Peter Nealen's Blog, page 15

Fortress Doctrine Chapter 2

The fact that the Triarii trucks were running blacked out probably saved their lives.

Most of the stream of fire went high, bullets cracking over Bishop’s head, though a few smacked into the hood, front fender, and frame with earsplitting bangs. Two rounds punched through the windshield, spiderwebbing the glass.

A hammer blow hit Reisinger in the helmet. He almost lost control of the vehicle as his head was smacked partway around, throwing his NVGs off. “Fuck!”

The bellow was the only way Hank knew that his driver was still alive. He’d heard the impact and seen Reisinger’s head jerk under the blow, but unless they dealt with that belt-fed, they were all dead.

Bishop hadn’t waited, but immediately opened fire. The Mk 48 roared for a second, before Reisinger jerked the wheel as he got hit, throwing Bishop’s aim off. Shell casings rattled off the truck’s roof as it swerved hard to the right.

Hank reached out to grab the wheel, more afraid of a rollover than getting shot. But Reisinger was still holding onto the wheel, and rapidly getting control again, though he was still swerving toward the right-hand shoulder. He was clearly not happy. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!”

Reisinger braked hard, just as Bishop opened fire again. The second vehicle, a RAM 2500 with another gun mount in the back, pulled up next to them, as Hank piled out, scrambling into the lower ground and brush at the base of the cut.

He almost bit it as he ran down into the ditch, trying to stay as low as possible. Bishop and Coffee were both laying hate, their machineguns alternating bursts, the muzzle flashes flickering in the dark as they raked the enemy position with streams of fire. The incoming fire had slackened considerably.

Hank, along with most of the rest of his section, had his rifle suppressed. It had taken some still-illegal machine shop work, but after San Diego, he’d been determined to make it happen. He still didn’t have the materials or the know-how to replicate the fancy machinegun suppressors that the Grex Luporum Teams got, but just having the rifles suppressed helped. Especially if they were on NVGs and the bad guys weren’t.

With Bishop and Coffee up on the guns, the drivers couldn’t bail. They did, however, pop the doors just far enough open to brace their rifles and open fire.

As the bulk of the rest of the squad joined him in the brush, Hank looked for their ambushers, but the low ground, the brush, and the curve of the high ground to his right had put them out of sight.

He almost got up to move up the ditch, but he hadn’t survived as long as he had by going “hey-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle.”

Craning his head to look up through his 14s, he gritted his teeth. This was going to suck.

“Faris, stay here with Fernandez, Moffit, and Vega. The rest of you, on me.” Slinging his rifle on his back and cinching the sling down, he started to scramble up the steep slope of the cut.

The first part of the slope wasn’t bad. But it got steadily steeper toward the top, to the point that he was almost on his belly while still standing up. The loose dirt and rocks tried to slip and slide out from under his boots, and defied his efforts to crawl up with his gloved hands. The others were having almost as rough a time.

Every time he reached higher, the loose earth slipped a little more. He was panting and sweating already by the time he finally got a hand on the flats, and even then, he could feel himself slipping off. He lunged forward, scrabbling for something, anything, he could use to drag himself up off the slope.

His fingers grabbed a rock, and he clamped down on it, pulling himself up. The rock started to move, and he felt his left boot, lower down, start to slide again. He threw himself up and forward, almost managing to hook his knee over the lip of the clifftop. But while he missed, he’d gotten high enough that his chest rig hooked, momentarily holding him in place. He grunted, crawling forward even as the lip of dirt holding him up started to crumble under him.

He low crawled forward, slithering onto the desert floor on top of the tableland on his belly, before rolling onto his side and pulling his rifle around. The others were crawling up onto the flats behind him, LaForce already getting up on a knee.

Hank followed suit, though he stayed as low as he could, raising himself up just high enough to see over the sagebrush and creosote bushes. A small cluster of buildings lay just ahead, a house, barn, and outbuildings. If he was remembering right, that would be the Barrios place.

As the rest of his maneuver element joined him, he started moving forward, staying low, his rifle at the low ready. He hadn’t seen any silhouettes, and the Barrios place was quiet, dark, and still, but it didn’t pay to take chances when you’re on open, flat ground without any appreciable cover for over a hundred yards.

The Triarii spread out, angling toward the Barrios place to form an echelon facing the low ground where the ambushers’ belt fed had been set up. The gunfire below had died down; the bad guys must have fallen back in the teeth of the withering fire Bishop and Coffee had laid down. Hank was still inclined to sweep through the ambush from the flank rather than try to drop back and push through the killzone.

Another gunshot rang out, answered immediately by a pair of nearly-simultaneous ten-round bursts. The echoes rolled across the desert as the Triarii descended the slight rise from the Barrios place toward the next cliff, around the corner from the killzone.

They got lower as they moved forward, until they were crawling the last few yards to the edge of the cliff that bordered the finger they’d climbed. Hank could already see part of the shallow arroyo to the right of the road, where the enemy was hustling away under cover, bent low to avoid the gunners’ notice.

If they had really been fleeing, he might have let them go. But they weren’t.

Whoever had set this up had known what they were about. It was a long way to see on the old PVS-14s, but he could just make out the backup positions they’d dug in another couple hundred yards down the road. The initial ambush had only been the first step.

Getting flat, he angled his M5, finding the offset red dot in his NVGs. It was a hell of a long shot for a red dot, but as long as he could see the targets—and he had the dot dialed way down for just this purpose; it wouldn’t eclipse their silhouettes in its bloom—he had a chance to hit them.

Bracing his elbow to steady the rifle, he let out a breath, his finger tightening on the trigger, the break coming just as his lungs emptied and stayed that way for a split second.

The shot cracked out across the desert, followed shortly by another three as fast as he could re-stabilize the sight. He had a MAWL laser mounted on the rifle’s forearm, but it was getting to the point that he couldn’t be sure the bad guys didn’t have night vision, in which case that laser would just point right back at his position.

To his right and left, a ragged fusillade tore out across the desert, the suppressors deadening what would have been the echoing booms to a ripping series of harsh cracks. Several of the dim figures in the distance dropped.

“One-Two, Actual, move up.” He had to take his hand off the rifle, momentarily silencing his own fire, so he could key the radio. “Bad guys are moving to fallback positions about two hundred yards further up the road.”

“Roger.” He couldn’t hear over the suppressed gunfire, but a moment later, he could see the two gun trucks rolling forward on the highway, Bishop and Coffee still leaning into their guns, searching for targets.

Bishop opened fire first, spotting movement. His Mk 48 roared in the night, hammering the lip of the arroyo. Though the bad guys were small, dark, indistinct shapes in the dim, green-tinted image in front of Hank’s eye, he could see two more drop. The rest were hunkering down.

He scrambled up onto his feet. “Flank right.” The rest of his element ceased fire and started to follow suit, as he headed around the top of the high ground, following the contours of the tableland, falling back to put most of the slight rise at the crest between him and the bad guys. He shuffled his feet slightly as he went; it was too late and too cold for rattlesnakes, but he really didn’t want to get stung by a scorpion in the dark in the middle of a firefight.

The rest of the element fell in behind him, in more or less a ranger file. He kept looking over his shoulder at the Barrios place, just in case. It would be too easy to get overly focused on the bad guys down in the arroyo and lose track of their surroundings. It didn’t appear that the enemy had any flankers out, but they’d planned ahead enough to have an ambush waiting for the convoy after they’d hit the squad at Terlingua.

These guys ain’t amateurs. They’re dangerous.

He could still hear alternating bursts of gunfire. With the initial contact shock over, both Bishop and Coffee had gotten a lot more cautious; their bursts were shorter and farther apart. They were only shooting when they had targets, keeping the bad guys pinned in their holes.

They only had so much ammo in Lajitas, and resupply could only be expected about once a month.

He kept his pace up as he moved, careful to maintain awareness of both the enemy’s position and the gun trucks’. Combat maneuver often boiled down to a game of angles, and he didn’t want to over-penetrate and put his squad into a position where they were aiming at each other.

It didn’t take long. He found a draw leading down, partially sheltered from the enemy’s fallback position, and turned down it, getting lower as he went, weaving between the clumps of brush and prickly pear. He still couldn’t entirely avoid them in the dark; he winced as a spine went into his calf as he brushed past what he’d thought was sagebrush, but that clearly included some cactus.

Another burst of gunfire hammered out ahead, answered by the throaty roar of one of the 7.62 machineguns. The bad guys were still kicking, and from the sounds of it, they weren’t happy that the tables had been turned so fast.

Shouldn’t have fucked with Triarii, assholes.

As he reached the bottom of the draw, instead of making the rest of the men behind him fan out, he turned right and started to move along the base of the slope behind him. LaForce followed, the rest of the maneuver element getting online without having to do anything but follow the man ahead.

About fifty yards from the arroyo, Hank turned left and started to advance.

He lowered himself to his belly after a couple paces and started to crawl. He wanted to finish this quickly, and that meant getting close.

It took a couple of minutes to close the distance. Just short of the arroyo itself, he paused, reached down, and keyed his mike four times. Shift fire.

Bishop and Coffee both opened up on the arroyo for a pair of long bursts, then ceased fire. And that was when Hank and the maneuver element struck.

Gathering his feet under him, Hank heaved himself up onto a knee, his rifle already in his shoulder and canted, his eye finding the red dot through his 14s, looking for targets.

