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Chapter 5

First platoon huddled around the hood of Lieutenant Quincy’s humvee, staring at a map. Captain Harcrow and First Sergeant Grant stood with them. Nobody spoke as they waited for Colonel Lidell, the 56th Brigade Combat Team commander, to read a note a runner had passed to him. He frowned as he read it, making Nunez wonder what bad news he had just received.

Lidell folded the note, put it in a map case hung over his shoulder and told the runner, “Go back and tell Colonel Burress he’s just going to have to make do until more troops get here. We’ll talk about it later.”

The runner gave a “Roger that, sir,” and headed through the dark toward the mall. Nunez figured Colonel Burress, whoever he was, was bitching about having his units split up just like Nunez’s battalion had been. Nunez’s company received the warning order about the Arriago mission over an hour after Bravo and Charlie companies moved out from the Edinburgh mall. Bravo was sent to reinforce checkpoints around the eight affected towns, Charlie given to a scout squadron that was sending dozens of small teams to ring the towns with observation posts. At least they weren’t getting some bullshit mission like guarding a police station or evacuee center, like other units were. Some mayors and police chiefs in unaffected towns near the border were making ridiculous demands of the Guard, even going so far as to insist soldiers be assigned as their personal bodyguards. The Guard’s commander and the Governor weren’t having any of that, but mobilized units were still being spread thin.

Arriago should have been a full battalion’s mission. Instead, each of Alpha’s three platoons would do the work of a company. Quincy’s and Nunez’s first platoon would secure the convoy, second platoon would push past them and secure the area immediately around it, third platoon would stand by outside the town as the Quick Reaction Force. If something went wrong, Captain Harcrow could find himself running out of troops real fast.

Colonel Lidell put both hands on the humvee’s hood. He looked tired and frustrated. Lidell gave a loud “Good evening, warriors,” and received a chorus of “Good evening sir,” in response. He looked around and gave nods to several men. The younger ones nervously nodded back.

Lidell’s voice didn’t reflect the fatigue Nunez knew he was feeling. They were all feeling it. Since first being mobilized two days earlier, the soldiers had only slept in brief naps of less than an hour at a time, whenever they had a chance. Nunez knew they weren’t at the stage where fatigue would cripple their ability to do their jobs, but another day without sleep and they’d be there.

“Men, you have received the most important mission I’ve ever given any soldiers under my command,” Lidell said. “And you didn’t receive it at random. I chose this battalion for the mission, your battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Ybarra chose this company, and Captain Harcrow chose this platoon.” He smiled, then added, “Well, this was the only company left in the battalion, so it wasn’t hard to decide who to send.”

The gathered soldiers laughed, just a subdued wave of chuckles. Nunez got the feeling that it was an expression of the platoon’s appreciation for Lidell’s willingness to speak the truth.

“Now that I know a little about this platoon, I know we’ve made the right choice,” Lidell said, then pointed toward Quincy. “I know it’s the right choice because this platoon is led by a man who took two rounds charging through a door in Afghanistan after an IED attack and ambush, and was awarded a Bronze Star with a V and a Purple Heart for it. The platoon sergeant,” he said, pointing at Nunez, “picked up Quincy’s SAW, dumped a drum through the doorway and then led two soldiers inside to clear it. And you all know what Sergeant Nunez did during the terrorist attack in Houston two years ago.”

A few soldiers new to the platoon looked at Nunez. They knew the basic story, but no details. Nunez kept his eyes on Lidell. He hated any mention of the attack, and refused to discuss that day with anyone but his wife and a few trusted friends. He still had nightmares about it, still went to regular appointments at the department’s psychological services division to talk about guilt he still felt. A lot of people had been killed while he was trying to figure out what to do. His soldiers had heard about what he had done, but not from him. He never talked about it.

Colonel Lidell pointed at another soldier. “And Sergeant Allenby ignored a serious arm wound during a firefight in Iraq so he could try to stop his squad leader from bleeding out. All your squad leaders have seen combat, almost all your NCO’s have been tested in Iraq or Afghanistan, or both. So have quite a few of the specialists and corporals, and even one of the privates. And those who haven’t been tested under fire aren’t slackers, they’re ready for what you’re about to do. Other units are staging tonight to push into other towns tomorrow morning, but your mission into Arriago has priority. Remember that.”

Lidell looked around again. “Men, it’s up to you to recover an entire company of American soldiers who we think have been lost, and to rescue any survivors. I stress that we just think they’ve been lost, we don’t know for sure. I know a million rumors blew through here last night after the ambush. Forget all that bullshit and just listen to what I’m going to tell you, because I got this straight from the command post. Here’s what happened. . .”

As Lidell ran down the details of the ambush, Sergeant Carillo lit a cigarette. Nunez took in the sight of geared-up soldiers crowded around a map and smelled the butane scent of a lighter mixed with tobacco smoke. He was reminded of other briefings, on other nights before other missions in other, less important places. The gathering of tense soldiers communing with their leaders before battle had become normal in Nunez’s life. The mission and place, however, were anything but.

Lidell continued, “After the gunfire tapered off, a soldier who claimed to be from the company got on the radio and started putting out information. He said the convoy had been hit by a near ambush that killed almost everyone. He saw over twenty enemy fighters dressed in black with black military gear, armed with M4 type weapons, AK’s and one RPG that they didn’t use during the ambush. He said he heard RPK fire, but as far as the command post could tell he didn’t see one. He saw one soldier captured. According to this soldier, the fire initially came from shops on the east side of the street. They also took fire from an elevated position on the west side. He didn’t give any more information after that. He had to get off the radio and we don’t know what happened to him.”

Lidell made eye contact with several of the soldiers again. “If this person’s reporting is true, this was a well-prepared, well-executed ambush, better than anything the Iraqis or Taliban ever did. The enemy prepared a kill zone, blocked the road and took the entire company out in seconds. The soldiers at the checkpoints reported that heavy gunfire lasted less than a minute, then was followed by short bursts or single shots for a few minutes. We don’t know what the gunfire after the initial ambush was for. Men, I hope to god they weren’t executing our wounded, but I don’t know. It’s up to you to find out.

“Now, the soldier who was reporting. He said his name was Corporal D’Angelo. We got someone to the maintenance company’s armory in Cuidad Irigoyen and found out there was in fact a Corporal D’Angelo on the convoy. He’s a former regular Army infantryman who did one tour of Iraq and one of Afghanistan with the 1st Infantry Division. According to the soldiers still at that armory, this guy D’Angelo was pretty sharp. We collected all the information about him that we could, and one of the Joes in my CP wrote up detail sheets on 3×5 cards. I’m told those cards have been issued out, Captain Harcrow?”

“Yes sir,” Harcrow answered. “The key leaders have them.”

“Good. Keep in mind that we don’t know if the person who was on the radio was really D’Angelo. Worst case scenario, one of these fucking guys just looked at a dead soldier’s nametape, got on the radio, used his name and gave us false information. If you find someone claiming to be D’Angelo, be real damn careful about trusting what he tells you. We don’t have a picture of him, just the information you have on your cards.”

Lidell leaned in toward the platoon a bit. “Men, I’m going to tell you something that doesn’t go any further than this parking lot. The truth is, that maintenance company was fucked up. Their commander was a disorganized dipshit, and there are still a bunch of soldiers at their armory who weaseled their way out of that mission. One of them even said he faked an illness to get out of it, because the company commander and First Sergeant were such shitheads. That doesn’t mean we won’t make every effort to recover them. But it does mean we go in there ready for a fight, not blind and stupid like they did.”

Nunez raised his hand. “Sir, how does this convoy ambush affect the big picture? General Landers’ bullshit about only one mag per soldier and nothing larger than a 5.56 went away, but what else has changed? What about the rumors that the President finally committed regular Army units?”

Lidell grimaced and rubbed his face. “Sergeant Nunez, the short answer is that a lot has changed. First, as you probably heard, General Landers has accepted responsibility for the ambush and stepped down from his position. I know some of you think that’s good, but I don’t. General Landers has been a friend of mine for over twenty years. I was one of his platoon leaders back when he had an infantry company, a long time ago. He’s a good leader and he cares about his troops. When he gave the orders restricting ammo load and heavier weapons, he was trying to prevent us from using too much suppressive fire, causing unnecessary collateral damage and killing American citizens. The order to not use armored vehicles was partly because we don’t have many, and partly because he was under pressure from the Pentagon to avoid the perception that we’re militarizing the border. He knew how serious those orders were, and he agonized over them. And he’s agonizing over the consequences. I know you men don’t care about that, you have more important things to worry about than how General Landers is feeling. The important thing for you is that the acting commander of the Guard, General Koba, and Governor Mathieu have both authorized the use of stronger measures they believe necessary to destroy the hostile forces in the affected area. And the word they used was ‘destroy’, not ‘neutralize’, not ‘arrest’, no weak bullshit like that. The mission now is to destroy them.

“And to answer your question about the regular Army rumor, it’s not a rumor. They’re coming. Once the President was informed of the ambush he authorized the use of federal troops. As of four hours ago you’re all under federal orders. This is no longer a criminal action, gentlemen. It’s a war, or something damn close to it. Elements of the 1st Cavalry and 4th Infantry Divisions have received warning orders to head south from Fort Hood, but it’s going to take some time. And remember, most of those divisions are deployed, so they only have about a brigade total strength between the two of them. All of their organic Apache battalions are overseas. Some of their troops will be airlifted in, but then they’re dependent on us for sustained support. The regular Army units can’t just jump in their armored vehicles and drive down here, they have to load them up on heavy equipment transporters and organize a convoy over a five hundred mile route. I’d like to think they had plans in place before they got the order, but the bottom line is that they’re not going to be here for at least a day. Then they have to figure out what units are being committed where, what the orders and rules of engagement are, how to integrate with the Guard units already operating in the affected area, everything. It’s going to be a couple of days before regular Army ground units move into any of the towns. Marine Reserve infantry units from San Antonio, Houston and Austin have also been mobilized, but they’ll take a little time to get here. Our National Guard 19th Special Forces Group soldiers might be tasked to recover any troops captured during the convoy ambush. Apaches from the Guard unit north of Houston will be here in about a day. Tonight we’ll have observation from two Navy Sea Hawk rescue helicopters from Naval Air Station Kingsville. They don’t have guns or thermal sights, but the pilots have night vision and can watch the area for you.

“For now, there will be no fixed wing support. Neither the President, the Governor nor General Koba are willing to authorize air strikes inside American towns. Same thing with the use of explosives. No hand or M203 grenades, no Mark 19 grenade launchers. That could change, depending on what happens when you and other units push into the towns. For the missions about to happen, the largest weapon you’ll have is an M240 machine gun.”

Nunez looked at his watch. Forty minutes after midnight. They were supposed to hit their start point at one. The Sea Hawks Colonel Lidell was talking about wouldn’t be on station until 0130. A unit could have been pushed into Arriago sooner, but the senior leadership wasn’t rushing anything this time. Sending another company pell-mell into Arriago could compound the problem instead of fixing it.

Nunez glanced up from his watch and saw Lidell looking at him. Lidell checked his own watch and said, “Alright men, I know you don’t have much time for your last minute checks, so I’ll cut this off now. I’ll be with your company leadership on the highway behind you, but I want you guys to know I’m not going into Arriago with you. That’s not because I’m not willing to take the risks I’m asking you to take, it’s because I don’t want to be a distraction to you. I don’t want anyone worrying about protecting me when you should be worrying about your platoon, the maintenance company, and any Americans that need help inside Arriago. If things go bad, I’ll go in with the Quick Reaction Force, either as the commander or just as an extra rifle. But don’t think about me while you’re in there. Just do your job, accomplish your mission and make our country proud. I know you can do it, warriors. Do you have any questions for me?”

Nobody spoke. Lidell put his hand on Captain Harcrow’s shoulder and said, “Alright men, that’s it. Get ready to move out, and I’ll be right behind you. Good luck to you.”

Lidell and his entourage walked away. Harcrow gestured to Quincy and Nunez, and they gathered near him as the rest of the platoon went to their vehicles. Harcrow said, “Rodger, Jerry, I know you’ve checked the plan more than enough, but I’ll ask anyway. Is there anything you don’t understand about what we’re supposed to do?”

“No sir,” Quincy said. “Second platoon secures the area, we recover the casualties, third stays on the highway as the quick reaction force. Too easy, sir.”

“Alright, you’ve got it then. Guys, I don’t have to tell you that we’re not about to let ourselves get taken out the way the 336th did. I trust you both to do this right. Good luck.”

Harcrow walked away. Quincy turned to Nunez and said, “I told him we’re ready, but are all the squad leaders really clear on the plan?”

“The squad leaders are as ready as we are. We’ve briefed and back-briefed them. We’re all set to go.”

“Okay, good.” Quincy looked at his watch. “Jerry, I already know the answer to this, but any luck getting more night vision?”

Nunez gave a dejected shrug. “I begged everyone I could and looked for any that weren’t tied down and under guard. There aren’t any extras. We’ve got our two for the whole company, and we’re lucky Captain Harcrow gave both of them to us for this mission. I don’t think we’re going to get more.”

“Yeah, I know. Fuck, I wish we could. It’s amazing how overseas everyone down to the lowest private gets a set, but here at home we got nothing.” He rubbed his chin. “Well, fuck it. The driver of the lead vehicle gets one set and the dismounted element’s point man gets the other.” He looked up at the lights and said, “Uh. . . any word on whether or not the lights are still on in Arriago?”

