by Peter Nealen
“Well, that is why we decided to insert and extract through the Czech Republic.” He chuckled. “What’s with you, Matt? I thought all you holy rollers were supposed to be perpetually joyful, or something.”
I glowered at him. “I’m Catholic. We’re not supposed to be Pollyannas.” My glare only elicited another chuckle. I decided to get back on track. I wasn’t in the mood for Hartrick’s needling. “Has Klemme talked at all?”
Another sardonic snort. “He’s singing like a canary. The going theory right now is that he’s a political appointee, not a professional.”
I nodded. “That sounds like the EDC. After Vogt’s attempted coup back in the winter, they’re going to be a lot more worried about loyalty than proficiency.”
“Funny how that works.” Hartrick straightened and turned back to the map table, waving me over. I heaved myself to my feet—which still took a little more effort than it should have, after an uneventful but grueling exfiltration—and joined him. “Unfortunately, if Klemme is a political appointee who doesn’t actually know much about warfare, that limits his usefulness.”
“You said he was talking, though.” I took up a spot at the corner of the table. There were a lot of photos printed out and spread out over the map, which showed most of Central Europe.
“He is, but he’s not providing us with a lot that we didn’t already know. Most of it just parrots that briefing the Verteidiger gave you.” Hartrick pointed to the photos. “The pictures you brought back have been a lot more informative, so far.”
Most of the photos were of either the EDC laager sites near several cities—we’d gotten a look at such sites near Nuremburg and Munich, as well as Ingolstadt—or the checkpoints that we’d had to try to avoid out on the highways, with some emphasis placed—by way of grease pencil markings—on the anti-armor capabilities at each checkpoint. The photos had been taped around the edge of the table, and 550 cord gut had been strung from each photo to the location on the map where it had been taken. There were also a lot more than just my team had taken. The other teams had been busy, too.
“That coup might have put the nail in the coffin on any ‘Seven Days to the Rhine’ plan.” Hartrick leaned on the table and looked down at the little cat’s cradle of white strings connecting images of hardened checkpoints and combined arms units clustered around just about every major urban center in what had once been East Germany. “With the numbers we can throw into it, any serious resistance will bog the offensive down, and then they can bring reinforcements up.”
I nodded. “Have you seen the brief Pascal gave us?”
“I did. And the tech geeks did manage to confirm that its genuine. At least, about ninety percent confirmed.” He ran a hand over his face. “Two more EDC divisions. And they’re not drawing from the Bundeswehr, Armee de Terre, or Ejército de Tierra, either.”
“And the Bundeswehr, at least, will be a hell of a lot more motivated than they were here in Gdansk, when we start kicking in their door.” It was something that was all too often ignored by the folks in air-conditioned TOCs planning at the 50,000-foot view. Someone who might be less than thrilled to be in the military just might change their mind when you start stomping on their own soil.
Hartrick blew out a deep breath. “What a cluster.”
Something about the tone of his voice told me more than his words alone did. “Let me guess. The powers that be don’t want to hear it.”
“Settar doesn’t. Oscar’s over there with Reeves trying to talk some sense into her. She still thinks they can hammer straight through south of Berlin, and move too fast for any coordinated resistance to slow them down.” He shook his head. “She’s in ‘I’m a general and you will shut up now’ mode.”
“Wonderful.” I rolled my eyes. “As if we haven’t seen enough of that over the years to know where it leads.”
“Reeves has, too, believe it or not. He’s been fighting the ‘quick fix’ plan since the get-go. But it gets worse.”
I grimaced. “Again, don’t tell me. Let me guess. The State weenies are using this as a pretext for their plan.”
Hartrick’s nod was slow and long-suffering. “That State hack, Martine, is insisting that now we have to stand down, so he can open negotiations with Brussels. Because we’re really all on the same side, and if some overly aggressive American soldiers hadn’t gotten out of hand, then we wouldn’t be in this situation, which looks like a lose-lose if we press the attack.” He scowled. “Unfortunately, it sounds like Settar might get orders from DC to precisely that effect soon.”
