Last Stand Read online

  But, finally, as I got the men up and moving back toward base, I heard that donkey bray. Even in a balls-out firefight, American soldiers are almost never willing to shoot an innocent animal.

  And that fact cheered me up again.

  * * *

  Morning at al-Tanf – the largest, and now last, American military outpost on Syrian soil. I rolled over on my rack, hauled myself up in my skivvies, and stretched – banging both fists on the corrugated walls of my CHU. Again. But at least the billet was private, a fringe benefit enjoyed only by Two Bravo’s commander…

  And its senior NCO – i.e. me. RHIP.

  In thirty seconds, I had my ACUs buttoned up and helmet and body armor on – no one’s allowed to walk around without them, due to the ongoing threat of IDF (indirect fire attacks, rockets and mortars) – and in another minute had reached the DFAC, where most of the platoon had already beaten me to morning chow. It’s not like me to sleep in. But last night’s mission had left me with disturbing dreams.

  And these were some crazy-ass times.

  I remembered this fact as I eyed CNN on the big wall TV, while lining up for my egg-white scramble and Greek yoghurt with nuts and fruit. Rangers work harder, put in longer hours, and are always first to the fight. Better chow is one of the few perks. Though of course it wasn’t to make us happy. It was to keep us healthy. Nutrition went hand in hand with the twice-daily PT smokers and fanatical Ranger commitment to superior fitness.

  We never let anyone out-train us.

  On the screen overhead, Christiane Amanpour was standing before a rain-lashed Eiffel Tower, looking serious. “…again, these are by no means the first reported cases outside the Horn of Africa, but they do represent the first confirmed presence of the virus in major Western capitals…”

  I tuned out again as I hefted my tray, swung by the dessert bar, and built a big-ass sundae with M&Ms and peanut-butter sauce, then walked it over to Specialist Smith at the junior-enlisted end of the table.

  “Ice cream for breakfast?” he said, looking exactly like a kid on Christmas morning – a twelve-year-old one.

  “Hell, yeah,” I said. “For keeping your gun in the fight.”

  “Just protecting the team,” he said, actually blushing.

  I scruffed his buzzcut, then moved down to the command end of the table, taking a seat across from Captain Darby and alongside Staff Sergeant Chandler, leader of first squad. Scarfing up my eggs, I glanced at the TV again: “…French health authorities have set up screening facilities in Charles de Gaulle Airport, which is believed to be the initial vector…”

  “Jesus Christ,” Chandler muttered, drawing the ghost of a sharp look from Darby – who, unlike most of the men he led, was a religious man. He’d grown up in southwest Virginia, where the two major themes were guns and God. He was also first in his family to go to college, but not first to go into the family business – which wasn’t just soldiering, but Rangering. His great-grandfather had died on the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, days after marrying his English great-grandmother. So far, Darby had never shoved his faith in anybody’s face, which I think we all appreciated.

  But it also seemed to give him some kind of a rock to operate from, a discernible steadiness.

  “Sorry,” Chandler said. “Anyway, at least this fucking outbreak is leapfrogging us.” I was pretty sure I knew what he meant – on this latest mid-East deployment of ours, in Syria, the western Levant, we were basically sitting on the land bridge between Africa and Europe. If you looked at a map of some shit going down in Africa, and needed to go around the Med, then the shortest route to the developed world ran right through us. Chandler had been a cop in Baltimore before enlisting. He tended to believe in what he could see with his own eyes – and also that shit rolled downhill.

  For my own part, and aside from that, I tried not to think about it too much. On deployment, Rangers tend to stay in our “five-foot world” – focusing on our jobs and what we could control, which was plenty hard enough.

  Then again, it was getting impossible to totally ignore the mystery epidemic raging out of East Africa like some fucked-up flash fire. The first reports had been conflicting – some victims the disease was said to kill outright, while others it made delirious. Then there had been stories of the sick people going crazy, getting violent – attacking medical personnel, family, or random pedestrians, like rabid animals. I’d gotten more than one news article forwarded to me with some version of the comment, “Well, looks like the goddamn zombie apocalypse is finally here.”

