The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  I'd left it up that night. And there she was in the morning, Old Glory still gallantly waving.

  Okay, she was sitting flat down the pole because there was, like, no fucking wind. But work with me here. Point was, the flag was still up and the enemy was toast.

  Of course, our mission was also toast.

  Chapter Eight

  It Seemed Like a

  Good Idea at the Time

  So it was time to report in.

  I'd prepared for that pretty well. Okay, I'd been out with the some of the sweep teams. There were burning vehicles. (Not the fucking Abrams, of course!) You had to get in close to those to make sure nobody was still hiding out. Very smoky, very sooty. Fun as hell.

  I'd checked myself in a mirror before calling in. Stubble check: Manly. Soot-covered face? Stopped in a line where my helmet band crossed my forehead. Quick wipe with a cloth and the soot was mostly standing out in the scars on my left cheek.

  Perfect.

  "I need to talk to the battalion commander. We had an incident overnight."

  BLEW IT ALL UP? Bad boy! Bad boy! No biscuit! Flayed Skin! Still beating heart!

  Yes, sir. Request new orders since "maintain and secure" is now inoperative.

  Bad boy! No biscuit! I'll get back to you. Bad boy! Flayed skin!

  So then I took a shower while Fillup and his XO and SkyGeek did some good works. They'd actually starting working on it the night before. The brigade commander was not going to be impressed by stubble and soot. He'd had plenty of stubble and soot in his time.

  "Did you really have to blow it up?"

  Freshly pressed uniform (thank you, Shadi, and for the quicky), cloth cap neatly placed, destubbled.

  "I'd like to squirt you some video, sir. It's about ten minutes long. I'll include everything in my full report. In my professional opinion, we're lucky to be alive. Sir."

  Sent him the video. Said he'd get back to me.

  Now, it's night in the States. Getting on to, anyway. Sunday. Colonel is still at work, though. Good man.

  Called me back two hours later. Middle of the fucking night.

  What was on the video?

  Shots of the approaching army with close ups of the civilians in their midst. Good view of the Abadan refinery for perspective.

  Close ups of the tanks.

  Troops rolling out of the barracks in battle rattle. (Did not note that they'd done that hours beforehand.)

  More of the approach. Let that one loom. It looked like "all the sands of the desert" if you didn't notice that more than half were unarmed women and children.

  Them blowing the fence with the suicide trucks.

  Thousands of heavily armed shooters pouring over the berm and celebrating.

  Explosions. More explosions. One shot caught bodies, literally, flying up in the air. Well, parts.

  Javelins firing.

  Tanks blowing up from Javelins. Technicals blowing up from Javelins.

  The Nepos holding the compound. We had to work with that one to make them look really seriously endangered, but the geek managed.

  The Strykers rolling out of the base in an unstoppable wave. (Again, careful editing.)

  Snipers on the berm. Day shot.

  Thermal imagery of the sweep teams and a really lucky shot of one of them engaging a small group of hide-outs. Guys dropping from snipers.

  One totally trashed compound. Bodies scattered everywhere.

  A last shot of the stars and stripes waving in the wind.

  All to music from the Halo movie. Well, and "O Fortuna." "O Fortuna" and Mjolnir Mix for the approach then "Blow Me Away" for the rest. Okay, it's more like 11 minutes. I didn't hear any bitching.

  (And, okay again, the flag was cheating. There was this video that was like some sort of marketing video for Titan Base. Didn't know the U.S. Army did marketing videos. Oh, well. Anyway, we took it from that. But work with me, here. A flag hanging limp wasn't going to do it. SkyGeek was a real find. Same guy that fixed our satellite shit. I was protecting him very carefully.)

  Did we carefully edit for "we're going to get fucked" and then "we survived and kicked ass!"? Oh, hell yeah. Was it propaganda? Yeah, probably.

  But I'd just trashed something like nineteen billion dollars worth of stuff. (Actually, less, but none of it was coming home.)

  I needed some propaganda on my side.

  So the brigade commander called me back.

  "That wasn't, exactly, a report. Where'd all that video come from?"

  "We had prepared the base with an extensive surveillance system, sir. We were only one company and it was a very long perimeter."

  "And some fencing, I noticed."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Busy little beavers. Actually, that was the corps commander's comment."

  "The Nepalese did most of it, sir."

  "The ones you armed. That was your battalion commander's comment."

  "I have been doing the best job I can, sir, to maintain and secure this environment. I may have taken some unorthodox steps, but I considered them necessary to ensure the security of myself and the troops and noncombatants I am responsible for. Sir."

  "The corps commander's question was actually 'Where'd he get the fucking Ghurkas?' I explained. He felt it was 'a pretty optimal use of available personnel.' He also mused about whether we can keep them."

  "Yes, sir."

  "What was your count on the threat? I was looking at better than two grand. I thought you said there wasn't that much threat in the area."

  "Faulty intel and things accelerated, sir. Sir, we're one company. I don't have an intel guy. Or overhead. Sir. And our rough count was six thousand. We've got enough video to do a hard count when it comes to it. But that was our estimate."

