Both vehicles made it around the curve—though the teenager almost wrecked along the way—just before machinegun fire split the night on the other side of the fields.
Brannigan, Jenkins, Pacheco, and Quintana were already moving up into the trees when Bianco opened fire. The Negev’s ripping roar was readily identifiable, compared to the heavier and slower thudthudthud of the PKMs or M60s that the Green Shirts mostly seemed to be using.
A moment later, Bianco’s fire was answered. First one, then two PKMs opened up, and Brannigan looked through the trees just in time to see green tracers pouring into the woods on the side of the road where Bianco had set in, just before Bianco’s fire went silent.
Oh, hell. Not Vinnie.
Curtis opened fire from about halfway up the hill, pouring his own stream of tracers toward the glow of the headlights, but it was almost futile. The Green Shirts’ gun trucks were still behind the arm of jungle that stretched down on the east side of the cornfields from Curtis’ position. Curtis was pouring fire into the jungle, hoping that he hit something on the other side.
Brannigan paused, even as Jenkins and Quintana kept going. Pacheco noticed and slowed, looking back at the big mercenary commander.
Brannigan looked back toward the road where Bianco had been set in. Every fiber of his being screamed at him to go down there and pull Bianco out, dead or alive. But a moment later, the first of the gun trucks came roaring out into the cleared section of the road, the M60 mounted in the back spitting flame, raking the cornfields with red tracers.
The policemen threw themselves flat, all except for an overweight man named Muñoz. His back arched as bullets punched through his spine and his lung, and he fell on his face against the next terrace, sliding down to roll on his back, his eyes staring sightlessly at the thin clouds moving in over the night sky.
Curtis shifted fire, raking the truck as it skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, and the incoming machinegun fire momentarily slackened. But then the next truck back hove into view and added its own fire, beating down the cornstalks and sweeping the terraces with a deadly rain of bullets.
For a moment, the Blackhearts’ fire died down to nothing, as those not already in cover crawled toward the treeline and some semblance of cover and concealment. Cornstalks waved as they thrashed through the fields, but the gunners down below weren’t so much aiming as they were spraying fire all across the open ground, either trying to suppress or just hoping that enough volume of fire might hit someone. That was the only reason no more of the Blackhearts or their allies got hit.
With Curtis silenced, the first gun truck opened up again, adding its fire to the second’s, even as two more trucks rumbled up behind them, stopping on the road and letting more Green Shirts with rifles and submachineguns pile out.
Then a shot from up above, near the house, suddenly silenced one of the gunners. That had to be Wade. It was quite a shot, given the lack of lasers or optics and the near-impossibility of using iron sights with NVGs.
“Move! Get up the hill and get cover!” The loss of one gunner had only made the Green Shirts intensify their fire, pouring bullets up the hill toward the house. Sheer numbers gave them fire superiority, and soon every one of the Blackhearts was pinned down, flat in the dirt and cursing their chest rigs for keeping them a little bit higher off the ground.
This was not going well.
Then Burgess yelled something from up behind the house and opened fire. Brannigan couldn’t see where, at first, but then the flickering muzzle flashes in the jungle to the east, up on the ridgeline, told him all he needed to know.
***
Bianco returned fire for a moment, half-blindly, spraying another long burst down the road. Tracers sparked off the one vehicle he could see clearly, forcing the gunner back behind a tree, and giving him a momentary breather. But the second vehicle’s gunner responded almost instantly, raking his position with more accurate fire, and Bianco snatched the Negev to his chest as he rolled down the slope and off the road altogether. More machinegun fire chased him, but he was below the lip of the road and in cover.
Rolling to his back, he got his feet under him and skidded a couple of yards down the narrow draw where he’d set in. This wasn’t a great position—they’d needed to stop the convoy cold, but it hadn’t quite happened. Of course, the Green Shirts had to have expected contact, given what had already happened, so this wasn’t a huge surprise.
Unfortunately, the terrain and the timing had limited the Blackhearts’ contingency planning. Now Bianco found himself in the low ground, packing a belt-fed light machinegun, with only a limited number of options.
He was on the wrong side of the road, and now there was a linear danger area, covered by enemy fire, between him and the rest of the team. The sides of the narrow draw he’d ducked down were relatively steep—the only easy ways out were up to the road or down into the valley below—and covered in more thick vegetation. He had to either fight his way out or run for it and try to circle around again.
The gunfire
