The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  Oh, except keep it from becoming Abadan.

  The evening of day one people had settled in. And two "military style" trucks approached the main gates, then turned off into the area where people were huddling. At that point, they barely had any shelter. It was just . . . people. Sitting in a fucking desert. (Yes, it was fucking with us, okay? We're American soldiers. Believe it or not, most of us are paladins somewhere in our heart of hearts. We did not like it.)

  The trucks stopped and "males in civilian garb" began unloading and "attacking" the refugees. They were stealing what little food and water they had and apparently engaging in some rapes. Or started to.

  The gate guards put in a call for the on-call platoon, which was mostly still engaged in moving shit, and the roving patrol. But the roving patrol was up by the ammo bunkers, about a mile away.

  The main camp of people was about five hundred meters west of the gates. Five hundred meters is a long shot for any sniper especially into the sun, which was setting.

  Captain Butterfill, however, and it was his idea not mine, had put two of his company snipers on the gates. Not a normal choice but it turned out to be prophetic. They "engaged the attackers at long range with careful aim." Apparently got three of them before the rest got the idea. Some people might have been kidnapped from the refugees. See also "raped." But the two "military grade" trucks drove off. Last we saw of that group of problem-makers but we were to have many many more.

  By evening the movement was complete. Nothing else but we were centrally located and close to the gates. (We hadn't been before.) Units were rotated. A third Stryker was parked outside the gates. There were Klieg lights over the gates (and all along the berm although most eventually had to get shut off). They could still see the edge of the refugee camp.

  A mortar carrier was sent out with an infantry Stryker in support. The Stryker stayed back while the mortar carrier approached the refugee camp.

  Look, we're human, okay? People were dying in the desert and God wasn't raining mana. Well, maybe He was but the "mana" said "U.S. Army" on the side and it came in brown plastic packages.

  Somewhere in the mass of shit were large numbers of "emergency civilian disaster support packages." They were sort of like MREs but they were made to fit just about any religious taboo and came in yellow packages instead of brown. We didn't have the time or interest to find them. We had MREs. We took MREs.

  And bottled water. We had that, too. Not quite acres but a shitload. We also had a water processing plant and all sorts of shit we didn't know how to run. We were to figure it out.

  In the meantime, we had bottled water. We took that and MREs out to the refugees.

  Mistake? I dunno. Maybe. Maybe if we'd been hard-hearted enough to just ignore the people dying in the desert they would have gone away. Or maybe not. Maybe we'd have had a few hundred or thousand corpses from dehydration and malnutrition.

  Saw this clip one time on a funny video show. First part was two ducks swimming in a pond. Mallards. The people were ooing and aaahing. Cool! Ducks in the pool.

  They apparently fed them and the ducks eventually continued their migration well fed and able to prosper.

  The next bit was the following season. The ducks had apparently reproduced or found friends. Ten ducks. Cool! Ducks in the pool.

  The next bit was some following season. Must have been over a thousand ducks trying to get in the pool. Water was splashing twenty feet as they nose-dived into the throng.

  Yeah. It was like that.

  But we knew not what we did.

  There were no attacks and people weren't trying to overrun them. They handed out one MRE packet and two bottles of water to each person who approached. They had extras and they left them behind. I'm sure that the toughest and the strongest grabbed the extras. Law of nature.

  The guys also dropped off shovels and pointed to the corpses which, thus far, had been left to rot.

  There were no major incidents.

  Day two was spent digging out stuff we needed to toughen up our defenses. We found the engineering equipment we needed right where it was supposed to be. You couldn't miss the wire storage area; piles of concertina that high are noticeable. We drove construction equipment over and got to work.

  More refugees. Hovels were going up.

  This time before dark we sent out the food wagon. The corpses were just sitting there. The guys on the mortar track pointed to the corpses and went away.

  Some people tried to run them down. The Stryker fired warning shots.

  About an hour later, the gate guards reported that some people were burying the corpses of the guys who'd been shot the day before. When the mortar carrier went back out, the guys on the gate went with them. (There were replacements on the gate.)

  They pointed out the guys who had been on the burial detail. They got extra rations and the translator told them to dig some slit trenches or find somebody to dig them for latrines. Or the food wouldn't come out the next day. And if there were dead bodies, bury them.

  Day Two: No major incidents.

  Oh, one but not about refugees or attackers. The BC called. He told us we were doing a great job and that our contribution was extremely important. I asked how long we were going to be stuck in this armpit. He said that hadn't been determined yet but finding out a fixed timetable for redeployment was at the top of his list.

  Yeah. Right.

  Day Three.

  Everybody didn't walk out to the refugee camp. There was a fair car-park building up. People were using them for shelters and such.

  A line of "civilian style trucks, vans and cars" came out from Abadan.

  Same shit as Day One. Guys started unassing and robbing everyone in sight.

  The ROE had been adjusted. And this time we had a response platoon. (The Nepos were taking up a lot of the work.) But we didn't really need it.

  The gate Stryker rolled out. It got close enough to "engage the vehicles with careful, aimed fire" and started shooting them the hell up. It continued rolling forward to the edge of where the refugee's shit was scattered and fired more shots over the group.