Four men in jeans, t-shirts, and plate carriers were still hunkered in the arroyo, arguing in Spanish. Two more lay sprawled in the bottom, unmoving. Several wires led down from what had to have been IEDs emplaced on the road, and what looked very much like a Milkor grenade launcher lay in the dirt next to one of them.

Hank put his red dot on the man farthest to the right and shot him twice, once center mass, the second time in the head. He must have been wearing plates; the first round slammed him into the dust with a gasp, before the second smacked the ball cap off his head and spattered dark fluid against the dirt and rocks underneath him.

By the time he dragged his muzzle toward the next man, it had all been finished in a crackling storm of suppressed gunfire. The enemy hadn’t even gotten a shot off.

The echoes died away, and Hank scanned the arroyo. A couple of the bad guys were still twitching, one still gasping out what was left of his life. From the sounds he was making, though, he didn’t have long.

“One-Two, this is Actual.” He was scrambling down into the arroyo, keeping a very careful eye on the bodies, just in case. “We’ve got probable IEDs emplaced on the road. Go ahead and fall back about five hundred; we’re going to clear them out the old-fashioned way.”

“Roger that. We’ll be on the other side of the high ground.” Faris had been one of Hank’s problem children when he’d been a squad leader; he’d been generally lazy, conceited, and far too quick to take failures out on his subordinates. Strangely, after San Diego, he’d been a lot more reliable, and hadn’t even bitched too much about being taken off the squad leader slot.

At least, not when Hank had been within earshot.

Hank crouched down in the arroyo as the rest of the maneuver element took up security positions. Two belt-feds lay atop three ammo crates, and four sets of wires led down to what looked like homemade clackers, rather than the cell phones that he’d half expected. Granted, cell service down by the border was spotty, at best, since the attacks on the grid, so the clackers were probably more reliable.

“One-Two, make sure you’re carefully checking your surroundings before you stop.” He gathered up the clackers, peering down the road. “We don’t know how many IEDs they might have buried and daisy-chained.” He thought a moment before Faris answered, then turned to LaForce. “Etienne, take Taylor and Evans and sweep this side of the road back to where that first belt-fed opened up. Just in case.”

“Roger that,” both men echoed at almost the same time, LaForce in person, Faris over the radio. LaForce and the two men mentioned got up and started to carefully move down the arroyo, toward where the high ground met the side of the road. Hank waited, listening and watching the desert. The gunfire off to the north seemed to have died down; a few pot-shots still rang out, but they might just be militia shooting at shadows. The attack seemed to have pulled off.

He wondered at that. Was all of this set up just to try to draw one squad into an ambush?

If so, he suspected that they’d need to get back to Lajitas posthaste. Nobody would set up this elaborate a feint if they didn’t have some kind of follow-up in mind.

“Actual, One-One. We’re clear. Give us a minute to get some cover.” LaForce clearly wasn’t eager to be anywhere near the road.

Before Hank could reply, his radio crackled with a different voice. “Tango India Six Four, this is Mike Actual!” Grant’s voice was distorted, with a lot of rasping background noise, but none of that could disguise the gunfire in the background. “We’re under attack! We need you back here now!”

Dammit. I fucking knew it. “This is Actual. Everybody get flat, now. Going loud in five seconds.” He gathered up the clackers and took his own advice, hugging the inside of the arroyo wall before he started mashing the clackers shut.

The night erupted with a series of catastrophic booms, lighting up the desert with brilliant flashes before the clouds of dirt and smoke rained debris down on the road. The concussions were painful even from behind cover.

“One-Two, Actual. Get up here.” He stood up as the last of the pulverized rocks pattered down out of the night sky. “And pick One-One up on the way. We don’t have any time to fuck around.”

 

Fortress Doctrine is out on Friday.

The post Fortress Doctrine Chapter 2 appeared first on American Praetorians.

Fortress Doctrine Chapter 1

It was starting to get chilly as the last of the sunset faded away. Hank Foss didn’t shiver as he walked down toward Overwatch Three, but he could feel the desert chill sinking into his bones. The nearness to the river only accentuated it. It wasn’t near freezing yet, but mid-forties in the desert at night can still sap body heat quickly.

Getting old.

He had to admit that he wasn’t quite as robust as a retired Gunny as he’d been as a hard-charging Lance Corporal. The cold bit a little more, his knees ached a lot more, and it took more effort to get up, whether in the morning or the middle of the night.

But I ain’t dead yet. And there’s still work to be done.

The gravel crunched underfoot as he and Huntsman walked down Paul Estevez’s driveway. The Rio Grande river valley was deathly quiet in the winter evening, making the sound of their footsteps strangely loud. Even the wind was barely a whisper. A coyote yipped and howled in the distance, but there was no telling how far away it was in the otherwise unbroken desert silence.

The lights were off. Texas had fared somewhat better than large swathes of the rest of the country when the grid had gone down, and some intermittent electrical power was coming back. But the key word there was “intermittent.” It had been on for about six hours in the last week. Everything else in Lajitas was running on generators, batteries, or was back to the 1800s.

The two Triarii infantrymen, dressed in desert khakis and full combat gear, their M5E1 rifles hanging on slings in front of them, would have been incongruous in a resort town like Lajitas even a few months before. But when they stepped up to Estevez’s door and knocked, the portly older man didn’t even blink when he cracked the door open.

“What do you want?” Estevez was wearing sweats and house slippers, lit from behind by a roaring fire in a hastily-installed steel drum wood stove. A lot of those had been going into houses as winter came on and the electricity still wasn’t reliable. Not all of them had had good results, either. A lot of people had already died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to poor stovepipe installation.

“We’re just here to check on the overwatch position, Mr. Estevez,” Hank said. “And to make sure that everything’s all right.”

“Everything’s fine, except for a damned machinegun nest on my property.”

Hank sighed quietly, though he didn’t let his annoyance show more than it normally did. His hatchet face and semi-permanent scowl tended to get the impression across, anyway.

They’d been over this many times. Only the pressure from the rest of the local militia, not to mention Sheriff Trujillo, had finally prevailed to get the overwatch position placed in Estevez’s back yard. He’d even conceded the fact that it was the most logical position, but he still bitched about it at every opportunity.

“Well, then, have a good night.” Hank wasn’t going to rise to the bait. He was too tired.

Huntsman hadn’t said a word; in fact, he hadn’t gone all the way up onto Estevez’s porch. The younger man had been in the running to be a squad leader; in fact, Hank still had him pegged to fill a slot if one opened up. But he didn’t like dealing with the more combative civvies in Lajitas, and Hank couldn’t say he blamed him.

He turned and stepped down off the porch, not bothering to look over his shoulder as Estevez shut the door. Huntsman fell in at his flank as he started around the two-story house and toward the dug-in Overwatch Three.

“That was pleasant as always.” Huntsman might not have liked to deal with the locals much, but he’d opened up a bit within the section. What was left of it.

Hank scanned the rocky, barren hills that loomed above the Rio Grande. This was a bit of a change from the section’s previous assignment in Phoenix, but in a way, he couldn’t say that he minded. Sure, they were still right on the front lines, as much as the likes of Estevez might want to deny it, but it was a lot quieter in Lajitas than it had been in Phoenix, never mind San Diego.

San Diego. He still had nightmares about that last stand in the hotel overlooking the Naval Base, months later.

Tom Wallace would never say as much, but Hank suspected that the losses they’d taken in San Diego were a large part of why they’d ended up working a Combined Action mission with local militia on the Rio Grande in the Big Bend area of Texas. That, and the fact that Hank had seriously ruffled some feathers in Phoenix before going to San Diego.

They still weren’t up to full strength. Everyone was spread thin.

He and Huntsman rounded the back of Estevez’s house and paused, within sight of the low dugout that was Overwatch Three. They waited, as the breeze whispered by and another coyote answered the first.

Hank felt his scowl deepen. They’re still learning. Only a few of the militia are vets, and neither Costa nor Peterkin have any experience. They’re bound to forget some stuff.

Except that while he was waiting for a challenge from the guys who were supposed to be on security for the whole village, somebody could very well sneak up and roll a frag into their position.

He knew that the likes of Estevez would have sneered at the ridiculousness of the suggestion. Hank’s section, re-designated Tango India Six Four, since they were no longer part of the Phoenix unit, had fallen in on an odd situation.

A lot of the local ranchers knew the threat that hung over Lajitas as well as anyone who had worked security near the border did. But a lot of the local residents and even more of the tourists who’d gotten caught at the golf resort when the lights had gone out were of a different sort.

Lajitas was, after all, the site where thousands of people met to freely wade across the Rio Grande every year, in an act of “civil disobedience” to defy the government’s ability to secure the border.

Many of them would be the first ones that the cartels would rob and murder.

It had led to some distinct pushback when the Triarii had showed up, working hand-in-hand with the Texas Rangers’ Border Recon Unit, to train a militia unit to secure the border crossing. There wasn’t any Border Patrol presence in Lajitas; they were all either up north in Presidio, or down south in Del Rio and Eagle Pass. Which meant that the locals knew that their ford across the Rio Grande was a fucking superhighway for smugglers.

Not all of the locals had resisted forming the local defenses because they were bleeding hearts. Many had resisted because they were afraid of what would happen if they openly resisted the cartels. Hank couldn’t say he entirely blamed them. He’d been fighting these savages for months.

