by Peter Nealen
Hartrick answered. “We fade and go back to trying to mitigate the damage in the shadows, just like we’ve been doing for the last few years back home. If we can work with the Poles, the Slovak Nationalists in exile, the Hungarians, and the Bavarians, then we play the long game. Eventually, we bring down the EDC for what they’ve done. If that doesn’t work…” He folded his arms. “Then we find our way back Stateside and leave Europe to burn.”
Gutierrez held up a hand. “We’re not to that point yet. There’s still time to hopefully get it through Settar’s thick skull that this plan is unworkable. But we’ll need intel for that.” He looked up at me. “Looks like you and the boys are headed back into Germany.”
I nodded. It was inevitable. It was why we were Grex Luporum Teams. “Will we have a trail section this time?”
“We probably won’t be able to get them into the country, but they’ll be on fifteen-minute strip alert in Luban.”
I nodded. “When are we heading out?”
“We’re waiting on a couple of things, so you’ve got about four days.”
“Fair enough.” It was less time than we’d had to prepare to go into Denmark, but still more than we were used to. “Get me a warning order, and I’ll tell the team.”
***
I was running a little late thanks to various team-related duties, but it was still light when we pulled up to the Mikolajczak house.
I say “we” because Gutierrez was not rescinding the buddy team requirement anytime soon, especially not after the dustup we’d gotten into on the streets of Wroclaw back in the winter. So, Tony had come with me, and we’d stopped along the way to pick up Inga Gajos, Klara’s roommate. Inga had latched onto Tony the first day we’d gone out with the girls after Mass, several months before, and if he still seemed a bit uncertain as to where it was all going, she sure didn’t.
I hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed. While Klara and I were both Catholic, and so was Inga, Tony wasn’t much of anything. He’d been thinking about it, coming to Mass with me more often—though how much of that was because of the Mass, and how much was because of Inga, I didn’t know—but he was still something of an agnostic.
We parked in front of the house, which was a bit bigger than I had expected. The walls were yellow stucco, the steeply peaked roof red tile, and the yard was well-kept and surrounded by a brick and wrought-iron fence. Light glowed from the windows already. The front door opened, and Klara came out as I got out of the car. She was beaming, though her father, a tall, skinny old man, while kindly, still looked unconvinced.
With a deep breath, I started up the walk.
Chapter 10
We didn’t go into Germany directly. Not this time.
We had a bit of time to work with. Reeves was bringing up every logistical problem he could imagine to stall the offensive until we could get more intel. It might have seemed like cowardice, if we didn’t have a pretty good idea of what would happen if that half-baked invasion plan went ahead without any changes.
Another charter flight took us to Switzerland, which was maintaining its neutrality and its distance from the “European Project.” There, some legerdemain with tail numbers, transponders, and flight logs had gotten us into the Czech Republic on a relatively clean slate.
We hadn’t gone to Prague, either. That would have been beyond stupid, given the grip the EDC’s lackeys still had on the Czechs. Brussels had forced them to keep out of the Slovak fight through a combination of financial and political leverage, that apparently still had Prague in a death grip.
So, we’d flown into a little airstrip outside Karlovy Vary. I’d been close enough to the cockpit to hear some of the radio chatter. We’d been carefully scrutinized by a flight of Czech Air Force JAS-39C Gripen fighters before we’d been given clearance to land. The Czechs might have managed to mostly stay out of the war so far, but they were clearly nervous.
There was no sign of heightened security as we got off the plane, though. It might as well have been Denmark. We hadn’t used Stenberg’s plane again, and this one had been considerably less comfortable, but it was still a twin-engine, white-painted charter, and we still got off in civilian clothes with a couple duffels apiece carrying our weapons and gear. Once again, given the nature of the mission, we’d brought the much more compact Rattlers instead of our full-size OBRs. I wasn’t sure I liked that, but walking around with full-sized gun cases would look a little suspicious.