“I suppose, in a way, he’s not wrong.” When he glanced at me narrowly, I shrugged. “He probably is on the same side as the EDC.”
Hartrick got pensive. “Yeah, I suppose in a way you’re right.” He sighed. “Fuck.”
For a long moment, the two of us leaned on the table and stared at the intractable problem in front of us. Finally, I looked up. “What can we do?”
“Right now? Not a damned thing. Get your gear reset—though I’m pretty sure your team already has.” I nodded. “Then get some rest and be prepared to go in, make contact with your German guerrilla friends again, and start to pick up the pieces when this all goes sideways.”
I didn’t have an answer to that. I just nodded and headed for the door.
***
I walked into what looked an awful lot like it was about to turn into a brawl.
Tony, David, and several of Tucker’s boys were standing on the street in front of the team house. Facing them was what looked like about a squad of soldiers, all in Army OCP. And the tension was downright crackling.
“What the hell is going on here?” I might have left the Marine Corps as a mere corporal, but I’d still had plenty of practice at making myself heard when I needed to. My voice echoed off the front of the team house, and several of the soldiers whipped their heads around, eyes widening as they saw me stalking toward them.
“Seems that some of our ‘brothers in arms’ here don’t like us very much.” David was at the forefront, standing shoulder to shoulder with Tony and backed by Tucker’s guys. “Seem to think that we’re ‘war profiteers,’ or some shit.”
“Is that so?” I scanned the knot of young men and women in OCP, most of whom were suddenly a lot less belligerent, as they realized that they’d gotten so focused on our guys and the team house that they hadn’t even noticed me coming up behind them. Some of them looked over my shoulder, as if wondering if another group was coming up to flank them. I was sure it was only a matter of time; Burkhart’s team was out doing PT, and Bradshaw’s section often swung by when they had a chance. We’d gotten pretty tight since Slovakia. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Y’all just got here.”
A young man with 1st Lieutenant’s bars on his chest stepped through the press. I raised an eyebrow. Officers starting brawls? Discipline must have slipped farther than we’d thought.
“Are you in charge here?” He looked barely old enough to shave, and I’m not the oldest Triarius around.
I folded my arms. “Maybe. Why are you picking a fight with my guys?”
“Your ‘guys’ should have a bit more respect. I know something about your mercenary outfit. I might not be able to do anything about whatever weird position you seem to have around here, but I do know that you fall under overall US command, regardless of your…special status.” He sneered a little as he said it. “Eroding the chain of command is…”
I cut him off. “We might be temporarily OPCON to the joint command, but that doesn’t put us in your chain of command, Skippy. So you can piss right off.” I was in absolutely no mood to deal with some Army zero’s bullshit. Especially not after my recent conversation with Hartrick.
“Do you know…”
I still wasn’t going to let him finish. “Does your commander know that you’re out here picking fights, Lieutenant?” I stared him down. “I don’t give a rat’s ass how high-and-mighty you think you are with that shiny shit on your chest. Most of these guys were in
combat while you were getting shoved into lockers in high school, if not before. And I think that if you talk to some of your Army brethren who were in Slovakia, you might find that they snatch you up by your collar and talk some sense into you, considering how many of them we got out of that hellhole alive.” Of course, there weren’t too many of those guys who had survived still around, and I suspected that more than a few of them had been PNGed like Warren. Though I also suspected that most of the veterans of the battle for Gdansk had started to adjust their own viewpoints as well. The fact that Reeves had apparently started to consider Oscar Gutierrez a confidant said a lot, too.
But I doubted that the officer corps as a whole would really appreciate that.
It also said something that the lieutenant didn’t really have an answer. And the soldiers behind him didn’t, either.
I looked up at David. “What happened?”
