Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  “What’s his MOS?” Bradshaw asked.

  “Information Systems,” Killian deadpanned.

  I raised my eyebrows in bemusement. “Your ranking officer is an IT nerd?”

  “Afraid so,” Killian answered, looking up at me. “So, you can see what the hard part is. He doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know. But he’s the ranking officer. I’m an E-7. I can’t tell a CWO-3 to sit down and shut up.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Look around you, Killian. Your support network is the people and vehicles in this clearing. That’s it. This is hardly the time to worry about rank when it comes down to survival.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Killian replied, though his voice was calm. “You’re outside the chain of command. I could be court-martialed afterward.”

  I snorted. “Who gives a shit?” I retorted. “That just means you’ll be alive when they court-martial you, and when the truth comes out, if they don’t give you a damn commendation, then they’re even stupider than I imagined they’ve gotten. We are out in the cold, Killian. There’s not time or space for niceties that permit stupid decisions, and an amateur trying to play field commander is just going to result in stupid decisions. And stupid decisions just get people killed.”

  Bradshaw heaved himself suddenly to his feet. “You know what?” he said. “Let’s go talk to him. Maybe we can talk some sense into him before he does something dumb. Maybe he’s smarter and more self-aware than either one of you are giving him credit for, and he’s just trying to fulfill what he sees as his responsibilities, even though he knows he’s in over his head.”

  I shoved off from the tree trunk as Bradshaw dusted off his hands and grabbed his Oracle. Killian looked a little uncomfortable; he was probably worried about what was about to happen. Under any other circumstances, I might not have blamed him.

  But here, surrounded, cut off, and hunted, I didn’t have much sympathy. Everyone needed to come to grips with what had happened and what was going on, or none of us were going to get out of this alive.

  We might not, anyway. But I’d rather go down fighting than get killed because of indecision.

  It was a short walk to the Powell, where Warren was sitting inside. He looked pale and cold; he didn’t have much in the way of warming layers, having grabbed some other poor bastard’s blouse. He looked up as we approached, his face cast in a weird, bluish light by the screens inside the armored vehicle. The look on his face was hard to read, until I realized that he wasn’t just nervous, like Killian was. He was terrified, and trying not to show it.

  “So,” I said, deciding to get things going when Warren didn’t seem eager to start talking, himself. “Killian here tells me that you’re the ranking officer.”

  Warren seemed to gulp, though it might have just been the light. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. His voice wasn’t as high-pitched as I might have expected it to be, but it wasn’t exactly the epitome of gravelly manliness, either. He looked at Killian. “Believe me, I’m no happier about it than any of you. I’m a computer geek.”

  I squatted down outside the hatch. “How much ground warfare training have you had?” I asked.

  “The absolute bare-bones basics,” he admitted. “I qualify every year. That’s about where it stops.” He definitely gulped. “And yet, here I am. Responsible for three armored vehicles and something like thirty people.” He looked down at me for a long moment, his mouth working. He wanted to ask the question, but he was scared of the answer. “At least, I’m pretty sure just the thirty,” he said. “That depends on…” he trailed off.

  “On who the obvious Americans in the strange fatigues and non-standard weapons are?” I finished for him.

  “I guess, yeah,” he said. “Are you with JSOC? Or the Agency?” There was a distinct note of hope in his voice. Ranking officer or no, he would feel more comfortable turning command over to Delta or DEVGRU types, or even Special Activities.

  He was in for a bit of a disappointment in that regard. Not that it really mattered. The trick was going to be whether he really understood that.

  “Neither,” I replied. “We are working for an interested third party.”

  His eyes flicked between me and Bradshaw at that, and his nervousness increased. “What…what exactly does that mean?” he asked.

  “Exactly what it says,” Bradshaw replied. “We’re not under either the Pentagon’s or Langley’s chain of command.”

  “They haven’t said it, and I’m pretty sure they’re not going to come out and say it,” Killian said quietly. “And given what’s been going on back home, I can’t say that I blame them. But I’m about ninety percent sure that they’re Triarii, Chief.”

