by John Ringo
China, a Tier One nation, was gone. It had gotten hit brutally by the Plague and it never was really high function anyway. All it had had going for it was a lot of people and some of them very bright. The Plague hammered them.
Japan was hanging. It had been distributing vaccine while the Plague actually spread. (It got hit early.) High death rates. But the Japanese are sort of used to that. They were consolidating in the way the Japanese always do. Economy wrecked but, hey, look at where they were in 1946. At least this time they didn't have atomic ruins to deal with.
The point to all of this being, the U.S. military may care for their troops but the last thing on anyone's mind, right then, was a company of infantry left in fucking Iran.
Problem was, things in Abadan were starting to shape up. And not in a good way. Actually, things in the region were shaping up in an ungood way.
We first got wind of this from refugee reports. We were in contact, now, and stayed that way. Refugees were still trickling out of Abadan and we knew, more or less, what was going on in there.
There were three factions holding various parts of Abadan. The Mahdi Army, The Warriors of Victory and Shia Liberation Front. All three had been at their core local "militias" we'd been fighting and trucing with since we'd been in Iran. Well, most of the Warriors of Victory were the remnants of the local "security forces" (Army, police and such) we'd been training. But we also knew they were connected with the Warriors at the time. Such is the nature of the Middle East.
When the Plague hit, the Warriors had a problem. They were not a family grouping. We'd worked hard on breaking up the clan structure in the "security services." But when the shit hit the fan, they didn't have their old, tried ways to fall back on. So they broke up into small bands.
The Mahdi Army was a family based structure. Oh, it had peripheral families allied to it, but it was mostly clan based. So it had coalesced faster than the Warriors and eaten up some of their little bands.
The Warriors reunited, sort of, in defense against the Mahdi.
The Shia Liberation Front was a minor faction. Very hard-core Islamicists, more hardcore than the Mahdi, who were more interested in secular power. The SLF thought this was the Apocalypse and the 12th Imam was coming any day and they were preparing to fight the great fight, blah, blah.
I think the first guys in the trucks were probably a Warrior faction. But who knows or cares?
Basically, what it was were three gangs controlling the city. There was some fishing going on in the Shat and out in the Gulf. That was where most of the food in the city was coming from along with a little bit of agriculture that was getting going again.
Every now and then there'd be some open fighting in Abadan between the gangs. We'd hear about it in time, but we always knew it was going on when refugees picked up on the road from Abadan.
The SLF were the smallest faction, but they were going to be our biggest problem.
Started off with a probe. A group of three "military style" vehicles came out of north Abadan across the plain. Nothing to stop them; it was really flat. There were a couple of small wadis but nothing you couldn't negotiate.
Now, we could see Abadan. By the same token, they could see us. They had watched us put in the perimeter fencing and decided they had a way to breach it.
As the three vehicles approached the fence, the drivers jumped out of the lead truck and ran. The other two stopped. The truck hit the fence, knocked down a big chunk and then blew up.
The reaction platoon Strykers were rolling out of the gate by then. I mean, they'd had to cross nearly six miles of desert. We had time to get the reaction platoon up and going.
The truck bomb probably took out most of the mines. It also tore up the fence and some of the internal concertina. Guys jumped out of the other trucks and tried to make it up the berm.
We had guard posts on the top of the berm for a reason. They were taken under fire.
By that time we had the mortars up, too. Oh, you think we forgot indirect fire? Hell, no. We'd even set up some Paladins, 155mm tracked artillery, oriented on Abadan just in case we needed it.
Point was, the guys trying to climb the berm came under fire from the machine guns on the berm guard posts just about the time the first mortar round was starting to fall. The mortars never got properly adjusted but they were falling.
The guys on the berm got slaughtered despite the bunker being damned near a klick away. The reaction Strykers were faster across the desert, and much more heavily armed, than the trucks.
Game, set, match.
The next stage was negotiations.
A Humvee (we'd provided quite a few to the Iranians) came rolling up the road from Abadan with a white flag on its aerial. It stopped for the refugee guardpost then came rolling up to the outer gate.
We rolled out the Gate Stryker. I got called.
There was an officer in Iranian Army dress uniform. Think Hussar in an opera but gaudier. Had the epaulets and such for a colonel and covered in awards. I could read the rank but not the awards and didn't care about the latter. The uniform was a bit big for the guy but one thing or another he might have lost weight.
Colonel Reza Kamaran. He was commander of Iranian security forces in Abadan. And he demanded weapons and supplies to be used in restoring order in Abadan.
I said I'd have to get back to him on that. Not my orders. I'll have to call my boss.
It is as Allah Wills.
He said he'd wait. I suggested he come back tomorrow. He insisted he'd wait.
This conversation took about an hour. That's the way Iranians talk.
I went back to the commo shack. I tried to get ahold of the BC. He was "unavailable." I talked to the duty lieutenant for a while. The battalion was trying to feed Savannah and get the port back up. They had had no luck on either score. Shit was bad. Fucking BC's back at Stewart in the rack. Or just hiding. He's not saying much these days. Casualties from gang fire. Voodoo priests. Shit's bad.
Hmmm . . .