Nunez’s eyebrows rose. That question hadn’t come up. “Well, shit,” he said. “Nobody thought about that. If the lights are on, I guess our stealthy approach might be a little harder to pull off than we planned.”

“Yeah,” Quincy said, shaking his head. “Whatever, who cares. We’ll deal with it when we get there.” He rubbed his temples and said, “Jerry, if anyone, and I mean anyone, isn’t clear on what they’re supposed to do, tell me. We’ll do a radio rehearsal on the way in.”

“Got it, Rod. I’ll pass the word.” Nunez started to walk toward the rest of the platoon.

“Jerry, hold up.”

Nunez turned back to see Quincy staring at him, eyes intense.

“Don’t let me fuck this up,” he said quietly, so nobody else would hear. “If I’m doing something wrong, tell me. I trusted you in Afghanistan and I trust you now. Watch my back.”

Nunez grabbed Quincy’s hand in a handshake. “Rodger, we all have each other’s backs. Relax a little. You’re doing everything a good infantry platoon leader should do. I trust you with my life. I mean that.”

Quincy swallowed. “Right back at you, brother. Let’s do this shit.”

Nunez hesitated. He was taken back to another early morning, with another platoon in another place, where another lieutenant had shaken his hand and said Let’s do this shit. Nunez had rolled into a Taliban-held valley in Afghanistan with that platoon leader. The disaster they expected that morning failed to materialize. But odds were a different disaster was out there, hiding on a dark street in Arriago, waiting to pounce.

Nunez gave Quincy’s hand a squeeze. “Let’s do this shit, Rodger.”

Quincy smiled, let go of Nunez’s hand and moved off toward his vehicle. Nunez walked to his humvee and climbed in. His soldiers were already there, passing a can of Copenhagen back and forth. Nunez liked the smell of chewing tobacco but couldn’t imagine sticking any of that crap into his mouth.

Engines started up and down the convoy. Nunez told his driver, Private First Class Conway, to crank their humvee. Conway flipped the start switch to standby, waited for the “wait” light to go out, then flipped the switch further right and let it go. The diesel engine rumbled to life.

Within two minutes the platoon was mounted in their vehicles with engines running. Radio and weapons checks had already been completed, drivers had inspected and re-inspected the fluid levels of their vehicles, personal gear tested to ensure it wouldn’t generate noise, radio frequencies set and communications checks completed. The platoon was ready.

Quincy got back on the radio. “Red 4 this is Red 1, check with 6 and see if everyone’s ready to move.”

Nunez answered, “1 this is 4, roger.” He hung the platoon radio handset back on its mount and grabbed the handset for the company net. “Rapido 6 this is Red 4.”

“Red 4 this is Rapido 6.”

“6, Red platoon is ready to go, request Start Point.”

“Red 4, standby one.”

A few seconds passed. Nunez turned back to see Sergeant Corley, the platoon’s medic, check his aid bag for what had to be the tenth time that night. Corley, twenty-eight years old, was tall, thin, pasty white and professional enough to hide the fear Nunez knew he felt. Three deployments to Iraq as a combat medic had taught him a lot. He had tourniquets on the outside of the bag ready to go, needles and tubing duct-taped to IV bags inside. His red helmet light was on so he could look into his bag. He closed the bag, turned his light off and gave Nunez two thumbs up. He was ready.

“Red 4 this is Rapido 6, all Rapido elements are ready to roll. Start your move.”

Nunez acknowledged and switched back to the platoon net. “Red 1 this is Red 4, Rapido is ready.”

“Roger,” Quincy said. “Red platoon this is Red 1, follow me.”

From his position in the convoy, three vehicles from the rear, Nunez saw Quincy’s humvee at the front move out. The platoon’s eight vehicles crept from their spots and followed in line as their platoon leader weaved through the parking lot and onto the highway. Nunez keyed the company radio.

“Rapido 6 this is Red 4, SP time 0058. How copy, over.”

“Red 4 this is Rapido 6, I copy your SP and I’m behind you. Godspeed.”

Dozens of soldiers from other units stood at the parking lot’s exit, watching Nunez’s platoon roll past. Nunez looked one of them in the eye. A tall and heavily muscled buck sergeant, with the demeanor and gear of an infantryman. The sergeant stared hard at Nunez and lifted his M4 over his head, a sign of one soldier’s respect for another.

Other soldiers joined him. The last thing Nunez saw as they left the parking lot was a cluster of soldiers raising M4 carbines and Squad Automatic Weapons in the air as a silent salute.

The enemy had stopped shooting into the truck bed, but D’Angelo knew any movement could draw more fire. He stayed still, hoping whoever had ambushed them wouldn’t advance on the convoy and shoot into the vehicles. If the ambushers’ plan was to hit them and leave, D’Angelo could stay where he was, get on the radio and wait for help. If the ambushers went into the vehicles, he was fucked.     

D’Angelo knew what was going to happen as soon as that fucking moron Olivares talked on the radio about the burning vehicle blocking their path. A blind and deaf tribesman from the Amazon rain forest could have seen it. DeLeon should have ordered Olivares to punch it and get past the spot they should have recognized as an ambush kill zone. But Olivares had the tactical awareness of an Alzheimer’s patient and DeLeon the leadership ability of a preteen girl. Those flaming dipshits hadn’t done anything but sit still and let the company get butchered.

The entire mission had been fucked from the start. The company had less than seventy soldiers to begin with, and when DeLeon told them they had the recon into Arriago a dozen suddenly developed severe medical issues. The remaining soldiers in the company had gone nuts trying to get the company’s piece of shit vehicles and rusty old M16 rifles ready.    

D’Angelo had been in the unit eight months, and he still couldn’t believe how shitty their vehicles were. He and the other mechanics kept them running well, but they had no turrets, no gun shields, no bulletproof glass, no armored doors, nothing. A blind insurgent with a .22 rifle could put a round right through them. In Iraq that type of vehicle hadn’t been allowed off the bases. And their weapons were almost worse. Ancient, poorly maintained M16A2 rifles with no optics that rattled like tin cans full of rocks when you shook them. They were practically muskets. The Army might as well issue ramrods and powder horns with them.

The order to carry only one magazine was bullshit. So was the order to leave the Squad Automatic Weapons. D’Angelo knew he couldn’t sneak a SAW out of the armory, but he could sure as hell steal enough ammo to fill a few more magazines. A combat load was seven mags and D’Angelo had rolled into Arriago with only four, but he had four times the amount of ammo as everyone else.

When they mounted up in the trucks to move out, Top Olivares’ brown-nosing little buddy Lerma reminded everyone they couldn’t insert magazines into their rifles without permission. D’Angelo hadn’t said a word. He looked Lerma in the eye, slapped a magazine into his rifle and loaded a round into the chamber. Lerma hadn’t even tried to assert any of his supposed authority. He just sort of folded up, got into the front passenger seat and didn’t look at D’Angelo anymore.

D’Angelo knew the company leadership was going to fuck this up. Their plan for the mission would work great, as long as nothing went wrong. Olivares assumed they’d make it to the school with no problems, Lieutenant DeLeon didn’t argue. Nobody made contingency plans. Nobody went over actions on contact. Nobody rehearsed what to do in case of an ambush, or if a vehicle was disabled. There was no casualty evacuation plan. D’Angelo got yelled at by Olivares every time he brought up the possibility of a firefight.  

When they climbed into the vehicles D’Angelo asked the soldiers in his truck for a mission brief-back. He wasn’t surprised to learn that some of them didn’t even know where in Arriago they were supposed to go, or what the communication plan was. When D’Angelo asked Lerma for the company and command post call signs, Lerma gave him a blank look and stammered in Spanish that he hadn’t asked. Lerma probably hadn’t expected him to understand, but D’Angelo had grown up in Cuidad Irigoyen, married a Mexican girl he met in high school and spoke fluent Spanish.

D’Angelo wrote down the radio frequency and stayed near the cab of the truck so he could listen to the radio. He figured out their company was Wrench and the command post was Thunderbolt. He knew he had better remember their call signs, because when the shit hit the fan Lerma sure as hell wouldn’t know what to say on the radio.

All the way into town D’Angelo talked the guys in the back of the truck through possible scenarios. He set up a casualty evacuation team, made sure everyone knew where everyone else’s first aid gear was, did everything he could to prepare his vehicle for combat. He positioned himself at the front of the truck bed, at the space between the bed and cab, where he could look out the windshield and listen to the radio. He made the soldiers lock and load their rifles. His planning wasn’t perfect, but he figured he had done all he could to prepare for an ambush. It almost worked.

When the ambush started, their truck and the one in front of it hadn’t been hit. All the fire came from the shop windows up ahead, on the left side of the road. D’Angelo saw windows explode and rounds tear through vehicles in front of them. The convoy didn’t move at all when the gunfire started, there was no attempt to push through the kill zone.

His truck’s driver, an eighteen year old just-out-of-basic-training private named Kallinen, shouted to Lerma in terror, “What do we do?” Lerma didn’t say shit to Kallinen, didn’t say anything on the radio, nothing.

“God damn it Lerma, tell them to push through!” D’Angelo screamed. “Do something!”

Lerma froze. D’Angelo shouted at his men to stay low and cover 360 degrees, and made sure the rear guard was in place. In front of them, gunners made short but valiant last stands before being shot to pieces. M16 rifles jutting from windows recoiled from three round bursts as soldiers fought back. They and their one magazine of ammunition didn’t last long. The volume of fire from the convoy died, humvee doors opened and soldiers struggled out. D’Angelo watched most of them pour dead onto the street.

D’Angelo’s friend Specialist Vicente Marroquin was the gunner on the humvee in front of D’Angelo’s truck. Marroquin wasn’t fired on at first. He milled around in confusion, yelled down into his humvee and then looked back to D’Angelo for guidance. They locked eyes through the windshield, and D’Angelo screamed, “Shoot, Vicente! Shoot!”

Marroquin’s face tensed, he nodded to D’Angelo. Then he turned and opened fired into the shop windows ahead. Disciplined, aimed shots, one every two seconds.

D’Angelo watched a stream of bullets smash through the humvee’s windshield. A round punched through Marroquin’s abdomen, just under his armor plate. Marroquin screamed, clutched his stomach and wavered like he was about to fall. Then he put both hands back on his weapon and emptied the rest of the magazine. More rounds hit the humvee, Marroquin’s head snapped back and he dropped into his vehicle.

D’Angelo screamed at Kallinen, “Back up, god damn it! Back the fuck up!” When Kallinen threw the truck into reverse D’Angelo turned and yelled, “Get ready to dismount!”

That pulled Lerma out of his trance. He looked back and yelled, “Top said you’re not allowed to get out!”

D’Angelo was about to tell Lerma to shut the fuck up when the rounds hit, from a roof on the right side of the street. The canvas sides on the truck bed were rolled up, the gunner on the roof had a perfect view into the truck and a perfect downward shot. D’Angelo recognized the sound of the RPK machine gun as the soldiers behind him shrieked and returned fire. He turned to see one man trying to hold the blood inside his throat and others rising to their feet, climbing over each other to get away.

“Get the fuck down!” he screamed. “Get below the walls!”

Bullets knocked the soldiers around the bed of the truck like bowling pins. The rear guard tried to go over the tailgate and got hung up on the nylon “troop strap” stretched sideways above it. D’Angelo saw his head jerk from a round’s impact before he dropped out of sight. D’Angelo rolled to the metal wall around the bed, threw his muzzle over it and laid down a magazine on burst. The truck started to back up. Lerma’s window exploded. D’Angelo jerked his head up to see Lerma flop forward until his helmet hit the dash.

Kallinen screamed, “Oh God! Oh fuck!” and spun the wheel. D’Angelo changed magazines as bullets punched through the front right door and windshield. Kallinen shrieked like his nuts were on fire. 

D’Angelo dumped a second mag, pulled his rifle back into the truck bed to reload and slid up to the cab. Another burst of RPK fire smashed into the truck bed. D’Angelo heard rounds impact the bodies around him. The radio squawked a frenzied message, DeLeon begging Olivares for orders.

The command post cut in, a voice yelling, “Wrench this is Thunderbolt, give me a god damn situation report! What’s going on?”

The truck jerked to a stop. D’Angelo flattened his body on the floor of the truck bed, found a dead torso with his foot and used it to push himself until his head stuck into the truck’s cab. He was about to slide all the way into the cab when the RPK fire from across the street stopped, and the gunfire from the left side of the street dropped to almost nothing. The ambush had lasted all of about a minute.

He looked up. Lerma was still folded over with the top of his helmet resting against the dash. He didn’t look like he was breathing, and D’Angelo didn’t have time to check. He turned left to talk to Kallinen.

Kallinen slumped in the seat with his back resting against the driver’s door. His eyes were open, and he cradled what looked like a small pile of grey sausage in his lap. The area around his midsection was soaked with dark red blood. D’Angelo wasn’t sure if he was alive at first, until he saw Kallinen blink and his hands shake.

D’Angelo almost said, “Oh shit,” but stopped himself. He looked at the radio in the center console and saw that the handset was hooked on the dash on Kallinen’s side. It should have been on Lerma’s, but that fat loser had probably thought he couldn’t talk on it the right way.

“Kallinen,” D’Angelo said. Kallinen blinked again, and looked at D’Angelo. “Hey bro, you’re good, alright? You hear me?”

