Fortress Doctrine (Maelstrom Rising Book 5) Read online

  “Bullshit.” Spencer stabbed a finger at him. “I was here when you told him to stay back. I was here when we geared up and left to link up, and I told him to stay back. He disobeyed both of us. That’s why he’s dead. That, and the fact that we’ve got enemies who don’t think twice about killing men, women, and children, and chopping them up for fucking dog treats.”

  Hank looked up at his assistant section leader. Spencer was breathing hard, fury in his eyes, his nostrils dilated. “What else could we have done? Hog-tied him? Then Margaret would have yelled at both of us for being cruel.”

  “He’d have been alive, though.” Hank stared out the windshield, once again not really seeing the landscape on the other side of the glass. “The kid was fourteen, Cole.”

  “I know.” Spencer calmed down a little. “Believe me, I know. But we’re back in the Wild West, brother, and a lot of boys had to become men at twelve or fourteen, back in the day. A lot of ‘em didn’t make it very far, either. It sucks that it was Arturo, but he made a man’s decision, and he died a man.”

  Hank didn’t answer, still staring at infinity, as the thoughts raced around his mind. The awful situation they found themselves in clashed with the images of Arturo’s death, and again with the fact of the invasion across the Rio Grande, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the days of Pancho Villa.

  His teeth clenched, he dropped the handset and swiveled to get out of the truck. Spencer stepped back, a concerned frown creasing his forehead. “I know that look, and it doesn’t usually bode well for somebody.”

  “Out of my way, Cole.”

  Spencer glanced toward Judge Kelly. “I’m not entirely sure that I should.”

  “You want to do this here?” Hank stood with his hands at his sides, but the threat was implicit. Spencer searched his face, as if looking for some sign that he wasn’t serious, but stepped aside, anyway. From the look in Spencer’s eyes, he wasn’t sure if he was really doing the right thing.

  A small voice in the back of Hank’s head had to admit that he wasn’t sure, either. But that little voice was drowned out by incandescent rage.

  He stalked across the desert floor toward their prisoner’s hole. Spencer followed warily. Hank didn’t look back at him, but he could feel him back there, watching and waiting, more than a little concerned about what was about to happen.

  Hank slid down into the little wash, past one of the Rodriguez brothers, twins who had both ended up in Spencer’s squad, who was standing guard. Marco Rodriguez glanced at Hank, then back at Spencer, obviously confused and a little worried, but not sure just how to deal with the situation. Hank was his section leader, and he and his brother Juan had only joined Tango India Six Four when they’d come to the Big Bend area. Neither quite knew how far they could push, and Hank was obviously pissed.

  Spencer waved him back, staying on the lip of the wash as Hank bore down on the captive, who was hog-tied and blindfolded.

  Hank reached down, ripped the blindfold off, and hauled the man up by his throat. He still had to bend down to put his face next to the bald Soldado’s; the hog-tying had made it impossible for the man to get up off his knees. “How about you and me have a chat, cabrón?”

  The Soldado, despite his situation, tried to spit in his face, but he was dehydrated, and Hank had been expecting it. Anticipating it, even. The gummy flecks fell short as Hank pulled back, and then he punched the man in the guts, hard. And Hank had boxed a lot in the Marine Corps. When he punched somebody, they’d know it for a week.

  The man doubled over, or tried to. He was still hog-tied, and Hank still had him by the throat. “Wrong fucking answer.” He lifted him higher, his fingers digging in. “I’m not fucking around, asshole. I want names. I want fucking targets. I want to know who sent you, who’s paying for it, who made the calls, who got the vehicles, who planned the routes, who talked to the Chales… I want every fucking one, and you’re going to give them to me, or I’m going to gut you like a fish and watch you bleed out.” He drew his combat knife off the back of his belt as he spoke, the late afternoon sun, which had momentarily broken through the clouds, glinting off the edge of the otherwise flat black spearpoint blade.

  “Oh, fuck.” Spencer was coming down the side of the wash. Hank ignored him, studying the blade for a moment as he held it near the man’s face.