  Like I said – nothing’s shocking anymore.

  “…at this point neither CDC nor the World Health Organization have updated the Hargeisa outbreak to the status of pandemic…”

  This raised a grim chuckle from more than a few of the older guys around the table. Evidently they’d named this disease after the second biggest city in Somalia, where the first cases had been reported. And Rangers – specifically our company, B-Co, which had fought in pretty much every U.S. engagement since the invasion of Sicily in WW2 – had some bad history in Somalia. Most of it on an October day when a couple of Black Hawks had conspicuously failed to stay in the air.

  “…going to have to interrupt you there, Christiane.” Looking up again, I now saw Wolf Blitzer in the studio replacing the live feed. “We’re getting reports that two British Airways triple-sevens have gone down on approach to London Heathrow. One may have ditched in the English Channel, possibly retaken by its passengers and crew…”

  And with this, the entire table – pretty much the entire DFAC – went silent as the grave. Baboon flu or whatever the fuck down in Africa was remote and abstract. But major terrorist attacks generally meant none of us should make any vacation plans for the next decade.

  “…Britain is reported to be going into lockdown, as multiple aircraft are still unaccounted for. This is all eerily like those first hours of 9/11…”

  “Stay put,” Captain Darby said, rising and heading for the exit.

  “Hey,” Chandler asked. “What day is today?”

  I checked my G-Shock. “November eleventh.”

  “Ha. Fucking 11/11. Great day for an attack.”

  As soldiers all around the room checked phones or craned at the TV, one of our senior staff officers, a full-bird colonel, crashed in the front doors with two MPs flanking him. His voice cut through the murmuring like an icebreaker.

  “Listen up! This installation is now under posture-one security lockdown. Return to your areas and report to unit commanders or team leaders for security assignments. Everyone stands watch, or stands ready. No one goes outside the wire.” He clapped his hands. “Move!”

  But even as the rest of us in Two Bravo bounced from our benches, Captain Darby stuck his head back in the door, shouting over the tumult. “Chris! I need you, in the JOC.” My commander and my mother are pretty much the only people who address me by my Christian name. To everyone else, I’m either “Sergeant,” “Sergeant Vogeler,” or – as the top sergeant in the platoon – simply “Top.”

  “New tasking?” I asked, following him out through the exodus.

  “Yeah. You could say that.”

  * * *

  “Navy confirms POSIDENT. It’s the Admiral Gorshkov.”

  “Sneaky fuckers.”

  “Yeah. Just like fucking Putin to take advantage of the chaos and slip new forces into theater.”

  “Like a hot beef injection.”

  Captain Darby and I were huddled up around a tactical station, with that same colonel and a handful of other ops officers. For reasons best known to the TOC jocks who worked in there, the JOC was kept in a state of permanent midnight. Monitors glowed around the arena-like space, illuminating the serious men and women who stared into them, or else spoke intently into phones and radios. Overhead, drone video, real-time mission data, and more CNN beamed down from giant flat screens.

  “What kind of forces are we talking?”

  “Intel desk thinks it might be an e
ntire Spetsnaz naval battalion.”

  I winced at this gigantic enemy-forces estimate – not because it was so big, but because I was still smarting from the prior night’s intel debacles, and was going to find it difficult to believe anything that came out of these guys’ mouths for a while. But I winced all inside, and kept my mouth shut, which was a big part of my job right now. And it was at least possible they weren’t wrong this time. Everyone here already knew the U.S. and Russia had basically been fighting a proxy war in Syria – the Russians backing Assad, and us heading up an awkward alliance of rebels, and more or less Islamist militias.

  This whole powder keg had nearly turned into a shooting war – between two nuclear powers – when we put in some airstrikes that slightly accidentally on purpose killed 200 Russian “volunteers” serving with Syrian government forces in Khasham, near the Iraqi border. Those dead guys were actually PMCs – private military contractors – and almost all of them would have been ex-Russian military.

