Escalation

by Peter Nealen

  I knew Killian might get it, but expected that some of his platoon would grumble. They were mech infantry. They weren’t hard-wired to try to stay in the shadows, the way we Grex Luporum guys were. They had armor and firepower, we had stealth. But with no comms and no air support, presumably badly outnumbered, they had to try to stay stealthy, too.

  “Look at these little pussies,” Phil muttered.

  I followed his gaze, frowning. He was supposed to be down on rest plan, but he was looking down at the Army infantry gathered around the stuck Stryker. Only about half of them seemed to really be doing much of anything, and even as I watched, Killian intervened, tersely bitching a bunch of them out and scattering them to security positions or giving them other tasks to do. But a lot of them moved slowly, looking more than a little mopey as they did.

  “Probably missing their pizza and Green Bean coffee,” Phil went on. “Saturday movie night at the MWR.”

  Reflexively, I felt the same way. But as I watched them, I couldn’t help but think about it. Sure, the modern military was soft. It had been when I’d been in; I hadn’t even realized just how soft until I’d gotten into Brian Hartrick’s clutches at Grex Luporum selection. Being stuck out in the woods without the amenities that had been a part of just about every US military base for the last twenty years had to be a shock.

  But there was a deeper shock that I thought some of these kids were still processing. We’d been on the move, escaping and evading, for days now, but the reality still had to be sinking in that most of their friends and comrades, people that they’d deployed with, trained with, even patrolled with, were dead. This had to be the biggest single US loss of life in a decade or more. Possibly longer.

  Of course they were traumatized. They’d survived a near-total team-kill. And it was going to get to some of them, more than it would to us, because they simply hadn’t been prepared for it.

  As nasty as things had gotten in the last few years, a lot of people could still go through life without thinking much about death. It just wasn’t something that Americans liked to think about happening to them or theirs. Hadn’t been for a long time. Having that many friends snuffed out…it was a wonder that most of them were still functioning at all.

  “If everybody in Bradshaw’s section were dead, you wouldn’t be doing too good, yourself,” I pointed out. “Quit being an asshole.”

  “I’m not being an asshole,” Phil replied. “We can’t afford to mope around like they’re doing. I’m sorry their friends are dead. I really am,” he protested when David snorted. “But if they don’t want to be dead, too, then they need to quit crying and act like somebody’s got a gun to their heads. Because somebody does.”

  As abrasive as Phil could be, I was afraid that he was right, in this case. It wasn’t pleasant, it wasn’t whatever buzzword the Army was currently using for friendship in place of leadership, but everything that the US military had done to lower standards and soften discipline was working against them. The enemy and the situation didn’t give a damn about feelings. They wanted us dead, and we couldn’t count on the kind of support that had been par for the course for our entire lives.

  “Well, fortunately or unfortunately,” I said, “they’re not your concern, or mine. They’re Killian’s.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” Scott said quietly. I glanced over at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. Scott wasn’t being an ass, either. He was serious. “Killian’s not a bad guy, from what I’ve seen, but he’s not exactly a meat-eater, either. He’s been keeping his head down, trying to get through his tour and move on to the next thing. Why else would he have come to talk to us about the Triarii before the meeting with Warren? He’s still afraid of being the nail that gets hammered down. He’s not going to rock the boat any more than he has to.”

  “He’s got enough sense to keep his people alive, and not let our affiliation get in the way,” I pointed out.

  “I’m not denying he’s got some common sense, Matt,” Scott said. He turned to look at me. “But common sense isn’t everything. Just like motivation’s not everything. He hasn’t got much fire in him. He’s not aggressive. It’s worked to our advantage because he doesn’t want to argue, particularly when he decided that we’re better-trained and better-prepared than he is. Any real meat-eater wouldn’t have been happy about playing second-fiddle to glorified contractors.”

  We were far from contractors, but I got his point. And as I watched Killian, I wondered just how close to the mark he was. Scott could be pretty perceptive, when he got his head out of Meiji Japan.

