Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  We were on our way.

  ***

  Medved wasn’t wasting time. While we had little to no visibility in the back of the BOV, a fact that I hated with every fiber of my being, I could paint a bit of the picture just from the way we were moving. And boy, once we finished the series of twisting turns that got us out of the castle and then through the maze of blasted rubble and wreckage-strewn streets of Nitra, we were moving.

  I suspected that the T-72 was the limiting factor for our speed; all the other vehicles were wheeled, and could probably do something close to sixty miles an hour on the open road. That tank could do maybe thirty-five. But from the feel of it, we were doing every bit of that thirty-five miles per hour once we got on the highway.

  It was a dark, cramped ride. I couldn’t see anything; the BOV didn’t have windows or vision blocks for the rear troop compartment. We could only sit and endure, hoping that we weren’t about to get turned into burned meat in the mangled remains of the vehicle when a HOT-3 missile hit it.

  David was asleep almost as soon as we started moving, his head lolling against the back of the seat, his mouth hanging open. Dwight just tapped his fingers against his Mk 48’s loading tray cover, his eyes fixed on nothing about six inches in front of his nose.

  Reuben was sitting closest to the gunner, and had his head craned to look out the top of the turret, peering at the sky. His lips were moving; I didn’t know if he was praying or just reciting something, or even talking to himself to pass the time.

  Tony had his eyes closed, but was so still that I was sure he was awake. It didn’t surprise me. Tony was quiet and meditative. It was his way.

  Jordan was off in his own little world, as aloof as ever. He was covering it well, checking over what was left of our team med gear, but clearly, somebody had said something that pissed him off.

  Or maybe he was processing what we’d just been through, and I was reading too much into his silence and focus. The trouble was, he’d been on such a hair-trigger for so long that I couldn’t tell anymore.

  Greg was sitting closest to the driver, and kept trying to engage him in conversation. It didn’t seem to be going very well, but that wasn’t dampening his spirits.

  It was a little weird, watching it. Greg had been the first to find out, if not the details, at least the severity of the situation back home. He was the nicest of us by a long shot, and had just witnessed the most intense urban fighting any of us had ever seen. And yet, he was still being cheerful and friendly. It took knowing the man, knowing what he’d gone through himself, to see why. Greg had just about had his head blown off by an IED. He’d skated so close to death that it was entirely likely that nothing would ever quite faze him again.

  Phil, on the other hand, wasn’t looking so good. He was staring at infinity, somewhere past David’s shoulder, his face set in a blank look of dread. He wasn’t even trying to get a rise out of Jordan.

  Phil was a big talker, and he certainly was competent enough to get on a Grex Luporum team, but he wasn’t head and shoulders above anyone else. I could easily replace him on point with Chris. That fact had never shaken his self-confidence, though. He was a bit of a legend in his own mind, and always had been.

  Facing the unmitigated hell that had been Nitra, and finding out just how bad the war was going, a war that we hadn’t even realized had reached that stage until a few hours ago, had apparently shaken him more than anything else ever had.

  Chris had his head down, a red lens headlamp illuminating the tiny New Testament he always carried with him.

  Scott was doing the same thing I was; scanning the troop compartment and checking on the team. He met my eyes as I looked over at him, and one corner of his mouth quirked upward. It wasn’t quite a smile. It was an acknowledgement that we were thinking on the same track. I just nodded my head tiredly.

  We rode on in silence, the only sounds the rumble of the diesels, the growl of the tires on the pavement, and the occasional chirp of the radios up in the crew compartment.

  ***

  After a long while, we slowed, and then lurched to a stop. A terse burst of Slovak came from the radio up front, and the commander replied. Then we just sat there and waited.

  There wasn’t really room to move my OBR to point it at the hatch. But the gunner didn’t seem overly agitated, and I couldn’t hear any gunfire. Hopefully, we were in Hronskỳ Beňadik, where Medved had planned on linking up with more Nationalists.

