The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  Detroit was a very special case. It was . . . touchy. It shouldn't have been but it had a number of "political correctness" factors associated with it.

  The group that had taken over Detroit was the "Islamic Caliphate of the 9/11 Martyrs." Now, right there most people like me were thinking "There's no better group to take out."

  Problem was . . . Warrick and the MSM had treated the IC9M with kid gloves. Why?

  The leader of the IC9M was Mullah Ali . . . sigh, here goes, don't get pissed if I screw it up . . .

  Mullah Ali Al-Kirbi Aqal ibn abu Meiri Al-Haj Amani El-Haddi abu Saleh Al-Ahad ibn Mohammed Al-Rashid Al-Kuwukji abu Kahdra Al-Wohoush Akim ibn Tamud ibn Bakdash Abu Saeb.

  I had, as part of a lot of briefings, an explanation in detail of his name. I cannot for the life of me recall any of it.

  Call him Mullah Ali or Caliph Ali as he styled himself. I don't give a shit. I called him "burrhead."

  Okay, yes, that's a racist comment. Caliph Ali would make Martin Luther King racist.

  Somehow Kuwazi Jones, aka half a dozen names ending in Mullah Ali, former drug dealer, armed robber and rapist, had become the darling of the media and what was left of the tofu-eater set. He had "established order" in Detroit and was "working for the poor and oppressed peoples of color of the degenerate and oppressing" United States by bringing a "new order" of "equality and enlightenment."

  He was, I'll admit, photogenic and charismatic. He was very good on camera. He was well-spoken and could deliver a good line. He knew all the liberal mantras to spout.

  But somehow the refugees that made it out of Detroit with tales of horror never got as much air-time.

  And Warrick had treated him like fucking God. He could do no wrong. Getting food shipments to the "established government" in Detroit had been a high priority. Whenever the Army tried to balk, somebody got canned.

  Since Caliph Ali was very good about not shooting at the troops, as long as they dropped off the shipments at the edge of his territory, the Army geeked. They didn't like it, but they geeked.

  Problem being, we also saw the intelligence coming out of Detroit. We knew that life in the "Caliphate" was, well, life in a Caliphate. Which meant hell for values of hell. Worse than most Caliphates, really, because Mullah Ali was one fucked up psychopath.

  Right-wing radio had long had Detroit as one of its underlying themes of how fucked up Warrick was. Carson knew about the conditions, he thought, from that. When he saw the real conditions in intel reports, he was said to have nearly thrown up.

  The problem being, well, the story that everyone had gotten for going on two years was that Detroit was a "model of modern good governance in a multicultural environment."

  Just rolling into Detroit and hanging every fucking hardcore would have thrown everyone for a loop. Sure, he had overthrown established order and governance. But for most people in 2021, that wasn't good enough. Here was an African-American spokesperson who had "saved the people of Detroit."

  The other cities that were "city-states" all had similar "image issues." To cover for Warrick, the news media had had to avoid finding anything wrong with dictators holding American cities. Since they'd practiced for years finding nothing wrong with Fidel Castro, they were very good at it. They'd made people look as if they enjoyed the chains. Hell, there were people who wanted to go to Detroit. It sounded like paradise.

  The only thing that would work would be showing people the truth of the situation in such a way as they couldn't ignore it. The Army was going to have to counter the propaganda. Hard.

  "Gosh, here's a thought . . ."

  Chapter Four

  The Penalty for a

  Job Well Done Is . . .

  Look, you don't get on the short list for promotion to lieutenant colonel after a year and a half as a major. You don't. It doesn't matter if you walk on clouds and suck every general in the Pentagon. You don't.

  Suddenly, I was up before a promotion board. And on the promotion list for lieutenant colonel.

  You don't go to boards, by the way. Officers sit on the board and consider a whole bunch of personnel packets. Based on the personnel packets they pick a group of officers and give them a score. Depending on the number of officers the Army needs for that rank, if your score is high enough they promote you.

  (When I got "selected" for major, that is the promotion board said I was a possible, the "promotion" rate was 93%. So all but the absolute lamest captains got major that board.)

  I'd been on the short list each time. Okay, I'm pretty good at what I do. And I'm a handsome devil and charming. (And, yes, unfortunately that matters.)

  But promotion boards are supposed to be "lacking in influence." A general isn't supposed to stop by, toss a packet on the table and go, "We really like this guy and if he doesn't get promoted you all might as well figure on staying at your current rank for the rest of your lives."

  Promotion boards are supposed to consider only what is presented in front of them. It's like a jury. Even if they've seen TV stuff about the guy they're judging, they aren't supposed to consider it. And they're also not supposed to consider if somebody calls them at home and says "he walks or your child goes through life blind."

  I didn't like the way it got handled from all appearances. If they'd said "you're a light bird" and given me the oak leaves, that would be one thing. There's paperwork and precedent for that. But it appeared that someone had fucked with the promotion board in my favor. That sort of thing, down the road, can really bite you in the ass. Besides . . . it's dishonorable.

