1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  Jambo looked different in the light of day. Well, in the light of the interior lamps. The TOC didn’t have windows or a skylight or any break in its concrete and sandbags that would let fragments and bullets through. Without the helmet and the night vision goggles, I could see that his hair was shaggy beyond regulation, and the combination of the hair, the mustache and the clothes was about to give Master Gunnery Sgt. Lopez an apoplectic fit. He left the man with us, not saying a word, but the deep scowl on his face telling his story.

  Molina was watching Jambo intently, as if she expected him to break into song and dance or a stand-up routine. Maybe she was just bored.

  “Nice to see you in your native environment, Andy.” Jambo said, nodding to me. “Hope you fellas made it home all right last night. Those old Strykers looked like they’d seen better days. Like in Iraq or Afghanistan, maybe.”

  “Our Strykers aren’t as likely to break down as those Land Rovers,” I returned the jab. “You guys have a Triple-A membership to go with them?”

  “You take what you can get.” He shrugged. “Which brings me to why I’m here.” He met Glenn’s eyes, the good-natured amusement fading away. “I’m going to need to borrow your boy here for a couple days. And his platoon.”

  “Absolutely not,” Glenn snapped. “This COP runs more patrols and takes more incoming fire than any other in the city.” He said that as if he was proud of it. “There’s no way we can spare a whole platoon. Not for two days, not for two hours.”

  Well, he might have been exaggerating there, but he was standing up for us, so I didn’t correct him.

  “Sorry to insist, Captain,” Jambo said, “but I think if you’ll have your RTO there call battalion, you’ll find the decision has already been made.”

  Glenn’s jaw clenched, shoulders hunching like he was about to blitz the quarterback.

  “Molina,” he said, emphasizing each syllable, “get me Battalion. Now.”

  “Who at Battalion, sir?” she asked, retrieving a handset, preparing to punch in a code.

  “Battalion Actual, Lance Corporal.”

  Molina’s eyebrow went up. That meant that Glenn wanted to speak to Lt. Colonel Masterson personally.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is a nice little place you guys have here,” Jambo said as Molina put through the call. “Good location, good sightlines, well-defended.”

  “Two-car garage,” I elaborated, “screened-in pool. Our realtor is having an open house next Tuesday.”

  “I have Uniform One-One Actual, sir,” Molina reported, holding the handset out to Glenn.

  “Sir, this is Captain Glenn,” he said. It was a secure line, so there wasn’t any need for call-signs or oblique references. “I have a man named James Bowie here who’s asking….”

  Glenn trailed off, eyes narrowing at the reply buzzing in the handset.

  “Yes, sir, but—” he tried to break in, but snapped his mouth shut sharply. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

  Yessir, yessir, three bags full.

  Glenn handed the handset back to Molina, his mouth pursed like he’d tasted something sour.

  “I have been instructed by Colonel Masterson to give full cooperation and support to Master Sergeant Bowie and his team.” He bit down on the man’s rank, as if it were a special insult to be ordered around by an NCO, particularly an Army NCO. “So, Andy, I guess you’re going with him, whoever and whatever he is.”

  “I’m with Combat Application Group,” Jambo told him, his expression deadly serious, as if he’d shared some dreaded state secret with Glenn that could get them both killed.

  “You mean Delta Force,” Glenn said.

  Jambo laughed. “No one calls it that anymore. Except bad movies. First Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta, if you’re feeling long winded.”

  “Tell me something, Master Sergeant. Bowie, why the hell are you picking on us?” Glenn waved around demonstratively. “Don’t you and your boys usually grab a handful of Rangers when you decide you need backup?”

  “We do.” Jambo leaned against the sand table with casual disrespect. “But the Ranger battalion rotated out and you Marines rotated in and this is time-sensitive. And just plain sensitive. I don’t have time to fly in a couple platoons of Rangers from the states, so you’re it.”

  Glenn sighed, as if unsatisfied with the explanation but knowing it was the best he was going to get.

