Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  Nevertheless, it was apparent that somebody was taking a hell of a shellacking out there.

  ***

  After another hour, things started to die down. No Nationalist forces had fallen back. One of the Slovaks from downstairs came to the top of the steps and yelled. I thought he was asking if we were still alive, which was a bit asinine. If one of those drones had hit the building, they’d have known it downstairs.

  Still, we at least had a breather for the moment. I tapped Chris and we left our hide site, following the Nationalist fighter downstairs.

  “What did you see?” the big man asked.

  “Lots of explosions and kamikaze drones,” I replied. “But nobody falling back, and nobody getting through, either.”

  He nodded. “They led with foreign militias,” he said. “They did not do well.”

  I could imagine. Most of those militias were heavy on the jihadist fighters, and they liked a lot of spray-and-pray, and didn’t often use cover that well. Running out into the middle of the street with a PKM under the arm and dumping half the belt seemed to be their favorite maneuver.

  I’d seen it in Africa, and I’d seen it again in Detroit and Philadelphia. And too many other American cities.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “The militias fell back after taking heavy losses,” the big man said. “Major Kysely said that the forward elements are staying in place for now.”

  I nodded. “So,” I said, “Now we wait.”

  It was the way of combat. Nothing ever goes entirely according to plan, and just when you get keyed up to fight, the fight goes somewhere else.

  Not that it wasn’t going to come to us eventually. It would. We just had to take the breather without losing the edge.

  Because it wasn’t a reprieve. It was a breather. Nothing more.

  Chapter 26

  It stayed quiet longer than I’d expected, given the intensity of the initial bombardment.

  Sure, we still heard the echoing crackle of small arms fire and the occasional explosion. But the stretch of Bratislavkà Street that we could see remained empty. We still stayed away from the unshielded windows; the enemy’s kamikaze drones could still be spotted from time to time, and every once in a while, a distant thump marked when somebody hadn’t been quite careful enough.

  Of course, I was pretty sure that the Nationalists had a few of those, as well. I wondered how many of them they were expending before the next push came.

  The day dragged on, and time slowed to a crawl as we watched the approaches, and each other.

  The language barrier kept us from interacting much with our Slovak counterparts, but that wasn’t all of it. There was some tension there, as if they weren’t sure of us. Some openly seemed to resent our presence, looking at us with disdain when they had to look at us at all. While on an intellectual level, I kind of understood, given that American forces had been backing up the “peacekeeping” forces that had been hell-bent on crushing Slovakian sovereignty, and, in some cases, had protected the militias that had committed atrocities against the local populace, at the same time, it pissed me off. Whatever had happened before, the EDC and their cronies and proxies were as much our enemies as they were the Slovaks’. And we were there, defending their city, when we could be running for the border.

  While we didn’t have a lot of choice—helping with the defense was a necessity of the immediate situation, and the price we had to pay for their assistance in getting to Poland—the fact that we were still stepping up, only to get the stink eye from some of these guys, didn’t play well with my temper, which was already worn raw by exhaustion and combat stress.

  And I wasn’t exactly alone.

  Two of the Slovaks manning one of the vz. 59s at the corner were glancing over at where Jordan, Phil, and I were sitting against the wall. One of them murmured something to his comrade, and they both looked pointedly at Jordan.

  “You gonna let them eye-fuck you like that, Jordan?” Phil asked.

  Oh hell. Phil had apparently recuperated enough to get his mouth back up and running.

  “I mean, I sure wouldn’t,” he continued. “Looks to me like they’re wondering if you’re a Somali or some shit.”

  Jordan, somehow, apparently hadn’t noticed the looks. Which was a little surprising, given how sensitive he could be. He looked over at the two Slovaks.

  “The fuck you looking at?” he demanded.

  Dammit, Phil.

  Before I could interject, though, Reuben spoke up from across the room. “Let it go, Jordan, for fuck’s sake.” He looked across the room at us. “Why do you keep letting other people jerk you around like that? You can’t change your skin color, and you can’t change the skin color of other assholes these guys might have dealt with. You keep letting other people knock that chip off your shoulder, and eventually you or somebody else is gonna get hurt, who doesn’t need to be.”

  “Yeah, when your mom dies from getting beaten up by skinheads, then come talk to me,” Jordan snapped. “Until then, mind your own business.”

  “Really, motherfucker?” Rueben turned away from his firing position, getting genuinely pissed. And being the massive dude that he was, when Reuben finally got pissed, he got a little threatening. “Get the fuck over yourself. You think you’re the only one who’s ever lost anybody? You think you’re the only one who’s ever been picked on for the color of his skin? I’ve had it with this race bullshit you’re always shoving in everybody’s face. You’re not fucking special, so quit picking fights with your own fucking team because you can’t control your fucking emotions.”

  Jordan’s face had gone rigid. Despite my own mounting anger, I could tell what was going on. It had nothing, really, to do with Jordan’s eternal touchiness or even Reuben’s intense dislike of identity politics.

  We’d been sitting there waiting for a fight, keyed up and ready to slay bodies for hours. The longer the fight was delayed, the more strung out we were getting, and on top of the hellish last couple weeks, it was straining the team to the breaking point.

