Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  I just looked at him for a second. I’ve been told that I have “resting mad dog face,” so he started to get uncomfortable pretty quick. I finished chewing and swallowed before I said, “How about you mind your damned business and get back on the perimeter, kid?”

  “I don’t answer to you,” he replied petulantly. “I don’t see any rank, or any unit patches.”

  Of course he didn’t. Bradshaw’s guys had stripped their fatigues sterile before insertion, and those of us on the GL teams never wore our patches, anyway. The old Roman helmet, crossed rifles, and US shield were a dead giveaway.

  Personally, I thought that Colonel Santiago never should have okayed the insignia in the first place, but I was just a team leader. He had to have his reasons.

  “What’s it matter to you who we are?” Bradshaw asked. “We’re on the same side. That’s it.”

  “So you are Triarii,” the kid said, a little smugly. “I’ll admit, I’m kind of surprised. I hadn’t expected…well…” He faltered a little as my stare turned icy. “Well, I guess…all the stories didn’t quite tell me what to expect.” He glanced up. “I’m kind of surprised there’s an African-American with you…” He trailed off as Jordan turned his not-inconsiderable glare on him.

  “What?” He snarled. “The fuck you mean, white boy?”

  “Jordan…” I’d known guys who would have taken that opening and run with it, just to fuck with the kid. With Jordan, though, I knew that that wasn’t what was about to happen. The kid had just knocked the chip off Jordan’s shoulder, and didn’t even know it.

  “I, uh,” the kid stammered, even as Jordan got to his feet. He stood half a head taller than the soldier, and was clearly in better shape.

  “’I, uh,’” Jordan mocked bitterly. “Spit it out. Go on.”

  “Well, uh, the Triarii are supposed to be hard-core, uh, right-wingers,” the kid stammered. He’d apparently figured out that he’d just stepped in it, but it was too late to back down, especially with a very angry black man glowering at him.

  “And just because of the color of my skin, I’m supposed to, what?” Jordan demanded. “Join the PRA?”

  He was pissed. Jordan hated People’s Revolutionary Action almost as much as he hated the Fourth Reich skinheads who had beaten his mother to death during one of the regular riots in Richmond. The only reason he’d wound up with us instead of one of the black supremacist organizations that were cropping up in the major cities was because they’d all sided, to one degree or another, with the PRA.

  Jordan had spent a lot of time in the Third World as a Special Forces Medic. He’d seen the kind of government that the PRA wanted, and he wanted no part of it.

  The kid, faced with Jordan’s rage at being stereotyped for his race, just stammered.

  “Jordan, not the time, nor the place,” I snapped. He turned his furious eyes on me, but I’d learned a while back not to give an inch when he got this way. I returned his glare with one of my own.

  He snapped a dismissive hand at the soldier. “The fuck outta here,” he said. “You don’t know shit, kid. Keep your fucking racism to yourself next time.”

  The chastised young soldier beat a hasty retreat, but we were getting looks from the other holes. I glared at Jordan until he sat back down. We had big enough problems without getting into fights with our allies.

  I finished my breakfast, or whatever you wanted to call it, and stuffed the wrapper back into my ruck. We’d pack it out. Another thing that I’d had to learn when I’d come to the GL teams was the concept of “target indicators.” Hartrick had thrashed us unmercifully for leaving anything behind in the field.

  Of course, he’d lost friends when their hide site had been compromised by a single piece of trash left outside. So, he had good reasons. Didn’t make him any less of a dick.

  I glanced at the Powell again, but decided that before I discussed our next move with Killian, I needed more info. I crossed to Greg, who had gotten the long-range, HF radio up before going down to sleep. He was still kind of a mess; he was rummaging in his pack for food, his rifle was leaning against the tree next to him, and he had taken his ghillie hood-over off. At least he only had one boot off.

  Of course, I’d left mine on. I was probably going to regret that, in the long run. But at least I’d change my socks before we got moving again.

  I squatted down next to him. “Are we up with Kidd?” I asked quietly.

