Luke didn’t like the look of this and moved toward Schoolman, whispering softly, “Don’t do anything you’ll regret, Sir. It isn’t worth it.”
Colonel Schoolman looked angrily at him. “Enough, Sergeant Major!” he yelled. Then he turned back to face the prisoners.
“Are there other bunkers with nuclear weapons?” he asked them in Russian. His hand was fiddling with the SIG Sauer in his leg holster as he grilled them.
The prisoners shook their heads, acting surprised.
He pointed to the bunker with the warheads, where several of his soldiers were standing guard. “Are any of the nuclear weapons in that bunker boobytrapped or rigged to explode?” he shouted.
Now the prisoners looked concerned, but again they said they had been unaware that nuclear weapons were still being stored here. One of the officers, the oldest looking of the two, said in rapid-fire Russian that they had been told all the nuclear warheads had been moved back to the Motherland prior to the war.
Schoolman, now confident that he had gotten a straight answer from the two Russian officers, turned and headed back toward the tactical command center his staff had now set up. As he walked, his signaled for Childers to come closer.
“What did you mean, ‘it isn’t worth it’? Did you believe I was going to shoot those prisoners?” he asked, surprised that his sergeant major would think that lowly of him.
Childers stopped walking for a minute, forcing the colonel to stop as well. He wanted to have this conversation out of earshot of any of the other soldiers. “Sir, when we were in the bunker, and you told us about your family, I honestly didn’t know they had died in Oakland. You had never spoken of them before. When you said you wanted to talk to the prisoners, I wasn’t totally sure where your head was in that moment.”
Childers paused for a second. “When I was a young Ranger on my second combat deployment, we suffered a terrible loss in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. Our captain and platoon sergeant were killed, and we captured a couple of prisoners following an extended battled with the Taliban. One of the Taliban prisoners had been wounded, and our lieutenant at the time was determined to get some useful information out of him before we provided him treatment or brought him back to headquarters. They dragged the prisoner away from the rest of us to question him away from prying eyes. We heard a lot of screaming going on and a lot of yelling. Eventually, we heard a single gunshot, and our lieutenant, and two other soldiers appeared from where they had been questioning the prisoner. They said the prisoner gave up the location of where other fighters were hiding, so we moved out to engage them. The next thing I knew, we were in another gun battle; eventually, we killed a few dozen more Taliban fighters later that day.”
The colonel could see his sergeant major was getting emotional about the story and placed his hand on his shoulder. “It’s OK, Luke. You can tell me what happened next. I need to know.”
Looking up, he nodded. “When we got back to base, one of the sergeants lodged a complaint against the lieutenant. The next day, our entire company was taken off rotation, and we were all interviewed about the situation. I was the youngest and newest sergeant in the company, so I wasn’t held responsible for not trying to stop it. But several of the sergeants first class were. The lieutenant was charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and kicked out of the Army. The two other sergeants and one other soldier that was with him were drummed out too. Sometimes, when I sleep or just have a moment to myself… I can still hear that man screaming. I couldn’t understand anything he was saying, but I could tell he was in terrible pain.”
Childers then looked at Schoolman. “When I heard you tell us about your family, I could see that same rage in your eyes I saw in that lieutenant, and when you said you wanted to talk to the prisoners and had your hand on your sidearm… I just wanted to make sure you didn’t do something you would regret. You’re a good commander, and we need more like you,” Childers finished.
“That could have been me. It probably was going to me…” Colonel Schoolman realized.
“Thank you, Sergeant Major, for sharing that. I can’t imagine how hard that has been for you to carry that burden. I wish your lieutenant hadn’t failed you guys like that and had been a better leader. We’re all humans, and we make mistakes. You saw me losing control, and you interceded in a way that prevented me from doing something I’d regret, and you did it in a manner that no one else saw or noticed. I owe you for that. You’re going to make a great sergeant major,” Schoolman said. He extended his hand, and the two of them shook hands.
They continued on toward the command center. When they arrived, they found the regiment commander had arrived, along with a few weapons experts. They talked for a few minutes and showed them the nuclear weapons. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when they learned that none of the weapons had been rigged to detonate and were, in fact, in safe storage and could be transported without fear of something going wrong.
One of the staff officers got the attention of his regimental commander. “What in the world happened with our drones attacking us, Sir?” he asked.
Colonel Hastings answered the question on everyone’s minds. “What a cluster mess that was. I was told a Russian hacker group, probably their intelligence directorate, had gained access to our C4ISR network and essentially turned everything off. The Division CG said they lost contact with GDF HQ, and then the Reaper drones in the area that were supposed to help provide us air support were taken over by the hackers who turned the weapons on us. Luckily, the Air Force had some fighters in the area that were able to locate and destroy the drones before they could fire any more of their missiles.”
Lieutenant Colonel Schoolman asked, “Are comms back up and running with headquarters, or is our division essentially operating on our own?”
“From what I’ve been told, the problem was largely isolated to GDF HQ and US Army Europe headquarters staff. We lost our surveillance and digital links, but it hasn’t interrupted our HF or UHF radios, so we’ve switched over to our backup systems,” Major Montanya, the regiment’s communications officer, replied loud enough for everyone to hear. “Don’t ask me when they’ll have everything sorted out — I have no idea, but I’ll make sure to pass along any additional information we learn,” he added.
The Russians had been wreaking havoc on the Allies’ communication and computer systems with their army of hackers. While the US forces had largely closed off a lot of the vulnerabilities discovered during the outbreak of the war, several of the Allied nations were still struggling to keep up.
One of the captains piped up. “Well, if this was a dress rehearsal for the summer offensive, I’d have to give us a C. Our surveillance and communications were all sorts of screwed up,” he said.
Colonel Hastings looked at his officers and senior NCOs, then added, “Kaliningrad was an easy objective to take, but it still cost us nearly three dozen soldiers killed and four times that number wounded. That’s unacceptable. We have a couple of more months before the summer offensive starts. I want to figure out what went right, what we screwed up, and what we should have been better at forecasting. Make sure those lessons are gone over with everyone. Be sure your junior officers and NCOs correct those issues, and let’s hope we’re able to incur fewer casualties when the big show finally does begin,” he concluded.
Pacific Invasion
It was nearly dawn. There were only a few clouds in the sky as the first wave of Xian Y-20 transport aircraft steadily moved closer to the drop zone. The predawn light was slowly increasing, revealing the image of twenty transport planes approaching Clark International Airport, formerly Clark US Air Force Base. The sky was about to be flooded with thousands of paratroopers; the next step in the Chinese plan to expand their sphere of control in the Pacific was now fully underway. Once they had captured this critical airport, they would have Chinese soldiers positioned less than one hundred kilometers from the Philippine capital of Manila.