by Peter Nealen
For a brief moment, nothing more happened as the echoes died away. A faint groan signaled that not everyone in that lead element was dead. I might have heard a muttered curse in Russian, somewhere ahead of us. But the shocking violence of what had just happened would take a few heartbeats to sink in.
We had to move while that happened. We were way too close to settle in for a slugging match, even if I’d been sure that we had the numbers for it. The advantage our NVGs gave us only went so far.
“Chris! Peel left!” I was still close enough to hiss the words instead of shouting, since the shooting hadn’t really started in earnest yet.
I was already getting up, though that consisted more of rolling to my stomach, doing a half a pushup, and getting my feet under me. I stayed low, quickly getting behind a tree just to my right. It was a low fir, so it provided more concealment than cover, but it was better than nothing.
Chris didn’t get up immediately, but shifted his position slightly, dug a frag out of his vest, pulled the pin, and lobbed it toward the Russians as hard as he could. At almost the same moment, gunfire erupted ahead of us, muzzle flashes flickering in the dark and the distinctive rattling reports of Kalashnikov fire split the night. Bullets tore through the air overhead, chopping branches off trees and smacking bark off the trunks to rain down on our heads.
A moment later, Chris’s frag went off with a tooth-rattling thud, and at least one of the AKs fell silent as screams erupted in the night. The fire got wilder and even less focused—they hadn’t known for sure where we were to begin with, thanks to our suppressors, which had hidden any muzzle flash. The frag hadn’t told them much more.
Chris got up, snapping a fast pair of shots at one of the muzzle flashes, then he was turning and burning, scrambling past me as fast as his legs could carry him, threading between the trees toward the rear of our formation. Bullets nipped at his heels, but the bad guys couldn’t see well enough to hope to hit him except by sheer luck and volume of fire.
I gave him a handful of heartbeats, then I rose up, shouldering my own rifle, finding a figure crouched halfway behind a tree but facing entirely the wrong directing, spraying gunfire out into the woods. I slammed two rounds at him, glanced to my right to make sure I wasn’t about to accidentally get shot in the back, then I was up, turning to the left and sprinting after Chris, careful to steer off to the side just enough that I wasn’t running into any of my teammates’ line of fire.
Greg cranked off four rounds, the harsh but muted cracks sounding right behind me as I ran past him. After another pair of shots, he was coming after me.
I ran down the length of our Ranger file, passing Chris where he’d taken up a position behind an ancient, hoary oak that we’d passed on the way up only a few minutes before. I hooked around behind him, finding a towering spruce about four yards beyond and to his right, and threw myself down behind it.
Someone was yelling in Russian, trying to get control of the situation, but these guys weren’t Spetsnaz. The discipline just wasn’t there. The more we shot at them, the more they shot at shadows they couldn’t see. I tracked in on a flickering muzzle flash, got eyes on a man doing the “rice paddy squat”, spraying fully automatic fire at the trees in front of him, let out a breath as my dot settled on his silhouette, and fired. I didn’t have a chance for a follow up shot. His head jerked back as my bullet punched through his brain and he fell over backward, his Kalashnikov falling silent as the signals from his brain to his trigger finger were suddenly cut off.
I hadn’t been trying to shoot him in the head, but I’d take it.
Greg opened fire from off to my right. We were forming a sort of echelon right as we fell back, giving the entire team better fields of fire while spreading out and making ourselves harder targets. It was another maneuver that we’d practiced enough that it just sort of happened.
We’d had quite a bit of time to practice since we’d gotten to Europe. And a lot of it had been in real-life, live-fire combat situations like this one.
I reached for my radio as Jordan ran behind me, huffing a little. Aside from Tony and Reuben, who were packing our machineguns, Jordan was the most heavily laden. He had the med bag on his back.
With Jordan falling back, Tony was suddenly in the clear. He went to work.
The stuttering chatter of the suppressed Mk 48 was a lot quieter than even the lighter AKs, but the effects were devastating, especially at that range. I saw two men get shot to rag dolls in two bursts as Tony cut their legs out from under them, bullets tearing through their guts and lungs as they fell. Then he was up and moving, David taking up the fire for a moment before following suit.
