by Peter Nealen
They were flat on the deck, including the last two still on the roof, as the Marine fire kept them pinned down. If I’d paused to think before moving, I might have gotten a little worried about that, since we hadn’t exactly coordinated this with the Marines. But they ceased fire as we got closer.
The guys on the deck started to look up as the incoming fire stopped, only to see that we had them covered. More Recon Marines were closing in from the other side of the roof, even as the other helo lifted off, taking serious fire. I couldn’t spare it a look, but I learned later that one of the Marines had shot the door gunner, who had fallen out and was hanging under the bird from his safety harness.
As I reached the helicopter, one of the shooters already aboard started to bring his MP7 around, and I shot him from six feet away, spattering blood over the man trying to treat the stricken door gunner.
If I’d hoped that that would be the end of it, I was disappointed.
None of the rest tried to surrender. Jordan shot the second gunman a fraction of a second behind my kill, and then we swept the inside of the NH90’s troop compartment, hammering pairs of rounds into each man until they all stopped moving.
Blood seeped across the aluminum deck as I clambered aboard, even as the pitch of the engines started to rise. I hammered my muzzle against the pilot’s helmet, forcing his head toward the door. “If this bird even starts to take off, I’ll kill you.”
For a second, I was afraid he didn’t speak English, or worse, that he was going to call my bluff. I really didn’t want to shoot him—even if he was armed, he wasn’t in any position to be much of a threat to me not with my muzzle scorching the side of his helmet. And Jordan was outside, aimed in at the copilot through the Plexiglas.
He eased off on the throttle and took his hands off the controls. Keeping my weapon trained on him, I stepped back and keyed my radio.
“Knife Five, Golf Lima Ten Six. We’ve secured one of the birds.”
“Roger. Roof secure. I’m going to start bringing my Marines up. Gomułka’s sending a few of the Brotherhood, too.” We’d have better lines of sight and fields of fire from the roof than from the rooms below. “Sounds like a few of the EDC shooters are still causing trouble down below, but nothing the SEALs and your infantry boys can’t handle.”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. I gestured at the pilot to get out. Jordan was already pulling the copilot down onto the roof.
Above, another fast mover exploded, trailing fire as it spun down toward the city in the distance. Small arms fire popped somewhere nearby.
Hurry up, Sandman.
Chapter 32
It got quiet after that, for certain values of the term. The ground troops backed off, apparently unwilling to risk the casualties that would be inevitable if they tried to force the fortified building while it was defended from the inside. Once again, the generally “civilized” character of our opponents was working in our favor.
Unfortunately, it was working against us at the same time. The air battle seemed to have died down due to attrition. Columns of ugly black smoke rose above the Brussels skyline in at least a dozen places where fast movers had gone down. Each one of those birds had been a multi-million-dollar asset. And I doubted that any of them could be replaced quickly, never mind the pilots.
The drones were another matter.
I saw two of Ortiz’s Recon Marines head for the front of the building, staying low to avoid sniper fire from the Belgian Army positions below and in adjacent buildings. But they should have been more concerned about overhead cover.
Before any of us could yell a warning, a hellishly familiar, harsh buzz rose in pitch, followed by a loud bang and a cloud of black smoke and pattering debris suddenly hid the edge of the roof where the two Marines had been crouched. I could see Jordan wince where he was crouched next to the helo. I felt the same thing, along with the sick feeling in my gut that if we’d been a few seconds faster, we might have prevented the loss.
We’d seen those drones in action. The Marines hadn’t, not before now.
“Gunny Ortiz! Keep your Marines back here near the bird!” Even as I said it, I knew that it would partially defeat the purpose of retaking the roof in the first place, but at least we could hold the LZ and keep the EDC from clearing the building from the top down.
Ortiz was already on it, consolidating what was left of his Recon platoon around the NH90. I’d made the pilot shut the engines down before we’d zip-tied him, the copilot, and the crew chief, so the bird wasn’t going anywhere.
