Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Read online

  Ten minutes before dawn Kurtz looked over at me as though assessing my gear and finding every piece of it, and me as a whole, woefully lacking for a warrior who finds himself among the Army’s premier fighting force, the Rangers. He took my MK18 and stripped off some of the equipment I’d been issued as part of the SOPMOD upgrade package we’d been handed back at the Fifty-One armory. In the end, after going through the rest of the gear I’d been issued, he took off the Specter telescopic sight I’d been rather proud of getting attached and zeroed all by myself.

  “Just use it this way,” he said not-so-angrily-as-he-looked and shoved it back into my hands.

  Now I would use the holographic reflex sight. Like a pro Ranger, even!

  We sat there in the dark for a little longer, and even though it had been a horrendous battle in the middle of the night and the bodies of the orcs were still floating slowly down the river or hung up on rocks or branches, or along the shore, the first birds of morning began to test their songs. Tentatively. Cautiously. Just a few notes. As if to say… We’re still here. You guys finished yet?

  Vonnegut’s poo-tee-weet sprang to mind.

  The sun was coming up in the east, but for now, along the river, it was all quiet and you could see a soft, forgiving, kind of light in the sky to the west. And the dark shadows along the near-silent river we were watching.

  Maybe it was beautiful because we were still alive.

  That’s me practicing at being a writer with this journal and Mont Blanc pen my mom gave me when I graduated Basic. Every so often I still try to figure out whether that was a nice gift, or a sarcastic one. A comment at me having turned my back on what I’d worked so hard to attain for something as mundane as serving one’s country. That had been her opinion.

  Knowing her, it was sarcastic.

  Sergeant Kurtz got a comm telling me to report back to the TOC. He told me to “shove off” with little fanfare even though we’d killed a bunch of bad guys together. Well, technically he killed them all. I was just there. Helping. By then Brumm and Tanner were back with more cans of ammo for the two-forty.

  Later, when I got back to the C-17 that served as our tactical operations command post, barely clearing the river and setting down in a long field the pilot was some how able to get it down onto, the morning light among the thin, skeletal trees on the island was gray and wan. It was silent out in the woods and the field. All I could hear was the sound of my own boots snapping dry deadfall and tramping through the dewy grass.

  I boarded the C-17 and found a full-blown meeting in progress with all the high muckety-mucks of detachment command and power in attendance. So, being a nobody, I sat in one of the seats and listened in. If they wanted to know how to say screwed in one of the languages I spoke, then maybe I could chime in and be helpful.

  Command Sergeant Major Stone was busy briefing the captain of our detachment. The sergeant major was riding with us when we left Fifty-One. Our colonel and three other detachments were on other flights, parts of the larger overall joint task force. The plan had been for us to all link up wherever it was we were going when we got there. Instead we ended up here, wherever here was.

  Information about the where we were supposed to have gone part had been woefully lacking in the week-long run-up to this operation. And since I’m a PFC linguist, no one is really obliged to tell me much of anything anyway. But still, I’m always curious. I knew it was something out of the ordinary when I’d signed on for two to five years in the future back at Fifty-One. But I was thinking Iran at the time. Not freaking Gondor.

  The captain here on the ground was in what would normally be considered a Major slot for Ranger company command, and the command sergeant major with all his years of experience killing people overseas in exotic places was effectively acting as staff for the captain. Supply. Planning. Intel. Having the sergeant major was probably our luckiest break. Everything we didn’t know, he did. And he’d probably forgotten a lot we’d never know. That kind of guy. Y’know?

  “… we won’t get hit, sir,” the sergeant major was saying. He had a deep voice and hadn’t quite managed to get rid of a Texas drawl. “At least not for the rest of the day. That’s my guess, sir. These… forces we’re facing… they’ve proved they’re night-fighters of some kind. I estimate we’ll have the day to prep, but they’ll be back after dark. Until then I suggest… in lieu of not being here altogether… we fortify, deploy the hi-ex, and get some Reaper teams together to respond asymmetrically. Something more creative than what those things saw last night. Rangers defend by offending, sir.