  Someone knocked on the rear hatch. He had to be using a hammer or a crowbar, otherwise we never would have heard it. Scott reached over and unlatched it, letting it swing open as he lifted his own OBR to lay it across his knees, the muzzle pointing out the open portal.

  I squinted in the sudden morning sunlight; I hadn’t realized until then just how dark it was inside the vehicle in comparison to the countryside. Medved was standing there, his tanker helmet under his arm and his brown hair in wild disarray, along with a man I didn’t recognize, wearing a tracksuit under an ancient AK chest rig and carrying an equally ancient and battered-looking vz. 58. Actual AKs seemed to be in short supply in Slovakia, which seemed strange after seeing them all over Africa, not to mention in more than a few PRA hands Stateside.

  We were sitting on the road, with a Y intersection just behind us. Low, tree-covered hills rose to the north and south, with the town, mostly one-story, stucco houses with peaked, red tile roofs, lining the single main road. A church with a red onion dome steeple loomed just to the north.

  “This is Kristiàn,” Medved said, gesturing toward the man in the tracksuit. “He commands the Nationalist forces here.” From what I could see, the Nationalist forces in Hronskỳ Beňadik amounted to maybe a couple dozen militiamen. This wasn’t a large village.

  But I got down from the BOV, trying not to wince and hobble as my stiffened muscles and joints protested, and shook Kristiàn’s hand. He nodded to me, his grip firm, and spoke rapidly to Medved.

  “He says that there have been some skirmishes in Žarnovica,” Medved translated, “but that the Loyalist forces there are reluctant to risk their necks fighting. The word of the cease fire in Nitra has already passed here, so he does not doubt that it will have reached Žarnovica by now. Kapitàn Zima will be nervous, but I think he will be more likely to try to wait things out. If he can avoid an engagement while the direction of the Loyalist Army gets determined, he will.”

  I frowned. “That sounds like a lot of ‘hopefully’s,” I said. “I think we should stop short. My team will disembark and recon the town before we move in.”

  But Medved shook his head. “No,” he said. “A normal Loyalist unit would not do that. Zima might not want to risk getting in a fight, but even he won’t fail to notice if we act strangely, and offloading a reconnaissance element before approaching what should be a friendly unit will be very strange.”

  I assented, though reluctantly. Part of it was because I simply didn’t like the idea of trying to roll through an enemy position while riding in a wheeled steel coffin. Part of it was because I really didn’t know Medved from Adam, and it had already been made clear that some of the Nationalists weren’t thrilled with American help. I sort of trusted Rybàr to have picked a trustworthy commander to lead this little trip, but there was always the possibility that he’d chosen poorly.

  But, ultimately, we were stuck. The only other thing to do would be to dismount and continue the next one hundred thirty klicks on foot, and without any real hope of cooperation from the Nationalists.

  We’d never make it. Not with our numbers, or with Warren’s kids in tow. And, worse, it would destroy any rapport we had with the Slovaks. And we’d need that alliance, along with the one with the Hungarians, if we were going to stand a chance of hitting back at the EDC.

  We’d been hurt. Worse than I think the US had ever been hurt before. And despite my paranoia and exhaustion, I knew I had to keep that in mind.

  The concept of the “Strategic Corporal” had been discarded by the Usual Suspects
in the echelons of command by the time I joined the Marine Corps. The Powers that Be didn’t want mere NCOs making decisions that would have far-reaching strategic and geopolitical consequences. Of course, tightening the top-down leadership’s grip didn’t keep those consequences from happening anyway, but that didn’t have much to do with their thought processes.

  But here I was, a GL team leader, having to make these decisions that would directly impact the American war effort, whatever form it ended up taking, for years to come.

  I shook Kristiàn’s hand again, and climbed back into the back of the BOV for the next leg of the trip.

  ***

  We stopped again almost an hour later, but this time, while there was some chatter over the radio, Medved didn’t come back to talk. Just judging by the time that had passed, I guessed that we’d come to Žarnovica, and Medved hadn’t wanted to risk having his American passengers spotted by breaking seal.

  I had no choice but to take it as a good sign that we kept on rolling after that, instead of getting into a firefight.

