Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  Instead, we were running and fighting for our lives in what felt an awful lot like World War III kicking off.

  Not that it hadn’t already. Nobody wanted to call it that, except for a few of the wilder pundits. The others were calling it an “unfortunate coincidence of conflicts,” or “the recent breakdown in global order.”

  I guess the reality was just too horrifying to think about. Easier to look at the fact that the Chinese, Japanese, and what was left of ASEAN were going at it hammer and tongs in the Pacific, Central Asia was one Pakistani shahid short of a nuclear holocaust, the Russian Empire was expanding violently, the Middle East was about to enter the next phase of open warfare, Europe was imploding, and the US was in the middle of what could only be called a civil war, as just a conglomeration of isolated conflicts.

  Except that a lot of the Second World War had really been the same way. The Germans and the Japanese had never conducted any joint operations. This was just even more out of control.

  Tired, footsore, and worn down, I still conducted my last-minute coordination with Killian and Bradshaw, before dragging my ass over to the team, rucksack-flopped in a circle just outside the main perimeter.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered. “We’re burning darkness.”

  “Can’t Bradshaw’s guys do it, this once?” Phil asked. He was still sitting against his ruck, his head back against the frame. “I’m beat.”

  “We’re all beat,” I replied. “You think they’re any less tired?”

  “Yeah, actually I do,” Phil replied. “They haven’t been on the ground as long as we have.”

  “Why don’t you turn in your GL tab, then?” David asked. “If it’s too hard for you.”

  “Hell, son,” Dwight rumbled. “I’ve got like twenty years on you. What are you bitching about?”

  “Are you talking to Phil, or to Peanut?” Scott asked.

  “Phil,” Dwight grumbled, with the exasperated growl that spoke of hearing the same joke about a hundred times too many.

  “Dwight’s not even my real dad,” David said. “Don’t worry, Phil. I’ll take point, too. You can go see if you can sleep with the Stryker crew. That chick who looks like she got beat with an ugly stick might like it. She’s been watching us when she’s not doing anything else.”

  “Which is most of the time,” Chris said sourly. “But I don’t get the vibe off of her that she’s smitten with Phil. More like she thinks we’re some kind of evil right-wing terrorists, or something.”

  “She’s infantry,” David said. “Can’t be a liberal and be infantry.”

  “You’d think,” Chris replied. “These days, you can’t be sure, though.”

  “Is the knitting circle done?” I asked. “Because if you lot have enough energy to chatter like little girls, then you’ve got plenty to hump another fifty klicks. We may as well not even try to go into Kuchyňa after supplies.”

  David shut up, his jaw closing with a faint clop. He was the shortest of us, and also tended to eat the most. He sure as hell didn’t want to keep up with the rest of the team for another fifty kilometers without chow.

  “Fine,” Phil said. “We’ll take care of it. Let the grunts get their beauty sleep. They need it more than we do, I guess.”

  He heaved himself to his feet, steadied himself against a tree, and then started out. I reached down to help Greg to his feet, then followed.

  We had to move downhill to the west to stay in the woods, spreading out in the sparse undergrowth. There wasn’t a lot of light getting under the trees, but the fusion goggles did a good job of amplifying what was there, and the addition of our thermal signatures helped, too. We weren’t going to lose each other in the dark, as thick as it was. Of course, that could go both ways, too.

  We got a few hundred yards before Phil slowed and sank to a knee, holding up a hand to signal a halt. I closed in on him before taking a knee myself. I didn’t need him to tell me why he’d stopped; I could tell for myself.

  The smell of smoke was heavy in the early morning darkness. And the sporadic pops we were hearing to the north were unmistakable as anything but gunfire.

  The war had come to Kuchyňa, as well, it seemed.

  We circled up and listened for a few minutes. The shots were coming at irregular intervals. There was nowhere near the volume of fire that one would expect if there was a fight going on. Whatever had happened, it was probably in the mopping-up stage.

