Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  He was sitting up against a tree, staring back toward the burning vehicles. His face was slack, his stare fixed. I hurried over to him.

  “Killian!” I barked, almost in his face. He blinked and looked at me, but the shock and horror in his eyes were unmistakable. I grabbed him by his kit and hauled him to his feet, running my hand over him quickly to check for bleeds. “You need to get accountability of your people,” I told him firmly, my voice probably a little too loud given my own battered hearing. “Then we need to get far away from here as fast as possible. Do you understand?”

  His glazed eyes seemed to clear a little, and finally focused on me. I didn’t know how hard he’d gotten hit. He probably had some degree of traumatic brain injury from being so close to the blast. Hell, I probably did, too.

  When he didn’t answer, I shook him a little. It wasn’t an ideal way to deal with a man with a TBI, who’d just watched some of his unit turned into hamburger in front of him, but right at that moment, we didn’t have time to deal with the trauma in any kind of sensitive manner. We needed to get everyone who was still alive the hell out of the kill zone.

  “Killian!”

  He blinked. “Yeah. Accountability. Right.”

  “Get moving,” I snapped. “We don’t know if they’re finished yet.”

  He staggered off, yelling for his fireteam leaders. I turned back to my team and caught up with Phil, who was looking more shaken than I think I’d ever seen him.

  There weren’t many in our line of work, in our generation, who had ever been the target of an enemy airstrike. The US had always had air supremacy; airstrikes were what happened to the other guys.

  We were going to have to get used to a whole different reality. The old narrative about how First World nations didn’t make war on each other seemed to be slipping into the fantasy that it always had been.

  We pushed farther northeast, taking up security positions deep under the trees while we waited for Bradshaw and Killian to get their units together and get ready to move.

  There wasn’t going to be time to bury the bodies or otherwise deal with the burning vehicles. We’d have to hope that any follow-up force decided that the dead were all there had been. Hopefully, the dead would help their brothers and sisters one last time.

  It was a grim way of looking at things, but it was grim world we’d woken up to. Grimmer than it had been only a few years before.

  Chapter 15

  Bradshaw had lost five men. I didn’t know them well, but I still knew their faces. Wheeler, Dekker, Crowley, Morrow, and Hughes were gone. Three of them had died quickly. Morrow had taken a shattered tree limb to the throat, and had died slowly, choking on his own blood. There hadn’t been anything any of us could do. Dekker’s chest had been crushed. He died while Jordan was working on him.

  Killian’s unit had taken almost thirty percent casualties. Of those, about half were dead. The others were mostly walking wounded, except for a young female PFC named Bond who had lost her leg. She would have to be carried.

  If she didn’t die of shock before we got very far.

  We stayed in place long enough to get Bond somewhat stabilized, her stump tourniqueted, and then, with two soldiers carrying her, we headed out. It was going to be a long night.

  ***

  We didn’t get nearly as far that night as I’d hoped. I think we covered about five more kilometers after dark, before having to find a hide site and lay up. The regulars were spent, ground down by the movement, wounds, and shock. We weren’t really in much better shape, except that we were better-trained, and our conditioning was better. Physically, we could have kept going another five.

  Mentally, I wasn’t so sure.

  Killian had shaken off some of his shock. His voice was a harsh rasp as he issued instructions once we halted. He didn’t give his soldiers a moment’s rest, not until they had dug in and set security.

  In a way, it was good to see. He was adjusting, finding the hardened spine he was going to need if he and his men were going to survive this. It was just too bad that it had taken such a disaster to bring it about.

  Warren hadn’t said much, deferring to Killian. He was clearly exhausted and in shock. We’d barely halted before he was down on his ass, back against a tree, either asleep or damned close. How he’d made it out when so many others hadn’t, I didn’t know. And I knew that others, among the regulars as well as us, were going to be asking the same question.

