by Peter Nealen
He shook his head. “I am, and they’re not. The official line is that ‘other avenues are being pursued.’ They’ve been authorized to start patrolling their AO again, but the ROEs sound like they’re stricter than ever. And that appears to be at the behest of the EDC.”
I snorted in disgust. I remembered a time when the US was the top dog on the block, and sure as hell would never have kowtowed to the French and Germans. Of course, that had been when I was a kid. The fact that everybody was at each other’s throats back home had pretty much made that a thing of the past. Half the government would kowtow to Satan if it pissed off the other half.
Which was why the Triarii existed in the first place.
We weren’t a PMC. Not really. Some of the op-eds back home that called us a militia weren’t that far off. Colonel Santiago had started building the network that would become the Triarii in order to counteract some of the lawlessness that was becoming par for the course back home. As he started to understand just how bad things had gotten, the network’s purview grew. And grew. And now we were the paramilitary force that we were, starting to fill in the blanks outside the borders of the United States as well as inside.
Why “Triarii?” I know. I thought it sounded weird the first time, too. But the triarii were the third rank of the old Republican Roman Legion. The oldest, most experienced, and most ferocious fighters, who were the last-ditch rank, the last guys to get stuck in, when the hastati and the principes hadn’t done the trick.
Once I learned that, it made sense. We were the third rank. We were the last ditch.
Which was why we were in Slovakia. The Colonel had decided that it was a good test of our expeditionary capability, on top of which, he was pissed about the fact that an American soldier had been snatched off the streets of Bratislava and was being held hostage while the US peacekeepers in the country sat on their hands.
“Well, then,” I said, “We’re still on mission.” If the Army had indeed taken up the hunt, we were under orders to back off and observe. The Colonel didn’t want us potentially butting heads with the Army. For rather obvious reasons, revealing our presence by making contact wasn’t high on our list of “good ideas.”
While cell phone tracking had advanced a lot in recent years, it still wasn’t a precise science. We could pick up when a phone pinged off a tower, which gave us a location, and Scott knew how to set the drone to simulate a tower, allowing us to do some triangulation. But it was still going to give us only a general idea of that location, and that was assuming that we were tracking the right phones.
I took the tablet and studied the readout. There were definitely some phones on there from the target list that the intel cell had put together. Mostly Syrians. This was going to get interesting.
I checked my watch. We didn’t have a lot of time; as soon as the first shot had been fired, Specialist England’s life expectancy had taken a nose dive. But we wouldn’t do him a damned bit of good if we went in exhausted and started making mistakes. None of us had slept in almost thirty hours.
“Rest plan for three hours,” I said. It wasn’t going to be enough, but it was going to have to do. “Everybody down except for security on the doors.” It was a risk, but we needed the rest.
We’d plan and move in the wee hours of the morning. It was a tight planning cycle, but it was one we’d trained hard for.
It said something for the Triarii special operations—or Grex Luporum—training cycle that even a guy like me could become a team leader.
***
I was never a Recon Marine. Don’t get me wrong; I tried. Not just out of spite, either, not that my parents would have understood. Nor would it would have made anything worse than it already was. The screaming when I had announced that I was going to enlist in the first place...let’s just say that it’s a good thing I was a hundred miles away at the time. Mom couldn’t throw anything at me.
See, I didn’t come from a military family. I came from the opposite. Both my mom and dad were hard-left lawyers, and I was going to be a good little activist clone. Until I wound up with a roommate in college who was a Marine Sergeant bucking for a commission.
Bart didn’t put up with my bullshit, and challenged every assumption I made. Within three months, we were fast friends and I was already talking to the Marine recruiter.
I don’t think I’ve actually talked to my folks since then. In my more bitter moments, I think that that’s not necessarily a great loss.
My enlistment wasn’t anything to shout about. I did four years as an 0331, a regular grunt machinegunner. I tried to get to the Recon screening, or MARSOC Assessment and Selection, probably six times each. My command wouldn’t hear of it.
