NewU Pt. 31

It seems to have been forgotten by most people that the opening phases of World War 1 were the bloodiest of the entire conflict. In the social memory of the nations involved, the western front is dominated by the great battles of 1916. For Britain, it was the battle of the Somme, where the creme of British youth was thrown almost callously at the German lines over and over again for months. For France and Germany, it was the siege of Verdun, the battle of attrition that bled both huge armies almost dry. But in reality, it was the start of the conflict, the great "race to the sea" that saw the most carnage and yet is the least remembered.

Between the declaration of hostilities on 28th July 1914 and the Battle on the Marne, where the German advance was finally halted on 5th Sept, more than 800,000 men were killed and wounded. More men than had died in the entire four years of the American civil war just fifty years earlier. The first day of the Somme has gone down in history as the most horrific and brutal of all military engagements, the definition of needless barbarism, but this was like having that first day, every day, for more than eight weeks.

Ranks of French soldiers, dressed in bright blue uniforms, were led by officers brandishing swords and wearing caps - not helmets - in bayonet charges across open fields into incomprehensibly murderous machine gun fire and artillery bombardment. The British Cavalry mounted headlong charges into enemy lines as if nothing had been learned since the wars against Napoleon, and German soldiers marched at a slow pace, shoulder to shoulder, into the jaws of static defensive positions. The losses were staggering.

Both sides were utterly convinced that offensive spirit was the key to victory, that allowing these great armies to just "get at each other" was the fulcrum around which the whole war could be won. But both were facing enemies that were bigger and more heavily armed than anything history had ever seen, and what - in many cases - would have been seemingly minor skirmishes in previous conflicts, the ones that these men had been expecting to repeat, became mass slaughters on a horrifyingly gargantuan scale. That reckless urgency to get at an enemy has led to more death and suffering than any other tactic in the history of human conflict.

The parallels to my own situation were not hard to miss.

I had been on a full-scale offensive since the attack at the party; taking a step back and thinking defensively - even though I had no idea how that could be done - had simply never crossed my mind. I was actively hunting for them now; even though they were fleeing after their slaughter on Christmas Eve, they had been actively hunting me in turn before that.

The immovable object and the unstoppable force.

As the plane landed and rolled to a halt on the tarmac, it occurred to me that this was not just a fight for revenge anymore. This was not my cause versus theirs. This was war; it was bigger than just me, and a whole lot more blood would be spilled before either side could claim any sort of victory, even a Pyrrhic one.

The crowd of heavily armed and armored men waiting for us on the tarmac of the small commercial airstrip when we landed was more than enough proof of that. Armed to the teeth and clearly ready for combat, these were soldiers.

Whatever conversation that Uri and Marco had been having since I had returned from the galley seemed to have Uri a little riled up; he was climbing down the steps of the aircraft before they had touched the ground. Marco, looking no less determined, was close behind him.

Jerry gave me a knowing smile with a glance to the attendant, who had been walking funny for the last few hours, before stealing his expression and heading out of the plane after his superiors, only to wait idly at the bottom of the stairs in the icy January air as Uri and Marco walked away without a second glance.

I was just about to follow after him when Bob put his hand on my shoulder. "Pete, I need to ask before we go any further," he said seriously, the look in his eye reflecting the genuine concern behind them. "How much do you trust Uri?"

I sighed and let my gaze fall onto the giant of a man power-marching across the tarmac to a blacked-out SUV off to one side. Marco was almost skipping to keep up with him. "I don't know," I answered honestly. "There are moments when I can see how much he is invested in our cause, but there are others when he seems so obstructive to it that I can't see how it can be anything other than intentional. I can sort of understand his hesitation in giving out information on a source..."

"Oh yes, so can I," Bob said with a shake of his head, "To be honest, that level of security isn't only justified but is essential. No, it's the going on his own that has me worried."

"I'm not following."

