Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  But I was fairly good at reading people. “I don’t think Killian’s got a knife out for our backs,” I said. “If his CO had survived, it might be different, but he’s almost as scared as his soldiers. And they’re fucking terrified.”

  Scott nodded, though he still looked a bit skeptical. “Yeah,” he said, “and I think I know why.” He looked at me. “Something ain’t right here, brother. There’s losing comms, and then there’s losing comms.”

  I didn’t have an answer for him, but he was right. The need to stay focused on the problem at hand was keeping the growing sense of dread suppressed at the back of my mind, but the fact that Killian and his platoon still didn’t have contact with Keystone, and the fact that even we had no satcom, was more than a bit worrying. It would take something big for that to happen. Something coordinated.

  “One thing at a time,” I said, as much to myself as to Scott. I crouched down and pulled out the map to give him an overview of our route. “Let’s get to Keystone, first.”

  ***

  We were ready to roll ten minutes before Killian’s platoon, to my utter lack of surprise. But with the infantry in the woods and the vehicles on the road, we finally started moving.

  Chapter 7

  “Deacon, Flat,” Bradshaw called. I turned and looked back. “We need to halt again.”

  “Dammit,” I muttered, before keying my radio and replying, “Roger that.” I signaled to Phil, but he’d heard it, and was already pushing toward a stand of trees where he would have good concealment while maintaining a clear field of fire both down the valley in front of us and toward the top of the ridge to our left.

  For my part, I headed back downhill, toward where the three Army vehicles were stopped on the road. Again.

  I passed the rest of my team and the handful of Bradshaw’s guys whom he’d split off to join us on the left-hand side of the road, while he kept the bulk of his section on the right-hand side. It was too dark to see much in the way of facial expressions, but the general demeanor was tired and frustrated. I could relate.

  We’d been moving at the pace of a depressed snail for the last six hours. While we hadn’t taken any contact, the tension was getting thicker and thicker with every step. We’d heard fast-movers roaring overhead, some distant artillery fire, and once had seen a formation of four EDC NH90 helicopters heading toward Bratislava. Drones were buzzing over nearby towns, but fortunately, the trees kept us out of sight.

  Something had prompted me to insist that we take cover when the birds had gone over. Technically, the US Army was in Slovakia in cooperation with the EDC peacekeeping mission, so the Belgians, the Germans, the Swedes, and the French were allies. But the loss of comms, the complete lack of reaction to the firefight in Borinka, and the tension that Killian had described when dealing with any of the EDC forces were weighing on my mind. Something had gone wrong, and until I knew what it was, I wasn’t comfortable with contacting anyone who wasn’t an American.

  Bradshaw, of course, was on the same page. Killian hadn’t needed much persuading, though I had heard some loud grumbling from his troops about having to do all this sneaky stuff. I was less and less impressed with the quality of the Army’s personnel, those days. Killian had cracked down on it, but it was obvious from what little I’d seen that he was fighting an uphill battle.

  How dicked up was his command, that even after the casualties they’d taken, his kids were acting like spoiled college students?

  I met Killian at the prow of his Powell, as Bradshaw came down out of the trees to join us. The contrast between the three of us was marked; I was wearing greenside kit and carrying a ruck, with a ghillie hood over my head, shoulders, and rucksack, a painted LaRue OBR, with a short-dot scope mounted, in my hands. Bradshaw was in plain green fatigues, with a similar chest rig to mine, an assault pack, and boonie hat overshadowing his thermal fusion NVGs, a much plainer DPMS Oracle AR-10 in his hands. Killian looked twice our size, without a pack on his back, thanks to all the camouflaged armor he was wearing, his M37A2 looking about half the size of our rifles. And he was carrying less ammo, for all the bulk of his gear.

  “What is it now?” I growled. We’d just halted what felt like half an hour ago.

  “We’ve got to stop again,” he said, his voice raised just enough to be heard over the rumble of the M5’s engine. “I’ve got three soldiers who are about to collapse.”

