by John Ringo
They'd also gotten word that the big combines might not be available for harvest. They could till with the cultivators on the farms if they could get the bodies but those were scarce. They'd had to close one of the milk farms because they didn't have the four guys to run the milking machine.
Hell in a handbasket.
March 21st was the day I got word my father was gone. The Iranian New Year. Normally a time of high holiday in Iran with lots of celebrations going back before Persia tried to knock off Greece. Not much celebrating going on in 2019, though. The Plague was starting to spread and people were dying like flies.
Also the spring solstice. There wasn't much spring in the air in Fars province. It was a high plateau more or less surrounded by mountains, and the major farming area of Iran. It generally had the weather of Virginia in terms of temperatures.
This year it was more like Minnesota in the spring. A normal spring.
The funny thing was, I knew there was a "cooling trend" going on. The Army knew there was a cooling trend going on.
Couldn't tell it by the news. We were still getting CNN and between the reporting on the Plague they had occasional weather reports. I stopped counting the number of references to "global warming" I got after fifteen in two days. I just quit listening after the damned meteorologist said:
"We're having a cold and wet spring on top of everything else that's going on due to global warming affecting world-wide ocean currents."
Ocean currents.
Ocean currents have a lag that runs from five hundred to ten thousand years. Anything that ocean currents were doing, now, was because of something that happened a long time ago.
And there was no "global warming" anymore. Yeah, there had been a slow warming trend going back to a mini-iceage back in the Middle Ages. But we'd stopped warming. Given that it was Old Sol driving it, we might go back to warming soon. From the solar physicist's predictions, though, it wasn't going to be any time soon. Not the rest of 2019 for sure and probably not 2020.
We were cooling off. Fast. And people were still beating the drum of "global warming."
Here's how it really works. And it's more complicated than "CO2 makes the temperature rise! Reuse, reduce, recycle! SUV owners are global terrorists!"
But not a lot.
Cosmic rays are produced from big stars exploding a long way away. They're all over the place in any galaxy and Earth is constantly bombarded by them.
Cosmic rays hitting water droplets in the upper atmosphere form clouds. Those clouds cool the Earth.
Cosmic ray impact is controlled by solar winds. What are solar winds?
The sun is a big ball of fusing hydrogen that pumps out an enormous amount of power every second. It not only emits heat and light but particles that fly out headed for deep space. Solar wind. When there's a lot of solar wind, it "blows back" the cosmic rays so less get to Earth.
Less cosmic rays, less clouds. Things warm up. More cosmic rays, more clouds, things cool down.
Decreased solar activity equals decreased solar wind. Decreased solar wind equals more cosmic rays impacting the Earth. More cosmic rays impacting the Earth equals more clouds. More clouds equal cooler temperatures.
QE fucking D.
That can be reduced to: Less solar output equals cooler temperatures.
But not by direct effect.
This had been studied repeatedly, proven rigorously and was the reason for Earth's long-term heating and cooling trends. Or, hell, short term.
"But CO2 tracks with temperature!"
Sort of. CO2 increases lag behind temperature increases. CO2 increases in the atmosphere are a result of temperature increases not the cause of temperature increases. They track eight hundred years later. Something that changes eight hundred years later cannot be a cause. It's an effect.
Why? Boyle's Law. Go see "oceans as CO2 repositories." It's okay. I'll wait.
Back? Okay.
Less solar output equals colder temperatures. (Also, in eight hundred years, less CO2. In the meantime, it's going to keep increasing.)
Sunspots had been tracked for centuries. And sunspot activity had been found to be a, pardon the pun, stellar indicator of solar activity.
The sunspots on the sun were going away, one by one. They had their own lag. But the layer of the sun that caused them had gone into "recessive condition." That is, it wasn't working.
Bottomline, the sun was cooling off. Big time. And so was the Earth. Because less solar wind equalled . . .
And all the fucking weathermen could talk about was "global warming."
AND PEOPLE WERE STILL BUYING IT.
Christ. I lose hope for humanity sometimes.
The same lack of sunspots had last been observed in that mini-iceage back in Medieval days I mentioned. Reporting on its effects when it first kicked in was spotty. But archaeological evidence showed that it kicked in fast. Bogs have been found that had frozen practically overnight and then been covered by glaciers. Things got cold, they got cold fast and they stayed cold for a long time.
It looked as if that was what was happening. And the people responsible for reporting the weather were still talking about global warming.
(Yeah, kids, I know. What the Fuck? I mean, you all know that they were fucking idiots as you wrap up in your coats and blankets. But back then, Global Warming was going to end civilization as we knew it. And it was all Man's fault. If we only cut back on CO2 emissions we could all sing kumbaya. I know, it's hard to believe. But go look up things like "The Dutch Tulip Frenzy" and "The Internet Bubble." Humans are pack animals and when the pack stampedes they tend to follow.)
