That is…a lot of metal for us to face down, Jabar thought.
“Was it this hot where you grew up, Corporal?” Van Duine asked.
Jabar glanced down, confused. “What? No, I grew up in Toledo.”
It was Van Duine’s turn to look confused. “You grew up in Spain? How come you said you can’t speak to the locals here?”
“Ohio,” Jabar said. “Toledo, Ohio.”
Van Duine had the good grace to look embarrassed. Jabar, though, had other things on his mind, and inched back away from where his Weapons Platoon Marines were positioned. A few meters along, he ran into 2nd Squad—“Sloppy Seconds”—who were on hand to back up Jabar’s Marines with their heavy rifles and grenade launchers.
Sgt. Arliss, 2nd’s squad leader, had deployed them in a nice, hasty zig-zag, using the terrain for cover and positioning them so they could offer supporting fire if needed. Someone remembered their dismount training from the School of Infantry. If only all the Marines remembered how to fight as well outside their armor.
Staff Sergeant Demeter had joined Stilwill in the bush, but stood upright despite the threat of Chinese powered armor out in the jungle. Jabar couldn’t decide if that was from some misplaced senior-Marine bravado or if Demeter had gone soft in the head after four years pulling Embassy duty in the plush urban surroundings of Bogota.
“Everything tight up front?” he asked Jabar.
“Everything’s good, Staff Sergeant. We’re dispersed for two hundred meters along the jungle track—machine guns out to the flanks, anti-armor assault in the center. It’s a good position for what we’ve got.”
“Excellent work, Jabar,” he replied. “We’ve got Third Squad backing us up on the hill to our south in case we need to fall back.”
Jabar concealed a sigh of exasperation in a cough. 3rd Squad—“Third Herd”—was good enough at what they did, but dismounted operations were not their forte. He’d be lucky if his detachment of Marines survived Third Herd’s “covering” fire. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“We’re a stone’s throw from the border,” Demeter said, possibly picking up on something in Jabar’s body language that he wasn’t hiding as well as he thought he was. “It’s probably just a patrol gone bad. Nav equipment off. Someone lost. Or just a test of the Colombian response. I doubt this’ll end up being a full-on firefight.”
Jabar nodded agreement and hoped that Demeter was right.
From his position behind the bush, Stilwill interrupted. “I still didn’t get any memos about Chinese troops being in Venezuela. You’d think that’d be news.”
Demeter looked over at Jabar, and the two shared a “Is this guy for real?” glance. Jabar, not for the first time, wondered if Stilwill’s colleagues sent him out here hoping he’d step on a landmine.
“There probably aren’t Chinese drivers in the armor, sir,” Jabar explained patiently. “The Chinese sell their walkers and their exo-skins to at least ten other nations, including Peru. They have a presence in South America.”
“We’re on the wrong side of the country from Peru…” Stilwill said, looking off to the west as though he could see the Pacific coast nation through the hundreds of miles jungle and mountain that separated them.
“But Venezuela is right there,” Jabar said, and pointed at the smuggler’s track.
“They’re under an arms embargo; China agreed in the UN Council to abide by this. They’re hungry for buyers, but not enough to risk the black mark,” Stilwill muttered.
A set of snapping branches and motion in the deeper jungle interrupted him. Jabar crouched, shoving Stilwill’s head further down into the bush, and Demeter even dropped to one knee.
“Hey, don’t shoot, it’s Reynaldo,” a heavily Colombian-accented voice said.
Jabar lowered his rifle as their guide stepped out to join them. Reynaldo had been ghosting his way through these jungles hunting FARC rebels from back when they were still considered revolutionaries by some and controlled at least a third of Colombia’s territory. He’d been picking off drug lords, some of them well intertwined with FARC, long before Camp Bell had been set up by US and Colombian forces working together for the final push back of Colombia’s fringe areas, where the drug lords were dug in the hardest and being funded by the Venezuelans.
“You see anything, Reynaldo?” Jabar asked.