“Friendly,” he hissed through clenched teeth as he got up and moved toward the Overwatch position.

He heard rustling in the sandbagged dugout just ahead, and a whispered, “Shit!”

“That’s not the challenge and pass, Costa.” He slid into the pit, narrowly avoiding landing on Peterkin. “Why the fuck weren’t you watching your six?”

“We were focused on the crossing,” Peterkin whispered.

“Not good enough. How many times have I told you that you’ve still got to maintain rear security?” Hank kept his voice low, but let his anger bite through it. He wasn’t quite as pissed off as he made it sound, though. He just needed to get it through to these two kids—and the two ranch hands almost were kids, being still in their early twenties—just how serious their situation was. “We’ve got eyes on the most likely crossing points, but there’s nothing that says the bad guys can’t come across elsewhere and work their way down the river toward us, especially if they’ve been paying attention and noticed that we’re watching the crossing.” Or somebody in town has told them about it. “You’re the northernmost post. You’ve got to pay attention.” He squinted through his NVGs toward the river. Still quiet. “Now, what’s the challenge and pass?”

“Donald Duck.” Costa still sounded a little confused as he repeated the name.

“And the parole word is ‘Darkwing.’” Hank looked over at Costa, who was looking back and forth between him and the river. “What is it, Costa?”

“Nothing.” Costa hastily turned his attention back to his sector, peering over the ancient M-60 that had been dredged up from somewhere Hank didn’t care to speculate about. For all he knew, it had been from one of Colonel Santiago’s friends’ personal collection.

Or, it had been in a cache of old military weapons that had been slated for DRMO, and had instead been diverted and buried for later.

“Spit it out.” He settled back against the sandbags.

“It’s just…’Donald Duck’ seems really random for a password.” Costa was still fairly hesitant. “Wouldn’t ‘Rio Grande’ or something work better down here?”

“And if you were one of the bad guys, how easy would it be to finish ‘Rio?’” Hank asked.

“Oh.” Costa sounded a little downcast, though Hank suspected that his tone was mainly because he’d just realized that he’d asked a dumb question.

“Yeah.” He shifted his position slightly; his knee was already starting to ache, having his boot up against one of the ammo cans. “’Donald Duck’ is even probably too easy, but the key is, it has to be something that the enemy isn’t going to easily guess, or easily pronounce.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” Costa still sounded a bit chagrined.

“That’s why we’re here,” Hank said. “Training and experience count for a lot.”

He was about to ask them to walk him through the turnover they’d gotten with the two-man team they’d relieved, but his radio squawked in his ear.

“Actual, this is Five.” He frowned. That sounded like gunfire in the background. “Be advised, we are taking effective small arms fire from the hills to the west. At least one belt-fed; we’re getting pinned down here.”

Hank didn’t hesitate. “Actual copies all. We’re on the way. Break, break. First Squad, this is Actual. Rally on the vehicles, time now.”

He turned to scramble out of the dugout, but paused to clap Peterkin on the shoulder. “You boys keep your eyes peeled. We could be in for a long night.” Then he hauled himself up, out from under the camouflage netting, heaving himself to his feet. Huntsman was still crouched on a knee outside, his head up, scanning the river through his old PVS-14s, his rifle resting on his raised thigh.

“Let’s go.” Hank didn’t pause, but started toward the road, stretching his legs out with each stride. Don’t run. Never run, until you have to. He knew that his boys, after everything they’d been through in Phoenix and San Diego, wouldn’t be bothered, but they had the locals to think about now. And seeing one of the Triarii running, as the distant echoes of gunfire rolled across the desert from ten miles away, might just start some of them panicking.

Huntsman kept up. The man was built like a fireplug, but he he’d always had the endurance of a much leaner man.

The two of them had been making the rounds on foot. Lajitas wasn’t that big, and they needed to save the fuel and the wear and tear on the vehicles for emergencies. Like this one.

They walked fast out of Estevez’s driveway, back onto the road, and headed up toward the hotel at a good clip. The sounds of gunfire were still distant, attenuated by the distance and the rocky hills between Lajitas and Terlingua, but it didn’t sound like anything was slowing down.

It took a few minutes to cover the distance. Most of the rest of the squad was already on the vehicles and getting ready to move when they got there.

“Ettiene!” Hank’s voice cracked across the courtyard. “Two minutes!”

“We’ll be ready in thirty seconds!” Ettiene LaForce could almost have been Huntsman’s twin, except that where Huntsman was a ginger, LaForce was dark, blunt-featured, and sported a thick, bristling handlebar mustache. LaForce had been a squad leader, back when the section had been at full strength. Now that they were down to what amounted to two thirteen-man squads, LaForce had become Hank’s right hand in First Squad.

They’d had to do a lot of restructuring after San Diego. Some still weren’t too happy about it.

“Mount up!” Hank suited actions to words as he clambered into the right seat in the old, beat-up F350 that had become his command vehicle. Bishop was already in the bed with a Mk 48, clamped into the removable gun mount that they’d jury-rigged in Tomas Zinni’s shop, up the road.

He pulled the door shut and his hand went to the PTT switch wired into his chest rig. It had two buttons: one for the section net, one for the militia net. “Mike Actual, Tango India Actual.” Getting the locals to use callsigns over the radio had been another uphill battle, won when he’d pointed out what the cartels could do with last names if they ever managed to listen in.

“This is Mike Actual.” Will Grant’s drawl still sounded faintly lackadaisical over the radio, even with the gunfire sounding off to the north.

“Tango India Two is under fire; we are moving north to support them. Mike security will be on their own while we’re gone.” Hank had developed a fair bit of trust in Grant’s capabilities over the last few weeks; the man might sound like he didn’t give a damn, but he was conscientious, hard-working, and had grasped the basics of light infantry tactics faster than some of the militiamen who had prided themselves on being Afghanistan, Syria, or Kosovo vets.

“Roger that.” Grant didn’t sound particularly disturbed. “You need any of us to go along?”

“Negative.” Hank had always planned on keeping his squads as the primary react forces. His boys had a lot more training and experience than the militiamen. “Just make sure your boys are staying alert; this might not be the only attack tonight.”

He almost didn’t hear the footsteps running up to the side of the cab until a head loomed in his window.

“Hank! Take me with you!” The speaker was short and skinny, his hair longish, his voice still relatively high-pitched. “I can fight!”

“No.” Hank stared at the boy. “I told you already, Arturo. You want to help, you stay up in your eagle’s nest and watch and report.”

“But…”

“The answer is no. Now get clear; we’re rolling.” He pointed forward, and Reisinger stepped on the gas, starting the truck toward the road. Arturo jumped back, standing at the side of the parking lot, his hands down by his side, dejected.

The four vehicles, three pickups and an old but well-maintained surplus HMMWV, roared out onto Highway 170, heading northeast toward Terlingua.

“Sooner or later, the kid’s going to need to get his feet wet, Hank.” Reisinger didn’t often voice his opinion on how Hank ran the section, but he’d been increasingly thoughtful since San Diego. A lot of them had been; the events of the last few months had a way of making a man think about what’s to come.

“He’s fourteen.” While he recognized that Reisinger was being more thoughtful about things, he wasn’t in the mood to discuss this. Particularly not on their way to a firefight, at almost nine o’clock at night.

“Lots of fourteen-year-old boys found that they had to grow up and be men back in the day.” Reisinger was concentrating on the road while he talked, which was good. The PVS-14s weren’t great for depth perception, and driving while blacked out and wearing them was tricky.

“That was back in the day. And he hasn’t got the training. Like I told him, if he wants to help out, he needs to stay out of trouble and keep an eye out.” Hank kept his voice even, though he was starting to get angry about it.

Arturo had showed up in town shortly before the Triarii. His parents had been green-card holders working one of the ranches up north, but had fallen afoul of one or another of the cartels that were trying to establish routes across the ranch itself. Both were dead. Arturo had fled, and ended up in Lajitas.

Once the Triarii had showed up and started organizing the local militia to defend the village and the river crossing, Arturo had started following Hank around. Hank had given him a job as a lookout, mainly to keep him out of his hair. But he’d also noticed that the kid was skin and bones, and seemed to sleep wherever he could find some shelter for the night. So, he’d grudgingly taken it upon himself to make sure that Arturo got some food, water, and always had a place to sleep.

He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but he’d be damned if he’d let the kid become another bullet sponge—which was exactly what he’d be if he tried to fight without a lot more training than he had.

Reisinger subsided. He might have a point, but he knew better than to argue with his Section Leader while they were en route to a fight.

The three vehicles raced up the highway, the black bulk of the hills falling away as the road threaded out through the flatter, tortuous terrain of the desert.

Hank scanned the desert as they went around the curve and headed toward the tiny airport that served the Lajitas resort. He was pretty sure that the golfers weren’t the only ones who used it—and anyone there right at the moment was probably not a tourist.

But the airport was dark and still as the patrol sped past. Wherever the bad guys had come from, it wasn’t from there.

Hank kept his eyes peeled, staring hard through his NVGs as he scanned the road and the surrounding desert, tensing up a little as they plunged into a curve partially occluded by a cut through a low, rocky hill.

He saw movement ahead, just before a brilliant, flickering muzzle flash erupted just around the side of the hill, tracers reaching toward the windshield.