  Now, by this time the attackers and the refugees were sort of mixed up. The refugees were mostly trying to run away, but some of them were fighting. The stuff they had was all they had. They weren't just going to give it up.

  Many of the "attackers," though, were armed. And quite a few refugees got shot by them.

  But when the Stryker rolled up and started lighting up their rides, they fired at the Stryker, which was buttoned up and thus a lousy target, and started trying to run.

  We did not give them the opportunity. Every single "armed person" was engaged and all the "convoy" was fired up and destroyed.

  Quite a few bodies to bury, though. So we rolled an engineering vehicle out and dug a slit trench. We were going to roll it out the next day but somebody had already filled it in. And the bodies were gone.

  Were there wounded among the refugees? Probably. Were we going to send one of our two medics out to find out? Or if anybody had eye problems or goiters or a host of other shit we'd fixed around the world?

  Nope. Not then.

  There were some shots from the refugee camp that night. Didn't know at the time if it was happiness that they had weapons or people settling personal disputes. But there weren't any bodies in the morning.

  There were the day after. And pretty much every day as time went on. But they got buried and that was all we cared about.

  Was there "pilfering" going on? Yeah, probably. Some. But, remember, we were in the middle of a big ass flat fucking plain. I mean flat like the flat parts of Kansas. And we were slightly elevated. (Slope of the plain coming up from the river. There weren't any hills, trust me.) We could see all the way to the Shat Al Arab, Abadan and the refineries. The closest point of concealed approach was about four miles and that was from a line of trees by the refinery. That was to the west and southwest. To the north there wasn't much but the trace of the highway (big one) runn
ing to Awhaz. To the south, flat plain that eventually became one of the world's biggest and flattest salt marshes. On a clear day, and there weren't many that clear, you could see the edge of the Gulf.

  To the east, way the fuck away, were the Zagros Mountains. You could tell the progression of the seasons by the way the snow on the top slid up and down. Point is, you could see them.

  Anybody approaching with any sort of vehicle we were going to detect miles away. Well, once we got eyes in every direction. That took about four weeks.

  Chapter Three

  Pax Americana

  What was happening in that four weeks?

  Inside the berm, a lot of changes. We cleared an open area around our zone and rebuilt a FOB inside the LOG. (Fort Lonesome.) It was pretty big for even a company to hold but every time Fillup and me figured we had everything we could possibly need we thought of something else.

  I'm from Minnesota. I don't know any Minnesotan, not a real Minnesotan, who's not a pack rat. It's in our genes. I could never have enough parts, rations, water, fuel, to satisfy me. Okay, maybe I was in the right place being an S-4. I hated being left to guard this fucker, but having it all? Mine all mine? The only person to tell me I didn't own it a face on a videophone who was way too far away to force me to do anything? Heaven.

  Mine, mine, mine.

  Speaking of mines.

  We got Fort Lonesome minimally prepared to withstand a significant assault. Then we got started on securing the whole base.

  We shouldn't have had to do it. But the ROE that came down on high (which we were still, technically, under) did not permit laying in mines. Don't know why we had so many of the fuckers, but we did. And we didn't lay the mines down first.

  First came the outer perimeter fence. That was just to keep kids and dogs out. It took two weeks to lay in and used up just about all of our remaining military link. It was right at six and a half miles around the perimeter. That's one big fucking fence.

  We put in gates by the main gate. (Later we played with that extensively.) The main gate had a series of berms, concrete barriers and such to keep suicide trucks from getting to it. The fence linked into the edge of those and we put in outer gates.

  Then we got started on the inner defenses. More concertina. (The stacks were, to my amazement, dropping. Who could have known?)

  Most of this was getting done by the Nepos. We had multiple patrols working, the gate guards, security for the workers on the fence and a reserve force. The troops didn't have time to do the manual labor.

  I'd been pissed at getting the Nepos dumped on us but they were a godsend. Okay, first of all, the troops were, by and large, lousy cooks. The Nepos were decent. They tended to start to cook some odd shit without their British supervisors. If you let them get away with it we would have all been eating vegetarian curry and vindaloo. I'll admit I got a bit of taste for vindaloo but it was not shared by all the troops.

  The nice thing, in my opinion, about vindaloo was that it was pork based.

  There were problems. Oh. My. GOD were there problems. I'm not talking about security issues, either.

  Electricity.

  The power plant for the base was a big gas-turbine fucker. Nobody but nobody had any clue how to operate it. But there were back-up generators that were, essentially, diesel-electric railroad engines. Those the mechanics could figure out. And we had one fuck of a lot of diesel in the tank-farm.

  We only needed power for the area we were inhabiting. The mechanics and a couple of the Nepos that had some clue about electric got those buildings hooked up to a couple of the generators. But we had a problem with power surging.

  So we got on the phone to back home. No, we have no fixed date for your redeployment. You're doing a great job. Keep the faith.

  (My fucking dad is dead you bastard and I'm stuck on the ass end of nowhere. All of the troops have gotten word that somebody in their family has died and to say the least morale should be shot. We're keeping it up by giving them shit to do but that's only going to last so long . . . )

  Fine, fine, but we need to find somebody who has a clue about generators . . .

