Peter Nealen's Blog, page 34

LTUE 2017 After Action

The 35th Life, The Universe, and Everything conference, my second, has come and gone, and it was a blast.  I got to sit on a few panels, hang out with Larry Correia, Jim Curtis (OldNFO online), and a few others, chat briefly with James Minz (executive editor at Baen), and along the way let the gears turn, leading to several new ideas, refinements of old ones, and possibly get some new, or new-ish projects rolling.  (There should be audio of Kill Yuan forthcoming in the next few months, for instance.)

Most of the panels I was attending (as opposed to being a panelist), I was sort of half-listening, half letting the gears turn.  That’s how the back-cover byline for Lex Talionis changed halfway through the “Hook” panel.  Originally intended to be “The Hunters Have Become The Hunted,” which fits, but has been used before, it will now be “War And Politics Have Consequences.”

There were a couple of weird parts.  There was a member of the “Writing Action Scenes” panel, who will remain nameless, who asserted that video gaming provides the real experience of being in a fight.  (I may or may not have seen Larry twitch toward a double-handed facepalm at that one.)  Since I was in the audience and not on the panel, I can now say what I was thinking at the time: No, there is no corellation between videogaming and real-world violence.  No one should think that Call of Duty experience equates to being in a real firefight.

Such moments aside, it was still a great time.  And thanks to Larry, again, I now have to find reasons to use the term, “Skin suit full of lizards…”

Lex Talionis Chapter 7

By the time we hit the rally point, it was pretty obvious that things were threatening to spiral out of control.

Gunfire was echoing through the night, more intense than anything we’d unleashed yet, except for maybe the mad minute into Fat Boy’s safe house.  Red and blue flashing lights were clearly visible, as were the flames from something having been set on fire not far from them.  The local PD was in the middle of one hell of a firefight.  Given what I’d seen, I didn’t imagine it was a fight that they were remotely prepared for.

Even though it had been a pretty successful night, we were all pretty subdued as we gathered around the vehicles in a field south of town.  Granted, some of our silence was simply professional habit; once you’ve spent as long as we have running around hostile environments, outnumbered and generally outgunned, you don’t get loud and chatty very easily.  Some of it was because of fatigue.  There hadn’t been a lot of sleep since Jim’s death.

But some of it was because of the glances we kept shooting toward the clusterfuck on the edge of the East Side.  Those cops were in deep shit, if I was reading the noise right, and it was at least partially our fault.  Now, I would be the first to say that they had also brought some of it on themselves by going along to get along until it was too late.  But since they’d been responding to our bombing, I couldn’t help but feel just a little responsible for their predicament.

“Decision time, gents,” I said quietly.  “We can use that fight as cover to go after El Presidente, or we can hit the assholes who have those cops pinned down right now.  Either way, I expect that come tomorrow, the East Side is going to be far more non-permissive than it has been.”

“I’m pretty sure those are automatic weapons I hear,” Bryan said sarcastically.  “Aren’t those supposed to be illegal in Colorado?”  He spat.  “Fuck ‘em.  We came here to kill the shitstains who ordered the hit on The Ranch.  Let’s do what we came here to do and get the fuck out.”

“Colorado’s fucked up laws aren’t the cops’ fault,” Larry said.  “If it was Brett down there, wouldn’t we feel at least a little obligated to go lend a hand?  He would.”  Especially with Jim gone, Larry was generally the team’s voice of reason and compassion, such as he was.

“But that ain’t Brett down there,” Jack said.  “Jeff’s right.  We’ve got a choice between killing El Pres and finishing the mission, or helping the cops.  We won’t get a chance at both.”

I was torn.  And looking around at several of the faces, those I could see in the dark, I wasn’t the only one.

“If we hit El Pres hard enough and loud enough,” I said after a moment, “it will probably take more of the pressure off the PD than if we went in and tried to intervene directly.  There will also be less chance of a blue on blue.”  That was a real concern, and there were several nods in the darkness.  Let the already beleaguered cops see yet another bunch of armed guys come in and start shooting, and they might think we were just another bunch of bad guys.  I had even less desire to get shot or thrown in jail by the Pueblo PD than I did to end up shooting any of them.

I looked at my watch.  “Presuming he’s hunkered down like the rest of them, we should be able to get in position to hit El Pres in thirty minutes.”

“What’s the plan?” Eric asked with a bit of a dubious note in his voice.

I grimaced, though he probably couldn’t see it.  “No time to get fancy, but we haven’t got the numbers or the firepower for ‘hey-diddle-diddle-straight-up-the-middle, either.  Fuck.”

“It will take some more time, but maybe we need to just go a little more old-school,” Larry suggested.  “Like we did on some of the hits in Basra.”

That jogged a memory, and though I couldn’t really see his expression in the dark, I nodded, as the gears started turning.  It was simple enough, though Larry, Nick, and I were the only ones left of the Basra team, so there would be a little bit of explanation involved.  “We don’t have a lot of time to plan, but here’s the gist…”

 

“El Presidente’s” house was one of the larger residential houses on the East Side, a two-story white-painted bit of Americana with a covered porch and a bay window.  The picket fence around the back yard only added to the incongruity of it being used as a safe house for a cartel rep, particularly one that we had tentatively identified as belonging to the CJNG, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion.

We’d started calling the guy “El Presidente” because of the professionalism of his Personal Security Detachment, which was packing better weapons and gear than anyone else in Pueblo, including us, and most definitely including the Pueblo PD, along with the target’s polished appearance and general air of “better than you.”  He usually wore slacks and a nice shirt, with his hair immaculately coiffed.  He was definitely more of the “businessman” sort of narco, as opposed to the flashier Sinaloans or the really gleefully savage types, such as the cartel we’d systematically dismantled in Mexico, Los Hijos de la Muerte.

His outer security was still rather low-key, usually consisting of a couple guys in a car out front, and another two on the porch, during the day.  They might be there in the wee hours of the morning, too, given everything else that was presently going on.

As I strolled down the street, keeping to the shadows of the trees planted along the narrow, cracked sidewalks, I could still hear the shooting off to the southwest.  The cops weren’t giving up, though it did sound like it was getting more distant.  I found myself hoping that they hadn’t gotten themselves surrounded, and would just fall back to safer parts of the city.  It would get them out of our hair.

The truck was parked three blocks away, locked up, with my rifle and chest rig hidden in a duffel bag beneath a bunch of junk and detritus in the cab.  I had one of Logan’s little party favors slung under my jacket, with spare mags shoved into pockets inside the jacket and in my pants.  Being seen on the streets at three in the morning was one thing; most people in the East Side were more concerned with keeping their heads down, and wouldn’t ask many questions, even if they thought it was weird.  Being seen packing a long gun might alert the wrong people.

I had eyes on the target house, and the low, dark sedan parked out front.  I could just make out the shapes of two figures in the car, though they helped a little when one of them lit up a cigarette.  I was pretty sure it was a cigarette; every indicator we’d gotten so far suggested that El Pres wasn’t the type to condone drug use in his PSD.  So, it probably wasn’t a joint.  The loss of night vision due to the flame would be slightly offset by increased alertness thanks to the nicotine.

Keeping to the shadow of the tree, I scanned the streets.  I could just make out the shapes of the rest of the team, spread out in a rough L-shape to the east and north.  The rest were sticking either to tree trunks or parked vehicles.  A quick count confirmed that everybody was in position.  Time to do this.

I had taken the role of initiator, so, adopting as shuffling and drunken a gait as I could, I started across the street.  There hadn’t been time to change, so I wasn’t in full derelict mufti, like Derek and Bryan had been the night before, but I didn’t have to be.  There was certainly enough substance abuse going on in Pueblo for anyone acting drunk or high to be a relatively normal sight.

I shuffled and staggered across the street, tripped over the cracked, weed-grown curb, and almost fell.  In fact, I had miscalculated the act, and damn near face-planted for real, though I caught myself before the subgun could swing out of my open jacket.  That could have been bad.  I knew that if they were on the ball, those two sicarios in the car were watching me carefully.  Too much had happened in the last forty-eight hours for them to be too relaxed about anybody.

I kept going, veering off the sidewalk onto the gravel and weeds to either side.  The target house had a really shitty front lawn, more dirt, rocks, and weeds than grass.  It kind of detracted from the “Leave it to Beaver” look of the house itself.

Swaying, I pretended to almost fall over again, before overcorrecting and staggering toward the car.  As I stumbled once more, I let my hand go into my jacket and wrap around the submachine gun’s grip.  I heard a sneering comment in Spanish and a laugh.

Game time.

As I heaved myself upright again, I checked to make sure that I had penetrated far enough that my background was clear, and I wasn’t about to accidentally put a bullet into one of my teammates.  There was the chance that something would over-penetrate and hit the house across the street, but there really are only so many angles that can be called “safe” when you’re opening fire in a residential neighborhood.

The subgun came out of my jacket, hitting the end of the sling, the fiber-optic sights gleaming even in the dark.  I was only a step away from the car, and while they had been watching me and laughing, neither of the sicarios had gotten out, though their windows were rolled down to let the smoke out.  I could see just enough to see the surprise on the closest sicario’s face, just before I obliterated it with a four-round burst of 9mm hollow points.