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Fortress Doctrine Prologue

To: Santiago@bastion.info

 

From: MerovichG2@bastion.info

 

Subject: Current Situation Brief

 

Sir,

As requested, I’m including an overview of the last month’s significant events. As you are well aware, the Stateside situation is still volatile, and while we have troops in contact overseas, the information we are getting from Poland is necessarily sparse. As we continue to build our own radio mesh network, that should change, but the Transatlantic gap will still throttle information, simply due to the nature of long-range HF comms. So, the bulk of this report will focus on the CONUS situation.

Both coasts and many of the major Midwestern and Southwestern metro areas continue to present significant operational and logistical challenges. While we have eliminated several of the IED cells that had all but brought long-range transport to a halt in many states, we still assess the threat on many major interstates as high. Another truck bomb was detonated on I-5 just south of Tacoma two days ago as of this writing, killing at least fifty people, wounding close to a hundred more, and destroying three semis loaded with food and medical supplies.

The IED cells, however, while a significant threat, are not the only factor. The continued domestic unrest poses the greatest threat to any relief or stability operations. The fact that electrical power still has not been restored in approximately seventy-five percent of the affected areas—in no small part due to the unrest and rampant crime that has accompanied the blackout—has only made matters worse. Desperation has led many people to attempt to take what they need by force, which has only exacerbated the violence. Furthermore, the lack of essential services has not only led to deaths from exposure as winter has set in, but disease is reported to be rampant in many of the affected metro areas.

Clashes have also been reported in many surrounding rural areas, as refugees from the cities have been met with hostility, some apparently justified, some not. Reports of desperate refugees attempting to storm rural homes and small towns for supplies seem to be roughly evenly matched with rural residents turning them aside at gunpoint before they can reach said towns and properties.

It is impossible to give hard and fast numbers at this point in time, but we believe that a current death toll of no less than 150,000, with considerably more than that to come as winter continues, is a relatively conservative estimate.

The financial and economic damage is still being assessed, as the cyber attacks on the markets just before the grid went down have not yet been fully cataloged. I don’t think that anyone disputes that it is profound and long-lasting.

The West Coast situation is still being dealt with piecemeal. San Diego and Long Beach ports appear to now be under mostly Marine and Navy control, and the Chinese presence has pulled back. Local unrest, fueled by those who had become dependent on the Chinese aid packages, has continued, and San Diego especially is still plagued by Soldados de Aztlan and other gang violence.

San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle are believed to still be partially Chinese-controlled, though they are still maintaining their façade of “humanitarian aid,” further bolstered by what remains of local government. That said, those local governments appear to be little more than figureheads, propped up and amplified by Chinese tech, without which they would be as silent as any other basic service providers in the affected areas.

We have inserted small reconnaissance and surveillance teams into the target areas, and they are reporting similar activities as those that Grex Luporum Team II and their trail sections reported in San Diego. While their resources and manpower are limited, the Chinese appear to be putting “grassroots” control measures in place, utilizing existing insurgent networks, supported by the local governments, to target any of the more outspoken opponents of their presence, while securing any vital infrastructure under their direct control.

So far, the Chinese do not appear to be extending their influence outside of those metro areas. Their focus still appears to be primarily directed toward control of the ports. Rangers and Special Forces out of Joint Base Lewis McChord have conducted operations in and around the Seattle Tacoma area, but as yet, their effectiveness has not been determined. They seem to have limited their attentions to Chinese personnel exclusively, while ignoring their proxies.

We have yet to mount any further major operations on the West Coast crisis zones since the San Diego operation. The major targets have long been low on our target priority list, due to the local governments’ hostility.

Washington DC has begun to issue statements, somewhat delayed by the power outages, DDOS attacks on main communications outlets, and political wrangling. While disappointing, it appears that the official line on the Chinese incursions has been weak, at best. While recognizing that they were incursions, the blame is being deflected from Beijing toward “overly aggressive responses on the part of private security firms contracted by the relief organizations.” A direct attack on our West Coast ports is being dismissed as a misunderstanding.

It is our belief that this is due in no small part to two main factors. The first is simply fear that we do not have the resources—never mind the national cohesion in the aftermath of the attacks—to deal with internal strife, a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented scope in American history, a war in Europe, and war with China. The other factor would be continued Chinese financial and political influence at the highest levels of our own government and industry, despite the pull-back over the last few years.

Regardless of the above mentioned factors, there is a growing body of evidence—not least the speed with which Chinese “relief efforts” appeared off the West Coast—that China is a central player in the current crisis on both sides of the Atlantic. To ignore it for expediency’s sake would be imprudent at best. That said, the current domestic crisis is of such scope that it will likely take years, if not decades, to stabilize.

I know that you are well aware of this, sir. But I fear that if we concentrate too much on the domestic situation, by the time we can turn our attention to Beijing, they will have maneuvered so far ahead of us that we will be defeated by default. Our current resources are limited, but it is my belief that we still need to act internationally as well as internally, as soon as possible, before we find ourselves on the back foot permanently.

We have discussed the so-called “Fortress Doctrine” before. I believe that it will be our best option going forward.

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Call of Duty and Subversion

So, the teaser trailer for Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War has raised some eyebrows. Also, it has apparently infuriated some Communists. Which is all to the good. It’s essentially a series of clips from an interview with KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in the ’80s, discussing Soviet “Active Measures,” the subversion campaign used by the KGB against the Soviet Union’s adversaries, the chief one of which was the United States.

The trailer has also been censored in China, ostensibly because of Tiananmen Square footage (though one might wonder if the Chinese, who have also practiced subversion and propaganda to a greater extent than some might realize, might be censoring it for other reasons, as well).

I’ve been effectively tuned out of the Call of Duty franchise for a while. I’ve heard some good things about the Modern Warfare reboot (or whatever it is) from last year, but it hasn’t been in the budget (either looking at money or disk space). This surprised me, though. (Especially after Activision/Blizzard bent the knee to the PRC last year.) That a major media company might actually be calling out Communists, and in a much more real-world context, is fascinating.

The trailer provides a few clips of Bezmenov. Here’s the full interview:

Now, not everyone who isn’t a Communist accepts Bezmenov’s story. I’ve even seen it said that he was simply telling Americans what they wanted to hear. That there couldn’t really be such an extensive infiltration and subversion. It smacks of wild-eyed conspiracy theory, McCarthy, and the HUAC. Soviet Communists weren’t really that much of a threat. To say otherwise is to sound like General Ripper, ranting about “our precious bodily fluids.”

And yet, here we are. Leave aside for a moment, the fact that a movement led by self-professed “trained Marxists” has sparked open riots in multiple cities. Look at much of the political and academic rhetoric today. When it closely resembles an awful lot of Soviet propaganda, you’ve got to start to scratch your head.

Even the assertion that the shift to the Left has been organic, a nearly inevitable movement of society, is a surrender to Communist agitprop. For one, it assumes the Marxist model of “Historical Materialism.” For another, it ignores the simple historical fact that nothing happens in a vacuum. I’ve written about this before, regarding revolutions. Even Vladimir Lenin was funneled back to Russia by the Germans as a spoiler to try to knock Russia out of World War I.

This won’t be the last article on this subject; it’s a deep subject that deserves a deep dive. Some of it will, of necessity, be circumstantial. The Soviet Union might be no more, but Mitrokhin only got some of the KGB’s documents out, and the KGB now quietly rules Russia. What’s more, Red China has now taken the flagship role in international Communism. So, active intelligence efforts are still underway to keep these operations secret.

That doesn’t mean that they aren’t happening. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, an invisible cause can be determined by observing its effects. The war isn’t over. In fact, it can be argued that the belief that the Cold War ended in 1991 was in itself a major defeat for the West.

Call of Duty might or might not truly explore this (probably not). But they’ve introduced some people, during a year of crisis, to the beginnings of an explanation of what has been going on.

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The “Fourth Balkan War” and the Real World

I admittedly haven’t worked out a lot of the details of the Fourth Balkan War. It’s part of the background, though largely as combat experience for a number of the veterans who form the backbone of the Triarii.


 


The general sweep is that it was, essentially, NATO’s last gasp, trying to defuse a powder keg situation between Kosovo and Serbia, based on news reports a couple years ago about Kosovo seeking to build it’s own army–to Belgrade’s rather strident objections.


 


In-universe, obviously, the powder keg was *mostly* defused. Though it was a lot nastier than most people Stateside got to see.


 


Yet, looking at the overall real-world situation in the Balkans right now, as Shirvan of Caspian Report outlines it, the Fourth Balkan War could very easily have turned into the flashpoint that started the Maelstrom Rising series.

Not only do you have a large Muslim population–and while it seems to have been mostly supplanted by Chechnya in the popular consciousness, Bosnia-Herzegovina has been a prime recruiting ground for Al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, and Daesh–but increasingly Russian, European, and Chinese interests have turned toward the Balkans.

It is still possible that a flare-up in the Balkans now would see Russian, American, and European intervention–with the PRC playing their shadow games the whole time–and without overt flare-ups. It could well be a very close thing, however. It might not see the complete US-European breakdown that comes to a head in Escalation, but there are quite a few reports of harassment and provocations between US and Russian forces in Syria. And with the US largely backing Kosovar interests while the Russians have long backed Belgrade…

Picture this in the Balkans, with a whole lot of other pressures built up:

None of this is saying that if the Fourth Balkan War happens, that it will necessarily be the flashpoint that triggers the next world war. Just like any flashpoint with multiple outside interests involved, the potential is always there. And the realities of Fourth Generation Warfare make it harder to see just when that war might kick off.