  I grimaced, though it was too dark for him to see the expression, and he wasn’t wearing NVGs. Bad call on his part, but he had presumably been using the Powell’s thermal imager to see. “We’re already behind schedule, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any more permissive out here,” I said.

  Killian didn’t say anything, but spread his hands. I got the impression that he didn’t really want to say what was going on; he didn’t want to admit that none of his soldiers could keep up with us, particularly burdened by body armor as they were. We were carrying more weight in our rucks, but a rucksack is easier to move in than plates and Kevlar. But the fact of the matter was, the Triarii had higher physical standards than the Army did. “There’s only so far I can push them,” he said.

  Bullshit, I didn’t say. You’re their commander now. You push ‘em as hard as they need to be pushed, because this isn’t a fucking war game. This is about survival.

  “Then get them on the vehicles,” Bradshaw said harshly. “If they can’t keep up, then they ride. Matt and I will cover the dismount piece. If we’re going to get to Keystone before daylight, we’ve got to step it out.” I glanced at my watch, shielding the faint green glow with my hand. He was right. The sun had set three hours before, and we’d been moving most of the day before that. The halts had just gotten more frequent and lasted longer.

  Killian looked uncertain and nervous. “If I do that…” he started to say.

  “If you do that, then yeah,” I said, “you’re turning over a chunk of your security to total strangers, working for you don’t know who. I get it. Tyler gets it. But if we wanted to double-cross you, we’d just have left you to the Kosovars and Syrians in Borinka.” I sighed. “We’re on the same side, Sergeant Killian. Whether your command knows it or not.”

  Or likes it.

  He still hesitated. I realized that I didn’t know what kind of monitors were supposed to be feeding audio and video back to the TOC at Keystone. I knew that even the Marine Corps had gotten stupid with such things even before I’d joined. It had been a large part of the reason why I’d had no trouble declining to reenlist in favor of joining the Triarii.

  Finally, though, he nodded. “I’ll get them to mount up,” he said. “We can be ready to move in…twenty minutes?”

  I knew that it was going to be more like half an hour, but just nodded. “Fine,” I said. “We’ll move when they’re loaded up.”

  I glanced to the north. It was too dark to see far, especially with the woods towering over the road, but I almost thought I could see a brighter glow in that direction. And I’d been smelling the faint tang of smoke for the last couple of hours.

  It wasn’t woodsmoke, either.

  ***

  It was more like forty-five minutes before everything got up and moving. I could only imagine the ass-chewing we’d have gotten in Weapons Company if we’d ever taken that long. But these kids just weren’t in shape for this kind of movement. They were strung out well past their endurance.

  I blamed their command. Which included Killian, despite what he might have had to work with for a CO.

  “We’re ready to go, Golf Lima Ten Six,” Killian called.

  “Roger,” I replied. “Keep your vehicles to about three miles per hour. We’ll be in the woods above and around you.” Three miles per hour was a little quick for a patrolling pace, but we had time to make up. And with the amount of noise—not to mention the thermal profile—that the vehicles were making, if we went too slow, it was just going to invite attack.

  I was already back up in position, and I tapped Phil, who got smoothly to his fe
et.

  “Nice little rest,” he said. “I could go all day, now.” Being Phil, he was being a smartass, but he wasn’t too far off. We didn’t train to take forty-five-minute halts after less than forty minutes on the move.

  We got about ten steps before he froze, and I followed suit, holding up a fist for Greg behind me. I’d heard it too. We made sure we were well under the trees as the drone buzzed overhead. I looked for it through the thick boles and leaves, catching little glimmers of thermal glow. It was off to our west, over the hilltop. I just hoped that it was at the wrong angle to spot the armor down on the road.

  As soon as it had passed, I tapped Phil again. On the off chance that Killian’s vehicles had been spotted, we needed to get some distance, quick.