David was in full Barrio Punisher mode. He jerked his chin at the lieutenant. “This stuck-up pendejo wanted us to stand up and salute him as he walked by on the street. We told him to go fuck himself. He started a ruckus, and pretty soon had his own little mob of lemmings right here, ready to pick a fight.” He snorted derisively. “Must think it’s easier to fight six of us than the fucking EDC and their lackeys, huh?”
I looked around at the group, taking in the unit patches. My eyes narrowed. These weren’t infantry, or even tankers or artillerymen. Figures. I’d always seen a pretty sharp divide between a lot of combat arms and POGs—Personnel Other than Grunts—and this looked like yet another example. One of the more poisonous examples.
“I think they might be surprised.” Grex Luporum Triarii are hardly pushovers. Hell, most Triarii train to a higher standard than the Army in general, and the GL teams take it a few steps farther. I fixed the lieutenant with a basilisk stare and pulled my phone out. “Who’s your commander, Lieutenant?”
That got through. He glanced down at the ground. He’d been expecting to bully us into submission, but I gathered that however justified he felt, he wasn’t eager to get his chain of command involved. That was probably not going to work out well for him, no matter how squishy his commanding officer was. They knew that they had no leverage on the Triarii.
Without much else but some mutterings and dark glances, the soldiers drifted away. I watched them go, and only turned to Tony and David after they rounded the corner and were out of sight. “Okay, straight up. How much did you actually try to deescalate the situation before you bowed up?”
David looked slightly defiant. “Not much. Why should I? I’m not in the Army anymore. That little pissant has zero authority where I’m concerned.”
“Granted.” I mounted the steps and headed inside, the rest of them falling in behind me. “But we’re in a delicate situation right now, and from what Brian just told me, we might be within a single incident of having the Army turned against us. If State has their way, we might well be Persona Non Grata in a week.”
That drew some quiet scowls. “Really?” Chris was standing in the doorway to our team room. “After what we’ve done for them?”
“Do you really think that’s going to matter?” I felt the weight of it all settling on my shoulders. “We’re already inconvenient, given how much we’ve done in direct contravention of DC’s edicts over the last few years. The fact that we saved a bunch of Army lives in Slovakia is only going to sting more, added to the fact that the US is stuck formally siding with the Poles, whom the establishment has hated for years. They’re pissed that reality has caught up with them, and they’re going to be looking for scapegoats.” I stared around at the group, guys from both Tucker’s and my teams. “Keep your go bags handy.” I ran a hand over my face, suddenly very, very tired. “Just in case.”
Chapter 17
The problem with planning ahead is that the enemy always gets a vote. And you usually find out that you have more enemies than you thought.
Tony and I had just gotten back to the team house after dinner with Klara and Inga. The requirement that we go anywhere out in town in pairs seemed to be pushing Tony and Inga closer together, and neither of them seemed to mind.
The incoming alarm started to blare as we started up the steps. We didn’t hesitate. That alarm had gone off far too many times over the last few months. Our gear was still inside, but we still had pistols, so we sprinted for the nearest bunker.
We got there first, with the rest of the teams flowing in not long after. The reactions were all hard-wired by this time. About half of my team and a couple of Tucker’s guys got inside before the bunker was full, and the rest quickly moved to the next. There were about four hardened bunkers set around the team house, and they’d been there since shortly after we’d retaken Gdansk.
None of us talked much. I hoped that Klara had gotten to safety; there wasn’t anything I could do for her from a distance. Her family had a basement, and they’d had plenty of practice getting into it quickly when an attack came in. But there was always that one time…
We waited, as the sirens wailed, and explosions rumbled somewhere in the distance. It was hard to tell from inside the bunker, but I thought that the impacts were somewhere off to the north, near the port.
My radio—which I never went anywhere without—crackled with Hartrick’s voice. “All Golf Lima stations, check in.”