  There was a reason he’d gotten the callsign “Weeb,” after all.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said. I levered myself to my feet, as much as I really wanted to take a nap. It was going to be a long time before I got another chance. “Phil, shouldn’t you be on rest plan, anyway?”

  “Just some last-minute observations,” Phil said, grinning wickedly.

  “Whatever. Shut up and go to sleep,” I said.

  I walked down toward where Killian was watching the Stryker crew try to get their vehicle freed from its predicament. He was frowning, his helmet shoved back on his head, his rifle slung in front of him.

  “How long, you think?” I asked as I came up to him. He started a little, looking over at me as if he’d just noticed I was there. I realized, especially as I looked into his bleary, bloodshot eyes, that he was probably almost as short on sleep as I was. I was just more used to it.

  He glanced back down at the stuck vehicle. “I don’t know. Could be thirty minutes. Could be seven hours. I’ve seen it go both ways. We might have to hook up the Powell and yank it out.” He glanced at the trees and the lay of the land. “That’s going to be harder than it sounds, too. The terrain being what it is.”

  I nodded. “Probably better to get started on that sooner rather than later,” I said. “We don’t want to be sitting here for the rest of the day. And there sure ain’t any recovery vehicles coming.”

  He ran a hand over his face. “Right,” he said, continuing to stare at the stuck Stryker. “I’ve got to remember that this isn’t a situation we ever really trained for.”

  I didn’t have an answer to that that wouldn’t have sounded like I was chewing him out. I was dead-on-my-feet tired, and when I get tired, what little tact I have goes flying away. Couple that with my “resting mad-dog face” and I’m not the best people-person.

  I looked around. “Where’s Warren?” I asked.

  He glanced toward the Powell. “Still in my vehicle,” he replied. “It’s gotten a little crowded in there.”

  I could imagine. They’d already stuck the survivors from the mobility kill outside Borinka into one of the Strykers, and the other stragglers from Keystone into the other. With the exception of a couple of the Keystone grunts, we were the only ones on foot most of the time. And the Powell had a lot less troop space than the Strykers did.

  “He’s been trying to reach Pathfinder, up at FOB Poole,” he continued. “On the comms every minute.” He stopped himself, but the tone of his voice told me that hearing the repetitive comm calls was getting on his nerves.

  “He needs to knock that off,” I said, glancing overhead reflexively. “We don’t know who’s listening. Or direction-finding.”

  “I’ve tried telling him that,” Killian said tiredly. “That if the bad guys can jam the SINCGARS nets, then they can listen in. He insists that it doesn’t work like that. And that as long as we keep moving, they’re going to have a harder time locating us.”

  He might have been right. I was no expert on comms; I’d avoided doing much of anything beyond the minimum necessary with the radios or other comm gear. Electronics in general are not my forte.

  But I couldn’t help but think that spewing radio transmissions constantly wasn’t a good way to hide. Especially since we didn’t know whether or not the enemy might be listening in. Of course, our personal radios were pretty much dead; Greg still had the long-range HF radio, and enoug
h batteries for a couple more good comm shots, but the rest of them were turned off for the foreseeable future.

  “He hasn’t gotten anything back, has he?” I asked.

  “Not a whisper,” Killian replied grimly. “The question is, are the comms just down, or…”

  “Or did Poole get the same treatment as Keystone?” I finished. He didn’t flinch, not quite. But he clearly didn’t want to hear it out in the open.

  And the fact was, I didn’t know that it had happened. Knowing what I did about our own military, the odds that the EDC had managed to coordinate two such strikes so flawlessly that both bases were reduced at exactly the same time seemed unlikely. However, Keystone had been destroyed days ago. Even if their timing had been off, and Poole had managed to put up some resistance, they’d had time to reduce it. Given the lack of American forces besides us in the Slovak countryside, and the silence on the comms, that seemed more likely. Even if Poole had held, they wouldn’t be able to talk to the major bases in Poland. And if US Mil was having the same issues with Slovak airspace that we were, they wouldn’t know any more about what was happening around Zilina than we did.

