1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  “Copy that, sir. I’ll put Napier on point.”

  It was his call, but it was a good one. Lance Corporal Napier was a steady point man who wouldn’t get spooked and shoot at every stray cat.

  “One minute,” I told him. “Double-check ammo loads and NVG batteries.”

  While he did that, I turned back to my “platoon headquarters,” which consisted, at the moment, of Chamberlain and the corpsman, Peterson. I was tempted to bring Peterson along, but we were split up into two units, and it made more sense to keep him at a central location where we could bring the wounded back to him. And Chamberlain was just about useless since the radio wouldn’t work worth a damn here with the jamming equipment.

  “Both of you stay with the trucks,” I told them. “If we get back here and those fuckers—” I motioned at Uncle Charlie’s drivers, who were leaning against the front fender of one of the trucks, smoking and speaking softly to each other. “—have taken the trucks and un-assed the area, we’re pretty much dead. Keep your eyes on them and keep this alleyway secure. Shoot whoever you have to who isn’t one of us. Clear?”

  “Clear, sir,” Peterson said. He was a Navy corpsman, but I trusted him to take down any threats more than I did Chamberlain, who was theoretically a rifleman in the way all Marines are supposed to be riflemen first.

  “Stay here,” I repeated, this time jabbing a blade hand at Chamberlain. “Don’t fucking leave this position unless you’re overrun. Don’t come help us, don’t go looking for trouble, don’t follow any Goddamned stray dogs, just stay here and keep these trucks secure. Do you copy, Chamberlain?”

  “Five by five, sir.”

  I wished I could see his eyes, because I didn’t trust his words. If anyone could fuck up a wet dream, it was Chamberlain. But the alternative was leaving the trucks unguarded, and even though Jambo hadn’t specifically told me to guard them, I figured it was important enough to take the initiative.

  “Come on, Gregory,” I said, slapping the bottom of my magazine to seat the rounds. “Load up some frag and let’s go.”

  There was a quality to the streets in Catia, something I hadn’t noticed before, driving in a Stryker, seeing the world through its periscope or targeting screen. The Strykers scraped the edge of the walls in places, yet somehow it seemed more claustrophobic on foot, as if the walls leaned inward, each empty window a possible sniper hide. The place beat down misery, dripping with it like the ever-present humidity, like every single poor son of a bitch who’d already been born with next to nothing to live here in the first place and then lost everything three times over had finally been forced out of even this place, the last place anyone else would ever want. The men went first, either drafted for the government’s army back when there’d been a government, or later by the EPV when they’d stepped in and told the poor that they could either join with them or be the enemy. Then the women, because war is an equal-opportunity employer, and finally, the kids. Anyone old enough to hold an AK.

  And when all that was left was the ghosts and the few old people who’d survived the starvation and the unrest and the Virus and the war, the EPV had moved in and made use of what was left, wearing the skin of a corpse. And we were walking through it, through the cemetery of a country.

  The alley was so dark, even the NVG’s could barely penetrate it, the computer’s simulation little better than a 16-bit video game from before I was born, and I wanted to rip them off. I didn’t, because I was an officer and had to set an example, and because I’d need them. The end of the alley was lit up day-bright by comparison, even though the only lights were what could leak through the blackout curtains from the apartment building.

  I snorted dark amusement. The EPV had Chinese jamming equipment mounted on their roofs, but they couldn’t even manage light discipline, as if radioing for air support was the only fucking thing American troops could do to kill them. Well, to be fair, we did have a history of using a shitload of air support, but that was just because we could.

  Okay, I’ll be frank, the lack of air support worried the shit out of me, but if the Delta team thought we could pull this off, then I believed it, too. Not because they were supermen or anything, although there was a part of me that couldn’t help but believe that, but because they weren’t known to throw their lives away pulling jobs they couldn’t complete.

