The Crisis

by David Poyer

  And above them, gathered in a ragged line, the milling, faceless biped amoebas that could be identified no more closely than as human. Dan conned back and forth between the image, the overlay, the paper map. The overlook wasn’t that high. Ten, fifteen meters.

  But made to measure for an ambush. Once into the pinch, the convoy was committed. Pick off the lead Humvee with a rocket-propelled grenade, and they could shoot up the thin-skinned trucks at their leisure. If the civilians fled on foot, they’d be lost in the desert, miles from water or help. Many of the aid personnel were in their fifties or sixties, volunteers who’d finished one or two careers and gone out to the wastes of the Third World to give back.

  But who were these onlookers? If he could just catch one clear image. If it were only daylight. But of course, they wouldn’t attack in daylight. In the constantly jerking scramble of motion he caught one queer frozen image. A blurred figure, head tilted back, hesitated between craggy rocks. Was that an RPG it carried? Or sticks picked up for a fire?

  Would women be out this late picking up firewood? Not from what he’d seen of Ashaari society. They kept close to home after dark.

  Complicating everything was the village. It lay north of the road, on another slow slope upward. No gunship fired straight down. Grazing fire was most efficient, impacting at a shallow angle to the terrain. Because of the convoy, they’d have to fire south to north.

  Any overshoot or ricochet would put high explosive in the village.

  His fingers raced over the keyboard, querying both the lance corporal flying the UAV, miles to the west, and the duty force J-2, the intel weenies, four terminals away. Answers glowed on the screen. Unsure, possibly hostile. The J-2: Probably hostile. Dan hesitated, fingers poised, brain searching for certainty.

  There was no certainty.

  The fog of war lay thick over the battlefield.

  On the screen, a bloom of incandescence. The lead vehicle careened off the road. Small figures detached from it and staggered back toward the body of the convoy. Dan frowned. What was going on? He’d seen no flash of heat from the gaggle on the hilltop. A rocket motor put out thousands of degrees and an immense backblast. He switched channels, put the convoy on one ear, the AC-130H on the other, processing visual, double audio, and at the same time keeping half an eye on Ahearn. Voices streamed through his head, text scrolled, images blurred. He hovered above the battlefield like a god of war, the finger of death pointing where he willed.

  Nothing was in his hands. Everything was in his hands.

  He felt immense doom, immense responsibility. His heartbeat expanded as his mouth went dry. He fought for the rationality that had come before in battle. But this didn’t feel like battle. He didn’t know what it felt like.

  Something like cold steel chilled his back. This was the war of the future. Where machines and computers watched, judged, executed from afar. What Admiral Contardi and Dr. Fauss were striving to perfect. It felt not just inhuman, but antihuman. Not antiseptic, but profoundly evil.

  From the stream of frenzied voices he plucked IED. An improvised explosive device. Something about a pile of debris that had concealed something less innocent.

  “Those insurgents?” The raw-onion odor of Ahearn’s sweat, his breath in Dan’s ear.

  “That’s the consensus. But they haven’t made a hostile move yet.”

  “Blowing up a Humvee’s not a hostile move?”

  “In charge of movement called that as an IED.”

  “So that was what they were watching for.” Ahearn looked at the wall clock.

  Dan said, “But maybe not.”

  “What?” The general switched his attention back.

  “They might not know about the IED. And there’s the village.”

  “Range?”

  “Six hundred meters. Easy for a ricochet from a 105.”

  Ahearn studied the screen; then him; then the screen again. “In ten minutes we won’t have the Spectre. If they turn hostile then, we lose everybody in the column. Take them for action, twenty-millimeter only, as high an angle as possible.”

  His right ear: “JOC, Spectre control. Locked in awaiting fire order. Eight minutes.”

  Dan licked his lips. The massive aircraft’s guns were tracking as it swung in its miles-wide orbit. The targets had been laser ranged. Only three words were necessary to destroy the shimmering creatures on the screen.

  Most likely, hostiles. But maybe not.

  The hell of it was, there was no way to tell. No way to be sure.

  He knew by now, midway through his existence, that evil was the inevitable result of ignorance multiplied by power. Even as human beings attempted to do good, the outcome was all too often bloody.