His companion didn’t even have time to register shock as the contents of the first guy’s skull splattered all over him.  The other advantage of my position was that, instead of having to traverse the width of the car, as I would have if I’d opened fire through the windshield, I only had to move the muzzle a little over an inch to give Number Two the same treatment.  Dark, glistening liquid splashed out the open window and his cigarette fell to the street as his lifeless corpse sagged against the door column.

The entire assassination had taken about three seconds, and the only sound had been the clicking of the action and the faint tinkle of the brass hitting the rocks.

As soon as I was sure that both were dead, I spun around toward the house.  I did not want to get shot in the back because I was facing the wrong way after I’d just presumably alerted anyone looking out the window that they were under attack.

The rest of the team was closing in at the same time, sprinting across the street, even as I ran for the porch.  The usual daytime sentries weren’t there, but I wasn’t laying any bets that nobody else besides the two in the car were up and about, even that early in the morning.

Ben beat me to the porch by a half a step, vaulted the steps in a single bound, and hit the door without breaking stride.  His boot crashed into the door itself right below the knob, the impact shattering the glass and smashing the latch through the doorjamb.  The door slammed open with a crash, and I pushed Ben through the opening, my subgun up over his shoulder to cover him.

The lights were off, and we didn’t have flashlights attached to the subguns, for the simple reason that Logan hadn’t bothered to put rails on them.  They were throwaways, after all.  But we all had smaller handheld jobs in our pockets, and I’d been fishing mine out on the way up the porch steps.

Brilliant white light blazed in the darkened living room, blinding the two figures that were stumbling through the door to the stairs and the back hall.  They didn’t have a chance.  One of them tried to lift a pistol to shoot at us, blind or not, and Ben cut him down.  I was a fraction of a second behind Ben, from making sure the rest of the living room was clear, and put a five-round burst into the next guy, who was in the middle of tripping over his buddy’s corpse.  Between Ben and me, he took ten or twelve rounds to the chest and head.  He hit the floor hard, his ruined skull bouncing off the floorboards with an audible clunk, spilling blood and brain matter across the doorway.

There must have been somebody at the top of the steps, because there was a sudden loud, profane shout in Spanish.  I had cleared the doorway by then, and had stepped out into the room, closing out the angles on the single door that was now partially blocked by two bodies as the rest of the team poured in behind me.  On a hunch, I aimed high and dumped the rest of the mag through the wall and ceiling where I guessed the top of the stairs was.

There was a high-pitched scream of agony and the sound of a body falling down the stairs, even as I ripped the mag out and dropped it to the floor, reaching for another one.  Old boy was hurt, but still alive, as he was still making a lot of noise as he got to the bottom of the stairs.  Larry silenced him with a short burst.

A rapid series of shots roared down the stairwell, followed by a shotgun blast that did little but turn the already dead bodies further into bloody hamburger.  Apparently, whoever was up there hadn’t taken the lesson from the guy I’d shot through the wall, and was trying to dissuade us from coming up by shooting down the stairs.

Jack, Eric, and I lined up, lifted our weapons, and hammered a good twenty rounds apiece through the walls and ceiling.  Drywall was blasted to powder and splinters flew, but none of it was slowing the bullets down appreciably.  Another sicario came tumbling down the stairs, preceded by his shotgun, which made one hell of a racket bouncing off the walls and the banister.

We still had the advantage of surprise; they were still waking up and wondering just what the fuck was happening, just judging by the responses we’d seen so far.  But gunfire has a way of focusing the mind if the enemy has any breathing space.  The longer we stayed downstairs, the sooner they were going to come to their senses and start doing the same thing to us we were doing to them—shooting through walls that provided concealment but no cover.

With visions of Bob Fagin’s death in a similar situation in Iraq dancing in my head, I dashed for the stairs.  Without plates, I was running one hell of a risk, but it was either possibly die on the stairs, or almost certainly die on the first floor.  Speed was our security.

Jack and Eric, seeing what I was doing, poured another pair of long bursts up at the head of the stairs, providing me a little bit of covering fire as I bounded up the steps, two at a time.  Bryan was behind me; Larry and Ben had pushed into the kitchen, while Nick and Derek were posted up on the doorway, covering what might have been a bedroom.

Looking up, I could see that there was somebody at the top of the stairs, though they had ducked back from the hail of bullets tearing up through the floor and the wall, so they couldn’t see me, though I could just see their shadow.  It wasn’t going to be all that accurate, and in the old days I would have cringed at this sort of shooting, but I punched out the subgun and ripped a burst through the corner.  Drywall was pulverized and somebody hit the floor with a scream.

Jack and Eric’s fire ceased at the same time.  I went around that corner as I hit the top of the steps.  I was breathing hard and my legs were burning, but I never got through a CQB fight without feeling like I’d just run a marathon, so that was nothing out of the ordinary.

The stairs opened up on a hallway going back the other direction.  There was a door to the right and another across the landing to the left.  I faded right for a heartbeat, covering down on the door across the hall to the left just long enough to make sure I wasn’t about to get shot in the back, then stormed into the right-hand door as soon as I was sure Bryan was going to be on my ass.  I could feel the shudder of boots on the stairs as two more started up behind us.

Bryan and I burst into the small room, where a cheap, Walmart floor lamp had been switched on, probably about the same time that Ben kicked the front door in.  It looked like the room had been a kid’s bedroom once upon a time; there was colorful wallpaper still up on the walls.  Whoever was presently renting the house, however, hadn’t cared, and had just thrown a mattress, a couple of folding chairs, and a lamp into the room.

The room was otherwise empty; I guessed that whoever had been sleeping in there was either lying on the floor across the hall or dead at the base of the stairs.  I still crossed to yank open the closet, making sure there weren’t any little vatos waiting in there for us to turn our backs.  It was empty.

More gunshots roared across the hall, with softer, almost inaudible clicks sounding in reply.  The unsuppressed gunfire was painfully loud inside the house, even through three walls.

Bryan led the way out the door and across the hall, just as Jack and Eric appeared in the doorway we’d bypassed.  There was a tense fraction of a second as all four of us quickly IDed the men with guns across the hall, but nobody shot a friendly.

A glance down the stairs as we passed only showed the dead bodies at the bottom.  Larry, Ben, Nick, and Derek were otherwise engaged, but as long as there weren’t calls for help or more bullets ripping through walls or floor at us, I figured we were okay.  Our focus needed to be on the top floor for the time being.

Bryan led the way to the third room.  The door was shut.  Bryan rolled past it, turned his back to the wall, and donkey-kicked it just below the doorknob.

The doorjamb splintered.  The door cracked, and swung open a whopping three inches before whatever had been stacked against it provided enough friction to grind to a halt.

At the same time, there was a roar of automatic gunfire, and bullets smashed out through the wall and the door, filling the hallway with splinters and dust.

Bryan dropped flat on the floor; I didn’t know if he’d been hit or if he had just sensed the gunfire coming and hit the deck as soon as the door didn’t open all the way.  I lifted my subgun and ripped an answering burst through the wall, dumping the magazine as Jack and Eric came up behind me.

There wasn’t time to think, plan, or even to see if Bryan was all right.  If we didn’t get in there and kill that son of a bitch, we were all going to die in the hallway.  Hesitation was going to be fatal.  So, I moved.

I took one step over Bryan’s prone form and aimed a kick as high up the door as I could get, hoping to smash the hinges off the doorjamb and lever the door over whatever obstacle was inside.  It was not the first time I’d encountered a barricaded door on a raid.

Naturally, it didn’t work.  The jamb cracked a little, but my boot rebounded from the door as the painful shock of the impact traveled up my leg.  Eric had shouldered past behind me and was putting another burst through the wall just to give whoever was inside something to think about besides turning me to hamburger.

I could stand there and try to kick that door all day, and only buy the asshole inside more time.  So, I changed tactics.  I stepped back against the wall over the stairs and bull-rushed the door.

I hit it low enough and hard enough that the barricade slid on the carpet.  It still was heavy enough that it stopped me and the door a good two feet inside, but that was enough.

I was low, almost lying on the floor, my submachine gun aimed in the opening to the darkened room, somewhat lightened now by all the bullet holes in the walls.  I heard the ping of a spoon flying free as Jack tossed one of our few flashbangs in over my head, and closed my eyes.  This was gonna hurt.

A fraction of a second later, the bang went off with a deafening roar, painting an actinic flash on my retinas even through my eyelids.  Smoke filled the room, and I was pretty sure that something was on fire.  Meanwhile, Jack jumped over me, bulling the door a few inches further open as he went.

I had to stay down for a few more seconds, because Eric was already heading in after Jack, and if I stood up, I was going to trip Eric up.  As soon as he was clear, I scrambled to my feet and shoved the door the rest of the way open, even as suppressed gunfire tore through the room.

Something was burning.  The flashbang had somehow landed on the bed and set the covers on fire.  The rest of the lights were off, and Jack’s and Eric’s flashlights stabbed brilliant white beams through the drifting smoke, making the blood splashes against the drywall look particularly bright.