  Napier held up about twenty yards from the end of the alley, crouched down behind a rusted-out burn barrel—what had once been a 55-gallon oil drum back when this place had produced oil—the rest of the squad taking alternating positions along the walls with as close to tactical separation as we could manage in the narrow alley. One RPG could still have killed three or four of us, but concealment was key for the moment.

  “I can see the cars from here,” Gregory told me when I moved up beside him and Napier.

  And of course, I could see them just as well. They were mostly European and mostly over a decade old and looked it.

  “You know what the difference between a BMW and a porcupine is, Gregory?” I asked him quietly, staring at the late-model SUV’s.

  “Negative, sir.”

  “Porcupines carry their pricks on the outside. Napier, MacMurray, you got the tools?”

  “I got the Benchmade,” Napier said, holding up the oddly-shaped tool in one gloved hand. It was called a Safety Cutter and could slice through seatbelts with one end and punch out window glass with the other.

  “I just got my knife,” MacMurray admitted. He had an orange lock-blade with a ridged metal stub on the butt end, which should be enough for side windows.

  “Start at opposite ends,” I told them, motioning at the cars. “Break the driver’s side windows, pop the hoods.” I waved behind me, catching the attention of Benitez and Williams. “You two come in behind them and cut the battery cables, the radiator hoses, anything you can get your hands on.”

  “What if they got car alarms, sir?” Napier asked. He was a skinny kid with a gaunt face and with the helmet and NVG’s, he looked like a praying mantis.

  “By the time you start busting windows, things’ll be too loud for anyone to hear them.” I hope. “Get going. The rest of you, cover the windows and the ends of the street, if you see anyone who’s armed who isn’t one of ours, take them down.”

  I took a final glance at my watch. Thirty seconds. Napier and the others jogged out of the end of the alley and the rest of us moved up in their wake, taking up overwatch positions, Gregory at the front, his Bravo team covering his Alpha team. I scanned the streets, but the only thermal signatures I saw that weren’t from our guys were rats scurrying around in the trash-strewn gutters.

  Napier’s arm was cocked back to crack through the driver’s side window of a 2019 X5 when the 240B opened up from the other side of the building. There was no mistaking the sound. Nothing else sounded quite like it, nothing the EPV had anyway. The lighter chatter of M27’s took the soprano notes of the song and as I’d promised, when the car alarm of the X5 sounded at the shattering of the window, it was background music to the main event.

  Return fire rattled high, echoing around the streets and off the walls of the ancient brick buildings, twisted by crumbling stucco and my guts twisted despite the fact I’d known it would happen. Those were my guys under fire, and I should have been with them. Instead, I was stuck watching the four Marines from Alpha team yanking open the hoods of German utility vehicles and speeding what the lack of maintenance and spare parts was already doing its best to accomplish.

  I waited for EPV soldiers to run around the corner at any second, waited for someone to recognize that the gunfire was a diversion and come to check out the car alarm, but the corners remained clear and the crack of the AK’s stayed on the opposite side of the building and, for an instant, I thought maybe everything would go exactly as planned.

  I just happened to be looking at the side of the building when something from the barricaded doorway that had used to be the east entrance to the apartment building caught my attention. They�
��d nailed plywood across the door and I’d assumed they piled furniture or oil drums filled with sand or some such thing on the other side to make the whole thing protection against attack from this side. I might have been wrong, or maybe they’d just had a way to remove it quickly, because something was pounding against the plywood from the other side and the right end was already beginning to give.

  I had about ten seconds to make a decision, I figured, before the barricade gave way and that closed exit became an open escape point. The easiest way to deal with it was probably to have my guys put a hundred rounds or so through the plywood to dissuade whoever was on the other side from trying to come out this way, but that was problematic. It might have been innocent civilians who’d been stuck in the building, though I doubted it. It might have been the Delta team looking for a safe exit. And I couldn’t ignore that we were here to extract Uncle Charlie’s ex-wife and kid and firing blind through a door might be contraindicated.