Kallinen swallowed and gave a weak nod. He had a look of pure, out of control fear on his face. D’Angelo couldn’t reach the handset and couldn’t climb into the cab without drawing fire. He’d need Kallinen’s help.

He said, “Hey Kallinen, I need you to do something for me. I need you to grab that handset and give it to me. But keep low and quiet, don’t move a lot, okay?”

Kallinen barely moved his head. His jaw shivered. He rasped, “I’m gonna die.”

D’Angelo looked down the length of the convoy. All the gunners were down, dead soldiers lay scattered along the length of the convoy. One torn and bloody driver had dropped out of his open driver’s door. The firing had slowed to a random shot every now and then. Loud voices conversed in Spanish somewhere ahead. They didn’t sound panicked, so they weren’t from his company. The voices weren’t leaving.

D’Angelo’s heart rate skyrocketed. He wasn’t going to be able to sit tight and wait for help. If the enemy had planned on a hit-and-run ambush, it didn’t make sense for them to hang around and have a calm conversation.

He took a deep breath to steady himself. He still had to get on the radio and tell the command post about the ambush.

“Kallinen, you’re not going to die. Chill out, I’ll take care of you. Now give me the god damn handset.”

Kallinen didn’t move. He looked at D’Angelo with tears running down his cheeks.

“Lean forward a little bit, reach out with your right hand and grab the handset,” D’Angelo urged. “Hurry up, man.”

Kallinen let go of the pile of intestines but barely reached his knee before his arm fell. Toward the front of the convoy a shrill scream rang out, followed by a short, sharp burst of fire. Someone laughed, and a gruff voice called out, “These idiots are American soldiers? Why the fuck were we so scared of them?”

“Kal, grab the fucking handset and give it to me. Now.”

Kallinen mumbled, “I can’t.”

“Kal, If you don’t give me the handset, I can’t call you a fucking medevac. Gimme the handset.”

Kallinen’s eyes widened. He struggled to force himself a little higher in the seat, then grimaced in pain as he reached to the dash. His arm shook like he had Parkinson’s. He made an “uuhhhnn” noise as he forced his arm the last couple of inches. D’Angelo flattened himself against the floor, hoping the movement inside the cab wouldn’t draw more fire. It didn’t.

Kallinen got his bloody fingers around the handset and just managed to lift it off the green nylon cord it was hooked onto. He collapsed back into the driver’s seat, then held his shaking right arm toward D’Angelo.

D’Angelo grabbed the handset. “Thanks, Kal. Lay back and rest, alright? We’re gonna be okay. Just stay quiet and don’t move, okay?”

Kallinen nodded, laid his hand gently back onto his intestines and closed his eyes. D’Angelo put the handset to his ear and felt the earpiece slip around from the blood on it. He keyed the mike and said, “Thunderbolt, this is Wrench.”

Thunderbolt shot back a reply. “Wrench this is Thunderbolt, what the fuck is going on? Give me a sitrep!”

“Thunderbolt this is Wrench, we got ambushed and wiped out. We need some reinforcements, like now. How fast can you get someone to us? Over.”

The response was delayed this time. “Wrench, we’re working that issue. What do you mean, you got wiped out? What happened? Over.”

“Fuck,” D’Angelo muttered. “We were hit in a near ambush. The enemy blocked the road in front of us with a burning vehicle and when we stopped they opened up from concealed positions in the stores on our left. They also had at least one automatic weapon in an elevated position on the right. All our vehicles are stopped and I think almost everyone’s dead. How copy, over.”

Seven vehicles ahead, two men in black fatigues with black masks and gear sauntered into view on the right side of the convoy. They didn’t seem the least bit concerned about any danger. They kicked a few corpses in the head, then opened the door of a humvee. One of them stuck the muzzle of his AK into the doorway and jabbed something with it. Then they both reached in, braced themselves against the vehicle and yanked the body of the state trooper onto the street. The man’s brown uniform was ripped and stained red.

One of the men reached to the trooper’s belt and took his duty radio. The men moved on to the next vehicle. Three other men in black appeared behind them, grabbing rifles from dead soldiers.

D’Angelo’s breath caught in his throat. Adrenaline spiked his veins. There was no question now, they were coming for him.

“Wrench, did you see any of the enemy? Can you give a description? Over.”

“Thunderbolt, I see five of them now. Wearing all black BDU uniforms, black masks, black chest rigs and carrying AKs and M4 type weapons. Over.”

There was another delay from Thunderbolt. Up ahead, someone yelled in Spanish, “Hey! One of these assholes is talking on the radio!”   

The five enemy D’Angelo could see rushed to yank humvee doors open and look inside. He blurted “Oh fuck!” and jerked his head down. He waited a moment, then eased his head up until he could barely see over the dash. More than a dozen men in black were visible now, on both sides of the convoy. They were pulling all the bodies out onto the street.

“Wrench, I need more information. Are you Wrench 6? Who are you? Over.”

“Thunderbolt, I’m not 6. I’m not one of the company leaders, I’m just a mechanic. Over.”

“What’s your name, Wrench?”

D’Angelo didn’t want to say his name over the radio. Instead, he gave the generic response, “Echo 4 Delta.” Echo 4 for his rank, E-4, and Delta for the first letter of his last name.

“Wrench, give me your name in the clear. Over.”

“God damn it,” D’Angelo mumbled. He heard a wheeze and turned to see Kallinen staring at him, blue eyes full of fear. He keyed the radio and said, “Corporal D’Angelo.”

“The guy talking on the radio is named D’Angelo!” a voice announced. D’Angelo thought, Shit.    

“D’Angelo, are you secure right now? Are you safe?”

D’Angelo spat back, “No I’m not fucking safe right now, Thunderbolt! I just told you I’m looking at the enemy. And they’re listening to this radio traffic.”

“What’s your location?”

Fuck you, D’Angelo thought. There’s no way in hell I’m going to put my location over the radio with the enemy listening. “I’m in the area of the ambush, Thunderbolt. That’s all I can say.”

Shop doors flew open on the left side of the street. Men in black fatigues walked out, joined by others stepping through broken windows. Over twenty men milled around the convoy, peered into vehicles and yanked dead soldiers onto the street.

D’Angelo watched one soldier’s head bounce off the concrete. The soldier cried out in pain. The men who pulled him out jerked back in surprise, then one of them grabbed the soldier’s rifle away. They dug through the soldier’s gear and pockets, pulled his helmet off and forced him to his feet. One yelled in Spanish, “Jefe! We found a live one!”    

Jefe. Boss. D’Angelo wondered, Who the fuck is in charge of these assholes? “Thunderbolt this is Wrench, they just took one of our guys prisoner. Do you copy?”     

“Thunderbolt copies! Do you know who it is? What are they doing with him?”

The prisoner’s back was to D’Angelo, he couldn’t see the man’s face. A masked man jabbed his AK into the soldier’s stomach and yelled something D’Angelo didn’t understand. The soldier raised his hands. Then another man with a short, paratrooper-style AK hanging on his chest walked around the front of the humvee. This man had an entourage of four other men in black. He said something to the soldier, who shook his head furiously. Then the soldier tore open his body armor and let it slip off his shoulders. The man with the short AK looked at the man’s chest, then turned to his entourage and shook his head. He turned back to the soldier and rubbed his hair, like he was a cherished son. The soldier recoiled in terror. The man took him by the arm and led him between the vehicles, out of D’Angelo’s sight. His entourage followed. D’Angelo knew he had just seen their jefe.    

Aw, fuck, D’Angelo thought. The boss checked his fucking nametape. They’re looking for me.     

“Thunderbolt this is Wrench, I don’t know who it was. They took his weapon and walked him away somewhere. Over.”

“Roger. Wrench, can you stay where you are and keep reporting?”

“He’s still talking on the radio,” a voice yelled. “He’s fucking watching us!”

The masked men swarmed around the vehicles, moving faster down the line toward D’Angelo’s truck. As he watched, three men popped all the doors of the humvee two vehicles ahead and pulled bodies out. He saw them tear open body armor to read name tapes.

“Thunderbolt, I don’t think so. I don’t have a lot of time. I see over twenty of them now, all armed with AK’s and M4 type weapons. Black fatigues with no markings. One of them fired an RPK during the ambush, I recognized the sound. They’re checking all the vehicles in the convoy.”

As soon as he let go of the transmit key, he saw something he hadn’t expected. A man stepped into view with a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher slung over his shoulder. His partner walked behind him, carrying a vinyl pack designed to carry three RPG rounds.

“Thunderbolt, one of these guys is carrying an RPG. They didn’t use it during the ambush. You copy?”

“Thunderbolt copies. Listen to me, Wrench. Don’t hang around if it’s not safe. You do whatever you have to to stay alive. You copy? Do anything you think you have to. We’re behind you and we’ll get you as soon as we can.”

D’Angelo’s exhaled and closed his eyes. They were telling him goodbye. He was on his own. He keyed up and said, “Roger, Thunderbolt, see you later. Out,” and dropped the handset.

He considered his options: there were only three, and two were suicide. He could get out and run, knowing he’d be chased down and shot in the back. He could fight back and kill a few of them before being killed. Or play dead and hope they didn’t check him too closely, or read his name tape. He opened his eyes to see Kallinen still staring at him with wide eyes. He said, “Kallinen, when they come to you, don’t say anything about me. Just surrender, okay?”

Kallinen started mumbling something. As D’Angelo rolled onto his back and slid into the truck bed he recognized a few of Kallinen’s words. “. . . thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God. . . ” D’Angelo felt with his feet for a gap, then forced his lower legs under an anonymous corpse’s legs. The truck bed was slick with what felt like warm oil, but D’Angelo knew what it was.

He forced his rifle under a jumble of limbs until it pointed at the tailgate. Then he rolled halfway left, listening for the men to reach his truck. Their voices were still a little ways off. He reached to the sleeve of the dead soldier beside him, pulled as hard as he could. He hoped to God that the RPK gunner wasn’t still watching, there was no way in hell that he wouldn’t spot the movement.

Nobody fired into the truck. The voices outside came closer. Kallinen still rasped a prayer, the same prayer, from the cab. D’Angelo got the body of the soldier closer and lifted one shoulder. Jesus, the guy was heavy. He got the soldier’s shoulder just high enough that he could jiggle his way underneath, one tiny bounce at a time.

The truck’s passenger door opened. D’Angelo froze. Someone outside laughed and said, “Shit, I thought you had to be in shape to be in the American Army. Look how fat this bastard is.”    

He heard a scraping noise, then a wet thud as something heavy hit the ground. A voice giggled, “Hey asshole, watch out. You hit my foot.”    

D’Angelo let go of the dead soldier’s shoulder and as slow as he could, laid his own left arm across his face. He turned his head a little, enough so that he didn’t look like he was watching the tailgate but not so far that he couldn’t see it. He quietly flipped the safety off his rifle. Outside, someone exclaimed, “Hey look, the driver’s alive, and there’s a fucking radio in here! I bet that’s the cocksucker who was talking about us.”    

Kallinen kept repeating a Hail Mary. Orders were yelled outside, and the driver’s door opened. Kallinen shrieked. D’Angelo grimaced despite his efforts to keep every muscle still. Kallinen’s back had been resting on the driver’s door, and D’Angelo knew he had fallen backward when the door opened. The pain in his torn abdomen must have been excruciating.

D’Angelo forced the thought of Kallinen’s agony out of his mind, let his lips part, left his eyes halfway open and tried to slow his breathing so the movement of his chest would be invisible under his body armor. He hoped he had a corpse’s expression on his face.

Spanish shouts mixed with Kallinen’s screams. Someone yelled in accented English, “Whas jour fucking name, boy?”

Kallinen didn’t answer. D’Angelo’s heart tried to smash a hole in his chest. His midsection heated, and he realized he had just pissed himself. It didn’t matter, the bodies in the back had pissed themselves too. Nobody would notice.

A stern voice outside said in Spanish, “Check his name tag.”

Oh, fuck, D’Angelo thought. Kal, let them think you’re me. If you don’t, I’m done. He cursed himself for his selfishness, but it was true. He hoped they would think Kallinen was him.     

Kallinen had new body armor, the kind that had a complicated fastening system and went on over your head instead of closing in front like the old vest D’Angelo was wearing. He tried to remember if Kallinen had a name tape on his body armor. He didn’t think anyone in the company had one. As far as he could remember, name tapes were only on their uniform tops.

Kallinen screamed, “No, stop! That hurts!”

Someone yelled back, “Chut thee fuck up, pendejo! How you open thees fucking thing?”

Another voice growled, “Who was talking on the radio, boy?”

D’Angelo closed his eyes. Kallinen, please, don’t tell them about me.    

“It was. . . it. . . I was! I’m sorry!”     

D’Angelo opened his eyes again. I owe you, Kallinen. For as long as I live.     

In his peripheral vision, D’Angelo saw the muzzle of an AK poke over the wall of the truck bed. He nearly shit himself, but caught it in time. Another AK joined it. Two men had climbed onto the side of the truck and were looking into the bed. One of the men said, “One of them is still moaning. That one, over there.”

D’Angelo’s heart rate shot way up again. He checked himself. Oh God. Am I moaning? Then he heard it, the pathetic noise one of the soldiers in the back had been making since the truck bed was raked by machine gun fire. With all the other crap going on, he’d stopped hearing it. The other soldier, who’d been making the hiccup noise, was silent.     

“I can’t figure out how to open his armor, Jefe. And he’s a fucking mess, his guts are hanging out. I don’t want to get that shit all over my hands. He’s the only white guy here, and he said he was talking on the radio.”    

