The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

I finally got the phone number, sat phone, for one of the big Perg Mersha commanders.

  Oh, the Perg Mersha. It means "fighters to the death" or some such and was sort of a National Guard. More like the original U.S. and Swiss militia. The guys were farmers or factory workers or whatever. Every now and again, on a rota, they'd get called up and either train in peace or raid in war. Every male Kurd had a weapon of some sort ranging from a rifle to heavy machine guns. They'd come in with their weapons and some ammo, get more ammo then gather under a tribal boss soldier and go fight like fucking demons.

  Don't get me wrong. They were not shock infantry. Shock infantry goes back to the Greeks again and their hoplites. Every other fighter in the world, back then, were essentially "raid" infantry or cavalry or whatever. They'd charge and poke then run away. Charge, poke, run away. Do that until one side backs up from too many (low) casualties.

  It's very conservative of losses. Also a good way to lose a battle if you're up against the alternative.

  The alternative is "we're going to keep rolling forward until you're either dust or we are."

  Think the difference between soccer and American football. One of them is all about swift moves and GOOOOOOAAALLL! The other is about slamming bodies together until you've forced the ball up the field. Oh, maybe a bit of throwing and such. But without the slamming bodies, the quarterback's toast.

  Think of Three Hundred Spartans facing two hundred thousand Persians and allies. And kicking their ass. Marathon: Ten thousand Greeks (Athenians mostly) vs. about two hundred grand, again, this time on a flat fucking plain. And they smashed the Persians.

  Put the Kurds on the plains against us or even the Iraqis, who sort of had the concept of shock infantry, and they were going to have a hard time. But the shock infantry people were never going to have a bit of rest. And in any sort of terrain, including urban areas, raid can counteract shock if shock's not done right. (Which nobody did except us in those days.)

  So I called this Perg Mersha commander.

  Bandit: O Great One, commander of the faithful, a descendent of Suleiman . . . (Three minutes.)

  Kurd: American! Dude! Amigo! Great to see you! (Pretty much that.)

  Bandit: Sorry, man. I've been dealing with fucking Iranians for so fucking long . . .

  Kurd: American! Dude! Amigo! No problemo!

  Bandit: Uno problemo. Need a fill up. Willing to trade some gear and shit.

  Kurd: Dude. Bummer. Got a problem.

  They didn't hold the oil refinery. Or the tank farms. Or any significant stock. And to get to them I'd have to hit the Iranian Sunni force anyway. Maybe they could sneak us up through the mountains. But then we'd be bingo on fuel.

  Motherfucker.

  This was getting to be too much like the Ten Thousand.

  (By the way. If you ever read the Anabasis or one of the really good historical fiction accounts, the guys who really fucked up the Greeks in the mountains? Kurds.)

  Okay, well if that was how it had to be.

  They don't call us Strykers for nothing.

  Chapter Eleven

  He Turned White.

  Well, Whiter.

  So here I switch right into a battle chapter, right? Good patterning. Build up and then fighting.

  Dude, life is never that simple.

  I don't know how they found me. They never told me and the investigation has never concluded who gave them the data.

  Look, I was up on commo with the States. We were using BFTs. Everybody in the Pentagon and various other places with the right clearance could tell where we were and our more or less status as well as I could when I was in the van.

  One of these days I'm going to find the guy with the "right clearance" and feed him his ass. And other parts. Slowly. Without mustard.

  We're in consultation with the Kurds. We're going to heightened alert with what they've told us. They don't have much intel on the threat in our area but we're getting some.

  We're sweating bullets. Somewhere up ahead is an armored force that's guessed by the Kurds to be about a division in strength. I didn't buy it. The one thing about the Kurds is that they always overestimate. But say a battalion. Even a brigade.

  It's way more complicated than this, but this is military structure 101. Three platoons in a company. (You'll already notice ours has four including mortar platoon. And then there's the techs and Nepos . . . Like I said, this is 101.) Three platoons in a company. Three companies in a battalion. Three battalions in a brigade. Three brigades in a division.