Presuming it hasn’t already.

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Words of Wisdom on The Nature Of War

I do a lot of research for my writing, particularly the military thriller writing. Unlike some authors, who take long vacations as “research” (I can’t afford to, and so much of the on-the-ground stuff is extrapolated from Google Earth.), most of my research is directed toward history, current events, and warfare. I’ve got an ever-increasing military professional reading library, from which the following words of wisdom come:

“It is often said that guerrilla warfare is primitive. This generalization is dangerously misleading and true only in the technological sense. If one considers the picture as a whole, a paradox is immediately apparent, and the primitive form is understood to be in fact more sophisticated than nuclear war or atomic war or war as it was waged by conventional armies, navies, and air forces. Guerrilla war is not dependent for success on the efficient operation of complex mechanical devices, highly organized logistical systems, or the accuracy of electronic computers. It can be conducted in any terrain, in any climate, in any weather; in swamps, in mountains, in farmed fields. Its basic element is man, and man is more complex than any of his machines. He is endowed with intelligence, emotions, and will. Guerrilla warfare is therefore suffused with, and reflects, man’s admirable qualities as well as his less pleasant ones. While it is not always humane, it is human, which is more than can be said for the strategy of extinction.”

–Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret), 1961

That quote comes from General Griffith’s introduction to Mao Zedong’s On Guerrilla Warfare. General Griffith served with the 1st Marine Raider Bn on Guadalcanal, then was XO for the 1st Raider Regiment on New Georgia. After the war, he served in a staff capacity in Qingdao, China, where he got to see much of the Chinese Civil War up close.

While I have posted about weapons and technology I feature in my books, I’ve tried to still make the point that war is not about the tools. War is about people. Carl von Clausewitz said that, “War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”

I remember hearing a Marine Captain lecturing in 29 Palms, during the workup before my second deployment, about how combat was still about “taking the hill.” While it might be taken metaphorically, depending on the delivery, in this case, it definitely wasn’t. I turned to my Platoon Sergeant and asked, “So, how is it that physical terrain is suddenly the most important factor in an irregular war?” The sardonic raised eyebrow and faint shake of the head said all that needed to be said.

We have a tendency, as Americans, to view most problems as mechanical ones, with mechanical solutions. I believe this is an outgrowth of a number of factors, including our own technological supremacy since the Second World War. But true wisdom lies in recognizing the truth, and the truth is that that overly mechanistic viewpoint has become a weak point, a blind spot. And as many readers say that the Maelstrom Rising series is awfully close to the real world, the real-world events that have inspired it illustrate that.

War is not only a matter of how many guns, bombs, tanks, and personnel can be thrown at the enemy. Nor is it finding the one or two targets that can make an enemy crumble (That really hasn’t ever worked, with the possible exception of Desert Storm, which was a very, very strictly limited war.). Mao recognized that. General Griffith recognized it, as well. And many of our opponents today recognize it, and are actively taking advantage of our mechanistic blind spot.

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Go Behind the Lines – Strategic Assets is Out!

And it’s time for our second release of the month. Strategic Assets went live at midnight. A few people of the paperback persuasion have already ordered it, since the paperback went live several days early.

They retook Gdansk…

…At a terrible cost for both sides.

Where and when will the next blow fall?

Winter is setting in, and Eastern Europe is hurting.  Russians prowl on one side, while the European Defense Council’s forces sit on the German side of the border, strangely quiet.  Matt and his team have recovered from the wounds they received in Gdansk, but as low-intensity warfare continues, the question remains:

What is the EDC waiting for?

The Triarii are sure that the same people who launched the war aren’t giving up.  They’ve already killed thousands.  Power is their only goal, and the EDC won’t simply leave the Americans and Poles in peace.  They can’t.  Too much blood has already been shed.

So, Matt and his team get a new mission.

Go deep into enemy territory and find out what is happening.

Before the next hammer blow ends the war for good…

 

Getting back to Grex Luporum Team X in Europe, this one’s a little different from the first two. The war is shifting and evolving, and will continue to do so as the series goes on, power structures shift, expensive assets are used up, and technology, techniques, and tactics adjust to the new normal.

You can get it on Kindle or Paperback here.

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Strategic Assets Chapter 2

Nine men with weapons and gear made for a tight fit in the little van. We ended up stacked up on the street as each man piled in, trying to climb into a seat without getting rifle or pouches snagged on seats, seatbelts, or door frames. Chris was already in the driver’s seat, looking over his shoulder as I climbed into the right seat. I didn’t have to worry about the crowding; privilege of command. Chris had the heater running full blast, and I was already sweating under my jacket, despite the cold.

“Come on, come on!” Chris was a bit older than I was, but he tended to be a bit more excitable. He’d been a SEAL before the Triarii, but he was now a minister in some splinter Protestant church, and an all-around nice guy. “They’re moving while we’re still sitting here!”

The van rocked on its shocks as nine big men in combat gear clambered aboard. I was trying to watch every direction at once, scanning windows and doors all around us. While the obvious threat might have run to the south, I’d learned a long time before that there was rarely only one threat, and the obvious one might not be the most dangerous. If there was one terrorist cell in Wroclaw, there might very well be a second. Or a third.

A long, rattling burst of gunfire crackled off to the south, punctuated by the heavy thud of an explosion. “That doesn’t sound good,” Greg chirped.

“It’s a terrorist attack,” Reuben grunted as he got in and pulled the door shut. “There’s nothing good about any of this.”

Bosko was on his radio, which had just gone nuts. I craned my head around to look at him. “What’s going on?”

“They have stormed the Wieża Ciśnień,” he said, listening closely to the radio. He met my eyes. “They have open fields of fire from the observation level, for a very long distance.”

“Hell.” I reached for my vest, then remembered that I didn’t have a detailed map for Wroclaw, not with the kind of fidelity I’d need. “Can you guide us to a covered and concealed position we might be able to stage from?”

“Yes.” He frowned. “There is much open ground around the tower. It will not be easy to reach it.”

“We’ve got pretty precise rifles, a belt-fed, and smokes,” I replied. “Just get us a spot where we can set in overwatch and a base of fire, and we can handle it.” I might have sounded a bit more confident than I felt; rushing a building that was being held by a fanatical enemy was never an easy proposition, especially across open ground. But one of the other things I’d learned lately was that when you’re working with foreign allies, you really have no choice but to be utterly confident in your own abilities, at least when you’re talking to them.

If Bosko saw through my bravado, he didn’t say anything.

Chris didn’t bother to try to turn around, but just said, “Heads down!” as he craned his head around to peer out the back window, threw the van in reverse, and stomped on the gas. We struggled to lean aside, out of his line of sight, especially as he came awfully close to smacking the back of the van into the side of a station wagon parked on the street.

He sped to the end of the block in reverse, passed the southern cross street, then braked hard, throwing everyone backward, shifted gears, and roared around the corner. The van wasn’t the newest or the greatest, but it still had enough horsepower to get where it needed to go with all of us crammed inside, without wallowing like some other vehicles of its type might have under similar circumstances.

Fortunately, there wasn’t much traffic. Some of that was simply because the Poles had gotten used to hunkering down when something blew up or somebody started shooting. Some of it was because gasoline and diesel were being sharply rationed. Gdansk was still open, but the amount of oil making its way into the Baltic that wasn’t controlled by the Russians was still slim. The French Navy hadn’t screwed with many tankers, not with the Abraham Lincoln task force still in the North Sea, but the number of tanker captains willing to risk the run through the Skagerrak and Kattegat wasn’t as high as it needed to be.

The Poles were doing some business with the Russians, but they were understandably reluctant to put all their eggs in that basket. Few hatreds in the world run quite as hot as the Polish hatred for Russians.

“To the end of the block,” Bosko said. Chris leaned on the pedal, and we sped down the street toward the flashing blue lights where another Policja vehicle had stopped, just on the north side of the corner. As we pulled up behind the vehicle, I could just barely make out the peak of the water tower through the trees ahead.

“Everybody out,” I said. My heart rate was going up again as I contemplated the problem ahead, even assuming that the Policja turned to us to take the tower back. I’d calm down once the action started, but anticipation always starts screwing with me in the meantime.

The two Polish cops were still in their car, hunkered down in their seats, on the radio. Bosko and I trotted up, staying low to keep from attracting attention if the terrorists had shooters up in the tower, and came up to the driver’s side window, Bosko calling ahead on the radio before we moved, to make sure they knew we were coming. Neither one of us, it seemed, wanted to get shot by the Policja. I’d been around enough mid-trained cops not to trust their target discrimination if they got surprised, particularly in what already amounted to a combat situation.

The driver rolled down the window and he and Bosko talked while I leaned out with my OBR and cranked up the scope’s magnification, trying to get a better look at the target. The red brick water tower had two peaked spires, one on the main body of the tower itself, the other above an observation deck that protruded on the east side, looking somewhat like a flying turret on a castle. Even with the scope cranked up to eight power, I couldn’t see any movement in the observation deck’s windows, but since I was burning between the bare branches of several trees, and the sun was glaring off the window glass, that didn’t mean much.

