A state of disobedience (34 page)

The third and subsequent pairs . . . 

"Arrrgh! Jesssuuus!"

"That motherfucker did it on purpose!" screamed one of the four, only four, men of the chalk who had landed safely. The other nine had, much to their surprise and chagrin, discovered that the rope ran out about seventy feet above the ground. Both surprise and chagrin had been brief phenomena, rapidly replaced by panic-stricken shrieks. The shrieks, too, had subsided very quickly as the men, by twos, had slammed into the hard-packed ground. These now lay in crumpled heaps—dead or very badly injured.

The angry survivor raised a rifle as if to fire at the helicopter. Only the door gun, pointed unerringly at his chest by the door gunner, dissuaded him from firing.

That gun never wavered as a chuckling Warrant Officer Harrington pulled pitch to go back for another load.

It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now . . . snickered Harington, silently. Just wait til Top Henry hears about this. Now how the hell do I explain my way out of this one? Oh, I know . . .  

Harrington keyed a microphone on the general frequency. "All flights inbound the objective area, be advised, we have some high winds gusting over the roof. My bird was blown off position about fifteen or twenty feet while I was fast-roping some people in . . . it was pretty ugly." He looked back at the target building and smiled.

"Motherfuckers," repeated the PGSS man as he watched the helicopter recede into the distance.

"Never mind that," insisted his leader. "We'll fix that asshole after we take the building. Now, help me carry this breaching charge."

With that those four survivors, plus the others landed nearby, raced for a place believed to be sheltered from any explosives the defenders might push through the roof. There, they began to lay out a doughnut ring full of shaped plastic explosive.

Bullets caromed off walls with malevolent cracking sounds before continuing on their half-spent way farther into the building. From a sandbagged shelter Pendergast fired nine short bursts from his rifle before pressing the magazine release and seating a new magazine. Farther back and below, a bloody hand snaked out to grab the spent magazine as it bounced. Empty magazine retrieved, the wounded guardsman who had grabbed it attached a small device and frantically force-fed more rounds, in ten round clips, into it.

From behind, a man with a blood-streaked face crawled into the bunker with Pendergast and the other. He reached a distracting hand to Pendergast's shoulder. "Sergeant Major . . ." the troop gasped out. "They're on the roof . . . I mean through the roof . . . all over . . . we ain't gonna hold 'em. . . ."

Pendergast looked from the newly arrived troop to the other.
Both wounded pretty bad. And I can't leave here.
 

"Can you make it to Major Williams, son?"

The newly arrived soldier gulped unconsciously and nodded.

"Go then. Tell him. Tell him we're holding okay here too . . . but I don't know for how long."

New-filled magazine seated in the rifle, the sergeant major turned back to the serious business of discouraging unwanted guests.

Williams helped ease the bleeding and exhausted soldier to a chair as he digested the news. Reaching a sudden decision he looked around the command post.
One junior lieutenant, a sergeant, James . . . and a number of people whose eyes just became much wider in their heads.
 

"Jimbo . . . take over here. I'm going to go try to seal the breach in the roof."

Captain James nodded weakly, then began to pull himself to a sitting position. Ordinarily he should have stayed in the makeshift infirmary . . . yet he had insisted his place of duty was here in the CP. His eyes wandered to a curious device with four playing cards, blue pattern printed, attached to it.

"I can do this. Go," he half whispered.

Williams saw where James' eyes had come to rest. He drew his pistol from its holster with his right hand, grabbed the company guidon with his left, then ordered, quietly, "Do it then. Take over. The rest of you"—a hand swept in the other eighteen or so men in the room—"fix bayonets and follow me."

Smoke filled the air in the upper half of the unblocked corridor, causing the necessarily tight little knot of troopers following Williams to have to crouch half bent over.
Somewhere, some portion of the building must have caught fire
, mused the major.
Might help; might hurt. No telling.
 

From nowhere, seemingly, a rifle-bearing man in the black battle dress and helmet of the PGSS appeared. The agent appeared confused as much as anything. Possibly he was in shock, as sometimes happens with soldiers in sustained, close and vicious combat.

