Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said. “We need to get started soon; we’ve got a bit of a movement ahead of us, and only so much darkness.”

  There was no way in hell I was going in there in daylight. Fortunately, Killian just nodded his agreement. Then we got down to planning.

  Chapter 10

  We’d split up. The woods between the lay-up site and the target were too thick for the vehicles to negotiate, and the route around was far too long for us to cover it on foot in a timely manner. So, we set the rendezvous, and left in different directions.

  Killian must have pushed, hard. The vehicles were already there when we got closer, and we had to deconflict the linkup carefully. We didn’t dare use the radios too much, not that close to the wreckage that had been FOB Keystone. Once we’d made contact, we slipped inside their perimeter, finding that Killian had set up much the same way as he had before. The vehicles were camouflaged and parked as far under the trees as possible. It wouldn’t hide them entirely from thermal imaging, but it would help.

  Bradshaw met me and Killian by the M5’s back ramp. “We’re getting set in,” he said. “You sure about this, Matt?”

  I nodded, though under the circumstances I wasn’t as sure as I should have been. This was a long shot, and I knew it. So did the rest of the team. Jordan hadn’t been shy about expressing his opinion about it. Nor had Dwight. But I’d stood firm and pointed out that if there really were Americans in there who needed our help, it wasn’t far off the mission we’d entered Slovakia for in the first place. And that, as cut off as we were, every gun helped.

  Jordan was still pissed about it. Dwight had just shaken his head and shrugged. Phil had been quiet, for once. Greg had agreed, if only because it was my idea. He was just agreeable like that. Tony hadn’t said much; neither had Scott. Chris had agreed, because it was the Christian thing to do, not because he liked the idea. David just wanted another chance to get stuck in. He’d joined the Army after reading too many Punisher comics, after all.

  Reuben had had the most to say. “I don’t care,” he said. “It’s a risk, yeah. But Matt’s right. We stuck our necks out coming here, when there was plenty of work Stateside, because an American was in danger. This is no different. If we don’t look out for other Americans, why the fuck did we join the Triarii in the first place?” Reuben was the one of us who was most likely to stick his neck out for his countrymen. He still believed that the American experiment could be salvaged, and that we were going to be instrumental in the salvage operation, through acts just like this.

  I wasn’t sure how many of us still thought that way. There’s only so long you can watch your country tearing itself apart before you start to wonder if you’re just fighting a holding action before the final collapse.

  But as cynical as I’d become, I had still signed on for this mission. All of it.

  “I’m sure,” I told Bradshaw. “We’ll drop rucks and leave them with you. I want to be light as possible for this.” He just nodded.

  “If we get in trouble, we’ll pop a red star cluster,” I said, speaking to both him and Killian. “Don’t leave us hanging for too long, alright?”

  Bradshaw nodded and clapped me on the shoulder. Killian just nodded.

  I turned and headed back to where I’d left the rest of the team, right at the perimeter.

  ***

  I paused in my crawl across the open field to look around and listen.

  It wasn’t an ideal approach, but there wasn’t going to be one. Not going into a FOB. The fields had been harvested the year before, and once the peacekeepers had come in, the farmer had been paid off to leave them fallow around the base, which had sprawled almost as big as Lozorno to the west.

  But there were no shooters in the guard towers now, at least not the ones that were still standing. There might be bodies in the ones that had collapsed.

  The fires seemed to have died down, but smoke still drifted across the fields. It stung the nostrils and threatened to make us cough. It was quiet enough in the country night that that could have been fatal. The sound would have traveled a long way.

  The team was spread out across almost three hundred yards, all of us flat on our bellies, using every bit of micro-terrain we could find to disguise us from the armored vehicles still parked on the highway to the southwest.

  Of course, we hadn’t just crossed the road right in front of them and then gone crawling across and open field. That would have been stupid. We’d worked our way around the northeast side of Jablonovè and then started working our way toward the back wall of the FOB.