Don't get me wrong. There were people out there saying the opposite. Climatologists were screaming about it. But the ones who were doing the screaming were "global warming deniers" and had been put in the same category as Holocaust deniers (not going to explain that one, go look it up later) and thus were tuned out by the "balanced" news media. They were getting no airtime. "Too busy reporting on the H5N1 catastrophe and how our Glorious Leader . . .sorry, our First Female President is gloriously responding! All is well except for that continued pesky global warming and, you know, this Plague thing."
Lose. Hope.
Anyway, it was getting cooler, H5N1 was running rampant and the world, warming, cooling, whatever, was indeed approaching the end of civilization as we knew it.
The support contractors were already pulling out. International air travel had been suspended but they could still get charter flights under local government (where they were landing that is) rules. There was fucking nothing we could do positive in Iran and we sat there all through March, watching the reports from the U.S., getting hit by the occasional attack, people starting to line up outside the FOBs looking for safety, food, shelter, anything to survive.
April 1 we got our warning orders for movement. The U.S. military was pulling out. Everywhere. We had too many problems at home to try to deal with the rest of the world's problems.
But.
This was only a temporary emergency. Warrick had stated that we were going to maintain our international obligations. And since we were coming back, any day now, well . . .
Okay, we couldn't move all the fucking equipment we had in the Middle East. Just wasn't feasible. Moving it over there had taken years. Minimum redeployment time, under optimal conditions, was considered to be six months. A. We needed to get home, now. B. These were not optimal conditions. Most of the ships we would have used to get us home were either sailing in circles trying to avoid the Plague or tied up alongside piers with mostly dead crews or crews long disappeared.
This didn't even cover the stuff we had in Europe, Korea, Japan . . .
But the troops were going home. We mostly had unit "sets" (all the equipment a unit needs) Stateside as well. So the troops were pulling out.
What to do with the equipment? We're talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of inventory. One report I saw said that the pre-Plague value o
f the total mobile overseas inventory of the U.S. was at least one Trillion in old Dollars.
Well, in countries that were allies instead of totally fucked like Iran, we could just leave it. The units pulled their equipment and supplies, all of it, into holding areas and from there it was up to the local government to secure.
In countries which weren't allies and in which we had "security concerns"?
We were leaving it. With guards to "maintain and secure" it "until relieved."
Each area was different. I can only speak for Iran. (MY can I.) We had six brigades and all their supports in Iran. We had four separate major logistics bases and I don't know how many FOBs and COBs.
The Big LOG base, though, was in Abadan. Abadan is a city that sits on the Shat Al Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, and is right on the border with Iraq. For a lot of reasons, (security) we used Abadan rather than Bandar Shapur or Bandar Abbas for our prime logistics base. And it was a monster. Keeping six brigades fed and watered, not to mention the units that fed and watered them fed and watered, was a major undertaking.
People just don't understand the enormous mass of materials that modern units require to keep doing their jobs. I'll put it this way. Think of a really big football stadium. Now, imagine filling it to the rim with . . . stuff. You don't want to break stuff so you put tanks at the bottom. Put armored personnel carriers on top. Keep stacking. Fill it from side to side and all the way to the top. Ammunition, parts, rations, tents, snivel gear, weapons, batteries. (My God do we use a lot of batteries. Remember, I was responsible for making sure the guys in my battalion had all this shit. I know whereof I speak.)
That's the logistics we had in Iran for ONE brigade. A full stadium of . . . stuff.
One.
We had six in country. And all the supplies for the camp followers. (Support and supply.)
Over the course of April and into May we moved it all back to Abadan.
Well, okay, some of it we left. We left a lot of rations in place. Units that were in the last detachments to pull out said that there were riots as people flooded in to strip the camps. We left most of the tents and shit that couldn't be used directly as weapons.
We pulled out everything else (and most of the rations) and moved it to Abadan. And piled and piled and stacked and parked and stacked on top of parked and parked on top of stacked.
An ammo dump is a very scary place under any circumstances. Good ammo dumps have massive internal berms (big dirt walls) or big really tough bunkers to prevent one set of ammo going boom and making all the others go boom. And only ammo that is pretty much assured not to go boom should go in an ammo dump. And only so much in each sector.
We had to build another ammo dump for all the ammo that was brought in. And we were still stacking it to the top of hundred-foot berms. It was very spectacular when it finally got blown up.
Rations?
The Army does not run just on MREs. Most "long storage" rations are in large cans (called Number 10 for really obscure historical reasons.) Unless you've got really huge hands, you can't get two around them.
We had forty-two ACRES of "long storage" rations. Boxes of Number 10 cans stacked two stories high. We had another fourteen acres of MREs.
When you're discussing MREs in terms of acres you know something has gotten truly screwed up.
The total coverage area of all the mass of material that was to be "left in place" and "secured" was right at two thousand acres.
Unless you live in someplace like Kansas or Nebraska, you've probably never seen two thousand acres. That's three square miles. Think a box a mile and three quarters across and wide covered in . . . stuff. Tanks, trucks, water blivets, stacked tents, weapons, internal bermed areas for ammunition dumps. Concertina wire, thank God.
It was amazing to look at. And very very scary. Especially when there was just one.