  “This was a probe. Clear and simple. They’ll be back tonight like they mean it. You’re the ranking ground force commander, Captain, and you have my recommendation. It’s your call. I’m just here to make sure they shave and don’t roll their sleeves up too high, sir.”

  Then the command sergeant major sat down and picked up a paper cup full of coffee to indicate he was done with everyone. He had a Kindle on his knee, but he wasn’t reading it. His stare was so downrange you couldn’t tell if he was here or somewhere in Iraq twenty years ago killing everyone.

  The platoon leaders were there too. The captain was there. The first sergeant was there. And so were the Baroness and the Deep State guy. And the Forge technician. I hadn’t caught his name yet. The pilot of the C-17 was around. But his first officer, a really cute LT with a blond ponytail, wasn’t. Which was too bad. I’d gotten a smile out of her a day ago and I was looking to improve my position with some witty turns of phrase in Italian.

  I locked eyes with the pilot instead. If anyone felt more useless than me, it was probably him. Getting us on the ground alive was the extent of what he could meaningfully contribute to our situation. We’d smashed a landing gear coming in, and the fact that the plane wasn’t spread all over the river rocks and burning in pieces in the tree line was to his credit. There was no getting off this small river island in the C-17. This was home for now. The Forge weighed about six thousand pounds, so until we figured out a way to move it without the plane, we were stuck here.

  The captain is someone I have no idea about. He’s always busy and he looks like his stomach is upset all the time. His hair has gone prematurely gray, but he’s tabbed and has a Ranger combat scroll on his right shoulder, and that makes him somebody around here.

  The scroll, according to Sergeant Thor, is a way of life and a culture of success, every day, at all things—it never ends. Every day is a selection in the regiment. The easiest day in the regiment, as explained to me, is the day you graduate RASP; after that it gets real hard to keep up. If you don’t produce results, you are fired. For junior enlisted, going to Ranger School and getting your tab is the standard—if you fail, you’re out. Sergeant Thor told me his young studs were great kids, but until they were tabbed, they were just “renting space.” You cannot be a “landowner” until you get your tab. After that you can take your first junior leadership spot as a gun team leader, and then, again according to Thor, “They start to figure out what this stuff is really all about.”

  Everyone who’s been through the various Ranger orientation programs, throughout the ages, is a Ranger. But if you earned the Ranger tab then you’re considered Ranger-qualified. Tabbed. And like I said, that’s something.

  But the captain was more than something. He was an officer, had a combat scroll, and was in command of a company-sized element, in a slot usually reserved for majors. And if that’s not enough, let me just add this. Company commanders can only be officers who have already had successful tours as platoon leaders in the regiment—a very small pool. If fifty guys are successful platoon leaders in the Ranger regiment (and that in itself is like .0001 percent of the infantry platoon leaders in the Army) then less than ten of those will be asked to come back and be a company commander. There are less Ranger company commanders than there are NFL quarterbacks.

  In short, to be a company commander means someone
is literally as good as the Army can produce.

  The captain thanked the command sergeant major for his assessment and was about to issue orders when the Deep State guy in his L.L.Bean adventure-golfer-I’m-not-CIA-no-really gear stood up to speak.

  “Hey, Captain Harwood,” began Deep State.

  “Go ahead, Volman,” Harwood said.

  “I’d like to jump in here right now and just… y’know… contribute a few things before we get started. Just some… contributions. I hope I can improve the overall atmosphere and synergy we need to achieve in this next phase of the… ah, well… the operation here on the ground and all. I think we’ve gotten off to a bad start with a… ahem… the locals. One of yours, a PFC Kennedy I believe, one of your Rangers, told me he thinks these are… orcs.”