  Warren didn’t quite twitch, though he blinked, hard. He looked down at his hands for a long moment. They might have been shaking a little. “That could be a problem,” he said, finally, his voice cracking a little.

  “That’s politics,” I said. “Politics stopped mattering to any of us out here as soon as Keystone got flattened. We’re in this together, whether we like it or not. You want to live? You work with us. Otherwise, we’re going to have to exfil on our own, and leave you to the tender mercies of the enemy.” I blew out a deep breath. “That might sound like a threat, but it’s not. It’s just reality. The bad guys won’t give a damn whether we’re Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Triarii, or even PRA. To them, we’re Americans, so we’re targets.”

  As I was talking, I was silently praying that common sense prevailed, and that this wasn’t going to be an issue. That he came to understand just how precarious our position was. If he let Stateside politics govern his decision, this could get real uncomfortable, real quick.

  Of course, the Triarii wasn’t an illegal organization, not really. We had our supporters on multiple State and Federal levels. It said something about just how deadlocked government had gotten that we were the unofficial State defense force in some states, and an invading terrorist group in others, while the Federal Government was so split that nobody with any authority even wanted to mention our existence.

  “I guess that depends,” he said. “We’ll have to see what the ranking officers say once we get out of hostile territory and back to the other peacekeepers. It’s out of my wheelhouse, I’m afraid.”

  Killian glanced at me. I didn’t look at him, but I felt his eyes, and Bradshaw’s. Neither man seemed eager to jump in. Thanks, guys.

  “That’s your plan?” I asked him. “Make for Camp Leyen and turn yourselves in to the Germans?”

  “That’s the nearest peacekeeper base,” he said. “If it’s still intact, it should be secure enough, provided they can get a relief force to us. And no, I’m not suggesting that we try to push through the Nationalist forces to get there. We should hold our position and call for help.”

  “Two problems with that,” I said. “One, the comms are down. Full-spectrum jamming. We’ve got some faint and fitful HF comms with our own support people, but SINCGARS and satcom are both out. Calling for help isn’t going to work very well.

  “Two is the more important one, though. We’d be better off slitting our own throats than walking into Camp Leyen.”

  “What are you talking about?” Warren asked. “I’m pretty sure the Germans don’t even know that the Triarii exist. They might not like you, but that doesn’t mean…”

  “Chief,” Killian interrupted. “We were fired upon by EDC helicopters the night that Keystone was destroyed. Tigers.”

  Warren either wasn’t getting it, or didn’t want to get it. He looked back and forth from Killian to me to Bradshaw. “Mistaken identity happens,” he said. There was a quaver in his voice. He got it. He just didn’t want to believe it. “Especially after a Nationalist attack like that…”

  “It wasn’t the Nationalists,” I said bluntly. “The only people with that much artillery anywhere near here were the US, the EDC, and the Loyalist Slovak Army.”

  “And the EDC’s been keeping the Slovaks on a really short leash,” Killian put in
.

  Warren was clearly shaken by this time. “No,” he stammered. “No, that’s crazy. We’re allies. We always have been. There’s no way. It had to be the Nationalists.” He was looking for any other explanation. “The Russians must have gotten the support to them that we’ve been hearing about, somehow. More artillery, maybe disguised BM-21s or something.”

  I shook my head. We had enough intel to know that the Russians were a threat; Russia has only ever cared about Russia, no more, no less. It didn’t mean they were the Soviet Union reborn, though there was some worrying continuity in personnel among the leadership. If you looked hard enough, just about everyone running things in Moscow had been KGB or FSB at one time.

  But they’d become a convenient scapegoat for everything in recent years. Just like the jihadis had blinded the American defense apparatus to any other threats for over a decade beforehand, the Russians had become the subject of a similar fixation.