“Shorty, Deacon.” I was glad that my voice was still level and calm, and I wasn’t breathing too hard. Firefights might have become common enough that they were simply another day at the office, but this had been a little too close for comfort already.
“Send it.” Arkadiusz Gniewek, callsign “Shorty,” was currently the unofficial ninth member of Grex Luporum Team X. We’d brought him in with his commander’s okay to act as our liaison with local Polish law enforcement, military, and militia. He was a short, scrappy bastard with a nose that looked like it had been mashed flat quite a few times, but he spoke fluent English and Russian as well as his native Polish.
“Fall back to the rear and get on the horn to Porucznik Jaskolski. Tell him we need backup in the woods just north of Podleśne. Incursion from Kaliningrad, foot mobiles, unknown numbers.” My Polish had gotten a lot smoother in the last few months, which was why I was able to pronounce the names without stumbling. I was still far from fluent, though. Which was part of why we had Arkadiusz with us.
“Roger.” A moment later, he was sprinting toward the back, having jumped the stack a little, turning and burning while Reuben was still laying down hate with his own Mk 48. Reuben was technically our secondary medic, but when Dwight had been killed in Slovakia, Reuben had taken up Dwight’s machinegun, quoting the old aphorism that, “The best medicine is lead downrange.”
I had a shot at another figure running from tree to tree, but I held my fire when I realized he was running away. The incoming fire had slackened considerably already. We’d killed quite a few, and the rest were starting to waver, since they still weren’t sure where the deadly fire was coming from.
Bad idea, sending your boys with no night vision. But it fit what we’d seen so far.
Arkadiusz was on the radio, speaking rapidly in Polish, too fast for me to quite follow. The harsh cracks of suppressed 7.62 NATO fire were making it hard to hear, too.
I took stock for a second. Scott was just starting to move, firing five fast shots into the trees before getting up and sprinting toward Chris, panting, “Last man,” as he passed. He angled behind us, heading for the rear and the easternmost tip of our new echelon formation.
We were now down behind cover, set in in a staggered slash across the narrow strip of woods that led south from the border between Kaliningrad Oblast and Poland. The interlopers were no longer capable of laying down any coherent fire. We were still taking sporadic bursts, but they had no targets from what I could tell, and they were shooting at phantoms under the trees. We probably should have kept falling back, but I thought we could hold our position until backup got there. If they’d pushed, we would have continued to break contact, but instead I decided to hold what we had.
“Golf Lima Ten, this is Deacon. Hold your positions and cease fire unless you have a target.” I’d have needed to shout to make myself heard without the radio, and that could have unnecessarily complicated the situation, giving the enemy a clue as to our whereabouts. As long as we were ghosts in the darkness, they’d be uncertain and tentative, which would buy us time.
I got a chorus of low acknowledgments and double squelch breaks. We stayed where we were, down on our bellies in the leaves and needles and ferns, some of us peering through our sights over fallen trees. Arkadiusz was still on the radio, but it sounded like he was making progress.
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br /> Furtive footsteps crunched in the leaves and needles, and a moment later Scott whispered from a few feet away. “Deacon, you good? You hit?” Scott was my assistant team lead, and he was doing his job. We weren’t quite what I’d call consolidated yet, but there was a lull in the fight, so he was going around to check everybody, lest one of us bleed out quietly without anyone knowing.
I had to check myself, running a hand over my chest, back, legs, and arms. I hadn’t felt myself get hit, but I’d seen men utterly ignore fatal wounds before. But I didn’t seem to be leaking anywhere. “I’m good. Check on Chris.” I didn’t look back, but kept my eyes on the woods, watching for a renewed advance. Scott slapped my boot softly and headed for Chris’s position.
I heard low murmurs from over there as Arkadiusz duck-walked over to me and got down behind a tree stump, in the prone behind his MSBS Grot C. “They are coming.”
“Good. How many?” I shifted my aim to cover what might have been movement, but I didn’t have a shot.