  I needed to do something, and quick. “Shut the fuck up, all of you,” I growled. “You know what? Push. All three of you.”

  Phil looked at me with a little shock. For a moment, nobody said anything.

  “What?” Phil asked.

  “You fucking heard me,” I snarled. “You jackasses want to start a fight in the hide, you’ve obviously got some nervous energy to burn off. Do pushups.”

  Phil glanced at Jordan, who was taken aback enough that he returned the look before looking back at me. I wasn’t generally a martinet; I knew that I didn’t have the background or the experience that some of my teammates did, so I tried to keep it low key and congenial. But I’d had enough. And I was the team lead. This entire lash-up was my responsibility, and I’d be damned if I let it come apart because discipline slipped due to fatigue and stress.

  “I’d do it,” Tony drawled. “Matt’s got his mad-dog eye going.”

  That seemed to snap them all out of it. Tony never said much—hence his callsign of “Chatty”—but that meant that when he did open his mouth, people tended to listen, if only out of surprise.

  Still looking a little shell-shocked, Phil leaned his rifle against the wall, got down on the office floor, and started doing pushups. He slowed almost immediately; extended combat ops weren’t great for maintaining certain kinds of upper body training. Jordan did the same, more slowly. Reuben was already cranking them out.

  The two Slovaks had watched this entire interplay with visible interest. I looked over and met one of their eyes.

  “You want to join ‘em?” I demanded.

  The big guy, whom I’d found out was a former Slovak Army Nadporučik, or lieutenant, named Biskup, said something wryly in Slovak. Both men hastily diverted their attention to their sector.

  I let the three push for a couple minutes, just long enough to get the message across without wearing them out. That could be counterproductive at that point. “All rig
ht, get up,” I said. I waited until they were back upright before continuing.

  “It’s been a rough couple of weeks for all of us,” I said. “No argument there. But you know what? I don’t care. This isn’t the fucking Army. We don’t get to fall apart because the going gets tough. Just because the Army cats sat down on their butts in the rear doesn’t mean shit to us.” I pointed to the northeast. “You idiots want to explain to the enemy that you need a few minutes to get a schoolgirl spat out of your systems?” I spat on the floor. Impolite, maybe, but I was just disgusted enough that I didn’t give a damn at that point. “Grow the fuck up and remember where the hell you are.”

  I stood suddenly. I could feel the rage thrumming in my veins. I needed to get back upstairs and take another look around. I needed to move, to do something. Truth be told, I was just as strung out and itching for a fight as the rest.

  Chris joined me as I headed up the steps. I ignored him; I didn’t want to talk. Chris seemed to sense that; he held his peace.

  We got up to the third floor and moved low along the floor to our previous vantage point. Only then did I realize that Biskup had come with us.

  “It is hard for all of us, I think,” he said softly. “The waiting.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “My guys should have known better.”

  “So should mine,” Biskup replied. “Some of them have come from other cells, though. Some of them from Russian-supported cells.”

  Something in his voice made me turn away from the window to look at him. He met my gaze evenly, and nodded. “You should be careful,” he said.

  I nodded, grimacing sourly, as I turned back to the window. The tensions with Russia had been ratcheting up over the last few years, between actual Russian influence operations, expansionist moves in the Baltics, and certain people stateside finding the very existence of such operations to be a convenient scapegoat for everything happening that they didn’t like. I couldn’t help but suspect that the MGB was rubbing their hands every time an American politician pulled “Russia” out of their ass to blame somebody who didn’t like their latest cockamamie scheme to waste more money. It only fed the Kremlin’s own finely tuned paranoia.

  And that paranoia had to have been passed on to their proxies in Europe, as well. Who knew what the American peacekeepers had been accused of during cell meetings and planning sessions?

  A rippling series of explosions that lit up the dimming horizon suddenly jerked me out of my reverie. A crackling roar of small arms fire was followed by a distant but unmistakable rumbling and squealing. It was the shriek of well-worn metal rubbing together.

  Tracks.

  “Heads up down there!” I barked down the stairs. “Incoming!”

  I got down behind my rifle, finding the scope with my eye and scanning the darkened Bratislavskà Street ahead, watching for movement.

  For a long time, there wasn’t much. Drones circled and swooped above the industrial and commercial section of Mlynàrce ahead, while flashes and flickers of tracers preceded booms, thuds, and harsh cracks. There was a lot of fighting going on out there, but none of it had reached us, yet.

  But it did seem to be getting closer.

  I heard a crackle of an electronic voice behind me. Biskup had a radio to his ear; apparently the Nationalists had managed to get some kind of comms up, though they might well be transmitting in the clear, using code phrases. I didn’t know, and right then wasn’t the time to ask.

  “The lead elements are abandoning their positions and falling back,” he reported. “They have taken heavy losses. The recognition signal will be blue chemlights.” He paused, listening. “The Army is coming. They are bringing tanks and BVPs, with infantry moving ahead to clear out anti-tank teams and IEDs, and hunter-killer drones in support.”

