by Peter Nealen
Rybàr led us through a shadowed, arched passageway that went all the way through a three-story stone building, then up a curving walkway that led toward a bronze statue overlooking the city, with the main hall and cathedral on the right, and a smaller, white building on the left, topped by a round stone tower. A metal crucifix stood in the grassy courtyard, and as we approached it, I crossed myself. Rybàr glanced at me as I did so, and seemed to nod slightly.
Armed guards were stationed at the doors, and there were more sandbagged positions at the rail on either side of the statue, manned by men in camouflage and equipped with mounted .50 caliber M2 machineguns and multiple SA-18 SAMs.
I’d been kind of expecting Rybàr to lead us to the main hall, but instead he turned down the short flight of steps to the white building, which I saw was a museum. More sandbags had been set up inside the door and inside the windows. The Nationalists had been busy.
As we passed into the dimmed interior, I saw that they’d been busier than I’d thought. If the building had been a museum before the war, the displays had all been cleared away. It was a command post, now, lit by actinic work lights. Maps were up on plywood easels and spread across folding tables. Radios practically covered one entire wall, and laptops cast a bluish tint on the scene.
There was a constant low murmur in Slovak, all centered on the man leaning against the folding table in the center. From the looks of things, the plastic and aluminum contraption wasn’t going to last much longer with his weight on it.
He looked up as we came in. He was massively built, and little of it appeared to be muscle. He had two chins beneath a round, flat face, with thick lips that seemed to be constantly parted. He was as pale as a fish’s belly, despite the dark stubble on his head and his jaw.
For all that, he was wearing Slovak camouflage with the shoulder boards of a general officer. This must be Pokornỳ.
He and Rybàr greeted each other coolly. Even without understanding the language, it was clear that there was no love lost between the two men, despite—or perhaps because of—the difference in age.
They spoke quickly. Rybàr introduced us, though he did so in Slovak, only motioning toward the three of us. Pokornỳ looked at us, his face blank, his small eyes looking us over coolly while he breathed loudly and laboriously through his mouth. I could see the wheels turning as he scanned us, and I could tell that he wasn’t happy to see Americans there.
I took an immediate and intense dislike to the man.
He turned back to Rybàr and spoke at some length. I couldn’t follow it, but I was pretty sure I caught something akin to “Russki” in the mix. The sudden flicker of cold rage that crossed Rybàr’s face for a split second before he clamped down on it at the word pretty well confirmed it.
Rybàr countered at equal length, motioning toward the map, the imagery on a laptop, and then at us. I didn’t know exactly what the argument was, but I could tell that our future was currently teetering on a knife edge.
Finally, with a decided note of disgust in his voice and a faint, wet snort, Pokornỳ threw up his hands and turned back toward the map. For a moment, Rybàr just glared at the other man’s back, then turned to us. “My friends,” he said, “we are in a difficult situation here. I do not know if any of you speak Slovak, but Generàlporučik Pokornỳ is inclined to send you away as soon as possible.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Warren asked.
I gritted my teeth. Shut up, Warren.
“Not as things stand right now,” he replied. “The enemy has nearly a regiment of mechanized infantry and militia, with tank support, staged and ready to move on the city. Every report we have gotten suggests that they could start their attack as early as tonight.” He shook his head. “You would not get far.”
“But, then, why…?” Warren hadn’t picked up on what I had.
“Pokornỳ thinks that the Slovak Nationalists should accept Russian help,” I explained. “Which makes us an unwelcome complication. I’m guessing that American participation in the peacekeeping mission probably doesn’t endear us to him, either.”
“You are correct, my friend,” Rybàr said. “I have made the case to allow you to stay inside the defenses for now. But…”
“But we need to lend a hand,” I finished for him. “Otherwise, there’s no call to waste valuable resources helping us.”
He looked a little pained, but nodded. “I am afraid so.” He stroked his mustache. “We have a common enemy, as you pointed out in Vrbovè. And you would have a long way to go. It seems that the EDC destroyed FOB Poole, as well. You would have to go all the way to Poland.”