That was why it didn’t take much persuasion to get out after my four years were up. Just before I had to decide whether I was going to go on terminal leave or sign the reenlistment papers, Bill Vagley, who had gotten out six months before me, told me about the Triarii.
I’d known that I didn’t have the background or the qualifications for the Grex Luporum Teams. They were looking for guys with at least four years in a special operations unit.
But I’d been determined. The Triarii were my second chance, so when I got called out for applying for the Grex Luporum—Wolfpack—teams without the requisite experience, I doubled down. I swore up one side and down another that I’d do whatever I needed to; I’d catch up. Brian Hartrick, the chief cadre, had been skeptical, but let me try out, just for having the balls to do it in the first place.
The next six months had been the most grueling of my life. But I passed.
It hadn’t been an easy road from there to my own team. Hartrick was still my section leader, and if there was anybody who wasn’t going to give me an inch of slack, it was him. He’d made me pay for signing up for the teams in selection, and nothing had really changed afterward.
Now, it seemed that the team leader who’d gotten in through sheer brass was spearheading the Triarii’s first overseas op.
If I’d only known.
***
I woke up painfully as Scott shook me. An hour and a half of sleep is never enough, and when you’ve spent most of the previous thirty hours planning, preparing, hiking a very long way, and getting in a firefight, it’s even worse.
Stifling a groan, I sat up. “Everything’s quiet,” Scott whispered. “The cell pings haven’t moved. Hopefully that doesn’t mean they already killed him.”
“Only so much we can do,” I whispered back. “Get some shut-eye. I’m going to start planning.” He nodded in the darkness, lit only by the faint glow from the tablet’s screen, and lay down against the wall of the barn.
I took the tablet, wincing. Everything hurt. Not that I had expected to wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed. That hadn’t ever been the case in the infantry, and it sure as hell hadn’t been in the GL teams.
Borinka wasn’t far from Marianka. It was smaller, little more than a one-street village nestled between wooded hills, overlooked by a ruined castle.
I glanced around the barn, double-checking that everybody who was supposed to be awake was, and then I hunkered down over the tablet and started to plan.
***
A little over two hours later, we were all awake and Alpha Element was getting ready to go back out. I’d given my quick brief, and everyone had had a chance to look over the terrain. The general mission profile was the same as it had been; we were just a little bit lighter on ammo and a lot shorter on sleep.
“As long as we can find the hostage this time and not get sidetracked trying to save everybody,” Jordan grumbled.
“Are you really sure you want to save the hostage so bad, Jordan?” Phil asked. “After all...”
“If you finish that sentence, I will cut your fucking throat, Twig,” Jordan snarled. “I’m not even playing.”
“Damn, Jordan, why you gotta be so sensitive?” Dwight drawled. “It’s a joke, man.”
“Racism ain’t no joke to me,” Jordan snapped. “I’ve
had enough of Phil’s ‘jokes.’”
“Really?” Scott put in. “Fuck, it’s like fucking high school again. Grow up, both of you.”
“Motherfucker,” Jordan began, but I cut him off.
“Knock it off,” I hissed, exasperated. It wasn’t the first time Jordan had pulled this shit, but it needed to be the last. “Not the time, nor the place. Phil, quit poking the bear. Jordan, grow a fucking Rhino liner and shut the hell up.” I glared at him, though it was hard to see in the darkness of the barn. He returned my stare, though I could feel it more than see it, but finally relented.
“Fine,” he said. “As long as Twig shuts his fucking mouth.”
“Enough of this shit,” I snarled. “We’re in the field, on a mission. Fucking act like it.”
“Come on, guys,” Greg said, with his usual earnestness. “Game faces.”
“Shut up, Greg.” Greg was once of the nicest, most cheerful guys around, certainly in the teams, but the last thing I needed at the moment was for this to turn into a team meeting. He was right, but we needed to get moving and get to Borinka.