  It might have just been paranoia. The only real adversaries that were supposed to be in Slovakia were the Slovak Nationalists, who were stronger out east, toward the central part of the country, and the vicious, mostly jihadi militias that had flooded into the country when the EDC and the Slovak government had nullified the general plebiscite that had demanded that Slovakia secede from the dying European Union. There had been no threat indicators that suggested we needed to worry about conventional troops in western Slovakia.

  But that sense of dread was still nagging at me, getting stronger and stronger the longer satcom stayed down, and the longer Killian went without being able to contact Gatekeeper. Until I knew more, I was going to treat everything as a threat.

  I knew Bradshaw was on the same page. I hoped Killian was getting there. Clearly, his troops hadn’t gotten the idea yet.

  I just hoped they figured it out before too many more had to die. Or that I was wrong.

  But as we paced through the trees, scanning carefully in every direction, weapons following eyes, I was still afraid that I wasn’t.

  ***

  The smoke was getting thicker and thicker in the valley. And it didn’t smell wholesome.

  “Golf Lima Ten Six, Doomhammer One Five,” Killian called me. “We still don’t have any comms with Gatekeeper.” He paused. “Something’s wrong. We should be able to talk to them. We’re not even getting them on the phone.”

  I didn’t ask why the hell a combat patrol was rolling with phones on the local cell network. Everybody had gotten sloppy in that regard for some time. It was a backup, everyone said, but it became too easy to turn it into a primary.

  “Roger, Doomhammer,” I said. We had halted again in another meadow, just on the back side of the last hill before the open valley where Keystone sat. There was definitely a stronger glow in that direction, though it might have just been the FOB’s lights. They hadn’t been blacking the base out lately, from what Killian had said. “I’m taking a leader’s recon up to the edge of the woods to take a look. Keep your vehicles here, and keep security up.”

  I know that I would have been insulted if an outsider reminded me of that basic continuing action, but at that point in time, I didn’t care. It had taken a long time for his soldiers to pile out of the vehicles once we’d halted, and they weren’t acting like the professionals they were supposed to be. They were tired, they were in pain, and they didn’t know why they were supposed to be acting like they were in hostile territory. They’d gotten away from Borinka, hadn’t they?

  I’d actually heard one of them say that. To his credit, one of the others promptly bitched him out about it. Not all was lost with these kids. But the fact remained that they were way behind the power curve, and they needed to catch up before the enemy did.

  Alpha Element was already gathered at the northern treeline, rucks on the ground, ready to go. I turned to Scott. “I’m taking Alpha, and we’re going up over the hill to get a look-see. I don’t expect to be longer than an hour, but if we are…” I finished out the contingency plan. It was something that we might all consider to be common sense, particularly after months of training, but when you’re splitting your team, it pays to make sure all the bullet points get hit. To make damned good and sure that everybody really was on the same page.

  Assuming such things in a combat environment was how stuff got missed or miscommunicated, and people got killed.

  He recited the plan back to me, just to make sure. I nodded, and he clapped me on the shoulder. I pointed to Phil, who led out, with me, Greg, Jordan, and Dwight in tow.

  It was easy going after the last few hours with rucks on our backs. Losing the weight meant that, despite the fatigue that was really starting to set in—it had been a couple of days now since my last full night’s sleep—it felt like a breeze to slip through the woods.

  But that didn’t mean I relaxed. I was getting more and more on edge, as the tang of smoke got thicker and nastier, and the glow to the north intensified.

  Phil got to the top of the hill and slowed, getting low and moving from tree to tree. He paused, but looked back at me and shook his head, making a “negative” gesture with his hand. No eyes on. The trees were too thick. We were going to have to push closer.

  I still signaled for him to halt. It wasn’t going to be a good idea to just go running in. I wanted to stop, listen, watch, and take stock.

  We gathered up in a tight perimeter. I placed Dwight next to Phil, pointing that Mk 48 downhill. The belt-fed always needed to go where the most likely threat was going to come from, and while Keystone was in that direction, I had the screaming heebie-jeebies at that point, and wasn’t going to take chances.