“Wait a minute.” It was finally starting to dawn on Warren what was happening. “No, I can’t do that. I don’t have the authority to do that. Don’t you understand? I am an officer in the United States Army. And the Army has not given me, or any other American, that I know of, orders that allow us to fight against the Slovak Army, or any EDC forces! We are here as peacekeepers!”
“Warren…” I started to say, but he turned to me, a mix of desperation and determination on his face.
“Look, Bowen, I don’t know for sure who you are, or who you work for, but in the Army, we follow orders.” His voice was shaking, putting the lie to his determined words. “And in the absence of orders, we are supposed to follow the last instructions received.”
I kept my calm as I stepped closer, all too conscious that Rybàr wasn’t the only one watching this interplay. Pokornỳ was watching, too, his piggish little eyes blank but alert.
“And if your last received orders are to hold security in a position that’s about to get overrun?” I asked him quietly. “If they didn’t include, ‘Fall back when you deem prudent?’”
“This isn’t the same thing!” he protested. “You’re not talking about falling back, you’re talking about fighting an urban battle against people who are ostensibly supposed to be our allies!”
“I would have thought that you’d have been disabused of that notion by now,” Bradshaw drawled.
Warren’s eyes flicked to him, a little too wide. I thought I understood what he was going through. He wasn’t cut out for this. He wasn’t trained for this. He was an Information Systems warrant officer. In the world he was used to, he wasn’t ever supposed to have to deal with this kind of a situation.
And I had the sudden realization that if he tried to lead those young soldiers in combat, he was going to get them, and probably himself, killed. Not out of any malice, or necessarily negligence or incompetence. Simply because he wasn’t prepared for it. And with that ad hoc, thrown-together bunch, it would be a disaster. And he knew it. But he couldn’t bring himself to say that much; he couldn’t allow himself, as the ranking officer, to show that weakness. So, he was falling back on orders and policy to try to cover for himself.
I wasn’t sure whether to respect him or despise him for it. Maybe a little of both.
I turned to Rybàr, though not before meeting Pokornỳ’s gaze just long enough to let him know that I wasn’t going to be intimidated. “If my guys and Bradshaw’s guys fight and Draven’s lend a hand with the mortars, will that be enough?” I asked. “We’re prepared for it. The regular Army soldiers aren’t.”
Rybàr looked slightly to one side, but he didn’t turn all the way to look at Pokornỳ. He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “You have my word on it.”
I blew out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Good,” I said. “We’ll need to restock and try to get a little rest. Is there somewhere that Chief Warren’s people can take shelter?”
He nodded again. “I will send Sỳkora with you as liaison,” he said. “He will show you everything you need.”
“Thank you,” I said. I glanced at Pokornỳ. No thanks to you, you fat fuck. “How soon are you expecting the attack to start?”
Before he could answer, a distant growl turned into a ripping shriek overhead, punctuated by a series of rippling explosions in the city and up on the mountain beyond. One of
the radio operators yelled out in Slovak.
“I would say it has just started,” Rybàr said. “They just attacked our air defense radars.
“They are coming.”
Chapter 24
It was a hell of an interesting movement to the forward positions.
The initial Suppression of Enemy Air Defense strikes had done their job well. Anti-radiation missiles launched from extreme long range had blown gaping holes in the Nationalists’ air defense network. Pillars of black smoke marked where S-125 batteries had died. And in the wake of the SEAD mission, the air strikes were inbound. The distant, growling roar of jet engines could already be heard, even as loudspeakers mounted on vans blared warnings in Slovak, warnings that were probably unneeded, given the already concrete evidence that the attack was beginning.
But while the EDC’s “Wild Weasel” aircraft had punched holes in the air defense network, they hadn’t knocked it out completely.
We had taken vehicles the first part of the way, speeding through streets that were all but deserted, as partially blocked as they were by defensive positions. Bunkers, barricades, and sandbagged armored vehicles were stationed at chokepoints in concentric rings around the castle, though getting more closely clustered along the main thoroughfares. Presuming that Pokornỳ had been the mastermind of this defensive plan, he might be an asshole, and a puppet of the Kremlin, but he knew his stuff. Nitra was going to be a hell of a fight.