  More complicated but you get the idea.

  Basically, if we're looking at anything like a normal battalion, we're outnumbered and outgunned three to one. And they've got our Abrams tanks, which are a bitch and a half to kill. Not to mention Strykers and Bradleys. Those were all confirmed as well as we could confirm it.

  If they've got a brigade, we're outnumbered nine to one. And way outgunned. Then there's artillery which is going to way outrange our mortars. Their mortars.

  There were also aircraft. Fighters dropping dumb bombs and some helicopters including a couple of Apache gunships. Those, right there, could rip Strykers a new one without breaking a sweat. The trucks? Toast.

  We are on a heightened state of alert.

  We've moved to constant movement for the time being. I want to get past Baghdad as fast as possible. The main force seemed to be to the north but the fucking Baghdad area is never good.

  So we're moving by day. And I get word that there's a visual contact on a plane. Whoa.

  Context for the young people: Back before the Plague there were always planes in the sky. Fucking always. One of the weirdest things about the few days post-9/11 was the lack of planes. And when they started coming back we all cringed. Compared to the Plague, 9/11 was a kiss on the cheek. But it was all we had as comparison back then.

  They're coming back, but still not up to the level they were in 2018.

  Since the Plague, if we saw something in the sky it had been a bird. I'd never even launched our UAVs. (Hadn't had to. The Scouts had them at the moment and we still hadn't used them.)

  Zero planes. Nada.

  So when we got reports of a plane, we went on really high alert.

  Okay. The LOG had had a lot of shit in it. Among other things, it had had Stinger missiles. Not sure why. The only air threat around was the U.S. Air Force. And while having been under blue-on-blue fire once I could see some benefit to blowing up an Air Force plane, they frown on that sort of thing.

  But the fucker had had swaggersticks. What can I say? Maybe the guy running it was from Minnesota.

  Point being, we had Stingers. We didn't have any qualified Stinger guys, but we had Stingers. And it wasn't as if my guys couldn't read the manual. And a Stinger is very easy to use.

  So we might be able to take out a fighter if it got low enough for a good bomb drop. Probably wouldn't, but then we'd just take our chances.

  Problem being, the guys said this was a big one. A transport.

  This I had to see.

  That was tough.

  The commo van didn't have a good way to see out except the commander's cupola. So I pulled the commander out, over his protests, and climbed up in his seat.

  Binos. Old fashioned optics.

  It was a plane. A big transport. And it was just sort of lazing around up there.

  Suddenly it turned and passed south down our west side near Baghdad. Banked around and headed back.

  The edges of the Baghdad suburbs were in view to the west. Barely. We were staying as low as we could given the terrain. But while there was some terrain it was mostly pretty flat. There was a bit of haze and I hoped that would let us get past unnoticed.

  But this transport had apparently noticed us. I thought, maybe, possibly, could it be a supply drop? Nobody had called ahead. Didn't seem likely.

  I had to climb up on top of the vehicle, not a good exercise normally, to see over the box on the back. There were grab handles, thank God. It was lining up behind us
. It was a transport but transports can drop bombs. Didn't seem likely, but I was starting to get a puckering feeling. It definitely seemed to be looking for somebody like us.

  Passed overhead at about two thousand feet over ground level. Flaps down, going slow. Russian Antonov. What the fuck?

  We're still on that flat fucking plain. Still farms and occasional irrigation canals. More widespread on the latter, bigger on the former. More "industrial." Sunni Triangle. Saddam made sure the good farmers got the good equipment.

  So we're bounding over this field at about thirty miles an hour and I'm trying to get back in the commander's hatch when the bird starts dropping shit. Not bombs. First there's a set of personnel parachutes. Standard static-line drop, the easiest kind in the world. Then a bunch of parachute bundles.

  Are we getting reinforced?

  I get back into the commo van and everybody is "what the fuck"ing. So I spread the word we don't know what it is and the scouts are to check out the drop. And I go "what the fuck?" and get on the horn to Brigade.