The Marines had taken a beating. I’d lost Scott, but they’d lost most of a whole team. And I could see it on their faces as they eyed the handful of prisoners we’d taken. Marines are aggressive to begin with—I should know, I was one—but with the losses they’d taken, they had blood in their eyes.
Ortiz was well aware of the situation, though, and he was keeping a close eye on them. He had murder in his eye when he looked at the EDC survivors too, but from what I’d picked up about his character, I didn’t think he’d act on it.
Stepping around the helo’s tail, I looked off to the north. There was a lot more smoke out that way, and I could hear the distant krumps of explosions and heavy weapons fire. The Belgians were still trying to stop the MEU, but it looked and sounded like the Marines were making headway.
They were still moving a lot slower than planned. I checked my watch. According to the original brief, the Battalion Landing Team should have been coming around the national cathedral about half an hour before. From the looks of things, they were still on the other side of Asse.
I would be willing to bet that the BCT was regretting the decision some years before to remove tanks from the Marine Corps’ arsenal.
Regardless, we still had to wait.
“Golf Lima Nine, Golf Lima Ten.” I hadn’t heard from either Tucker or Burkhart since we’d headed up toward the top floor, and it was past time to check in. “Status?”
It took a few seconds for Tucker to respond. “Still mopping up the handful of EDC shooters that got through. We’ve had some unrest, too. A few of the office-dwellers thought they’d play ‘Hero of the Revolution.’”
I grimaced. “Need any help?” We really needed eyes up on the roof, but if the building beneath us descended into chaos, we weren’t going to be any better off up top.
“Negative. It got messy, but they folded pretty quick once they realized they were facing real bullets.” I winced at that. Yeah, I imagine it did get messy.
“How many bodies did you have to leave on the floor?”
“Not many.” Tucker sounded casual enough that I was sure he wasn’t downplaying it. “Like I said, real bullets were a bit of a wakeup call.”
“How are our packages?” From what he’d said already, I expected that he’d left the Council under the SEALs’ and Recon Marines’ supervision, but he’d still have at least some sense of the atmospherics in the chamber.
“Unhappy but weirdly smug.” Tucker sounded a little pensive. “I don’t know. I’ve been told at least twice something to the effect that we’re never going to get away with this. It’s like they think we’re just rando terrorists or something, not part of an actual military offensive.”
“Well, they are pols.” I’d certainly had some experience with the type. We all had, even before Slovakia. It wasn’t as if the Triarii had originally set out to be a parallel US military force fighting a war on the other side of the Atlantic. For several years, our primary focus had been on the domestic situation, which had meant dealing with as well as working against more than a few politicians. “They probably live in that politician bubble where they’re untouchable. Can’t quite wrap their heads around the possibility that somebody might actually be able to get to them.”
“Maybe. I can’t help but think that we’re sitting on a powder keg here, though.”
He wasn’t wrong. Especially if someone had already screwed themselves up to try to jump some of our guys. The truth was, ev
en with the twin advantages of firepower and training, we were pretty badly outnumbered inside the building as well as outside. If there was a general rising, we might drown the building in blood, but we’d go down eventually.
“Agreed. I think I can see the MEU—if that’s what all that smoke and dust is. They’re still behind schedule, but they’re coming.” I wasn’t usually the encouraging one, but at this point, any hope we could hold onto was needed. Not so much for our sakes, but for our brother SOF guys. We’d all been in hopeless situations with zero support before. The big mil? Not so much.
“Hey, Matt?” Ortiz was standing under the NH-90’s nose. “You should come take a look at this.”
I let go of the PTT switch wired to my chest rig and joined him, careful not to expose myself over the edge of the roof too much.
But I could see what he was looking at.
A large crowd had formed on the street to the north and was moving toward the Belgian Army perimeter. The forward edge of the crowd was still a good five hundred yards from the outer cordon, but they were moving quickly.
I lifted my OBR and peered through the scope, cranking the magnification up. The crowd appeared to be mostly younger people, though enough of them were wearing masks that it was hard to tell for sure. But they were stirred up about something, that much was obvious.