Bosko straightened up some from the car and got on the radio again. A moment later, he tapped my boot with his own. “The command post is there.” He pointed to the building above and half a block to the west. “We can go through the buildings to reach it without exposing ourselves to the terrorists.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s go.” Bosko at least had a good grasp of the terrain and use of cover and concealment, which was a damned sight better than what I’d come to expect from cops over the years. Especially some of the ones we’d worked with Stateside, in the places where we weren’t necessarily considered right-wing terrorists.

Bosko bent to speak to the cop in the car, who said something flippant in return, though even with my extremely limited grasp of Polish, I could hear the brittleness in his voice. Wroclaw was supposed to be a safe area. A haven from the war. It had been bombed once or twice during the EDC offensive, but the southern push had been a feint. Gdansk had been the real prize.

Unfortunately, the reality of modern war was that there were no rear areas. When the enemy willingly unleashes scum like these on target populations, everyone and everyplace is a target.

“Come with me,” Bosko said, swinging around the back of the vehicle and heading for the steps that led up into the apartment building above us.

I waved at the rest to follow. They had spread out across the street, taking up security positions while Bosko and I had figured out the next step. They were all out of the line of sight from the tower, too.

Even after all this time, it occasionally strikes me just what a pure pleasure it is to work with professionals.

The interior hallway was mostly lit by the bright sunlight pouring in through the glass doors on either end, though the overhead lights were still on. The lobby was deserted, though I thought I saw at least one door close as we crossed to the back door.

Bosko led us out into a courtyard, not far from where we’d parked the van, but sheltered by the three-story brick and concrete buildings all around. There was still snow on the ground and on several of the vehicles parked in the courtyard. He trotted across, ignoring the patches of snow and ice, and paused at the door, calling up on his radio before pushing through and waving at us to follow.

I had a hunch that Bosko had been in combat before. After the initial shock from getting his partner blasted right next to him had worn off, he’d adjusted fast. I’d have to ask him, when this was all over, if he’d been in Gdansk, or one of the other fights out to the west.

Most of the lights in the building were off, and we trotted up darkened stairs to the top floor. Uniformed Policja with rifles, submachineguns, and a few shotguns were stationed at the landings. The Policja had armed up more openly since the war had kicked off. Especially with the Wojska Lądowe, the Polish Land Forces, committed to the borders in force, the Policja were the first line of defense when one of the EDC’s agents of chaos struck in the cities.

The interior was ancient, filthy, and stank of mold. In fact, the building appeared to have been mostly abandoned until the Policja had needed it for an overwatch position. Which was fine with me; it meant fewer civilians around, potentially getting caught in the crossfire.

The command post had been set up in the hallway outside a south-facing apartment. The Policja were gathered around a large radio set, two of them peering through the doorway with binoculars, while an aging, sallow-faced man with deep bags under his eyes stood behind them, talking on the radio while he scanned a tablet in his other hand.

“Zastępca Inspektor?” Bosko said by way of greeting, saluting. The sallow-faced man held up the hand holding the radio handset without looking at him, his eyes still fixed on the tablet.

The Deputy Inspector—I’d figured out most of the Polish ranks, in the Policja as well as the Wojska Lądowe—spoke curtly into the radio, then handed the handset and the tablet to a junior cop before turning to us.

He took us in, one of his plus eight men in green, wearing military equipment and carrying high-end AR-10 rifles, except for the biggest one, who had a short-barreled, belt-fed machinegun in his meaty hands. He shot a question at Bosko, who answered before turning to me.

“I told him that you are the American mercenaries, and that you are here to help. He has a SPAP unit coming already.” The Samodzielny Poddodział Antyterrorystyczny Policji were something like the Policja’s SWAT capability. Before the war, they’d done a lot of work around Europe, cooperating with the Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, and others. They were pretty good, from everything I’d heard. The question was, could they get on site in time? They’d been busy as hell lately.

I asked the question. “How soon can they get here?”

When Bosko translated, the Deputy Inspector grimaced. His answer was curt and not happy. “Anywhere from four to five hours,” Bosko said, mirroring the older man’s expression. “There was a major incident in Krakow. All regional units had to be called in.”

I motioned toward the doorway. “May I?” I suspected that I knew why they’d set up the CP in the hallway.

The Deputy Inspector might not have spoken English, but he understood my meaning. He nodded.

I eased past the young woman kneeling at the doorjamb, peering through binoculars, and looked out. Sure enough, there were three bullet holes through the window in the abandoned apartment, and broken glass on the floor. Somebody hadn’t been quite careful enough about keeping a low profile, and the terrorists had made it clear that they didn’t like being watched.

I couldn’t see much more from up there than I’d been able to down on the street. The sun was still blazing against the restaurant windows on the second floor, and while I thought I might have seen movement, I couldn’t be sure. It sure wasn’t enough to take a shot.

Not that opening fire right then was necessarily a good idea. Until we knew more about the terrorists’ dispositions, whether they had hostages—it was a restaurant, so they probably did—and when the SPAP was going to be in position to assault the water tower, opening the ball early was just going to get people killed.

Plus, it wasn’t my call right then. I might have wanted to go ahead and bull through and crush these guys, but the call to assault was going to be on the Deputy Inspector. And as I turned away from the door and looked at him, I honestly couldn’t tell if I thought that was a good thing or not.

“Well, then, I guess we wait.” I pointed to the next apartment over. “Is it okay if we set up an overwatch position while we wait for the SPAP unit to get here?”

Bosko translated. The Deputy Inspector studied me for a moment, then nodded with a few words in Polish. “He says yes, and thank you.”

“We’re here to help,” I said.

Hartrick might have kicked us out of Gdansk for a week to get out of the war, but right then, there was no getting out of the war.

***

We set in and waited. The building really had been abandoned; the apartment next to the CP was barren and unfurnished, which meant we had to either brace our rifles against the doorframe to hold overwatch on the tower, or else get too close to the window and risk kicking things off early.

War involves a lot of hurry up and wait. A lot. What stuck in my craw was that this waiting might just be unnecessary, and that we might be giving the bad guys time to prepare that we didn’t want them to have.

Tony was sitting against the wall next to our overwatch doorway, his Mk 48 sitting on its bipods on the floor. Jordan was leaning against the opposite wall, radiating his usual “fuck off” attitude. Chris and Scott were both on overwatch, each leaning with one hand on the doorjamb, that hand clamped around his OBRs’ forend, eye fixed to scope. Greg, happy and gregarious as always, was trying to strike up a conversation with any of the Policja who would give him a moment’s attention. David was playing with a knife, squatting against the wall next to Tony, humming something that sounded vaguely Deguello-ish. Reuben was snoring.

As for me? I paced.

I was getting close to wearing a hole in the floor, with the estimated time of arrival for the SPAP unit still two, two and a half hours out, when the whole building suddenly shook with a tooth-rattling boom. Shattered glass rained down somewhere nearby.

A moment later, as every head snapped up and I moved quickly to join Chris and Scott at the doorway, gunfire cracked and echoed across the city again.

“What’s going on?” I couldn’t see any activity.

“I don’t know.” Scott was tracking from one side to the other, trying to get a better view. “It’s not at the tower.”

The Policja’s radio was going nuts. I turned to Bosko.

“Another cell,” he said grimly. “They just hit the cordon on the east side with a bomb, and are shooting at the survivors.

“We have to move now.”

Strategic Assets is available for preorder, and will be released on Kindle on Friday, July 24. (The Paperback went live a little earlier than planned.)

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Strategic Assets Chapter 1

We were only about half a block away from Saint Augustine’s Church when the explosion shattered the morning calm.

I saw the ugly black cloud of dust, smoke, and debris billow out from around the corner a fraction of a second before the ground shook with the tooth-rattling boom. Scott and I dove between a van and a box truck, getting into the questionable cover of a crooked brick wall that bordered the narrow lawn on the side of the street. I glanced up at the clear, cold, blue sky, scanning between the barren branches above for fast movers. My hand had instinctively moved for the pistol under my jacket, even though there wasn’t a blessed thing I could do with it if the EDC was bombing Wroclaw.

The sky was clear, though, and no more explosions followed that first big one. Instead, gunfire rattled down the street near the church, and yells and screams split the morning air as the smoke rose higher in the sky.

Scott and I looked at each other for a second before we both drew our weapons. I pulled the radio out of my back pocket.

“Chatty, Deacon,” I called. “Contact at St. Augustine’s. Meet us a block southeast of the church. Bring everything, and contact the Policja to let them know we’re coming in!”

“Roger,” Tony Barnhart replied. There was a pause, presumably while he checked the map. “Five mikes.”

Scott cursed under his breath. “A lot can go wrong in five minutes,” he muttered. He was faced down the street, his PR-15 9mm held at the low ready. His gloves were almost too thick for the Polish pistol—we hadn’t had pistols when we’d gotten to Poland, months before, so we’d wrangled a few out of the locals—but Scott had never liked the cold. He’d always claimed it was because he was Asian, to which I’d always countered that Japan got some pretty cold winters, too.

“Nothing for it,” I replied, my breath smoking. “We’re not exactly down here to play react force, and I’m not all that keen on running in there with only two of us with pistols.”