My senior officer is unavailable. Come back tomorrow. In'sh'allah. Okay, whatever.
Note. Time difference meant I had to be up in the middle of the night to talk to the BC and vice versa. Actually, if I called in the evening I'd get him in the morning. I called in the evening. He was in a meeting. I left word that we had been contacted by a local group about giving out free weapons and ammo as party favors and I was thinking about it. (The last part being a lie.)
Fucker called me back at 2AM local time.
Don't give out anything. Secure and maintain.
Says he's a colonel in the Army, yawn. Don't know. Name. Local allies.
Don't give out anything until I check with higher.
Okay. When you getting us home.
Top of my priority list. No transport at this time.
Want a security update?
Send me a memo.
Colonel came back the next day.
Where's my stuff?
It is in consultation among my bosses. Come back tomorrow. In'sh'allah.
I quit going out to meet him. I sent the BC a memo. After a week or two he quit coming out. I don't know if he'd gotten tired of the drive or died. Didn't care.
Here's the thing. The refugees, who I trusted more than this guy, said there wasn't any "Iranian Army" in Abadan. There was the Warriors, who were made up of gangs that had fractioned off the Army and police, but they weren't the Army. They were a fucking gang that didn't even give the pretense of being a formed unit.
I figured the guy was one of the Warriors, probably a lieutenant maybe captain by his age, who'd gotten the uniform and decided to come out and stroke me out of gear.
Absent a direct order, wasn't going to happen.
But it got me thinking. More.
Sooner or later somebody was going to come and try to take this shit away. And although we were supposed to "secure and maintain" it, I wasn't going to have a pocket mech division's worth of gear fall into the hands of these yahoos.
&nb
sp; The Nepos were, at that point, just sitting there.
Well, sort of. I'd put Samad in charge of training them for guard duty and such. Not Ghurkas, but somebody that we could use as spare rifles if the crunch came.
That was kind of funny. I told him that they needed to be trained. I had them set up a short range inside the perimeter. I told him to take over. Get them to be reasonable soldiers.
Look, the rest of us were busy. I was busier than a one-armed paper-hanger keeping everything working. Shit was always breaking down, working with Fillup on security, I was finally getting the sort of busyness I prefer. Basically, I'm pretty lazy but I get bored if I'm not given something to be lazy about.
I didn't notice for a couple of weeks that I hadn't heard any shots. Well, the boys were starting to use the range a bit, but I didn't hear the sort of crackle you'd expect to find if sixty guys were being trained in marksmanship.
So I went poking around.
Found Samad and the Nepos in one of the areas that had been emptied out to make the defenses. I think it used to hold concertina.
It had been marked off with chalk in a very precise square. The Nepos were out there in what looked like British combat uniforms (turned out they were, don't know how I missed that line item) doing close order drill.
And they were good at it. Damned good.
Of course, when they hadn't been doing their other duties they'd apparently been out there every day, all day, doing close order drill. For two fucking weeks.
I waited until the end of the day to pull Samad aside. I'd taken some time up to write up a training schedule. I suggested to him that maybe just maybe it was time for his guys to start training on something other than close order drill. Like, you know, weapons training, field sanitation, first aid. Here, I have a list.
He looked at it in puzzlement.
"You mean we will be given live rounds to practice?"
There was the fucking ammunition for a division and thirty days of combat sitting in the ammo dump. There was no way that it was ever going to be "redeployed." It was either going to sit there until it rotted or we blew it the fuck up.
"I think we can spare some, yeah."
"Very good, sahib!"
That grin. Okay, so sometimes you had to give him kind of detailed orders until he got the hang. But he had a great grin.
You can't turn raw recruits into a good reinforced platoon overnight. Not even Nepos. But we got them started on the path.
I gave him two weeks of "additional training" before I started my next little scheme. I mean, the demo was just sitting there.
Chapter Five
Unofficial? You're Fucked.
I know I'm sort of jumping around but we were getting into late August at this point. There'd been a couple more probes. No more negotiations. One what looked like an attack on the refugee camp. Convoy of vehicles, some of them with weapons on the back (called "technicals" for some reason.) Gate Stryker drove it off by taking them under long-range fire. Might have been an attack on us. Don't know. Wasn't getting close.
But sooner or later a big force would get in motion. Refugees were still coming in and they all said that everyone knew how much booty was in our walls. And people wanted it. Most of them to just fill their couscous bowl but the gangs wanted the weapons, ammo and equipment.
I'd set things up so that we could roll out at any time. There were enough Strykers, trucks, fuel trucks and all the rest, including one hell of a lot of parts, lube, ammo, food, water and most especially batteries, that we could roll to Israel if it came down to it.
That was my plan. If everything exploded we were going to roll out and head to Israel. Israel had held on, more or less. The Plague had hit their enemies worse than them. Maybe they put lamb's blood over their doors, I dunno. But they'd taken about 20% casualties and were still hanging in there.
Oh, that's something I mentioned a while back. All the models said at the point that a society took 20% casualties from a disaster, especially a plague, it broke down.