  He cleared his throat again and forced out, “Spectre Control, JOC: Jockey 05, cleared in hot.”

  “Video from Jockey,” a disembodied voice announced. In front of the room the screen flickered and changed, to another image, like that from the UAV, but steadier. It seemed to be from a low light sensor rather than from IR, for the figures were more detailed. Dan even caught the shaded blur of an upturned face. But he still couldn’t tell age or sex, only that it was lifted, sensing perhaps in its last moment of existence that it was observed.

  The picture shuddered for a second. Two seconds later intensely bright specks bloomed to the right of the blobs, turning instantly to dust clouds. Some of the specks flew off the top of the screen. North, toward the village.

  The specks moved to the left, over the blobs, and suddenly pieces detached. They seemed to fly apart, like overripe tomatoes thrown against a wall. Then dust obliterated the view. The speckles of light moved past them, ceased.

  The wind picked up the dust and smoke and carried it off at a walking pace. The blobs lay still, amoebas exterminated by some potent biocide. Here and there one still squirmed.

  “Reacquiring targets, going hot,” the voice said. The screen juddered again, and light and then dust reblossomed. Dan forced himself to keep watching. This time when it drifted off none of the forms moved. Those on the outskirts were already fading.

  “Fire mission 0105 complete. Jockey 05 is Winchester and RTB,” said the voice, flat, as if another piece of metal had been stamped out. Dan sat with shoulders hunched, staring at the screen. When he looked around, every man and woman at a terminal was too.

  There was no cheering, the way it was in the movies. The whole JOC was completely silent. Until the next radio call came in.

  28

  Ashaara City

  SPAYER woke to the rumble of artillery. Or at least it sounded like it, low and distant.

  It was the LAVs and amtracs starting up for the day’s attack. He rolled out of the shelter of a shattered rubble wall, where he’d cocooned in his poncho just after midnight. He sucked thirstily on his camelback, pushed the last of the crystallized instant coffee into his mouth, and rammed a dip in on top. Fire lifted a chin from his overwatch above on the rubble; the rest of the team stirred in the gravelike holes they’d dug. He crawled to the side of the wall and darted a glance out in the predawn light.

  Ashaara City was burning, the smoke visible for miles across the desert. He wondered what the nomads thought of that. Probably made them smile.

  The Marines had gone into war-fighting mode, breaking through the thin shell of insurgent resistance around the Zone, then aggressively pushing west toward and then through Darew. For days they’d fought their way through demolished, horrific miles of smashed homes, breached compounds, frightened, dirty, ragged people, dead animals. The usual smells of raw shit and smoke were flavored now with old blood and rotting flesh. This village had been fought through before by one or another militia, and the new owners had put up huts amid the wreckage of the homes of those they’d displaced.

  Interesting, that they didn’t move into the buildings themselves; just pitched huts between. The huts were bent poles or looted conduit covered with WFO rice sacks, the omnipresent UN blue tarps, goat hides, or whatever would keep sun ou
t. Under them huddled families, children, eyes white in the dim hooches, who shrank back as heavily loaded, filthy, on-edge marines slogged past, eyeing each heap of shattered bricks or drift of trash for IEDs, sweating and coughing in the smoke and dust like lung cases.

  Caxi hitched up his load-bearing equipment, cleared his throat of the night’s nastiness, and spat. He looked around for the kid, then remembered: Little Team was gone. Fire’d seen him talking to some skinnies on a corner. He’d never come back. Spayer missed his antics, that smile, the happy way he’d inspect their cartridges and load their magazines.

  He tried to look on the bright side. Maybe Nabil had found his family. Hey, he could hope.

  “Squad leaders, front,” his handheld crackled, the sergeant’s hoarse voice. Spayer pulled himself together, starting with a convenience pack of baby wipes. Close as anyone had gotten to a shower since the start of Tet Two, as the troops were calling the instant insurgency.

  A little later he took a knee with the other squad leaders, holding a cup of MRE coffee, its rim crawling with flies, as the company commander gave them the big picture. He was sandboxing it on the ground, the sergeant and the corpsman watching off to the side.

