicles in between what looked very much like tanker trucks along the highway were only of limited moment.

  What drew the Triarii’s eyes were the corpses hanging from the power poles next to the highway. More had been staked out alongside the road for at least a hundred yards.

  They’d been stripped, men and women alike. Some had had their hands and feet cut off. Some had been eviscerated. All had been beheaded.

  “Ah, fuck.” Huntsman looked away for a moment, gulping.

  Hank forced himself to look, his eyes hard, his jaw clenched. “This is what they do. We resisted. So, anyone left behind paid the price.” He was glad he couldn’t recognize any of them, then felt a surge of disgust at the sentiment. He knew every one of the bodies down there, friends or otherwise. He just couldn’t identify them from that far out. “This is what they’ve been doing to the Mexicans who’ve stood up to them for years. Now it’s come here.”

  “Look at how many of them there are.” Taylor seemed unfazed by the carnage, but then, Taylor had always been a little… interesting in the head. “What’s got the ‘revolutionaries’ and the latest and greatest in paramilitary narcos working together?”

  “Good question.” Hank pointed. “My guess is that those tankers have something to do with it. Remember the stories about Los Zetas stealing oil a few years back?”

  Taylor frowned. “You think they’ve got the balls to go after the West Texas oil fields?”

  “Unless you’ve got a better idea.” Hank brought his cat-eyed binoculars up. Sure enough, those tankers looked like petroleum tankers. “One of the biggest fields in the world. And they proved a long time ago that the drugs were only ever a means to an end.”

  “They must be really confident in how bad things have gotten on our side of the line.” Huntsman had mastered his gorge, and was back up, scanning the town and the highway.

  “Hey, look.” Taylor pointed, and Hank followed the line of his finger, raising the binoculars again.

  There appeared to be a confrontation happening at their old headquarters trailers in the RV park. Two of the Vengadores trucks were parked outside, currently hemmed in by three much more ad hoc vehicles, one of which was also flying a small red flag—presumably another SdA flag.

  The Vengadores were wearing tan—not quite a uniform, but close. The Soldados were a lot more eclectic. They were also being held back by the Vengadores up-gunners, who had their machineguns pointed at the numerically superior Soldados.

  “Looks like they’re fighting over our stuff. Fuckers. They’d better leave my box alone,” Taylor growled.

  Hank watched as the confrontation continued, the couple of tan-clad Vengadores standing in front of the gun trucks openly defying the Soldados. He couldn’t see faces from that far away, but body language was readable from a lot farther out. And the Soldados were suddenly nervous.

  That didn’t surprise him that much. The majority of the competent Soldados they’d faced in Arizona had mostly been mercenaries from one cartel or another, but the overall organization had always seemed a little… loose. The Vengadores, with their pseudo-uniforms, military gear, and uniform camo pattern, appeared a lot more professional. And therefore, a lot more likely to tear through a rabble like the Soldados regularly fielded. The Vengadores were another step along the “third generation gang” evolutionary path.

  His eyes narrowed as he watched. Maybe it was the three hours of sleep he’d actually gotten. Maybe that had given him the distance to start thinking more dispassionately, despite the white-hot fury the sight of the mutilated bodies had lit in him.

  He started to move back. “We’ll set in here for the rest of the day and keep an eye on things. But we’re bringing the rest of the section up as soon as it’s dark.

  “Then it’s going to be time to go down and sow some chaos.”

  Chapter 13

  The sun had just gone down, disappearing almost without fanfare in the murk of the overcast that had rolled in about midday. Hank was more than glad for the clouds. Total darkness would only work to the Triarii’s advantage.

  He’d only brought Triarii for tonight’s mission. The militia might have every bit as invested in it, but this was going to be hairy enough with the professional light infantrymen he’d built Tango India Six Four into. Some of the militia could hang, but he couldn’t afford to risk them.

  Plus, fewer numbers might actually work in their favor tonight.

  Moffit was on point again, staying low, working his way through the brush. Hank followed a few yards back, watching every step while scanning the back of the La Cuesta Suites hotel. The generator was running, but it wasn’t big enough to power all the lights; it had only been wired to a couple of the courtyard lights and the interior. Which left the low ground behind shrouded in almost complete darkness, as the already dim sunset faded away.

  He looked back over his shoulder. LaForce was about three yards behind him, also keeping his head below the tops of the bushes. It was a bit damp down there, being so close to the river, which meant that there was a lot more vegetation.

  Moffit halted just short of the final slope below the back windows, watching and listening. Hank joined him, sinking to a knee behind a larger bush, breathing slowly through his mouth to stay as quiet as possible.

  He could hear music and raised voices. The music sounded like some kind of narcocorrido, one of the “narco ballads” that had become popular among those who viewed the cartels as Robin Hoods or revolutionaries. Many of them had been commissioned by cartel leaders precisely as folk propaganda. It was a bizarre cross between mariachi music and the celebration of murder, torture, and t
he peddling of poison to weak people.

  He hated the sound of it as much as he hated the narcos themselves.

  His time in the Southwest meant he’d picked up a fair bit of Spanish. It had become almost a requirement, working the border, and while he’d always considered himself a simple man, focused on the immediate task at hand, the strategic nature of every move the Triarii made had necessitated taking more of a holistic approach to warfare. He had to know his enemy, and that meant knowing their language as much as he knew their minds.

  He couldn’t make out what was being said; they were still too far away, and the music was too loud. Looking back, he signaled to LaForce to break off and start the approach. LaForce signaled the affirmative, and he and Taylor slipped off into the brush. Two by two, the rest of the squad faded away, moving to their pre-planned avenues of approach.

  Spencer and 2nd Squad weren’t with them; they had taken the long way around, dismounting in the hills to the southeast, and should at that point be working their way up the northeast side of the golf course.

  Hank and his recon team hadn’t stayed in place all day; he’d wanted more information, and after the first few hours they’d determined that the enemy wasn’t actively patrolling the hills. So, they’d circled around the town, watching and noting what they saw before moving down behind cover and moving again.

  So, they had a pretty good idea of what was going on, and where their targets were.

  They’d spotted identifiable groups of Vengadores and Soldados, though there might have been more who just weren’t flying their cartel colors. The Vengadores were still unabashedly a cartel, while the Soldados had wrapped themselves in a revolutionary mantle in the name of “Aztlan,” a supposed Hispanic homeland carved out of the American Southwest, from California to Texas. They were still the same thugs—their leader, Jose Ravela Muñoz, who had been on Hank’s target deck for over a year, was believed to be the infamous El Sonrisa—but their adoption of the “Aztlan” cause had drawn a lot of activists who might otherwise have stayed out of the narcotics business.