Williams raised his pistol, took two steps towards the disoriented agent, aimed and fired. The bullet entered the victim's head having passed squarely through the bridge of his nose. Both eyes were forced out of the man's head even as his brains scattered across the light green painted wall behind him.

Waving his pistol forward, Williams repeated the refrain, "Come on; follow me."

The smoke grew worse, chokingly worse, as the group ascended a broad flight of stairs. "Don masks," Williams ordered, though he knew this would not help if the fire—wherever it was—had sucked all the oxygen from the air. "Forward."

From chokingly thick with smoke the air soon became a gaseous morass of blinding fumes and sooty embers. Williams could see precisely nothing. He felt the tension and fear of uncertainty emanating from the men following him.

"Nothing is good," he whispered to himself.

"Sir?"

"We can't see, right?"

"No, sir . . . not a goddamned thing."

"That means they can't see either, right?"

"Yes, sir . . . ohhh."

"Right. We've been here before. They haven't. Let's go . . . quietly. And remember; we have this corridor booby trapped about fifty yards ahead."

Onward they crept, silently. Ahead were shouts and orders. None sounded quite like Army standard. Nor were the accents, in general, quite right.

"Bayonets only," ordered Williams, wishing he had one himself; that or a good sword.
Oh, well, the guidon will do for a spear.
"Come on . . . and once we hit 'em? 'Keep up the skeer.' "

Williams holstered his pistol and reversed the guidon, gripping it firmly in both hands. Then, with a fierce toothy grin, sharklike, he advanced.

The first PGSS man was taken from the rear. Concentrating on some problem up ahead, that man never heard the stealthy approach of the Texans.

Williams' eyes registered neck-to-buttocks Kevlar and decided that the only way in was right through the aramid fibers. He drew the guidon back a bit, then with an open mouthed, predatory glare he drove it forward, all of his bodily weight and strength behind it. The sharp point of the ferule touched the tightly woven fibers and slid slightly until reaching a small space where two of them met. The point parted these, parting likewise the next several layers. A small flange on the ferule hung up on the fibers. No matter, the point only penetrated three inches into the PGSS man's back—missing his spine by several inches—but the force of the thrust, along with the surprise, knocked the wind from his body. He went down, gasping for air.

Williams, on the point, pressed onward. Behind, another of his men tore the helmet from the fallen PGSS man, half strangling him in the process. That guardsman then proceeded to beat his victim's skull in with his own helmet.

Bayonets slashed; rifle butts crashed. In moments the corridor had turned into a swirling orgy of struggling, screaming, cursing and fighting men.

And then it was over. Williams saw the last actively resisting enemy physically picked up by a bayonet point thrust under his armor and into his groin and then tossed, screaming, upon the tangled and matted up wad of barbed wire that had been blocking the corridor. He released the corpse of the man he had strangled and looked around. The guidon was broken in two, though the smoke was too thick to see more than the kindled upper half of it. To his right another guardsman was rhythmically cursing as he raised his rifle over and over to smash it downward into the red paste face of what might have been a PGSS
woman
. All the others were gasping for breath except for two who had had their own masks torn off in the fight and were choking and vomiting as they frantically attempted to reseat their masks.

A headcount revealed there were four Texans dead or so badly wounded that they could not go on. No one bothered with a headcount for the PGSS as they were very dead indeed.

Williams grasped the remnant of the guidon in his left hand, redrew his pistol with his right, and ordered, "Forward," while pointing the pistol up a broad stairwell.

They met the enemy—the next wave of the enemy—as they were coming down the very stairs the Texans were going up. This time, with fresh men facing worn ones, with momentum on the side of the PGSS, and worst of all without the surprise that had made the previous encounter such a relatively easy victory, the Texans could not win.

Yet they died hard. Williams met the first of the PGSS' thrusting bayonets with a sweeping block from the guidon. Then he plunged his pistol forcefully into the soft spot under the jaw of the bayonet wielder and pulled the trigger to create a shower of brains, blood and red-speckled bone.