  And given the general level of leadership I’d seen even before I’d gotten out of the Marine Corps, the likelihood of a flag officer giving the order to roll across the border without Washington’s say-so were slim to none, and Slim left town.

  I didn’t say any of that. From the look on Killian’s face, he’d already thought most of it.

  “Tell him…” I stopped myself. “Politely and respectfully suggest that, since he hasn’t been able to establish comms by now, he needs to stop trying for a while. We don’t know that the enemy has DF equipment around us, but there are definitely drones up, and if they get too nosy about sources of radio transmissions, we could be in trouble.”

  Killian didn’t look happy about it; I didn’t know what kind of exchanges he’d already had with Warren, but as I was getting to know the man, I was seeing the little indicators that Scott’s assessment was pretty spot on. Despite the fact that he knew I was right, and that Warren hadn’t even really tried to throw his considerable weight around, he didn’t want to confront the man who outranked him. About much of anything. It was a weakness.

  We all have our weaknesses. The problem arises when those weaknesses could potentially get you and yours killed.

  He was sort of hemming and hawing, looking around as if he was searching for something else to talk about rather than go back to his vehicle and tell Warren to get off the net. I was about to just go ahead and tell him, as gently as I could, to get his thumb out and get moving, when one of his soldiers came trotting over from the Powell.

  “Sar’nt?” the young man called softly. Despite the fact that the vehicles were still running, our stealthy flight seemed to be affecting some of the younger hard-chargers, and they were trying to be as low-profile and “tactical” as we were. “I think we’ve been spotted, Sar’nt.”

  That got Killian’s attention. He snapped his head around to face the young Specialist, suddenly all business. “Talk to me,” he said.

  The kid pointed skyward. “A drone went over about five minutes ago,” he said. “It got to the end of the valley, then turned and came back toward us. It’s circling now. It’s at high-altitude, and it’s small; we almost didn’t spot it.”

  I looked up, searching the mostly clear sky. Spotting a high-altitude drone with the naked eye was going to be tough, but I’d done it before.

  There. Sunlight glinted off metal. It was moving slowly, but it was definitely circling, nearing Vyoskà’s peak.

  Something like a chill ran up my spine. I’d developed a finely-tuned sixth sense during my varied career, going back to those interventions in Africa. And it was going gangbusters right at the moment.

  I tore my eyes away from that tiny glint, quickly scanning the rest of the open sky between the trees. I couldn’t see the threat yet, but somehow, I knew it was there. And it would be on top of us before we heard it, more than likely.

  “Killian,” I said, somewhat proud that my tone was low and even. “Get your people off the vehicles. We need to move. Now.”

  Something in the tone of my voice must have told him more than I said. “What?” he asked, looking up.

  “Everyone,” I repeated, letting some steel into my voice. “Grab their kit and their weapons and get moving northeast, minimum five hundred meters. Now.”

  “But…” he still didn’t see it. I grabbed him by his plate carrier.

  “Listen, Killian!” I snapped. “We have minutes, at best. Get your people moving!” I shoved him toward his vehicle, hard, and turned back toward my team. “Scott! Tyler! Victor! Everybody up! Five hundred meters northeast! Go!”

  Tony was already on a knee, his pack on his back, his Mk 48 in his shoulder and the ELCAN sight to his eye, scanning the sky. Tony never said much, which made some people think he was kind of slow, but he was usually quicker on the uptake than I was. Phil was scrambling to get up, Greg was stuffing things back in his ruck, and Jordan was rolling to his feet, shifting his pack onto his back as he went. Reuben was already up, having set himself between a tree and a sapling that he could use to pull himself up without taking his ruck off.

