Chapter 116: Old Men Trip Sometimes
The cultists didn’t have a chance.
They had been part of the group harassing our perimeter—firing potshots at the men from a concealed position. They were holed up in a narrow flood-control ditch that ran along the edge of town, now repurposed into a crude trench. The elevation drop and earthen banks gave them good cover, and they made the most of it, keeping our defenders pinned near the church.
They didn’t know we had circled behind them. Their attention remained locked on the church and the soldiers dug in around it. That was their first mistake.
I had taken the ten-man escolta with me for the flanking maneuver. Ten was small enough to move swiftly and quietly, but still large enough to mount a counterattack if anything went wrong.
We were crouched about ten meters from the ditch, behind a nipa hut raised slightly on bamboo stilts. Its walls were thin and brittle, and the roof sagged under years of sun and rain. The space beneath it was cluttered with firewood, a pile of discarded tools, and a few clay pots.
From the cover of the hut’s wall, Sargento Guzman leaned out. Without a word, he raised his rifle, aimed at the nearest fighter, and fired.
The crack of the shot echoed down the alley.
The cultist was hit square in the forehead just as he was slotting a bullet into his rifle. The round in his hand dropped with a light clink onto the pile beside him. His body slumped forward, limp, against the trench wall, head lolling at an unnatural angle.
The two others beside him spun around in confusion, but they were cut down instantly. Two of our men fired in quick succession. The bullets tore through the enemy’s thin cover of grass and wood, hitting center mass. The cultists collapsed without firing a shot.
Their blood mixed with the murky ankle-high water in the ditch, flowing in streaks along the canal’s length.
I wasn’t watching the ditch. My eyes were on the second-floor window of a nearby bahay-na-bato. It had a clear line of sight over the field where we now stood. Earlier, that was where the enemy snipers had pinned down Roque and killed one of the younger recruits. I had been keeping watch on it even before we moved in.