Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  I was already itching to get out and get somewhere better hardened.

  Sỳkora stopped in the entryway, looking around as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Then he pointed, and led me toward a map table in the center of the CP.

  A short man with a pointed face and a slight gut was leaning on the table with one hand, holding the handset of what looked like an old Soviet field telephone to his ear with the other.

  He spoke rapidly in Slovak, pointedly ignoring us until he got a reply, then snapped something else, then slammed the phone back in its cradle before looking Sỳkora up and down with a sour, disapproving look on his face. I didn’t understand the Slovak word he snapped out impatiently, but I could recognize the tone. Who are you and what do you want? Can’t you tell there’s a battle on?

  Sỳkora spoke quickly, motioning to us, as well as the Slovak fighters he’d brought. The sour-faced man looked us up and down, his narrowed eyes taking in every detail of our features, our clothing, our gear, and our weapons. I was sure he didn’t miss the sour smell of a week and a half in the field, or the dirt, grime, and camouflage face paint ground into our pores and the lines in our faces.

  “This is Major Kysely,” Sỳkora said. “He is in command of this sector of Mlynàrce, controlling the main approach along Bratislavskà and Štùrova streets.”

  Kysely was watching us, his eyes narrowed and looking rather less than impressed. Given what we were capable of, I suspected that that was his default expression when he wasn’t sure what to do with what he’d been given. He spoke briefly, and Sỳkora answered. “I told him that you are American Special Forces, and that you are here to help defend Nitra. He has heard about the attacks on your bases outside Zilina and Lozorno.”

  I glanced at Scott. Did every Nationalist in this country know more about what was going on than we did?

  Probably. They had information networks that we simply hadn’t had time to build. And the Army wasn’t in the business of building such networks, especially when a good chunk of the locals resented their presence in the first place.

  “Where do you need us?” I asked Kysely. Sỳkora was already acting as translator, and I’d learned a long time before that if you’re talking to the Big Man, you talk to the Big Man directly, instead of to the terp.

  Kysely eyed me for a moment, then motioned us closer to the map table. He started pointing and speaking in rapid-fire Slovak, while Sỳkora translated. Given how fast Kysely was talking, I suspected we were only getting a brief summary, but it was better than just doing pointy-talky and hoping that some tiny glimmers of information got through.

  “He wants to keep you back here,” Sỳkora said, as Kysely’s finger pointed to positions flanking the traffic circle. “There are already teams in place at the forward positions, and the enemy is already moving into the town.” He turned a little paler at that, and visibly swallowed. “They will be falling back as the enemy advances, and will pass through our positions here. He says that there is no time to push to the forward line.”

  I glanced at Kysely. He had already turned away impatiently, snatching up the field telephone again and rattling orders into it in Slovak. As bad-tempered as he seemed to be, I couldn’t blame him. This was quite possibly one of, if not the primary approach route an attacker would take to clear the city. He had a lot of responsibility on his shoulders, and couldn’t waste time with a bunch of foreign fighters who had no Slovak and no clue about the city or its defenses.

  “All right,” I said. “Fine. Show me where he wants us, and we’ll get split into elements and get set.”

  Kysely looked up at me. I didn’t know if he understood my words; he didn’t seem to speak enough English to articulate his orders in the language, but he might still know enough to understand what was said. But he picked up on something in my voice. A flicker of some indefinable expression crossed his face. I got the impression that he still wasn’t too happy about having us there, if only because we were Americans, but he wasn’t going to turn away extra guns to fight the EDC, their proxies in the militias, and the Loyalists.

  He quickly pointed to three spots. “He says these buildings have been fortified, and have more weapons and initiation systems for the explosive traps.”

  I nodded. “Tyler, we’ll take this one,” I said, tapping the farthest away, on the other side of the circle. It wasn’t as far forward as it might have been, but given that the building closest to the enemy was a gas station, I was going to take that as a win. “You can split your guys between the other two.”

  He nodded, turning to look around the crowd stuffed into the command post. “Allen! You take 3rd and 4th Squads, and get over to this three-story on the corner. The rest of us will move to here and set up.”

  A distant rumble sounded, barely audible over the radio noise and mutter of voices inside the marshalling area. It was a ways off, but after the air strikes, I didn’t think it was far enough.

  “Let’s move,” I said. “I don’t think we’ve got a lot of time.”

  Chapter 25

  The building hadn’t been as well fortified as Kysely’s headquarters, but it was still useable as a strongpoint. Plastered concrete walls were going to be hard to penetrate with small arms, anyway, and there were sandbags stacked against the windows, at least on the ground floor.

  We got to the front door after one of the longest, most nerve-wracking sprints across open ground I could remember. After the airstrikes, it really didn’t feel good to be out in the open, and it didn’t get much more open than running just under two hundred yards across a traffic circle. We didn’t bound. We ran flat-out, lungs starting to burn by the end, boots pounding on the pavement and gear beating against our chests. Dwight and Tony both fell behind early, only catching up once we reached the corner of the building. Dwight was red in the face, visible even past the bits of camouflage face paint still clinging to his skin, and breathing hard. He was getting along, and he was built like a powerlifter, anyway. Running had never been Dwight’s strong point.