  I moved quickly to Greg’s side, grabbing the balled-up socks that had fallen out when he’d pulled out whatever it was he was stuffing back into his ruck, and jammed them in for him, my rifle pointed at the sky with my other hand. “Let’s go,” I said urgently. He hastily clipped the pack closed and threw it on his back. I hauled him up and shoved him toward where Phil was already pushing along the treeline, heading northeast at a faster clip than we usually adopted on movement.

  If I was right, we needed to get out of the open as fast as humanly possible.

  Bradshaw hadn’t paused to ask questions, but had his section up and moving. When you just get a direction and distance and a command to move that way with a quickness, it communicates something. Usually that hell is on the way.

  Scott and I were the last ones of the team, making sure that everybody else was up and moving, and nothing had been left that might be vital for our survival in the days ahead. Provided there were days ahead, and we didn’t bite the big one in the next few minutes.

  We weren’t quite running when we left the edge of the clearing, but we weren’t far short of that pace. I thought I could already hear the distant roar of jet engines.

  The roar increased in volume, from a far off, barely heard rumble like thunder, to a banshee shriek. “Down!” I screamed, as I threw myself flat, my rucksack trying to fly over my head and bury my face in the leaves and loam beneath me. For a moment, everything went black, my breath muffled by moldy leaves and dirt.

  Then the world seemed to split apart.

  The shock of the bombs hitting actually picked me up off the ground for a split second before slamming me back down again. The overpressure washed over me like a hurricane, before frag, dirt, and the splintered remains of trees started raining down like hail. I tucked my legs under me as much as I could, trying to get as much of my body under my ruck as possible in lieu of actual overhead cover. I couldn’t get low enough. My fatigues and my chest rig were holding me too high off the ground.

  The rain of debris petered out, but I didn’t get up. I couldn’t hear much; the detonation had deadened my hearing. But I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  The Dash Two strike almost seemed muted after the first. It still hurt. Being danger close to a five-hundred-pound bomb going off was going to.

  I stayed down as the pattering cascade of debris slowly decreased to nothing. Dust and black smoke hung in the air between the trees. A lot of them had been stripped of their leaves by the blasts.

  Only after a few minutes had passed without a follow-on strike did I pry myself up off the ground and look around.

  Ugly black smoke billowed over the fiercely-burning Powell. From where I was, I couldn’t see the Strykers clearly, but at least one of them was def
initely burning. The vehicles were gone.

  The vehicles weren’t the only casualties. I could see several soldiers nearby sprawled in unnatural contortions on the forest floor. One had been thrown against a tree by the shockwave, and was bent around it in a way that no human spine was supposed to bend.

  There were other bodies in less wholesome shape.

  “Head count,” I croaked.

  For a moment, I was met with silence. My heart started racing. Had I lost my team?

  “I’m up,” Scott groaned. He levered himself up to one knee, patting himself down for wounds. I started to breathe a little easier. He’d been closer than I had been. Maybe we’d all gotten clear before the bombs fell.

  “Up,” Tony said, in a tone of voice better suited to saying, “Ow.”

  One by one, the rest of the team rogered up. We’d made it. Barely. Reuben had a piece of frag or a chunk of wood stuck in his calf, but it was a relatively superficial wound. He’d be a little bit slower, but he could walk on it. “It just stings,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

  “Bradshaw!” I called, my voice echoing strangely in the woods. “Flat!”

  He came back through the trees, looking a bit better than I felt. “I’m still getting a head count, Matt,” he said. He looked back toward the wreckage of the vehicles. “Was Killian…?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I answered. “My team’s up. That’s about where my SA ends at the moment.”

  “I’ll see if I can find him,” Bradshaw said.

  “Killian!” I barked. It still felt wrong, yelling in such a situation, but we were clearly made if they’d dropped on us. Stealth would have to wait for the moment. I didn’t know what kind of follow up was coming.

  My hearing was still muffled and my ears were ringing. They’d recover with time. Partially.

  “I’m…I’m here,” Killian replied. His shout was more of a croak. I turned toward the sound and spotted him.