Last Stand Read online

  But 16 against a half-million would be a hell of a lot worse.

  I ducked back as another .45 ACP shower wafted in – a heavy one, as those APC9s had a full-auto rate of fire of 1,080 freaking rounds per minute. Another quick look revealed this new shooter in the exact same position as the first – never a good long-term survival strategy – but he seemed to be covering a line of dudes running perpendicular behind him. Which meant they weren’t running toward us.

  My biggest overall fear was they’d use their huge advantage in numbers to encircle us, slow our advance, and stop our sweep through camp before we could finish it. As long as we maintained surprise, speed, and violence of action, the uneven numbers didn’t matter so much. But if we lost the initiative, got jammed up, started trading rounds from static positions… the bigger force would win.

  I couldn’t get any radio reports. But I could feel the motion of the assault on either side of me, almost as if Two Bravo was an extension of my body, or the cells of a single organism. I took a breath and drove on, pushing forward across the HLZ to the next hard cover. This would be our last big push.

  After that… mop-up.

  * * *

  Until that push became unnecessary – and the mop-up was moot.

  When all four of our fire-teams converged at the north edge of camp, we found the bodies of a few Taliban stragglers littering the ground – but nobody still living, never mind fighting. I already knew we hadn’t killed even a significant fraction of the force our initial drone surveillance had shown here. Yet, somehow, in minutes…

  The whole place had turned into a ghost town.

  At the head of first squad, Staff Sergeant Chandler approached, pushing his NVGs up on his helmet. It would be a while before the sun cleared the peaks, but the darkness was quickly turning to smudged browns in the pre-dawn light.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  “Casualties,” I said, ignoring his question for the moment. In a few seconds, I had the exact numbers: zero. We had lost no one in the assault, and the only injuries were a shallow bullet crease to an arm, and a slightly rolled ankle.

  “Message repeats,” Chandler said. “What the hell?”

  “Yeah,” I said, turning away and walking off down the perimeter fence. It took all of about twenty steps to figure out where the rest of them had gone. They had gotten out, literally under the wire. At some point they’d built an escape tunnel, and today they had used it.

  “Smart,” I said, holding the trap door open – but also keeping my weapon pointed directly into the tunnel.

  “Yeah.” Chandler shook his head, and spat. “Like they had a well-rehearsed plan for abandoning ship.”

  He wasn’t wrong – getting that many guys out a narrow tunnel while under fire must have required a well-practiced drill. I said, “Well… you would, too, I guess, if you were down in this bowl, surrounded by the dead.”

  In the less-great-news department, I was pretty sure they had only bugged out because of the shock and ferocity of our initial assault – and because they had no idea how few of us there were. As soon as they figured that out, we could expect a counter-assault. And as smart as they were already looking, they might even be smart enough to know the best time for this was immediately after the initial assault – before the attackers had time to consolidate, or dig in.

  “Aw, man,” Specialist Smith said, walking up and cradling his Mk 48. He’d been upgraded from AG to gunner, but had also been ordered not to do any shooting – not unless and until we got in trouble. His MG had a suppressor, but it was a little like putting a pillow over the head of your screamer girlfriend – only partially effective, and everybody still knew exactly what was going on. From Smith’s wide eyes, he’d been enjoying the adrenaline high of a perfectly choreographed assault – but was also crestfallen to not have got his gun in the fight.

  Chandler slapped him on the helmet. “Hey, this is a great outcome. Who wants a fight to the last man?”

  Chandler was right again. Then again, I couldn’t help thinking – how much did it really matter? We were all doomed. We’d either die here, or else in the next post-Apocalyptic shithole over. Today, next week, or fifty years from now – what difference did it make?

  And yet… and yet… the beatific image of that gleaming, invincible, indestructible 110,000-ton warship, the USS John F. Kennedy, still danced out on the far edges of my vision. The idea that this place of safety existed, that we could get there, that life there could be something like normal and finally make sense there… well, it was all probably a mirage, or illusion. But it was the mirage that lured me on, crawling through the desert.

  And the illusion that kept me going.

  I came back to the moment, and saw Smith squatting down beside me, peering into the escape tunnel. He said, “But what if they come back?”

  “We won’t be here long enough,” I said.

  Whatever intel the tech guys in the Gorshkov’s CIC had gathered from hacking the carrier’s comms, we weren’t privy to most of it. I only knew what Uron had told me. And all he told me was to move as fast as possible. But I had to believe our freedom birds from the Kennedy were inbound, even in that moment.

  I had to believe in something.

  * * *

  I raised my voice for the team leaders. “Second squad set security – all five towers and the front gate. Plus two guys here.” I kicked the tunnel hatch closed. “Chandler and first squad on me.”

  They fell in, and I fell in behind Uron, who knew the layout of the camp, and presumably where the toys were kept. I’d never seen him all kitted up before. But he wore it well, like a genuine operator. The posture, the lean lines, the economy of movement. You could tell. His usual insouciance was also intact.

  In minutes, we’d secured the HLZ, as well as the Valor tilt-rotor sitting on it, our main prize – and the way out for all the other stuff. It looked like it had been sitting there since the end of the world. Its new owners were never going to be able to fly it. But they’d at least had the good grace not to destroy it, like those stone Buddha statues they dynamited.

