Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  Two arrowhead shapes roared by overhead as the second pair of Tigers dove for the deck and ran for it. I could feel the crackling thunder of the jets’ engines in my chest as they streaked past, their single engines bright points of light in the dark. At the same time, I heard another set of jet engines growling in the distance, getting louder by the second.

  The second flight of F-16s fired a rippling cascade of rockets at the Leopard 2s that had been murdering the Nationalists from the south side of the road. Fireballs and spouts of dirt and smoke billowed up into the night sky, followed a moment later by the hammering thuds of the rocket detonations.

  More noise was reaching us from the far side of the hill, more explosions and what sounded vaguely like tank gun fire. More planes went by overhead, this time the considerably bigger, twin-tailed forms of F-15s, while heavy, dragonfly shapes beneath pounding rotors started to lay rockets into Vykorà nad Kysucou itself.

  The Poles must have heard the fighting and decided to join the party.

  “Deacon, Flat,” Bradshaw called. I breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of his voice. “Warren’s got comms with an American unit commander from BCT 7. They are hitting the EDC formation from the eastern flank, moving west across the fields. Watch your fires in that direction.”

  “Roger,” I replied. “I hope they do the same.”

  “We’ve passed on that you’re up there,” he said. “They’ll be watching, but you might want to turn on some IR strobes or something. Those Hind pilots might not be sure that you’re friendlies.”

  That might not be the best idea, under the circumstances; I was pretty sure that the EDC troops had NVGs, as well. But we had to do something.

  I had just dug my strobe out of my chest rig and flicked it on when Phil grabbed me and pointed.

  A ragged group of figures, carrying rifles, were moving out of Vysokà nad Kysucou below us, pushing northwest and toward the trees. They weren’t in much of any kind of formation, and they were moving fast. They looked like they were running for it.

  The only one not carrying a weapon was the little man in the middle.

  The Americans and Poles were unleashing holy hell on the EDC formations to the east of town. The Leopards 2s to the west—those that had survived the F-16s’ first pass, that is—were pulling out, fleeing down the road toward Makov. We suddenly had no targets within range.

  Except for that group down there.

  “Let’s move,” I said. “If they fight, kill ‘em. If they surrender, maybe we can get some intel out of ‘em.”

  We spread out, weapons up, and started slipping through the trees. It was as if, suddenly having been given some renewed hope by the American and Polish attack, we’d gotten our second wind.

  Some of the EDC soldiers were still looking around them. One of them looked up as we swept down toward them and let out a yell, snapping his rifle to his shoulder and opening fire. The muzzle blast flickered in the darkness, and bullets smacked into a tree above Greg’s head as he ducked behind the trunk.

  We responded with a ragged volley, flame flickering in the woods. Bullets smashed men off their feet even as the group turned and dropped to a knee to return fire.

  They reacted with admirable alacrity. One grabbed the unarmed man and forced him flat, while the others ran for trees or any bit of cover in the dirt they could find.

  I shot one who was trying for a tree just barely too far away. I tracked in toward him as he dashed toward it, catching him with a bullet high center chest just before he slammed into the trunk and slumped behind it, his rifle clattering off the bark as he fell. Quickly tracking toward the next man, I had to duck behind a tree myself as he fired at me, the first round going past my ear with a harsh snap, the next one ricocheting off the trunk with an angry buzz.

  Then Tony about cut him in half with a burst from that Mk 48.

  Two more dashed from cover, trying to get out to our flank. Three of us fired at the same time, and they dropped. One kept moving for a while, but he was curled in the fetal position around the bullet hole in his guts, screaming his lungs out. He wasn’t a threat anymore.

  The unarmed man was suddenly yelling, in a language I couldn’t quite make out. The gunfire had stopped, which was when I noticed that a lot of the sounds of combat in the distance had also died down.

  I peered around the trunk of the tree. The unarmed man was standing up, his hands held on his head. He barked something at the men next to him, who dropped their rifles and followed suit.

  We moved down toward them, weapons leveled, fingers hovering close to triggers. I wasn’t sure this wasn’t a trap; I’d seen it happen before. But nobody pulled a grenade or was lying in wait with a rifle pointed at us. The wounded and dead were scattered across about twenty yards, and we moved through them carefully, kicking weapons away from hands until we came to the man with his hands on his helmet.

  I couldn’t see a lot of detail in the fusion goggles, but he wasn’t nearly as heavily geared up as the others. He did have a pistol, which he had unloaded and laid on the ground at his feet. He also had a small pack on his back.

  He didn’t resist as I tied his hands behind his back while the rest of the team either secured his two surviving soldiers and set security. “Who are you?” I asked, as I cut the pack off his back and started rummaging through it. There was a laptop and several maps inside, along with what looked like survival gear, a radio, and extra food. I wasn’t sure if I could expect an answer, but the man replied in a faint British accent.

  “I am Captain Blithe, 3rd Company, 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Mechanized Regiment, EDC 1st Division,” he said.

  “What’s on the laptop, Captain?” I asked, looking up from the pack at him.

  “You can’t expect me to answer that,” he replied.

  “Maybe,” I said, turning him around. “It’s going to be a long war. May as well make it as easy for yourself as you can.”

  “I don’t think it will be,” he said in reply. “I daresay it’s already over. This little victory of yours won’t count for much.”

  “We’ll see.” But while I wasn’t indulging in false bravado, a part of me wondered if he wasn’t right. It wasn’t like we were in a good spot as a nation, and Poland wasn’t the most strategically advantageous position to fight from.

  But we’d fight. One way or another.

