“Slow your fire, QRF One. Slow your fire,” Jeff called over the radio, knowing his teams above had to be running low on ammunition.
“Jeff,” the QRF commander spoke over the radio. “We’re bingo ammo. I’ve called for resupply, but they’re five minutes out.”
Jeff answered on the radio, “I’ll be dead in five minutes.”
“Roger. Making it happen.” Tim’s anguish came through even over the tinny radio. Jeff pictured the battle from Tim’s point of view. They had cover and high ground. They had been killing enemy as fast as they could pull the trigger without any substantial risk to themselves, until they ran out of ammo.
“Tim. This is Jeff. Consolidate ammo and wait for my command. Repeat. Hold fire. Consolidate ammo and wait for my command.”
“Copy, Jeff. Awaiting your command.”
Jeff did a quick inventory of his little team behind the barricade. As far as he could tell, he hadn’t lost anyone, and he believed he was full-force. The battle had lulled, everyone waiting for the slow-moving heavy equipment to make its way into position.
The rumble down the road turned to thunder as two of the four armored vehicles appeared above the rise in the blacktop. Dozens of Latino men jumped up from the down-sloping side of the road and ran behind the pieces of heavy equipment, using them as cover to advance. Short on ammo and under orders to hold fire, Jeff’s QRF above held.
Behind Jeff, the two men he’d sent away earlier crouched, cradling four bulging, thick-ply trash bags filled with lawnmower gas. Jeff waved two more men over, knowing he would shortly sentence them all to die.
“Each of you take one of these trash bags. You’re going to sprint straight at those front-end loaders, and you’re going to hit them on top with these trash bags. Do not throw early. Make sure you’re right on them before you throw. This is the only way your families live. Do you understand?”
A shadow passed over each man as realization dawned; he would die in the next five minutes. One by one, they nodded, saying nothing.
“Wait for my order. Again: do not throw early. Do you understand?” Again, they nodded.
Jeff had sent men to die before. The calculus of battle demanded it. No matter the rising flood that threatened to choke his throat and drown his eyes, Jeff knew he mustn’t feel—mustn’t hesitate. He shoved that part of him deep down and turned his gaze to the battlefield, mostly to avoid looking at the dead men kneeling by his side.
As the trundling machines neared, Jeff made rough calculations. How close were the machines? When would his men have the greatest amount of cover?
In a last-minute panic, Jeff shuffled through his chest rig, pulling out magazines one after another, dropping them on the ground. Eventually, he found one with red-tipped ammo—incendiary tracer rounds for night fighting. He dropped the mag out of his Robinson, slammed the tracer mag home and racked the slide.
Almost too late, he looked up to see the armor bearing down on them. Jeff grabbed his radio.
“QRF One. Commence firing. Repeat. Commence firing.”
“Roger.” Three seconds later, the QRF on the bluff opened up on the men stacked behind the front-end loaders.
“Go.”
The four men leapt up from behind Jeff’s barricade and ran full-out. Rifle fire from the armored boxes behind the drivers’ cages shifted toward the rushing men, dropping one of them within twenty paces.
Jeff’s three remaining men ran directly in line with the cages where fire couldn’t reach. QRF One on the bluff tore into the enemy crouched behind the armor, dropping a dozen men and forcing the rest to shift around to the downhill side of the front-end loaders.
Amazingly, three of Jeff’s men made it within five yards and tossed their bags full of gasoline. One of the bags hooked on a magazine stuffed in the man’s pocket, dousing the man with gas. He stood in the road with his hands furiously rubbing his eyes until he was gunned down.
The other two bags slapped against the front-end loaders, one each, exploding gasoline out of the mouth of the bags, drenching the roof, sides and tires. Both men turned and ran for cover. One of them took several rounds in the chest.
Jeff unleashed a hail of tracer rounds, shooting past and around his final man, who was running straight at Jeff and the barricade. The incendiary rounds touched off the gasoline and both armored vehicles burst into flames. The men hiding behind the armor leapt back from the burning machines, many more of them falling to the hail of bullets from the bluff. Others ran into the homes beside the road, seeking any cover they could find. Jeff’s man reached the barricade and slipped into a flesh-grinding slide behind cover.
The tires of the armored vehicles began to burn briskly, licking up into the drivers’ cockpits, where wires, plastic and fluids began burning as well. Both drivers and gunners burst from their metal boxes, attempting to shoot their way out of the death trap. Jeff’s men riddled them with bullets and one man fell from the front-end loader directly on his head onto the pavement.
The battle lulled again as the surviving Latinos took cover in the homes, controlling houses on both sides of the boulevard now. The gangbanger army, burrowed into the McMansions on both sides of Vista View Boulevard, turned their attention to QRF One on top of the bluff. The Latinos with scoped hunting rifles found places within the homes where they could shoot from concealment—windows, door frames and fences—and they started firing carefully at the elevated shooting positions of QRF One. Tim lost two of his men to head shots before radioing Jeff.
“Jeff, this is Tim. Over.”
“Go ahead.”
“We’re taking casualties from the road. I’ve lost two men in the last five minutes. They’re shooting from those homes in front of you with big rifles. It’s a pretty even fight and they have a lot more men than I do. What are your orders?”
Jeff could no longer force his enemies into the funnel of death up the boulevard. Now they would be fighting house to house, and Jeff knew his forces couldn’t sustain a war of attrition.
The low rattle of the two remaining armored vehicles forced Jeff’s hand. “All units. This is Jeff. Pull back to barricade three. Repeat. Pull back to barricade three. And, for the love of God, where’s my fifty-caliber?”
“Jeff. This is Winslow. I’m moving into position over barricade three. ETA three minutes. I had to get the fifty from the top of the ridge. Almost in position.”
“Do me a favor,” Jeff radioed back. “Be a damned Marine and kill those two tanks, please.”
“Roger that.” Winslow signed off.
A thick column of inky smoke rose behind the screen of McMansions up the road and around the corner from Francisco. He tore at his hair, anxious to know what had happened around the bend. He had sent in his ultimate weapons—two of his four pieces of armor—and the black smoke worried him to distraction.
He tried to contact Crudo and his other lieutenants over their radios. He had more than five hundred men stacked half-way up the hill, infuriatingly inactive, waiting to advance. Francisco had no idea what was holding them up.
His forces had definitely taken ground. They had fought through the barricade at the bottom of the hill, but something had brought them to a halt half-way up the mountainside and Francisco couldn’t see what it was. As if to punctuate his frustration, the sun peeked over the mountaintop and stabbed Francisco’s eyes. The harsh sunlight blotted out the softness of the fall morning, as if to say the honeymoon was over for Francisco and his men. The Latino army would fight it out in full daylight, and to Francisco, the harsh sunlight felt like a message: the easy victory had eluded him again. Now he found himself in a serious fight.
How was he supposed to succeed without knowing what was happening? How could he lead his men in battle without any reliable way of commanding them?