  “PFC Kennedy,” interrupted the command sergeant major, “is a wretched child who I will turn into a first-class killing machine unless it destroys him in the process.” Statement of fact. More like an ancient truth carved in granite.

  In the short time I had been part of the detachment, I knew as gospel that whatever came out of the command sergeant major’s mouth was like some unbreakable code written in granite law that was the basis of all our existences. Even the Deep State guy, Volman, seemed to flinch as the senior-most NCO in the detachment interrupted him and began to fire words like the slow sure boom of distant artillery headed your way. Falling on your head directly. Meteors falling from the heavens. Giant space rocks that could crush you flat.

  Stone was a good last name for the command sergeant major because it was him. A hard ass thing that was there before you showed up with all your agendas and ideas. And would be there long after he kicked the dirt over your shallow grave on the other side of the firefight you just got yourself killed in. The one your fancy ideas and agendas got torched in by the cold reality of expended brass, timing, preparation, and just plain old bad luck.

  The command sergeant major made you feel temporary. Unless. Unless you adhered and knew wisdom. And then… maybe. Just maybe. You might see the sun rise tomorrow.

  Maybe.

  The Deep Statie barely recovered from the command sergeant major’s sudden destabilizing verbal attack. Allowing emotions to cross his presidential appointee face that had been beaten out of the rest of us during Basic. Drill Sergeant Ward would have smoked this guy like a cheap cigar until Ward got tired. Just for nothing more than letting his face react the way it did to what the command sergeant major had said.

  And as Drill Sergeant Ward was fond of telling us, “I don’t tire easily.”

  Nonetheless, Volman persisted, despite seeming completely unaware of the situation and the kind of people he was dealing with. He continued, a sick smile, but a smile nonetheless, pasted on his sallow civilian face. Like he was gonna turn all this around and close the deal on a brand-new BMW. He just needed you to sign on the dotted line. Will you be financing at twenty-four percent interest?

  “Be that as it may,” continued snake oil salesman of the month Deep State Volman. “They… whatever they are… let’s call them orcs. They’re the locals and we’re here as guests. In their territory. Don’t you think we should try to… you know… talk to them first, Captain Harwood?” He was speaking to the captain directly now. Not playing to the crowd as had been his first instinct until the sergeant major tactfully rained down verbal fire on his rhetorical position and caused him to doubt the footing of his not-so-firm foundation.

  The captain just stared at the Deep State man like some town sheriff might regard a local village idiot who’s just gotten himself up to some new drunken indiscretion involving pants down around ankles. Raving that two plus two was steak and that he, the village idiot, was indeed the Grand Czar Nicholas the Second’s long lost great-great-grandson while the deputies got ready to cuff another lunatic for the drive out to the mental asylum.

  Volman opted to nod to himself in a long-suffering saintly fashion when he realized his grand play to manipulate the low IQ losers he thought we all were didn’t go over like he’d planned. Rangers are screened for motivation and aggressiveness. They also, like all Special Forces, test high on the military’s intelligence test, the ASVAB. They just prefer to act stupid because they think it’s tougher. And tough is a kind of cool regardless of what some beta-male website says about letting other men sleep with your girlfriend.

  Then, and for me this was the fun part, the high point of the whole trip, Volman decided to try, active word try, to pull rank. On a Ranger captain.

  Oof.

  “Listen, Captain,” said Volman anew. “I don’t want to go over your head. But the calls you’re making here, right now, in this situation. Armed soldiers out there on the line… out there playing with explosives and indiscriminately killing anyone who comes near them. Locals. Most likely a minority or even a victim group of some kind. We don’t know. And here your guys are, acting like they’re making up the rules of engagement as they go. And forcing the… the uh… the kid who runs the Forge to start making more bullets. That’s your first call on the ground, Captain Harwood? Correct me if I’m wrong. But we don’t know… orcs or whatever those things are… we don’t know if they started out as enemies or if you just turned them into enemies when they came out to communicate with us. And now we’ll probably never know thanks to you and your Rangers.