The fact of the matter was, we were in Wroclaw for some R&R. I’d have been fine with staying up north, in Gdansk, but Hartrick had insisted. He’d had some idea that I would have been looking for a mission if we’d stayed up there.

I had no idea where he got that idea. It wasn’t as if I’d been prowling around the TOC for days, showing up early for every intel brief every time the Germans or the Russians so much as twitched for three weeks straight.

Okay, maybe that’s exactly what I’d been doing, regardless of the fact that I was still recovering from getting the last of the grenade fragments pulled out of my leg, and Jordan had needed two surgeries on the gunshot wound in his arm. I think Hartrick sent us south just to get me out of his hair for a while.

It had been the nicest day in weeks, so Scott and I had decided to walk the streets after breakfast. I couldn’t say that I’d enjoyed big cities in a long time, but any fresh air was welcome after being cooped up for days under the snowstorm that had hammered Poland recently. It had kept the hostile activity down, but there’s only so long you want to be cooped up in a hotel suite with seven other dudes before you start to go crazy. It had just so happened that we’d gone out just in time to run into another terrorist attack.

Whooping European sirens were starting to blare across the city. The Policja were responding quickly. No big surprise; they’d had plenty of practice since the EDC had turned their baleful eye toward Poland.

Those bastards had shown no compunction about using terrorists as proxies and distractions.

Another siren started closing in on us from behind. I turned, peering past a parked van on the street, and spotted the flashing blue lights in a moment as the blue-and-white Polish police car raced toward us.

Keeping my weapon pointed at the snow-covered sidewalk, I stepped out into the street and raised a hand. I really, really didn’t want to have the Polish cops get right on top of us before they noticed two guys with pistols out, barely a block from an ongoing firefight with terrorists.

The Policja car started to slow as the two Polish cops saw me. A hand was raised in acknowledgement in the windshield.

Then a burst of machinegun fire ripped down the street just over my shoulder, smashing into the cop car’s windshield with a series of hammering reports, shattering glass and spattering red against the suddenly clouded window.

I hit the street hard, rolling out of the line of fire behind the box truck. The Policja car skidded as the driver stomped on the brake, the back end breaking free on the ice and snow that was still packed on the street. It hit the back corner of the parked van with a loud bang that wasn’t quite drowned out by another long burst of machinegun fire that thundered down the street.

The van lurched forward under the impact, and I had to scramble to get out of the way before I got crushed between it and the box truck. Scott grabbed me by the jacket and hauled me back up onto the sidewalk before I got pinched.

I heard a door open behind me, and what sounded like a lot of cursing in Polish. But then the bad guys were coming into view and there was no time for screwing around.

The first of them came into view across the street, dashing behind a parked Lada. He was short and bundled up, wearing a thick, puffy jacket and a dark balaclava, carrying what looked like an AK. I started to track in on him, but he disappeared behind the car.

I almost shot at him anyway; cars don’t make good cover. But I only had a 9mm and about fifty-one rounds. Until Tony and the rest got to us with our long guns and gear, I needed to make every shot count.

The Polish cop scuttled over to us, dragging his PM-98 submachinegun around to point it down the street. He almost pointed it at Scott’s back; he was still rattled, and I saw with a glance that he had his partner’s blood spattered across his face. I grabbed his muzzle and forced it down, just as the terrorist behind the Lada popped out and fired at us, the muzzle blast kicking up a bit of snow as bullets smacked into the van above our heads.

Scott opened fire right then, but I couldn’t look. I shoved the Polish cop farther behind the box truck to get him some cover, while I dropped flat behind the rear tire, punching my pistol out with both hands, finding the sights and letting my breath out with a cloud of steam. The terrorist was only showing his head and a bit of his shoulders.

There was enough glare coming off the snow that I had to squint one eye. The PR-15’s initial double-action trigger pull felt like it weighed a hundred pounds as I dragged the trigger back, concentrating on keeping my press even and crisp, forcing myself not to rush the shot.

The bad guy had leaned out some more, pivoting to turn his AK toward the sound of Scott’s fire. I shifted to follow, then the trigger broke, the 9mm sounding like a pop compared to the rattle of AK and RPK fire. His head jerked back and he flopped, bouncing off the Lada’s trunk and hitting the snowy pavement with limp finality.

Yells echoed down the street, and a moment later, a renewed storm of automatic fire blasted at us. The box truck rocked with the impacts, and shattered glass showered down onto the sidewalk. Bullets snapped overhead, smacking into trees and blasting bits of plaster and concrete off the multi-story apartment building above us.

“Shit!” Scott lunged backward, scrambling away from the incoming fire. The Polish cop, swearing and yelling in Polish, half stood and ripped off a long burst with his PM-98, until I grabbed him and hauled him back down before he got his head blown off.

More bullets punched holes through the thin sheet metal just above our heads with a staccato series of loud bangs. If those bastards figured out that they just needed to shoot lower, we were screwed.

The fire redoubled, and the world momentarily turned into a small hell of noise and fear as bullets chewed into the truck above us, ripping through sheet metal, shattering what glass remained, and showering us with fragments.

Then it stopped suddenly. While sirens were still whooping, people were still screaming, and terrorists and Policja were both still shooting, for a brief moment, it seemed very quiet right there on the side of the street.

Our Polish police companion was still muttering under his breath. I’d picked up some Polish over the last few months, but not enough to make out what he was saying. I couldn’t worry too much about it right then, anyway.

I rolled onto my hands and knees and pushed myself up off the ground, easing around the truck to clear the street next to us, little by little. I didn’t know for sure how close Tony and the rest were; that brief engagement had felt like it had taken a small eternity, but I knew it had only been mere seconds. Adrenaline does that.

The man I’d shot was still lying flat and still behind the Lada, his AK in the gutter. I stepped out, carefully easing around to get a view of the whole street before I moved out any farther.

Smoke was still rising from St. Augustine’s. Blue lights flashed farther down the street. Gunfire popped and cracked, both the heavier rattle of the terrorists’ AKs and the lighter pops of Policja 9mms.

I risked a glance back the way we’d come. No reinforcements yet. “Come on,” I croaked. “Looks like they turned south, between the buildings.”

Without waiting for a response, I dashed across the street. If I was going to be getting into a street fight with heavily-armed terrorists, I wanted something more substantial than my sidearm.

I skidded down behind the Lada, hitting a knee and bringing my pistol up, just in case the bad guys had anyone watching their six and waiting for someone like me to do something like this. Fortunately, they didn’t; if they’d been watching the street and been competent shots, I probably wouldn’t have made it across.

My shot had been good, all right. The dead man was lying on his back, staring at the sky with one eye. A bloody, liquid mess seeped where his other one had been, and the red puddle under his head was slowly spreading in the snow.

I reached down and grabbed the AK-47 he’d dropped, glancing over it before holstering my pistol. Most of the bluing had been worn off, and the wooden furniture was dinged and cracked. It was loaded with a 75-round drum, though he only had the regular 30-round mags in his chest rig under his jacket. I stripped out the drum since I had no way of knowing how many rounds were left, rocked in a fresh mag, then grabbed the rest and stuck them in my jacket pockets.

He sure wasn’t going to need them anymore.

I peeked over the Lada’s trunk, finally able to take a little bit of a pause to look over the wider situation. Several Policja vehicles were splayed across the street near the clouds of smoke that still billowed from the far side of St. Augustine’s sky-blue steeple. I could see the blue-uniformed Policja mostly hunkered down behind their cars. They weren’t advancing yet.

The bad guys had forced open the gate leading into the churchyard on the south side of the street. As my eyes tracked in on it, I saw a burst of muzzle blast puff out through the opening, accompanied by a staccato thunder of gunfire. I couldn’t see the shooter, but he was keeping the Policja pinned down.

“Scott!” I bellowed. “Moving up!”

“Roger!” I couldn’t quite see him; he and our cop were on the far side of the box truck still. But Scott would have the sidewalk covered.

I knew my Assistant Team Lead well enough. I didn’t have to see him to know he was on it.

I got my feet under me and dashed across the side street, skidding down to a low knee behind a van parked with its rear pointing toward the open gate. I could have gone farther, but when I was running basically solo, I didn’t want to over-penetrate and expose myself to that gate without having a bit better idea of what I was dealing with.

Easing out past the hood, I just got a glimpse of the bad guy’s shadow. He was set in well back from the opening itself, giving himself a narrow arc to shoot at the Policja, but keeping to the cover of the thick brick wall as much as possible. He fired off another long burst, green tracers spitting up the street with a stuttering roar. The sporadic AK and PM-98 fire in response seemed anemic in comparison, even as the 7.62 and 9mm bullets spat fragments of cement and brick off the wall with hard, sharp cracks.

I couldn’t see if he had a buddy, but so far, it sounded like it was just him. I hadn’t heard a second gun, and from where I crouched, I couldn’t see anyone else. Which told me, in the analytical part of my brain that never quite shut down even in the middle of a firefight, that he was holding the rear for his buddies.

If these assholes were who I thought they were, that meant he probably wasn’t expecting to live through the next few minutes. And he probably had a suicide vest for when the time came.

I really wished I had some frags right about then. But wish in one hand…

“Deacon, Chatty, we’re coming up on your six.” I glanced over my shoulder to see the green loaner van we’d driven down to Wroclaw in coming up, slowing as the smoke and tracer fire came into view.