  We’d stopped at the corner, and Phil and I moved toward the door, which faced southeast, away from the enemy. We still moved carefully; neither of us wanted to get shot by friendlies, or, rather, allies. We still weren’t sure exactly where we stood with the Nationalists.

  Of course, we hadn’t gotten cut down by machinegun fire crossing the traffic circle, so there was that.

  “Friendlies!” I yelled toward the door. “Priatel’!”

  “Come, Americans!” a heavily accented voice yelled back. “Quickly, before the planes come back!”

  I looked back and signaled the rest of the team to follow, as Phil and I pushed toward the door, passing in front of sandbagged windows with narrow firing slits between the sandbags. I glanced up, but it didn’t look like the upper stories had been so fortified, but at least they had good fields of fire from the ground level windows.

  There was a big man just inside the door, with a Bren 805 in his hands. He was so massive that the rifle looked like a kid’s toy in his mitts. He wasn’t even looking at us, but peering at the sky past my shoulder as we mounted the steps.

  “Hurry,” he said. “They are using explosive drones against the forward positions.”

  That got us moving. I knew the last thing that I wanted was to be in the open when some drone operator with an itchy trigger finger flew a glorified model airplane packed with Semtex overhead.

  We ran up the steps and inside. The big man shoved the doors, which had been covered in what looked like bomb blankets, closed, then shoved more sandbags against them. They wouldn’t stop an assault for long, but the whole point was to kill the assaulters before they got to the door.

  The building had been some sort of government office, but unlike the farm store, it hadn’t been stripped. Instead, the desks, computers, file cabinets, chairs, and everything else had been shoved against the walls, away from the windows, aside from the desks that were being used as firing platforms for the three vz. 59 machineguns I could see
from just inside the foyer. The place didn’t seem packed; I could only count four men from where I stood, including the giant who’d ushered us in through the door.

  “We are glad to have you here,” the big man said, sticking out his hand. From the looks we were getting from a couple of the men in the larger office space, that appreciation might not have been quite as unanimous as he made it sound. “I have ten men here, and Major Kysely thinks that the enemy will come down Bratislavskà first.”

  “Is everybody on the ground floor?” I asked.

  He nodded. “It is all we had time to harden,” he replied.

  I nodded as well, looking around as he led us through the office space. There were trees around three sides of the building, but he had machineguns set up with fields of fire to the north and west, even where the trees made it difficult to see more than a dozen yards. There were RPG-75s and Matador launchers set up near the western corner, but even they wouldn’t be enough if a full armored column came up the road.

  Of course, from what I’d gathered from Kysely, this was only supposed to be one of several fallback positions. It had sounded, based on his explanation of the forward elements falling back through our line, that a staged, defense-in-depth had been planned. Which meant that we had a fallback position as well.

  “We only got the wavetops,” I said. When he looked a little confused, I explained, “We didn’t get a complete briefing. Just told to come here and dig in. What’s the plan?”

  “Oh,” he said, nodding. “We hold here while the forward defenders fall back through our lines, then fight until we get the order to fall back, or we run out of anti-armor weapons.” He pointed southeast. “Our fallback position is the Dynamik building, three hundred fifty meters that way.” He pulled a municipal map out of his plate carrier, and traced the line along the roads that would be our route. “We must stick carefully to the route and stay off the main roads.”

  I nodded. At that point, I expected that most of the parked civilian vehicles we’d seen on the way out to the front were probably VBIEDs. It would not be healthy to run down that street under fire.

  After looking around again, I frowned. “You don’t have anyone on rear security?” I asked.

  He looked at me as if I’d said that the sky was green. “The enemy is that way,” he said, pointing to the northwest.

  I sighed. “Yeah, I know that. Doesn’t mean that they can’t pull a fast one. What if they get past one of the other positions and come around the flank?”

  “I’ll take the door, Matt,” Dwight said. He was still breathing hard and was leaning against one of the desks that had been pushed to the wall. “I don’t really feel like moving for a bit, anyway.” He took a deep breath. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

  “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you, Dad,” David said, as he peered out one of the firing slits at a sandbagged window.

  “Shut your damn mouth, Peanut,” Dwight said, though he was still blowing hard enough that it lost a lot of the growl it might have had.

  I gave him another look, feeling my brows knit slightly. Dwight had been sticking it out, but he’d been slowing down a bit the last couple of days. He was a beast, strong as an ox, but he was past fifty, and the prolonged movement and combat was clearly starting to take its toll. I just nodded, though. It didn’t need to be commented on.

  What were we going to do, anyway? There was nowhere to fall back to, no safe haven where we could rest and recuperate. It was fight, or die.

  Dwight wouldn’t give up. I knew that much about him. Hell, he’d stopped bitching, and that worried me more than anything else. He was grumpy old bastard, but he was husbanding his strength for the fight.

  We were all strung out. I could see it as I looked around. Jordan was tight-lipped as he watched the Nationalists who were studying him with varying degrees of curiosity and a bit of hostility. Given how many of the “immigrants” who had been forced on Slovakia were Somalis and other Africans from the Sahel, I expected that they didn’t have a lot of affection for black people. I just hoped that the fight at hand kept that whole nest of snakes under a rock, because Jordan was way too strung out to keep his temper under control if things got racial.