  Greg looked up at me and smiled. “Of course,” he said. “I had to change freqs a couple times, but we’re good.” He handed me the handset. “He might not be in the COC right at the moment, but he probably hasn’t gone far. I just talked to him a couple minutes ago.”

  With a nod, I lifted the handset to my ear. “Tango Charlie Five Seven Six, this is Golf Lima Ten Six,” I sent. Tango Charlie stood for Triarii Command. All of our unit callsigns were very practical, downright boring. Personal callsigns got more interesting.

  It took a second before Kidd’s voice, scratchy and faint, came through. “Golf Lima Ten Six, this is Tango Charlie Five Seven Six,” he said. “Good to hear you, Deacon.”

  “Likewise, Pegleg,” I answered. Kidd didn’t have a prosthetic leg, but his name had required a pirate-oriented callsign. “Have you got contact with any other stations in the AO?”

  “Negative,” he replied. “Believe me, we’ve tried. Once things went sideways with the SINGCARS comms, we tried raising every major FOB in-country. Nothing. There seems to be a complete comms blackout over Slovakia. Satcom’s still down. Hell, the cell network seems to be down. Same with the Internet. It gets worse, too.”

  He paused for a moment. “We can’t get drone coverage on you, Deacon. We’ve sent four over the last eighteen hours, and not one has lasted more than a klick inside the border. It seems to be electronic, not physical. They just fuzz out and we lose the signal.”

  My lips thinned as I stared at the woods around us, the handset at my ear. This was bad, alright. And it was coordinated. There was no way all of that had just happened by accident.

  And with the satcom down, it made me wonder what else was happening in the rest of the world.

  Not that we had the time or the energy to worry overmuch about that. We had a much more immediate set of problems.

  “I’m sorry to say this, Deacon, but you guys are on your own, at least until the skies clear or we get more reinforcements,” Kidd said. “I don’t dare send the birds in blind. We could just lose them as fast as we’ve lost the drones.”

  “Understood,” I answered. He was right. Losing the Vipers and the S-70s wouldn’t help us any. It was probably a minor miracle that they hadn’t been shot down on the way back to Hungary. And we didn’t have the full expeditionary force that Colonel Santiago was building yet, so there were no armored vehicles to come get us, either. “Have you been able to make contact with anyone back home?”

  “Negative,” was the answer. “We’ve tried several HF shots, ever since the satcom went black, but we haven’t gotten any reply yet.” He paused, and though his voice was scratchy and distorted, when he spoke again there was a note of desperate hope in his voice. “Might be solar activity. Might just be that the satcom jamming is localized to this region, so they don’t know that it’s down, and so they haven’t gotten the HF up.”

  Kidd didn’t really believe that, any more than I did. The Triarii wouldn’t have let two days’ worth of comm windows slip by without trying secondary or tertiary comms. Something big was up, bigger than just a sneak attack on FOB Keystone.

  “Copy all,” was all I said, though. We had a limited time window, and while we were in a reasonably secure position for the moment, pointless wrangling over the radio wasn’t going to do anyone any good. And the longer we kept transmitting, even if the enemy couldn’t listen in, the more likely it became that they were going to spot the fact that somebody was transmitting.

  Besides, there wasn’t anything more that Kidd could do for us. Like he’d said, we were on our own.


  While I kept my composure and maintained my bearing, my blood was running cold and my stomach was doing flip-flops. The realization that we were alone, unsupported and surrounded, with nothing more than the supplies in our rucksacks, which would last about another day, wasn’t a good one. I was having to mentally focus on keeping the dread down while it was still dread, and not full-blown panic.

  We’d find a way out of this. We had to. The alternative was to lie down and die. And the Triarii don’t select for men who are likely to just lie down and die. The Grex Luporum teams even less so.