There had been three men in the room; two sicarios and El Presidente.  All three were now rapidly cooling piles of meat and bone.  The sicarios had gone down fighting; one had a pistol clenched in his hand, while the other had an AK.

El Presidente had not died well.  He was still in his underwear, huddled on the floor on the far side of the smoldering bed, unarmed.  If he’d been smart enough to stay down, he might have lived a few moments longer.  But he apparently had peeked over the top of the mattress just as Jack and Eric were doing for his bodyguards, and had taken a round right in the T-box.  One eye was slightly bulged out from overpressure, just below a gently smoking hole right over his eyebrow.  A sizeable chunk of the back of his skull was gone.

“Clear,” Jack said, his voice only slightly louder than normal, probably because of the ringing in the ears we were all experiencing thanks to the opposition’s unsuppressed gunfire.  His face was blank as he looked at the corpses crumpled on the far side of the room.  For all his sarcastic belligerence, which had earned him the callsign “Anarchy,” most of the time Jack did his damnedest to affect a demeanor of bored cynicism.  That extended to combat, as well.  The guy never got visibly excited.

Of course, few of us did, anymore.  We were all too old, too jaded, and too combat hardened.

I didn’t say anything but, satisfied that I wasn’t going to get burned down as soon as I turned my back, I went back to the door to check on Bryan, hoping and praying that we hadn’t lost him, too.

But he was already levering himself painfully off the floor.  He was alive, but I put out a hand to stop him before he moved too much.  “You’re bleeding,” I told him.

“I know,” he said with a wince.  “I got burned on my right trap as I went down.  It hurts like a motherfucker, but I’m all right.”

I ran my hands over him anyway, checking for bleeds or holes that he might not have noticed.  Aside from his shoulder, he came up clean.

“I love you, too, Jeff,” he said as I worked.

“Fuck you, Bryan,” I said.  I finished, got to my feet, and held out my hand to heave him up.  “Let’s get out of here before the hordes come.”

Fortunately, as we cleared out of the bullet-riddled house of corpses, there was no sign of any response, yet.  The shooting off to the west had died down; whatever had been going down between MS-13 and the cops appeared to be mostly over.  But it also appeared to mean that the Mara hadn’t had a chance to re-orient themselves to the hit going on deeper in the East Side.  We scattered to the winds, jogging away singly or in pairs, bombshelling into the fading night even as the first pale light started to grow in the east.

 

We didn’t link up again in Pueblo itself.  As soon as I got back to the truck, I sent a mass text to the whole team giving an RV point way out by the Pueblo Reservoir.  Our target deck was clear, at least for the moment.  I was reasonably certain that we’d eliminated the major players who had ordered the hit.  It should give our enemies pause while we got to work on a more strategic plan.

I knew on some level, even as we drove west, that what I had in mind wasn’t going to work.  There was no way to kill everybody who wanted us dead, not least when so many of them were powerful and violent men south of the border.  I hoped that we’d sent a message not to fuck with us on our home ground; we’d lost Jim and almost lost Little Bob, but we’d reaped a lot of souls in recompense.  But it wouldn’t stop the cartels, or the other assholes who had it out for us.

I didn’t have any answers, not then, aside from building the target deck and taking down enough big boys that they got the message to never fuck with us ever again.

I wasn’t going to have time to complete the plan, never mind put it into action.

More on Realism and Storytelling

This post, while following on from the last one, will be addressing a bit more of a broad problem across genres.  It’s gotten a lot more talk in the science fiction and fantasy genres (particularly fantasy) than it has in the thriller genre, but it still applies.

The fantasy version of this has been most recently highlighted by the work of George R.R. Martin, though there are plenty of authors working along a similar vein, which has been coined “grimdark,” a term that became at first something of a joke, based on the tag-line for the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop sci-fantasy wargame: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”  Taken to its extreme, it can become so ludicrous that it shades into “grimderp.”

The basics of “grimdark” is that everyone’s an asshole, life sucks, any victories are defeats in disguise, heroes are dupes, and only anti-heroes have a snowball’s chance in hell of success, though it would be better to be a villain.  Endings where the bad guys win, or the good guys’ (if there really are any such) victory turns out to be hollow, are considered “good” endings by this model.

This is, of course, a very basic rundown.  There are various shades across the spectrum; the Praetorian series would probably count as “grimdark” by some of the above rubrics (though I’ve tried to include good guys along the way; not everybody’s an asshole).

The problem is that this gets passed of as “realism,” when in reality, it’s not. And the thriller genre is as full of it as the SF/F genres.  How many thriller heroes are more anti-heroes, ruthlessly doing “what needs to be done?”  (Yes, I’m aware that Jeff Stone is pretty close to that archetype.  And he’s going to be doing some soul-searching about it in Lex Talionis.  Dan Tackett, however, I would argue is not.)

The Praetorian series is as dark and bleak as it is because it comes out of a particular set of circumstances, i.e., the general failure of the GWOT, and the chaos that it’s left behind.  There aren’t a lot of happy thoughts going through a veteran’s head when he’s reading the news and seeing places that he patrolled through and fought over, maybe even made friends with some of the locals in (Yes, it did happen.  Iraq as a whole might be a shithole, but there were plenty of the villagers who welcomed us, fed us, and begged us to protect them.), being taken by ISIS (or whoever the successor Sunni insurgency turns out to be), or the Taliban, or some similar batch of bastards.  But even so, nothing is ever 100% dark all the time, and not everybody is an asshole.

One of the greatest Recon Marines I ever knew, whose funeral I unfortunately had to attend in 2012, was also one of the greatest men I’ve ever known.  Not only was Dan Honor Graduate in every course he ever went to, but I can’t remember a time where he was ever surly or genuinely mean (aside from the usual team-room shit-talking that goes hand-in-hand with the profession).  While he was good at what he did, and took justifiable pride in it, he was, rather like Steve Rogers, “a good man.”

A better-known example would be Maj. Dick Winters, of Band of Brothers fame.  By all accounts, not only was Maj. Winters an outstanding combat leader, he was also a thoroughly decent man.

Some would argue that, say, Martin’s crapsack world of “A Song of Ice and Fire,” better known to TV viewers as “Game of Thrones” is more realistic in regards to the Middle Ages.  Except that that doesn’t fit, either, when there were knights such as Bayard who were equally respected for their courtesy and nobility by friend and foe alike.

None of this should be taken as advocating for Pollyanism.  Too often in thrillers we find the opposite problem, where the nuke is stopped, the day is saved, and everything goes back to normal.  Violence has consequences, and especially plots to blow up tens of thousands of civilians with weapons of mass destruction have repercussions.  Even the generally more personal violence found in heroic fantasy, or smaller-scale thrillers, has repercussions.  It is brutal, painful, and life-altering when it isn’t life-ending.  It shouldn’t be taken lightly.

The point is that there’s a balance.  You are trying to tell a story.  Justifying a cast made up entirely of unlikable characters doing nasty things to each other with no real conclusion isn’t “realistic.”  It’s lazy storytelling.

Authenticity vs. Reality vs. Story

A friend of mine just ran up against the fact that the research questions he was asking for an Unconventional Warfare story may or may not have run up against the brick wall labeled “Classified.”  As in, “You’re not supposed to know the answers to those questions, let alone put them in a book.  Stop asking.”  This got me thinking about a few things I’ve run up against as an author over the last few years.

There is a delicate balance that must be struck when telling a story, a balance between authenticity, the demands of reality, and the story you’re trying to tell.  My military fiction has been praised by some for its authenticity, since I have my guys use realistic tactics, using the terrain and what resources they have at their disposal to the best advantage they can.  I also try to include the various mishaps and turnabouts that happen in real-world operations, following a guideline that I came to in Iraq on my first deployment: “‘No battle plan survives contact with the enemy?’  Try, ‘No plan survives the first step outside the wire.'”  Misread terrain, bad intel, weather, enemy action, random local civilian action…all of the above can throw an op into a cocked hat, and that is something that I’ve tried to illustrate, along with some of the intensity and fatigue of firefights and the like.

I’ve worked some of the same elements into the Jed Horn series.  Even though it’s about fighting mostly made-up monsters and demons, I’ve gotten comments on how it feels authentic, just because the main character is human, doesn’t see everything coming, and gets his ass kicked a few times on the way to victory.

At the same time, there are ways that strict realism is neither desirable nor workable.  The first case is the aforementioned “reality.”  Some of the stuff that I could describe shouldn’t be described, for the same reasons that my friend couldn’t get his research questions answered.  The most obvious example in my own work is from my Author’s Note at the end of Alone and Unafraid.  I was deliberately making stuff up about the embassy in Baghdad, because the security arrangements there are not something that anyone who is not directly employed in them has any business knowing about.

On the other end of the scale is “story.”  The whole point to writing a thriller is to tell a rollicking story that people want to read.  If it’s authentic to the core and as boring as 90% of real-world military operations really are, then you kind of failed.  Some people (not many, but some) have complained about the pacing of the Praetorian books, that it’s unrealistic.  I could point out that I make mention of the long days of planning and bored watching of the objective that comes before the excitement, but apparently some people missed that, or were just looking for a reason to complain.  The fact of the matter is, yes, I do skip ahead instead of spending fifty pages on planning and gear prep before ten pages of action.  That’s why it’s a “story” and not “real life.”