To Williams' right a Texan went down to a bayonet thrust that just cleared the man's Kevlar collar before plunging seven inches into his neck. Williams swept his pistol rightward but a rifle-smash from the PGSS blocked his arm, hurling the pistol away.

Undeterred, Williams plunged in. Dropping to one knee, he used the dullish spearpoint of the guidon to pierce the thigh of one likely target. He heard a dull, muffled curse then lunged through the forest of flailing legs to come to grips with his foe.

Crenshaw felt the piercing point as a wedge of fire burning rather than cutting into his leg. It did not slice the muscle so much as it tore it asunder. The pain was so great that he could barely mutter a curse before losing control of his body. With an unintelligible, agonized gasp he fell to the stairs.

His eyes rapidly lost focus as his brain tried to deal with the pain. His fuzzy near view was blocked by a tangle of legs as his far view was by the smoke, and the ex-Marine could not truly see the clawing hyena that tore its way up his body in a desperate effort to reach his throat.

"Hh . . . Help," he barely squeezed out. "Help me."

No need; as the Texan clawed his way upward four PGSS bayonets drove downward. Crenshaw breathed a sigh of what would have been relief had his thigh not been so horribly gored.

As he began to pass out, he heard someone . . . His XO? He wasn't sure . . . yet someone shouted for a medic and to "get the captain the hell out of here. And no quarter!"

Williams barely noticed as his life's blood drained away, barely noticed the dozens of booted feet trampling him on their way past. Behind and below him he could, dimly, make out the sounds of his soldiers going down with a bitterly hard fight.

He thought, We needed more men . . . we could have held if we'd had more men . . . the rest of the battalion . . .  

Then, without a whimper, he died.

His breath coming short and harsh, Tripp felt the exhilaration and the terror of impending combat. Around him, ahead of him . . . but mostly behind him, his battalion's tracks began to turn over, one after another. The soft whine of the tanks' engines was lost amidst the thunderous roar of the Bradleys' diesels.

Just ahead of Tripp stood a lone police car from the Santa Fe Police Department. The officer standing beside the patrol car looked expectantly upward. Tripp nodded, slowly and deeply. The officer jumped in, started his sirens, and began to lead the battalion forward at a fast clip.

Useful that that cop decided to attach himself to us, thought Tripp. No telling what accidents we might have had with civilian autos crossing our path at every intersection. 

Civilian bystanders, drawn by the sirens, came out to watch the battalion's progress. A few, understanding, cheered.

The column raced on, the leading police vehicle changing the lights by remote control at each intersection.

Tripp's mind wandered to that portion of his men cut off in Fort Worth. He thought that it would go hard on them when the PGSS assault finally went in, very hard . . . terminally hard.

This isn't really war, is it? Tripp asked himself. Do the rules even apply? To people that gunned down helpless civilians and outgunned state troopers. Fuck it; today they don't. 

His eyes steel cold and determined, Tripp keyed the radio by flicking a switch on the right side of his helmet. "Battalion, this is Black Six. The rules do not apply to these murderers. No quarter."

Crenshaw found himself sliding in and out of consciousness with neither pattern nor control. He remembered sharp pains, at times. At others he could recall only a dim foggy ache. He managed to turn his head to one side.

More broken toys like me, he thought. There seemed to be a lot of pain going around, much moaning, many screams. Why don't we have enough medics to treat the wounded? Didn't they know we would have wounded. Where are the helicopters, the dust-offs? 

Turning to the other side, Crenshaw saw black-clad men, more and more of them, ascending what had to be flexible ladders anchored on the roof and dropped over the sides of the building. Unable to turn his head very well, he lost track of those men as they cleared his field of vision.

His vision blurred, dimmed. Crenshaw passed out.

The Surgeon General's Riot Control Police had plenty of warning, both immediate, from the siren, and more long range, from a few sympathetic reports.