  The Soldado, for his part, was staring at the knife. From the look in his eyes, which were still watering from the gut punch, he was unsure just whether to believe what Hank was saying or not. But fear was starting to work its way into his black eyes. He was used to being the man with the knife. He might have been brave in a firefight; most sicarios were. They knew that they danced with death every day, and so they knew that the Reaper—or The Beast, to some of them—would come calling. So, they ceased to worry about it much.

  But any remotely sane man can be brave in the face of sudden death, death in combat. Facing a long, slow, lingering death, every moment in excruciating agony… that was something else.

  “You know what?” Hank slowly started to put the knife away. “No. That’s too quick.” He sheathed the blade, snapping the retention strap over the handguard again, and leaned closer again. “I’ll do you Apache style. There are anthills out here. I’ll find the biggest one I can, just crawling with fire ants, and stake you out over it, bare-ass naked. It’ll be a tossup whether the sun finishes you or the ants.” He squinted up at the sky. “This time of year? I’m guessing the ants.”

  Spencer’s hand gripped his shoulder. “Boss? The judge wants to talk to you. I can take over with this shithead.”

  Hank stepped back, his pulse roaring in his ears. He knew what Spencer was doing, and as a small part of his own rationality took over, slightly horrified at just how serious he’d been about following through on his threats, he knew that he owed his second-in-command. Again.

  “I’ll be back for you, fucker.” And he was serious. He’d just have a little bit of time to calm down first.

  He turned and trudged up the side of the wash toward Rodriguez, who was watching Spencer and the prisoner, his face impassive. Hank stopped next to the younger man, who was a head shorter and lean as a whip, his back still to Spencer and the prisoner, watching the knot of people around Morgan and Kelly, who hadn’t moved or turned toward them. “The judge really asking for me?”

  “I don’t think so.” Marco Rodriguez was soft-spoken at the best of times. Right at the moment, he sounded downright hesitant, almost scared. “Cole walked right past me just behind you. Unless the judge talked to him just before he walked over here.”

  Hank shook his head. “She didn’t.” Spencer had followed him straight from the truck. It was a white lie to get him away from the prisoner before he did something he’d regret, all without eroding the fear he’d already instilled.

  Cole Spencer was often quite a bit smarter than his more volatile section leader. Which was a fact that Hank was often thankful for.

  Well, can’t just stand up here in full view if he thinks I’m going to go talk to the judge. Guess I better head over that way. With an angry sigh, he moved away, letting Spencer handle the interrogation without him.

  Without much of a goal except to kill time, he found himself drifting back toward the F350. Only to find Margaret Radcliffe already there, talking to Reisinger.

  Oh, hell. Not now. But she’d already spotted him, and hurried around the hood as he approached. “Hank? I was going to make sure all the boys got some food, but I can’t find Arturo, or the Samson brothers. Have you…?” She trailed off, staring at his face with growing horror. “No…”

  It was too much. “I told him to stay back.” His voice was thick, and despite all his rage and his focus, the lump in his throat was suddenly so hard and painful that he could barely breathe. “I told him…”

  He’d expected tears. He’d expected recriminations and screaming, accusations that he’d led the boy to his death by encouraging him when he’d tried to be a Triarii. What he hadn’t ex
pected in a million years was that the red-haired pain in his ass would take three quick steps to him and clasp him in a tight hug, as tears leaked soundlessly from her eyes. “Oh, Hank…”

  Hank didn’t know what to do. His own grief threatened to overwhelm him, as the unexpected compassion from a woman he’d expected to blame him and berate him got past his carefully erected defenses. He couldn’t quite break, so he just kind of froze, his arms down at his side, as Radcliffe embraced him and wept. For both of them.

  She finally pulled away, looking up into his face. He couldn’t meet her eyes. He didn’t know what to say; he just wished she’d go away and let him try to bury his grief and shock again before it all came spilling out…

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know you have to be strong, if only for the rest of us. I was awfully hard on you about him, but it was only because I was afraid that this would happen. But I know you tried. I know he was like a son to you, whether you admitted it to yourself before now or not.” She clasped his unshaven face in her hands, briefly. “Don’t bottle it up until it eats you alive. Let it out, if only in private.”