 

Lex Talionis Chapter 6

Twelve hours later, aching with fatigue and sleep-deprivation, we pulled off and headed to another one of the myriad abandoned houses that we’d picked out as safe houses elsewhere in the city.

 

“Well, that’s interesting,” I said, looking around at the weary, grimy faces gathered in the shadowed living room.  At least, I think it was supposed to have been a living room.  It was just an empty space covered in dust and debris at that point.  We were keeping well back from the broken front windows to avoid being easily spotted from the street.  “Nobody saw any police response at all?”  I looked at Derek.  “I know you were monitoring their comm freqs.  Even the IED wasn’t enough to stir ‘em?”

He shook his head.  “They were aware of it.  Several calls came in, from locals and police units.  But there was no response from dispatch except to say, ‘Yeah, we know.’”  He shrugged.  “They knew that the wild goose chases I had them on were probably connected to it, too, judging by a couple of the responses to the bots’ 911 calls.  But they still didn’t lift a finger to go into the East Side.”

“That is very interesting,” I mused, scratching my beard as I stared at the map.

“I guess the East Side is more of a ‘no-go’ zone than we thought,” Eric said.  “Just like down by the border.”

“It’s more than that,” Jack said.  “It’s parallel governance, just judging by what we saw last night.”

I had to nod.  Parallel governance was an old concept, though it had really only started getting called that, or “shadow governance” in the aftermath of the COIN wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It was essentially a situation where an irregular force established its own, parallel set of laws and public services, in direct opposition to the local, legitimate government’s institutions.  We’d seen a lot of it in the Middle East.  Hell, we’d been part of it in Basra, before the alliance of militias that we’d helped push out the Iranian-backed Provincial Police Force turned on us.

Jack was right.  What we’d seen the night before, in the aftermath of the hit, had been textbook parallel governance.  Groups of gangbangers had descended on the target shortly after we’d gotten clear, and immediately taken control of the scene before starting to patrol the neighborhoods and search nearby houses and people, looking for us.  It had been characteristically brutal and sloppy, as one might expect from MS-13, but it had been crudely professional all the same.

“It might explain why the cartel reps came here,” Larry suggested.  “If MS-13 has firm enough control of the East Side, the underground had to know that it was the place to go if you wanted to contract them in the States.”

“Makes me wonder how long they’ve been in control here,” Nick muttered.  “If they’ve got the cops scared enough not to risk crossing them at all.”

“Doesn’t need to have been that long,” I mused.  “Look at what happened down south after Gila Bend.”  A very well-known—one might almost say “infamous” in certain circles—sheriff had been gruesomely murdered in the town of Gila Bend, after which local law enforcement in Arizona generally stayed out of the cartels’ way south of Phoenix.  “First, they start pushing other gangs, then they start offering protection to locals against them.  Then they start enforcing their own taxes and tariffs on the locals.  Kill a couple cops who get nosy, along with a few locals who might stand up to them.  For all we know, they deliberately staged it so that the locals called the cops, then had to watch the cops get murdered, before they killed the locals who called.  I’d be willing to bet that with as much anti-cop sentiment as there is floating around that the local PD decided it was better not to risk new riots over dead gangbangers and stay out.  The locals might not like having MS-13 run the show, but they’d rather that than getting gruesomely murdered for talking.”

“That would explain why we got fuck-all for intel when we first got here,” Jack said.  “They’re de facto loyal to the gangs because they don’t want to rock the boat, so they’re not going to talk to a bunch of outsiders asking questions.”

“Well, that means one thing,” Bryan said.  “We shouldn’t have to worry about the local cops getting in the way.  Open season, motherfuckers.”

“Not for a while, anyway,” I said.  “But I’d be hesitant to put too much faith in that.  Bombs going off or no, last night could be put down as an isolated incident.  Once we start really stacking bodies, that could very well change.  Remember, we found out the hard way that there are never only one or two factions at work once this shit starts hitting the fan.  We leave enough corpses in the streets, the Feds might get involved.  Then it’s going to be a different ballgame.”

“Getting back to the more immediate stuff,” Ben said.  “It does look like the targets just hunkered down and didn’t try to run.  They must be relying on MS-13 pretty heavily for their security.  We saw some extra firepower out on the porch where White Jacket’s staying, but he didn’t go anywhere.”

“Same here,” Bryan said.  “Slick stayed put.  There were armed men in the windows, but nobody outside.”

“Again, good news for now, but subject to change once things get hot enough,” I said.  “For the moment, I think we can essentially consider the East Side to be Indian Country, and the rest of the town to be a—relatively—safe zone.  That’s going to make it easier.  Let’s not get too comfortable and fuck it up, though.  Mara Salvatrucha might not control the rest of Pueblo, but I guaran-fucking-tee that they’ve got eyes everywhere.”  I checked my watch.  It was getting toward noon.  “Let’s bed down and get some rest.  At least five hours each.  Larry, since Jim’s gone, you’re ATL.  Set the watch up.”  I didn’t even choke when I said that, though I did feel my throat get momentarily thick.

“We’re taking White Jacket tonight,” I said, letting the hate burn out the grief.  “We’ll approach it a little differently.  I’ve got some ideas, but we’ll get to that at the brief.  For now, everybody get some shut-eye.”

I stayed up just long enough to work out the watch rotation with Larry.  I could tell it was bothering the big guy to be taking Jim’s job.  It bothered all of us.  It wasn’t like replacements were new, but something about this time just felt different.

After making sure I got the middle watch, giving the rest of the guys as much uninterrupted sleep as possible, I promptly crashed in the corner.

 

It was stuffy as hell lying under that dusty, probably moldy, tarp in the bed of the old, rusty Duramax.  I thought back to Basra, where we’d ambushed a bunch of Ansar al-Khilafah fighters in the cemetery.  We’d buried ourselves under a tarp in a shallow ditch and waited.  This wasn’t that much different.

I was behind my SOCOM 16, with the tarp carefully arranged to conceal me and the rifle, while still allowing enough of a peephole that I could see through the scope and shoot without too much blast giving away my position.  The tarp was still going to move when I fired, but then, this wasn’t a schoolhouse stalk, either.

For the moment, I was staring down about three hundred meters of empty street, my scope dialed back to widen my field of view as I watched the house where Jack and I had observed White Jacket and his cronies.  Or tried to, at least.  There were trees and other houses in the way, but I could still make out the cars in the front and the street was clear.  That was all I needed for this part of the hit.

“Anything moving?” Jack asked from the driver’s seat.  We had a hole drilled between the cab and the bed, so we could chat without having to raise our voices.

“Nope,” I replied.  “Looks like two guys in a car parked out front, but nobody seems to be moving around.  I think they’re still hunkered down.”

“Guess it’s time to get them moving, then,” Jack muttered.

Almost right on cue, the radio came to life.  “I’m in position whenever you guys are,” Eric announced.

I reached up carefully to dial up the scope’s magnification before tucking my off hand against the stock.  The rifle’s forearm was resting on a sandbag in front of me, and I’d taken the time earlier to get it well-seated.  Recoil would move it a little bit, but it was about as stable a shooting platform as I was going to get in the bed of a pickup truck.

I had to shift my position slightly to make sure as much of my body was behind the rifle as possible as I set the reticle on the first guy, the dude in the dark collared shirt buttoned all the way up sitting in the passenger’s seat.  It wasn’t a long shot, not by any means.  Hell, I’d killed a Somali militia leader at almost four times the distance a few years before, lying on the roof of a van.  But fundamentals are fundamentals.

Letting out my breath, my finger tightened on the trigger.  It broke as cleanly as ever, and the rifle boomed, painfully loud from inside the truck bed, in spite of the folds of tarp trapping some of the blast.  The flapping plastic cut off my view through the scope momentarily, but I’d known right where the reticle had been when the shot had broken, so I wasn’t too worried.  I just had to get my loophole back so that I could deal with the second guy.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long to get the tarp out of my way, and I focused in on the target car again.  As I’d figured, the guy I’d shot was sitting slumped in the passenger seat, behind the neat, spiderwebbed hold in the windshield.  He wasn’t moving.  If my shot call was right, I’d put the bullet right through the top of his heart.

There was no sign of the second gangbanger.  The driver’s seat was empty.  They must have been jumpy after the night before; old boy had bailed out as soon as his buddy got schwacked.

For a long moment, nothing else happened.  There was no immediate response to the killing, though I had no doubt that the surviving sentry had low-crawled his ass inside and was at that moment screaming at the rest of his eses that they were under attack.  They were probably arming up and getting ready to shoot back when the drive-by started.

But we weren’t playing the same game we had the night before.

My shot had been the signal to Eric, who had been crouched in an alley not far from the target house.  As soon as I’d fired, he would have started moving.

A flash was followed by a heavy, window-rattling thud and a boiling cloud of smoke rising into the evening air.  Eric had just tossed a grenade into the target’s back yard, and, if he was following the plan, was even then booking his ass away from the scene, hopefully in a different direction than he’d used on approach.