“No. And to answer Mr. Stilwill: the Venezuelans got around the embargo by giving most of their reserves directly to a Chinese corporation that makes the heavy metal. Oil for weapons.” He shook his head. “And not much of it left. Caracas is ready to riot, the lights are going out all over the country. It’s desperate over there.”
Desperate enough to do something stupid, like attack Colombia? Jabar wondered. That seemed beyond the pale.
But he glanced down the road, a chill running down his back despite the moist heat.
“What I do,” a drunk Stilwill had told Jabar, barely a day after being helicoptered out, “is show these peasant farmers how first-world farming works.”
“Where did you get that?” Jabar had asked. “Alcohol’s prohibited on base.”
“It’s not about equipment, or technology. You’d think it was. You’d be wrong. It’s really about the guarantee.” Stilwill gulped the amber-colored, peaty-smelling scotch in his hand like he’d stumbled into an oasis after a week of crossing the desert. “That’s modern farming. All about the subsidies. No one really wants to fess up to it, but guarantee a farmer a minimum price on his crop, so that he knows his family won’t suffer, and he’s willing to take a risk on what is a professional field with a shrinking user base. We talk a good talk about markets; in fact, in order to enter into trade agreements with us, you have to agree not to subsidize your farmers. But at the end of the day, that’s how first-world farming works.”
“Sir, you can’t just sit out here on the edge of camp with a flask of scotch…”
“There was an African country which decided to stop using ‘the market’ and subsidize its farmers. Lost all US aid, but within two years, they had a stable local agro-economy and could feed themselves. So we have that dilemma facing us as we look out at these little guys sitting out there,” Stilwill waved his hand at the jungle. “You’re a farmer: you’re offered your chance of two crops. One pays a few bucks an acre. Another pays ten times that. What do you plant?”
“Sir,” Jabar insisted.
“You plant the more expensive! Problem is, until me, that’s always been cocoa. Colombia needs stability, and crops. They can’t subsidize their farmers or they lose agricultural assistance from the US. They can’t afford all out war out here. We, on the other hand, want less drug production and are desperate for more land to grow crops for bio-plastics as oil prices hit the stratosphere. So the State Department works with foreign aid, and suddenly Monsanto is here to offer farmers a minimum crop price guarantee if they grow what the bio-plastics industry needs. Just as back home, Monsanto somehow sits in the middle of it all. Everyone’s happy. Except me, because I’m in the middle. Of. Fucking. Nowhere.”
“Sir, the reason you can’t sit here with that is because we occasionally come under sniper fire,” Jabar said.
Stilwill paled. He shoved the flask into Jabar’s hands and scurried back for the safety of the sandbagged walls.
Jabar turned the flask over thoughtfully.
“That’s what they look like?” Amir asked, twisting the holographic image of Jabar’s rig this way and that, three months prior to his big brother’s deployment to Colombia. He poked at the angular shape, freestanding but cracked open for maintenance. “What’s the armor?”
“The plate armor is a poly-metal synthetic, gray with your camo painted over top. Green for jungle, sand for desert. Once you have it all strapped on, you look just like one of those videogame characters,” Jabar told him.
“And you’ll jump twenty feet into the air with a leap, because of the joint motors inside, right?”
“After lots and lots of training,” J
abar grinned. “Do that your first day you’re liable to land and break every bone in your body. The armor’s tougher than you are.”
“What about the big ones, Faisal? The walkers?”
Jabar flicked over to some pictures he’d taken of one of the big boys, a M-19 Mattis, out at 29 Palms. “These guys? That’s more like driving a car or something. The driver sits up in the cockpit here, between the big weapons pods on the shoulders. The legs can put him up to twenty feet off the ground, and a good driver can get those legs moving like a sprinter.”
Just after he had taken the picture, Jabar had watched them lope across the Mojave Desert like so many gazelle, running and bounding and chewing up distance with breathtaking speed. He’d felt like a turtle in his own armor for weeks after that.
“Can I drive one?” Amir asked, looking up at him.