  “We’ll figure out our next move and keep you advised,” I said. “That way, if we don’t make it out, at least somebody knows what happened to us.” Someone else might have thought the sentiment ghoulish, but Kidd was a veteran. He was relatively new to the Triarii, but he’d been on the ground in the Fourth Balkan War. Between the Kosovars, the Croats, and the Serbs all trying to exterminate each other, along with anyone who tried to get between them, he’d seen some shit.

  “We’ll be here,” he answered. “I wish there was more that we could do. Stay alive.”

  “We’ll try,” I said. “Otherwise, we’ll take a lot of ‘em with us. Golf Lima Ten, out.”

  I handed Greg the handset. “That sounded cheerful,” he observed.

  “We’re cut off,” I told him. I wouldn’t sugarcoat things for my team, and they wouldn’t expect me to. “No drone support, no air support for the time being. Jamming, or some such.”

  Greg nodded. His camouflage paint had been worn off to the point that it was mainly just darkening the lines on his face, and his fiery red mustache was showing through quite brightly. He stroked it momentarily as he looked around at the surrounding woods, which probably had something to do with why there wasn’t much paint left in it.

  “Well, at least it’s pretty country,” he said. “It could be Africa or Syria.”

  “It is way too early for your cheerfulness, Greg,” I said, shaking my head as I got to my feet and turned toward Killian’s Powell. “Especially under these circumstances.”

  “It’s not early,” Greg pointed out with a grin as I started walking away. “It’s getting late; it’s almost sunset.”

  I flipped him off without turning back.

  I felt the Army soldiers’ eyes on me as I walked toward the armored vehicle. Most of them turned back front as I looked at them; some of them had probably heard the confrontation earlier. The rest just didn’t want to look me in the eye.

  Some warriors.

  I knew that I was probably being unfair; the Army didn’t encourage the kind of warrior spirit that the Triarii did, but there had to be some meat-eaters in that crew. There always were. It was just that in that kind of outfit, they tended to be the low-ranking ones who were always in trouble.

  Reaching the M5, I stepped to the open hatch and stuck my head in. “Killian?”

  He was awake, sitting up on one of the four seats in the back. That kind of space was why the Army had kept the Stryker in service; the Powell just didn’t have the troop-carrying capacity, and it was way too expensive to field in sufficient numbers to make up for it. “You’re up,” he observed.

  “Not that I’m enjoying it, but it was past time,” I replied. I still hurt everywhere, and my eyes were gritty. I didn’t expect that to change anytime soon. “We need to figure out our next move.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “About that. Have you guys been picking up anything on the open comms?”

  I shook my head. “Not that I’ve heard. Bradshaw would have told me if his comm guys had heard anything during the day.”

  He nodded. “No surprise.” He pointed, indicating the vehicle he was sitting in. “We’ve got bigger amps than you do.” He looked down at the handset in his hand. “I’d invite you to listen, but we don’t have recording equipment, and there hasn’t been anything for the last hour. But there’s been something, real faint. It sounds like it might be somebody back at Keystone. There might be survivors.”

  “Or it might be a trap,” I answered. “Whoever knocked out Keystone is clearly sophisticated enough that they can play all sorts of electronic games.”

  “Even so,” he said, “we need to be sure. I sure don’t want to leave somebody back there to die.”

  “You didn’t see what was left,” I told him. “The whole base was on fire. And it looked like somebody blew the hell out of it beforehand.”

  “Maybe,” he answered. He wasn’t quite looking me in the eye. It was a little off-putting, but he was arguing with someone he didn’t know about going back into a hellscape that he hadn’t seen. He was nervous about it. “But there were some pretty sturdy bunkers in there. Somebody might have holed up and survived.”

  I thought about it. On the one hand, it was a stupid risk. On the other hand, I had to agree with him. If we could get anybody else out, and didn’t, I knew I was going to have a hard time with it later on.

  “You know what that’s going to mean driving into?” I asked him. “Those two Tigers were only the air component. There were tanks, IFVs, and infantry on the road, overwatching the ruins. I doubt they’ve pulled off, especially after the birds traded fire with us last night.”