At first, there was still no response.  They had to be hunkered down, ears ringing from the blast, wondering just what direction the attack was really coming from.

I heard the rear window slide open, as Jack got himself positioned.  I’d initially wanted him to stay behind the wheel.  The driver drives.  If we needed to get clear in a hurry, the seconds it could take him to get turned back around could be the difference between life and death.  But he’d pointed out that I might be a good shot, but one rifle against however many vatos came pouring out of that house was probably not a good set of odds.

The quiet, broken only by barking dogs and surprisingly few people shouting, stretched out.  MS-13 must have really had that part of the city cowed, if that kind of violence went relatively unremarked and unresisted.  Of course, the other possibility was that we’d misread the situation, and these people were just too shocked by explosives going off in their neighborhoods to have the presence of mind to do much more than keep their heads down.

From what I’d seen, my money was on the first option.  I’d seen Mara Salvatrucha in action, more than once, and if they were operating this openly, without police interference, then they had to have spilled quite a bit of blood to make sure nobody got in their way.

The stillness dragged on, as the cloud of smoke and dust from the grenade detonation drifted down the street.  The local dogs were still barking furiously, but the neighborhood had otherwise gone silent, as the more vocal inquirers were hushed by the more cautious of their families, friends, or neighbors.  Whatever was going on out on the street, it wasn’t their concern.  Let the gangsters and narcos fight it out.

Finally, there was movement.  Half a dozen figures ran out into the street, scrambling into cars.  We were close enough that even in the low light, I could make out White Jacket, though he wasn’t dressed as fancily as he had been before.

Jack and I opened fire at almost the same instant, without saying a word of coordination.  The targets were there, it wasn’t a hard shot, and we went to town.

I started on the right side of the street, killing White Jacket’s driver with the first shot.  The tarp flapped with the muzzle blast again, covering the scope, and I hastily ripped it back so that I could see.  I could worry about concealment later.  Right at the moment, I wanted to make sure that we didn’t let any of these bastards get away.

White Jacket had ducked down below the seat backs, though he hadn’t gone down far enough.  I could just make out movement through the shattered windshield.  I pumped three more rounds through the seats before moving on.

Jack had already dropped the three who had crossed the street to the lowrider pickup parked there, so that just left one, and I couldn’t see him.

“Where’s the last one?” I asked.

“I think he’s hiding behind White Jacket’s car,” Jack answered.  He hadn’t had his visibility cut off by the tarp.  “I can’t hit him from here.”  He paused.  “You want to close and finish him off?’

I thought about it for a second.  After the night before, MS-13 was going to be descending on this neighborhood pretty quick.  And letting one guy survive to tell the tale might not be a bad thing.  “Nah, let’s get gone.”

“Roger.”  I heard him slide the back window shut.  A moment later, as I rearranged the tarp to conceal myself, he fired up the truck and started to pull away from the curb.

Another one down.  One more to go before morning.  There was still plenty of darkness to work with.

 

I hadn’t been wrong about MS-13 responding more quickly.  We’d hardly gone a block before I heard engines roaring and tires squealing.  I couldn’t see shit until they were past, but I tensed up.  If we were spotted, they were going to come after us, and we were going to have to fight our way out.  We could expect none of the niceties of even Middle Eastern cops, not here.  These were bad guys, and we would either go undetected, or we were going to have to kill them all.

I remembered Jim talking about the necessity of avoiding engagements that could be avoided, when the mission wasn’t just killing everybody.  They presented more points of failure, increasing the odds that the whole mission would go pear-shaped without being accomplished.

That thought just made me want to bang on the cab and tell Jack to stop.  I wanted to slaughter all those sons of bitches.  But Jim, or Jim’s ghost, was right.  That wasn’t the mission.  Not this time.  Kill the ones who gave the orders.  That was the mission, and killing a bunch of cannon fodder wasn’t going to get that done.  It would only tie us up and give the real assholes time to run for it.

It would probably get us all killed in the process, too, but my fixation on killing the ones who had killed Jim in our own backyard had shoved that to a secondary consideration.

If I’d had more time and inclination for self-reflection, I might have wondered why losing Jim had driven me to this point more than losing Colton, Hank, Rodrigo, Bob, Paul, Mike, or any of the others who had gone down in the years we’d been running around Third World hellholes killing people and breaking their shit.  Looking back, I could only figure that having it happen Stateside, on our own turf, had been the breaking point.

None of that was going through my head as Jack slow-rolled the Duramax around the corner, the lights out, then slowly accelerated away.  I just gritted my teeth, braced myself against the wheel wells, and started getting my mind on the next target.

 

White Jacket had been easy.  He’d had a relatively small entourage, and his safe house had been equally small and in a relatively quiet, dark neighborhood.

Slick was going to be another matter.

While he was by no means the toughest nut we had to crack in Pueblo, he had taken over a garage on the south side of Highway 96 as his safe house, and had a lot of sicarios with him, close to a platoon.  Deeper into the East Side, there were lots of shadows to hide in, alleys to slip through, and vehicles to cover our approach.  Slick’s garage had some long sightlines and a lot of open ground around it.  Getting close was not going to be easy.

Eric had nicknamed this guy “Slick” both because of his hair, which he wore longish and slicked back, and because he looked like he was more than a little wet behind the ears.  None of us actually thought he was.  He wouldn’t be representing a cartel this far north if he hadn’t done his bit.  Baby-faced he might be, but he was a made man, and probably had a lot of blood on his hands.

If we’d had more firepower along, I’d have been more than happy to launch one of those thermobaric RPG-27 rounds we’d had in Iraq into the garage and call it good.  We’d nailed an Iranian target in Basra that way.  As long as we hit the garage, nobody inside would be getting out.  They’d be cooked as the round mixed its fuel with the inside air and ignited it.

But we didn’t have RPGs or thermobarics, so we were going to have to approach this a little differently.

South was an open field, and Eric had spotted what looked very much like sentries on the perimeter.  East and west were residential houses, and there was a gas station across the highway to the north.  Our approaches were limited, and Slick’s security was going to be on the alert.

My first thought had been to do something not unlike our approach to taking White Jacket out.  Considering what we’d seen of Slick’s PSD, they were a little more arrogant and aggressive than some of the other gangs in the area.  My idea had been to stage a drive-by shooting, then ambush them when they came out and pursued.

Larry had pointed out the flaw in my scheme.  Given the events of the previous night, and the attack on White Jacket, word of which was probably going to spread quickly as MS-13 tried to lock down the East Side, it was entirely possible that the bad guys would refuse to be cocky, and would hunker down and wait for us to either come in after them, or for reinforcements to get there.  That would throw our entire plan sideways.

So, we came up with Plan B, which sort of wound up becoming Plan A.  Prep had taken a bit of doing; after all, we had come south with enough firepower and explosives to fight, not to get fancy.

Which was why I looked up at the ramshackle contraption that we’d thrown together in a couple of hours that afternoon with a certain amount of skepticism.

“I am still in no way convinced that this is going to work,” I said.

“Well,” Derek said, “it either works or it doesn’t.  There wasn’t exactly a good way to test it beforehand.”

“Oh, I know,” I replied.  Derek, Larry, Jack, and I were presently crouched in a darkened alley just about straight across the highway from the target garage.  Derek was putting the finishing touches on his latest monstrosity, while the rest of us held security and tried not to think of all the ways this plan could go very, very badly.

Plan A, or Plan B, or whatever it was called—Derek had started calling it Plan F U—was a flatbed with half a dozen 55-gallon drums of gasoline strapped down in the back, along with a few of the carefully rationed explosives that we’d brought south with us.  It wasn’t pretty, and it was going to be anything but precise, but it was the best we could come up with on short notice.  Call it a suicide truck bomb, hopefully without the “suicide” part.

“If this was a manual,” Derek continued, his voice muffled from where he was buried in the truck’s cab, “I don’t think this would even work at all.”  He grunted as he fixed the anti-theft rod to the steering wheel.  It should keep the truck from veering too significantly off course, though much of any kind of obstacle could still knock it aside.  “I’m still not sure we’re going to get enough speed going quick enough.”

“It just has to get through a roller door,” I pointed out.  “With as much weight as this thing is carrying, it doesn’t have to be going full speed.”

He reached up next to the steering column and turned the key.  The engine coughed to life with a roar.  “I hope those boys are ready,” he said, just audible over the noise.  “Thumbs up, let’s do this.”

Holding down the brake with all the weight he could put on it, he proceeded to wedge a brick against the gas pedal.  The engine roared even louder, and the truck started to inch forward, despite his pressure on the brake.

I reached up and grabbed him by the back of his chest rig, yanking him out of the cab as hard as I could.  I did not want Derek getting dragged along with that thing.  He still got a little banged up as the truck surged forward, catching his side with the door column as it rolled out onto the highway.

I barely caught him as he was knocked sideways by the impact, both of us staggering against the wall of the bicycle shop that flanked the alley.  “Ow,” he muttered.

The truck was trundling across the highway by then.  As Derek had expected, it was not picking up a great deal of speed, but at least it was still moving in a more or less straight line.  It drifted to the left just enough to hit the curb at the entrance to the alley that Derek had aimed it at, but bumped over it and kept going.  If anything, instead of getting hung up, the curb had actually corrected its course a little.