  Draven had gotten his guys out quick, and had managed to get them to cover in time to avoid any casualties beyond some battered hearing and minor frag. They were every bit as tired as we were, but they were infantrymen, even if they’d been humping mortars. Draven had quickly teamed up with Bradshaw, and the mortarmen were mixed in with the other infantry on the perimeter.

  My team didn’t have a sector. We were scouts, snipers, saboteurs, and shock troops. We needed to be able to move without taking away from the larger unit’s security. Some of Killian’s soldiers weren’t happy about it; we were getting looks. Of course, so were Bradshaw’s guys, but not to the same extent.

  They could look all they wanted. We had our role, and it was going to keep more of them alive.

  Even as we planted ourselves among the bushes and rocks in the middle of the oddly-shaped perimeter on the mountainside, I heard the distant rumble of artillery. Another section of fast-movers went by overhead with a dull, crackling roar. I spotted them briefly in my NVGs as I craned my neck to look up, just before they passed out of sight, blocked by the trees. A few minutes later, I thought I heard the distant crumps of their ordnance.

  “I need one guy,” I said quietly. “I’m going up to the crest of the ridge, see if I can get a better view.” It was recon, but I wasn’t going to assign anybody unless I had to.

  “I’ll go,” Chris said. “Phil’s been breaking trail all day and all night, while I’ve been tagging along.”

  “Because I’m better at it,” Phil said. “Recognize.”

  “Because you’re the last one we’ll miss if you get blown up, more like,” David replied.

  “Pot, meet kettle, Peanut,” Phil shot back. “If you hadn’t wormed your way into the secondary comms billet, you’d be right up here. Having to be stealthy might finally shut you up.”

  “Come on, Chris,” I said, dropping my ruck and slinging my rifle. I started uphill, toward the perimeter. Scott could sort this bickering lot out.

  Draven, it turned out, had the northern, uppermost sector. I crouched down next to him and hastily explained the plan in whispers, giving him my rough direction, distance, and timeframe, along with instructions if we didn’t come back within that timeframe. It mostly boiled down to, “Tell Scott, and get ready to get the hell out of here, because we’re probably captured or dead.” But he got the gist. And Draven was no newcomer, either. He’d been around the block almost as long as Kidd. He’d dropped mortars on Kosovars and Serbs alike in the Fourth Balkan War.

  With contingency plans and linkup procedures established, Chris and I moved out.

  It was a tough climb. The slope got steeper and rockier as we went up, the pines and firs getting farther apart on the stony mountainside. Both of us slipped a couple of times, freezing as a rock tumbled away down the slope from under a wrongly placed boot.

  It took nearly an hour to get the top. It was barely three hundred meters, but we were tired and the terrain was unforgiving. Once we reached a good lay-up spot, I stopped, sinking to a knee and scanning the ridgeline carefully, my rifle held ready, the muzzle never far from my line of sight.

  After about five minutes of just staying put, listening and watching, I was satisfied that we were alone up there. I could hear faint noises from down below; I was pretty sure it was Killian’s troops. My guys would have gone silent, and Bradshaw would be ruthlessly enforcing light and noise discipline. Not that he needed to with Triarii, especially when we had regular Army pukes along with us. They’d stay silent and professional just to show the little guys how
it’s done.

  Satisfied with our position, I turned my attention north and east.

  Distant flickers preceded more faint rumbles. Somewhere below us and to the north, a multiple-launch rocket system battery opened fire, the missiles roaring northeast on fiery streaks of exhaust, the rapid-fire whoosh of the launch only reaching us most of a minute later. The rockets spent their fury on the far side of a hill we couldn’t see over, though the earthquake rumble of the impacts echoed across the fields in the night.

  “Somebody’s getting pasted tonight,” Chris whispered.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s the bad guys.”

  We watched in silence for a few more minutes, while I tried to get a handle on just what we were looking at, casting back to the map in my mind. Judging by the direction, and the amount of time it was taking for the sound to get to us after the flashes, I thought that we were looking at an engagement somewhere between us and Vrbovè. Which meant that the Nationalists had advance forces out to try to forestall the “peacekeepers.”