  Our Russian pilot peeled off to start his checks on the aircraft. Getting it started after six months sitting idle might be a stretch, but then again it had been designed for austere environments. It’d probably be okay. And if it wasn’t, it sure as hell wouldn’t be my problem. I didn’t care if Uron crashed and burned in the mountains.

  At that point, me and my men would be free.

  Next stop was the armory, where we found a no-shit legit SOF fantasy wonderland. There were racks of more of the APC9 submachine guns – fewer than half taken by the fleeing Taliban. There was a giant Tuff Box full of folded and stacked liquid-Kevlar assault suits. Costing about $100k a pop last time I checked, these bad boys were lightweight and supple while worn, but had a shear-thickening nano-particle fluid inside – which locked together into a solid lattice when hit, providing superb full-body protection from bullets, knives, blast damage… and presumably bites and scratches.

  There were a variety of the latest-gen mini- and micro-UAVs, in their expensive-looking hard cases, with flight controls, video displays, and electronics inside. Also a rack of XM2010 Enhanced Sniper Rifles – totally bad-ass precision-guided smart weapons, with persistent target tracking, ranging, ballistic calculation, and wireless integration with combat LANs. You almost couldn’t miss with these things. Worryingly, there were spots on the rack for six – but only three left sitting there.

  “These, then all of that,” Uron said, pointing. “It all goes.”

  Chandler turned to me with an arched eyebrow, his meaning clear: there were fifteen of us and only one of him – were we really going to just hand over all this priceless, lethal, and not to mention unbelievably cool shit? He had a point. But, then again, a deal was a deal – even if I was by no means sure the Russian would keep his end of it. So far I couldn’t see how he could screw us. But I was also smart enough to know he was smarter than me – and certainly more
devious.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter – I didn’t care about the damned weapons at this point. It was all just dead steel. If I still cared about anything, it was the men. And getting them the fuck out of there.

  “Do it,” I said, turning to leave with Uron.

  “Hey,” Chandler said. “Where you going?”

  “The TOC.” This place had not so long ago been an operational FOB, and so it would have had a nerve center. Judging by the good order its new residents kept it in, it still would.

  * * *

  I'd only been in there two minutes when I was interrupted.

  “Hey, Top.” This was Corporal Avarone from second squad. I didn’t ask why he was here in the TOC, and not out pulling security. With no radios, he was a runner, here to tell me something.

  “What,” I said.

  “You know there are sentry guns in the guard towers?”

  I didn’t know that. Like the JOC at al-Tanf, the Chapman TOC was blacked out, except with no monitor glow. The entire world’s power grids had of course gone down, but then again this part of the world never had a power grid. Remote combat outposts in Afghanistan always had to provide their own. I’d already checked the big-ass diesel generator out back, on my way in. It looked intact – plugs un-corroded, gas not scummy. My guess was the Taliban kept it maintained, but kept it off. Power was good; noise bad. And fuel would be limited, to say the least. Uron and I started tearing down the blackout curtains to let the first light in. I was slightly surprised there were windows at all, but quickly saw they were armor-glass with thick wire mesh.

  And, in the thin light of dawn, I finally saw the terminal for the remote sentry-guns. I picked up the manual controller from the station – nearly identical to a PlayStation controller, the Army leveraging a training head-start for the 19-year-old boys that made up most of its workforce – but it wasn’t plugged in. I squinted into memory, then pulled out a thick binder from beside the terminal, and took a flip through.

  “Shit,” I said. “They made it work.”

  “Made what work?” Uron asked.

  “The jihadi terminator.” This clearly required some explanation. “It was still in development last I heard. After the thing in Libya, a lot of Tier-1 guys demanded it. Said they weren’t going out like punks, overrun the same way the shooters and State Department guys in Benghazi were. So the Defense Sciences Office at DARPA accelerated work on this.”

  “On what?” Uron said, obviously exasperated at not getting the actual explanation he wanted.

  I sighed and looked up. “It’s an autonomous sentry gun. A chaingun nobody has to operate. They’ve all got onboard cameras and target-selection software – driven by advanced AI.”

  “How the hell does it tell the bad guys from us?” Avarone asked.

  “Gait analysis, for one thing – operators and even conventional soldiers move differently from insurgents. But also from local garb and eastern-bloc weapons.”

  “Great,” Uron said, tapping his advanced AK. “Remind me not to go outside the wire.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “No power, no sentry guns. And we’re obviously not turning the generator on.”

  I flipped to the back of the binder, where there were a few loose sheets covered with handwriting, all in Arabic script. That was weird. Even weirder was the last page, where someone had drawn what was pretty clearly a bunch of undead Pashtun, wearing their half-rotted man-jammies or women’s chadors, and standing in those awkward poses the dead favored. But time hung heavy in the ZA, and I guessed doodling was as good a way as any of killing the long hours. I dropped the binder, stepped back outside, and scanned the surrounding peaks and ridges in the blanching dawn. I sensed more than heard Uron emerging behind me.