We were tearing down Pàrovskà Street, weaving through the web of defensive positions and, quite noticeably, avoiding certain sections of road that otherwise seemed fairly clear. I could imagine why. Barely slowing down, our driver yanked the wheel over and, tires squealing, turned onto Štùrova Street, speeding toward the open traffic circle ahead, and the mall beyond, where more columns of black smoke were rising into the air, as smoke trails streaked down out of the sky in the distance, the impacts of rocket artillery throwing billowing clouds of dust and smoke into the air at the edge of Mlynàrce.
None of us could do much more than cling to our seats in the back. The boxy MAN TG truck had been a civilian model before the Nationalists had pressed it into service, and hadn’t really been set up for carrying passengers. I was pretty sure that the rough benches bolted into the box on the back hadn’t been in there a week before, and to say that their installation had been hasty would be an understatement. I could hear the benches creaking and banging back there from the front seat as the truck swayed alarmingly through the turn.
I couldn’t say that the driver’s haste was unwarranted. He was a young, slightly pudgy kid, pale as death, gripping the wheel with white knuckles that made his otherwise pasty complexion look like a Caribbean tan. He was scared shitless, and given the low rumble of explosions, the shrieking howl of jet engines, and the flickering flames of ZSU fire from the mall parking lot ahead, he wasn’t wrong. I’d thought I was jaded after what I’d seen over the last eight years, but even the nastiest dustups I’d seen in Africa with the MEU had been playground scraps compared to this.
A pair of tiny, triangular silhouettes appeared on the horizon, apparently coming right for us. The kid started to panic, but there was nowhere to go. There was a solid row of high-rise apartments with businesses between them on either side of the street. I pointed ahead and to the right, where there was an opening under the trees. I was pretty sure there was an armored vehicle under there, so it could be a target, but it beat being the only thing moving out in the open.
It had happened before I was born, but I remembered seeing video of “The Luckiest Man in Iraq.” I had no desire to recreate that scene, as a lone car had sped across a bridge, running from a Coalition air strike during Operation Desert Storm, and almost not made it out.
The kid floored it, just as flickering antiaircraft fire, the tracers barely visible in the early morning, converged on the two speeding silhouettes, accompanied by fast-moving, white smoke trails. They might have taken out the bulk of the S-125 batteries, but from what I’d seen so far, the Nationalists had a lot of SA-18s squirreled away in defensive positions. And there was no way to use anti-radiation missiles against heat-seeking MANPADs.
Both planes popped flares and jinked hard, but in trying to evade one of the man-portable SAMs, one of them ran headlong into a stream of 23mm tracers. The aircraft came apart in midair, fireballing with a distant boom that reached us a bare three seconds later, as flaming debris showered down on the town beneath.
Then the driver skidded us into our shelter under the trees, stomping on the brake and almost throwing me into the dash as he stopped abruptly behind a sandbagged T-72.
“Everybody out!” I yelled. There was no way I was going to get that kid to go any farther. And with the air attack already underway, it probably wouldn’t be smart to try to push any farther in a vehicle, anyway.
Slamming the door open, I dropped out of the cab, dragging my rifle and a small haversack with me. We’d left our rucks behind; they were too heavy and bulky, especially if we were going to be fighting in close quarters and falling back. But several of us had grabbed small sacks and packs, stuffing ammunition and grenades into them. I had an extra three hundred rounds of 7.62 NATO and four weird, ribbed, pear-shaped URG-86 grenades stuffed in the sack.
I’d also ditched my ghillie, leaving it stuffed in my ruck. It wouldn’t do much good here.
Sỳkora had apparently been semi-permanently designated as our liaison, and he seemed to be resigned to it. He and three more of his men had been in the truck with us, with the rest of his unit riding in the trucks behind us with Bradshaw.