Scott was finishing packing his ruck. We weren’t going to leave anyone in the barn this time; he and the Bravo Element were relocating to a site near the ruined castle. The rear security element, consisting of Dave, Chris, and Reuben, were already joining us near the front door.
“Is Jordan getting his panties in a wad again?” Reuben asked.
“Leave it, Reuben,” Scott muttered. The last thing we needed was for Jordan to start feeling like he was being ganged up on. Reuben wouldn’t get overtly racist just to push buttons, like Phil would, but he’d made it abundantly clear during the entire workup that he figured getting bent out of shape over skin color was stupid.
Of course, Reuben hadn’t had his mom beaten to death by white supremacist thugs, but he still had a point.
I was just glad that Dave hadn’t stuck his oar in. Our resident shit-talking Mexican with Short Man Syndrome would just have poured gasoline on the flames.
“We’re moving out,” I told Scott. Not only would it put the simmering dispute to rest, at least for the time being, but we were short on time. It was going to be a long trek back toward Borinka, and we needed to take advantage of every moment of darkness.
I pointed at Phil, who nodded silently and slipped out through the barn door.
Chapter 3
Even given how early it was, the Slovakian countryside was eerily quiet.
During the initial infiltration into the country, we’d heard a constant drone and rumble of aircraft, drones, and vehicles. The peacekeepers, sans the Americans, had been out in force. Now, following the fight in Marianka, it was like the country was dead.
Or breathlessly waiting for something.
I signaled Phil to halt when he looked back. He was a bright silhouette against shades of gray in my PSQ-20s, the thermals outlining him clearly. He signaled his acknowledgment and took two more steps before sinking to a knee next to a towering beech.
The woods were thick, though there wasn’t a lot of undergrowth, which made movement fairly easy. I joined Phil in a few moments, sinking to a knee beside him, my rifle over my thigh. With a faint rustle of dry leaves and gear, the rest of the Alpha Element joined us over the next couple of minutes, forming what we could of a circular perimeter on the slope of the hill.
The terrain reminded me a lot of northern Virginia. Hilly and covered in thick woods. The thick carpet of leaves made footing on the slopes somewhat treacherous at times, especially carrying our rucks. It had slowed us down, though we’d still made better time than we had the previous day.
For a few minutes after Dwight had sunk down in the roots of another beech, about two meters uphill from me, none of us moved. We just stayed put, breathing quietly, listening. Only after I was reasonably sure that we weren’t close enough to any human habitation to be heard did I key my radio.
“Weeb, Deacon,” I called, as quietly as I could. “Are you in position?”
“Deacon, Weeb,” Scott replied. “We’re in position and we just sent the drone up. We should have some info for you soon.”
“Roger,” I answered back. “We’re halted about five hundred meters from the treeline. Holding here for a bit.”
The trouble with doing this op on a timeline, with the sharply limited resources that we had, was that locating one man, even in as small a town as Borinka, got difficult quickly. Especially since we didn’t want to risk detection before we found him.
If we’d had more teams, we might have been able to get eyes on a bigger portion of the village. Same with more technical assets. Hell, even a local intelligence network would have been useful. But we hadn’t had time. And the necessity of sneaking into Slovakia, when the Triarii are often characterized as right-wing terrorists by half the US government, had also necessarily lowered the footprint we could afford. The Hungarians didn’t give a damn about American or European perceptions; they’d cut the cord with the EDC the same way the Poles had. They’d been more than happy to let us pass through. But that ended at the Slovak border.
So, my plan was to use the drone to narrow down where we needed to look. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do. We’d stay hidden in the woods while Scott looked the town over from the air, remotely.
We settled in to wait. I could already feel the morning chill seeping through my sweaty cammies.
***
“Deacon, Weeb.”