  I just nodded, keeping my eye on my sector. The drones would be used to try to neutralize any pockets of resistance, and lacking that ability, the infantry would push into the buildings to clear them, unless resistance was too heavy. In that case, the tanks and BVPs, which were a Czechoslovakian version of the Soviet BMP fighting vehicle, would bring heavier firepower to bear.

  At least, that was what I gathered. There had been a time, not long past, when international sentiment would have negated that kind of use of firepower. Western forces were expected to minimize collateral damage, which meant precision-guided munitions and careful raids.

  Given that the EDC had been using increasingly savage jihadist militias as their proxy forces in Slovakia, it was apparent that the old rules no longer applied. Never mind the artillery barrages that had preceded the assault.

  More flashes. More grumbling thunder of explosions. A massive fireball rose into the sky; I doubted that was a cannon shell. More likely, the retreating force had had a nice, big IED prepped to cover their retreat.

  The shooting died down a bit as the forward elements disengaged. I could see drones swarming around the buildings ahead, but I held my fire. Shooting one of them down might just give away our position and draw more of them to that window. It was time to be patient and wait.

  A blue chemlight appeared through the smoke still drifting off the wrecked air defenses in the mall parking lot. A pair of figures came running through the trees, pausing behind the boles to cover their comrades, who ran past them and across the traffic circle. I noticed that they were avoiding the gas station to the north, and could imagine why.

  Their route wasn’t the best they could have chosen, though; the traffic circle was wide open, and the drones had penetrated deeper into the city. Movement caught my eye, and I shifted my sight picture to find the drone that was even then stooping on the running men.

  Chris and I both fired at the same time. One of us missed. The other caught the drone in the wing and sent it spinning into the ground, where it detonated.

  We missed the second remote-control kamikaze, though. It plunged down and blew up a foot above one running Nationalist’s head. The sudden, ugly black puff shrouded the carnage, but as the smoke cleared, there were three bodies lying on the grass, motionless. The other four Nationalist fighters kept running. There wasn’t anything they could do for the fallen men, anyway. And staying in the open was a recipe for disaster.

  A half-dozen drones were suddenly buzzing nearby, searching for the source of the shots that had dropped one of their number. I had to wonder how many drone operators the EDC had working, or if these were the new, semi-autonomous ones that all the tech magazines had been wetting themselves about lately. If the latter, they were going to have a hard time finding us. Bots still needed very strict search parameters, or else they locked up.

  The guys with the blue chemlight made a run for it. Another drone stooped on them, but got shot out of the sky from the other side of the traffic circle. The last of the forward fighters disappeared between the buildings to the south.

  It had all happened with nightmarish rapidity. The drones were small targets, especially in the dying light and drifting smoke that hung like a pall over Mlynàrce, and they moved fast.

  We stayed still, as much as the situation made me want to move, to maneuver, to go out and take the fight to the enemy, to do something to help those guys out in the open. But that would have been suicide.

  So, we waited and watched, as the drones patrolled, circling around above our heads, looking for us.

  After what might have been a half an hour, I started to see more movement down by the road.

  Getting on my scope, I scanned until I spotted a human silhouette down by the trees on the side of the parking lot across the traffic circle. The man was wearing a helmet, body armor, and carrying a rifle. Probably not militia, then. Slovak Army. I doubted that the EDC themselves would be leading the charge.

  He paused, holding up a hand to signal a halt, taking a knee next to the tree, and I almost lost him. But after a moment I thought I saw why he’d stopped. And why it had taken them so long to advance that far.

  He was pointing, and a moment later a small, tracke
d robot moved forward, a manipulator arm poised above its chassis. He thought he’d spotted another IED.

  So, they were advancing carefully, sweeping for IEDs as they came. That was a good idea. Except when the enemy had overwatch on the IEDs themselves.

  “Chris, you seeing this?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  “Biskup, how many IEDs are in that area?” I asked, without taking my eye from the scope.

  “IEDs?” he asked.

  “Bombs,” I clarified. Apparently, the Slovak lieutenant’s knowledge of English didn’t extend to US military acronyms.

  “Ah,” he said. “There are several at that intersection, and the petrol station is rigged with many explosives.” He paused. “There are two, I think, that are supposed to be obvious.”

  I nodded faintly. It wasn’t a new tactic. Set an obvious trap to force the enemy into the less-obvious one. “Well, shall we make it even more obvious?”

  My finger was already tightening on the trigger as I spoke. Any step to slow the enemy advance down would help.

  My rifle cracked, and a moment later, the robot hitched a little in its movement, plastic blasting away as the bullet punched a hole into its electronic vitals. It wasn’t hardened, then. Good.

  Chris had fired at the same time I had, and the pointman slumped to the ground behind the tree.

  The nearby drones were suddenly swarming more closely, and it was making me nervous. We had the window open to facilitate shooting, and if one of those things flew in…

  I fired again, putting another bullet into the bomb robot as it hitched forward. That must have hit something vital, because it suddenly stopped and didn’t move again.

  For a long moment, everything stopped; no more infantry showed themselves. I glanced over, to see that the man Chris had shot had been dragged out of sight. They were there, but they were being smart; they didn’t know exactly where the shots had come from, but they had some idea, and they weren’t exposing themselves.