  He looked away. Damn it, Margaret Radcliffe wasn’t supposed to be this understanding. She was supposed to be a harridan and his nemesis in Lajitas.

  Spencer saved him. “Got a minute, boss?”

  He gulped down the lump in his throat as he turned away from Radcliffe, who stepped back and excused herself, though her tear-stained eyes were still fixed on Hank’s face. “Yeah.” His voice was hoarse, and his throat hurt as bad as his eyes burned.

  Spencer’s expression was as impassive as ever, though he did glance over at Radcliffe, something like approval in his eyes. “Turns out, that asshole down there really doesn’t want to be staked out over an anthill. He’s no major facilitator; he was a chosen right-hand man assigned to keep the peace between the Soldados and the Vengadores. So, he doesn’t know much. But he sang like a canary when I told him I was going to call you back because he wasn’t going to talk to me.

  “We’ve got a couple of targets. It’s no whole enchilada yet, but it’s a start.”

  Chapter 16

  Hank took some time to compose himself before he got on the ham radio set. There was no video, but his voice was raw. Radcliffe had retreated to join Alice Morgan, but kept glancing over at him, as if checking over and over to see if he was okay.

  He grumbled silently under his breath. Why couldn’t she just be an annoyance, like always?

  Finally, he had to go ahead. Lifting the handset to his mouth, he keyed the mic. “Tango Charlie Two Bravos, this is Tango India Six Four.”

  For a moment, his only reply was the faint hiss of static. Long range comms had been spotty for a while. The Triarii had been using radios a lot before the attack on the power grid, and with a lot of cell networks going down, they’d become the go-to method of communication. Unfortunately, somebody seemed to have figured that out, and the number of jammers going active, some of them apparently just out of spite, had increased wildly over the last couple of months.

  Hank was sure that a lot of the jamming really was deliberate, set in place by many of the same factions and foreign enemies who had collaborated to bring down sixty percent of the US power grid. But again, these sorts of situations always seemed to bring the assholes out of the woodwork, who wrecked things just to make life harder for everyone else, because they could.

  “Tango Charlie Two Bravos, Tango India Six Four.” The “Two Bravos” part stood for “Big Bend.” Wallace had taken area command for most of West Texas, not just the Big Bend, but he’d liked “Two Bravos” better than “Whiskey Tango.”

  He listened to the hiss and pop of static again, shaking his head slightly. He hoped he could get through; he needed to get through. Trying to do this without Wallace even knowing about it would probably turn out to be suicide.

  It might end up being suicide, anyway, but it still needed to happen.

  “Last calling station, this is Tango Charlie Two Bravos, say again.” The signal was weak and scratchy. He adjusted the set slightly to try to compensate. Unlike the military PRC radios they’d been using, the ham rig could be a little bit finicky.

  “Tango Charlie Two Bravos, Tango India Six Four. Requesting contact with Two Bravos Actual.” He enunciated clearly and slowly, hoping that he could get through the interference.

  “Stand by, Six Four.” Hank let his hand with the handset dangle and waited.

  It took a few minutes. Meanwhile, he watched the Echo Site as the sun went down. The place actually looked a lot more dead than he might have expected. It was as if the morning’s events had taken something out of all of them, left them exhausted and beaten down.

  He supposed it had. He certainly felt like he just wanted to sleep for a week. Or he would, if not for the nightmares that he knew were coming. He didn’t want to watch Arturo and the Samson brothers die again, in living color, over and over. But he knew that he would as soon as he closed his eyes.

  So, no matter how badly they ached, he kept trying to keep them open.

  Finally, the radio crackled to life again. “Six Four, this is Two Bravos Actual.” Wallace’s rasp was unmistakable. “Glad to hear you boys are still kicking; with what hit us in the last forty-eight hours, we were starting to wonder.”

  “We didn’t have the numbers to stop them cold.” Hank felt like he was making excuses, but he steeled himself. It was the truth. “They flanked us with a feint, then blasted their way through the militia at the crossing and forced their way through. They still have control of the crossing and Lajitas itself.”