  So it was a little bit personal, not to mention emotional, for Mother Russia. In the end, cooler heads had prevailed. But Putin, the former KGB intel officer, was always looking for ways to stab you in the back, because it was a lot safer than stabbing you in the front.

  “Hey, Colonel,” a liaison officer shouted from across the room. “We’ve got a request for assistance from one of the NGOs at Rukban.” The nearby refugee camp at Rukban had been a flashpoint for a long time, with pretty much every combatant in the civil war accusing every other one of using the refugees as human shields at one time or another.

  “What?” the Colonel said, straightening up. “What is it?”

  “Something about unrest, or maybe an uprising? Also they’re saying they’ve got more sick people than they can deal with there.”

  This caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. But the Colonel didn’t actually have a neck and so he just said, “We can’t deal with that particular shit-show right now. We’re fully tasked with our own shit-show. Tell them to ring UNHRC.” He turned back to me and Captain Darby. “And as for your airborne sons of bitches, we just got your marching orders from CENTCOM. Nobody on that Russian vessel comes ashore.”

  Darby said, “Sir, what’s our high-level mission concept?”

  “High-level is you get your asses in the air and over to the port at Tartus, then put in blocking positions – and shoot any sonofabitching Russkie who crawls up onshore. Your bird is rotors-turning now.” Suddenly, I could hear it, through the sandbagged walls of the half-buried JOC. “Wheels up in ten.”

  “Sir.”

  * * *

  “So let me get this straight,” I said to Darby as we jogged toward our barracks at the other end of camp. “It’s going to be the thirty-six of us against— wait, how big is a Spetsnaz naval battalion?”

  “About two hundred.”

  “So us against two hundred Navy SEAL wannabes – except bigger, meaner, and even more impervious to pain. All while blockading a no-shit legit Russian naval facility.” It wasn’t even an open secret anymore that the port at Tartus was basically owned and operated by the Russian Navy, who’d been gunning for warm-water ports for centuries. “Hey, sir, you think we need the whole platoon?”

  Darby sighed. “You want numbers, join 3ID. Rangers make do.”

  I almost laughed. “One riot, one Ranger platoon.” With that, we’d reached the barracks. Pausing there, I said, “Oh, and good thing nobody’s allowed outside the wire.”

  “Yeah,” Darby said. “Thanks for not saying that back there.”

  “No problem, sir.” I opened the door and blasted inside, “Okay, ladies! Anyone who’d like to kill somebody today, kindly get your asses to the other side of this majestic army base. Full battle rattle and extended combat load-out, let’s go, let’s go!”

  * * *

  “From Regimental Ranger to exploding trip-wire. Yee-hah!”

  This was Staff Sergeant Chandler, shouting over the wind and rotor noise as our spec-ops MH-47G Chinook rose up over camp and then turned toward the Med like a high-tech flying septic tank, a whole lot of sandy nothing spreading out to the horizon on all sides. Like the other team leaders, Chandler had instantly grasped the reality of our situation. Basically, the 36 of us could not really fight a warship, never mind a whole Spetsnaz battalion. So we were more or less just going there to be human trip-wires – and to dare the Russians to come through us. Evidently, someone was betting Putin would blink.

  But if he didn’t, everyone in Two Bravo was dead.

  “Sua sponte,” I yelled back at Chandler. The motto of the Ranger Regiment, it meant “Of their own accord,” and it succinctly got my point across: none of us had to be there. This also had the desired effect of shutting Chandler the fuck up.

  I leaned over the Captain’s shoulder, and peered into the ruggedized tablet where he was scanning real-time intel and updates as they streamed in. Onscreen I could see the specs for the Admiral Gorshkov. The lead ship of her class, she mounted a 130mm deck gun, 16 cruise missile cells, 32 for SAMs, and two Kashtan auto-cannons, plus torpedoes and 14.5mm machine guns. I already knew our insertion plan had us putting down two klicks from the port, then humping in on foot. But I figured the SAMs would probably shoot us out of the sky long before that, saving everyone the walk.

  All this was too fucking depressing, so I got up and moved to the rear, finding Smith sitting at the end of the bench. I slapped him on the helmet. “What’s the good word, Specialist?”