  Hello. Commo. We had one radio tech. He was not a satellite radio tech. We had this big fucking communications van and no clue how to run most of the shit.

  Fortunately, one of the privates in the company had spent time before enlisting working in a satellite shop in a cable company. He wasn't a satellite engineer, by any stretch, but when we lost commo with home for three days he finally figured out how to get us back up. (Without SkyGeek, in fact, this book would never have come about.)

  The water for the base was a pipeline from the Shat that ran to a water processing plant. The plant was called a ROWPU. I had to look that one up. Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Unit.

  About week three some bastard cut our water line. We had water for about three weeks at current use (big fucking tanks) but after that we were going to be dying in the desert.

  Turned out the original base had been supplied by a deep bore well. There was water down there. We weren't all that far from the Gulf and the Shat. Water percolates. There were even limestone layers that carried subsurface water from the Zagros. That was actually what the well was tied into. Crisp, clean water. Don't know why they ever put in that fucking line. It was a tactical weak point.

  Only one problem. The well had been rather radically disconnected from the water system. It wasn't even left as backup. Don't know why.

  So we had to figure out how to reconnect it. We were not plumbers and so proved figuring that out. And then figure out how to get the very deep water up to the surface.

  "Head pressure" does not always have to do with something obscene. I'm a farmer. I understand head pressure. Farmers use wells a lot. However, this one was a holy mother of a bitch of a big, deep well. We got it done.

  React, adapt, overcome. We did one hell of a lot of that.

  We got the mines laid in. We even found a stack of signs that warned of mines in multiple languages. We shot some guys in a pickup truck who were trying to sneak in the back way. We filled in all but the main gate entrances to the base.

  It took two months of work, mostly by the Nepos. But we got the base surrounded by multiple lines of fencing, mines and such whot. We even found a complete "video surveillance" system that had never been installed. We installed it. The reserve platoon monitored.

  We fed and watered refugees. There had gotten to be a fuck-load of them. And they'd apparently established some sort of governance body. At least there were guys with guns (scavenged from attackers) who strutted around with angry expressions on their face.

  Feeding and watering of the refugees had gotten to be a massive chore. Again, handled mostly by the Nepos. We now had to send out two mortar carriers to carry all the rations. Each of them towed a water buffalo. (A large water tank that had spigots on it.) The refugees would get handed a meal. (We'd found the yellow stuff by then. Some people waved the old MRE wrappers after the first couple of "refugee" meals. Apparently they hadn't realized that was a pork patty and wanted more.) They had to figure out how to get their own water. Doing it that way increased the time but just handing out that many meals increased the time.

  Sometimes the guys with guns took a meal away from somebody right in front of our eyes. That really stuck in people's craws. But we weren't going to get off the tracks to give the meal back.

  A couple of weeks after that sort of thing started to happen, one of the guys with guns took away a meal from a woman and then started beating on her.

  Each of the tracks was manned by a track commander at the .50, two Nepos to hand out meals and three guys with rifles for security.

  One of the guys with a rifle shot him.

  There was a lot of shouting. More guys with guns came out. The woman ran to the track. The TC jacked a round into the .50 and fired a burst over the camp. The Stryker that was sitting back on overwatch gunned its engine and rolled forward a couple of feet.

  Things
settled down. The lady was allowed to scramble on the track. Others came over. They were shooed away. Meals were passed out until they were gone. The tracks came back to base with an extra body.

  That was the first refugee we let in. It wouldn't be the last and, yeah, that had issues, too.

  Specialist Stephan Noton's ass was in a very deep crack and he knew it. The track commander wasn't real happy, either. He had just brought a refugee into the camp.

  What was worse was, well . . .

  Salah wasn't gorgeous. But after this long in the desert and no fucking women around at all . . . She was seventeen according to the translator and as far as she knew all her family was dead. She had lived in Abadan all her life and was a very good Moslem as far as that sort of thing went. She was a nice girl. We didn't question her about specific events. I didn't want to know if she'd been raped or how many times. Yes and many was probably the answer. I also didn't want to know how she'd been surviving in the camp. But apparently whatever she'd been doing wasn't good enough for at least one of the guys with guns.

  I could see the thought percolating through the heads of the troops. Most of them had, at this point, been out feeding the refugees one time or another. And despite the conditions there were quite a few females out there better looking than Salah. And we'd been away from women a long time.

  And when you've been starving to death in a desert, you'll do a lot for a cracker and a bottle of cold water.

  Hell, I was thinking it.

  But I had some capacity to think with my topside head. And various thoughts were percolating. Some of them had to do with maintenance and support.

  The Nepos were doing most of that. But as the major construction ran down, I'd been thinking about other uses for them. A company was not enough guys to hold this place against any sort of serious attack. Yes, we could draw back into Fort Lonesome but that wasn't the mission.

  We believed as an article of faith that sooner or later we'd be "relieved." Maybe some other unit would be sent out to replace us. Maybe we'd be ordered to just leave all the shit behind. My personal choice was to destroy most of it in place. But something was going to happen. Uncle Sam was not going to leave us out here to grow old and die.