“Two platoons. Porucznik Jaskolski is not fucking around.” He wasn’t wrong; the 43rd Light Infantry Battalion of the 4th Warmian-Masurian Territorial Defense Brigade was already stretched thin, with detachments patrolling most of the coast, the border, and the cities of Braniewo and Pieniężno, all while already understrength. Getting the Territorial Defense Brigades up to fighting snuff was proving more difficult than anyone had hoped, especially given the body blows that Poland had taken since the previous fall.
That was part of why we had two Triarii Grex Luporum Teams out in the northeast of Poland, when the most immediate threat was coming from Germany in the west. The Poles had other enemies, as well, and while the Russians had intervened to our benefit during the battle for Gdansk, that most decidedly did not make them friends.
Especially not to the Poles. To the Poles, no Russian was ever going to be a friend.
“How far out?” I had my own estimate in my head from what I knew about Jaskoski’s unit, but that was just that—an estimate.
“Fifteen minutes. He’s had them on standby every night for the last week.” Arkadiusz sounded a little sympathetic, and I could understand. Those boys had to be tired as hell.
But with raids hitting the small farming villages along the border with Kaliningrad about every other night for the last week, Jaskolski had reason to be a hardass.
The Russians were insisting that it was the work of criminal elements and “Polish terrorists trying to stir up trouble with Russia.” We all knew better, but it was providing them with justification for the growing military buildup in Kaliningrad. And it was making the Poles nervous.
I thought about the timing and the lay of the land for a moment. I couldn’t see any movement ahead of us anymore, though a few of the intruders were still firing random bursts of AK fire into the trees in our general direction. We were going to lose track of them soon, certainly within less than fifteen minutes. And if they had a leader who was remotely smart, we might just get flanked if that happened.
It was unlikely, given the skill level I’d seen so far that night, but far from impossible. And I’d learned not to underestimate glorified monkeys with guns a long time ago. The least-trained, least-disciplined thug can sprout some serious animal cunning when the chips are down.
I got up and moved up to join Scott and Chris. “Scott, stay here with the boys and keep an eye out for those Territorial Defense guys. I’m going to take Chris up along the edge of the trees and see if we can’t keep eyes on our little buddies up there before they give us the slip and pop up somewhere we don’t want them to be.”
“I’d say they already did, but I’m with you.” Scott scanned the forest, his voice still low. We were all still talking quietly, barely above a whisper—and that actually doesn’t carry as far in the woods at night as a whisper does—so that we didn’t give our position away any more than we already had.
I whispered the five-point contingency plan that we always did—we could all recite it in our sleep by then, but we still went through it anyway, just in case—gave his shoulder a squeeze to acknowledge his thumbs up, and tapped Chris. “Let’s go.”
He got to his feet and we faded into the dark, hunting the survivors we’d left behind.
***
They’d made tracks. We found the bodies, but their buddies were long gone. The two of us continued about another two hundred yards toward the border without catching up with them. Though when we paused, I could almost swear I could still hear movement ahead of us.
When a column of headlights appeared on the road to the west, coming from the general direction of Braniewo, I signaled Chris to turn back. We hadn’t heard shooting, so they hadn’t flanked the rest of us. At least, not yet. Though from the amount of noise they were making, I didn’t think they’d be flanking anyone anytime soon.
I could imagine the welcome they’d get back in Kaliningrad. They’d failed, rather miserably. And I doubted there was a lot of brotherhood between the Russian Army and whoever these clowns were. Otherwise, they would have been better equipped. These guys were disposable pawns.
I’d be a lot more sympathetic if I hadn’t seen what they’d done to a couple of Polish villages already.
“Weeb, Deacon. Opposition appears to have called it a night from where we are. We’re moving back.” It was time to link up with Jaskolski and mop the rest of this up.
I just hoped the night was over with, and we could go back to our temporary berthing in Braneiwo and get a few hours’ sleep.
But somehow, I doubted it was.
