As Jeff raced his OHV around the last bend in the boulevard, his breath hitched in his throat. The first barricade, at the base of the hill, had already been overrun by hundreds, maybe thousands of men. A smattering of gunfire continued, but the battle for the gateway to Oakwood Highlands had already been lost.
Jeff had no idea how many of his men had died and how many had retreated to the second barricade, but he could see the enemy pouring over the top of his belt-fed machine gun overlooking the lower barricade. He had placed a lot of hope in that machine gun nest, figuring that no mob had the sack to walk into sustained machine gun fire.
This enemy obviously had the discipline and manpower to storm a Browning 1918 belt-fed machine gun. This was no mob; this was an army.
Jeff stared in wonder as four steel behemoths on wheels trundled up to the lower concrete barricades, shoving them aside like empty cardboard boxes. The machines looked like nothing he had ever seen in battle but, after watching their wheels crab around the discarded concrete walls, he realized that the enemy’s battle plan centered around these four grotesquely armored front-end loaders—heavy equipment that had been welded up with metal plates and tasked for battle. Unless they defeated, or at least neutralized the armor, the Homestead had no chance.
Losing the neighborhood and the Homestead no longer seemed a theoretical possibility. It seemed very likely to Jeff. As a student of military history, he knew that an army with greater numbers usually won, and the army arrayed below him had the Homestead outnumbered at least ten to one.
Jeff couldn’t think of a single historical battle where a force as small as the Homestead had defeated a force this large.
Directly above Jeff, Chad Wade looked down from a Cessna twin-engine airplane.
He struggled to make sense of what he saw. A surging mass of people pushed up Vista View Boulevard. At first, he thought it might be some kind of protest march, with hundreds of men filling the road from gutter to gutter. But then he noticed the armored vehicles and realized he had arrived at the exact moment of a large-scale attack on his Oakwood friends.
“Circle around,” Chad ordered the pilot.
He watched impotently as more than a thousand men marched up the road toward his home.
“Goddamnit! Goddamnit!” Chad yelled in the small cockpit, pounding on the armrest of his seat. “Get us on the ground!”
The plane peeled away from its banking turn and headed toward Davis County Airport.
Francisco rode into battle on the armored platform of a front-end loader, shouting orders and shooting his AK periodically at nothing in particular. Having led gangs his entire adult life, he knew to keep things simple and brutal.
His plan was Stalinesque. Each of his Los Latigos men lead a troop of twenty Latino laborers. He had given his trusted gangbangers strict instructions to herd their men out in front of them, shooting any man who faltered or ran.
With time, perhaps he could have developed loyalty and discipline among the new recruits, but with time they would also lose the initiative, allowing the whites to organize. Francisco knew the lethal efficiency of whites who organized. He had no intention of subjecting himself to it ever again.
As planned, his army rolled up the frontage road along the freeway and slammed directly into the defenses Gabriel had described. The Latino army didn’t regroup, didn’t reset their order of battle. His lieutenants ran directly into the barricades. They crushed the few defenders at the bottom barricade and quickly brought forward their tanks.
From his position in the center of his army, Francisco heard the low roar of a machine gun. The thundering rumble drowned out the staccato pops of rifle and handgun fire, heralding death of a more voracious kind. Francisco grabbed a megaphone he had brought and screamed for anyone and everyone to assault the machine gun.
Several of his lieutenants massed their men behind the scant cover around the machine gun position. Men piled behind dirt berms, trees, trash cans, fences and an electrical junction box. By horrifying trial and error, the Latinos learned which cover would stop the heavy rounds of the machine gun and which wouldn’t. Men behind trash cans, cars, fences or even medium-sized trees died, cut in half by the machine gun, the rounds punching through almost anything. Others, behind thick dirt berms or lying pancaked on the ground behind the rise of the earth, survived. The terrified men stacked up deep behind the little cover they could find.
The roar of the gun paused occasionally, changing the belt of ammunition or swapping out a red-hot barrel. In those lapses, the Latino men sprinted forward, coming closer to the gun position. With every bound, the men not only got closer, but they spread out further around the machine gun, forcing it to traverse back and forth at an ever-greater arc, giving brief windows where the men could shoot back at the machine gun operators. Eventually, Latinos occupied an almost three-hundred-sixty-degree circle around the gun emplacement. The last hundred yards to the machine gun were taken in a single, mad rush.
The belt-fed swung madly, scything men down like an invisible blade. Eventually, the hundred fifty-round belt ran dry, and the pause allowed men to overrun the gun emplacement. The machine gun operators died, fighting hand to hand against fear-crazed Mexican gardeners, short-order cooks, and factory workers.
Bodies lay in a gruesome fan about the machine gun, piled behind bits of cover. Well over a hundred men had died, but only a few of Francisco’s Latigos gangbangers had been lost. Francisco sent in one of his lieutenants to figure out the gun’s operation and press it into service for the next assault.
In Francisco’s mind, the initial assault had gone off without a hitch. He had mostly lost only laborers—none of whom meant anything to him—and he had proven his battle strategy. They had taken the whites’ most powerful weapon, and he had only lost two or three Latigos soldiers in the process. He could keep this up all day and, by his best guess, he had already destroyed the bulk of the defense force.
While Francisco didn’t hesitate to spend men’s lives on his private campaign of thievery and power, he had been unwilling to place Gabriel anywhere near the battle. So he invented a safer mission for Gabriel. Francisco sent his brother and six men to recon the flank of the enemy. His mother would be inconsolable if anything happened to Gabriel.
As soon as the heavy equipment cleared the lowest barricade, Francisco got on the megaphone and ordered his men to march up the boulevard, heading toward the string of little mansions.
After a couple of hundred yards, his army slowed. A massive barrage of gunfire descended on them from the homes above. Even from a quarter mile below, Francisco could see his men dropping at an alarming rate. Francisco’s irritation rose. In his mind, he had already defeated the whites. Why did they insist on making this more difficult than necessary? Okay, then, he fumed, we’ll make them pay. And, if they keep this up, we’ll make them watch their women and children pay.
The gunfire from above proved too vicious even for his lieutenants and their hundreds of men. Panicked for cover, his men flung themselves over the downhill embankment, tumbling away from the fight. Some stopped their fall and climbed back into shooting positions; others rolled away from the fight, picking up speed. With few exceptions, when they came to rest at the bottom of the escarpment, the Latino conscripts gathered their wits and ran away.
“Shoot those cowards!” Francisco screamed into his megaphone, pointing at the handfuls of Latinos running back toward the city. Nobody could hear him except for the men hiding around the armored bulldozer where he stood. They turned their guns on the men running away, over six hundred yards down the hill, shooting half-heartedly in their direction.