Bob let out a sigh of his own and set his eyes to follow mine in time to watch the SUV pull off. "Look, I mean no disrespect," he started. "But if anyone should know how bad it is on the ground here, it's him. Going, well, anywhere in that part of the country without an escort, or at least some sort of provision made for security, is... fucking insane."

"Maybe because he is from here, he is thinking he can get around easier on his own without raising too much suspicion? Maybe he knows the lay of the land or something."

Bob shook his head, "That's the thing. Because he is from here, he should know that isn't possible. Knowing 'the lay of the land,' even on a superficial level, should tell him how bad it is. He didn't tell us where he was meeting his contact, but he said enough about the other informants being killed or displaced for an educated guess to be made that she is at least in one of the active combat areas or maybe one of the occupied zones. Either way, there is no chance in hell of him just being able to drive in without being noticed."

"So... what? What are you trying to say?"

There was another pause. "In my experience, when things sound like they don't make sense, it is because they don't. I hope I'm wrong, but I think that Uri has ulterior motives or at least ulterior methods. Both possibilities make me nervous when we know we are dealing with some level of treachery in both of our organizations."

"Hey, don't lump me in with those fuckers..." I started.

"You know what I mean, Pete. Someone is doing their damnedest to start a hot war between our species, and neither of us has the first clue who they are. At this moment, splitting our team and strength doesn't just make no sense; it's reckless and dangerous. What's more, Uri knows that. So only one thing can be true. Either he really does have a way of getting this information without needing us and really is genuinely concerned for the safety of his contact. Or..."

He left that hanging for a moment. "Or he is involved." I finished for him. "Either way, he knows something that we don't and has chosen not to share it."

"I am not making assumptions one way or another," Bob went on with a nod. "But I know you haven't overlooked the massive coincidence of his nationality based on where we are. Not to mention the compartmentalized nature of the traitor's organizational structure and its likeness to his obsession with the "need to know."

I sighed. There wasn't a single flaw in anything Bob was saying, there was no easy explanation, and as much as I wanted to explain Uri's actions as reasonable, I couldn't overlook the fact that something had stopped me from trusting him from the very start. "You think he is involved."

"I don't know," Bob answered after another thoughtful pause. "But more importantly, neither do you. I think it would be unwise to assume he isn't. Blind faith and questionless trust are not as noble traits as they sound."

I sighed again, much deeper this time, and pinched the bridge of my nose. "This is so fucked! So... suggestions?"

Bob just shook his head again and shrugged weakly. "I don't have any. There is nothing we can do without more information, and we are not in a position to get any. Even if we changed tacts and followed him now, we would be putting ourselves in the same danger as he is. We can only go along with the plan as it stands and just... keep an ear to the ground."

"Hey, are you guys coming, or what?" Jerry's voice wafted through the door.

I nodded to Bob. There was nothing else to be said and nothing else to be done. My one consolation was that if Uri was the traitor, I knew I could take him in a straight-up fight. But... In a straight-up fight, I could have taken Sterling too. People who know they will lose a fight head-on almost always find ways to avoid them. Bob was right; we didn't know Uri's allegiances either way. All we could do was be careful and stay vigilant. I waited for Bob to step out of the door, flashed a smile to the smitten-looking stewardess, and then stepped out into the frigid winter air.

********

The relative combat strength of any military unit can be measured by two main factors: Equipment and training. Throughout all of recorded history, when superior numbers have been thrown at superior forces, the latter has performed better in every single instance. Sure, you can point to events such as the battle of Thermopylae, where the now legendary Spartan three hundred - and the lesser mentioned thousand or so other Greek soldiers - held their ground against around one hundred times their number and were slaughtered to a man.

And to any of you who would agree with that assessment, you need to read more and stop relying on Hollywood for your history lessons.