  The second possibility was just to have Napier and the others withdraw to the cover of the alley and concentrate our forces from a defensible position to see what came through the door. The problem with that was, I wasn’t sure I could get their attention above all the gunfire and if even one of them was late getting back, they’d be in our firing arc and we might shoot them or the bad guys might shoot them, but either way, there was a damned good chance of them getting shot.

  And then there was what I’d already decided I was going to do and was just going through the motions of arguing the point.

  “Follow me!” I yelled at Gregory, then I ran out into the street just like Captain Glenn and Gunny Moore would have yelled at me not to do.

  Napier and the others had worked their way through four of the vehicles, leaving their hoods propped open and leaving them near the middle of the street, only a few yards to either side of the entrance. It would have been just too damned convenient if one of them had managed to look up and see the plywood flapping in the wind like the ensign on a British yacht, or been able to hear me yelling at them over the thunder of full-auto fire, but they were too buried in their work, counting on us to watch their backs.

  I was maybe forty yards from the door when the plywood gave way and two of the biggest fucking Venezuelans I’d ever seen came through it shoulder first. Behind them was a machine gunner gone full Hollywood, carrying his PKM at the hip, with ammo belts draped over his shoulders and a black bandana tied around his head, and behind all of them, being pushed by another pair of EPV soldiers, were Laura and Paulo Martijena.

  The image smacked me in the face, that moment in a dream when you realize it’s actually a nightmare, that moment on a battalion run when you think you’re a mile away from the finish and then the Sergeant-Major goes left instead of right and takes you up Heartbreak Hill again and you know it’s going to be another four miles instead and you have to run faster than anyone else and not show how badly you think it sucks, because you’re an officer.

  The best thing to do would be to have Gregory put a grenade into the middle of them, but that would have killed our hostages, which would have been, as Captain Glenn liked to say, suboptimal. The next best thing would have been to put everyone behind cover and hunker down, maybe lay down fire at the edges to keep them penned inside, but the downside to that would have been the EPV assholes taking the hostages back into the building and time was a huge factor. And none of them had taken the time to put on night vision goggles. The big assholes who’d broken down the door hadn’t seen us, hadn’t noticed the hoods up on the cars, hadn’t had nearly enough time to let their eyes adjust to the dark outside, and any delay would give them time to react.

  So, I did something stupid. Because if you can’t do something smart, do something quick, that’s what I always say. Well, I’d recently started saying it. Like right then.

  I was running pretty damn fast, and shooting accurately on the run was difficult, but I was about fifteen yards away from the door and if you can’t hit a man-sized target at fifteen yards with an M27, you’re not much of a Marine. The red targeting reticle in the carbine’s optical sight danced with every pounding step of my boots on the cobblestone, but the mooks in the door had very big torsos and I pulled the trigger.

  5.56x45mm has next to no recoil, and my adrenaline was pumping, rocking that auditory exclusion and I for a single, fleeting instant, I thought I’d forgotten to take off my safety. But the big man stumbled, still off balance from running through the door, his AK slipping out of his hand as he went down. I transitioned to the other doorkicker, this one sporting a bushy beard and a mop of curly black hair sticking out beneath an olive-drab military cap. His eyes went wide and white at the muzzle flash, finally seeing that there were armed men rushing straight at him, and he tried to dig in his heels and stop and bring around his AK all at the same time.

  I shot him through the face.

  I wasn’t some badass commando, and this wasn’t some highly-trained, intricately-practiced move, though later on, looking back, it might have seemed that way. But the truth was, I was just rushing headlong into them and shooting as I went and the only reason I didn’t get killed immediately was technological—I could see them and they couldn’t see me.

  That said, the machine gunner would have got me. He had warning and he had my position from my muzzle flash and I had no way to dodge in time to get out of his way, but he also had that big-ass, front-heavy, long-barreled PKM 7.62x54mm GPMG and he was lugging it freehand with the bipod folded. If it had been a lighter weapon, something easier to maneuver, he could have shouldered it and put a magazine through my chest before I could do a damned thing about it. He tried. He squeezed the trigger even before he moved the muzzle, chopping heavy 30-cal Russian rounds through the wall beside him, trying to pan the gun to his right across the lot of us.

