An Undeclared War (Countdown to Armageddon Book 4) (5 page)

     He froze in the doorway at the sight of Joyce’s body, laying on the floor betw
een Hannah and his mom. She looked almost serene and peaceful. Were it not for the ugly red hole in the top right side of her forehead, it would have been easy to think she was merely napping.

     Tom’s voice on the radio brought him back into focus.

     “Zachary, gather everybody’s empties and run them down to Sara. Sara, can you reload them from the box of ammo next to the desk?”

     “Yes.”

     Zachary did as instructed and Scott, listening to the mayhem, began to get an ominous feeling in the pit of his stomach.

     Everyone involved in the firefight had either spoken on the radio, or were addressed by name.

     Except his fiancé, Joyce.

     John, in the driver’s seat beside him, seemed to read his mind.

     “Hang in there, buddy. Everybody’s coming through this just fine.”

     And John felt just a little bit ashamed that he felt a rush of relief when he heard his wife Hannah’s voice on the radio a few seconds before.

     Both men, as well as their two friends in the back seat, hoped that their mounting suspicions were unfounded.

     Scott keyed his mike again.

     “I don’t know if you can hear me now, we’re about four, maybe five minutes away. Hang in there.”

     This time the signal was stronger. Everyone was able to make out Scott’s words through the heavy static.

     The cavalry was almost there.

-7-

     From Tony Pike’s point of view, things couldn’t have gone more wrong. He’d gathered plenty of additional bodies to go with him, with the promise every man would share equally in the women and the livestock.  

     He’d made sure they were well armed and carried plenty of ammunition. He made sure the druggies weren’t high and the drunks were sober.

     He’d thought he’d be smarter this time by attacking during the daytime. Their previous excursions onto the property had been at night, when it had been pitch black. He figured that attacking in daylight was bold enough to catch them with their pants down.

     Hell, he expected most of them to be asleep, so they could be up during the hours of darkness to fend them off again.

     It didn’t work out that way. He was hoping to get all of his men into position, scattered in the heavy brush on three sides of the house and along the fence line, before the shooting even started.

     He’d even briefed his men, “Don’t go doing anything stupid, like firing before we’re all ready. Once we’re in position, I’ll fire the first shot. That’ll be everybody’s cue to open up on all the upstairs windows.”

     From the beginning, his plan fell apart. They had been spotted by a sentry on the north side of the house.

     It had been that sentry who’d fired the first shot.

     Then all hell broke loose. Marut had gone down with the first shot, with a wound in the knee that almost took his leg off. Most of the others had no discipline at all. Instead of making their way to their planned positions, they scattered in all directions.

     Pike had even see
n one stupid bastard cut and run full speed back from where they’d come. Pike had watched him as he dove headlong into the pit the old man from the compound had dug, obviously not knowing it was full of punji sticks.

     He hoped the deserter was dying a slow and miserable death.

     The rest of his men were all over the place. Most of them were dead. From his vantage point on the front of the house, hidden in heavy brush, Pike was periodically able to peek out. He’d seen a leg sticking out from behind a dead mesquite tree that hadn’t moved in ten minutes. Over by the fence he could see a body face down in the dirt.

     Behind the Bobcat was O’Hara, half his head gone, his dead face leaning against the side of the machine’s body as though giving it a macabre kiss.

     The worst error he’d made was assuming the house wouldn’t be fortified. He thought it would be a piece of cake, killing the men inside, just by focusing their fire on the upstairs windows where the shots were coming from.

     After all, how long could a shooter
in the window come under fire before his luck ran out and he caught a bullet?

     It wasn’t until the shooting started, and the first few shots shattered the windows, that they could see the thi
ck barrier of plywood inside them.

     The plywood was pockmarked with dozens of bullet
holes now. But still the rifles came peeking through the firing ports every few seconds to rain more death down upon them.

     “Shit!” he’d heard Gonzalez
shout a few minutes before. “How thick is that wood, anyway?”

     They had no way of knowing, but the five sheets of half inch plywood was doing a very effective job of catching their bullets. It would continue to do so for a long time to come. It took a lot of gunfire to shred two and a half inches of plywood.

     They also didn’t know, had no way of knowing, that several of their shots did indeed penetrate the house through the firing ports. All of them lodged harmlessly in the ceilings of the upstairs bedrooms.

     All of them except for one, which tragically ended Joyce’s life.

     Despite the chaos, though, Pike knew he wasn’t the only one left alive. There were periodic gunshots coming from the south side of the house, in the woods to his left. He saw at least one of his men along the north side of the high back fence. He knew that Gonzalez was in the brush about forty yards to his left.

     It wasn’t over yet.

     But it soon would be.

     He’d been spotted, and a bullet whizzed over his head.

     “Oh, crap!” he said as he low-crawled twenty yards farther south, in the general direction of Gonzalez.

     “Gonzalez
, you there?”

     “I’m here, you son of a bitch. You said this was going to be easy. I
ought to shoot you my own damn self.”

     “Let’s try this. Pick a window. As soon as we see a rifle come out of it we’ll both unload at the same time. One of the bullets is sure to hit ‘em. We can pick them off one at a time, instead of sitting down here waiting to die.”