I hadn’t been dozing, but the voice in my ear still startled me a little. The woods were quiet, and I hadn’t seen a thing move beyond my teammates occasionally shifting position, birds flitting from tree to tree, or leaves occasionally falling from trees. Scott’s voice on the radio broke a deep silence that had gone otherwise unbroken for some time.
“Send it,” I answered.
“I’ve got a couple of possibilities,” he reported. “There appear to be militia in the center of town, near the church. Two technicals in sight, and it looks like they’ve got some kind of checkpoint or something there; I’ve counted at least twelve armed men. Looks like they took over the church, too.”
I didn’t say anything, but I clenched my teeth a little at that news. I was pretty sure that the church in Borinka was Catholic, and that these bastards...weren’t. Being a recently-baptized Catholic myself, the thought of what a bunch of jihadists were doing in a Catholic church pissed me off.
I could deal with that later. Right at the moment, the focus needed to be on finding Specialist England before he got his head sawed off.
“The cell tracker is picking up a lot of pings toward the east side of town, however,” Scott continued. “And I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted sentries outside of Building 345.”
I turned to Greg, but he was already holding out his own tablet. We had two of them; one per comms guy. Not ideal; I would have preferred a laminated printout, especially since a printout didn’t glow in the dark, but having printed photomaps for every town and village in southwestern Slovakia that we might have to search hadn’t been practical.
Of course, I questioned the practicality of humping the solar charger for the tablets around the hills and woods, too, but we had to do something.
Greg had already pulled up the imagery for Borinka, which Scott and I had marked the night before. Each building had a number assigned, making for easy identification of landmarks.
Building 345 was a two-story building with a walled courtyard in front. That was going to be interesting.
“Are they concentrated in just those two places?” I asked.
“It looks that way,” Scott said. “It’s kind of weird.”
I nodded, even though Scott couldn’t see me over the radio, as I studied the imagery. It was a little odd, especially given some of the reports we’d gotten before insert of fighting between Slovak militias and the Kosovars, Bosnians, and Syrians who had been forced into Slovakia by the EDC. Why would they split their forces like that, unless they were trying to keep something hidde
n away?
“There’s something else,” Scott continued. “I went ahead and did a wide circle with the drone before we narrowed the search area to Borinka. There were two US patrols out and about with M5s and Strykers in southern Stupava, but the Belgians in the next sector, on the north side, don’t seem to be moving at all. The checkpoint is manned, but that’s it.”
That was even weirder. The Belgians had been some of the more aggressive peacekeepers so far. It wasn’t like them to turtle. Of course, like most of the EDC military contingents, the “Belgians” didn’t have many actual Belgians in their ranks.
The parallels with the later Roman Empire were striking.
Under the circumstances, though, it meant that we had an opening. If the Belgian peacekeepers were confined to their FOB for annual sensitivity training, or whatever, then they’d be that much farther behind the ball if their commander decided they needed to intervene in Borinka.
I kept studying the imagery, thinking. Twelve armed men plus two technicals observed from the drone in the center of town suggested to me that there were a lot more out of sight, especially since sunrise had just hit an hour and a half ago.
“We’ll check out 345 first,” I decided. “If he’s not there, it’s going to be a lot easier to pull off and break contact than if we go charging into the middle of town.”
I was showing Phil the imagery as I spoke, and he nodded silently. Phil wasn’t just my pointman because I didn’t know where else to put him; like Jordan was a medic because he’d been an 18D, Special Forces Medic, or Greg was a comm guy because he had an affinity for it. Phil was good at the job, and he was good at navigation, even in thick woods and in the dark. He was better at it than I was; I’d lost track of direction and pace count a couple of times during the night, only picking back up once we hit a known rally point or landmark.
We weren’t using GPS, for the obvious reasons.
After a couple of minutes checking his map and compass, Phil got to his feet and started out. I followed, feeling my knees pop as I did so, every muscle protesting the movement. We’d been sitting there in the morning cool for long enough that everything had stiffened up.