  The armored vehicles on the highway weren’t what worried me. It was the drones buzzing around. Fortunately, most of them seemed to be focused on the south side of the highway or closer to Jablonovè. They didn’t seem to have spotted us yet, despite the fact that we were probably standing out as blazing white thermal beacons against the cool dirt.

  Phil had found an old, now dry, irrigation ditch that appeared to lead right up to the T-walls. That was our infiltration route. Getting over the wall was going to be interesting, but it looked like a few of the pre-fabricated concrete sections had been blasted down or smashed by explosions.

  Phil was almost to the wall. My elbows and knees were aching, but fortunately, the fatigues were reinforced in those spots, so I wasn’t too worried about skinning them when the fabric wore through. Our stuff was designed for field work, unlike some of the cammies I’d worn in the Marine Corps, that had disintegrated within a couple of weeks of hard use in the field.

  I was carrying my rifle with my thumb and forefinger wrapped around the front sight, the weapon itself laid over my elbow and shoulder. I’d managed to keep from stabbing the muzzle in the dirt so far, thankfully. Clearing it before going over that wall would have been a bitch.

  Phil got to the base of the T-walls and got up on a knee, his rifle held ready, scanning all around us. I would have given my eyeteeth for a diversion just then, but that would have likely required expending munitions, and we needed to conserve as much of them as possible.

  It took a couple minutes for me to join him. I had to resist the urge to move faster, to turn my careful and measured movement into a frantic scramble to get to the wall and out of that exposed, open ground. Even if the drones were far enough away that they couldn’t quite spot us, if there were foot-mobiles in the woods, rapid movement would attract attention. I knew that much from personal experience, as well as training. I’d shot a would-be jihadi infiltrator once because he’d moved too fast.

  I finally reached Phil, who helped me up with his off hand. My heart was pounding, as hard as I was working to regulate my breathing. Crawling is hard work, and when you add the strain of trying to go unseen for almost half a klick across flat ground, it just gets worse.

  With my own rifle at the ready, crouched against the base of the T-walls, I could take stock. I’d taken my NVGs off on the approach; they were just going to cause problems and point themselves down at the dirt otherwise. Now I pushed my ghillie hood back long enough to pull the skullcap mount over my head before pulling it back up again. The fields lit up in shades of gray and black in front of my eye.

  Greg was close behind me, and the rest were following. Our thermal signatures weren’t quite as bad as I’d feared, though if anyone with thermal imagers was looking at the field closely, they’d see us. I scanned the woods beyond, where we’d come out, and saw only the dark under the trees.

  Movement above the trees caught my eye, a spark in the NVGs drifting north above the forest. A drone. It was too small to be anything else. I stayed perfectly still for a moment, resisting the urge to hiss at Greg to freeze. I’d have to make too much noise.

  But the drone kept on drifting north, without altering its course to take a closer look at us. If its operator had seen us at all, he’d probably dismissed us as local livestock.

  I hoped so. We were banking hard on the bad guys thinking that nobody would be stupid enough or crazy enough to come back here a
fter what had happened the night before.

  Greg caught up and struggled to his knee, taking up his own position along the wall. We started spreading out, even as Phil moved toward the nearest gap, where a T-wall had halfway tipped over, held in place by the steel cables that were strung along the inside of the barrier.

  In some ways, it was risky; a series of heat sources lined up against the concrete T-walls might stand out more. But the barrier itself would provide some shelter from observation from other angles, so getting close to it made sense. Plus, while the fires had died down, there were still enough smoldering structures inside that there was a pretty decent thermal bloom inside, that might further mask our presence.

  There weren’t any perfect solutions. There never were. Just “good enough” solutions that hopefully didn’t get people killed.