The H5N1 Plague disproved that. What it proved was that certain types of societies broke down at that point. The models and historical records had never accounted for modern, technological, democratic, high-trust societies. All the previous societies hit with that sort of plague had been preindustrial, nondemocratic or functionally nondemocratic, low-trust societies.
Every society like that on Earth that got hit with H5N1 had broken. Iran and Iraq might have been notionally democratic societies, ditto Turkey, but they were not resilient enough to withstand their casualty rates (which, anyway, ran into the 50–60% range).
The "good" societies held together. Hell, Thailand held together. And they had 60% mortality.
Nobody knows, to this day, what it takes to destroy a society like the U.S. or any of the other Anglosphere countries. Or Japan. Or Thailand or Singapore or (South) Korea. What we know is, it takes more than the Time of Suckage.
But getting back to the point, at some point I figured we were going to pull out. That we'd either be extracted or, it was looking increasingly like, have to self extract. Getting to the U.S. was going to be . . . interesting. Among other things there was an ocean in the way. Flying back was optimal, but we needed to have an airport to do that.
And when we pulled out, whether I tried to pass it off as an "accident" or just bit the fucking bullet, I wasn't going to leave this shit for the enemy.
Got any idea what it takes to really destroy an Abrams tank? I mean, so it's not even vaguely useable as a tank ever again?
Yeah, neither did I.
Or a Paladin. Or a Bradley (we had a lot of those). Or a Stryker.
Trucks and such were pretty easy. Oh, it was time intensive and manpower intensive but the Nepos were just sitting there.
Take one 155mm round. Place it on the engine block. Place another in the cargo compartment. Daisy chain them together with det cord and a small "initiator" package of a half a block of C-4 per round.
All that could be left to the Nepos. At this point you have two explosive rounds that aren't going to go off short of blasting caps (which weren't installed) and maybe not even then tied together with some funny looking cord.
In the meantime, the boys of Company B were getting an intensive course in demolitions safety. This was not "do I put the blasting cap under the sandbag before installing the claymore?" demolitions safety. This was "if you don't do it in these precise steps, everybody is going to blow the fuck up including you."
You see, none of that stuff was going to blow up short of blasting caps. Military explosives are very resilient. They have to be; they're handled by soldiers. Soldiers can break just about anything.
Stuff like 155 rounds were designed to survive handling by soldiers. They were tough as hell.
But put blasting caps in the mix and you are dealing with a different situation.
Frankly, I would have preferred that all the blasting caps be put in place and wired by myself or Fillup. But that simply wasn't possible. He had good sergeants, though, and we were very careful.
Wiring the whole damned camp, though, took a long time.
Oh, we didn't wire everything. I mean, I figured leaving all the food and shit was fine. But just wiring the vehicles and ammo was interesting.
How do you bust an Abrams tank so nobody was ever going to be able to use any part of it again?
It's not fucking easy. There are five separate sealed compartments on an Abrams. Each of them is, more or less, capable of withstanding any reasonable explosion in the other. Driver, control area (turret and crew compartment), engine and chassis. That's four, right? The gun is such a tough motherfucker it's going to resist most explosions. And it's the part that, in the end, counts so I wasn't going to leave any functional if I had my way.
The tanks were not loaded with their rounds. All of the vehicles had been stripped of ammunition before parking. (Ammo specialists had destroyed most of the onboard munitions; they weren't considered safe enough to store.)
Well, the ammo was just sitting there.
Five 155 rounds in the central compartment. Another in the driver's compartment. Another in the engine. Anti-tank mines under the chassis. A tank round up the breach preceded by a charge of C-4. Partially close the breach. When the round detonated something was going to happen to the fucking gun. Didn't know if I could destroy the fucker, but I wouldn't want to ever use it again.
Daisy chain. That is, hook them all together so they'll go off at once.
The problem being, I'm doing all this without orders. I'm getting prepared to destroy a whole bunch of billions of dollars worth of Uncle Sam's equipment (nineteen billion and change) and nobody in my chain of command has suggested that is a good idea.
It was early September when we started. Compared to some deployments we hadn't actually been left in place all that long. Three and a half months since we'd been left.
But this wasn't a normal deployment. Look, we had one guy get sick. Doc didn't know what was wrong with him. Thought it was appendicitis. (Turned out it was food poisoning. His honey had fixed him some "special" food and hadn't been quite as sanitary as she should have been.)
I got on the horn to the States. Got a soldier with possible case of appendicitis. Request evac.
Nada.
Fucking NADA.
The U.S. mililtary does not leave you to die. They've killed crews trying to save civilians. What they do for their own sick and wounded is astonishing.
There was no way to get us. No. Fucking. Way.
The only possible choice was to move a whole fucking Marine Amphib unit into the Gulf and fly helos up to us. Maybe just a frigate.
Only problem was, all the ships were back in the U.S. zone.
The nearest "stable" zone, barely, was Israel. And there wasn't a helo on earth that could make the run. Oh, there was a way to do it with tankers and special helos. But the Israelis didn't have the capacity, even if they were willing, and our tankers and helos were in the States saving lives.
We didn't have a doctor. We didn't have a hospital. (Well, we had one but no clue how to use it.) We were on our fucking own.