  It could simply be somebody randomly shooting off his back porch, too. We didn’t know that there had been a fight. But given what had happened at Keystone, and what we’d heard in the distance since, I didn’t think it was all that likely.

  Besides, when you’re sneaking around a country where you’re not supposed to be in the first place, loaded for bear and cammied-up, paranoia isn’t just a good idea. It’s a requirement.

  Finally, I tapped Phil’s shoulder. Staying there and listening wasn’t going to get the job done. We needed to move in and get eyes on.

  He got to his feet and moved out. If he was moving slightly more cautiously, stopping more often in the cover of trees to look and listen, I wasn’t too worried about it. We had a limited amount of darkness left to work with, but if we rushed right into a firefight, it wouldn’t matter if it was still dark.

  It took most of another forty-five minutes to reach the edge of the trees. The forest had been cut down there, on the south side of town, but a lot of bushes had grown up in the aftermath. Most of them would have come to my upper chest if I’d been moving upright, but we moved through them as best we could, crouched down underneath the tops. It was a punishing movement. It would have been even without the rucks. As it was, my back was screaming by the time we reached the edge of the reservoir that sat at the southeastern corner of town.

  We had already been able to see the flickering light of fires inside the town, before we’d even been out of the woods. It wasn’t the raging inferno that had been FOB Keystone after the attack; it looked more like isolated houses were burning. Another gunshot rang out as we crouched in the bushes near the reservoir, the report echoing across the valley.

  We circled up in the trees. This had just gotten a lot more complicated. Not that it had been simple from the outset.

  “We’re going to have to drop rucks, at least for the moment,” I whispered. “Scott, you’ve got the Bravo Element back here. I’ll take Alpha and see what’s going on before we try going in there and making contact.”

  “Roger,” Scott replied. We’d be pushing daylight if this did work out, because we’d have to go in, make contact if it was feasible, then come back out and get the rucks, load them up, and then get away.

  Presuming that making contact worked out well at all. It might not. It might go very, very wrong. We were on thin ice.

  But we really had no other choice. We needed supplies, and we weren’t going to get out of Slovakia with seventy people without working with the Nationalists. Unless the comms magically cleared up so that we could call for help.

  There comes a time when you’ve got to accept that there is no safe way forward, spit on your hands, and get ready to win through or go down fighting.

  ***

  The first street was deserted. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean empty.

  One of the houses about a hundred yards from where Phil and I had come out of the trees was burning. In the light of the fire, we could see bodies in the street. They were sprawled in attitudes of violent death, some curled in the fetal position, as if they had died surrounded and under attack.

  As I scanned the scene, I realized that the street wasn’t quite deserted. It was hard to make out past the big thermal bloom of the burning house, but there was a low, angular shape squatting at the far end, a small turret topping it with a shrouded cannon pointing toward the east. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a German Puma IFV.

  More gunfire echoed across the town, this time a rattling exchange of shots that shattered the night, punctuated by what might have been
screams and yells. Kuchyňa wasn’t a large town. Sound carried.

  The armored vehicle stayed where it was, neither intervening nor fleeing. Almost as if it was posted on guard, to keep anyone from getting out of the town.

  I realized that that might not be the case; this might just be a repeat of the Dutch at Srebrenica, standing by while the massacre went down. It amounted to the same thing, in the end. I strongly doubted that the attackers were Slovak Nationalists. With only a couple of notable exceptions, the Nationalists had been remarkably discriminating in their target selection, mostly going after the peacekeepers, the Army, and the militias. Massacring towns wasn’t their usual MO.

  I stayed in place, as Phil crouched at the corner of the first house, looking back at me from time to time. I didn’t want to move too soon, though. Five of us getting into a firefight, with that armored vehicle sitting with a pretty clear shot down the lane, wasn’t a good idea. Sure, Scott and the rest would be down in minutes, but we’d probably all be dead by then.

  Finally, I squeezed Phil’s shoulder and pointed to the closest window. I didn’t want to go out in the street if we could help it, not until I knew more. He nodded, moving to the window and peering inside.