  I tried not to think about the possibility that we’d been sold out, and were on the way to a prison camp, as the miles stretched away behind us and we headed deeper into the mountains.

  Chapter 32

  The forest on the south bank of the Vah River was so thick that we had to push right to the edge of the road to get eyes on the bridge.

  It wasn’t the main bridge into Bytča. That was about a kilometer to the west, coming off the main highway. For obvious reasons, we were still trying to avoid major thoroughfares.

  It had been a fast run north. Medved hadn’t stopped for anything, though he admitted, after I brought it up when we halted in the hills above Hrabovè, that we had taken some fire going around Prievidza. It seemed that that city was a free-for-all between the “immigrant” militias, Nationalists of both pro-Russian and strictly Slovak stripes, and EDC peacekeepers. We’d managed to avoid getting entangled, but he couldn’t promise that the EDC aircraft overhead hadn’t noted the column of armored vehicles pointedly avoiding the conflict.

  But we’d made it clear, and had covered the rest of the distance in about four hours. That was almost four times what it would have taken in a regular civilian vehicle, but military vehicles sacrifice speed for ruggedness and armor.

  Frankly, I was thankfully surprised that the T-72 hadn’t thrown a track.

  The entire trip had been conducted buttoned up in the armored vehicles, and now, as non-ideal as this range to the objective was, I was just happy to be out of that steel coffin and back on the ground, on my own two feet, where I could maneuver and take cover instead of sitting and waiting for the bomb, missile, tank shell, or mine to blow me to crispy bits inside a steel box.

  Another storm was rolling in. The sky overhead was leaden, and the wind had picked up. That was good, since we’d seen several drones circling above the city as we’d approached through the trees, but most of them were too light for that kind of turbulence. They’d cleared out, recalled by their controllers, leaving the sky mostly clear. Which meant we only had to worry about detection from the ground.

  There were two BVPs that I could see on the north end of the bridge, and there might have been two more behind the buildings that obscured our view of the intersection beyond it. So, there was at least a mechanized infantry platoon watching the smaller bridge. Which meant there were probably more watching the bigger one.

  We had to get across. Poland lay only twenty-five klicks as the crow flies from us. The only other ways across the Vah meant either going northeast to Zilina, past the ruins of FOB Poole, which would have been a bad idea, since Zilina was also the headquarters for the EDC’s 2nd French Contingent, or southwest to Povàžka Bystrica.

  We’d picked Bytča because Kristiàn had told Medved that two companies of the 11th Mechanized Infantry that were holding the bridges and the surrounding countryside had publicly declared their allegiance to the Nationalist cause, shortly after hearing about the fight for Nitra. Which, if true, meant that we had a friendly crossing.

  If it was true. That was the question.

  “What do you think?” Phil whispered. He and I had moved up to the edge of the road, leaving the rest of the team about fifty yards back in the trees. We were too close as it was; I knew that every extra body I had up there was going to increase the chances that we’d get spotted.

  “Hard to say,” I replied, still watching the BVPs through my binoculars. It was early afternoon, but the clouds made it look like evening was coming on. “They’re still flying the Slovak flag, but so are the Nationalists. And if they just flipped…”

  “I really, really don’t like this complete lack of partisan linkup procedures,” Phil muttered.

  “You and me both, brother,” I replied. I lowered the binos. “Let’s head back.”

  We eased back from the edge of the road and started slipping through the thick forest. It was as bad as anything I’d had to thrash through in northern Virginia; the trees weren’t all that tall, but they were very close together. The vehicles were parked on a road on the south side of the hill, about a mile behind us. They were going to have to get on the road to approach the bridge; there was no way they were making it through these woods.

  But we hadn’t gotten ten yards before my earpiece crackled with Scott’s voice.

  “Deacon, Weeb,” he hissed. “Are you moving back?”

  “Roger,” I replied, taking a knee and signaling for Phil to halt. Scott wouldn’t be asking for nothing.

  “Did you move off to our west?” he asked.

  “Negative.”