“Does he have a wallet?”    

Seconds of silence, then another scream from Kallinen. “No wallet, Jefe.”    

“Fuck it. It’s him. Get rid of him, he’s too fucked up to keep. We have two others anyway.”    

“You don’t want any others?”    

“No. No need for more. How were our losses?”   

“Not bad, Jefe. A couple of these Americans got lucky. Two dead, one other might die from wounds. They were just throwaways, nobody important.”    

Outside, Kallinen screamed, “No! Please, no!”

A voice replied in Spanish, “Calm yourself, son. It’s alright.”    

Two shots rang out. They sounded to D’Angelo like pistol shots. Kallinen didn’t scream again. D’Angelo felt a wave of guilt wash over him, with an even guiltier touch of relief. They had killed Kallinen, D’Angelo might be safe now.

One of the AK’s pointing into the truck fired once, two feet from D’Angelo’s head. His eyes slammed shut for a moment. He could have sworn his body jerked from the sudden shock of fear. The moaning from the wounded soldier stopped. D’Angelo swallowed and waited for another round to explode from the AK. Another round, for him.

Go away, God damn it, D’Angelo prayed. You think you just killed the guy you were looking for, get the fuck out of here.     

A voice ordered, “Take their rifles and let’s go.”     

The rifles pointing into the truck bed withdrew. D’Angelo swallowed again and prayed, Please, God, don’t let them come in here.     

Metal scraped metal, chains rattled, and the truck tailgate fell with a clang. A masked man hoisted himself with a groan and stepped into the bed. Heads appeared behind him, looking into the truck. D’Angelo had a sudden thought, that maybe he should have followed Top Olivares’ orders to wear the same gear as everyone else. D’Angelo’s gear was unique and better than everyone else’s. If one of these guys decided he wanted it, D’Angelo was a dead man.

The man inside the truck picked up an M16 and handed it back. One of the men at the tailgate pulled his mask off. Through slitted eyes, D’Angelo saw the face in the sunlight. A dark, bearded man, maybe forty years old. He took the M16 and looked it over, then said, “What a piece of shit. I don’t know why they want us to send these back, they won’t sell for much in Mexico.”  

“I don’t know either, Jefe.”    

The man in the truck grabbed another two rifles and passed them to waiting hands. The unmasked man smiled and said, “Boys, this is a good day’s work. I think God will smile on us for today.”     

“Jefe, do you think this was a good idea?” one of the entourage asked. “I understand why we killed the police, but killing American soldiers? Don’t you think that will bring more attention to the border, instead of making it easier for us to move our stuff across?”

“Miguel, I hear what you’re saying,” a paternal voice answered. “Maybe it will make it harder for our business, I don’t know. But you have to trust those who planned this operation, they thought about everything. It will work out for us. If God wills it.”    

Voices murmured agreement. The man in the back passed another rifle back. He stepped over another body onto D’Angelo’s ankle. D’Angelo stifled a groan. The man grabbed D’Angelo’s rifle by the front sight and started working to free it from under another soldier’s hip.

This was it. D’Angelo had to decide, right now, what to do. He could let the man free his rifle and then surprise him. Blast him in the face with a burst, then take out that asshole in charge and maybe a couple of others before he was shot down. Or he could keep playing dead, let the man take his rifle, and hope the man didn’t realize he was alive. Every soldier he knew would want him to shoot it out, kill as many enemy as possible and die a hero’s death. On the other hand, his wife, daughter and parents would want him to play dead, to reach for that one faint hope of survival.

D’Angelo didn’t know what to do. The faces of his wife and daughter floated across his mind. He remembered his Vietnam veteran grandfather’s advice, before his first deployment. Never let yourself be captured, no matter what. Take death over capture if it comes to that. And his wife’s words, on that same day. Don’t be a hero. Do whatever you have to so that you come home to me.  

He wished God would give him a sign, some kind of direction. He swallowed again. His hand tensed on the pistol grip of the rifle.

The man in the bed of the truck freed the front of the rifle and lifted it. D’Angelo moved his eyes, looked into the man’s face. The man was looking down at the rifle, not at him.

D’Angelo took his decision, said a silent prayer, and made his move.  

NOTE ADDED 4/9/13: I made some changes based on very good critiques from several readers. Please check out the revisions and let me know what you think.
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“Well, 9? You see anything yet?” Lieutenant DeLeon asked over the radio.

First Sergeant Olivares answered, “Nothing yet, 6. A few more bodies, no activity at all.”

“Roger. Keep me updated.”

Olivares tried to relax a little. Supposedly every time the police went south of the checkpoint they were shot at. But nobody shot at Olivares’ convoy. That had to mean the enemy was gone, which was what Olivares expected anyway. Shooting cops in some podunk town was one thing, taking on the U.S. Army was something else. Olivares didn’t believe a bunch of criminals, even cartel criminals, were stupid enough to try it.

Olivares looked around from his humvee at the front of the convoy as the outskirts of Arriago slid by. Run-down wooden shacks and overgrown junk-filled yards lined the highway. Here and there an “antique shop”, which was more like a shed full of old worthless crap, stood out from the other structures. If not for the handful of bodies and random burned cars, nothing would have been out of place.

The corpses, looking like piles of stained rags instead of men, women and children, were almost all face-down in the road. One fat old woman had her knees bent under her gigantic stomach. Olivares saw her hands still clasped behind what remained of her head. He didn’t have to work with CSI South Texas to know she had been executed, shot in the back of the head from behind. Or that there would be more just like her less than a mile ahead, inside the city limits where smoke from several fires rose. The bodies had been stewing in the Rio Grande Valley summer heat for two days. The stench here, outside of town, wasn’t too bad. He expected it to be much worse by the time they reached the Arriago high school.

When his company first received the order for this mission, he had been pissed to discover that none of his soldiers were from Arriago. It would have been good to have at least one soldier who knew the town to act as a guide. Now, after first spending half an hour picking up the punctured bodies of six Harper county deputies outside the town, then driving past the corpses of murdered town residents, he was glad nobody from Arriago was on the mission. Recovering the dead deputies had given his soldiers a bad case of the willies already. The last thing he needed was one of his troops going crazy after seeing his family and friends decomposing on the highway.

The convoy of ten vehicles, a mix of soft-skinned humvees and an old five-ton truck, crept past the fat, dead woman. It was the last one Olivares knew for sure was a body. The other clumps lying in the road ahead were too far away to identify.

Olivares looked in the side mirror as the last truck weaved around the body. The convoy’s spacing looked right, his soldiers had rifles pointing left and right from their windows. The last truck commander had just comfirmed one of his troops had a rifle over the tailgate, covering their six. The company was maintaining 360 degree security, just like Olivares told them to.

He turned forward again, looking for the city limit sign. The structures along the highway were packed a little closer now, they couldn’t be far. Olivares scanned the road ahead through binoculars. Heavy brush lined the highway. He still couldn’t make out the city limit sign, but he could see what looked like downtown Arriago, such as it was. Olivares had grown up in Cuidad Irigoyen, just over forty miles away, but hadn’t been to Arriago since elementary school. He had thought the town was a dump then, and it hadn’t improved any in over thirty years. Even without the burned out cars, burning structures and rotting corpses on the street, the place was a shithole.

Olivares scanned left, came back the other way and spotted the city limit sign in his binoculars. It was just a few hundred meters away, nearly hidden behind a faded sign advertising a restaurant that had probably been closed for years. He pulled the humvee’s radio handset off the sun visor and keyed up.

“Wrench 6 this is Wrench 9, the city limits are just ahead. I still don’t see any activity. We’re continuing on.”

Lieutenant DeLeon answered, “Roger. Hey 9, um, before we get into town, you sure you don’t want to dismount some guys to walk alongside the trucks? Over.”

Olivares answered, “Negative, 6. We keep everyone in the trucks, just like we said before. Out.”

Without waiting for a response, he stuck the handset back onto the visor. Even though DeLeon was officially in charge, Olivares wasn’t interested in what that weak, inexperienced shithead had to say. Olivares had the experience, so he was running the company.

When they had received the mission order, he told the lieutenant that the company should mount up in their vehicles and stay together the whole way into Arriago. Olivares had been on at least six convoys in Iraq, between Tallil and Kuwait, and that was how they had done it. He didn’t see any reason to jack with success. But when they briefed the company, one of their soldiers, a former infantryman named D’Angelo, almost blew a gasket.

D’Angelo had been discharged from the regular Army, come back home to Irigoyen and checked into the Guard unit eight months earlier. He hadn’t seemed like a bad soldier at first, and had breezed through the National Guard mechanic’s course. But after a few months of drills he started running his mouth nonstop. His scorn for Olivares’ and DeLeon’s decisions, and his loud disgust at the company’s tactical training, bordered on insubordination.

Olivares and DeLeon conducted training the right way; nothing that might be dangerous, no extra risks taken, no reason to do more than the bare minimum. Olivares ignored the medical training requirements because they were a waste of time. If someone was really wounded, a medic would be there to treat them. At the range they got everyone qualified, whether they could actually shoot or not. Soldiers who were blind and helpless with a rifle got a little extra help with a pencil on their qualification records. Rifle qualification was just a “check the block” exercise anyway. There was no reason to waste time with all that advanced tactical training bullshit the Army wanted Guard units to do now. The bottom line was that units only needed to qualify once a year. Anything more was extra, unnecessary effort. And a maintenance company didn’t need it anyway.

When D’Angelo had gone to the range with them the first time, he showed up with personalized gear, different from everyone else. Olivares had almost lost it. The company’s standing order was for every soldier to set their gear up exactly the same way. Everyone knew the military had to have uniformity at all times. The fact that D’Angelo was good with his gear didn’t make any difference. All that mattered to Olivares was unquestioning obedience.

During the operations order brief, when Olivares said every soldier in the company would be mounted in the vehicles, D’Angelo had to open his big mouth. He insisted, in front of the whole company, that keeping everyone in the vehicles was the wrong thing to do. According to him, soldiers needed to walk alongside the convoy to give the company more flexibility and better observation. The vehicles were the biggest targets and as many troops as possible needed to be out of them if they got hit.

Lieutenant DeLeon, weak-willed as always, stumbled over a few words of halting agreement. Olivares told D’Angelo to shut the fuck up and follow orders. Then he told D’Angelo to ride in the back of the last vehicle, since he was so scared. D’Angelo had answered, “Cool, thanks Top. That’ll be the best place to be when we get ambushed.”

Olivares had wanted to hit him. Fucking D’Angelo. A twenty-four year old Italian who grew up in a Mexican town, spoke Spanish and looked Mexican enough to never get picked on about his background. The one guy in the company who was in shape and always carried himself like a soldier, who should have been the shining example of someone who followed Olivares’ every order without question. He could have been an asset to the company. But he wasn’t, because of his fucking attitude. He thought he knew everything about combat, just because he had been an infantryman during one tour of Iraq and one of Afghanistan. Olivares didn’t care what D’Angelo knew, he wasn’t going to listen to anything he said.

A few hundred yards ahead of the lead humvee, Olivares was able to make out two of the burning structures. One looked like a gas station, the other a falling apart dump, maybe an old store, on the right side of the road. Dark plumes rose into the sky above Arriago, mixed with smoke from other fires Olivares couldn’t see. The narrow three-lane road through downtown was obscured with it, but Olivares thought it was far short of a smokescreen, if that had been the intent. Most of the fires were on the right side, so if the convoy stayed left it should get through fine.

He looked at his map again. Preston street was just past city hall. They had to turn left there and then make the second right to get to the high school. If they reached the school, they would circle their vehicles in the parking lot, sit tight and wait for additional orders. If they took fire, even one round, they were to turn around and drive back out of the town. Of course D’Angelo had made some remark about the order being chickenshit, but Olivares ignored him. As far as Olivares was concerned, if D’Angelo wanted to get shot that badly he could walk into Arriago by himself.

Olivares had stuck D’Angelo in the back of the last truck, under the command of Sergeant Lerma, a man he trusted. Lerma was an old-school Guardsman, from the days when soldiers did nothing at drill except get drunk. He was forty-seven, fat, lazy, slow, and wouldn’t even take a dump without Olivares’ direct order. So when Olivares told Lerma to keep D’Angelo in the back of the truck no matter what, he knew Lerma would keep him in the back of the truck. Problem solved.

“Wrench 9, this is 6. Do you see anything else going on up there?” Deleon asked over the radio. “The trooper here is getting a little nervous.”

Olivares rolled his eyes. Deleon had a state highway trooper riding with him in his humvee, but Olivares knew if anyone was getting nervous, it was Deleon, not the trooper. Olivares understood it to a point. Some seriously bad stuff had happened in Arriago. But still, he couldn’t imagine that whoever had done all this killing would hang around and wait for the Army to show up.

Olivares grabbed the radio handset and said, “Negative 6, there’s nothing going on up front. Just a few bodies around and stuff on fire. Like I told you already.”

“Uh, okay, roger,” Deleon said. “Make sure you tell me right away if you see something. Tell me if we need to turn around.”

Olivares turned to his driver, Private Salazar, and gave a sarcastic smirk. “Roger, 6. I say again, I’ll tell you if there’s anything for you to be scared of. Right now I can’t see much through all the smoke.”

“9, can you tell how far we are from city hall? I don’t want to miss the turn.”