We came down the steps, scanning our surroundings carefully. The airport was set in a field that had been cleared out of the woods, on the floor of a small valley surrounded by rolling, forested hills. The air was clean and crisp.
I had a comms plan for our contact in the Czech Republic, but I hadn’t been sure what to expect. He was supposed to meet us without the need for a phone call.
I hadn’t exactly been expecting what looked an awful lot like an official motorcade sitting by the tarmac. We’d been the only plane on the taxiway. And the half dozen men gathered around the black SUVs looked an awful lot like official muscle, too.
My hand started to itch for that Rattler. It was in the bag, easily accessible, but it would still take longer to get out than it would take any one of those men to draw a sidearm and open fire.
My heartrate was already up, but it spiked as I saw the small, balding man who was supposed to be our contact—we had photos—step out of the lead SUV and start toward us. I shifted the duffel on my shoulder and unzipped the flap.
Hell of a way to start an op. Compromised from the get go. Well, they do say that the most dangerous parts of any operation are insert and extract.
But as he came forward, the little man waved and grinned. If it was a setup, he was awfully relaxed.
Or he’s trying to put us at ease until the hammer can drop. But if that’s the game, he’s already screwed it up by bringing the Goon Squad.
“Hello, my friends.” His English was good, which was a blessing since I was tapped out between English, Polish, and German. “Relax, please. I realize that this might have been the wrong way to do this.” He waved toward the Goon Squad in the background. “They are only my escort. You are among friends here.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it, cautiously.
I still left the flap unzipped so I could reach the gun. And I could tell that he noticed, too.
“You are ‘Deacon?’” He had to have been given a description. I found it somewhat interesting that he’d been given my callsign rather than my name—or the name that was on my not-entirely-true-to-life Canadian passport.
“That’s me. You’re Jaromir?” His grip was firm enough. He was—if our information was good—a senior officer in the BIS. I had a vague picture of why he was helping out, involving the Czech government surreptitiously trying to get past the sanctions imposed by the EDC, especially as the internal strife in Germany, France, Spain, and Greece got worse. But how accurate it was remained anyone’s guess.
He nodded. “I am Jaromir. Welcome to the Czech Republic.” He waved toward the vehicles. “Let us get to somewhere more secure, then we can talk more freely. Do you need assistance with any equipment?”
I shook my head. “We traveled light.” Guerrilla warfare isn’t something you do—at least, not successfully—with two-thirds your bodyweight in gear.
I glanced back toward Scott, who was holding position by the stairs, and nodded. A careful look at the security men gathered around the black SUVs didn’t reveal any threat to us. They weren’t watching us. They were watching the road and the parking lot. If they had been there to grab us, at least a few of them would have been watching us, especially since they had to assume that we’d be armed. Which we were.
I wasn’t going to relax, exactly, but if there was a double-cross in the works, it didn’t look like it was going to happen here.
I allowed Jaromir to escort us to the vehicles, and we loaded up. It was a tight fit; each SUV already held three men, a driver and two shooters, and so we had to spread out quite a bit. Gear
got piled in the back compartments, and then we were off, pulling past the parking lot and the weird, UFO-ish terminal. A statue to Yuri Gagarin held a wave as we turned onto the highway and toward the wooded hills that lay between the airport and the city.
“Seems like an awfully official-looking motorcade,” I commented, watching the scenery outside with one eye. I wasn’t really focused on it, though, but was taking in every movement inside the vehicle with my peripheral vision. I still had a PR-15 in my waistband, just in case.
Jaromir chuckled. “I didn’t realize until you were on the ground what it might look like. You are not being arrested. You have to understand the situation here.”