It continued to accelerate, smashing through a signboard before hitting the garage.  It wasn’t quite centered on the rollup door, but by that time it was moving fast enough that it didn’t really matter.  It pulverized the wall and the doorframe as it plunged inside the garage.

I hoped that it would run up against something solid enough in there to stop it, but I was careful with my timing, just in case.  Jack was still watching our six, down the alley, but Derek, Larry and I had spread out to cover the open parking lot between us and the garage, though only Derek and Larry had their guns up.  I had a small burner cell phone in my hand.

As the truck smashed its way inside the garage, I mashed the “call” button.

A lot of the pyrotechnics at air shows and in Hollywood movies are created by putting a small amount of explosive, usually TNT, in a barrel of gasoline and setting it off.  It produces a nice, big, impressive fireball, without a lot of frag or blast.  Given the nearness of residential houses, and our own relative lack of explosives, we made it work.

With a rolling boom, a roiling orange fireball blasted through the inside of the garage, licking out of every opening.  In seconds, the entire building was fully involved, a thick cloud of black smoke rising into the night sky.

Dropping the cell phone into a side pocket of my trousers, I brought my rifle up and watched for squirters.  A few shots cracked off in the distance; Ben, Eric, Nick, and Bryan were set up in pairs along a couple more avenues to pick off anyone who got out, or any sentries who were outside the building when the VBIED hit.  They were doing their work, but it didn’t sound like they had many targets.  I doubted anybody had gotten out of there, at least not in any condition to need a bullet.

It was a hell of a way to go, but war is hell.  They shouldn’t have come north.

In the distance, for the first time that night, I heard sirens.  I looked west, but couldn’t see anything.  Still, it sounded like they might be coming closer.  Maybe we’d crossed the line where law enforcement couldn’t look the other way anymore.

That was not a good sign.  I keyed the radio.  “Everybody pull off, regroup at One Two Seven.”  As always, we’d gridded out the city and set numerical reference and rally points to use over the radio.  We were encrypted, but there were a lot of EM sniffers out there.

The four of us turned and hustled down the alley.  We’d hit our targets for the night, but I didn’t think we were done.

I had a nasty suspicion that we were about to have to pull some cops’ asses out of the fire.

Reading List

I’ve had a couple of requests for a recommended reading list, largely for stuff similar to the Praetorian series.  I’ve also been asked about stuff similar to the Jed Horn series, just not as often (since Jed seems to have a slightly smaller following, that shouldn’t be surprising).  So, after a little thinking (and a little turning around to stare at the bookcases behind my desk), I’ve got a few recommended reads, fiction and non-fiction, that might fill the bill.

Non-Fiction

Secret Commandos, John Plaster

The Village, Bing West

War Story, and The Devil’s Secret Name, Jim Morris

First Recon: Second To None, Paul R. Young (Included here mainly because this was the book that first got me interested in Recon, and led to my Marine Corps career as an 0321.)

First In, Gary Schroen

Jawbreaker, Gary Berntsen

Hunting the Jackal, Billy Waugh

The Last Hundred Yards, H. John Poole (if you can find a copy; this was Poole’s first, and appears to be out of print.  The rest of his bibliography is well worth it for a good look at true light infantry tactics.)

The March Up, No True Glory, The Strongest Tribe, and The Wrong War, Bing West

El Narco, Ioan Grillo

Killing Pablo, Mark Bowden

McMafia, Misha Glenny

Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization, Michael Miklaucic (This one is big.  It’s a long read, and extremely detailed, but it was one of the formative pieces of research for The Devil You Don’t Know.)

The Bush War in Rhodesia, Dennis Croukamp

War Dogs, Al Venter

Fiction

This is going to be more of a hodge-podge, crossing lines of thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy.

Dead Six, Swords of Exodus, and Alliance of Shadows, Larry Correia and Mike Kupari

The Deckard Series, starting with Reflexive Fire, Jack Murphy

The PRIMAL Series, Jack Silkstone

The Countdown series, Tom Kratman

The Pike Logan series, Brad Taylor (Personally, I think the earlier ones were somewhat stronger, though I haven’t read any of the newer ones since No Fortunate Son.)

The Kolt Raynor series, Dalton Fury (RIP)

Hell and Gone, and Tier Zero, Henry Brown

The Profession, Steven Pressfield

The Ben Williams series, Steven Hildreth

The Task Force Intrepid series, Dan Tharp

Hammer’s Slammers, David Drake

The Monster Hunter International series, Larry Correia

The Dresden Files series, Jim Butcher

Iron Chamber of Memory, Awake in the Night Land, and Somewhither, John C. Wright (Actually, just buy everything the man has written.)

***

That should keep y’all busy for a while, at least until I can get Lex Talionis finished.  The list will likely expand as my own genre writing expands; this is a wavetops list, at best.  Once I’ve got some HF and SF out there, it’ll definitely get longer to include those genres.

Why I’m Branching Out

Some reflections on this subject have started, in part because of how long it’s taken me to get into Lex Talionis, in part because of a few of the reactions I’ve gotten to the announcement that the fifth book in the Praetorians series will also be the final one.  After all, my primary audience seems to be focused on the Praetorians, so why not keep telling stories about Jeff and Co.?

There are a few reasons.  For one, when I started the Jed Horn series with A Silver Cross and a Winchester, I found that I just needed a break, a different outlet for my mind.  That need hasn’t gone away, which is why I’ve been alternating between series and genres for the last couple of years.

I’ve also made the statement that I’ve put Jeff and his boys through some pretty harrowing stuff over the last four books.  I was starting to touch on how it was wearing on Jeff as a man (not a Mack Bolan superman) in The Devil You Don’t Know.  That’s coming out in spades in Lex Talionis.  Most real-world shooters only have so many years of running and gunning before they either go contract (which in real life tends to be far less eventful and far more comfortable than what the Praetorians have been up to), or get promoted into more administrative and logistical jobs.  Even before that, far more time is spent in training than in actual combat.  I’ve developed a (admittedly small) reputation for realism, if compressed realism, as Dave Reeder put it, and to not show the toll that the high-risk, low-support operations have put on these guys would be straining that realism to its breaking point.

The fact is also there that the Praetorian series was born of a particular mindset, coming out of the Marine Corps.  Not to compare myself to David Drake (The man is a grand-master.  I am an apprentice.), but Drake once said that the Hammer’s Slammers series was born of a mindset post-Vietnam that he really didn’t want to go back to.  I’m not quite entirely in the same boat, but I increasingly find myself thinking along somewhat different lines than I used to.  Some of this will be reflected in Jeff’s own internal journey through Lex Talionis.

I have found in recent months that there are some themes that I can explore through somewhat more fantastical and speculative genres and settings that are harder to get into in the military action thriller business.  I have found my muse drawn in that direction more and more lately.

Also, from a purely mercenary standpoint, the mil thriller market is dominated by big names that I simply can’t compete with in the indie market.  The likes of Tom Clancy (and his posthumous ghost-writers), Brad Thor, and Vince Flynn (again, posthumous ghost writers included) are the sure-money bets that Big Publishing will back, and they are the sure bets that most readers are going to pick up.  The indie thriller market is a very niche one, and it’s hard to get noticed in the shadow of the rest.  So, diversification offers more options and a broader audience.

None of this means that I’m abandoning the shooter genre.  There are more near-future war stories on the horizon, albeit with new characters and new problems that need to be solved through speed, surprise, and violence of action.

There just might be more stories coming out in other, less familiar settings.

Lex Talionis Chapter 5

The sound of pistol shots could only mean that things had just gone very, very bad.  Of course, being the East Side, we heard sporadic gunfire all the time.  If I had been inclined to wishful thinking, I might have been able to put it down to just another couple of gangbangers removing themselves from the gene pool.  But the timing, the direction, and the fact that the explosion we’d been waiting to hear hadn’t gone off yet, disinclined me to such hopes.  Bryan was probably dead, and our first diversion was a bust.

Strangely enough, I didn’t feel the surge of rage and frustration that I probably should have.  I was in the zone, game face on, and I just did what came naturally anymore when things inevitably fell apart.

I attacked.

“Go, go, go!” I yelled out the window.  Derek was close enough that he surged to his feet, though he had the presence of mind to lend the movement a drunken sway.  He didn’t rush the gangbangers down the street, either, though they turned toward us, having heard my shout without necessarily understanding what I’d said, or even where the sound had come from.

Nick started slow-rolling the van, keeping us to just under a walking pace, creeping up to our imaginary line of departure.  He kept the lights off; we didn’t want to otherwise draw attention to ourselves until either Derek dealt with the pickets or we had to intervene.

Derek was doing a workman’s job of looking and acting like one of the numerous derelicts wandering the streets of Pueblo, keeping his head bowed as he shuffled and swayed like he was crazy, smashed, high, or some combination of the three.

He’d almost made it another block, eliciting only the vaguest interest from the gangbangers, before a bone-rattling explosion rocked the night.  A bright flash lit the sky to the north, and all four gangsters suddenly turned to look.