  “The Russians are still focused on Ukraine and the Baltics,” I said. “Trust me, our intel people have been watching them, too. They wouldn’t have gotten that kind of materiel into Slovakia without somebody noticing.” I shook my head again. “No, this wasn’t the Nationalists, and it wasn’t the Russians. It would seem that the EDC decided to take Slovenský Grob as an act of war, after all.”

  “But…” He was starting to look a little overwhelmed. His safe, tidy notions of how the world worked were crumbling. “But we explained that! The people responsible were punished! It wasn’t US policy! How…”

  “My guess is that they needed a war, given how fast the EDC countries are imploding,” Bradshaw said. “It’s happened before. The money for all their social programs is running out, the people have no more trust in their leaders, so they found a new boogeyman to try to get the people to stop rioting in the streets. They’ve already targeted every nationalist and traditionalist group in Europe as an enemy of peace. How much do you want to bet that they’ve been quietly doing the same thing with the US, and that Slovenský Grob was just the excuse they needed?”

  Warren didn’t even have an answer to that. He was still trying to process it. Having his base blown to hell had rattled him enough. I had to actually, if grudgingly, credit him some. He was an office geek; probably had been for close to twenty years. His world was computers and information systems. Not explosives and bullets and sneaking around in the woods and the dirt. The fact that he hadn’t shut down completely when FOB Keystone had been flattened, had taken cover and, despite that young grunt’s opinion, probably saved their lives by keeping them inside the bunker instead of trying to take the fight to a prepared and coordinated force of attackers with one rifle, was good on him. But this seemed to be a step too far for him.

  “Weren’t the Germans kind of giving us the cold shoulder before the EDC was even a thing?” Killian asked. “I think I remember hearing something about that. Somebody who was traveling to Frankfurt, or something.”

  “You could say that,” I answered. I’d made sure I’d read the whole intel package on the way to Hungary. It had been long and complicated, and had stretched clear back to the ‘teens, but it had been eye-opening. We’d been in an economic and increasingly military cold war with Germany ever since the “EU Army” had first been proposed. It was just that nobody wanted to call a spade a spade anymore. Everyone was terrified of what might happen if they did.

  Maybe those days were over. I suspected they’d just been blotted out in the last few days of fire and death. The only question was whether or not anyone would figure it out before it was too late.

  Presuming it wasn’t already too late.

  “The point is, we’re surrounded by enemies, we’re getting low on supplies, and we’ve been in one place too long,” I said. We needed to get this little meeting over with, before a lucky drone or helicopter pilot spotted us and brought all hell down around our ears. I looked at Killian. Warren seemed to have partially shut down. “How are you doing on fuel?”

  He patted the Powell’s hull. “This baby’s got about another three hundred seventy-five klicks in her,” he said. “The Strykers are about the same. Ammo could get tight soon, though.” He pointedly glanced at my rifle. “We’ve got some 7.62; there are still M240s on the Strykers. But the supply’s limited.”

  “We’ll make do,” I said. We had trained for a long time to make every shot count. It had meant not just hours on the range, but days. Hartrick had laid down the law, though.

  “If the Selous Scouts could hunt bad guys in the African bush for a month on three magazines, so can you,” he’d said. “You don’t shoot unless you’ve got a kill shot. Leave suppression for the belt-feds.” We hadn’t been one hundred percent faithful to that, but we were still doing alright for ammunition. Plus, Bradshaw had brought some extra, which had been passed around after we’d linked up outside of Borinka.

  “It’s water and chow I’m getting worried about,” I continued. “We’ll be all right for about another day, but then things are going to get tight.” I glanced at Warren, who was still staring at his hands, apparently tuned out. He’d have to snap out of it sooner or later, but for the moment, I just turned my attention back to Killian.

  “I think our best bet is to find the Nationalists and link up,” I said. Warren did look up at that, but he was still turning over what we’d told him, and didn’t comment.

  Killian glanced at Warren. He was clearly uncomfortable with the situation. Warren was the ranking officer, so Killian could be considered out of line if he took over. But Warren was out of his depth, and wasn’t saying anything anyway.