Jabar rubbed the top of his brother’s head. In another year, he’d be eighteen and free to enlist. “You like to tinker, maybe you can fix them, and test drive them, or something. They always need more mechanics.”
“But not fight in them?”
“What I do is dangerous enough for both of us, little brother.”
The chatter of a dozen heavy rifles broke the jungle’s wet silence. Jabar snapped his own rifle up, and Demeter and Reynaldo both dropped into crouches.
It wasn’t Weapons or Second, Jabar realized. He glanced back up the small hill where Third had set up their covering position.
“Contact front!” the platoon’s comm net crackled. “Three walkers, two thousand meters!”
“Jesus Christ, what the hell do they think they’re doing?” Demeter muttered.
“Giving away their damn position,” Jabar replied. Stupid fucking buttplates, he thought, carefully censoring himself. Only Weapons used that term, and not in a complimentary fashion.
It was Stilwill who verbalized the changed atmosphere. “This isn’t a lost border patrol; this is an attack.”
Jabar and Demeter—who’d both switched from anticipating the worst (while hoping for the best) and accepted the reality that a firefight had just broken out—glanced at him. “It’s a thrust of some sort, yes sir,” Jabar confirmed. He looked at Demeter. “Victor’s gonna light Third up with tracking software and return rocket fire.”
Demeter was on the comm net already, thinking the same thing. “Disengage, disengage!” he ordered. “Fall back to Rally-Delta.”
It was too late. Third was lobbing grenades out in a high arc from their hill as explosions dotted their position. It was hard to miss them.
Demeter and Jabar looked at each other. “Pull your squad back, Corporal, we can’t sit here anymore,” Demeter said. Third had blown their pretty little road ambush. “Keep Stilwill safe and close.”
Under attack by an unspecified number of possibly Venezeulan walkers and Jabar was still on babysitting duty.
“Stay low,” Jabar ordered, and rushed forward to where his squad was parked, muttering obscenities under his breath the whole way. His teams should have been on that goddamn hill, not Third Herd, but Demeter had wanted the big guns out front to act as a screen and Jabar had given in because he didn’t have the nuts to stand up to a Staff Sergeant yet, even one as semi-hopeless as Demeter. He came down to the edge of the track, not far from where Rader lay in the prone, scanning left and right with his rifle.
“I don’t see any—”
“Doesn’t matter. Third got some, and now they’re going to roll us up if we don’t boogie.” Rader looked appropriately annoyed at the FUBARed situation. “Fall back to Delta now. You remember the way?”
“Yes, Corporal.”
“Good, you’ve got point. Hustle us back there and don’t wait for the buttplates to get their shit together.”
With a mumbled “Aye,” Rader was up and moving, falling back into the jungle, dragging the rest of Assault section with him. Jabar dared to jump out into the rough road that they had been beside and ran to their southern flank first, toward where Third was still firing sporadically. Stilwill followed behind, panting and out of breath from the effort of keeping up.
“Get up, get up, go,” Jabar yelled at the machine gun team there, “fall in behind Assault, go!” Then he ran back to the north and got that gun team moving. He plunged into the jungle at the very tail end of the line, urging his Marines onward. As they passed SSgt. Demeter’s former command position, he could hear trees at the smuggler’s track starting to crack and splinter under high velocity fire. He put himself between the sounds and Stilwill, whom he kept shoving in front of him.
He still had yet to lay eyes on any enemy metal, but it was quite clear they were in the middle of a firefight.
For the first time in a month, Jabar thanked Allah for the thickness of the jungle. He even permitted himself a tiny smile, wondering if the Venezuelans had had any time to practice operating armor in the jungle. Judging by the crashing sounds and slow progress, he was willing to bet they hadn’t.
“Dropkick Red, moving to Rally Delta. We have ambulatory casualties.”
Jabar urged Stilwill to run faster. “Red” was Third Herd’s callsign, and if they were coming down the hill with walking wounded, they would be moving slow. Hopefully the withdraw and rally path, which was little more than a foot trail that went through dense jungle, would keep the Venezuelans from rolling Third Herd up in a neat bunch. The walkers would have a bitch of a time, while Jabar and Stilwill were able to thread past the thick jungle quickly enough on the footpath.