  (So later I went digging. There is "standard minimum time in grade" for all positions. There is also "nonstandard minimum time in grade" for all positions. When promotion boards sit, they can, at their discretion, consider "nonstandard minimum time in grade" officers. The promotion board had looked over the list of all majors in "standard minimum time in grade" and found some that deserved the next rank. Then, since they'd done their jobs efficiently, they had some extra time and considered "nonstandard minimum time in grade officers" for light bird. And ran across Bandit Six in the bunch. And, well . . . People who are on the board are not supposed to talk about the board. What happens on the board, stays on the board. But a guy told me about when they ran across the "Centurion" packet as they put it. And passed it around. And talked about shit they're not supposed to talk about like "I fucking die every time I watch 'CAM(P)ing'!" And moved it to the top of the stack and recommended the packet be "selected under waiver of time in grade." Still kind of pisses me off. There was some guy my grandstanding fucked for that go-round. To whoever it is, I apologize.)

  So I was now a major promotable. Big whoop. I was still in the Pentagon and still shoveling horse-shit. Nice bump in pay, though, when the promotion finally came through.

  So one day I get word I need to report to a different department for "consultation on Emergency Methodology." I've got an office. And the name of a major.

  I go to said office and meet a nice major. The major is wearing the tabs for aide to a full general. The nice major asks me questions. I answer them politely. Some of them are on the borderline of "wrong." They were a touch . . . political.

  The Army has to play politics all the time. That is, they have to find the Congresscritters who will support funding and all that. But within the Army, it's a written rule that you don't discuss or argue politics. You don't ask someone what their politics are. Yes, it gets done all the time, but not in an official setting. It was the equivalent of asking me "Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?" It's Just Not Done.

  At the end of the "interview" I was told "thank you very much, we may be talking again."

  And I got orders. To my old unit. As Battalion Commander.

  Wait. WRONG!

  First of all, I can't think of a time when a guy who has been a commander in a unit has been brought back as a BC. There are too many battalions in the Army. Just luck of the draw says you're not going to get your old unit. At the level of major, you
've scooted off somewhere else. If you spend the normal time as a major, you've done staff time at various levels and some in a battalion to get the feel. You probably have been an XO. But not of your old unit. Doesn't work that way.

  Second, it was like taking over the Company. Normally, the "career progression" was that I'd get promoted to light bird and take a staff position for my rank. If I was a very good boy I might get a battalion. But not until I've gotten some experience under colonel's silver.

  And I still wasn't on the books as a light bird. Majors hadn't commanded battalions since WWII.

  Oh, wow, look. I'm a light bird. Fancy that.

  Promotion came in the day after my orders.

  My skids were being greased. And greased hard. "Selected" way out of zone. Command time when I should have still been shuffling papers. And now promotion out of zone.

  Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

  Note, this sounds crazy. But there are two things about promotion in the Army. If you get promoted at one rank too fast, you're bound to get fucked over later. I, eventually, wanted to be a general. Despite the number of generals around, getting to general is very hard. Having my skids greased now would probably fuck that up then. (Absent, like, a World War.) The other is, if someone is hand-selecting you, and that is pretty much verboten in the Army, it's rarely for something you're going to enjoy. It means somebody wants you to do something fucked up.

  I didn't know at the time how fucked up.

  I drove down to Stewart, which I hadn't seen in a while but it hadn't changed much either, and found quarters. I reported in to the Division. I got the usual smoke blown up my ass but not as much as usual. I was an old Division hand. The Army's "Third Herd." (The actual motto is "Nous Resterons Là" "We Shall Remain." Don't ask.) I got the standard incoming battalion commander "in-brief."

  With FEMA actually starting to be left to do its job, the Army was coming more and more off of "disaster relief" duties and getting trained back in on "kill people and break things." The Brigades (which were the actual deployment units) weren't by any stretch back to their glory days of being able to break your hearts and your armies any where, any time, but they were getting back in shape.

  My battalion was the next one slotted up for "combat retraining." I got some frowns but they weren't explained even when I asked. But I did notice that my Brigade wasn't up for combat retrain, yet. We were getting bumped up the cue.

  Combat retrain means starting from the ground up. Soldiers train on individual tasks while officers try to remember how to conduct operations. The latter is mostly "TEWTs," Tactical Exercises Without Troops, and can range from sitting at a table working over a problem to sand table exercises to going out in the field and considering how to take terrain to full up computerized battle with independent scorers.

  Later on the officers and troops are "mated up" for field exercises and then finally go through a test to see if it's taken. Generally, after the test (called an ARTEP) there's a stand-down for maintenance to fix all the shit that broke in training then the unit, if it passes the test and the inspection of its equipment, is considered "combat certified." It's ready to go to war.

  Normally, "combat retraining" is a six-month process.

  We were scheduled for three.

  I looked at the, very tight, schedule, kissed sleep goodbye then looked again.

  We were scheduled, if everything went well, to be "combat certified" one month before the end of Carson's requested "six months."

  We weren't going to be the first "combat certified" battalion available while Carson still had "Emergency Powers" authority, suspending habeas corpus and posse comitatus (the law that said you couldn't use federal troops in United States territory for police forces) but we were going to be one of the first.