He looked around. “Come on!” he yelled, as he pointed toward the buildings. “There is a rally point nearby!”
He was almost drowned out by a thunderous explosion, as one of the vehicles in the mall parking lot ahead was struck by either a missile or a guided bomb. An ugly, black-and-orange fireball boiled up on the other side of the trees as another arrowhead shape flashed by overhead, spewing flares while hissing, white smoke trails sped after it.
We ran in a loose column, trying to get close to the side of the apartment building, heading for the south side of the traffic circle. The building didn’t provide a lot of overhead cover, but it would help. A direct hit on the roof might well drop it on us, but anything other than a direct hit on our side would probably be survivable.
I can’t say that I’d ever really expected to be dodging bombs and artillery fire in an Old World urban setting when I signed up for the Marine Corps, all those years ago. Strange, how the model of war we’d grown up with in the post-9/11 world had suddenly taken a turn toward an older form of warfare, that we’d all been assured was a thing of the past.
Reaching the apartment building, we huddled at the base of the wall for a moment as another flight of fast-movers roared by overhead. Another one was hit by a SAM and curved off to the south, trailing black smoke and losing altitude.
I had a pretty good idea where Sỳkora was heading; I’d looked over the map, too. There was a marshalling point and assembly area in an ag equipment store on the southwest side of the traffic circle. Getting to it was going to be interesting, though, since we had to cross an open street to reach it, with residential houses in the way.
But after a moment, the airstrikes on the mall parking lot seemed to be over. There were still explosions in the distance, but our little pocket of Nitra seemed to be quiet. I nudged Sỳkora, and we got moving.
That didn’t mean we got complacent. We paused at the edge of the street, scanned the sky above, and ran for the next bit of cover. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much; we were right on the edge of the traffic circle, with a clear enough view of the smoke still billowing out of the mall parking lot ahead, accompanied by the roar of flames, what might have been dim screams and slightly louder shouts, and the popcorn crackle of 23mm ammunition cooking off.
So, the pause only lasted for the briefest moment, just long enough to make sure we weren’t about to run right into an armored column, b
efore we were dashing for the assembly area and command post. It wasn’t a long way, but with the amount of firepower flying around, it sure felt like it was a lot longer than a hundred yards.
We pounded up the pavement and across the grass, toward the glass-fronted businesses. The glass had mostly already been smashed out, I imagined reduce the frag if a nearby bomb blast or artillery impact shattered the windows. In its place were more sandbags.
These guys had been busy.
Of course, they’d had almost three months to fortify the city. The peacekeepers and Loyalist Slovak Army had tried to smash the Nationalist resistance early, but had been bloodied at Galanta, after which the Nationalists had fallen back to Nitra. Earlier attempts by Loyalist forces, even with peacekeeper backup, to enter the city had been rebuffed by direct fire and IEDs. It had become to the Nationalists what Fallujah had been to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, back when I’d been a kid.
And now, it seemed that the EDC was going to try to recreate Operation Phantom Fury in Nitra. Only this time, there were Americans on the defenders’ side.
Sỳkora was yelling out the countersign, even before the sentries dug in at the entrance to what had once been a farm store could yell the challenge. The kid really didn’t want to get shot by his own side, which was a risk when he was accompanied by a bunch of foreigners in unfamiliar fatigues and carrying unfamiliar weapons.
Especially given the Nationalists’ already rocky view of Americans, since we’d technically been on the peacekeepers’ side until recently.
The countersign was apparently enough for the men at the front of the store, as Sỳkora waved us forward, and we hurried inside.
I looked around. The agricultural equipment store had been stripped, all of the sales counters and products carried off who knew where. Stacks of ammunition crates, storm cases full of weapons and munitions, and more crates of medical supplies filled the bulk of the old store, while dim red lights shone from the CP near the back. There were knots of men in all sorts of camouflage, or civilian clothes, with a similarly diverse assortment of chest rigs, plate carriers, helmets, and rifles. Sandbags lined the walls, but there was little to no overhead cover to speak of. A single direct hit on that place, and everybody inside was dead.