  Of course, I could have pointed out that his bravado was a bit misplaced. The company commander running away from the fight was hardly the sign of a robust fighting force.

  But I was too tired. I’d hand him over to the BCT commander and the Poles. Let them get what information they could out of him. We’d make sure we got our hands on it, one way or another. The Triarii had friends high enough that we could make that happen.

  We were all in the same fight now, anyway.

  The thunder of gunfire and rockets was dying down. Smoke was drifting across the valley below us, but the fighting seemed to have started petering out. With the last of the prisoners secured, it was all over but the linkup.

  Epilogue

  Dwight lay under a poncho, accompanied by far too many other bodies.

  Part of the lumber yard just north of the railroad tracks in Turzovka had been set aside for the dead. It seemed that our intel hadn’t been completely accurate; while we’d heard that there had been cross-border incursions to the north, the Poles and elements of BCT 7 had pushed across the border after they’d discovered the destruction of FOB Poole, and secured Turzovka. They’d been probed by the EDC, but that had been about it until the previous night.

  Now, in the aftermath, as many of the dead as possible had been retrieved from the battlefield around Vysokà nad Kysucou, and laid out for identification and burial.

  David was taking Dwight’s death hard. The two of them had verbally sniped at each other since the team had been formed, but now that Dwight was gone, the hole he’d left had made it really seem like the running joke about him being David’s dad had had some truth to it. He’
d been a grumpy old bastard, and hardly the fatherly type, but he’d been around a long time, as a Marine and then as a contractor before he’d joined the Triarii. He’d seen a lot, and he took loyalty to his team seriously. Hard-headed common sense had been his stock in trade, and we’d miss him.

  The nine of us left were gathered around him, though the poncho was still up over his face. We knew what Dwight looked like. We’d rather remember him as he’d been alive, rather than the blood-spattered, bluish corpse that he was now.

  “Matt!” I turned to see Bradshaw and Warren waiting at the door. I held up my hand. Bradshaw nodded. He understood. He still had more of this to do, himself.

  Together, we lifted the body and carried it. It was rough; Dwight hadn’t been a small man, and the poncho he was wrapped in didn’t make it easy to carry his bulk. But we made it work. We had to. We owed it to Dwight.

  The grave had already been dug, under an oak with its leaves turning yellow. We struggled over to it, and set him down for a moment.

  I stood over his body, trying to find the words. That was when the Polish chaplain saw us and started over.

  He’d already said the funeral Mass for the dead. He was praying over as many of them as he could as they were lowered into the ground in the already-crowded cemetery between the lumberyard and the river. The Americans didn’t have a Catholic chaplain, but of course the Poles did. He didn’t speak much English, but he motioned to Dwight’s body. I nodded.

  The prayers were in thickly-accented Latin, but I could follow most of them, praying along as much as I could. We committed Dwight’s body to the earth, while we begged God to have mercy on his soul.

  Then we buried him. It was a long way from Virginia, but there was no way we were going to be able to get him back Stateside for a funeral anytime soon.

  As the rest of the team took turns covering the grave, I turned back and rejoined Bradshaw and Warren, where they stood respectfully waiting. Bradshaw’s face was drawn and his eyes were haunted; his section had gotten through the battle at Vysokà nad Kysucou without taking any more losses, but the men they’d lost since this had started still stung.

  “Well?” I asked quietly.

  “He accepted the orders,” Warren said. “Not gracefully, but he accepted them.”

  I nodded. General Reeves didn’t have a good reputation from what I’d heard already; he was a political general and thoroughly married to the “New Army,” which was just repeating the mistakes of the old with more gusto. He couldn’t have been happy about having to work with the Triarii.

  But he didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. While the Amphibious Ready Group and the 6th Fleet in the Med had made contact with the Hungarians and started probing Slovakian airspace, and we had sporadic contact with the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group in the North Sea, American assets in Europe were damned thin at the moment. We had a copy of the first “Letter of Marque and Reprisal” issued by the US Congress in over a century, that I knew of. The Triarii were independent of the Department of Defense, but now had full top cover to prosecute the war in Europe and wherever else it was flaring up on behalf of the United States.

  Because Slovakia wasn’t the only place. The Chinese had moved against the 7th Fleet in the aftermath of the attack, and there were more strikes in Central Asia and along the southern border of the US. Contact had apparently been lost with several advisor units working in Iraq and Syria. It really wasn’t looking like the EDC had acted alone.

  We still didn’t know exactly who was behind the cyber attack that had crippled most of the country, but we had our suspicions. Whoever had spearheaded it, it had clearly been coordinated with as many enemies of the US as possible.

  “He’s not happy with me, either,” Warren continued, looking a little sheepish. “After all, I was supposed to refuse to have anything to do with an ‘illegal organization of right-wing terrorists.’ His words. Apparently, getting cut off and slaughtered would have been preferable. He’s really not happy that I defended you, even before I knew about the Letter of Marque.”

  He was looking a little worried. The political consequences of his decisions were coming around, and I realized that while they hadn’t mattered while we’d been fighting for our lives, now his career could well be torpedoed for doing what had needed to be done.

  “Well,” I said, “if they do decide to cashier you, you could join us. You’d still need some serious train-up, but I’d say you got some not-insignificant OJT on the way here.”

  He nodded, his mouth getting a little tight. “Thanks, Matt.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder before turning back to finish helping to bury Dwight. “Like I told that Limey bastard we captured,” I said, “it’s going to be a long war. We can use all the fighters we can get, political generals be damned.”

  THE STORY CONTINUES IN:

  HOLDING ACTION

  MAELSTROM RISING BOOK 2

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