  “And as for why I picked Lt. Andy here,” Jambo went on, “well, he demonstrated qualities last night that I appreciate in a soldier…or a Marine. And I’d rather have someone I can count on to have my back, whether they eat crayons in their off time or not.”

  “What’s the op?” Glenn demanded.

  “Compartmentalized.” Jambo shook his head. “Need to know.”

  “Well, I fucking need to know, since it’s my platoon going on it!”

  Jambo stood, arms folded across his chest.

  “Do we need to get Colonel Masterson back on the horn so he can repeat his orders, Captain?”

  I’d been silent the whole time, letting Glenn do his thing because I had the gut feeling this was going to happen and I didn’t want to fuck things up with either the captain or this guy Jambo. Because I found it all intriguing for some reason I couldn’t have put into words. Yeah, it could be dangerous as hell, but this was fucking Delta Force, and if it wasn’t Chuck Norris and motorcycles with rear-firing rocket launchers, it was still Shughart and Gordon laying their lives down and hunting HVTs in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a whole bunch of other shit that I would have given my left nut to have been a part of.

  But now it seemed like Glenn needed rescuing and the whole thing was academic. I was going and there was nothing he could do about it, nothing I wanted him to do about it.

  “Should we load up the Strykers?” I asked Jambo. Glenn offered me a glare but said nothing.

  “No Strykers, no Humvees, no MRAPs. Prepare for dismounted operations, though we will have vehicles available.”

  “Be fucking careful, Andy,” Glenn advised me, grabbing my tactical vest to get my attention. “Just because these cowboys think they can pull off any mission doesn’t mean they won’t leave you and your men hanging out to dry.”

  Jambo smiled thinly at him.

  “Sorry, you must be thinking of the SEALs.” He motioned toward me. “Come on.”

  I shifted my 27 around from back to front, pulled my helmet back on and followed him out of the TOC and into the glare of the mid-morning sun. I’d showered not that long ago, but sweat trickled down my back and beaded on my forehead just a few steps into the brisk walk across the outpost. Dirt-filled HESCO barriers formed the walls and sandbags were packed against every interior surface, adding layers of cheap armor against mortars and rockets.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Jambo, struggling to keep up. The man had long, quick strides like some of the avid backcountry hikers I’d gone backpacking with during my summer breaks from college.

  “Your platoon bay.” His arms were resting on his M68, hanging off his neck and chest by a patrol sling. “Gonna get your Marines geared up for this operation. Make sure they bring enough food and extra batteries for three days.” He shrugged. “It’s your call, but I might tell them four, just to be sure everyone actually brings enough and doesn’t try to get by with the lightest weight they have to carry.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “There are a few who try to pull that shit, but Gunny Moore straightens their shit out. I have him check the loadout whenever we go on patrol.”

  He squinted at me from under the brim of his black boonie hat. “What’s your normal ammo loadout?”

  “Minimum is 310 rounds per,” I said. “Seven loaded mags, five boxes of ammo in stripper clips.”

  “Leave the boxes, load up another five mags each. More if they can find a place to stick it. Don’t worry about humping it, we’ll have motorized transport.”

  I stopped, and I thought for a second he would keep going without me, but he only took
another two steps before he turned, hands raised in a “what?” gesture.

  “Can you tell me where we’re going?” I asked. “Now that we’re out of the TOC, can you tell me what the mission is?”

  He chuckled, and I didn’t know the man, but I thought I detected embarrassment behind it.

  “The truth is, Andy,” he said, leaning in as if it was our secret, “I don’t even know yet. But I know we’re going to see who’s going to give us the details of this mission, and the who and the where make it need to know. And fucking dangerous.” He grinned and slapped me on the arm, heading back off to the other end of the COP, where my platoon barracks were. “That’s why I’m bringing you along. Come on,” he urged. “We have to be at the airfield in two hours.”

  I tried to smile back, tried to act like the badass I wanted him to think I was, but something tightened in my gut. That was the problem with being a badass and doing badass things, of course. They had the very real possibility of getting you killed.