“Jesus Christ,” Olivares muttered. He clipped the radio handset onto the visor and told Salazar, “Fuck that, I’m not going to answer him. He needs to quit being such a pussy and just wait for me to give him updates.”

The city limits sign, advertising City of Arriago, population 2357,coasted past Olivares’ window. The gas station map in Olivares’ hand showed city hall six or seven blocks from Arapahoe street, the town’s northern border. He didn’t know if city hall was on the right or left side of the street. Like most small Texas towns, the old downtown area consisted of long one story buildings separated into shops. City hall should be somewhere among those buildings. If it was the right, they’d have a hell of a time spotting it in all the smoke. The tiny downtown area was not quite blanketed in it, but it looked thicker now than it had from outside the town. The left side of Nogales street, the main north/south street, was still clear enough to drive through.

Salazar pointed to the right side of the road, about a block ahead. “Top, see those things on the sidewalk? What are those?”

Olivares followed Salazar’s pointed finger and raised his binoculars. Through the grey haze he saw what looked like six or seven charred trash bags scattered around the pavement in front of what had been a small grocery store. Smoke rolled upward from the tops of the store’s shattered front windows. He focused on one of the bags, and saw what looked like an off-white stick protruding from the side.

“Uh…that’s nothing, Salazar. Just garbage bags, or something.”

“Bullshit, Top. I think those are bodies.”

Olivares swallowed. “Just drive, Salazar.”

Deleon’s voice came across the radio, shaky as usual. “9 this is 6, the command post just asked for our front line trace. What does that mean?”

Olivares turned to Salazar and asked, “What’s a front line trace?”

“Fuck, Top, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask D’Angelo? He’ll probably know.”

“Fuck D’Angelo. I’m not asking him shit.” Olivares keyed his radio and said, “6, they probably just want to know where we are. Tell them we’re at Nogales and, uh, 5th. If they mean something else they’ll tell you.”

“Roger.”

Olivares’ humvee reached a burned car in the right lane, not blocking their path but pushing them left. The right lane was blocked and filling with smoke. Olivares was getting the urge to cough from breathing it in. He reached down and pulled the humvee’s plastic window up, then struggled to zip it closed. His gunner, Rivera, coughed and ducked into the passenger compartment. Olivares swiveled his head back and said, “Rivera, get the fuck back up there.”

“Shit, Top, it’s smoky as hell up here. I’m gonna get sick.”

“We’ll take you to the doctor later. Just get your ass up there.”

Rivera mumbled curses in Spanish and stood back up. The humvee didn’t have a turret like they’d had in Iraq. They had just rolled back the vinyl top so the gunner could stick his upper body out, he had no protection at all. And Rivera didn’t have a machine gun, just his M16A2. The one magazine Rivera had was in the rifle, but Olivares hadn’t let any of the gunners lock and load. That was a sure way to have a negligent discharge, and he wasn’t about to risk that. The soldiers inside the vehicles hadn’t even been allowed to insert the magazines into their weapons. Olivares could just imagine what one moron could do if he accidentally fired a three-round burst inside a humvee.

“9 this is 6, we just passed the city limits.”

“Yeah? So fucking what?” Olivares said to the windshield. Then he keyed the microphone and said, “Roger.”

“Hey, Top!” Rivera yelled down into the humvee. “There’s a bunch of empty shells and crap laying around! Like there was a firefight here, or something.”

Olivares looked at the line of shattered windows fronting the old buildings, and at the burned cars. Bullet holes were everywhere. Olivares felt a little chill at the sight. No kidding, there had been some kind of fight there. He covered his nervousness by saying, “Gee Rivera, you really think so? Damn boy, I’m gonna have to promote you to Lieutenant. You’re a genius.”

Rivera mumbled something in reply. Olivares couldn’t understand it, but the very tone of the mumbling was disrespectful. He was about to get him back in line when Rivera yelled down into the humvee again.

“Top! Something just started burning, around the corner to the left! It’s about a block up!”

Olivares looked and didn’t see anything. “There’s nothing burning over there, you dumbass. It’s just smoke drifting over from the right.”

“No Top, there’s a real thick column of black smoke coming up on the left, and I know it wasn’t there before! I can’t tell what it’s coming from!”

“Calm down, Rivera,” Olivares said. “I don’t see shit and you’re probably wrong anyway, but so fucking what if something else is burning? Shit’s burning all over the place out here.”

“Top, someone just set something on fire,” Rivera said. “Someone’s doing something out here. Take another look, you should be able to see it now.”

Olivares muttered a curse, crouched and tilted his head to get his eyes under the upper edge of the windshield. And he saw it, a solid black tower of smoke. His brow furrowed in confusion.

“9 this is 6, my gunner says he sees smoke rising on the left,” Deleon said over the radio. “Do you see anything?”

“6 this is 9,” Olivares answered. “Yeah, we see it too. I can’t tell what it is.”

“Uh…you think we should turn around?” DeLeon asked.

God damn it. What a friggin’ faggot. “No, 6, we shouldn’t turn around. We’ll see what it is when we pass the next intersection, and report it up if we need to. Got it?”

“Roger, 9. I got it.”

Rivera tapped Olivares with his foot. “Top, we should stop and dismount some guys. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but we need guys on foot looking around corners and shit.”

“Shut up, Rivera. I was on plenty of convoys in Iraq, and we kept everyone mounted. I know what I’m doing.”

“Top, you did like five milk runs on routes where nothing ever happened. I was on a couple of those convoys, remember? This ain’t Iraq, Top. This shit is different.”

Olivares bit back anger. “Rivera, shut the fuck up! If we get hit I don’t want to wait for guys to mount back up before we haul ass. Everyone stays mounted.” Olivares turned to his driver and said, “Salazar, don’t slow down. Rivera, keep an eye that direction when we get to that corner.”

Rivera gave a reluctant “Roger” and hunched down in the hatch, rifle ready. Salazar moved his head closer to the steering wheel, looking left. Olivares checked the side mirror and saw the convoy maintaining pace and interval. That was a relief. Of the ten vehicles, only four had radios. The rest of the drivers were just following the trucks in front. He hoped none of the drivers would see the smoke and slow down on their own.

Salazar jammed on the brakes. Olivares’ head rocked forward. Rivera yelled “Shit!” and Salazar yelled, “Top, look!”

Olivares looked forward. An old red Suburban, engulfed in flames, rolled onto Nogales street. The doors were open and what looked like flaming human bodies hung out. One dragged on the street. The Suburban crept on burning tires, obviously not under its own power. Its front bumper just reached the center lane before its momentum died. The vehicle coasted to a stop, less than fifty yards ahead of Olivares’ humvee. As the soldiers inside stared at it in silence, a burning body flopped out onto the pavement. Rivera yanked his rifle’s charging handle to the rear, loading a round into the chamber. Salazar put the humvee in reverse.

“Salazar, stay put. Don’t back up.”

Behind them, the convoy tightened up and rolled to a stop. Olivares looked around and didn’t see anything. He keyed the radio and said, “6, this is 9. There’s a burning vehicle blocking our path. I mean, uh. . . it’s blocking our path now. It wasn’t before.”

DeLeon responded, “9, what do you mean it wasn’t blocking the path before? How did it get in our path?”

“6, uh. . . it just came out from a side street.”

There were several seconds of silence over the radio. Then DeLeon said, “9, well, what do you think we should do? Should we turn around?”

Olivares looked around again. There was still nothing going on. They could just drive around it or push it out of the way. But he couldn’t understand where it had come from. And now DeLeon, that chickenshit, was asking him what to do. Fuck that, he wasn’t about to make that call and be at fault for whatever happened.

“6 this is 9, that’s your job. You tell me.”

Several more seconds of silence followed. DeLeon finally got on the radio and managed to say, “9 this is 6, the trooper thinks -” before the first volley of automatic gunfire ripped through Olivares’ humvee from the left side of the street.

A roar punched Olivares’ ears. Glass and shards of metal slapped him in the face. He jerked back and slapped his hands over his eyes in defense. Gunfire exploded above him as Rivera shouted “Motherfucker!” and opened fire. Salazar screamed “Oh shit! Oh fuck!” and stomped on the accelerator. He hadn’t taken it out of reverse. The humvee lurched backward and slammed into the humvee behind it.

Olivares’ head bounced off his seat. Blobs of steel zinged past his head. Panic flooded his brain, all he could think to do was hide. He tried to slide onto the floorboard. Something smashed into his left forearm. It went numb and he fell back onto the seat, shielding his face with his right arm.

“Salazar! Do something! Hurry!” He tried to slap Salazar but his left arm didn’t work. He looked to his driver. Salazar’s upper body was slumped onto the empty space between the front seats. His head hung down and a stream of blood poured from his helmet. Rivera yelled “Ow! Ow!” above him. When Olivares looked up something heavy fell onto his helmet, knocking the rim onto the bridge of his nose.

He saw stars. Dead weight pressed Olivares’ head against the flimsy door handle. The door popped open. Olivares spilled backwards and slammed the back of his skull onto the street. He lay with his head and upper back on the street, legs and rifle still in the humvee. Hundreds of pounds pressed down on his calves, trapping them on the seat. The speaker squawked, “9 this is 6! They’re shooting us! What do we do?”

The weight on his calves jerked violently several times. Something stabbed him in the right foot. He shuddered from the agony. Further back in the convoy someone yelled over the gunfire, “Top! Move your fucking humvee!”

Olivares looked down the convoy. Soldiers were piled in clumps next to the passenger sides of vehicles. Bits of metal and plastic exploded from the humvees, limp bodies poured from the doors. He shouted “Someone get over here and help me! Please!”

Nobody responded. Two soldiers sprinted toward the right side of the street. One of them didn’t have a rifle. Gunfire exploded from a roof. Puffs of concrete dust erupted around them.

The soldier with the rifle didn’t make it even halfway across the road. It looked like someone switched him off midstride. He slammed down onto his face with arms limp beside him. The other soldier dropped to his knees, got back up dragging one leg. More concrete erupted around him and he fell onto his ass, then keeled over sideways.

Olivares closed his eyes and tried to shut out the terror. He didn’t know what to do. Someone had to help him. His soldiers weren’t supposed to leave him like this.

A burst of automatic fire rang out in front of his humvee. Gunshot concussions slapped Olivares’ skin. He opened his eyes and snapped them to the right. A man in black fatigues with a black mask, chest rig and scoped M4 carbine stood at the front bumper, firing through the windshield. He looked down at Olivares. Their eyes met. The man stopped firing.

Olivares closed his eyes again. I’m dead, he thought. It’s over. I’m dead.

Looking for honest critiques. Hope you enjoy it, and thanks.

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Chapter 2

Sergeant First Class Jerry Nunez kicked open the humvee door and stepped out onto the pavement. As he stretched his cramped muscles, all the old, familiar aches and pains hit. Riding for hours in a humvee wearing full gear had always been hard on his knees, shoulders and lower back. Nunez had spent countless hours stuffed into humvees on convoys and patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan, and didn’t miss those missions or places. He took his helmet and body armor off and laid them on the seat, then grabbed his M4 carbine and headed toward his platoon leader’s vehicle.

Lieutenant Rodger Quincy stood stretching by his own vehicle. His first words to Nunez were, “I don’t believe we’re doing this shit, Jerry.”

“Me neither, Lieutenant.”

“Jerry, quit calling me ‘Lieutenant’. When the kids aren’t around, just call me Rodger,” Quincy said to Nunez, his platoon sergeant.

“Sure thing, LT.”

Nunez and Quincy slung their carbines and walked toward the main doors of the mall. The parking lot was jammed with humvees and utility vehicles, many with sleeping soldiers draped over hoods or scattered around them. Police cars from several different departments, some as far away as Victoria and Corpus Christi, were parked around the military vehicles.

Except for the police cars, the scene looked almost like every forward operating base Nunez had ever been to overseas. But this wasn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. It was Edinburgh, Texas, well within the borders of what was supposed to be the safest, most well-protected country in the world. And the soldiers weren’t there for a training exercise, and weren’t on their way to some foreign country. They were there because the United States of America had been attacked.

Nunez agreed with Quincy; he couldn’t believe this was happening, not here. When he reenlisted in the National Guard after the terrorist attack in Houston, he had expected to be back in Afghanistan within a year. He had not expected to be mobilized for what was happening on the border, whatever the hell it was.

Nunez had been patrolling his beat two nights earlier when news of the border attacks first broke. He and his partner watched the initial reports on CNN. Local reporters repeated what little they had been told by the few refugees brave enough to stop and talk at highway rest stops and gas stations. But the reporters hadn’t been able to make sense of it. Traumatized survivors sputtered wild stories of masked men in black mowing down women and children in quiet neighborhoods, police cars shot to pieces, bombs exploding in fire stations.

The first calls from the National Guard had come in that night. An unofficial mobilization order trickled out to thousands of soldiers, including Nunez. He went home from work early, loaded his jeep while arguing with his wife Laura about following the order even though there was nothing on paper to back it up, and headed out.

Laura was furious, sick of Nunez leaving her and the kids alone every time the Guard needed him to do a dangerous job somewhere in the world. After his close call with death at the hands of terrorists in Houston two years earlier, she decided he had done enough. Iraq, Afghanistan, the attack in Houston, and now this, were too much to ask of her and their children. She didn’t want him doing one more dangerous job or responding to one more call up of troops. When he left the house she warned him she wouldn’t be there when he came back.