  Before Scott brought up the rear, Phil was already moving, standing up under the gap opened by the tipped concrete barrier, while Dwight moved past him to cover the flank with his Mk 48. Reuben started to crouch down to give him a boost, while I grabbed Chris and moved over to the other side of the cracked T-wall to do the same. I wanted as many guns pointed inward on the breach as possible when we crossed the threshold.

  Chris squatted down with his back to the upright T-wall, even as it shifted slightly. It’d had clearly been damaged by the blast that had tipped over its neighbor. I just hoped that it didn’t decide to collapse on Chris and me.

  Putting my boot on his thigh, I shifted my OBR to my right hand, grabbing the edge of the canted T-wall with my left, and hoisted myself up, dropping the rifle level as I came into the rough, V-shaped notch left between the sections of cement. I quickly scanned the open ground on the inside of the wall, even as Phil appeared across from me, similarly clearing the area to my right that I couldn’t see.

  Nothing. The “cans,” prefab trailer living quarters, right in front of me were smashed wreckage, one of them still smoking over a day after its destruction. Smoke was still drifting, though not nearly as thickly as the night before. Everything else was still.

  I glanced across at Phil, and nodded. He returned the gesture. Our entry was clear.

  So far.

  I took the lead, putting all my weight on the one foot that was braced on Chris’s leg. He grunted a little, and I felt him sag, but I wedged my other foot in the notch above, barely reaching it and struggling with my balance for a second. I wasn’t as flexible as I used to be.

  Dwight was really going to have a hell of a time getting through. We might have to leave him and a couple others outside, on exterior security.

  I got my weight on that foot, and promptly felt a pang of pain as my boot was squeezed down into the notch. No surprise, really. The job isn’t supposed to be comfortable. I’d gotten somewhat inured to pain as a Marine machinegunner.

  With another heave, I got myself up, having to let my rifle dangle on its sling as I grabbed the cable and the concrete, then swung a foot over the cable. If I was hoping for a graceful, silent entry, I was doomed to disappoint myself, because as soon as I got a foot over the cable, it started to slip on the pocked, dusty concrete. I started to fall toward the inside, catching myself on the cable with one hand and my other foot, even as my rifle swung and hit the inside of the concrete wall with a loud clack.

  I hung there for a second, feeling exposed as all hell, then got my boot over the cable and deliberately dropped the rest of the way.

  I almost ate shit at the bottom, especially when one boot slid off the bottom of the T-wall. Only a fast movement got my weight over my feet as I bent my knees to absorb the shock, quickly snatching up my rifle before I buried the muzzle in the dirt.

  I heard Phil land next to me, but I was getting my weapon up and scanning, my heart pounding in my throat. That had been sloppy and noisy, and if there were any bad guys—or simply any shell-shocked, trigger-happy survivors, then the next few seconds could go very badly, very quickly.

  But the open ground was just as empty as it had been a moment before.

  Phil and I moved away from the breach, leaving room for the others to cross. As Chris hit the ground and came up beside me, I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed, indicating he should cover the sector I’d been watching, then moved back to the breach as David appeared in the V.

  “Tell Dwight, Tony, Scott, and Reuben to stay outside on security,” I whispered, as he paused in the notch, his boot wedged into the gap and a gloved hand on either concrete wall. He nodded, then turned back and whispered. Then he resumed his passage through the gap, making it look a lot easier and smoother than I’d managed.

  I told myself that David was small. Of course it was easier for him.

  It took a few minutes to get all of us over the wall. Getting out wasn’t going to be fun. We might have to find a different breach point, though that was going to depend on the enemy. The place we’d picked seemed to be the least likely point to be observed.

  Finally, everyone who was coming was on the ground, on a knee, scanning the hellscape around us.

  The base had been obliterated. There were smashed, smoldering prefabs and the ash heaps that had been tents everywhere. Furthermore, there were craters. A lot of craters.

  It looked like it had been hammered by artillery or massed airstrikes. It sure as hell didn’t look like the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

  The smoke that still drifted stung the throat and threatened to make me cough. It stank of burnt plastic, rubber, and worse.