As units finished their "phased redeployment" (euphemism for "run away, run away!") they were flown out. Yeah, international air travel was suspended. Which just meant there were a lot of planes sitting around. And pilots could be scrounged up. We had 747 after 747 roaring out of Abadan airport (which we secured) morning, noon and night.
And then there was one.
Somebody was supposed to stay behind "until relieved" and "ensure inventory, maintenance and security" of the enormous mass of material.
Units were needed in the States. Things were going to hell and the Army had a job seeing that things didn't come apart entirely. Every body that could be spared was going home.
I don't know what fucking lottery led to our battalion being tasked with leaving ONE COMPANY to do the job of a fucking BRIGADE but we got handed the shit end of the stick.
Remember me mentioning the Bravo Company commander? One of my former JO's and not the battalion commander's fair-haired boy?
You guessed it. The battalion was tasked with leaving "one company of infantry and minimal necessary supports" as security for an area you couldn't walk around in an hour.
And "a logistics officer" to maintain inventory of the "stored equipment."
Gulp.
Chapter Two
There's this Duck Video . . .
The Emperor Trajan once ordered a legion of Roman soldiers to "march east until you come to the end of the world." Everything but that is spotty history but they're believed to have been destroyed in battle by, well, the Iranians somewhere not too far from Abadan. They're remembered in military legend as "The Lost Legion."
(It's possible, though, that some of them made it as far as Western China. There's a very odd tribe over there. But that's ancient history at this point.)
As we watched the last trucks headed for the airport, watched the eyes of our fellow soldiers who were headed home, leaving us behind to "maintain security" over an area that was impossible to secure . . .
Well, we wondered what history would call us. If anyone remembered us at all.
We weren't the last people in Titan Base. (Don't know who named it originally but it had gotten fairly titanic that's for sure.) All the contractors hadn't pulled out. There were a few Brits left. They'd been in charge of the mess section for the original Titan Base. They, however, had to leave on a plane at the same time as our guys or they figured they'd never see balmy old England again.
They were in charge of the mess section. They didn't do the scut work. The scut work had been done by a lot of different laborers. Most of those had gotten out. But they still were in charge of sixty Nepalese.
And while there was transport for the Brits, there wasn't any for the Nepalese.
The guy in charge had been a British Army cook then worked in one of the universities. He was a specialist in producing large amounts of good to excellent food. He also was a stand-up guy. Which was why he stopped by my office as the battalion was loading up to "redeploy."
"Old chum, got a bit of a bother."
(Okay, he was a stand-up guy. But he also had a very affected Oxford accent. It's a Brit thing. Think Keeping Up Appearances but a guy.)
"Go," I said, not really paying much attention. Look, Captain Butterfill was, technically, in charge of security. But, one I had time in grade on him and two he wasn't in charge of inventory for all this shit. I was up to my eyeballs in the paperwork regarding inventory for two fucking divisions.
Look, nothing had been inventoried. What I had were the inventories for the units. And inventories, notoriously, are inaccurate. Oh, not stealing. The Army had an incredibly minor problem with that. Usually just bad paperwork.
But in this case, shit had been picked up and then dumped off. There'd been a general with a huge staff in charge of the base. Before all the shit was "redeployed."
I knew, deep in my bones, that at some point someone was going to be asking me pointed questions about where a case of DL123 batteries went. Okay, four truckloads of batteries.
It took me a couple of days to grasp the futility of my job and revel in the fact that I really didn't give a shit.
But at the time I was trying to be a good little Assistant S-4.
"I don't have transport for the Nepos."
"Nepos?" I asked, wondering what in the hell Britishism that was. Soap? Guns? Hell, with Brits it could be anything. They were worse than pharmaceutical companies. Why not just call Viagra "Dickerector"? I think it's a plot with the Brits.
"The Nepalese," he said, pretty patiently given that his driver was honking the horn. "The cooks and whatnot. Been screaming to home office about it but Nepal's gone quite isolationist what with the whole birdie thing and Foreign Office won't take them in. The rest have gotten transport out or bunked off. But there's the Nepos, you see."
I did see. What he was telling me was that there were a bunch of foreign civilians left on the base with no way home.
What to do? It wasn't like I could just kick them out. The Nepalese are not Iranians. They couldn't get integrated into the society. And things were coming apart, fast. Hell, there was still, technically, a government in Tehran but if it controlled anything past the city borders I'd be very surprised. Kicking them out into the wilderness Iran was quickly becoming would-be murder.
"Vaccinations?"
"Up to date," he said, handing me more fucking paperwork. "Good chaps. Willing. Couple of them speak English. Sort of. Don't suppose you've got a Gorkali speaker?"
"No," I said, coldly. We had one translator, an American born Iranian who'd been raised learning Farsi. He'd grown up in L.A. and really wanted to go home. He also spoke a smattering of Arabic. I'd been told by one of the Iranian officers I met that he was very nearly incomprehensible in Farsi. Basically, what he spoke was the Farsi equivalent of Ebonics.