He believed her, but he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t ignore an order to respond to attacks in America, in Texas, just hours from home. It didn’t even matter if the official orders were never cut and he wasn’t paid. He couldn’t sit this one out. If his troops were going, and were going to be in danger, he was going with them. He told her he’d call when he had the chance, kissed the kids, and drove away.

Nunez and Quincy stopped at the main doors to the mall, gave the guards their information and headed toward the Apple store, where an intelligence briefing was about to be held. Nunez was amazed at the way a once-regular shopping mall had become a military base. But Edinburgh was less than twenty miles from the border. Once word of the attacks on the border spread, the city effectively shut down. Any family that was able headed north to Corpus Christi, Houston or San Antonio. Refugees forced out of besieged border towns were stuffed into every school in Edinburgh. The owners of the one mall in town offered to let the National Guard use it as a base of operations. That would prevent looting, but the shop owners must have thought the soldiers themselves would steal what was left. Nunez noticed the merchandise was gone from almost every business, hidden in storage somewhere.

Every store they passed had been taken over by a Guard unit. Sears, the largest, was occupied by the 56th Brigade Combat Team headquarters. The smaller shops had been taken by battalion commanders and their company commanders. All the makeshift command posts were beehives of activity. Junior sergeants and lower enlisted set up maps and butcher block paper on walls and checked connections on radio antennas, preparing for the hurricane of activity that would follow their units’ commitment to the coming operation.

“Fuck, I wish the food court was still working,” Quincy said as they walked past all the closed junk food places. “I want a smoothie.”

Nunez pulled out his notebook and pretended to make a note. “I’ll tell your driver to get right on that, sir. ‘Lieutenant Quincy wants a smoothie.’ Any specific flavor?”

Quincy looked like he wanted to say something smart-alecky, but all he could come back with was “Asshole.” Then he asked, “You get ahold of Laura yet?”

“No Rod, I haven’t,” Nunez said, looking a little down. “She wouldn’t answer my calls or return any texts, and the phones don’t work down here so I can’t even try anymore. And I forgot my phone charger and ran the battery out. But, whatever. She’ll be there when I get back. Or she’ll divorce me. I’ll live either way.”

“It won’t bother you if Laura divorces you?” Quincy asked.

Nunez looked down and drew a long, slow breath. He thought of his beautiful red headed wife, and their son and daughter who looked just like her. He had almost lost them before. He and Laura had teetered on the edge of divorce more than once over the years. Sometimes his determination had saved the marriage, more often hers had. Once they were so close to ending it that he packed his things and moved in with a friend. That had given him one whole day of a false sense of relief. But the thought of his wife married to someone else and his children being raised by someone else, like the ex-wives and kids of a million cops he knew, made him want to cry. So he went back, cried in front of his wife, and she cried with him. He moved back in and they stayed more or less stable, without any discussion of divorce, until he walked out the door with his gear and headed toward the Texas border.

The last few years had been a hard road for Nunez. He had been sent to Iraq early in the war, and spent a year riding a humvee down scarred, bomb-ravaged highways, cringing every time they passed an abandoned car or pile of trash. He had dreaded every convoy, but made it through his year whole and safe. His unit had a few wounded, no deaths. He went home, shook off the anxiety of the war, and spent two years back on the streets of Houston. But then new orders came, this time for Afghanistan.

In Iraq, Nunez was never in a big firefight. In Afghanistan, he was in huge battles. In Iraq he never lost a soldier. In Afghanistan, his orders had cost a close friend his life. In Iraq, every mission he went on was a success. In Afghanistan, he felt like he had lost the most important fight he had ever been in. He came home physically fine, but Afghanistan left a mark that he knew time wouldn’t erase. He got out of the Army, pledged himself to his family and job, and moved on.

What happened a year later changed Nunez’s life. It had been a November afternoon that he’d never forget. Houston SWAT officers screamed on the radio as they were engaged in a brutal, close range firefight with a terrorist cell at a mosque. Nunez had charged straight into the fight. That decision almost cost him his life.

He was nearly killed several times during the fight, but was on his feet when it was all over. He had beaten the grim reaper again. But there was no celebration because, as it turned out, the wars he fought overseas and at home weren’t as big a threat to his life as they were to his marriage.

Nunez made it through Iraq and Afghanistan without a divorce, but his actions the day after the terrorist attack almost killed the marriage. He had rejoined the military, against Laura’s express wishes. He half expected her to leave him that day. She stayed, but it had been close.

Nunez considered Quincy’s question, It won’t bother you if Laura divorces you?, and knew two things: first, he honestly didn’t know if he would still be married when he got home. And two, losing his wife would tear him apart.

“Bother me?” Nunez asked. “Nope.”

“You’re a liar,” Quincy responded.

Nunez nodded and gave a hopeless shrug. “Yup.”

“Well, good luck. Let me know if you wind up single, I’ll take you to pick up some nasty, disease-ridden strippers in Beaumont. They’ll make you feel better.”

Nunez smiled. “That’ll work, Rod. Hook me up with some woman who’s so disgusting even her herpes have AIDS. It’s like you looked into my soul and saw all my hopes and dreams.”

Nunez’s group was almost there. Other company commanders and platoon leaders, along with their platoon sergeants and a few squad leaders, came from different spots around the mall and converged on the Apple store. Nunez saw a few dozen soldiers already inside, and when the others got in there it would be pretty well packed. But when he made a quick estimate of the numbers, it didn’t seem that there were enough leaders to represent a full strength brigade combat team.

Nunez and his company’s leaders bumped their way through the doorway into the Apple store. The Sergeant First Class about to give the intelligence brief had a Rand McNally map of south Texas spread out on one wall and was reading from a small green tactical notebook. Eight large satellite images of what looked like small towns were plastered above the map. The soldier had no computer, there would be no PowerPoint presentation. This looked like it was going to be a bare-bones affair, not like the complicated briefings intelligence soldiers gave to senior leaders overseas.

The intelligence sergeant, Lacey, looked about thirty-five years old, wore a Combat Action Badge over his US Army name tape and had a 36th Infantry Division combat patch on his right shoulder. He was stocky and medium height, his light brown hair a little long, face overgrown with stubble. Nunez guessed he had been called up so quickly, like the rest of the soldiers in the room, that he hadn’t had time to get a proper haircut. He looked like he hadn’t slept for days. Lacey waited for the last few soldiers to trickle into the Apple store, then began his briefing.

“Good morning, gentlemen.” He looked at his watch. “I mean, good afternoon. Sorry, I’ve been awake a long time. I’m Sergeant First Class Lacey from the brigade intelligence section, and guys, I have a shitload of information to give you. I’m winging this whole briefing, so you’ll have to bear with me. If I fuck something up or miss something important, call bullshit on me so I can get it straight and find the information you need.”

He yawned, turned away and rubbed his eyes. When he turned back he said quietly, “Whoops. Sorry.” Then he picked up his notebook and put his finger on a page.

“Alright, quick roll call. The only soldiers in here should be company commanders and below. Battalion staff and higher are getting a separate briefing from my lieutenant. If there’s a few people missing I won’t hold everything up for them. You guys can fill in anyone who couldn’t make it.” He looked at his notebook again. “Okay, from 118 Cav, do we have reps from Headquarters Troop?”

Hands went up and a few “Hooahs” sounded.

“Alpha troop?. . .Bravo?. . . Charlie?” Responses sounded from each unit’s soldiers. Lacey went down the list for each battalion, all five in the brigade. Nunez and his group answered for Alpha company, 4th battalion of the 112th Infantry Regiment.

“Alright, good enough. Let’s get started. If you guys want to take your uniform tops off, get comfortable, have a seat on the floor or tables, go right ahead. Just don’t fall asleep. This briefing isn’t going to be some blow-off waste of time. Everything I’m about to tell you is no shit, life and death fucking important. Your soldiers’ lives, and the lives of a whole lot of Americans on the border, depend on you taking in what I’m telling you, processing it, and acting on it the right way.”

A few soldiers sat on the floor or jumped up backwards onto tables. Lacey looked around the room, and Nunez saw that his gaze was right around shoulder level. He was looking at combat patches, taking note of how many combat vets were among the soldiers in the room.

“I see that most of us have been somewhere and done something before today. That’s good, because we’re going to need veterans for what we’re about to do. And guys. . . I hate to say this, but this is going to be way different than what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Different, and worse.”

Lacey paused to take a drink from a plastic water bottle, then screwed the cap back on and set the bottle aside. “Okay gentlemen,” he said, looking over the room again. “Here’s what’s up. I know you’ve been watching the news, and the rumors have been flying like crazy, but most of what you’ve heard and almost all of what’s been reported has been complete bullshit. Here’s the actual situation.”

Lacey ran his fingers through his hair. “Friday night, two nights ago, right around 2200 hours local, all the police in eight border towns were wiped out. And I mean, completely wiped out. All the city cops, all the deputies, all the state troopers, and we think all the constables. And their families.”

Heads turned, while mumbled gasps of “holy shit” and “Jesus fucking Christ” floated around the room. Nunez bit his lip. He had gone to Iraq with several soldiers from units near the border. Some of them had been small-town cops. The names came up from his memory: Arellano, Zavala, the Haynes brothers, maybe a dozen more. Good soldiers, all of them. He wondered if they were dead.

Nunez and Quincy looked at each other, and at their company commander, Captain Harcrow. To their sides the two other platoon leaders, Lieutenants Campbell and Belding, and their platoon sergeants, Beall and Quiran, stayed silent. Lieutenant Belding was new, having received his commission within the last two years. He had never deployed. Campbell and the platoon sergeants were Iraq veterans. Nunez didn’t know any of them well.

When they were called up, the company was so understrength that almost all the its soldiers were consolidated into Nunez and Quincy’s platoon. The one other lieutenant, Campbell, had been thrown together with the one other platoon sergeant, a former Marine infantryman named Beall. They had been given command of the soldiers from other, even more understrength units in other battalions who had been sent to fill out Nunez’s unit in Round Rock, outside Austin. Belding and Quiran were sent from two different infantry companies outside San Antonio. They didn’t know each other, or the men from other units that had trickled in and been placed under their command, or anyone else in the company.

Nunez was lucky to have Quincy as his platoon leader. He and Nunez had first served together years earlier in Afghanistan. At that time, Nunez was the platoon sergeant over then-Corporal Rodger Quincy. Quincy was black, tall, and built of solid muscle. He had played college football and could have pursued a career in professional sports after graduation, but never considered it. His father, who settled down with his third and last wife relatively late in life, had been a Marine in Vietnam. Quincy was going to be either Marine or Army infantry, and that was all there was to it. The National Guard offered him a good deal, so he signed up.

Quincy’s reputation was established three months into their Afghanistan tour. One day after a bomb attack and ambush on their convoy killed three soldiers, Nunez led a charge to a compound where the Taliban had fired at them from. When they reached the door Nunez ordered Quincy to go in first. Quincy didn’t complain or hesitate, he just did it. Or at least tried to do it.

When he kicked the door in a Taliban machine gunner shot him through the thigh and helmet, barely missing his skull. Quincy was knocked out cold. Nunez picked up Quincy’s machine gun and led the charge into the compound himself. Until the compound was clear and he walked back outside, Nunez thought Quincy was dead. He would never forget the relief he felt when he found Quincy alive. And never stop questioning his decision to order Quincy through the door first.

Quincy recovered, applied for officer candidate’s school and found his way back to Nunez’s platoon as the platoon leader. Quincy was only twenty-six now, much younger than Nunez’s thirty-nine years. Quincy was single and under assault by so many awestruck women he had to choose the best two or three to sleep with every month. Nunez, on the other hand, had been married almost ten years and had two kids. Quincy worked with at-risk teenagers in his hometown of Beaumont, Texas, Nunez was a cynical cop in Houston who put those teenagers in jail. Quincy was an Adonis. Nunez was small, thin, not bad looking but basically unremarkable. But their shared wartime experience bonded them, and they were close friends as well as superior and subordinate.

The intelligence sergeant went on with the briefing, saying, “And guys, that’s not all of it. The initial reports are that most of the mayors of those towns are dead, along with a shitload of the firefighters, although their families apparently aren’t. The same thing happened with the municipal court judges, except for the judge from Curran’s Pass, ‘cause he was on vacation in Galveston when all this crap went down. All this happened between here,” he said, pointing on the map at Roma, “and here,” pointing at Brownsville. “Those two cities, Roma and Brownsville, have not been attacked. That might be because there’s such a strong federal government presence in those cities, but we don’t know for certain. Brownsville is a lot bigger than any of the cities that got hit, and that might have something to do with it.”

Lacey unscrewed the water bottle cap while he was speaking and took another drink. The liquid was dark, and Nunez figured he was overdosing on caffeine in an effort to stay awake. Lacey flipped a page in his notebook and said, “The night the killings happened, just about every surviving person from those eight towns decided to pop smoke and haul ass. Although that decision came after a little prodding. Some refugees said bad guys went house to house banging on doors, telling people to get out or they’d be killed. Locals were encouraged to tell their family members and neighbors to leave as well. Then when they got moving out of town, the bad guys stopped random cars headed out of town, pulled the people out and set the vehicles on fire. There are a few reports of bad guys shooting the people they yanked out, but most reports are that they were just made them get out and burned the cars. We think that was done to make it harder for help to make it in, but we don’t know for certain.