He leaned back in the seat. He was the third man in this vehicle, so he and I were in the back seat while two of his dark-suited minions drove and right-seated up front. “No one—not the President, not the Prime Minister, not most of Parliament—was happy about paying obeisance to Brussels once Slovakia fell apart. Most Czechs are not happy about it. We had our independence after the fall of the Soviet Union, we have tried to rebuild our country, our laws, and our culture after the nightmare of Communism, and then first the European Union and then the ‘European Defense Council’ decided to take that away. And by then we were too deeply in debt.” Contempt had dripped from his voice when he’d said, “European Defense Council.”
“So, while the French and Germans have eyes all over Prague, much of the rest of the country works for the Czech people, not for Brussels. We cannot confront them directly, but we can do what we can do.”
I looked over at him and scratched my beard. “So, you’re saying this is an off-the-books BIS op?”
He grinned. “Of course not. That would mean that the government of the Czech Republic is not entirely committed to our obligations to the European Defense Council.”
I echoed the grin faintly. So, while we still wouldn’t let our guard down, it appeared that we were among friends, and more powerful friends than we’d been counting on. “So, what’s the plan?”
“It will be a couple of days before we can link up with our contacts. We have a lodge near Nové Hamry, where we will stay until the night after tomorrow, when we will get you across the border and into Germany. I hope you brought good boots. There will be a bit of a hike.”
I chuckled. “We’re all infantrymen. We’re used to it.”
***
The lodge was pretty nice, a classic sort of place with lots of dark wood and whitewashed stucco, set on the hill above the railroad tracks, with a pretty clear view of Nové Hamry and the hills beyond from the porch. It was a lot newer than it looked. It wasn’t on the imagery we had for the area. The builders had obviously put a lot of time and energy into making it blend in with the landscape.
It was a nice enough place that it crossed my mind that I’d like to bring Klara there, after the war. Which sparked a whole different train of thought.
What would “after the war” really look like? Even if I survived it? And where were we really going to go from here, on a personal level? She and I were definitely getting closer, and dinner with her family had gone astoundingly well. Her father and I had chatted about the military and the war as much as we could, given my limited Polish and his limited English. He’d seemed to accept me, American though I was, and from talking to Klara later, the fact that I was Catholic had a great deal to do with that.
But how could we plan for a future when we didn’t even know there was going to be one?
I’d pursued the relationship with her because I’d made a conscious choice to try to ignore that line of thought. I’d lived with the distinct possibility of death for a long time. It lends a certain clarity. Any one of us could die for any reason at any time. I could survive months of continuous combat, only to die in a traffic accident the day after returning to a “safe” area.
I’d seen it happen.
So, putting off living because of fear of death was to die prematurely. We had to be ready to die, but that didn’t mean acting like we were already dead, and everything was hopeless.
But the fears always came back.
I finally told myself that there was no point in dwelling on it, and in the middle of a mission was the absolute worst time to be doing so, anyway. I pushed it to the back of my mind and concentrated on what I could control.
Which was precious little until it was time to insert.
***
It was a quiet couple of days. Jaromir stayed with us, as did a couple of his compatriots, who it turned out were also BIS officers. Antonin and Tibor had been around the block. Greg, as was his wont, had gotten chatty with Antonin, who was willing to talk. He’d tried with Tibor, but Tibor seemed to be the more taciturn type. But Antonin told Greg that all three of them had been in Kosovo. He hadn’t said exactly what they’d been doing, but that kind of went without saying.
They didn’t know exactly what we were going into Germany to do, either.
Officially—meaning, as far as Reeves and Settar knew—we were going in to run what was essentially a repeat of our mission over the winter that had culminated in Vogt’s failed coup. We were going in to collect information regarding the European Defense Corps’ dispositions, how much support they were getting from the Armee de Terre, the Bundeswehr, and the Ejército de Tierra. There were rumors spreading from a number of sources—and a couple of sketchy, pixelated bits of imagery—that the EDC had started leaning hard on the Spanish to lend a hand. Broke, deeply in debt, and increasingly torn by the same internal strife and runaway agendas, the Spanish didn’t have a lot of options. The Ejército de Tierra was still pretty strong, too, despite Spain’s fiscal problems. That alone could alter the situation considerably.