“You don’t think that the locals have decided to spontaneously rise up against the EDC, do you?” Ortiz didn’t sound like he thought that was very likely.
“Oh, they might have.” My voice was grim even in my own ears. “But from the looks of that crowd, I don’t think that the uprising is going to turn out to be on our side.” I keyed my radio again. “All Tango units, be advised, it appears that a large crowd is heading for the Belgian Army cordon. They appear to be hostile, and they look a lot like some of the mobs we’ve faced elsewhere.” That might be vague enough for the radio, but Ortiz picked up on the subtext, anyway. He knew who he was dealing with, after all.
“You think those are EDC loyalists?” He wasn’t going to go so far as to say what kind of political ideology that might correspond to, but nobody serious had ever accused the EDC of being right-wing.
Actually, I was sure that some people had. I’d just been too busy to read that kind of propaganda. There are people who call Chinese Communists “right-wing,” too.
“No, I don’t. I think they’re probably worse.” A lot of European far left militancy was as fluid and amorphous as it was in the US, so I didn’t know if this was the Partisans de L’égalité, the Belgian equivalent of the DDSB, or some group with a different name and the same manifesto. Or just an amalgam of said groups, which probably included the PdL, the DDSB, and about a dozen others. We’d seen the same thing with People’s Revolutionary Action back home. “Some revolutionary groups would just love to have a chance to hit the Americans and the European powers that be at the same time.” I crept a little closer to the edge of the roof so that I could get a better view of the cordon below. I didn’t want to get too far from the helo, but at the same time, it appeared that more than a few of the drones swarming around the Council building had been pulled off, winging north to cover the advancing crowd.
Leveling my rifle, I watched the Belgians just over the lip of the roof’s low parapet. They clearly didn’t think that the advancing crowd—crowds, now that I looked up and saw that there were more people flowing down the adjacent street, as well—were particularly friendly. I saw turrets turned toward the oncoming crowd as well as toward the building where we held the Council—most of the Council—at gunpoint. Furthermore, I saw vehicles repositioning, firing up their engines and moving to block the incoming streets, providing some pockets of cover for their foot-mobile infantry between the inner cordon and the outer perimeter.
“No, it doesn’t look like they think the mob is friendly at all.” I shifted my sights toward the mob. They fit the PRA mold, all right. There were a lot of black hoodies, a lot of red bandanas and t-shirts, and a lot of black and red flags. Only a few that I could see were Soviet or Chinese Communist, but the idea was sure there with the rest. I saw a lot of black clenched fists on red fields, and vice versa. “This just got a lot more interesting.” I lowered the rifle and scanned the rest of the city around us, ducking around the NH90’s nose to get a better view. Another mob was approaching from the southwest, though it was smaller and a lot less cohesive.
It still appeared plenty aggressive, though. And when I scanned it, while I saw a lot of black clothing and banners, there were a lot of beards, black-and-white shemaghs, and kufi hats. The jihadis in Brussels were getting involved, too.
Joy.
“You’d better let your CO know about this, Gunny, and get it passed on to Sandman.” I looked toward the north and the rising columns of smoke. “Let them know that they might have to push through some irregulars and street mobs to get to us.”
***
Things got interesting over the next hour.
The revolutionary mob to the north didn’t run right at the outer perimeter. They weren’t that stupid. But over the course of about a half hour, they had spread out along cross streets until they had halfway surrounded the park that had been turned into the Council building grounds. The Belgian Army wasn’t necessarily equipped for riot control, so things were getting very interesting for them. So far, they had held their fire, but their gunners were very clearly aimed in at the mobs, while the infantry sheltered behind the vehicles with their weapons ready.
As for the rioters, they were keeping their distance, but some of the front ranks had already started throwing stuff at the troops. Most of it was falling short, including the odd Molotov cocktail, but the intent was certainly there. Fortunately or unfortunately, the troops appeared to have orders not to just gun them all down.