Derek didn’t waste any time.  He suddenly abandoned his addled shuffle and sprinted forward, bringing his weapon out of his jacket as he went.

He covered the ground quickly; Derek was no slouch when it came to cardio.  Lean and hungry-looking, he ran a lot, and it paid off.  Before the confused gangbangers knew it, the bum who had been swaying and staggering along the sidewalk far enough away to not even be worth picking on was right on top of them, pointing what looked like a pipe with a handgrip at them.

In fact, that was, essentially, what it was.  Logan hadn’t wasted time or materials making the little subguns aesthetically pleasing.  They were essentially mutant crosses between Uzis and Sten guns, only slightly longer to allow for the integral suppressors.

Those suppressors were good, too.  Almost good enough to mourn ditching them, though Logan would just look at you funny and say it wouldn’t be that hard to make new ones if you said it.

There was hardly any noise as Derek brought the little bullet hose to bear and opened fire.  We just watched the four young men stagger under the impacts of the bullets, dark fluid splashing from exit wounds as they fell to the street beneath the streetlight.

It was a fast, professional shooting, as much as it might have looked at first blush like a gangland spray and pray.  Derek had punched the gun out to the end of its sling and held it tightly controlled, sweeping the stream of bullets across the targets’ centers of mass.  All four had taken at least two to three fatal hits in a single burst.

Nick didn’t wait to admire Derek’s shooting.  He just floored the accelerator, threatening to throw the flanker team in the back against the rear doors, and sent us roaring down the street toward the target house.  I heard Ben rack the 60’s charging handle, getting ready to lay the hate, and I brought my rifle to my lap.

We could see the front door of the target house already.  There were a couple of people out on the porch, looking in the direction of the explosion.  Not only that, but there were several other faces peering through nearby windows and doors, trying to see what had blown up.  We might have woken a few people up with our diversion, which meant more witnesses.  But it had had the desired effect of drawing attention away from the strike team, at least for the moment.  We’d hopefully sowed enough chaos that we could get in and out without too much interference.  Nobody was going to know what the hell was going on for a few minutes, anyway.

Nick braked smoothly just short of the house.  I didn’t even have to say anything.  Larry threw the rear doors open, and he, Eric, and Jack were gone.

Ben had rigged a strap so that he could release the latch on the sliding door and pull it open without having to get up out of his shooting position.  I heard the door roll back as we came parallel with the front of the target house.

I’d already had my window down; I didn’t feel like eating a bunch of broken glass if we took any return fire, and it made this part that much easier.  I lifted my rifle and pointed it out the open window, even as Ben cut loose.

Even with the door open and the windows down, that 60 in the confines of the van was loud.  It wasn’t just the stuttering roar of the gun, either; the muzzle blast was still inside the van.  The brake was right behind my seat, so I was getting the brunt of it around the seat back.

I got just enough of a glimpse of the two guys on the porch in the light of the flickering orange streetlamp to recognize at least one of them as one of Fat Boy’s security detachment.  Then they went down in a welter of blood as Ben hosed the house down at over five hundred rounds per minute.

I added pairs of shots to the quickly-shattered windows, but there really wasn’t much my rifle could do that the pig wasn’t already doing.  The M60E4 was made famous a few years back by an internet video in which eight hundred rounds were linked together and fired off on a single trigger pull.  That’s a lot of lead.  We didn’t have that long a belt, but I knew that Ben had linked quite a few boxes together; he didn’t want to waste time reloading.  The E4’s barrel could take it.

If Larry, Eric, and Jack were engaging anyone on the far side of the house, I couldn’t hear it.  I couldn’t hear anything but the ravening, thumping roar of that machine gun behind me.  Then, after just over a minute, the pig fell silent.

“I’m out!” Ben yelled, tossing the 60 to one side.  I threw my door open and followed my SOCOM 16 out, with Ben following, grabbing his own FAL off the floor.

Even as we vaulted onto the porch, passing the bullet-splintered porch posts and facing the smashed, bullet-riddled door that was now hanging off its hinges, I heard shooting from around back.  Most of it was still muted in my rattled hearing, which wasn’t what it used to be anyway, but I could still pick out the heavier booms of our 7.62 rifles opposed by the lighter pops and cracks of smaller caliber carbines and pistols.

I was about to kick the wrecked door in when Eric came around the corner, posted up on the porch, facing back the way he’d come, and bellowed, “SET!”

I hesitated.  If the flankers were being engaged badly enough to need to fall back, we didn’t have time to sweep the house.  We had precisely enough time to fall back to the van and make ourselves scarce.  If this went Blackhawk Down, we were fucked.  We couldn’t count on any friendlies in the East Side of Pueblo, and we’d deliberately made sure that law enforcement was a long way away—not that we were going to be seen as law-abiding citizens ourselves at that point.

Jack and Larry came pounding down the side of the house, even as Eric opened fire with a staccato series of controlled pairs.  Yep, it was time to go.  I rolled away from the door, yanked a frag off my chest rig, donkey-kicked the door in as I pulled the pin, and tossed the frag inside for good measure before slapping Ben on the shoulder and pointing to the van.  “Get in!” I roared.  “Go!”

Fortunately, I’d chucked that frag in pretty hard.  The building wasn’t exactly all that solid to begin with; otherwise hosing it down with machine gun fire would have been pointless.  As the explosion blew out the remains of the windows and doors, frag whistled through several of the bullet holes and punched some new ones of its own.  I felt a hot sting on the side of my neck, as a bit of notched wire came through the wall and scored me.  If I’d had the mental energy or time to think about how close I’d just come to blowing us all to bits, I might have gotten the shakes.  That probably hadn’t been a terribly good idea.  It had been born of haste, hate, and frustration.

Ben was already flying off the porch toward the open side door of the van, on Jack’s and Larry’s heels.  I followed, hoping that I wasn’t bleeding anywhere else, and that I hadn’t fragged Eric with that damned grenade.  He seemed to be doing all right.  I angled out onto the street behind the van, dropped to a knee where I could shoot past Eric while giving him a clear lane to the van, and lifted my rifle.

There were a few gangbangers back there, mostly spraying and praying around corners, none of them apparently willing to expose themselves more than absolutely necessary.  I thought I could see a few dark lumps on the ground that might have explained their reticence.  I cranked off three shots at the nearest muzzle flash I could see, then yelled at Eric, “Turn and go!”

He didn’t move right away, and I was drawing a breath to repeat myself when he glanced back, saw me in place, then turned and sprinted for the van.  I saw another head and what looked like a weapon appear down the alley, and cranked off another round.  The head vanished.

The van rocked as Eric got in, and then Larry was leaning out of the open rear door and yelling at me.  “Get in, get in, get in!”

There wasn’t any more fire coming from behind the house by then, so I got up off the asphalt and sprinted for the front.  My rifle banged off the door frame as I piled into the passenger seat, and I had to wrestle with it a second to make sure I could close the door, but Nick was already rolling before I even got the door slammed shut.

“That was interesting,” Jack said as we careened away from the target, rapidly leaving the neighborhood behind.  “Did one of us toss that frag, or did they have grenades, too?”

“I did,” I replied ruefully.  “I wanted to make sure of anybody left in the house, since we weren’t going to be able to sweep it.  Should have thought that one through a little more.”

“No, it was good,” he said.  “We were taking a lot more fire before that went off.  I think you scared ‘em.”

“Hell, it scared the shit out of me,” Eric said.  He didn’t sound nearly as ambivalent about it as Jack had.  “Dude, it was a stick house!”

“I know, it was stupid,” I replied.  “It won’t happen again.”

“It might have to,” Nick said suddenly as he checked the rear-view mirrors again.  “Let’s face it, if we’re going to make this work, we’re going to have to be crazier and more dangerous than the sons of bitches that we’re killing.  If we want to be safe, we need to head back to Wyoming and dig in.  And even then, I don’t think anybody in this van thinks that’s going to work for long.”

His words kind of hung in the air as we rounded another corner and kept going into the dark.

 

We picked Derek up about half a mile away; he’d made good time once he’d done his bit.  Nick pulled over just as Derek shuffled into the shadows of some trees in an overgrown yard, and Ben hauled him in through the side door.  I don’t think Nick actually brought the van to a complete stop before the door was sliding shut and we were rolling again.

“Head to Bryan’s RV,” I said quietly.  Nick didn’t ask questions, but just nodded.  It was still quite possible that we were wasting our time; Bryan’s part obviously had not gone according to plan.  It was entirely possible that the gangbangers had shot him, then accidentally set off the backpack while searching his corpse.  On the other hand, he might have been shot, crawled away, then detonated the pack.  If he was alive, he might not have been able to make it to the RV.  But we weren’t going to bail on him.  If there was a chance that he was still alive and at large, we were going to be there to pick him up.

It was a winding, roundabout route to get to the next RV.  We were steering well clear of the target area; that place was almost guaranteed to be crawling with bad guys by then, and quite possibly cops.  There was no way the local PD could ignore the explosions.  Or at least, that was what I thought.