  “All squared away, Top!”

  And so he was. But as I fought to stay upright in the rattling and bouncing cabin – a helicopter is basically 10,000 parts flying in close formation – my eye was suddenly caught by some wild shaky-cam action on his phone, which he had perched in his lap. “What the hell is that?” I shouted. “You watching 28 Days Later as we all fly to our deaths?”

  “No, Sergeant! It’s not a movie. It’s the damned news!”

  I leaned in closer and squinted at the tiny screen, at what looked like a live news broadcast gone horribly wrong – flames and rioters in the background… then the reporter getting tackled to the ground, followed evidently by the camera crew, judging from the frame rolling sideways, then upside down. “Put that shit away,” I said. “Get your head in the game. Five-foot world, hoo-ah?”

  Even then, the rotors overhead changed in pitch – and my stomach took a dive for my anus, then climbed back up into my mouth – as we zoomed up over a last hill, then dropped again like a bag of rocks. According to the five-line op order we got in the air, we should hit the port about the same time as the Russians.

  Happy fucking days.

  * * *

  “Damn dude, when this kicks off, we’re all gonna fuckin’ die!”

  This was Chandler again, looking over his shoulder from a hasty leadership meeting, taking place twenty meters behind our lines. And so far those “lines” consisted merely of the men digging in like sped-up Looney Tunes characters, in the shallow bluffs overlooking the perimeter fence of the naval base. We were actually close enough to hear shouting Russian sailors tying up the frigate at the dock, below us and behind the chain-link fence. Worse, we could hear the groaning of the ship’s 130mm deck gun, as it depressed to point directly at our dismounted, unarmored, and totally unsupported asses.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And when this kicks off, we’ll also be at war.”

  “But since we’ll all be dead,” Captain Darby said, “the war will be somebody else’s problem. Until then, we do our jobs. Who's got input?”

  I sighed and took a look around. “The MGs in the rear are fine. But I say we put the anti-armor team right up front.”

  “Do it. We can at least make it hot for Ivan to disembark. Before he rolls over us.”

  As I moved to make this happen, Darby turned away, finger to his ear. “Two Bravo Actual, send it…”

  “No seriously,” Chandler said, trotting alongside me. “We’re gonna fuckin’ die.”

  I followed his
gaze now toward a whole new industrial sound of doom – namely the whining of the two Kashtan CIWS guns on the frigate’s bridge deck.

  “Shit,” I said. “I didn’t even know those could point forward.”

  A six-barreled rotary cannon, the Kashtan is intended to shoot down supersonic anti-ship missiles, or aircraft, both in mid-flight. But, then again, its 9,000 rounds per minute of tallboy-sized 30mm HE incendiary shells would make short work of a handful of airborne Rangers. We couldn’t hide, and we definitely couldn’t run.

  “And on top of every other goddamned thing,” Chandler said, piling it on, “here we are hanging our pale asses out in full-on daylight.”

  It was true we almost never went out on ops in the light anymore, for a lot of compelling reasons. Then again, this was unlike any mission we had ever been on – the Cold War ended before most of the men were born, and the world after 9/11 was the only thing most of them had ever known. Nonetheless, being operational in full daylight I think was making everyone feel profoundly naked, plus up on stage in our high school gyms.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, trying to lower the temperature. “The Russians probably have better night-vision gear than us, anyway. Our aiming lasers would just be homing beacons for their snipers. Use your EOTech, you’ll live longer.”

  “Yeah,” Chandler said. “And at least this way, we can see ourselves all getting killed, and wave goodbye to each other.”

  By the time I had the AA team in place, Darby was waving me back over. “We’re advised not to expect a QRF on this one.”

  I shrugged. “Who the hell do they even have to come bail us out at this point – the cooks?”

  “No, not even them now. Al-Tanf is under attack. It’s every man to the walls there.”

  Shit. This was all getting worse by the minute.

  “Who is it? Baqir Brigade? Hezbollah?”

  “No. Sick people from the refugee center.”