The jihadis were being a bit more aggressive, and not just toward the Belgians. It took time for both crowds to reach each other, but when they met on the other side of the national cathedral, things got loud. Somebody had definitely brought firearms—and given what the gun laws were like under the EDC, that was interesting in and of itself—and even then, a few of the reports were even heavier than gunfire. There were some grenades or IEDs in the mix, too.
It was hard to tell even from twenty-eight stories up, but it seemed that even more clashes were happening off to the east. There were large Muslim enclaves in Brussels—I’d heard once that the biggest jihadist enclaves outside of Syria and Iran were in Brussels—and we were smack dab in the middle of them.
Tucker, Weiss, Gomułka, and Bealer had come up to the roof to join us, along with Weiss’s platoon RTO. We watched the city turn to chaos in silence.
“Sandman’s getting close to the outskirts, but this is slowing them down.” Weiss was reading the reports on a tablet that was linked to the radio via Bluetooth. I was kind of surprised, after everything that had happened—GPS still wasn’t reliable, months after the first attack—that the Marines were still using so much wireless tech. “We’re not going to get authorization to start machinegunning rioters.” He sounded a little ambivalent about that, which was weird for an officer. Ordinarily, even in my time, they were extremely politically conscious. From what I’d seen so far, the military in general had gotten much worse.
Weiss must not have a lot of ambition. And I kind of liked him for that.
Granted, I might have some trouble with machinegunning or driving through a mob with an armored vehicle. Don’t get me wrong, if it was the only way, I’d do it. I had some experience with just how much damage a mob could do, even against armored vehicles. Baltimore, remember? But it wasn’t something that left you feeling good about yourself unless you’re a psychopath.
I’d gone to Confession as soon as I’d been able to after we’d gotten out of Baltimore.
“There’s some discussion of just bringing in Ospreys and lifting us out with the Council.” Weiss was still reading.
“That’s going to accomplish fuck-all in the long run.” T
ucker spat on the asphalt roofing under our feet. “Especially since we’ve still got two unaccounted for.” He glared at the mob. “And if I were a betting man, I’d say that one or both of them have something to do with our new friends out there.”
“Maybe.” Something about the whole thing didn’t sit well with me. I was sure that somebody had gotten these mobs moving, but given everything else that had happened since Slovakia, I wasn’t entirely sure it was the EDC themselves. They tended toward elitism, despite their mealy-mouthed “democratic” professions. They’d certainly use the mobs to their advantage—they’d done it quite a lot over the last few years. But mobs tend to develop a mind of their own, and from what we’d seen, the DDSB in Germany hadn’t had much use for them, the EDC not being far enough left for the Communists. And if that revolutionary mob out there wasn’t strictly speaking DDSB, they probably had more than a few representatives, not to mention the fact that there’s a certain continuity in what passes for revolutionary thought. “The other possibility is that they courted people who hated them as much as they hated anything outside their own control, and now in their moment of weakness, the wild dogs they fed are turning on them. Or…” I trailed off.
“Or what?” Bealer was watching me curiously.
“There’s always somebody behind the scenes, and there have been other interests involved in this war from the start. We found Chinese PLA in Neubrandenburg. The Russians have been pushing in the east. Somebody may have decided that the EDC itself is at the end of its usefulness.”
Something big exploded somewhere off to the northwest. A boiling, black mushroom cloud rose above the skyline, followed by the distant boom a couple seconds later. Weiss swore under his breath and looked down at the tablet again.
“Fuck.” He tapped at the screen furiously for a second, then started toward the roof access hatch. “Sandman’s lead elements just hit an IED. A big one. They’re stalled out in central Zellik and getting surrounded by another mob. And again, they don’t have authorization to shoot their way through.” He looked around at the roof and the NH90 and swore bitterly again. “The decision’s just been made for us. The Ospreys are twenty minutes out. We’re bringing the Councilors up and lifting them out of here. We’ll regroup and work up a plan to get the other two once we’re back aboard the Iwo.”