  “I don’t have a better plan,” he said. “Except to try to get to FOB Poole. But that’s a long movement. I doubt we can make it in a day.”

  FOB Poole was the other major US base in Slovakia, set up right outside the city of Zilina, just south of the Polish border. And while I didn’t say it, I doubted that Poole had escaped Keystone’s fate. If they’d mobilized their guard force and QRF fast enough, they might have held their own, but given what had happened to Keystone, that was a faint hope. It’s hard to prepare for an attack from people who are supposed to be your allies.

  “I’ve got the more up-to-date intel,” Bradshaw said, pulling out his own map tablet. “Last we heard, there should be a major cell in or around Vrbovè. There’s been a lot of reporting on attacks and ambushes around there.”

  What went unsaid was the fact that most of those attacks had been directed at peacekeeper units and the Slovak Army. And we were talking about rolling in there with a Powell and two Strykers. Not exactly what would be sticking in the memory as “Nationalist-friendly” forces.

  “That’s sixty klicks or more from here,” Killian pointed out, looking over Bradshaw’s shoulder. “That’s going to be a hump. We can’t fit everybody in the vehicles.”

  “I know,” Bradshaw said. “It’s going to take a few days. Or nights.”

  “We’re not going to get sixty klicks on the supplies we’ve got,” I said. “We might make it thirty.” Killian gave me a sharp look at that; he probably couldn’t imagine going that far on what I’d said we had left. Of course, what was one day’s chow at full rations could keep us going for a while. Just not all the way to Vrbovè. We needed to resupply before that. The question was, where? It wasn’t like there were a lot of American supply dumps around. “We need to find a cell somewhere closer, if we’re not just going to be robbing the locals.”

  “We ran into the most trouble around Kuchyňa,” Killian put in. “Not quite so much after Slovenský Grob, but it was always tense going through there. Especially if we were rolling with the Germans or Belgians.”

  “That might be our ticket, then,” I said, peering over Bradshaw’s other shoulder at the tablet and its imagery. “It’s only about a ten-klick movement from here.” I stepped back. “Probably a good idea to keep the vehicles back in the woods; even if the locals have decided that Americans are now friendlies by default, there are probably going to be EDC or their
proxy militias around. Let’s not bring the hammer down on our heads before we have to. I’ll go in with my team; it’ll make for a smaller footprint, and we’re trained for this kind of thing, anyway.” Not that we had any contacts with the Nationalists, or any partisan linkup procedures worked out. This could get interesting.

  “How soon can you be ready to go?” Killian asked. Warren was being ignored, and didn’t seem to mind all that much.

  “In the next few minutes,” I said. “We’ve been ready to break out since we halted.”

  He nodded, looking a little shamefaced. “It’s going to take us about thirty,” he admitted.

  “Make it quick,” was all I said, as I turned to head back to my team. Harsh, maybe, but we weren’t in a situation where any of us could afford to be nice.

  Nice had gone out the window the moment our “allies” had started shelling one of our bases.

  Chapter 13

  Ten klicks isn’t all that far. But when you’re running on short sleep and short rations, carrying a third of your bodyweight on your back, trying to stay out of sight and alert for the enemy, covering a hell of a lot of nasty, wooded terrain, it becomes a long way.

  I called a halt on the back side of the last hill south of Kuchyňa. There were still a lot of woods, but most of the forest around there had been clear-cut some time ago. The clear-cut was crisscrossed with vehicle tracks, but it wouldn’t provide much cover or concealment. Fortunately, Killian was learning fast. He kept the three vehicles as far back under the remaining trees as he could.

  Being on the receiving end of an attack helicopter’s rockets tended to make a man more than a little cautious.

  We didn’t drop rucks that time. We’d need them, provided this went according to plan. I had that nagging worry at the back of my mind that it wouldn’t; nothing ever went according to plan, and this op was the crowning illustration of that fact. We were supposed to be back in Hungary, getting ready to return Stateside. The plan had been to get England, drop him at Keystone, and then exfil.