But recon was only part of our mission. We’d do the reconnaissance work. We had several areas of interest marked out from Dresden to Görlitz. That stuff was still important. But we didn’t plan on doing it solo.
Jaromir might not have been completely read-in on the mission—he didn’t need to be, and he was apparently completely comfortable with that fact—but his contacts on the German side of the line were crucial. Because at Gutierrez’s direction, we were going to try to contact the shadowy Verteidiger in Bayern.
The EDC publicly denied that the Verteidiger even existed. Of course, they’d dismissed Nouveau Gallia as nothing but a bunch of disorganized neo-Nazi thugs until they’d seized Narbonne and been welcomed with open arms by a good chunk of the population. The Verteidiger in Bayern were much more low-key, but what intel we had on them pointed to a largely stolid, traditionalist group who were increasingly sick of both Berlin and Brussels, and were starting to tighten their hold on Bavaria, as well as some of the other areas in what used to be southern East Germany.
If we were going to have a hope in hell of pulling off any sort of offensive, we were going to need support inside Germany. And while we were certainly interested in contacting Nouveau Gallia, since we were coming from Poland, France was going to have to wait. With the current plan, it was going to be hard to explain why we’d sent a Grex Luporum team into southern France when the main effort was supposed to be going through Germany and into Belgium.
Not that we were entirely beholden to the Army or to Washington’s plans, but we were coming up against that delicate relational equilibrium again.
“So, tell me about Elias.” Jaromir and I were sitting by the fireplace in the common area, even though it was warm enough that no fires had been lit. I didn’t know if the BIS owned the lodge, or if they’d just hired it for the week and cleared all the staff out.
“I know little of his background.” Jaromir took his cigarette out of his mouth and blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. “He is quiet. His compatriots, the few times we’ve met, have been more so. But if I had to guess, I would imagine he is former KSK. He has the…how do you say…the manner.”
I nodded. Most SOF guys had a certain air about them. I supposed that I’d taken it on after over six years in the Grex Luporum teams, even tho
ugh I didn’t technically have a special operations background. I’d been a regular grunt who’d been too stubborn not to try to gut through Grex Luporum selection.
“How extensively have you vetted him?” I wasn’t smoking, but the lodge had a nice bar, and the German beer they stocked was still fantastic. I was pacing myself and had limited it to just the one beer, which I’d been sipping at for the last half hour.
“I’ve been meeting with him for two years now. He tipped us off to an EDC operation aimed at kidnapping a German dissident who was staying in Prague—not unlike that op a year or so ago that essentially turned Ukraine over to the Russians. He’s gotten a couple of our people into Germany, as well, and they’re still there and reporting regularly.” He crushed the butt of the cigarette out and pulled out another. The man smoked like a chimney.
“What are his feelings about Americans?” That could end up being crucial. We had very little concrete information on the ViB. What little made it to our ears was all secondhand and heavily biased. Too heavily biased to entirely trust.
“Depends on the Americans.” Jaromir chuckled. “You, I think he’ll probably get along with. I doubt he’ll be chatty—it doesn’t seem to be in his nature. But he won’t look down on you like a lot of left-center Germans would. He and his fellow Bavarians are in much the ‘same boat,’ as you say.”
I nodded, then killed the beer and checked my watch. It was the afternoon of our second day there.
In six hours, we were heading back into Germany.
Chapter 11
Infiltrating Germany was a lot different this time around than the last.
For one thing, while the night was still pretty chilly, we were dry. Jaromir and his boys had driven us up a dirt road to a small wooden shack that stood less than two hundred yards from the German border. The van—unlike when they’d picked us up from the airport, we were riding in an old Volkswagen Eurovan that looked far less “official”—stopped outside the shack, and Jaromir slid the side door open.