  “Looks clear,” he whispered. He tested the window; it was an inward-opening setup, and it was latched. That didn’t stop Phil; he glanced behind him to make sure he wasn’t about to flag any of the rest of the team with his muzzle, and buttstroked the joint between the panels. The window bent inward with a crack, but didn’t open. He hit it again, and we had our entry.

  Of course, I would have preferred to be first in, but Phil didn’t wait. He hefted his rifle in one hand, put the other on the sill, and started to clamber inside. I had to move quickly to boost him when his boots started scrabbling for purchase on the wall beneath the opening. I might have shoved a little too hard; he almost fell inside, hitting the floor with a thump that made me cringe from outside, even though I was only a couple feet away, and it probably hadn’t been audible for more than about ten more past that, especially with that ragged, sporadic firefight going on farther into town.

  I followed quickly. I didn’t want Phil to be stuck in there by himself. One-man clears are possible, but rarely advisable. Fortunately, nobody inside had started shooting yet.

  As I hit the floor, having gotten through a little more easily than Phil on account of my longer arms and legs, I saw that all the shooting in that house was long over.

  There was a corpse slumped in the front doorway. The long-haired man was dressed in a tracksuit and chest rig. He didn’t have much of a face left, thanks to the shotgun blast that had killed him, but the stubborn remnants of what looked a lot like a jihadi beard clung to his shattered jaw.

  The man who had shot him was lying in the middle of the common room, riddled with bullets, an ancient break-barrel shotgun underneath him. The splintered holes in the front wall revealed that the tracksuited man’s compatriots had simply mag-dumped into the front of the house as soon as he’d gone down.

  The violence hadn’t stopped there, though. There was spent brass scattered amidst the shattered glass on the floor inside, and the man with the shotgun wasn’t alone. His family had been huddled under the table in the kitchen behind him.

  They were still there. What was left of them.

  Everything in the house looked like it had been tossed. Furniture was torn up, cupboard doors hung open. The crucifix on the wall had been torn down and dashed on the floor.

  Phil and I moved away from the window, spreading out to allow the others room to make entry, while we cleared the corners and the dead space. I doubted that we were going to find anyone else in the house, but there was still the possibility that we’d run into a straggler, busily looting the house while his fellows had moved on.

  The bottom floor was mostly open, so it took seconds to clear it. All of us steered clear of the bodies for the moment. Jordan led the way upstairs, Greg on his heels, while Phil, Dwight, and I set security on the ground level. A moment later, they were coming back down, Jordan whispering a terse, angry, “Clear.”

  “There was a girl up there,” Greg said, his voice haunted. For once, his usual cheerfulness was gone. “They…they weren’t quick.”

  I just nodded, as I picked up the crucifix where it had been thrown on the floor. Setting it carefully on the table, I knelt next to the dead man with the shotgun.

  While the others watched the exits, I crossed myself. “Réquiem ætérnam dona eis Dómine; et lux perpétua lúceat eis. Requiéscant in pace. Amen.” The others kept their eyes on their sectors, though I might have heard Dwight muttering a prayer of some sort. I thought he was Baptist, but I honestly hadn’t ever asked, and he hadn’t been particularly forthcoming.

  I hadn’t grown up religious. In fact, if there was one thing my parents probably hated even more than my choice of profession, it was my newfound Catholicism, especially since I was what they would have contemptuously referred to as a “trad.” But sometimes God opens doors in ways you don’t expect. I probably would have gone on being a rather snooty agnostic, regardless of my political views, if it hadn’t been for Caleb Mosby’s death.

  Caleb had been the first friend I’d ever really lost. We’d been together since boot camp. Losing him sent me into a downward spiral that could have ended badly, if it hadn’t been for our Regimental Chaplain, Father Krieg. I’d known some wishy-washy chaplains, but Father Krieg wasn’t one of them. Padre had been a grunt in Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Somalia before he’d become a man of the cloth. He saved my life, and my soul along with it.