  "Before I showed it to the division commander and his staff I asked for their count of what they considered 'overwhelming force' in the circumstances. His answer was around a thousand. Same for the corps commander when he was asked. He's sending it on to FORSCOM with his comments. But you're going to need to do an actual report."

  "Yes, sir. Breaking the chain, sir. Extraction?"

  "Still nothing. Brought that up, too. You're probably going to have to roll to somewhere. Ensure your own security and make plans for that. The last is probably redundant but you didn't destroy all your ammo and equipment, right?"

  "I'm an S-4, sir. You really think I'd destroy all my equipment, sir?"

  "Yeah. We need to unfuck that when you get back."

  Yes!

  "Out here."

  So we were out of the woods for now. The Chief of Staff might be less forgiving, not to mention the Secretary of Defense, and I figured it would get that high what with a billion here and a billion there.

  But for now, we were out of the woods.

  Well, actually we were stuck deep in them. But we could see some paths and shit. Maybe.

  Then we had to deal with the State Department.

  Most of the "governments" in the world were, essentially, thugs. We'd had embassies overrun in a dozen countries. And then gotten in contact with them and said "no harm, no foul." (Look, a dead ambassador, not to mention the Marines, was foul.) The "governments" were whichever group happened to have commo with the States at any moment.

  I'll give you an example that actually mattered. Turkey.

  The capital of Turkey is Ankara, which had been a fairly big city in the middle of fuck all. Our embassy, there, was evacced by that MEU in the Med when "the security situation deteriorated."

  Subsequent to that, the U.S. had been contacted by three separate groups, all claiming to the be "the official government of Turkey."

  The "official" official government was the one that the Turkish ambassador to the U.S., who lived, said was the official government. Sort of.

  See, the Turkish Ambassador to France was buddies with a different faction. So the French were recognizing them.

  The Turkish ambassador to the UN had also survived. And he was saying the third facti
on was the "official" government.

  And the State Department was in a dither. Which was the official government of Turkey?

  I can tell you that from my experiences. None of them. They were three groups of thugs who had satellite phones and the ears of three more thugs who happened to have the ear of idiots.

  There was no "official" government of Turkey if you count "official" as having control over most of the territory. Or even a big segment of it. Say, half. Not at that time.

  There was an official government of Israel. New prime minister; the vaccine hadn't worked for the last one. Somewhat reduced Knesset was in session. Elections were in the planning stages.

  It was willing to take us in. But not the Nepos.

  What the fuck?

  They were still afraid of the flu. Okay, there was some constant to that. But I had documentation that the Nepos had been vaccinated with Type Two. (I wasn't mentioning the girls at all. Just a vague mention of "local contract staff." Besides, we'd vaccinated them too.)

  For some reason, well some pretty obvious ones, they were willing to take a company of American infantry, but not the Nepos.

  And then there was the problem of how to get there.

  Remember my discussion of Turkey?

  To get to Israel, we'd have to pass through Iraq and Jordan.

  Get this, there were four semi-official governments in Iraq and three more in Jordan. The really "official" government in Jordan was the one led by the son of King Hussein. Kid was a former tanker and he'd actually managed to gather a pretty decent body of troops and stake out some serious territory. But there were two more who were recognized by various ambassadors who'd survived.

  The King Hussein faction was okay with us rolling through. Actually, they were asking for our help. The other two were against it and raising holy diplomatic hell.

  Then there's Iraq.

  Okay, one of the factions I could dig with. The Kurds had managed to hold things pretty much together. Really high death rate, but they were tribal based already and the tribes had things worked out between them pretty well. And the Kurds just react, adapt and overcome. I'd say it's a mountain people thing but that doesn't explain the U.S.

  Anyway, the Kurds were one faction. They didn't say they were the government of Iraq, they were the government of Kurdistan. Which by their maps included some parts of Iran and Turkey.

  They didn't have an ambassador in the U.S. The State Department didn't recognize them at all. Of course, they just had the most effective control over the largest area in the Middle East. But they were, officially, nonexistent.

  Then there's the other three (major) factions.

  Note, these guys weren't, any of them, as big as HAMB. At the rate General Dead Meat had been going he was well on his way to taking Iraq and turning it and Iran back into the Persian Empire.

  But all three of these guys were recognized by one or another government and none of them were willing to let us through "Iraq."

  Truth was, territorially, we weren't going to be dealing with but one of them, depending on our route to Israel.

  If we even went to Israel.

  "State Department thinks they can talk the Iraqis around. But Israel is not going to let your Nepalese in."

  I'd stopped dealing with the BC. I mostly was talking to the Brigade 3 these days.

  "I'm not going to leave my Nepos behind."

  "With the Jordanians?"

  "I'm taking them to the States. If I have to canoe over."

  "Nobody is willing to let you through."

  "And that's going to stop me exactly how?"

  I didn't know how much hell I was causing at home until one of the guys called me in to watch TV.

  Yeah, I know. Here we are in a compound filled with rotting bodies and still burning equipment and the guys are watching TV.

  What else were they going to do? There weren't enough hands to bury all the bodies.