“Roger, Chatty. Unload and move up to join Weeb on the south side of the road. We’ve got a single shooter inside the gate; suspect that he’s on a one-way trip.”

I could have dropped back to the van and picked up my vest and my OBR. But I was already committed, and the faster we took this bastard out of the game, the better. So instead, I waited for the bad guy’s fire to slacken, then left the dubious cover of the van, staying low and keeping the AK’s muzzle and open sights pointed at the gate, sidestepping out and looking for a shot.

Gliding as best I could over the slick, icy pavement, I angled toward the street, all too conscious of how close I was getting to the Policja’s line of fire. The Poles had redoubled their fire as the bad guy had stopped to reload, and a crackling storm of submachinegun and rifle fire was now chewing into the brick wall around the terrorist’s hiding place. He’d hunkered down; I should have seen him already.

Two more steps and I had him. He’d rocked a fresh mag into his RPK, and looked up just as I settled the front sight post on him.

To his credit, he didn’t hesitate. He yanked up the long-barreled light machinegun and fired, the burst ripping over my head so close that I could feel the bullets’ passage. But he’d have been better off if he’d aimed.

The AK in my hands was still on “Auto.” I stroked the trigger, stitching the five-round burst from his crotch up into his head as the muzzle tried really hard to keep climbing. He jerked under the impacts, screaming for a moment before the fifth round blew a hole through his brain, scattering a spray of red across the snow behind him as he slumped.

I didn’t close with him immediately, but reached back with my off hand and flipped the selector all the way down to “Semi” before putting a final round through his skull. I’d seen the bulk beneath his chest rig; he was wearing an S-vest, all right.

I usually tried to avoid employing the “insurance round.” Too often, I’d seen it boil down to cold-blooded murder, where a mortally wounded man, his guts in his hands, screaming his head off, had been finished off “just in case.” But when you’re facing jihadis, sometimes there just wasn’t any other choice. I hated it, and I hated them for making it necessary.

And at that point, given their target and the S-vest, I had no doubt that these were jihadis.

I didn’t cross the street right away, even though the gunfire had died down. Some Polish cop was still screaming and yelling as another kept shooting at the gateway. No sense in taking chances with a suicide vest, or getting shot by some trigger-happy Policja officer, shaky from adrenaline.

“Deacon, Chatty.” Tony sounded as bland and blasé as ever. He was as given to emotional displays as he was to talk. “Is that you on the north side of the street?”

“Affirm.” I glanced up and down the street. The Policja were starting to close in. “Have we got a Polish terp?”

“This is Weeb,” Scott called. “Officer Bosko here speaks some English.”

“Have him call his buddies and warn them to stay back until they can get EOD over here,” I told him. “I’m pretty sure this dude’s got an S-vest on, and I don’t know what kind of failsafes they might have put into it.”

“Roger.”

I stayed put, my weapon still pointed at the dead man. It was instinct, more than anything else; there was no way he was getting up.

I could hear more sporadic gunfire to the south as Tony and Jordan, both fully kitted out with vests, helmets, and weapons, ran across the street to join me. Tony, who was already bulky enough between his massive build and his SAW vest weighted down with 7.62 ammo belts, had a kitbag slung over his shoulders, and as they took a knee next to me, he shrugged out of it and dropped it next to me.

“Thought you might want this stuff.” He leveled his Mk 48 at the explosives-laden corpse next to the fallen RPK without another word.

“What happened?” Jordan was watching the Policja, his muzzle pointed at the ground. He was slightly shorter than me, and while I’ve been described as having “resting mad-dog face,” he tended to watch everyone with a sort of default belligerence that had led to more than one fistfight. Unfortunately, given that Jordan tended to think of himself as a black man first and anything else second, many of those fights, and his belligerence, tended to be race-related.

He was still adjusting to Eastern European attitudes, and hadn’t necessarily gotten along well with the Policja we’d dealt with. Or many other Poles.

“Somebody bombed the church,” I replied, as I put the AK down and started to shoulder into my own vest, weighed down with 25-round 7.62×51 magazines, medical gear, survival pack, batteries, navigational tools, and a better antenna for the radio that I pulled out of my back pocket and shoved into its pouch. I slung my LaRue OBR, checked that the lens caps were off the scope, and then shoved the AK and the spare mags into the kitbag. “Then they tried to shoot their way out. Looks like they left a shahid to hold the rear when they shifted their escape route.”

Scott and the Policja officer named Bosko were coming across the street to join us, steering well clear of the gate. More sirens were whooping in the distance, and a knot of bundled up Policja were coming from the opposite side, also hugging the far side of the street.

If that S-vest was big enough, of course, then we were all danger-close, but there was only so safe you could be in a combat zone, and this fight wasn’t over yet.

Bosko was a tall, lanky man with pointed features and sandy hair. He was already talking fast as the other cops joined us, all of them glancing at us curiously. Fortunately, we were all in uniform, of a sort. The Triarii, being something of a cross between a militia and a private military company, didn’t have a proper “uniform,” as such, but we all tended to wear either plain olive green or tan fatigues, depending on the conditions, and we were all currently wearing our Triarii patches on our jackets. I hadn’t been a fan of the patches when they first started to get circulated, back when we were still a relatively clandestine organization Stateside, trying to plug the gaps in local security where the Feds or local government had either dropped the ball or were fanning the flames, but now that we had official recognition, thanks to a Letter of Marque and Reprisal, they were coming in handy.

I was pretty sure the patches were the main reason Officer Bosko hadn’t shot us from the get-go.

Tony stayed on a knee while the rest of us stood, his wide, stony face unmoved. Tony was like that. Jordan kept looking from one Pole to the next, almost suspiciously, as if he wondered if they were talking shit about the black dude. Scott kept his eyes outboard, though he was clearly paying attention. He’d picked up more Polish than most of the rest of us already.

As for me, I held my peace while the Policja jabbered at each other. I wanted to just start taking charge of the situation, pushing out to go after the rest of the terrorists. This was, after all, becoming too much of a common occurrence. The Poles had been harsh in their rejection of the “migrants” that had been flooding into Europe from the Middle East for over a decade, but they hadn’t been able to keep all of them out. To make matters worse, when the EDC had invaded back in the fall, they’d let a lot of small cells of Islamists, Communists, and simple violent criminals into the country. The European Defense Corps had been driven back across the German border, but their stay-behind elements were still wreaking havoc.

But as much as I wanted to go hunting, we were on leave, and were hardly part of the Policja’s response plan in Wroclaw. If I pushed too hard too fast, I might just make the situation worse. I can be the guy who starts getting pissed off when I think the decision makers are talking too much, but being a Grex Luporum—Wolfpack—team leader, I’d had to learn a certain degree of patience.

Bosko turned to Scott. “You are the American mercenaries?”

Close enough. “That’s us,” I said. He looked between the two of us for a moment, as if unsure just which one of us was in charge. Scott nodded toward me before turning his eyes back toward the smoke-wreathed churchyard. “We’re available to help, if you can use us.”

Bosko studied me for a second, took in our weapons and gear, and then turned to the squat, flat-faced officer who seemed to be in charge of the group of Policja who had joined us, rattling off another stream of Polish that was too fast for me to catch more than a couple of words. The officer looked at me, then nodded, almost grudgingly.

“You are the special ones, yes?” Bosko asked. He seemed a little more eager for us to get involved than the other guy. He’d watched me shoot a terrorist in the head from across the street with a pistol, after all.

I nodded. “We’re a Grex Luporum Team, yes.”

He nodded back, quickly telling the flat-faced man something. I thought I heard “GROM” in there somewhere.

Our reputation seemed to be spreading in Poland.

The older officer squinted at me, took a deep breath, and nodded. He said something in Polish that I couldn’t quite make out, and then Bosko said, “The criminals are fleeing south on foot. If we move in your vehicle, we might be able to cut them off. There are Policja units already moving, but most of them are in pursuit.”

I smiled coldly behind my dark red beard. “Let’s go hunting, then.”

Strategic Assets is currently available for preorder, and will be available on Kindle and in Paperback on July 24.

The post Strategic Assets Chapter 1 appeared first on American Praetorians.

Weaponized Outrage Judo

So, some of you might have noticed a bit of a kerfuffle around SPOTREPS – A Maelstrom Rising Anthology during the last couple of days. Someone (identity unknown and uninvestigated due to a complete lack of giving a damn) pulled a drive-by on the reviews within the first few hours after it went live.

Most of their one-star review was gibberish. Mike Kupari had to look some of the nonsense jargon up. Turns out, the “reviewer” (who most likely did not like the book and had a grudge against one or another of the authors) was using specifically “ethno-nationalist” terms. Their bitch was that we didn’t buy into the idea that the only viable foundation for a nation-state is race. That a republic based on the Natural Law and the equality of all under the law was “magic” and in no way preferable to Marxism and Communism.

Larry Correia promptly rubbed his big hands in glee and turned his considerable fanbase loose. We call it a “Hooning.” (Long story.) Many bought the book out of sheer spite. If the racist punk who tried to drag it through the mud was hoping to damage the anthology, their hatred had the opposite effect.

Weaponized Outrage Judo, indeed.

As LawDog put it, pissing off an actual fascist is just icing on the cake.

Fascists might have been pikers in the body count arena compared to actual Communists, but they’re still plenty vile.

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