  “But maybe… maybe… maybe we still have a chance to do like I said and try some parley. Encounter them on their level. Get to know the leaders. See what they need. See what we can give them to be our friends and allies. No different than how Lewis and Clark won the favor of the Native Americans. This kind of thing worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it can work here. We are guests in their country, wherever this country is. And to be brutally honest… I’m a direct appointee from your commander-in-chief. So you should just consider that, Captain. In other words… what I say…”

  I think he was about to say… goes.

  But the captain had had enough at that point.

  He held up his hand and looked like he was fighting down sudden indigestion. The hand held up was knife-edged, and you had the feeling as you watched it come up and stay there that it could probably slam a carotid artery and just kill you right there on the spot. And that it wouldn’t be the knife hand’s first rodeo in carotid artery slamming.

  “I’m going to stop you right there, Mister Volman,” said the captain, using concise clipped speech. The rage was controlled. “This is a military operation. No Tomorrow Rules in effect. So until a lawful government is established… I am the government. I am your commander-in-chief. The one you’re referring to… that commander-in-chief, Mr. Volman, sir… he died about ten thousand years ago if our pilot is correct in his celestial navigation calculations regarding our current position and how many years we’ve gone forward.”

  Deep State’s face drained of all color.

  The captain put his knife hand down and came around the desk he’d set up near the C-17’s rear cargo deck door.

  “So, here’s the situation…”

  Chapter Three

  I probably need to stop right there and tell you how exactly we got here, wherever here is. Surrounded by orcs. Trust me, an explanation of what Captain Knife Hand had to say next will sound a lot more rational and sane if I give you that much. Otherwise it would all just sound crazy.

  And believe it or not, things still weren’t as crazy as they were gonna get. Crazy was gonna be an easy and good day in comparison to what was coming for us.

  So there I am before I join the army. I just wrapped my sixth master’s degree in language, this time in Farsi. It took me seven degrees to finally realize that I hate academia and… I’ve got this crazy desire to be a soldier. I want to have an adventure. A real adventure. Not just travel to another country, take a few selfies, eat the local food, and record it all on Instagram.

  I want to do something with my life before the day
comes when I can’t do anything but wish I’d done something. So I start talking to the recruiters, and yeah, when they find out I speak a lot of languages they’re excited and offer me all kinds of fun things that may or may not be true. Bonuses. Choice of station… “How’d you like to go to Hawaii?” None of which really matter to me. I don’t think the recruiters really understood what they had in me. What I can really do with languages. They just get me into Basic Training and then I’m off to the Defense Language Institute at Monterey.

  It wasn’t until Monterey that someone figured me out. I showed up at the Chinese School, an eighteen-month course, and tested out two days later. To be honest, it wasn’t fair. I already knew Chinese. Then we played a fun game where I ran through most of the other languages they offered and tested right through those, too.

  It became kind of a game-show atmosphere for a couple of weeks after that. A general even showed up to watch. I should have known something was up then. The guy was from SOCOM and covered in badges and tabs and he looked like Captain Knife Hand’s older, angrier brother.

  I’d already been to Jump School after Basic. And after the teachers at DLI were told in no uncertain terms they could not have me, I was sent off to learn how to Ranger on the introductory level at an abbreviated three-week RASP course designed especially for me and a few other intel monkeys who were needed late in the game. Then a two-week intel school that was completely off-book. It was basically me and a guy who told me I could call him John but that that wasn’t his real name. I kid you not. It was in an airport Best Western out in Las Vegas. And not the good part of town. Then he drove me to Area 51 and dropped me off at the Ranger detachment’s temporary headquarters along the airfield.

  And though I’d been in an isolation bubble of training for the previous six months, I knew a little bit about what was going on out in the world. Things were coming apart at the seams, and you could tell it was for real this time because the news networks weren’t saying a lot. It was their guy in the White House and they didn’t want him to look bad.