Nobody said much.  There didn’t seem to be much to talk about.  I’d owned up to my own fuckup with the frag, and the rest of the team seemed satisfied.  After all, we knew each other, and had trusted each other with our lives in some pretty hairy places for a long time now.  “I fucked up, won’t happen again,” was generally accepted, as long as it didn’t happen again.

The silence was also fueled by uncertainty.  We’d already lost Jim.  Little Bob was in the hospital and in a bad way.  None of us wanted to have to either bury Bryan or leave him to be buried by somebody else.

It wasn’t as if we hadn’t lost people before.  The list was not short.  Of the original team that had gone into Djibouti, what felt like forever ago, Alek, Larry, Nick, and I were just about the only ones left.  Several had gone in the ground in East Africa, more in Iraq.

And the butcher’s bill just kept getting longer.

 

The rendezvous was at a park; it was a good place to loiter if you were trying to look like a bum.  There were quite a few huddled lumps of rags and dirty coats at the base of trees and lying on park benches in the light of the van’s headlights, which, by some miracle, hadn’t been broken by gunfire.

One of those lumps moved as Nick turned the turn signal on for exactly three blinks.  The lump stood up and strode toward the van.  Even before seeing his face, I recognized Bryan with a surge of relief.  He was alive, and, judging by the way he was moving, he wasn’t hurt.

Ben hauled the side door open again, and Bryan piled in, his lanky frame only adding to the crowding in the back.

“Well, that sure was fun,” he said sarcastically as the door slid shut and Nick started to roll out of the parking lot.  “Holy shit.”

“What the hell happened?” I asked.  “The boom was late, then we heard shooting and figured you’d gotten smoked.”

“I almost did,” he answered, reaching out to brace himself against the sides of the van as Nick turned us out of the parking lot.  Bryan’s callsign wasn’t “Albatross” for nothing.  “Those motherfuckers really didn’t want to play according to the script.  They were acting more like guys on security than gangbangers just loitering around the street looking for trouble.

“The first time I went past, they watched me but didn’t say anything.  Didn’t yell, didn’t try to stop me, didn’t even act curious.  Which, of course, kinda fucked the entire plan.  So, I went around the block and tried again, this time getting farther out into the street so I’d pass closer.  I figured if worst came to worst, I’d toss the pack at their feet and run.  Maybe I could get far enough away and set it off before they came after me.”  When I turned around in my seat to raise a skeptical eyebrow, he just shrugged.  “Hey, it was a thought.  I’m not saying it was a good thought, but it was a thought.”

“Tonight seems to be the night for that,” Eric commented.  Bryan shot him a quizzical glance, but then shrugged again and continued his story.

“Anyway, the second time around they must have gotten suspicious, because one of them yelled at me.  They all pulled guns and started toward me.  I thought this was a good sign, at first; I figured they might rough me up a little, take the pack, then shove me away and tell me to get lost.  Instead, they start pointing their guns at me, and telling me to get on my knees.

“Needless to say, I thought that this wasn’t good, but since they were all watching me, I just cowered and did what I was told.

“Fortunately, one of them got kinda impatient.  He yelled at me to toss my pack, so I did.  I gave it a pretty good swing, too.  By then I kind of figured that they were going to search me a little more thoroughly, and since I didn’t want them to find my gun or the detonator, while the pack was in the air, I drew down and started shooting.”

“You mean the shots we heard were yours?” Nick asked.

“Best damned shooting I’ve ever done,” Bryan said.  “I’m still not sure how I pulled it off.  Four shots, four kills—or at least all four of them were down in the street and not shooting me in the face.  I booked it out of there, and hit the detonator once I was far enough away.  Then I E&E’d for the rendezvous point and hunkered down until you guys showed up.”

There were some muttered comments, but nothing of real operational significance.  I think at that point, it was really starting to sink in to all of us that we were flying by the seat of our pants more than normal on this op.  It was somewhat sobering, offering to put a chill dash of reality on the flames of rage and vengeance.  We’d dodged a bullet twice that night, and the night wasn’t over.  We were going to have to calm down and start stepping more carefully if we wanted to get through this alive.

“All right,” I said, loudly enough to be heard in the back.  “I know I don’t really have to go over this, but we’re not going to have a lot of time once we get clear, so I’ll hit it anyway, to make sure we don’t skip anything.  Once we stop, the van gets sanitized, weapons and gear gets put out of sight, everybody gets changed over, and we split back into buddy pairs and get out to our surveillance points as quickly as possible.  We just kicked the hornet’s nest, and we need to see as much of the reaction as we can before we can properly plan our next moves.  Nick and I will handle ditching the van, then we’ll get out to our spot.  Any questions?”

There were none.  We’d already gone over the details in the initial planning, even before meeting up for the brief earlier that night.  Nick pulled up to the old, ramshackle abandoned house that we’d picked out as the refit area, and we piled out and got to work.

 

Only a few, hectic minutes later, Nick was back behind the wheel of the van, heading southwest on the 78.  I was following in the beater Jeep Cherokee that we’d be using for the rest of the night.  He kept driving until we were far enough into the desert that ours were the only two pairs of headlights in sight, then he pulled over to the side of the road, parked, and shut off the engine.  I pulled up behind him, dousing my headlights as I did, just as he got out of the driver’s seat, chucked the keys off into the desert, and jogged back to the Jeep.   He climbed in, shucking the black nitrile gloves off his hands as he did so and tossing them in the back seat.

“We’ll have to dispose of those, too, you know,” I said as I pulled a U-turn and headed back into town.

“I’d be more concerned with the duffel bags full of guns, ammo, and explosives in the back,” Nick pointed out, “than with a pair of black rubber gloves lying on a black carpet.”

“I guess you’ve got a point,” I replied.  “Especially in Colorado.”  Most of our long guns and all of our mags were illegal in that state, which was part of why we had our base of operations in Wyoming, not Colorado.  That alone was a good reason to avoid getting pulled over, though we had a short window of time to get to our position across town.

We’d just offed a cartel rep in the middle of what should have been relatively safe territory.  There were two possibilities as to what would happen next.  Either they would tighten security and start to watch each other more closely, in which case we would watch and take notes, tailoring our plans to deal with the rest of them accordingly, or they would run like rabbits, in which case we were going to have to move fast to make sure we got a few more of them before they disappeared.

Either way, one thing was certain.  One dead Fat Boy was not enough of a message.

You kill Praetorians, you pay the bill, and that price tag is pretty fucking high.

Life, The Universe, And Everything

No, that’s not a lead in to a Douglas Adams joke.  Though it could be.

Life, The Universe, And Everything is a writer’s conference in Provo, Utah, mostly concerning Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I first went last year, and ended up having a blast, in large part because I got to hang out with Larry Correia for a good chunk of the three days, as well as meet Steve Diamond, who runs Elitist Book Reviews.

I’m going again this year, and this time, I’ll be a panelist.  Self-published or no, having eight books out means I can sort of coherently talk about some of this stuff, so I’ll be on four panels, discussing several aspects of writing in the genres I dabble in.

On Thursday, Feb 16, at 1300, I’ll be on the “Modern Warfare” panel, along with the creator of the Dead Six series and my co-author on “Rock, Meet Hard Place,” Mike Kupari.  My reason for being on that panel should be self-explanatory to anyone who’s read my stuff.

At 2000 the same day, I’ll be on the “Convincing Conflict” panel, since “conflict” seems to be the primary characteristic of my fiction.

On Friday, I’ll be on the “Military Culture” panel at 2000, again with Mike, as we enlighten those who haven’t been in the Green Machine as to the manifold uses of creative profanity and the drawing of dicks on everything not nailed down (and some things that are nailed down).

Then, on Saturday, at 1700, I’ll be on the “Apocalypse vs Dystopia” panel, since the Praetorian series can be said to be fairly dystopian.

I’ll also be signing books on Friday evening.  Not planning on the gala though.  Too cheap.

So, if you’re in the Provo area that weekend, it’s $45 to attend.  If not for me, it’s at least a chance to get to see Larry and Mike and a bunch of other awesome authors.

Might Need To Spend Some More Time Here…

So, by way of Brian Niemeier’s blog, I was pointed to this blog post by Nick Cole:

http://www.nickcolebooks.com/2017/01/11/platform-you-need-one/

Now, for those who are unfamiliar, Nick Cole got dropped from his publisher for, apparently, purely political reasons.  That’s not a problem I have, so far, faced, in large part because I’ve been entirely indie from Day One.  Where I have run into a problem is that I don’t really have a platform, aside from Amazon’s algorithms, which really only work for you if you’ve already sold a lot.  (Insert something about vicious cycles here.)

So, in light of Nick’s advice, and since Facebook is hit or miss (mostly miss, if my numbers mean anything), I’ll be making an effort this year to blog a bit more.  Can’t guarantee that it’s going to be every day, but at least a couple times a week.  I don’t intend to let it get in the way of novel writing, and I frankly can’t say what exactly I’ll be covering.  I’m a better storyteller than I am a blogger.  It might get fairly random, though I fully intend to stay the hell away from politics as much as possible.  That stuff’s poison, and I don’t need any rage-induced aneurysms, thank you very much.  (For one thing, that would mean that you, the reader, wouldn’t be getting any more books if that happened.)