  It said something that nobody had confronted me about my case of the willies. Phil and David, at the least, would have said something. Which told me that everybody else was sensing the same thing.

  There was a brooding threat in that otherwise idyllic countryside, that got heavier and heavier the longer we went without comms with anyone except our own guys in Hungary. And those were weak and spotty, since the satcom still wasn’t working. Which told me that something big had to have happened; satcom doesn’t just go down and stay down. It’s not like regular radio that is reliant on the ionosphere to transmit over distance.

  Something had to have happened to the constellation we were using. Which was big, bad medicine.

  The smoke was getting thicker, though the wind was blowing from the southwest. Whatever was burning, it was big. And it stank of petroleum, rubber, and less wholesome things.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered to Phil. Without a word, he got up and moved forward.

  We crept down the hillside, moving as carefully and silently as we could in the dark. The carpet of old leaves underfoot made that interesting, but we still moved with only faint rustles. Our only communications were hand and arm signals.

  The glow to the north was intensifying. And even before we came to the edge of the trees, I could see what it was. And that my worst fears had been realized.

  “Holy shit,” Dwight muttered as we set in within a tight stand of trees at the edge of a cornfield. We still had to look through another line of trees along an irrigation canal between us and the road, but even that couldn’t obscure the horror we were looking at.

  FOB Keystone was burning. Fierce flames blossomed white in my thermal fusion goggles, belching a thick column of black smoke into the night sky.

  Chapter 8

  I tore my eyes away from the burning base, forcing myself to look past the conflagration and scan for more immediate threats. While it was a no-brainer that we weren’t going to go rolling up to the gate, not after that, it never paid to get so fixated on one disaster that you didn’t see the next disaster coming.

  Sure enough, there were plenty. The hulking shapes of several tanks and armored fighting vehicles squatted on the road, about five hundred meters from the ruin of FOB Keystone. I could only get glimmers on thermal through the vegetation and the drifting smoke, but I was pretty sure they had foot patrols out in the fields, too.

  Mid-sized drones were buzzing along the road at treetop level, apparently keeping an eye out for anyone approaching the base. Drones would extend a commander’s visual range by a consid
erable margin, being able to see past where his vehicles’ sights were cut off by terrain and vegetation.

  A pair of helicopters appeared suddenly, bursting through the smoke with a whirl of rotor wash, snarling as they circled the smashed, burning FOB. My eyes narrowed as I watched them. I couldn’t ID the armor squatting on the highway, but those were definitely Tiger attack helicopters. Which made them either French or German.

  I turned my eye back to the FOB. The front gate—or what was left of it—was facing the highway. It was a crater, backlit by the fires. I’d seen detailed imagery of the base before we’d inserted. We’d taken high-definition photos from high-altitude drones; the Army wasn’t so ass-backwards that they were posting publicity photos of their FOBs and security measures on the Internet, though I’d seen stuff almost as dumb. That gate had been solid, a serpentine of T-walls and HESCO barriers. It had to have taken some serious boom to flatten it.

  There were other gaps in the T-wall outer barrier, chunks of the hardened concrete sections having been blasted to rubble. Whatever had happened, there had been a lot of explosives expended to do it.

  Which drew my eye back to the tanks and other armored vehicles squatting on the road. If those were EDC Tigers in the air overhead, who were they?

  “We’re moving back,” I whispered. “Slow and careful. Let’s not get spotted now.”

  “You think those tanks had something to do with the FOB getting blasted?” Jordan asked. His tone was flat, offering no clue as to his thoughts. Knowing Jordan as I did, I knew that he was more than likely to object if I assumed anything one way or another. He was like that. He considered himself a very critical thinker, and didn’t like assumptions.

  “I don’t know, Jordan,” I replied. “But under the circumstances, I don’t want to take chances with just walking up to them, not without comms.” I stared at him, though he could only see the same thing I could; the blocky shape of my fusion goggles sticking out from under my vegetation-adorned ghillie hood-over.