Chapter 2
The Territorial Defense troops were piling out of the Star 266 trucks where they’d pulled over on the side of the road, and the first couple of squads had already started to spread out into the woods as Chris and I rejoined Scott and the rest of the team. Scott and Arkadiusz had already deconflicted and linked up with the Poles. The two of them were standing near the lead truck, talking to Jaskolski while Reuben guided the Light Infantry point elements into the woods. It would not be a good thing if they stumbled on us in the dark and the wrong people got shot.
I glanced over the men and women spreading out into the trees. They were better equipped than the raid force had been, but that wasn’t saying a lot. Load bearing vests worn over bulky, early 2000s era body armor turned even the fittest soldier into a lumbering pear shape, and not all these boys and girls were lean and mean studs to begin with. They at least had night vision, monoculars mounted on old MICH helmets. The Territorial Defense Brigades had gotten a lot of the Wojska Lądowe’s old FB Beryl 5.56 AKs, as the regular Land Forces had switched to the Grot Cs.
But while their equipment was a bit better than the bare-bones 1960s stuff the raiders had been using, their training wasn’t great. Even as I watched, I saw a lot of them bunching up near the trees, and their small unit leaders were being awfully loud getting them sorted out.
The two of us walked across the narrow field, raising our NVGs so as to avoid getting whited out by the glare of the headlights, and joined Scott, Arkadiusz, and Jaskolski at the lead truck.
Jaskolski was dressed and equipped just like the rest of the Territorial Defense troops, though he had a PM-84 submachinegun slung in front of him instead of an FB Beryl rifle. Arkadiusz was still in his Wojska Lądowe cammies with his MSBS Grot C rifle and monocular NVGs, but otherwise was dressed and equipped a lot like we were. We’d run as light as possible. No body armor, NVGs on skullcap mounts, and only carrying ammo, comms, minimal med gear, and water on load bearing vests under the ghillie hoodovers we’d brought through Slovakia all those months before.
It felt like a small lifetime ago.
“Lech.” I stuck out my hand and he shook it. “Glad you got here so fast.”
“Mateusz.” Jaskolski was tall and lanky, and about ten years older than one might expect for a man of his rank. His English was about as fluent as my Polish, so aside from greetings and some basic small talk, we usually conversed through Arkadiusz. We also used
first names, because as Triarii, we didn’t really have ranks, and Jaskolski was old enough and flexible enough that he just rolled with it.
He rattled off a string of Polish, and Arkadiusz nodded and turned to me. For all his stocky build, oft-broken nose, and pugnacious attitude, in the light Arkadiusz looked like a kid. He wasn’t; he’d been in combat in Kosovo. But he had a baby face that he tried to offset with a short, neatly trimmed beard. “He was waiting for this. After what happened in Pęciszewo, we were all expecting it to happen again.”
Jaskolski pointed as he spoke again. I caught a little bit of it, but not enough. “We will spread out and sweep the woods from here to the border. One squad from Fourth Platoon will move out onto the eastern flank, to make sure they did not slip past.”
I nodded. “We’ll stick with you, unless you want us to push up ahead.”
But Jaskolski shook his head when Arkadiusz translated. “No. You come with me.” He might not have been particularly fluent at English, but he still tried from time to time.
“Fair enough.” I wasn’t going to say so, and I knew that Jaskolski wouldn’t either, but none of us quite trusted the Territorial Defense troops’ target discrimination. Unfamiliar shapes in ghillie hoodovers in the dark could very well draw fire.
I keyed my radio. “Golf Lima Ten, Deacon. Hold what you’ve got. Once the Tango Delta boys and girls are deployed, we’ll join the sweep.”
“Great.” That would be David. “I’ve got time for a nap, then.”
***
We had just started moving when the Russian helicopters showed up.
Jaskolski, Arkadiusz, and I were just under the eaves of the woods, so we heard them first. I stepped out from under a tree, scanning the sky above the treetops with my PS-31s. I picked up the dark dots against the sky pretty quickly, especially since they weren’t running blacked out. That made some sense, considering the game they were playing. They were only moving to counteract “instability” on the Polish side of the line, after all. They totally weren’t flexing for an invasion or otherwise intruding on sovereign territory.