  “Then watch yourselves,” he said. “We’re hearing movement to the west; sounds like anywhere from five to ten foot-mobiles.”

  I swore silently. If Scott had wondered if it was us, that meant that they were coming between Phil and I and the rest of the team. Which could get dicey. At the very least.

  I signaled Phil to go flat, but he had heard, and was already halfway there, crawling back under a low tree. I followed suit, pointing my rifle toward the west. We were still just in our fatigues and chest rigs; none of us had bothered to get our ghillie hood-overs back out of our rucks. That might have been a mistake, though I’d hidden in plain sight in just cammies before.

  Then we waited.

  It didn’t take long before I heard what Scott had heard. Footsteps rustled in the leaves and grass under the trees. A twig snapped. Low voices murmured in what sounded like Slovak.

  Slowly, the first man came into view, barely twenty yards away. He was dressed in Slovak Army camouflage and gear, carrying a Bren 805. The man behind him was identically dressed and equipped. They were clearly patrolling. But whose side were they on?

  It wasn’t a new problem. The days of uniformed armies and clear-cut factions seemed to be long over. It was made worse in Slovakia with the split in loyalties, and the apparent shifts within the Loyalist Army after Nitra.

  When Medved and I had briefly spoken before this little leader’s recon, he had mentioned that we’d gotten a lot farther, a lot faster than he’d expected. Entire Loyalist units seemed to be standing down. We’d passed abandoned checkpoints, or checkpoints where the unit was still there, but had pulled back and hunkered down. The entire country seemed hushed, waiting.

  Nitra had been a pivot point. It remained to be seen just what would come of it, especially with the EDC’s 1st Division moving in from the west. But for now, the central part of the country seemed to be holding its breath.

  The patrol came closer, more men filing through the woods. They were about as spread out as was reasonable in that sort of close vegetation, with about one to two yards between them, moving in single file. They weren’t all that tense, and some conversation was going on; they weren’t trying to be clandestine like we were.

  About five yards away, the lead man held up a hand to call a halt, and they took up positions, on a knee, while the leader pulled a radio out of his vest.

  Well, this was
a problem. We were both low and behind trees, but we were so close that all it would take was one glance in the wrong direction and we were made. Of course, I was sure that between the two of us, we could take most of them out in the first couple seconds, but it would be a near thing.

  I had my sights trained on that lead man, my finger resting lightly on the trigger, my thumb on the selector. It would take a fraction of a second to flip it to Fire and put a bullet through him and into the man behind him. The stack had turned out that way; I had two for the price of one. And yet, I didn’t want to shoot him, not if he turned out to be a friendly. The problem was, I wasn’t sure at that point how to find out without getting shot.

  Hell, if we startled these guys from five yards away, it was probably going to be a firefight no matter whose side they were on.

  Just as I was resigning myself to staying as stock-still and silent as possible, hoping that the patrol moved on without spotting us so that we could link back up with the team and plan from there, Scott’s voice hissed in my earpiece again.

  “Deacon, Weeb. If you can’t reply, just listen. Làska thinks that he’s picked up the Loyalist net on his radio, and wants to try to call them.” Làska was the young scout that Medved had sent up with us. He hadn’t been willing to leave the entire mission to us, not that I could necessarily blame him. “If they’re on our side, he’ll try to arrange a linkup.”

  I couldn’t reply. At that distance, we’d be made if my stomach growled.

  A moment later, the lead Slovak’s radio crackled with what sounded like Làska’s voice. The pointman looked startled, and looked back at his number two man, who didn’t seem to have any answers for him.

  He lifted the radio and spoke into it. I couldn’t understand the words, but the tone was easy enough to make out. Who the hell is this and what the hell are you doing on my net?

  Làska spoke rapidly, while the Slovak pointman interrupted twice. I still couldn’t follow the conversation. But it didn’t seem especially acrimonious. In fact, the longer I watched them, the more I figured that these guys were desperate for somebody, anybody to show up on their side. These guys were looking like cornered rats, and it wasn’t a good look.