The soldiers holding the pass of the hot gates were never going to win, but they knew that. They didn't go there to win. They went there to delay the advance of the Persians, and if measured by this objective, they were staggeringly successful. Let's be generous and say there were, in total, two thousand Greek warriors - there weren't, there were at most fifteen hundred, but carrying on - they managed to hold up the march of anywhere between three-hundred thousand to one million Persians for four days, giving the rest of the Greek city-states enough time to martial their armies and meet the invaders in force. That happened at the battle of Platea, where they kicked the ever-loving shit out of Xerxes and sent his God-King ass paddling back to Asia. If it wasn't for that fuck stain hunchback traitor - the only character in the movie vaguely accurate to historical accounts - it is likely that they could have held them off for significantly longer.

Another example would be the entire Russian campaign during the second world war and the waves of T-34 battle tanks sent headlong into the invading Nazi lines. The Eastern Front is so full of hyperbole and myth that entire books can - and have - been written trying to correct all the bullshit that was propagated after the war. So let's clear some things up. The T-34 medium tank was... okay. It wasn't great. It wasn't bad, and it certainly wasn't the unstoppable war-winning machine that the Nazi commanders would have you believe. The countless memoirs of former Nazi officers beaten on the Eastern front are an exercise in self-justification, putting some distance between themselves and Hitler or the Holocaust, and in many cases, can be read as long-form applications for command positions in NATO. The lie that they would have you believe is that the ingeniously innovative sloped frontal armor (an innovation that can be seen regularly in 12th Century castles) could shrug off the rounds fired at it by anything smaller than a Panzer III, an apparently inferior tank, incapable of penetrating a T-34 despite the fact that they were blowing them to pieces with alarming regularity and were responsible for around sixty percent of all T-34 combat losses. The technological disparity between the Nazis and the Russians on the Eastern Front was, contrary to what your Dad told you, practically nothing. The Nazies were not several decades ahead of everyone else and were significantly behind by the end of the war. What separated the two armies were better training, equipment, and veterency on the Nazi side and massive numbers for the Russians. Yes, the Russians won, but not only can a large proportion of their victory be attributed to the opening of the second front when the allies landed in France, diverting a huge amount of Eastern-bound forces to its defense, but the fact that Hitler was a drug-addled moron who kept giving the German commanders orders which were tantamount to suicide. Even still, the Russian victory came with losses so high that, even now, eighty years later, there is no reliable number available. A conservative guess is that for every German soldier the Russians killed, they lost somewhere between thirty and eighty.

That is... terrifying.

Waves upon waves of Russian tanks and the young men inside them were hurled into the jaws of the Nazi war machine, and despite what the lazy historian might tell you, quantity does not have a quality of its own. One hundred shitty made and poorly operated tanks are not superior to ten good ones. Because for those one hundred tanks, you need ten times the crews, ten times the fuel, ten times the ammunition, ten times the maintenance crews, ten times the spare parts, and ten times the training for the men expected to use them to fight. Russia had none of those things, hence their jaw-dropping, blood-chilling losses. The Germans... well, also didn't; they just had more of it than the Russians, and the so-called superior race was getting its ass handed to it on not two, but three fronts. Yes, Italy counts as a front. All of those losses came down to marginally superior equipment and vastly superior training and experience. My point is that every time quantity has met quality on the battlefield, quality has won every single time. As the Russians were finding out once again with their ridiculous invasion of the beautiful country that we were now standing in. Weapon systems designed in the 70s and manned by soldiers with as little as six weeks of training tend to do poorly against modern weapons designed to blow them the fuck up.

The moral of the story could be summed up when looking at the small group of men waiting for us just outside one of the hangers on this remote airstrip. Geared up in state-of-the-art equipment, they were the epitome of what an actual, real-life special forces unit should look like - as opposed to what Hollywood thinks they look like. Full, heavy-duty body armor, tactical helmets, and side-arms strapped to the thigh or chest, not the hip. Modern, encrypted, tactical radios, Polish-made Grot assault rifles with incomprehensibly advanced looking scopes and sights attached to the tac-rails, and not one of them had their chin straps hanging loose from their helmets. Those things stopped bullets; anyone with a modicum of sense wanted those helmets to stay on their heads to keep that sense where it belonged and not, say, spread all over the ground!