I pulled it out and keyed the mic. We’d gone to the radios for the primary comms because none of us entirely trusted the phone system. Especially after a cell tower had been bombed only a few months before.
“This is Deacon. In Bunker One with Chatty, Malcom, Peanut, Kicker, and Fosters.”
One by one, the rest of the teams checked in, confirming that everyone had made it to a bunker. Even as Scott called out the callsigns from Bunker Three, another string of impacts thumped off in the distance. The sirens kept wailing.
There was a pause after Burkhart called out from Bunker Four. “Roger. All teams are up. Be advised, we are taking incoming cruise missiles from over the German border, appear to be coming from the vicinity of Neubrandenburg.”
He’d barely finished speaking when a third salvo came howling in. This time, we could hear the roar of the engines as they went over. This barrage was heading somewhere farther south. And the impacts were a lot closer. The explosions shook the ground under us.
“Damn.” Jordan looked up at the ceiling. “They’re throwing more at us than usual.”
He was right. The cruise missile bombardments had become a fairly regular thing—though not so regular that we could start calling them “clockwork” yet—but they’d always come in only one or two salvos. As we heard a fourth wave of missiles coming in a lot of heads started to come up. This was something big.
We could only hunker down and wait as three more salvos came screaming in to vent their explosive fury in the city. Not all of them made it; we could hear the C-RAM miniguns buzzing in the background, too.
The impacts died down, though the sirens kept wailing. I listened carefully, but didn’t hear any more missiles coming in, or C-RAM fire in response.
Almost an hour later, the sirens died down. “All clear, all clear, all clear.” That was coming from my radio, not the alert system. “All Golf Lima team leaders, report to the TOC.”
I heaved myself off the bench. “Make sure everybody’s ready to move. I have a feeling.”
I could smell smoke on the air as I came out of the bunker. There were too many trees between me and the impact zones to see much, but an orange light in the sky told me that there were buildings burning in the aftermath of the strikes. Gdansk had gotten hammered.
Tucker and Burkhart joined me as I headed across the fort toward the TOC bunker. “What do you think?” Tucker waved toward the underlit smoke around us. “Did we wait too long?”
“Maybe.” I thought about it as we strode quickly across the green. “Seems like we’d have heard something by now. Unless…” I trailed off.
“Unless we’ve been officially cut out of the i
nformation flow.” Bobby Burkhart’s voice was low and grim.
That wouldn’t be good. Especially not after the little confrontation outside the team house that afternoon, coupled with my earlier conversation with Hartrick.
I was glad that we were all packed and ready to move on short notice. We had a good relationship with the Poles, but we’d definitely be stuck in Poland for a long time if things were really going pear-shaped. Which also wouldn’t be good if the Americans decided to sell the Poles down the river because they actually agreed with the EDC more, dead Americans notwithstanding.
Triarii infantry were on guard outside the TOC. I frowned. That was new. It meant that Gutierrez was more than a little concerned. About infiltrators? Or our allies?
We passed through without any trouble. There were few enough Triarii in Poland that most of us knew everybody else by sight, even if we didn’t necessarily always remember names or personalities.
Everybody was in the TOC. Gutierrez, Hartrick, Modine, and every one of the subordinate infantry, air, and armor leaders. Hartrick looked up as we came in, and jerked his chin for us to join them.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen the TOC so crowded. And as I threaded my way to the map table, I got a good look at some of the other maps and their growing clusters of red pins. This wasn’t good.
“What happened?”
“It’s not what happened, it’s what’s happening.” Hartrick pointed to the big map, where the picture was getting clearer. “The Russians just crossed the Belarussian border, driving a land bridge to Kaliningrad. And the EDC just attacked Wroclaw. Special operators hit within the city, while a ground strike force moved in fast from Görlitz. It doesn’t look like they’ve committed everything yet, but they’re bound and determined to break any budding offensive coming from Wroclaw while the Poles are focused on the Russians.”
I frowned down at the map. “That means they were waiting for it.”