  Brigade knows fucking diddly. No, no transport drops. No transport planes that they know of outside U.S. states and posessions. Most grounded. Cannibalization. Bad here.

  Scouts come back while I'm on the phone with Brigade.

  "Sir . . . No threat. Need you up here."

  It's reporters.

  Flying assholes from the sky.

  They're scattered across a field but the scouts have helpfully gathered them up and gotten all their bundles for them. It's a team of six. One of them I vaguely recognize.

  "Graham Trent, Skynews. Bandit Six, I presume."

  (Look, it was his reference, not mine.)

  Most people have probably heard the story. It's still in reruns. If you haven't, here goes.

  Skynews (I tend to call it SkyNet. Kids, get your parents or grandparents to explain the reference) along with Fox and a bunch of other "media" holdings were owned by this guy named Rupert Murdoch.

  Fairly conservative, for a Brit, and a bit of a character. He'd used the character, and a fucking ruthless business sense, to build up a pretty fair business empire.

  Skynews was a British satellite news service. The Brits, then and now, had the BBC, the Beeb, which was paid for by the government. (From taxes on TVs. If you had a TV, you paid a yearly tax to watch it, I shit you not. And it went to the Beeb.)

  Going up against a government monopoly was hard. But Murdoch knew there was money in giving people something other than the relentless propaganda of the Beeb. Oh, the Beeb occasionally had "alternative view" programming, but not in its news. It's news was pure liberal tofu-eater, rainbow this and global warming that.

  So he founded Skynews. And it had made a fair amount of brass. (Brit for change. Got brass in pocket. Money.) That was, up to the Plague when shit was falling everywhere.

  The Brits, despite being overall much more socialist than the U.S., had not been seizing businesses left and right. But they also weren't propping them up. And they especially weren't propping up Murdoch. He was barely holding on. He knew that he needed a gimmick to get some viewers. Preferably something he could sell to other networks that still had money.

  (Oh, the U.S. "networks," NBC, CBS and ABC, were all being supported by "government emergency support spending." Fox, which was owned by Murdoch, was not. CNN somehow, though, had gotten in on the money. Politics? Nah.)

  He needed a show that people were going to watch.

  What was the biggest news story in terms of viewership in the U.S. and Britain?

  You guessed it.

  (The U.S. for reasons previously described. The British because they had a thing for the Nepos as well and, having a bit better history program in school, the whole "Ten Thousand" thing had caught on.)

  So he, and it was Murdoch, got a brilliant idea. Send out a news crew to embed with us. It was going to take cash he didn't have, but if it worked it was going to be big news. His stocks, where stock markets were still trading, would go up. He would get more viewers. Might sell subsidiary rights.

  He was putting most of his remaining wad on a roulette square marked Bandit Six. Yeah, some days I still dream about walking up to him and whispering "Residuals."

  I got this, more or less, from Graham Trent when I pulled him over to the side to get a brief conversation away from the troops. By then the rest of the unit had caught up. Scouts were out forward, the unit had spread automatically. The Nepos were grinning in their turrets. No immediate threats.

  There was some sort of building. A pumping station, something, by one of the irrigation canals we were going to have to cross. I could get out of sight for the conversation by pulling him around to the side. Unfortunately, that left us nearly at the waterline.

  He laid this all out for me grinning ear to ear. What a lark! Wasn't this grand! Russian bird. Flew in from Greece. Good luck we found you, eh? Make you famous.

  I'd asked what was going on and since then just nodded. Calmly. He was pumped up. Turned out they hadn't practiced the jump at all. First time out of a bird. Flying on that adrenaline high. I'll give him credit for brass ones.

  I grabbed him by the front of his fucking safari jacket, down to the water, into the canal and then pressed his face under the water. Looking up. I wanted to watch.

  I kept him there, despite his struggles, until I could tell he was about to pass out. Then, against my better judgement, I let the fucking idiot have air.

  What? What? What's all this, then?