  All of us were wearing the same beat-down, hangdog expression. It wasn’t depression, not really. We’d been concentrating too hard on staying alive to think too much about how bad our situation really was. It was just exhaustion. The only one who didn’t seem like he was carrying an extra fifty pounds that nobody could see was Greg. True to his character, he had found a group at one of the firing slits, and was trying to strike up a conversation, asking for the names for things in Slovak. Greg was just too friendly for this business.

  “I’m going to take a look up top, is that all right?” I asked the big guy. I wanted a better look at the situation, and without drones of our own, that was going to mean getting some elevation.

  “The windows are not sandbagged up there,” he said, sounding a little uncertain. “It is not as safe as down here.”

  “Not as safe, maybe,” I said, without adding that staying safe wasn’t going to win the battle. “But I want to see more. I’ll stay away from the windows; I’ve done this before.”

  Even as I said it, I had a sudden flashback to a year before, just before I’d gotten my own team. Hartrick and I had climbed an abandoned building just outside one of the no-go zones in Detroit, to run overwatch for a relief convoy after a rash of bombings downtown had killed dozens and left half the city without food or water when the truck drivers had refused to venture past the suburbs. That had felt similar, setting up well back from the window with a pair of 6.5 Creedmoor RPRs, watching for the gangs to try to hit the responders. The convoy drivers hadn’t known we were there, but they hadn’t complained later, either, after we knocked a hijack operation back on its heels with aimed fire.

  I could still picture the blood spatter on the windshield of the old Corolla, and the shocked expression on the face of the right-seater, just before I snuffed him out, too.

  The big man still looked a little doubtful, but he nodded. I’d hoped that he’d decide that we projected enough of an air of professionalism, despite our bone-crushing fatigue, that he wouldn’t get in our way too much. Apparently, we’d succeeded.

  I beckoned Chris to come with me. I didn’t want to take too many up with me, but Chris was a bit better at long range than Phil was.

  We mounted the steps, climbing two at a time. I don’t know about Chris, but I was simply forcing my body to do what I wanted it to at that point. I was struggling to keep my breathing deep and even by the time we hit the third floor.

  Nobody had done anything up there; the offices were still set up, if abandoned. The computer screens were dark, but it still looked like things had just been closed down for the weekend.

  I realized I had no idea what day of the week it was. Hell, I wasn’t sure what day of the month it was.

  The windows, fortunately, weren’t all that large, and were set high enough off the floor that I could crouch down and look out from just over the sill. Unfortunately, there was a good-sized tree, the leaves turning bright yellow, right outside, obscuring a good chunk of my field of view.

  Not all of it, though. I could see the smoke rising from the burning ZSUs in the parking lot across the traffic circle, and see some of the tracers ricocheting high over the edge of town, punctuated every once in a while by the billowing gray-and-black cloud of an explosion. The fighting had already kicked off.

  I got up and moved back, letting my rifle dangle on its sling as I grabbed a desk and started pushing it toward the window. Chris joined me, and we got it up against the wall. I had to stack some books as a rest, but I got my rifle set up so that I could use the scope with a fair degree of stability.

  Movement flickered above the fighting. I couldn’t make out just what I was looking at, not at first. Whatever it was was too small. But a moment later, the dark speck dove toward the ground and disappeared.
A few seconds after that, a small, muted boom sounded, and a dark wisp of smoke and dust rose into the sky.

  The big guy downstairs hadn’t been kidding. The enemy were using kamikaze drones against Nationalist positions.

  Not that they were a particularly new threat. They’d been common weapons for at least a decade by that point. But it’s one thing to know that. It’s another to know that the enemy has them in the air, over your head, poised to blot you out in a puff of smoke and fire.

  Another explosion, a much bigger one, rocked the town. A huge, gray mushroom cloud rose up above the roofs. That wasn’t a drone; that had to have been an IED.

  Even though I’d told the big guy that I just wanted a better view of the situation, I was looking for targets. Anything we could do to slow the enemy advance down was going to help, and from my position, I could knock off enemy infantry with only a slim chance of being detected.

  As I’d told the big guy, I’d done this before.

  But as the weapons fire and explosions to the north got more intense, there was no sign that either the Nationalists were falling back, or that the enemy was breaking through. I’d gathered that the plan was to fall back by stages, whittling the EDC and the Slovak Army down block by block, street by street. But I didn’t know what the signal was to retreat, and it was looking and sounding an awful lot like a pitched battle out there, rather than a holding action prior to breaking contact.

  Two more massive explosions rocked the building, the shockwaves rattling the window in front of us. A moment later, half a dozen drones, just that I could see, made their suicidal dives, blasting more of the Nationalists to bits. Or attempting to; I’d gotten a better look at one of them, and they weren’t large. They couldn’t carry the same payload as a HOT-3 missile or a Hellfire, so it was entirely possible that they might be venting their fury uselessly against hardened positions. I hoped so.