If any of these soldiers decided to sell the kit they were carrying around, they would make enough to buy the Queen's Head two or three times over. These were not the mercenaries I had expected when Bob had told me that a Private Military Contractor would escort us to our destination. Well, they were, but they certainly didn't look how I thought they would. They weren't sketchy-looking men in black fatigues and an assortment of equipment - like, for example, the now-dead Inquisitors who had attacked the party. These were honest to god soldiers, and all that shit they were carrying? They knew exactly how to use all of it with deadly efficiency.

What was even more surprising, considering they worked for the Inquisition, was that all of them were human.

Part of it was automatic, part of it was curiosity, but my mind instinctively reached out to theirs before we had covered even half the distance between the plane and the hangar. Each of them was, predictably, fanatically loyal to the Inquisition and to Isabelle in particular. To each of these men, the Inquisition, as they knew it, was akin to a secret society dedicated to maintaining order and world peace. An order that the micro-dicked twat in the Kremlin was currently fucking up in spectacular fashion with is ego-boosting crusade into Ukraine. But that was it. That was all the Inquisition was.

Not a single one of them had ever even heard of an Evo. Let alone the history of violence between our two peoples.

I suppose that made a sort of sense. If Isabelle was to be believed - as I was increasingly suspecting she should be - the Inquisition hadn't considered Evos to be an enemy since before the great-great-great grandparents of these men had been born. But at the same time, it was a little surprising, considering they had been sent here to help a bunch of us out. It made me wonder what the Inquisition did to pass the time these days and what it had been doing for the past few hundred years. But that was a question for another day. For now, I was satisfied that these men were not only who they were supposed to be but were determined enough and possessed the ability and loyalty to get the job done. I felt the brush of a familiar mind as I scanned through the thoughts of the last merc and cast a glance over to Jerry. He'd obviously had the same concerns as I did and was also scanning the minds of the men lined up before us. The small smile he flashed back to me told me that he was as satisfied with his findings as I was.

The other surprise that came from their minds was the fact that there were only six of them. Six! There weren't any more of them waiting in the hangar, and no more were on their way. In a war where Russian and Ukrainian soldiers had been throwing themselves at each other, fighting and dying by the thousands, I had expected we would need a significantly higher number to complete our mission. I had expected a convoy of heavily armed men to get us through the front lines and back again. But no, there were six of them.

However, every single one of the soldiers before me thought six was, if anything, overkill. They were all convinced that four could do the job almost effortlessly and the other two would be more useful on the front lines where they were badly needed.

These men had been fighting the Russians since the first days of the invasion. I don't mean that their company as a whole had been - although they had - but that these actual individuals had been heavily engaged in combat for huge portions of the past year. In the first week of the war alone, they had intercepted two teams of the Spetsnaz - the Russian special forces - in Odessa and had gleefully fucked with them so much that they ended up opening fire on each other. Then they mercilessly slaughtered the survivors without taking a single loss. It hadn't hurt that the Russian military was using unencrypted radio frequencies for their communications. In some cases, those radios had been looted out of the electronics stores of the city they were now invading. You can imagine the surprise of the inhabitants of Odessa when they woke up one morning, flicked on their radios, and were able to listen in on classified, live, Russian military coms traffic.

Of course, they didn't just listen for long. By the end of the first few days, the Russians were finding their coms routinely jammed up by civilians blasting the Ukrainian national anthem at them or just calling them all fascist cunts.

However, the more tactically minded opposition to the invasion - like the men before me - had used that glaring weakness to track enemy movements, feed them false information, lure them into ambushes, and generally ensure that they had a really bad day. Often the last day they would have at all.