  That short prayer for the dead was all that I had time for. I straightened as a massive explosion shook the house around us. The entryway was briefly lit brightly by the flash as a fireball rose into the night sky, barely five hundred yards away. The gunfire died down a bit after that.

  “I don’t think we’re going to be able to make contact with the Nationalists here,” I said. “Search the kitchen for any food we can take, and something to take it in.” The light outside was getting brighter, and it wasn’t from the impending sunrise. Whatever had blown up, it had set at least one more house on fire. “We’ll load up with what we can find and head back to rendezvous with Scott and the others.”

  More gunfire rattled outside. Something told me that the fighting was over; that was celebratory gunfire. Given the looks of the dead man in the doorway, and the shattered crucifix, I had a feeling I knew who had come into Kuchyňa and gone house-to-house, killing anyone who resisted. And it hadn’t been the Germans.

  Just their proxies.

  There was going to be a reckoning. At least, I hoped there would be. I knew full well that I might not be alive to see it.

  At the same time, as the rage mounted in my chest, I knew that I was going to do my damnedest to make sure that I was.

  ***

  In the end, we had to fade back into the woods after only searching three houses, coming away with two duffels full of bread and sausage. It was going to have to do; most of the other food we’d found wasn’t going to be all that packable. And it would require stopping to cook. I’d been a little surprised; processed food had made its way all over the world, but it seemed that a lot of the people in Kuchyňa had been a bit more traditional. Or, given the town’s size, they were just more dependent on local food sources, particularly as the European economy collapsed.

  Every house had been the same. The bad guys had been thorough. And all the time, that Puma had sat at the end of the street, not moving. Overwatching the carnage.

  The picture was becoming clearer to me, putting the massacre in Kuchyňa together with the accounts of the destruction of FOB Keystone. The EDC was letting the militias do most of the dirty work, keeping their own forces aloof from the worst of it. They didn’t have to worry so much about casualties, or the potential backlash if the regular German or French people, many of whom were simmering with unrest already, found out that their sons or daughters were slaughtering al
lies and civilian populations, only a couple hundred miles away.

  If they thought that using proxies was going to insulate them from the war that was coming, they were doomed to disappointment.

  I was determined on that point.

  Chapter 14

  We took the risk and moved in daylight. Bradshaw, Killian, and I had agreed. We didn’t want to stay put anywhere near Kuchyňa after that. Fortunately, Draven had linked up with Bradshaw while we’d been in town, so they were hiking with us, the mortars strapped to the tops and sides of the Strykers to lighten the mortarmen’s loads. They had rifles, the same DPMS Oracles that the infantry section was carrying. They just didn’t have as much ammo for them.

  It wasn’t an easy movement; the Little Carpathians look small on the map, but when you’re humping everything you need on your back, even little mountains get to be a bitch to cover. We kept close to the vehicles as they found the logging roads and back tracks, but mountain terrain wasn’t great for armored vehicles, especially when you’re worried about helos and drones. In places, it was even slower going for the vehicles than it was for us with our leather Cadillacs.

  We’d stopped just after noon, in a clearing just beneath the peak of Vysokà. Not because we necessarily wanted to, but because one of the Strykers had gotten stuck. The driver had apparently miscalculated, and hooked one of the drive wheels over a log.

  Bradshaw had his men spread out on the outer perimeter. He’d talked me into putting our team at fifty percent; Dwight was snoring like a sawmill, Jordan was motionless, his eyes closed and his hands folded over his rifle in his lap. I was only awake because I still had a few things I wanted to check on. We had been making better time than I’d expected; depending on how long it took to get that Stryker moving again, and dependent on not getting spotted and attacked, we could well make eleven klicks by nightfall.

  I knew I’d get some pushback, but I was going to insist that we keep going after that. We needed the cover of darkness; we needed to grab every advantage we could find with both hands. We were moving during the day out of necessity, but that didn’t make it a good idea.