  I switched my radio to the open channel that Killian had told me he’d heard the faint transmissions on. “Any station this net, this is Golf Lima Ten Six. We are Americans. If you are alive and need help, send your position.”

  There was a long silence. My guess was that if there really was anyone left in that desolate ruin, they weren’t going to be quick to trust an unknown voice on the radio.

  On the other hand, they had been the ones transmitting in the clear. Which meant that they’d already spotlighted themselves to anyone listening. They might even already be dead or captured.

  Captured by whom was the question. I still doubted that this was the Slovak Nationalists’ doing, but without more information, we had to assume that everyone was the enemy.

  “This is Chief Warrant Officer Warren,” a hoarse voice said over the radio. “We are in a bunker, in hiding. Is the base clear?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I replied. “But there does not appear to be any movement. Where is the bunker?”

  “We’re on the north side, next to the TOC,” Warren replied. “Come get us.”

  “We are on our way,” I said, resisting the urge to tell him to be a little more specific and a little more circumspect at the same time. He’d made no effort to verify that we were who I said we were. “Are there any other identifiers for which bunker you’re in?”

  He didn’t respond. Great. That was going to make deconfliction to link up that much more difficult.

  I moved up and tapped Phil. We were at the northeastern corner of the base, which meant that we didn’t have far to go. Of course, “the north side” wasn’t exactly all that specific, and none of us really knew where the FOB’s Tactical Operations Center had been located. Which meant we were going to have to search every bunker we came to until we found Warren and whoever was with him.

  We moved out, stepping carefully, eyes and weapons up and staying as alert as possible on what sleep and food we’d had. This kind of thing was why Hartrick had made Selection as brutally harsh as he had. We had to be able to push through when every faculty just wanted to shut down.

  Phil slowed as he neared the corner of one of the trailers. The can had a massive hole blown out the side of it.

  I stepped up next to him and saw why he’d stopped. There was a bunker right there, between the rows of trailers. It wasn’t complicated; these things never were. Little more than a U-shaped chunk of reinforced concrete, set upside-down, with smaller versions of the T-wall barriers at either end.

  T
here were bodies lying on the ground just outside. And from the way they were lying there, they’d been leaving the bunker when they’d died.

  Rifles up, we moved toward the bodies, as the rest spread out and took cover at the corners of the surrounding trailers, covering down every approach. I came up to the nearest corpse and looked down at it, a cold fury starting to build in my chest, a rage that hadn’t been able to really come to the fore under the weight of fatigue before.

  There were two young men and a woman. One of the men was in uniform; the other man and the woman were in PT gear. They hadn’t been killed by the artillery. They’d been shot, multiple times. All three had head wounds that looked, even through the blurry gray tones of my NVGs, like they’d been administered at close range.

  Someone had shot these soldiers, then walked up and made damned good and sure they were dead. Presumably, standing close enough that he’d gotten blood on his boots.

  I glanced down the lane. More craters and wrecked trailers stood out in the faint, drifting smoke. And there were more bodies on the ground, that hadn’t been in the open when the bombardment that I was sure had flattened the base had happened.

  “Warren!” I hissed toward the bunker. I doubted he was in there. Whoever had murdered those kids on the ground would have made sure that there wasn’t anyone left inside. Silence met my call, and I risked sticking my head and weapon inside.

  The bunker was empty.

  Despite the sickened hate churning in my guts, I got Phil’s attention and pointed along the outer wall. We needed to move.

  He glanced down at the bodies again. Phil was a smartass and a shit-talker, but even he didn’t have anything to say. He just shook his head in disgust and got up, turning back toward the perimeter wall. I thought I saw his hands clenching on his rifle as he did so.

  The next row looked much the same. The only difference was the brass piled at the corner of one of the trailers, and the fact that there weren’t any bodies outside the nearest bunker.