“Remember that all the reporting we’ve gotten has come from refugees getting the fuck out of Dodge. There have been no cell phone or land line calls from any of those towns since that night. Some residents of those towns called family in other cities to say that the shit was hitting the fan. Those calls either were cut off or ended abruptly and there was no further contact. We do know that no calls are getting through now. We think the cell towers and landline interchanges have been destroyed, but you know what that means. Think in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.”

Lacey walked closer to the map and pointed to the highways leading away from the border. “As of Saturday, maybe early afternoon, police have had checkpoints set up on these roads, two to five miles north of each city’s limits. Before anyone asks why the checkpoints are so far away from the targeted cities, I’m going to ask a question. Where are the cops in here? If you work in law enforcement, please raise your hand.”

Nunez raised his hand, along with several other soldiers in the room. He looked around at the other cops, checking for familiar faces. He didn’t know any of them.

Lacey pointed and said, “You. Sergeant, uh, Nunez. If you’re a cop on duty in one town, and you hear a cop from another town screaming for help, what do you do?”
Nunez answered, “I go help him. No matter what.”

Lacey responded, “Right. That’s what we expect you guys to do. And that’s what officers from other towns and counties and state troopers did. But apparently the guys who hit the border cops expected the same thing, and they prepared for it. So what happened, and this is confirmed, is that twenty-six officers were ambushed and killed hauling ass into these eight cities. In two cases, other officers were killed responding to calls for help from the first officers who were ambushed. We know some civilians tried to help the officers, and some of them were killed as well, but we don’t know the number. We do know that anyone who tried to get close to those officers was at least shot at, so nobody’s even tried it since then.”

Nunez spoke up abruptly. “So you mean those officers are still out there on the road? Nobody’s recovered them?”

“That’s correct,” Lacey answered. “Nobody has been able to recover them so far. Some of them are in view of the checkpoints, but anyone who approaches gets shot at. Nobody right now has the ass to fight their way to those bodies. I can almost guarantee that will be our first mission when we head into those cities. And it won’t be only those bodies we’re recovering. Most of the refugees have said there are shitloads of dead civilians all over the towns, and some on the roads.”

God damn, Nunez thought. Things must be really fucked up if the cops down there can’t even get to the bodies of their friends.

Nunez looked around, seeing the anger on the faces of almost everyone, not just the police. Lacey held up one hand and said, “But guys, don’t get so wrapped around the axle about the bodies that you miss some real important background details. Did anyone ask how the bad guys were able to carry out these ambushes? The fact that so many officers were successfully ambushed within such a short time suggests to me that bad guys had spotters further up on the highways, identifying targets for the ambushers. And this couldn’t have been an afterthought, not if they were already in place when the first cops tried to respond. They showed up with that plan ready to execute. In other words, these guys don’t seem to be stupid.”

Lacey turned away from the map and looked at his notebook again. “Now, our enemy,” he said. “I wish I could give you some information that’s worth a damn, guys, but we don’t have shit right now. There’s been a stream of refugees pouring from the border for the last two days, and the police have tried to get information from them. We’re getting bits and pieces of what they’re hearing, but it’s a bunch of confused shit so far. A lot of it has been contradictory, like some of the descriptions. Most of the reports are that the bad guys are Hispanic, but some reports have said they’re white, some that they’re black. One witness swore they were Vietnamese. The common threads from the reports have been that these guys roll around in SUVs, carry military rifles and wear military gear. And they speak Spanish.”

Lacey made eye contact with several soldiers before he spoke again. “I don’t have to tell you that this is a hell of a big deal, gentlemen. All the first responders in eight towns are gone. All the people who could pick up a phone, call the cavalry and say, ‘Hey, we’re under attack by such and such guys, this is what they look like, this is how many there are, this is where they are’, are dead. Any officials who could be a threat to this enemy force, whoever they are, have been neutralized. But Roma and Brownsville haven’t been touched. So what does all this mean? We don’t know yet. We’re trying to figure it out.”

Lacey turned and tapped one of the satellite photos. “One big question mark we have is about Curran’s Pass, right here. Someone in that town fought back. Refugees reported a huge gunfight inside the town somewhere, maybe around midnight Friday night. Of course the witness stories don’t all add up, but we think the firefight went on for about half an hour. We have no idea who fought back, or if it had any effect.”

Someone toward the back of the room spoke up. “Sergeant, are these cartel guys doing all this crap? Who the fuck are these people?”

Lacey’s answer was less than definite. “Well, it sure as hell sounds like cartels. Who else would have the ass to pull something like this off? And even if it isn’t cartels, how would whoever this is be able to do it without the cartels knowing about it, and at least giving tacit approval? But on the other hand, it sure seems to me that this would hurt their business. They couldn’t do all this shit and expect easier flow of drugs across the border.”

Lacey ran his finger along the border on the map. “The affected area is well known for drug and human trafficking. The cartels run the area, and we know they have their hands into all kinds of criminal enterprises, on both sides of the border. You don’t have to be a master of intel to know that, it’s common knowledge. And we know that federal law enforcement has a lot of that area under surveillance. So one of the first things we asked when we got here and met with local cops was, ‘What did the feds’ surveillance see before all this shit kicked off?’ And the answer surprised us. I guess it makes sense now that I’ve had time to think about it, but before this happened I had the impression that cameras were covering every inch of the border. As it turns out, the cameras are only covering specific areas previously identified as heavy drug trafficking routes. And we’re told that there was no increase in activity along those routes in the week before the attacks.”

Captain Harcrow raised his hand. “Sergeant Lacey, what about camera surveillance in the affected cities themselves? Haven’t we gotten anything useful from that?”

“Sir, there isn’t any camera surveillance inside the cities,” Lacey answered. “As it turns out, the federal government doesn’t have cameras watching what goes on inside each border town. If there are security cameras around, they either belong to the city governments or private businesses, and we don’t have remote access to them. When all this started, the federal government sent up high altitude aircraft to get imagery. I haven’t seen it yet, but as far as we know the aircraft aren’t seeing anything other than bodies laying around the towns, and abandoned or burned cars. My guess is that these guys are staying indoors during the day. We’re hoping we get access to drones for real-time surveillance, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

Harcrow responded, “Well, fuck. So what do we have in our favor, I.S.R.-wise?” I.S.R. was a term usually used only overseas, and meant intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

“Captain, right now our only sources of intel are human intelligence reports and what we hear from the media. And when I say human intelligence, I’m using the broadest possible interpretation of the term. The reporting we’re getting isn’t formal, isn’t vetted, and so far isn’t being collected and analyzed in any organized way. The police have been overwhelmed with evacuees and can’t take the time to write reports like they normally would. All the cops are doing is taking brief statements from people at checkpoints, writing notes and passing them up their chain. We’ve established a shared command post at the Edinburgh PD station with the state police and we’re hearing the reports they’re receiving, but there’s no quality control process in place to make sure any of this reporting is worth a fuck. Right now we could be getting a bunch of bullshit reporting from people intentionally trying to mess up our response.”

“Is that likely?” Harcrow asked. “Do you think we’re getting lied to by whoever these people are?”

Lacey rubbed his face. “No, Captain, I don’t think so. My gut reaction is that we’re getting honest reporting. But that doesn’t mean it’s true. You know, some people are making mistakes, misinterpreting what they see, or reporting stuff they only heard but have no firsthand knowledge of. But I think they’re reporting what they honestly believe.”

“And what’s the media getting that we can use?” Nunez asked.

“The media’s getting about the same thing that the police are getting. We have guys who have been ordered to watch local and national media reporting twenty-four hours a day, and notify us in case something major comes up. Any important information we get from the media will be sent out to you ASAP.”

Lacey took another drink, then his face lit up and he slammed the water bottle down. “Holy shit, I almost forgot,” he said. “Speaking of the media, don’t expect any intrepid reporters to go forcing their way into these towns at the risk of their own lives, or any of that crap. The reason is that a media van, one of those with the satellite antennas, came from Corpus Christi and drove into Morenitos. That news crew hasn’t been heard from since they passed the police checkpoint outside the town. Cops at the checkpoint heard gunfire in the town after they lost sight of the van, and nobody’s heard shit since then. There are rumors that the TV crew was feeding live video back to their station and that the news people watching it saw them get ambushed and killed, but the station refuses to make any comment on that. My guess is that they don’t want to shake up anyone’s family until they have confirmation.”

“What about news helicopters?” Nunez asked. “Haven’t they made flights over the area?”

“One helicopter from Corpus tried it the first night,” Lacey said. “They went over Morenitos, looking for the media van. Somewhere over the town the helicopter got hit by ground fire and got the hell out of there. Nobody on the helicopter was injured and the helicopter wasn’t badly damaged, but the crew said they took tracer fire from several directions. It sounds to me like the bad guys were triangulating their fire, you know, making a coordinated effort to bring down the helicopter. It wasn’t random harassing fire like we saw overseas. The air space over the affected towns was shut down after that. There have been a few flights by Navy search and rescue helicopters from Kingsville around the perimeters of some affected towns, but they haven’t seen anything that helps us. The Navy is being real careful about where they let their helicopters go, they don’t want one to go down where the crew can’t be recovered.”

“Sergeant Lacey,” another captain asked, “is that the only air support we have? Just Navy SAR birds? No Apaches or Kiowas?”

“Sir, we have Apaches on the way. A battalion of National Guard Apaches at Ellington in Houston has gotten orders. There are twenty-four Apaches there, but six were down for regular maintenance and four others failed preflight inspections. They’ll be here tonight-ish. But they’re not going to be worth much when they first get here. Their support package of spare parts and crew chiefs has to be flown in by Chinooks or C-130s, and that hasn’t been arranged yet. On top of that, the birds don’t have any armament at their station, the only thing available is thirty millimeter ammo from Fort Hood. That’s supposed to meet them at the Brownsville airport sometime tomorrow. Maybe we’ll get Hellfires and rockets for them at some point, but even if we do there’s an absolute ‘no air strikes’ rule in effect. Once they’re in the air over the affected areas, they’re pretty much just going to be armored observation platforms.”

“And fixed wing support? Air National Guard F-16s from Houston?”

Lacey shook his head. “We’re working that issue. But no promises.”

“Well, shit,” Hacrcrow said. “Okay, so we know for the moment we have no air support. Next question. Sergeant, what’s the plan for us? How are we going to be committed?”

Lacey gave a Don’t look at me gesture, hands up and eyebrows raised. “Sir, that’s the question of the year. Since yesterday the goal has been containment of the incident, which is why the first Guard troops here were fed to the police at the checkpoints in ones and twos. All they wanted at first was bodies, no attention was paid to keeping units together. Just after midnight this morning someone figured out that we were degrading the effectiveness of the entire force, and managed to get the state disaster response people to at least keep company sized units together.”

Lacey looked around and asked, “Does this sound familiar, guys? It should. This is the same shit they do to us when we deploy overseas. Our battalions get piecemealed out and can’t function like they’re supposed to, so all we can do are force protection missions instead of full spectrum operations. This time, there isn’t anyone else available to do the full spectrum missions, just us. But they’re still parting out companies as they become available, and I guess they’re just hoping that little problem will work itself out later. Bottom line for you combat arms guys, expect your battalions to be split up and tasked as individual companies. I can’t give you any better news right now.”

A voice in the room groaned, “Geez, that sucks.”

Lacey said, “No shit.”

A captain from one of the Cavalry troops, spoke up. “Alright, we know this is a huge shitstorm and it’s going to be a fucking mess, but what do we do? What’s the first step?”

Lacey held his hand up again. “Hey sir, I can’t tell you what to do. Those orders have to come from your commander. All I can tell you is what we know, and what we don’t. And I suppose I can also tell you this. Forget rumors about the big Army coming to the rescue. They’ve been ordered to keep their hands off. Posse Commitatus is in effect. The federal government says this is a criminal matter that should be handled by law enforcement and Guard troops. We’re just here to assist law enforcement. I hope the regular Army is at least spinning up in case things get worse, but the federal representatives have been very clear about this. This is a crime, not a war. Emergency teams from the FBI and DEA are responding, plus FEMA, but they won’t enter the affected towns until we establish a presence.

“As far as directly confronting whoever these people are, that’s all on us. And because we’re just here to assist law enforcement, we can’t carry more than one magazine per rifle, no weapons larger than a 5.56 millimeter, no explosives, and no armored vehicles. That comes from General Landers, commander of the Texas National Guard. Your commanders will lay all that out to you.”

The room erupted with loud exclamations of “That’s bullshit!” and “Fuck that!” Lacey held up his hands and yelled over the noise, “Hey guys, don’t shoot the messenger! I’m not saying those rules are my idea, I’m just telling you what to expect. I know it sucks, and I guarantee you that if I roll into one of those towns, I’m going to have more than one God damn magazine. Like I said, your commanders will lay the rules out to you, then it’s up to you to decide how much you can get away with. But they give the orders, not me.”

The room quieted. The Cavalry captain gave a smirk and said, “Yeah sergeant, I know a little bit about where I’m supposed to get my orders from. I think I saw on TV once how the chain of command works. What I’m asking you, since you know the overall situation better than we do, is what are we doing about this? What’s our response?”

Lacey smirked back, “Well Captain, if you asked the people you’re supposed to, they’d probably tell you the first step is for the nearest available unit to go on a recon mission into one of the cities. When they get into their target city and report back to us what they see, we formulate a response. Until then, we’re just operating on guesses.”

“So which of us is the nearest available unit?” the captain asked, without the smartass tone this time.