  "Listen, you little pissant," I said, slamming him up against the wall of the concrete building. I don't even recall carrying him up the pretty steep and slippery slope. And he was not a small guy. Didn't matter. "Let me tell you what you and your fucking boss have done. You have just probably killed us. All of us. Including you. I figured we had about a one in seventy shot of making it to the fucking Dardanelles. We're looking at having to take on three to ten times our numbers in firepower to have any shot. You've just added six fucking useless mouths to my force. Six seats I have to find room for. Six slots to load gear into. And you're going to want to give fucking 'regular reports' since you're in the news business and every last fucking RIF with a damned satellite dish and power is going to know we're coming and more or less where and when. Last but most assuredly not least, you just did a fucking drop in full view of Baghdad which I was sincerely hoping to slip by unnoticed. My first thought is to just kill all of you. Nobody would ever know. Overrun by RIFs before we got to them. Poor brave reporter bastards. Never stood a chance. Are you listening? Do you clearly understand my dilemma? That dilemma being whether to push in with my forearm and crack your hyoid to leave you to choke in your own blood, walk around the corner and say 'Kill them. Kill them all.'? Because my boys won't bat an eye and they will never, ever talk."

  He'd gone white. Whiter. He'd gone white when he realized I was drowning him and not just kidding around.

  "We hadn't realized it was that bad . . . I'm sorry. Sorry."

  He wasn't pleading to live. He clearly understood what I'd said and realized how badly he had screwed us.

  I doubt I could have killed him if that hadn't been his reaction. But I was sorely sorely tempted.

  "You're working for me, now. Not Murdoch. You will send what I say and when I say. You will explain to your crew, who I hope all include smart people, just what a fucked up situation they have dropped into."

  "You've got it."

  "It's going to be censorship."

  "If it keeps us, all of us, your Yanks, the Nepos, my crew, alive, I can work with that."

  "You fell in the stream. We laughed about it."

  "Got it."

  The fucked up thing was that I knew what I was going to do before I'd ever pushed him underwater. I knew in a moment while he was talking. Oh, not the details but the outline and it never was much more than an outline.

  I hadn't pushed him under because I was negotiating. I really had had as my first plan killing them. Nobody would ever know.


  But I went with Plan B.

  Rupert Murdoch wanted news to prop up his flagging networks?

  We'd give him the same kind of news the MSM had been sending for years: We'd be sending entertainment.

  The only thing was, I was hoping to send much much more.

  Get news back to what it was supposed to be.

  If we survived.

  We rolled out. Fast.

  Didn't matter. We got hit, anyway.

  I had the Scouts echelon to the west towards Baghdad. I figured if there was going to be a threat, it would be from that direction.

  Sure enough, they spotted a line of trucks, couple of military grade and more pickups, some of them "technicals" rolling down the highway to cut us off.

  When the trucks, in turn, spotted the Strykers some of them pulled off the road. Guys started bailing out. The technicals opened up and started weaving across the field.

  Our guys started backing up. There were two Strykers moving by fire and maneuver. One would fire up the convoy moving slow while the other backed up fast, also firing but not as accurately. There was a line of trees they were headed for to get behind.

  A bunch of the RIFs had dived into an irrigation ditch. Some of the technicals were smoked.

  One of the Scout Strykers blew up. Just blew the fuck up. No clue why.

  The other one backed up faster and started maneuvering. They didn't see anybody bail out of the other, which was billowing smoke.

  I could see the smoke from the commo van. It had external viewers even if they were lousy for spotting planes. I told Fillup to maneuver his unit and find out what had killed them. There was a marker for the enemy unit where the scouts said it was. Pretty much a klick from where they first engaged, klick and a half to where the Stryker was hit.

  Second Stryker maneuvered into the trees. One of them blew up but the Stryker lived.

  They had Javelins.

  Only two, thank God, but that's what we found when we rolled over their position. One sight and two expended launchers. For one of our vehicles.

  DOD, on orders from the Secretary of Defense under consultation with State, gave the whole damned LOG base in Iraq to the fucking Sunnis. Including the Javelins.