  “Where do you think they all went?” he finally asked.

  “The OP,” I said. Combat outposts like this one, especially in remote or mountainous areas, almost always had a smaller but heavily fortified satellite base – an OP, or observation point – with a higher vantage on the terrain, plus mortars to rain down hell on anyone attacking the main base. It could also serve as a last-ditch fallback position. Our initial ISR hadn’t shown anyone up there. But as smart as the enemy was starting to look, and as smooth as their withdrawal had been, I was betting they’d kept the OP secure as a fallback position.

  And were regrouping there now.

  I knew the OP was just out of sight behind one of the northern ridge lines, and I squinted off in that direction. The snow-covered peaks glittered with the first orange and pink tint of dawn, against an ultramarine sky. And I knew that, concealed somewhere in all that beauty, were 140 men who really, really wanted to kill us.

  In fact, they almost certainly believed their survival depended on killing us – or at the very least driving us out of their stronghold, their little place of safety in the middle of a dead and extremely hostile world. Of course, I had no idea that within thirty minutes, every one of us inside this base who was still alive would be falling back into what we’d call “the Alamo position” and preparing to make a last stand in the only two buildings that weren’t on fire.

  But I probably should have guessed.

  PART THREE

  “The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.”

  - Sebastian Junger, War

  * * *

  We got back to the HLZ just in time to help hump the last crates of weapons and high-tech gear onto the Valor. There was no time to waste. We needed to get Uron, the cargo, and the aircraft the hell out of there – before the Americans turned up, and especially before the Taliban realized how few we were, and launched a counter-attack.

  There was also still the small matter of the dead. As much as we seemed to have had a tacit agreement to run a silent-disco gun battle, there was always the risk of things going loud. Whichever side was losing would be strongly incentivized to start chucking grenades, rockets, mortars, fucking tac-nukes, whatever the hell was handy. Attracting the dead would be a huge problem for the survivors – but surviving long enough to deal with that beat dying beforehand.

  As the very last pallet rolled on, I turned to Uron and put my hand out, palm up. He nodded and unslung the satchel hanging beneath his pack. This contained a Barrier-T satcom station – man-portable, but not exactly light, and to his credit Uron had humped it all the way here through the mountains. Even more to his credit, it looked like he was going to keep his end of the bargain after all. As soon as they lifted off, the radio would allow us to make commo with the Kennedy. Hilariously, Uron’s tech guys had even provided an encryption key for the American nets.

  But before he handed it over, he had to make his own call – the one that would release his hostages. My last four guys on the frigate.

  But even as he pulled the handset out, it buzzed – with an incoming call. Squinting, looking at me in a bizarrely apologetic way, he put the handset to his ear. “Da… Ponimat’.” He turned back to me. I had a strong premonition I wasn’t going to like whatever came out of his mouth next.

  I wasn’t wrong.

  * * *

  From back inside the TOC, we could hear the jets from the Kennedy screaming overhead. This was galling. The mighty air power of the U.S. Navy was practically close enough to touch. And we could do nothing.

  Nothing except hide out. The call to Uron had been from CIC on the Gorshkov, telling him about the incoming air patrol – in advance of the supercarrier itself, which was steaming into the Gulf of Oman. This meant Uron couldn’t fly out on the Valor – not until the airspace cleared. The Russians, paranoid to the last, were absolutely convinced the JFK would hunt them down and destroy them if they knew of their existence. So that couldn’t be allowed to happen.

  Meanwhile we were grounded – and trapped.

  Which was when the first probing attacks on the wire started. Corporal Avarone came dashing in the door, out of breath again, perha
ps permanently. He didn’t looked thrilled about his new job.

  Uron got in his face. “I said everyone stays out of sight.” He didn’t want the pilots overhead seeing Americans on the ground, any more than he wanted us signaling them.

  “Fuck you,” said Avarone.

  I almost laughed. I sure as hell approved. “Report,” I said.

  “All three guard towers on the north side,” he said, around heaving breaths. “They’re taking incoming small-arms fire. It’s still suppressed – but effective, and getting heavy fast.”

  Trained as they were always to dominate a firefight, I already knew our guys would be returning fire – but I also knew they were at a huge disadvantage, shooting up at steeply elevated positions. And those high ridgelines were also dotted with ample cover and concealment, increasing the enemy’s advantage.

  “The incoming’s also weirdly fucking accurate,” Avarone said. He pointed to the top of his helmet, at a deep furrow across the top. “I popped for like two seconds to take a look – and almost got drilled a new asshole. In my face.”

  “The XM2010s,” I said.

  “What?”

  I shook my head. “Enhanced sniper rifles, with smart scopes.”

  “Great,” Avarone said. “Now the hajjis have a weapon that can’t miss. Anyway, it’s bad. They’re laying down a base of fire, allowing their guys to maneuver in on us. It’s pretty hard to stop, as badly outnumbered as we are. And with no heavy weapons support.”

  There was a time when I would have been surprised at guys in robes using solid small-unit infantry tactics. But that was a long time ago. Anyway, whatever advantages we had in training and unit cohesion would quickly be overwhelmed by their numbers. A lot of clocks were ticking now.