  Actually, we'd done something on that score. Basically, we sprayed as much of the compound as we could reach with diesel and lit it up. Burned for a day or so (we used a lot of diesel and it soaked into the soil) and most of the bodies were crispy.

  But we couldn't get all of it and they were a health hazard. People were staying inside away from the flies as much as possible. Flies that have been on rotting bodies are not good for the body. We were immunized against every fucking thing in the world but they still weren't good.

  "What's up?"

  The day room is the province of the troops. Good officers go in only on duty or if called in. The lieutenants and I had our own official "O Club" which we had tarted up with some stuff from the "low-inventory" stores. Would you believe there was a fucking Ming vase in there?

  (Wife Edit: So that's where that came from.)

  (Shut up.)

  So, anyway, I was walking out of the commo van after another fruitless conversation with Brigade when one of the troops waved me into the day room.

  There, large as fucking life, on fucking Fox, was our video.

  Oh. Holy. Shit.

  The troops loved it. They'd replayed it a couple of times themselves for shits and giggles and then played around with the video some more. That one concentrated more on dying ragheads.

  But this was the one I'd sent to Brigade and then had, apparently, been marched up the chain. Fucker was supposed to be secret.

  Holeee shit. I was fucked.

  Don't get me wrong. It was a good video. For a certain audience.

  But viewed in the wrong context? Scrambled around a little bit by the media? With CAIR doing a voice over?

  Holeeee shit.

  "Hell, yeah!" I said, grinning. "You're all fucking heroes, now."

  Hollllleeeee SHIT.

  I went back to the commo van. The on-duty RTO was already running to get me.

  Fecal storm incoming.

  Chapter Nine

  Cross that Strait

  When We Come to It

  Nobody knew how it had leaked out. I guess we did too good a job. Some Fobbit SOB just had to send it to some friend on the Internet and then it had all gone bad. It had one of the highest hit counts on record on YouTube (which was back up). I tried to figure out if there was some way we could get residuals, given that we'd sweated blood for it. And were about to sweat more.

  But that wasn't the problem.

  Was all that force necessary?

  They destroyed how much equipment?

  Why was the equipment still there? Hadn't all the troops come home?

  Why did we still have troops in Iran?

  Are we still going to have to fight terrorists as well as the flu? Isn't it time for peace to have a chance?

  Where had the Ghurkas come from?

  Britain had sent an official query asking how an American unit had come to be in command of their troops. So had Nepal but that one took longer to be noticed. Except, as far as either knew, they weren't missing any Ghurkas. But they had on the right uniforms. They were even wearing kukris. (I told you there was some strange shit in that place. Hell, there were cavalry sabers and saddles and . . . You wouldn't believe the list. I wish I could have kept it but there was no fucking way.)

  Congressional investigation. Congressional fucking investigation.

  Except for one problem.

  Witness A would be me. And I was in fucking Iran.

  They wanted to video-conference me in.

  It ended up with the Army Chief of Staff explaining. On national TV. Bet he loved that.

  "By order of the President, we had over fourteen 'support and maintain' detachments scattered in as many countries around the world. Six were evacuated when the security situation reached critical. And in all six cases the equipment on site had to be destroyed or fall into the hands of the enemies of the United States. As of this date, there are two units responding, including the unit under the authority of Bandit Six. The other six units have all been lost. Two we do not know what happened to them. They simply stopped responding to
requests for update. The other four are confirmed by reports at the time and satellite imagery to have been overrun. Total lost military personnel over one thousand, making it the highest KIA/MIA single action operational loss since the Vietnam War! One of them destroyed some or all of the material under their control. That was Bandit Six and he was under orders to do so rather than have it fall into the hands of enemies of the United States.

  "I've been watching my men being overrun one by one sitting on material that has exactly no value to the United States under the current world conditions and you want me to explain why a captain and one company, a hundred and sixty troops, had to destroy the material in the face of SIX THOUSAND? Is that what you want me to explain, Senator? Senator, I'm glad my boys are ALIVE!"

  Most of the damned session, as is normal with congressional hearings, consisted of fucking idiots talking about nothing and then asking a koan. Four minutes of the importance of the Health of Children Opportunity Bill followed by "Why did he use rock and roll music?" I swear, they must slip some sort of fucking psychodelic into the water in DC. But a few of the questions, from Republicans naturally, were on point. Okay, actually the best Q&A came from a Democrat.

  "You were ordered to leave the equipment in place by the President?"

  "Yes, Congressman. There was no logistical option. That is, we couldn't pick it up and bring it home. Things were and are in a situation such that disaster relief takes priority."

  "Understood. And to bring back all but, and I quote, 'absolute minimum forces. No more than a company to be left behind.' Is that correct?"

  "Yes, Congressman. That was the order from the President in consultation with the Secretary of Defense."

  "What did you think of that order?"

  "I was given an order by the Commander in Chief and carried it out to the best of my ability. In situations where a company was unavailable I tried to leave equal or better forces. Such as the SF battalion in Colombia which had the approximate firepower of a company. And which was the first we lost contact with."

  "But what did you think of the order?"

  "I thought I was being given an order, Congressman."

  "You're a member of the Joint Chiefs, correct?"