     By now it was apparent to Gonzalez that Pike wasn’t the tactical genius he thought he was. But he had no plan that was any better. And they were presently pinned down. So Pike’s idea was better than nothing.

     From their positions they could see the windows on both the north and east sides of the house. They were
twenty yards apart, so their bullets would fly from two different angles. But that was probably a good thing. Bullets coming from two different directions would have a better chance of hitting their targets.

     “Okay. Which window you aiming for?”

     “First window on the right side of the house.”

     “Okay.”

     Tom had backed away from the firing port, in the shadows of the room. He couldn’t be seen from the outside, he hoped, while he scanned the area outside through his rifle scope looking for movement.

     Finally, a hundred yards northeast of the house, he thought he caught a patch of blue in the thick shrubbery.

     A pair of blue jeans, perhaps?

     He moved back to the firing port and placed the barrel of his rifle into the port. His intent was to rise
up and aim his sight in the general area of his target, then disappear for a few seconds before rising again, sighting in, and firing.

     But he didn’t have time to do that. As soon as the barrel of his AR-15 went throug
h the firing port, he was subjected to a barrage of bullets. He kept his position, ducking down below the port, hearing and feeling the bullets striking the outside of the plywood barricade inches from his face. One bullet came into the house and shattered the globe on the ceiling fan, spraying shards of glass all over the room.

     In the other bedroom, on the east side of the house, Linda was able to see smoke and movement coming from the same stand of brush Tom had sighted. Now she, too, knew where some of the aggressors were hiding.

     After firing fifteen rounds into Tom’s window, Pike and Gonzalez held their fire. Surely one of their shots had found its target.

     “Okay. Now to the other side of the house. First window.”

     “Got it.”

     Linda didn’t know what she was in for when she rested the ba
rrel of her own weapon on the bottom of the shooting port. She was in the process of raising up to find a target through the scope when her weapon exploded in front of her.

     The first bullet
Pike fired caught the right hand guard beneath the rifle’s barrel, exploding it into a dozen pieces. One of them flew through the firing port, opening a gash on the top of Linda’s head and knocking her back.

     Her hands were still on the stock of the rifle, and she pulled it back out of the window as she fell backward.

     She fell in a heap across Joyce’s body.

     Hannah cried “Oh, my God!”
loud enough to be heard throughout the second floor of the house.

     Linda was in considerable pain, but had enough presence of mind to know that her sons would hear Hannah’s words and think the worst.

     “I’m okay!” she shouted. “But I’m out of commission.”

     She looked at Hannah and said, “You’ll have to take over, sweetie.”

     Linda moved out of the way and Hannah picked up Linda’s weapon. The bullet that shattered the hand guard disintegrated into the barrel itself. The barrel appeared to be bent, and the rifle was now worthless. She was smart enough to cast it aside and pick up Joyce’s weapon instead.

     While the fusillade of bullets was focused on Linda’s window, Tom had taken the time to fire two quick rounds at the patch of blue he’d seen a couple of minutes earlier. Then he cleared the window again, knowing that staying in the port too long would be deadly.

     Since he couldn’t make out his targets in the brush, he had no idea whether he hit anything. But he noted that the shots fired at Linda’s window didn’t slow down any, even after his own shots were fired.

     He didn’t know he almost got lucky, and that his second bullet whizzed a mere two inches past Tony Pike’s left ear.

     Over the radio came Scott’s frantic cry. “We’re on Highway 83 nearing the cutoff to Tom’s place. We’ll be right there.”

     Hannah looked at Linda. She was applying direct pressure, but her
wound was bleeding profusely, as head wounds always do. But it was a flesh wound and nothing more.

     Linda saw the concern on Hannah’s face and said, “I’m okay. Really. Let’s take care of this problem first, and you can give me some stitches later.”

     Tom yelled from the other room.

     “Okay, the
y seem to be getting smarter out there. Let’s just lay low and wait for our reinforcements to get here.”

-8-

     All went quiet. It seemed that a brief cease fire was a welcome relief to both sides. In the house, Linda left the bedroom just long enough to get a towel to press against the gash in her forehead to try to stem the bleeding. 

     Hannah chewed her out, saying that she could have had someone bring the towel to her.

     Linda said, “Everybody’s busy doing stuff far more important than this. I’m a tough old bird, and I’m not nauseated or dizzy. I’ll be fine. I just wish my hands weren’t covered with blood so I could load your ammo for you.”

     “Don’t worry about the ammo. You just lay there and keep pressure on that wound. I’ve got plenty of ammo loaded.”

     Outside in the brush, Tony Pike took the break in the battle to try to reassess his situation. They had no radios, and could only communicate through word of mouth. The problem was, only he and Gonzalez were within earshot of one another. Farley was on the far side of the black wall, on the south side, unsure what to do. He’d been directly below Jordan’s window when Tom rained down the storm of bullets that killed Moran on the spot. One of the bullets took Farley’s ear almost completely off, went through his cheek, came out of his chin and lodged in his forearm.