  Okay, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. What is four?

  It's a puckering feeling in the rectum.

  I still didn't have the word "Detroit" in my head. But I did have the word "pacification actions." Okay, it's a phrase.

  I also didn't have the word, phrase, whatever, "Centurions" in my head.

  We started training. Part of the training was learning to be a battalion commander without:

  A. Being an S-3 (operations officer).

  B. Being an XO (second in command of a battalion).

  C. Ever having been to or even taken the correspondence course for Command and General Staff College, which was normally a "must have" for battalion command.

  I'd had experience with "large force" command. Don't get me wrong. Hell, by Istanbul I was commanding the forces of a light brigade. Or a heavy battalion "team."

  But that was there under make-it-up-as-you-go-along rules. Now I had to learn to play by Army rules and there were a lot of them.

  But I had very good help. All the staff officers were excellent. They'd been trained in by my previous commander and for the first month or so I just let them keep doing what they were doing. Hell, I never really made a lot of changes.

  And my company commanders were also "hold-overs." They'd all been doing their jobs a bit over time for when they should have rotated out. They knew them well.

  The only fly in the ointment, at first, was me. But I'm a quick learner. I didn't make the mistakes I'd made as a company commander because, among other things, I'd sort of done this job before. I just had to figure out the details.

  We trained up, hard. We had a pretty decent budget for it, thank God. And I knew some tricks to get more. Budget was a "use it or lose it" proposition. You had to use up all your budget by the end of the year.

  Unfortunately, we weren't near the end of the year but there were still some units that were looking at their projected training and going "I'm not going to use all this budget." Normally, it's the other way around. But there were some. I found them and got more budget for stuff like ammo for live-fire training.

  (Hell, there was a lot of ammo sitting around. We hadn't been using much for the last couple of years and we'd stopped very abruptly in the middle of a war. There was plenty of ammo. Less fuel but that just meant the troops learned to walk.)

  We were getting ready for ARTEP, not up to that point but close, when I got orders cut for TDY to the Pentagon. What the Fuck? I'm a commander! You don't send battalion commanders TDY (temporary duty) to the Pentagon for fuck's sake! Not when there's an ARTEP scheduled in two weeks!

  I got on a plane and flew up to the Puzzle Palace, again, cursing under my breath.

  And got "briefed in."

  The mission of my battalion, like it or not, was to "pacify" the city of Detroit and return it to "normal order" under the laws and customs of the United States of America and the State of Michigan.

  But that wasn't all.

  I was asked, not ordered, asked if it would be possible to reactivate the Centurions stories for the mission.

  Some of those meetings were totally fucked. The PIO assholes had somehow become involved. They had lots of "recommendations" on ways to improve Centurions.

  Look, I'd made it up as I went along but it was still the highest rated show in reruns in the U.S. and maybe the world. A lot of people were just starting to get back TV, especially cable. And they'd heard about Centurions but had never seen it. DVDs were selling like hotcakes. (I swear, Murdoch owes me, big-time. The bastard.) It was about the only thing that was selling, consistently.

  I didn't need PIO shit-for-brains giving me recommendations on how to improve Centurions. Especially recommendations that amounted to turn it into a steer. It was a bull. That was its horror and glory. If they couldn't figure that out, they could kiss my ass.

  Oh, and they wanted it more "family friendly" and "gender friendly" and "culturally friendly" and . . .

  I wasn't just meeting with them, though. I was meeting with serious colonels and generals who were laying out the problem. Detroit had to be taken down while we still had posse comitatus. The President was smart but he
hadn't realized how long it was going to take to get units back in shape for combat. And it was going to be combat. The caliph had seized NG military hardware early on, both convoys that were under orders not to defend themselves and stuff that was already in the Detroit area. An entire company had been "suborned" and turned over military grade weapons and hardware. He might have all the shit I'd faced before. Low ammo for most of it, maybe none. But he had the gear and some ammo was very much missing.

  And with the caliph being held up as a shining light by the news media, it was going to be a shit-storm. The MSM wasn't going to just take us taking down the caliph. They were going to spin for all they were worth. And they were going to be all over the mission. No way to keep them out, practically. If we did, it would look like "censorship" and that was the last thing we needed.

  We had to get the word out about what was really going on in Detroit. And we needed to get the word out fast. And hopefully show what the media was spinning.

  And the one thing the generals agreed on, but weren't going to shove down my throat, was that the name needed to change.

  Thus was born The New Centurions mini-series.

  I started getting balky. I was getting dozens of "briefings" on every conceivable subject. Some of them were useful, much of it was crap (especially any that involved PIO). I was digesting all of it, sure. But I was on short time. My battalion was getting ready for its final exam and I was having to be thinking way past it to a mission that still wasn't clear and was going to be very very complicated. And very secret. That we were going into Detroit was Top Secret. That we were planning a Centurions broadcast about Detroit was Top Secret and compartmentalized.

  And, thus far, nobody was asking me anything. I was given information and "suggestions" but nobody was asking me what I thought or how I thought it should be done or, critically, what I was going to need. It was like they thought I could just pull one out of my ass.