  He looked down at his hands. “That’s assuming that what happened wasn’t a friendly-fire incident. I know I was pretty rattled when you told me that the FOB was gone. Maybe the pilots were, too. Shot too fast, before they’d IDed us.”

  “You really think that?” I asked. I sure didn’t. There were too many bad things lining up.

  That time, he really did look me in the eye. “What else am I supposed to think?” he asked. “That the EDC decided to declare war on the US? They’re our allies, for fuck’s sake. We came here at their request. Why would they do something like that?”

  “After Slovenský Grob?” I asked. “You figure it out.”

  “That was one incident,” he protested.

  “One incident that had you on lockdown for over a month, and that created more political trouble than the Slovak uprising did in the first place,” I pointed out. I sighed. I’d probably seen a lot more intel than Killian had, particularly lately. I hated to think about what kind of bullshit was being spun for the troops’ consumption in their weekly briefs, presuming that they were even getting weekly briefs. I’d seen enough during my own Active Duty days.

  “You may not have seen it,” I said, “but the EDC’s getting fucking desperate. Especially within the last year. The unrest in France and Germany’s getting worse, and with the pushback they’re getting from Eastern Europe, they know that they’re screwed. The money’s running out, and control’s slipping through their fingers. What do you think desperate people are going to do when an ‘ally’ starts standing up to them? Especially one that they’ve been sniping back and forth with, politically and economically, for the last decade?”

  Besides which, I’d seen enough of the European Defense Council’s rhetoric to know a pack of utopian sociopaths when I heard it. There was no doubt in my mind that those soft-clothed bastards wouldn’t hesitate to order thousands of people killed.

  “It’s crazy,” he protested.

  “What about the world today isn’t?” I asked rhetorically. A shooting war in the Pacific, Europe coming apart at the seams, the Shi’a about to invade Saudi Arabia to crush the Sunni once and for all, Central Asia on the ragged edge of a nuclear holocaust…

  The US in the middle of a civil war that its own government didn’t want to admit was even happening.

  There was a long silence after that. The radio squawk box near his shoulder hissed and popped, but there was nothing like regular radio traffic on it. He rubbed a palm against his forehead, looking down at the decking between his boots.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, finally. “If there’s anyone still alive back there, we’ve got to help them. They’re Americans.” He looked up at me. “I guess I’m hoping that still means something to you.”

  “Why the hell do you think I’m here in
the first place?” I asked. “Your command was sitting on its hands while an American was being held hostage.”

  I blew out a sigh. This was going to suck. “Hold this position,” I said. “My team has a lot better chance of getting in there undetected and looking around than your guys do. You roll up in these gigantic turtles, and you’re going to be in a firefight. We might be able to sneak in and sneak back out.” We’d certainly practiced it enough. Infiltration was a key Grex Luporum skillset, and it was one that we honed in all sorts of situations, usually against OPFOR role-players who were other GL operators.

  But Killian shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m willing to concede that you guys are probably better for going in; I still don’t know exactly who you are, but you’re clearly some kind of SOF types. Or you were.” His tone made it clear that he had his suspicions as to who we were, but he wasn’t going to voice them under the circumstances. He didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. “But if we stay here, we’re not going to be able to support you if something does go pear-shaped.” He pulled up an electronic map on a screen that was mounted on a rotating armature attached to the front bulkhead. “We’ll move up to here,” he said, indicating another clearing, about a klick away from where we’d taken contact from the Tigers. “That way, we’re within shouting distance if you end up in trouble that you need some extra firepower to get out of.” He slapped the overhead with a gloved hand, indicating the 50mm above us.

  He looked me in the eye, and there was some steel in his gaze. “They’re our people, too,” he said. “We’re not going to sit back here on our hands and let you do all the heavy lifting.”

  I nodded. As long as they stayed out of the way. This was going to be tricky enough as it was. But I wasn’t going to turn down support, given our situation.

  Thomas Paine once said, “If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.” I held out my hand and he shook it.