  The Blue Zone stretched from a left flank anchored on the Victory Bridge, along the Fenteni ring road. The right flank ran to the sea, to keep RPGs or mortars from interdicting the sea approach to the marine terminal. The battalion held the road out to the airport, too, and a mile-wide circle around.

  The first few days of the insurgency had been a hasty scramble to get all the NGOs accounted for and back inside the Zone.

  During that hectic two weeks, Raven had deployed west, then leapfrogged back along the Durmani escorting convoys, guarding bridges, establishing OPs along the high ground and checkpoints along the road. At one their corporal had taken a bullet through the leg that UPS’d him back to the World. Now Spayer was acting squad leader, and though he’d never done the ISLC course it would still go on his Page Eleven. He had three fire teams now, but still thought of Raven Eight as his.

  He and Ready and Team and Fire had survived the southern quarter, cordon-and-knock operations that had degenerated into house-to-house fighting, rooting out the Waleeli fanatics who fought like they wanted to die. They’d had to kill and kill. This was what marines did, but he felt it sinking inside him like heavy ice. He’d taken a hit in his Kevlar combat-stacked at a doorway, when an insurgent leaned around a corner and let loose. They’d done night ops too, though the Ashaaran dogs made that difficult. Hard to sneak up on an insurgent when a bunch of mutts were yapping their heads off. But after two days all ROEs had come off except Laws of War and after that they’d managed to push through. With wounded, but to everyone’s satisfaction, not one marine KIA. So far.

  The company commander was still at it. “Higher’s confident we’ve broken the insurgents’ back. The next step’s to reopen the main highway and link with the airfield. Like yesterday, the ass will lead off. Kickoff at zero-six.”

  “Ass” was the armor. “Stay clear of those RPG magnets,” another squad leader muttered beside him. Spayer drank off his coffee and actually lowered himself to sit. A moment of luxury in the midst of hell. A guy went around with more coffee and a box of only partially melted Twix. The captain was earning points.

  He went over the phase lines and axes of advance as they took notes. “Keep your heads on those brass swivels, hooyah? When we roust ’em, take ’em away with shock and firepower. Any questions?”

  The expressions around him reflected what Spayer felt: be nice if it came that easy. So far, it hadn’t. Their enemies weren’t marksmen, but they were brave and they had unlimited RPGs and grenades. Another squad had found a burlap-wrapped Dragunov, the first sniper-type rifle they’d seen in country.

  The chain-saw whine of a Pioneer overhead. So familiar now, no one looked up. Spayer put up a hand.

  “Lance corporal?”

  “Sir, we keep hearing about the northerners and the Council forces, but the guys we’re fighting are all Brotherhood. Where are these northerners? We gonna see them behind us one of these days?”

  “Intel thought the Governing Council was behind the insurgency. That’s why we had a special ops team take out Assad.” The captain looked across smoldering acres. “Doesn’t matter who they are. We’re even hearing about foreigners, coming across the border. We fight anybody who fights us. And did I say, keep your guys hydrated. Hooyah?”

  He got his “Hooyah” back and a few scattered “Kill”s and “get some”s, but not as rousing as it could’ve been. The meeting broke and Spayer eased to his feet, feeling eighty years old. Sleeping on bricks wasn’t doing shit for the back he’d strained falling down a cellarway. Fortunately the S-4 was bringing forward plenty of everything they needed: Ibuprofen. Batteries. Ammo. Antibiotic salve for their eyes. Meds for the drizzly shits almost everybody had. Plenty of water too, Egyptian, in liter bottles.

  He took the plans for the day back to his team leaders, made sure everybody had ammo and MREs and batteries, then got them into position. First and third fire teams to the left, second to the right. He reminded them to interlock fields of fire and hold position when they got close to the LAVs. The sun leered over the jagged roofs of shattered buildings, greeted by a chorus of barking and the revving of the armor. He checked his rifle and made sure everyone had extra water. He leaned against a broken wall before he shouldered his ruck.