  Or, we were watching another massacre, in real time.

  However, as I watched, I started to doubt it. A faint growl reached my battered ears, that wasn’t artillery fire or explosions. I squinted. It was a long way off, but I thought I saw the speck in my NVGs that might be a helicopter. Then another. My suspicions were confirmed when a long line of tracers reached up toward the two distant specks, forcing them to veer off.

  So, somebody was getting pasted, but they were still putting up a fight.

  “You think this is it?” Chris asked quietly as we watched the biggest battle I’d ever seen in my life.

  I knew Chris. I knew what he was asking. I still asked, “You mean the End Times? Hell, I don’t know, Chris. It’s another war. There have been an awful lot of them throughout history.”

  “Yeah,” he answered. “But everything seems to be falling apart at once. There are a lot of parallels with Revelation.”

  “There always are,” I replied. I sighed. Chris was a zealous member of some evangelical splinter church. This wasn’t the first such conversation we’d had. “There were a lot of parallels at the fall of Jerusalem, too,” I told him. “It’s apocalyptic literature, Chris. It’s got multiple layers and meanings. That’s the nature of it.” I watched the next salvo of rockets streak off to the north. “Maybe it is the final war. Maybe it’s no more the last war than World War I was the ‘War to End All Wars.’ Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters,” he said. “If the End Times are coming, we want to make sure we’re on the right side.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure that the EDC ain’t on the side of the angels,” I said wryly. “Look, Chris. It doesn’t matter because all that we need to be worried about is how we’re going to face our own deaths, even if they come tomorrow.” Which they might. “’Thou knowest not the day, nor the hour,’ remember? He told us not to worry too much about it.”

  Chris fell silent. This wasn’t a new conversation. Like a lot of people in his particular sect, Chris was borderline obsessed with trying to suss out just which element of the modern world corresponded precisely with which element of the Book of Revelation.

  I thought it was a waste of time, and a lack of faith. But there came a point where the argument became somewhat pointless. And on a leader’s recon, watching the EDC and the Slovak Army hammer the Nationalists that we were trying to reach, wasn’t the time to really go into depth.

  After a while, there wasn’t much more we could figure out from our vantage point. The battle continued to rage, but it was too far away to tell who was winning and who was losing. After I glanced at my watch, seeing that we had about three hours of darkness left, we started back down.

  ***

  Greg had the HF radio up when we rejoined the rest of the team, and handed me the handset. “Kidd’s on,” he whispered.

  I took the handset. “Pegleg, Deacon,” I said.

  “I don’t have a lot of new info for you, Deacon,” Kidd said. His voice was scratchy and weak, and I had to press the handset hard against my ear to hear him, even in the relative quiet of the night. “We’ve still got no comms Stateside. We might have gotten a whisper on the HF, but satcom’s still flatlined. And get this; we’re locked out of most of our email accounts. There seems to be some kind of denial of service attack across the board. We might have gotten something through on one of the tertiary accounts, but so far, there’s been no reply. That might be because nobody back home can get access, either, or…” he paused, as if carefully picking his words. “Or, they’re too busy to get access.”

  Given what had been happening back home for the last couple of years, the increasing frequency of riots, flash-mob violence, assassinations, bombings, and infrastructure attacks, both by foreign and domestic terror groups, that didn’t bode well. If the main body of the Triarii were too busy for the command to make contact with the first Triarii expeditionary unit, something had to have gone pretty far south.

  Given the coincidence of timing with the attack on Keystone and the crash of US military comms in Europe, I doubted that the coincidence was accidental.

  “Roger,” I acknowledged, before filling him in on what we’d seen in Kuchyňa, and from the peak above us. “This looks to me like a concerted effort to wipe out the Nationalists, and punish anyone who helped them in any way,” I said. “I think they realized after Slovenský Grob that the US wasn’t going to play ball, so they decided to take the American peacekeepers off the board.”