  Chapter Six

  If there was one aphorism which summed up the total of military existence from the first armies thousands of years ago right up through to the first half of the Twenty-First Century, it was “hurry up and wait.”

  The shuttles, I’d been told, were to leave in three hours. We’d shown up at the landing field with an hour to spare and found Brooks and her Rangers already lined up at their shuttles, waiting on the small, robot forklifts to finish loading ammo and supplies in through the belly ramp before they could board, and the flight crews nowhere to be found. We walked past them and I tried to hide the “told you so” smirk wanting to fight its way out. The rest of the team didn’t bother, some of them actually laughing and pointing.

  We’d been standing around a half an hour by the time the Space Force passengers showed up, just life’s little way of reinforcing its inherent irony.

  “Hey Andy,” Julie Nieves said, stepping around the rest of the security team to trace a line across the shoulder of my armor. “Almost didn’t see you in that robot-man suit.”

  Something electric crackled across my skin even though I couldn’t feel her finger. I hadn’t seen her in a few weeks and until that very instant, I hadn’t realized that I’d missed being around her. Julie and I were of an age, though she wore it better than I did. I wasn’t sure if the Helta anti-aging treatments had already done their work with her or if it was natural.

  “Hey,” I replied, never sure whether or not to call her by her name or her rank, since she was my superior officer by a rank, a Space Force light colonel. “You get any time off before they dragged you back into this?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, her smile a bit wistful. “I spent five whole days with Traci on the beach at Kauai before the call came through. Goddamn that girl has gotten big.”

  “Tell me about it,” I commiserated. “Zack is going to be taller than me soon. He’s already two shoe sizes past me. Kid can barely walk without tripping over those flippers.” I gestured at the shuttle. “I don’t suppose you’re part of the flight crew for this thing, are you?”

  “Sadly, no,” she sighed, her shoulders sagging. “I’ve had to resign myself to being the Helm officer of the Jambo and leaving flying shuttles and other fun stuff like that to Captain Lee and the rest of the flight crews.”

  “Is that a comedown for a former Navy fighter jock?” I wondered. The tone was teasing, but the question was serious. Most fighter pilots I’d known considered it the end of their career if they got slipped over to flying transport planes.

  “At first, maybe,” Julie admitted. “But then someone pointed out that I was the first ever human to pilot a starship, which was pretty damned cool.”

  “And a woman,” I added. She smiled.

  “Thank you for noticing.”

  “It’s so weird being the first to do everything,” I mused, trying to ignore the remark, afraid I was misinterpreting it. She could have just been trying to be snarky. “First humans to meet aliens, first humans to travel to another star system, first humans to pilot a starship, first humans to fight an interstellar war….”

  Julie had a look like the cat that ate the canary, like I’d delivered her the perfect straight line.

  “What, Andy?” she asked. “You’re telling me you’ve never been the first to do…anything before?”

  It was warm in the armor out in the sun, but not warm enough for my face to be this hot.

  “Umm, not since high school,” I said, trying to sound as if the humor didn’t bother me. And normally, it wouldn’t have. I was a Marine and bawdy didn’t begin to describe the sort of joking around we usually did. Hell, disgusting didn’t do it justice. But for some reason, when I was with Julie, I felt…intimidated? Maybe?

  “I see nothing’s changed even in this new space age,” Pops said from behind me, unexpected enough that I nearly jumped, which might have taken me a few yards off the ground in my armor. “The Marines are still trying to get a ride from the Navy.”

  Now my face wasn’t warm, it was on fire and I turned on Pops with my eyebrows so far up, they drove my hairline back into my scalp.

  “You know, I think I might be interested in trying an experiment on this mission,” I said with a growl that was only half-joking. “I’m curious how high a rank an officer has to be in order to tell a Delta CWO to drop to the front leaning rest position and push Idaho into Montana.”

  “Sir,” Pops said, frowning as if deep in thought, “I would say the result of the experiment would probably be that whatever you rank you have, it would require the one just above that.”