  Suddenly he realized: he’d been here before. He remembered these shattered bricks, the orange fog, the smells of shit and smoke. The breach in the building opposite, as if some giant had bored through it with a sharp iron rod. But he didn’t remember being himself, or wearing this strange uniform. Didn’t remember carrying a weapon like this, black, short-barreled. Though at the same moment he still knew it intimately, he remembered other weapons, smooth-hafted, longer, heavier . . . man, he almost had it. . . .

  It slipped away. He sighed, bear-scratching his spine against the masonry. The hell was that all about? Getting loopy. Like everybody else. What the fuck were they doing here, anyway? Half the skinnies hated them, the other half had their hands always out. Nobody back home gave a shit.

  But that wasn’t why marines did what they did. The mission. The guys. The Corps. If you didn’t understand, no point explaining. Looking around at the unshaven chins, leaking noses, infected eyes, askew helmets, dusty, worn-shiny magazines, the faces—some pale and some dark but all the same color now under the cocoa-powder dust—he knew why.

  “Zero-six, El-Corp,” Fire yelled.

  “Yeah, dog.” He jerked awake, checked his watch. Flicked out the signal: advance in fire team wedges, squad wedge. It was open enough here, at least for a couple hundred yards. At the same moment the racket began, the whipcracks and gunrattle as the armor cleared ambush points ahead.

  Flung across what had once been a street, covering each other with short hops forward more like weary trots than rushes, the squad advanced.

  THE air hummed in the JOC. Dan rubbed his face. It felt gray. Down in front Dickinson had put up a plastic-covered map for Operation Chicago, the linkup of elements from the Zone and the airfield. They had the same map on the terminals, of course, but when a general wanted a vertical display, he got one.

  The attackers were Brotherhood. Assad had certainly supported the initial attacks, and the northern clans had taken advantage of them to carry out looting, raids, and reprisals. But hours after his death, the Governing Council had offered to cooperate. A meeting was set up for today. He’d heard Peyster berating the J-2 for the bad call, but Dan thought the embassy was equally at fault. Shouldn’t State at least be able to tell them, if a group began attacking foreigners, who it was likely to be?

  He cushioned his head on the keyboard. Had to get out of here. No night or day in the JOC. Infinite connectivity, but no link to the world outside, where for several days there it had seemed like they were losing this unexpected war.

  The enemy had followed the depar
ting aid people down the roads to the city. The JTF had abandoned observation posts and support airfields, needing the troops for the retrieval effort, and fed them into a defensive perimeter as they trickled back. The insurgents had tested it over two days with vehicleborne stabs out of the desert preceded by barrages of RPGs. Each time they were cut to pieces by the Marines’ organic weapons, 155s, 60- and 81-mm mortars, and the MEU’s air element.

  Nor was that all. Ahearn and Dalton had screamed loud enough that Centcom had handed the mission to the Air Force. The 506th Air Expeditionary Group had self-deployed from Texas to Ashaara International, and flown its first A-10 strike four hours after arriving. That wasn’t the only USAF contribution. The Spectre had returned, roving the Line for the entire night, breaking up groups and any transport it caught on the move.

  The MEU had its own fire support coordination team, but he’d been able to fold in; he’d filled a similar billet years before. Ahearn had tasked him to set up on-call Tomahawk missions, in case they got a bead on whoever was directing the enemy’s operations.

  After several days and hundreds of casualties, the enemy had learned his lesson. The U.S. Marines could not be dislodged by force, no matter how many suicidal young men they expended.

  Now Chicago was kicking off, to break out of the pocket they’d been compressed into and link up. They were turning everything west of the city to rubble, and the place hadn’t been far from it before.

  The presidential candidates had debated the previous night, carried live on Armed Forces Television. One said he’d withdraw U.S. forces as soon as the ground situation stabilized. The other promised to pull out as soon as he took office; nation building wasn’t an American responsibility, especially with no Ashaara left to build.

  Dickinson stood from his terminal. He spotted Dan. “How’s that Tomahawk strike going, Commander?”

  “Chancellorsville’s on call. All we need’s a target worth a half-million-dollar missile.”

  Dickinson took his wraparounds off and examined the plot. Without them his eyes looked small and weak. “How about General Al-Maahdi?”