He came up on one of the machine gunners struggling a little under the weight of the ammo he was carrying. In a training situation, he probably would have just walked alongside, berating the boot for not being in better condition—hell, he might have done it out here in the jungle if it weren’t for death lurking in the trees somewhere behind them. Today, instead, he just grabbed one of the two slung panniers, draped it across his own back, and hustled on. He caught up to Rader just as his scout reached the edge of the small clearing that was Delta. They entered to find Sloppy Second, breathing hard in the thick jungle air, forming themselves into a defensive circle.
They’d made it back to Rally Delta. Stilwill was in one piece. So the mission has that going for it, at least, Jabar thought. The man they’d been ordered to escort and protect was still alive. Kneeling at the point where trail met clearing, Jabar counted off Marines and pointed them into position around the clearing, backing up Sloppy Second.
“Are we going to call Camp for armor?” Jabar asked, prodding Demeter.
Demeter glanced back through the jungle. “Too late for that now.”
“Maybe, but you do realize we’re going to be the first platoon ever to face down enemy metal in an actual firefight, and we’re naked?” The walkers and power armor had only been developed in the last decade, most of it in the hands of nations rich enough to deploy it…and rich enough to have no vested interest in fighting each other.
There’d been metal up against flesh, though. Richer nations against less-equipped nations. Normally that didn’t end so well for flesh.
“Let’s see what shape Third is in,” Demeter said. “We could just have spooked a patrol. We need to make sure we understand what’s happening before we start calling in armor or airstrikes.”
He was being cautious. And trying to cover his ass. Because ultimately it was Demeter who made the call to go out into the bush without powered armor. If this mission shit the bed then it was going to be Demeter’s ass on the line. But an excess of caution would send things down the same chute, get them just as dead. There was a reason the Corps prized aggressiveness.
“Let’s get some eyes in the sky,” Jabar suggested. “We’ll know for sure what we’re looking at if we unpack the moth.”
Demeter thought about it for a split second and nodded. “Okay. Unpack the drone, and tell me what you see.”
Stilwill was shaking his head. “Colombia’s not a narco-state anymore, Bogota’s got better public transportation than my home city, and Carta
gena’s a vacation spot. But they’re still struggling with the rural areas. If this goes south, it undoes decades of growth in the area, growth we were hoping would check the Venezuela problem.”
The moth was a tiny collapsible radio controlled drone with memory metal wings. It took half a minute to unpack, fold the wings into place, and throw into the air. Jabar controlled it with a joystick and goggles.
He spiraled it up just over the tree canopy, and then slowly flew out well away from their position. After a few minutes of that, he jerked it up into the air and spiraled up for altitude.
The jungle jerked and stuttered and spun as he climbed, and then leveled out.
A mat of jungle top stretched for miles, emerald green, sliced by the smuggler’s road they’d double-timed away from to Rally Point Delta. And all along the road stretching back into Venezuela: a long convoy of heavy, metal-clad humanoid shapes stutter-walking along, interspersed with the two legged walkers, canopies glinting in the sun.
Further back, supply trucks and older tanks ground along, following the spearhead of powered armor.
One of the suits paused, and a gauntleted, metal-clad arm rose and pointed, the finger flashing as energy stabbed out at the tiny drone.
“Sir…” Jabar’s video feed exploded in static. He ripped the goggles off and looked up to see a cloud of debris slowly falling. “It’s no patrol.”
It was a goddamn invasion force.
The sound of Third Herd preceded the Marines themselves by less than a minute, and a few of them were still shooting somewhere to their rear as they moved into the clearing.
Two had clearly been wounded. One, Cpl. Barney, leaned against their squad corpsman, HM3 Danks, a blood-soaked bandage at Barney’s neck. Jabar frowned when he saw that; Barney was one of the better NCOs in Third—probably the best—and they would be struggling without his influence.
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