  Unfortunately for him, the big guy I’d shot through the face hadn’t gone down yet, momentum carrying him forward another step, and he was a big guy. Big enough that the rounds lost energy going through him and when they punched into the SAPI plate over my chest, they didn’t quite penetrate, though I wasn’t immediately aware of that fact.

  I’d already pulled the trigger before the baseball bat slammed into the right side of my chest and drove the air out of me, which was a damned good thing, because I sure wouldn’t have thought to do it afterward. I didn’t go down despite the pain, but I think that was more a function of the headlong sprint than any special fortitude on my part, because the fact I’d shot the machine gunner barely registered in my consciousness. He was going down and I was, too, stumbling forward, tripping over him and right into the woman.

  She was, I thought, a bit haggard, rougher around the edges than she had been in the photos we’d been given, wearing threadbare blue jeans and a flannel shirt instead of the yellow sundress of happier times. Her long hair was tied into a ponytail, and her hand was wrapped so tight around the boy’s wrist that when I knocked her over, she brought him right down with us.

  I barely felt either of them beneath me, because I was wrapped in Kevlar body armor and elbow and knee pads, tactical vest, spare mags, pistol holster, helmet, NVG’s and all the other battle rattle we brought with us, not even counting the fact that my entire chest was numb. One thing did penetrate the pain and the fog, though, and that was the thought that the last two guys in line were going to kill me. I couldn’t see their faces, just their boots, old, black leather Venezuelan Army boots, laced up haphazardly, as if they’d been pulled on in a panic. But they both had AK’s, and if those were also former Venezuelan military from five years ago as well, they’d probably still work for all that.

  I heard the shots, penetrating the auditory exclusion and the adrenaline-fueled pounding in my ears, like being on the inside of a drum kit, and yet something sounded wrong about them, too high-pitched to be the ancient Russian weapons. The boots scrambled backwards and then a body fell, AK blasting a dying burst into the ceiling, sending plaster and glass from a long-dead light fixture showe
ring down around us. The other EPV soldier turned and ran, chased by bullet strikes in the walls.

  “Get your ass up, sir,” Alvin Gregory yelled in my ear, grabbing me by the casualty handle on the back of my vest and hauling me to my feet. “If you get yourself killed, Gunny Moore is going to kick my balls into next Tuesday.”

  I tried to take a breath to answer him and winced at the pain it caused in my chest. He tugged at my vest and felt around beneath it, then withdrew his hand, seeming satisfied.

  “You’re not bleeding,” he declared. “It didn’t penetrate. Don’t get shot again, sir.”

  “Working on it,” I wheezed at him. “Secure the hostages.”

  But it was already being done, because they were a Marine infantry squad and not a bunch of idiots who needed me to tell them to tie their shoes. I couldn’t tell who it was because their backs were to me and one armored, helmeted Marine pretty much looks like another when they’re wearing NVG’s over their face, but they’d pulled Laura Martijena and her son off the floor and were urging them toward the door, but the woman was trying to break away, yelling at them in Spanish. Her son just stared up at me with wide eyes, like I was some sort of alien life form.

  I drew on my reserves of Spanish and tried to intervene.

  “Mrs. Martijena, don’t be scared. We’re United States Marines and we’re here to rescue you from the EPV. Come with us and we’ll get you out of here.”

  “I don’t want to leave!” she yelled at me in nearly unaccented English, still trying to yank her wrist away from the Marine holding onto it. “I wasn’t a prisoner! These people are my friends, damn you!”

  My chest hurt and it wasn’t from the bullet.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Oh, shit.”

  I don’t think I lost consciousness. The hit had been pretty hard, but not as hard as it could have been. I hadn’t registered the words at the time, but now they echoed in my memory as much as the pained moan I’d just uttered.