  “Sounds about like it,” Kidd replied, his words almost drowned in a wash of static. “We still can’t get air over Slovakia; we lost two more drones yesterday. But before we did, we got imagery of some major movements toward the Hungarian border. Most of the units looked Czech; I think that the EDC is forcing Prague to walk under the yoke.” It would take a Triarii to understand the reference, these days. In the old Roman days, forcing a defeated army to walk under an ox yoke was a way of enforcing their subservience to the victors. The EDC had forced both Prague and Bratislava to open their borders to the continuing flow of “refugees” from North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans, while increasing their financial and military contributions to the EDC itself, based on the debts already owed by both governments to Paris and Berlin. The Czechs had folded quicker than the Slovaks, and now both nations were paying the price, if in different ways.

  “The Hungarians are treating these movements as a threat,” Kidd went on, “which I’m pretty sure they are.” Kidd would have been in close contact with the Hungarian Army. The Hungarians had split away from the EU at about the same time the Poles had, and had been more than receptive when Colonel Santiago had sent Kidd with our advance party to lay out what we wanted to do. “They’re deploying elements of the 25th Infantry Brigade to the border.” He paused again. “I’m not sure that coming this way is going to be the best idea, Deacon.”

  “We weren’t really planning on it,” I admitted, though this was one of the first times I’d really had a chance to think about it. “The original plan was to get the Army cats to Zilina and FOB Poole. Now, I doubt that Poole’s still standing. Nobody’s gotten comms with them. And without the vehicles, these kids are going to get slaughtered.” They would have been slaughtered in the vehicles if we hadn’t moved fast. “That leaves the nearest American forces in Poland.” Despite the magnitude of the sneak attack in Slovakia, I doubted that the EDC had managed to penetrate far enough into Poland to wipe out the big US bases there, the same ones that the Russians had been complaining about for years. “We’ve got you guys in Hungary, but if we go there, we’re going to be stuck with the same problem of returning these people to the Army that we’ve got now.”

  “Well, you’re the guy on the ground,” Kidd replied. “See if you can link up with the Nationalists. We’ve been trying to contact them in Vrbovè via HF, but we haven’t gotten through yet. If we can, we’ll tell them to be on the lookout for you.” We
didn’t have any solid contacts with the Nationalists, but there had been messages sent before we inserted to rescue England. “Just keep me posted as best you can,” he continued. “I’ll do what I can to coordinate with the Hungarian Ground Forces if you do come this way. They’ve got no reason to love the EDC.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” I replied, before signing off. Truth be told, I doubted that either Killian or Warren would be willing to head for Hungary. As far as the US Army knew, there were no friendly forces there. Granted, they were still operating on the old paradigm that the EDC, the new de facto successor to the European Union, were American allies. Hungary having told the EU to sit on it and spin even before the formation of the so-called European Defense Council, the Hungarians were going to be viewed by Washington with suspicion, at best. And the Army answered to Washington, no matter what the grunts on the ground might think about the realities of the situation.

  I didn’t seek either of the regular leaders out. There was no real change to either our situation, or our plan. We were still heading for Vrbovè the next night, provided we didn’t get forced out of this position again during the day. Being limited to our feet, in a way, made things a little easier. Foot-mobiles are harder to spot from the air than steel behemoths spouting exhaust fumes.

  I found my ruck, lay back against it, and was asleep in seconds.

  Chapter 16

  Vrbovè had taken a beating. But it was still standing.

  We’d seen the smoking hulks of vehicles on and around the road, starting at Chtelnica. Entire stretches of fields and the hedgerows in between were blasted and blackened, where the Nationalists had put up a fight before either falling back or being annihilated.

  Now, from our vantage point in the woods, on one of the last foothills of the Little Carpathians before the open valley where Vrbovè sat, Phil and I scanned the fields in front of us and tried to plan our infiltration.