  “Yeah?” I tried to stay mad at Pops, but it was a waste of time, not to mention impossible. “Well, what if it was the President? Who’s the next rank up from him?”

  “My mother,” he answered, not missing a beat. “If you can get her to order me to do pushups, I will pound my face against the ground all damned day.”

  Julie was laughing now, which gave me no choice but to join in.

  ***

  Put the fucking armor on, take the fucking armor off. It was the story of my life. The racks in the ship’s armory were basically dressing dummies, each bit of the Svalinn stored on the corresponding part of the metal-reinforced plastic in human form. Its arms were outstretched like a crucifix, the Catholic kind with Jesus still on it. I resisted an urge to cross myself when I settled the helmet down on the thing’s head.

  “How the hell is it you guys always get into the armory first?” Dani Brooks asked, pulling her helmet off and shaking out her neck-length blond hair to free a stray strand from her neck yoke.

  Her headquarters platoon was filing into the compartment behind her, chattering like little kids. And some of them weren’t that much older than my son. I was suddenly glad the Delta team was made up of older men, senior NCOs and warrants who wouldn’t look to me like I was God handing down tactical truth from on high. I remembered what that was like, and what it was like when one of them died.

  “There’s only twelve of us,” I reminded Brooks, waving at the number of Rangers just in her headquarters platoon. “We don’t have to drag around four platoons’ worth of troops everywhere we go. And that’s when you’re travelling light.”

  Theoretically, Brooks commanded a battalion, but in practice, there weren’t yet enough Svalinn suits or M900 KE rifles to outfit a whole battalion and have spares for breakage. She had two companies, and this time, we’d had to leave most of one of them behind because of injuries and suit damage during the last mission.

  “What do you think about this operation?” I asked her, pulling the security cage down over the team’s suits and weapons.

  “I think it’s a half-assed, spur-of-the-moment idea that only a Zoomie would have come up with.” She was referring to Olivera, though she was careful not to say it. “We have very little intelligence, despite the drone recordings Joon-Pah seems so proud of.” She snorted, working loose the connections of her torso armor. “The Helta think that remembering to do some basi
c recon makes them fucking ursine versions of James Bond. All we know is that they built a military base outside the city. We have no idea how many soldiers they’re housing in it. Waypoint has a single city and a few outposts, but they evacuated a lot of the population when it became clear the Tevynians were invading. How many soldiers do the Tevynians think they need to control a few thousand Helta? A hundred? A thousand? One for every one of them? Or are they treating the planet like a staging area, bringing troops in to store them and their weapons and gear where they can pick them up along the way to somewhere else?”

  “Good questions,” I admitted.

  “That we don’t have the answer to, and won’t until we get boots on the ground at Waypoint.” She shook her head. “It’s nebulous bullshit like this that got so many Rangers killed during the joint campaigns against the Sinaloa Cartel. We moved on incomplete and sometimes just downright wrong intelligence from the Mexican government and walked into one ambush after another.” Her voice was calm, even, but when she lowered her torso armor onto the rack, she slammed it down hard enough to shake the mounts and drew stares from the other soldiers in the compartment.

  “Sorry,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Didn’t mean to hit a nerve.”

  She shrugged, as if it hadn’t meant anything. I didn’t know her that well, hadn’t spent any time with her off duty, but I didn’t believe that for a second.

  “Mexico has been a clusterfuck for most of the last forty years. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the cartels had their hooks that deep into the military, but I was younger and more naïve.” Brooks held her helmet in front of her like Yorick’s skull for a beat before she set it down on the frame. “Mind you,” she went on, meeting my eyes, her expression still calm, “I don’t blame anyone in particular. We were in a no-win situation. If we’d done nothing, the cartel would have kept up their terrorist attacks until law enforcement was too busy dealing with them to worry about interdicting drug shipments. If we’d done it without cooperating with the Mexican government, we’d have had to go to war with Mexico on top of going to war with the cartel.”