“None of you are,” Lacey answered. “This shit started Friday night. A maintenance company had already reported for drill Friday morning in Cuidad Irigoyen, about forty miles north of the border. Those guys are at about two thirds strength, and have vehicles and weapons ready to go. They’re the first unit tasked for a recon, into Arriago. They were supposed to start their mission yesterday, but nobody was able to get ammo for them until today.”

Jesus Christ, Nunez thought. He jerked his hand into the air and blurted, “They’re sending an undermanned National Guard maintenance company with no heavy weapons, unarmored vehicles and one magazine per soldier into this shit first? When do they start their recon?”

Lacey looked at his watch. “If they kept to the timeline, they hit their start point about thirty minutes ago, Sergeant Nunez.”

Please drop critiques on me. Don’t be gentle. It’s not my first time.

Thanks and hope you enjoy it.

——————————————————————

Line in the Valley
Chapter 1

Carlos Ramirez’s phone rang in his pocket, rousing him from a half sleep, half pleasant buzz. He put his beer down, lifted himself halfway off his recliner, reached past belly fat and dug his phone out. The caller ID showed it was his coworker and across the street neighbor, Andy Carter. Carlos slurred a greeting.

“Hey Andy, what’s up? Why you bothering me now, when you know by this time every night I’m into my tenth beer?”

Carlos’ wife gave him a dirty look from the kitchen as she washed dishes. She had complained about his drinking for years and threatened to divorce him more than once, to no avail. She was Mexican, devoutly Catholic and wouldn’t want to be stuck taking care of their kids alone. He knew she would never leave him.

“Sober up, pendejo,” Andy said. “You remember that little shithead Antonio Guevara you arrested last week? He’s walking around by the corner, next to the Melendez’s. He’s been looking toward your house.”

“Shit,” Carlos responded. “That little punk needs his ass kicked. Again. You see any of his little gangster friends with him?”

“Nadie mas, hermano,” Andy answered. He was white, but like most of the white people in Arriago and all the white cops, he spoke fluent Tex-Mex Spanish. “Nobody but him. He’s been walking from the corner toward your house and back, talking on a cell phone.”

“A cell phone? Who did he steal that from? When I arrested him he didn’t have a phone, and he gave me his house number to write on the blotter. That little shit can’t afford a cell phone.”

“He must have burglarized another car, or maybe one of his gangster homies gave it to him,” Andy said. “Who gives a fuck why he has a phone? I didn’t call to talk about his phone, I called to tell you he was outside in case you want Jesse to run him off.”

Carlos took another swallow from his beer. “Nah, I won’t bother Jesse for this. He’s the only one on duty tonight, he’s probably busy. I’ll go outside and run Antonio off myself. He’ll probably piss his pants and take off as soon as he sees me. And if he doesn’t, I’ll kick the shit out of him again.”

“Andale Carlos, that’s what he needs. Call me if you want me to come outside and videotape it.”

“Go to sleep, hermano. Thanks for the call.”

“Hasta luego.”

Andy hung up, and Carlos struggled out of his chair. He went to his room and pulled on a t-shirt, then grabbed the flashlight and pepper spray off the duty belt hanging on his bedpost. He thought about it, then went to his closet and threw a .38 snubnose into a pocket. He doubted he’d need the gun for Antonio, but you never knew how stupid a wannabe gangster could be.

Antonio Guevara was the seventh grade, fourteen-year-old head of Los Nortenos, a middle school “gang” made up mostly of eleven to thirteen year old aspiring thugs who desperately wanted attention. Since annointing themselves gangsters, they had been trying like hell to make a name for themselves in the tiny Texas border town of Arriago. Being the oldest, Antonio naturally fancied himself the leader. He and his flock, all eight of them, had been making themselves royal pains in the asses to the town’s 2,400 residents. They had spent the last month spray painting wooden fences with their made-up gang symbol, bringing beer to school in backpacks, beating up terrified ten-year-olds and even talking trash to police every time they saw a passing patrol car. Arriago had real gangsters, but they tried to keep a low profile. The Nortenos wanted everyone to know who they were.

Carlos had caught Antonio breaking into an old woman’s car the previous week, and Antonio bowed up to fight. Carlos convinced Antonio that he didn’t really want to fight a cop after all. Antonio hadn’t needed any medical attention afterward, but Carlos knew he would feel the asskicking for a few days.

Carlos walked toward the front door, past his sons playing Xbox in their bedroom, and told his wife, “I’m going outside to handle something, I’ll be back in a minute.” She asked what he was talking about and he ignored the question, walked out the front door and turned toward the corner, two houses away.

He didn’t see anything at first. His neighborhood was poor and overgrown with brush, especially on the corner where Antonio was supposed to be. Then, in the pale light of a barely working street lamp, he made out the baggy, rumpled outline of Antonio, standing half-hidden behind a bush.

“Antonio!” Carlos yelled. “You don’t live here! What you want, boy? Didn’t you get enough last time I arrested you?”

Antonio stepped out from behind the bush. Carlos saw that he had a cell phone to his ear. Carlos walked toward him fast, calling out, “Hey, I’m talking to you! What you doing here, pendejo?”

Antonio yelled back, “Fuck you, lambiache!” and spoke into the phone. He didn’t back away.

Antonio was a punk and a coward. He shouldn’t stand his ground. Surprised, Carlos yelled back, “Ass kisser? Boy, you better run, because I’m about to beat you to death!” He quickened his pace, ready to whip Antonio’s ass again.

Before he made it out of his front yard the sound of racing engines came from around the corner. Carlos stopped, unsure what to make of it. He didn’t see light from headlights, he just heard engines. Antonio looked toward the sound and didn’t move. Carlos heard him say, “Aqui, aqui!” Right here, right here.

Two black Ford Explorers raced into view, screeched past Antonio and made the turn toward Carlos. Their lights were off. The lead Explorer covered the distance to Carlos’ house in two seconds and slid to a stop. The brake lights didn’t come on. The second Explorer skidded to a stop in front of Andy’s house. That one didn’t have brake lights either.

Carlos stepped back, turned on his flashlight and pointed it toward the Explorer in front of his house. The SUV’s doors flew open. Two men in ski masks jumped out, dressed in all black with AK-47 rifles, body armor and tactical vests. Carlos turned his light to the man who had come out of the back seat. The man shifted his body so that his chest faced Carlos, and raised his AK. He moved like a soldier, his actions quick and efficient.

Carlos took another step back. What the fuck is going on? Behind him he heard his front door swing open. He turned to see his wife standing at the front step. He looked back as two more men with rifles and gear ran toward his house.

The impulse to react finally worked its way through the alcohol. Carlos jammed his hand into his pocket and grabbed his pistol. Before he was able to yank his weapon free the man pointing the AK at him pulled the trigger one time.

A white-orange flash exploded from the rifle’s muzzle. The bullet hit Carlos to the right of his sternum, punched straight through and exited his back. His vision went grey. He dropped flat onto his back, struggling to breathe. He heard his wife scream “Dios mio!”, then more shots. The scream stopped, but was replaced by shrieks from his sons’ room. He turned his head and could just make out another man in black rushing through the door. Down the street he heard more shots, more screams. Andy’s screams.

He looked up. Antonio stood over him, flashed a gang sign and said, “See that, bitch? See what happens when you mess with Los Nortenos? Never fuck with me, bitch.”

Carlos couldn’t process this. His sons’ screams drowned in automatic gunfire. Slow, painful recognition worked through the haze of pain and alcohol. His family had just been murdered. He had just been murdered. This couldn’t be the work of Antonio and his band of preteen shitheads. They couldn’t do this. It didn’t make sense.

Antonio kicked him in the groin. Carlos’ body rocked from the blow, his blurred vision bounced, but he couldn’t feel the impact. He heard feminine screaming and could just discern Andy’s teenage daughter running down the street. Gunfire sounded, the scream disappeared as if it had never been there. Carlos saw the blurry, ghostlike image of the girl slam facedown to the pavement. He heard laughter and shouted comments in Spanish.

Carlos closed his eyes and tried to breathe. When he opened his eyes he barely saw the man standing over him holding an AK to his face. He heard Antonio’s voice, but couldn’t make out the words. He croaked, “Why, Antonio? Why?”

Antonio laughed. The man next to him said in Spanish, “Muevete atras.” Move back. Carlos didn’t understand him. He managed to wheeze, “No entiendo, no entiendo.”

The man in black fired another round, from ten feet away. This wasn’t the first time he had shot a man in the head with an AK. He knew enough to stay at a distance so that the blood, bone, brain, skin and hair wouldn’t spatter back on him. Carlos never heard or felt the round. It hit beside the bridge of his nose and exited the back of his skull. The blast scattered shards of Carlos’ head across his lawn, spraying the yard with an arc of gore.

Carlos died without knowing that all seven Arriago police officers, and all seventeen Harper County deputies, had died with him. Or that their families had been killed. Or that the Arriago mayor, municipal judge and twelve firefighters had been killed. Or that the same thing had happened in every Texas town along a hundred mile stretch of border between Roma and Brownsville, within fifteen minutes of Carlos’ murder.
—————————————————————

NOTE ADDED 3/23/13

Son of a. . . after my writer buddy Lilas told me to look, I checked the CreatSpace account I forgot I had, and saw these two reviews from “ABNA expert reviewers”:

Review #1:

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

The narrative was smooth, fast reading, as well as the realistic dialogue, but the strongest aspect is the quick intro to the story line. Gets you thinking, could happen, right?

What aspect needs the most work?

Nada. Excellent work. Good character descriptions, but if you added some physical descriptions of the characters, it might add a little more.

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

Mad that this is just an excerpt, because I would still be reading this well into the night. Very original, albeit possible, plot. We,unfortunately, live with these possibilities everyday, especially those on the southern borders. This contemporary thriller would sell.

Review #2 (which also addresses the second chapter):

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

The pacing here is great, which means I wanted to keep turning the pages and reading further. The staff sergeant’s briefing is detailed and vivid, and the reaction of the tired and half-drunk cop to the news that a wannabe gangbanger is hanging around outside his house was completely convincing. What all that adds up to is the fact that the author has a distinctive voice, which is pretty hard to come by. That means, IMO, that it’s worth toiling away on the hard work that it might take to make this publishable, because the voice is the one thing is hardest to come by.

What aspect needs the most work?

Well, I’ll just mention the fact that if you want someone to read a lot of content, please format it with paragraphs… This segment read as one very very very long paragraph, with no breaks, which is very hard to process. NB: My ratings, below, don’t reflect that, but be aware that it makes life harder for a reader.

[Chris Hernandez note: I have my novel formatted correctly, but when I loaded it onto the ABNA submission page it changed it into one big paragraph. I tried three f'kin' times, and it did it every time. I even went back and tried to do it manually, but it kept making the excerpt into one big paragraph. And then I get criticized for that. Bastards!]

What I struggle with here is what happens after Carlos and his neighbor and their families are murdered. Instantly, we’re plunged into the military response team, telling me it’s going to be all action. I found myself craving some kind of bridge to that scene — Nunez and Quincy could hear rumors about this, or we could see Lacey being told about it, or something else. The segment started with a big bang (well, technically, a lot of ‘em…) and sometimes it’s good to take a step back and take the time to set the stage and develop the characters so that we know what’s going on and care about the people who are here. It’s as if the 9/11 story went straight from the attacks to the invasion of Afghanistan, without us understanding how or why the attacks took place and thus why it’s logical that the invasion is taking place. Yes, I’m sure Lacey is about to explain it all to them, but then that would fall into the category of telling the reader, rather than showing them. As it stands, this feels like an abrupt and unconvincing jump for the reader.

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

The writing needs a lot of polishing: there are lots of awkward phrasings — eg “pulled the trigger one time” rather than pulled the trigger once. Or, “saw the blurry, ghostlike image of the girl slam facedown onto the street” — presumably it wasn’t the image of the girl that slammed down but the girl herself?

And there are exchanges between the two soldiers that feel unnatural, as if the conversation is taking place just for the reader’s benefit. (which goes to my criticism above.) Sure, all this information about Laura and the marriage is great to have but don’t just download it, dribble it out in a natural way. It’s a shame to waste an intriguing idea, after all.

The idea is intriguing, and I assume it comes from all the narco-trafficante stories. One element that I would hope is going to be explained somewhere very early on is just why they would want to wipe out every law enforcement member and their families? Clearly this would bring about precisely the kind of reaction that is taking shape: a military incursion. To make this more than just a “soldiers shooting guns and being violent” novel, there needs to be a logical backbone to the story, one that is apparent to the reader from early on. I did find myself wondering just why this would unfold this way (beyond the fact that it was because a novelist wanted it to happen this way to write the book he/she wanted to write…)

The level of detail in the writing here is mostly excellent, particularly segments like
“Lacey paused to take a drink from a
plastic water bottle, then screwed the cap
back on and set the bottle to the side.
“Okay gentlemen,” he said,
looking over the room again.
“Here’s what’s up.”
I could literally see this scene in my mind’s eye, and that’s an excellent sign.

For me, a lot comes down to where this excerpt goes next. If it veers off in what I think of as “fictional gun porn” — a novel about soldiers and their weapons and their brotherhood and so on — then you’ve lost me as a reader. If you can convincingly explain why drug cartels would do this, and make this a story about people, then I think it could be very interesting, with work on style and structure.

[Chris Hernandez note: so if this becomes a story about soldiers and their weapons and brotherhood, he's not interested? Or did I misread that?
It sounds to me like one guy loved it, and one guy saw positives and negatives but doesn't care for military fiction. Damn it.]