  “Easy, son.” Wallace wasn’t known for having a fatherly demeanor with his subordinates, but there was a calming note in his permanently hoarse voice. “Nobody’s faulting you for getting out of the way when that came at you. Your orders were never to hold and die.

  “In fact, you’d better not. I can’t afford to lose another infantry section. Give me a SITREP.”

  Hank dispassionately outlined the events of the past few days, from the first incursion to the attempted flanking maneuver that they’d thwarted with West’s help, through the mortar attacks on Terlingua and the subsequent losses incurred by the militia and the fallback to the Echo Site. Then, as calmly as he could, no matter how badly it stung, he described the failed attempt to get the rest of the civvies out of Lajitas.

  And what it had cost them.

  Wallace didn’t interrupt throughout, but simply listened. At least, Hank hoped he was listening, instead of cursing at a broken, unreadable mess because of the state of the comms. But once he’d finished, after a long pause, Wallace broke silence.

  “Copy all.” He paused again. “That’s a hell of a mess you found yourselves in the middle of. If I’d thought Lajitas would be Ground Zero for something like this, I probably would have put a lot more resources in there. I’m sorry you boys had to face that on your own. I thought Del Rio or Presidio would be the primary targets.

  “Which isn’t to say they haven’t been hit. Presidio’s in bad shape. It all seems to have been diversionary, though; nobody’s been sticking around.”

  “Then, with all due respect, sir, why the hell are we still out here in the breeze?” It wasn’t something Hank might have said under more normal circumstances, but if Wallace was pissed about his lack of radio protocol, he didn’t say anything.

  “Because this was almost as well-coordinated as the attacks after the hit on the grid.” Wallace paused, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded different, as if he was reading. “Hits were launched on Border Patrol, local Sheriffs, police departments, even a couple of National Guard Armories, all within a few hours of each other. They killed enough people—and they appeared to know exactly who they needed to kill—that they disrupted any coordinated response for days.

  “Meanwhile, they blew through Alpine like a wildfire. There’s still some fighting there, but it only seems to flare up when somebody tries to stop them, or they see something they want, and som
ebody objects to them taking it. They’re not seizing the city—not like what you told me they did in Lajitas. They’ve just killed a corridor through it.”

  “Sounds like they’re trying to do that on a bigger scale,” Hank mused, the analytical part of his brain pushing the pain and exhaustion to one side. “Forcing a corridor right into Texas. And given the tanker trucks they’ve been escorting, I’ve got my suspicions as to what for. I don’t think this is a drug plaza.”

  “I don’t think so, either. It’s not like it’s unprecedented. Los Zetas made a killing stealing oil from Pemex before they dissolved into infighting.” Wallace snorted softly. “I think they overplayed their hand, invading Texas, though.”

  “I hope so.” Hank took a deep breath. “Any possible timeline on getting reinforcements here?”

  “Could be a day, could be a week.” Wallace’s voice had taken on a bite of anger. “The Guard’s mobilizing, though they’re getting some political pushback, and its slowing things down. Hell, I’ve heard that the Mexican government has even said that mobilizing the Texas National Guard could be seen as an act of war. The State Guard’s ignoring any such worries, though; they should be heading your way within a day.

  “I’ve got another infantry section and an M1117 troop headed to you, along with some air. But they’re coming from Little Rock, so it’s going to be a bit. Everybody in Texas is tasked out.”

  Hank nodded, even though there was no way Wallace could see him. “We’ve got a possible target set. I need to set up linkup procedures for the reinforcements with the remnant of the local militia. My section probably won’t be here.”

  “Talk me through it.” To Wallace’s credit, at least in Hank’s mind, he didn’t question it. If Hank said he had a target, then he had a target.

  “We’ve got a couple of locations. Apparently, they’re using the town of Manuel Benavides as their jumping off point near the border. And the coordinators are in Camargo. It sounds like a federation of the Vengadores en los Sombres and the Soldados de Aztlan, but that’s not the most interesting part. If our information is correct, the whole thing was brokered by guys in suits, apparently known only as Los Chales. That’s Mexican slang for Chinese.”