Fiction Contest Week

2nd Place Finisher

By Michael Barretta

Grace saw him—slim-waisted, broad-shouldered, piercing blue eyes, close-cropped brown hair a quarter-inch past military. He stood apart from the potbellies and balding pates of the leaders. It was perhaps more accurate to say they gave him space. She watched him for a few moments. His eyes scanned the room, automatically assessing threats, figuring out who needed to be neutralized first, the best place for cover, and where to procure a weapon. He would be unapproachable until he finished. She waited. It was more than inevitable that they would find each other.

She signed a contract.           

Without any person in dire need of killing, he focused on her. She could tell. She had just as much training as he in the arts of observation and analysis. Perhaps more. She didn’t have a weapon—technically speaking, in this context, she was the weapon. According to the machine intelligence consulting on the Black September program, they had a natural compatibility rating of 61 percent, an exceptional rating. Old married couples barely breached fifty percent. After training and aesthetic augmentation, the machines estimated her chances of success at 68 percent. She suffered a lot of pain for a measly seven-point bump, but every point counted when their lives hung in the balance.

His twelve years of service, five of which were in the Black September program, should not end on a stainless steel table. No one had ever told her what her fate would be, but she imagined it would be something like that.

_______________________________________

After she passed the background checks and signed the government nondisclosure agreement, the Special Programs recruiter provided background and particulars.

“Do you know who Yasser Arafat is?” asked the recruiter.

“Yes,” she replied. “That was a long time ago.”

“It was,” said the recruiter. “Have you heard of Black September?”

“My history is very broad, but not terribly specific. So, no, I don’t think I have.”

“Black September was a Palestinian terrorist organization. They were the ones who murdered the Israeli athletes at the 72’ Munich Olympics.”

“Okay, yes, my classes did cover that. That, too, was a long time ago.”

“I am sure your classes covered the events, but I bet they did not go into the details,” he said. “The Olympic massacre was a botched operation. Poor execution. Pointless deaths. Black September didn’t achieve any of its stated goals, but the attack demonstrated a willingness to spread conflict beyond the Middle East. It stimulated the West to create specialized, military-trained, counterterrorism units which would make further operations . . . uh, problematic. But more important, Black September’s operation made it difficult for the PLO to portray itself as an aggrieved party. The PLO wanted wins, but they could not win so big that it would prompt their destruction. In every conflict, a certain level of violence is expected and tolerated, but Black September exceeded that threshold by massacring innocents abroad at an international event dedicated to peaceful coexistence. Yasser Arafat needed to decommission Black September.”

“So, Arafat had a problem,” she said.

“To say the least. There he was, a political leader with a very dangerous unit of elite killers. How do you turn them off?” asked the recruiter.

“You kill them.”

“I like your answer. Killing them is one possible solution—if the secret could be kept—but everything leaks, and if it did, it would have sowed violent discord among the PLO factions. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

The recruiter sipped his coffee and then put the mug down. Her coffee cooled in front of her, untouched. He never took his eyes from her, assessing in some predatory cat-and-mouse kind of way. There were programs running behind his eyes, ones he wasn’t born with. She kept herself composed and hoped she wasn’t giving too much away.

“At the very least, killing men responsible for the execution of policy is . . .” He searched for the proper word. “Distasteful.”

“How else do you stop men like that?” she asked.

“With love.”

_______________________________________

The waist-high slit of her black dress parted around her leg. She kneeled, back straight, head up, and adjusted the strap on her right high heel. There was nothing wrong with the strap. She rose and walked toward him holding her clutch just under the swell of her breasts. It was the only thing she carried and the only place she could possibly conceal a weapon. She knew his eyes would follow. Damn near every other male eyeball followed, too, but she kept her focus on him.

She knew him. He knew her, though they had never met. As a Sensor, assigned to the Combined Special Forces Operations Center at Hurlburt Field, Florida, she was one-half of an Alpha Commando team in the Strategic Regional Dominance program. She manned the Q-link console that fed him near-real and real-time intelligence data to aid in tactical decision-making.

“Hello,” she said to him.

“You’re Topsail,” he said.

Even without the benefit of the Q-link, he recognized her. The Q-link, a powerful system of quantum computers and technological telepathic links, transmitted voice, but that was the least of its capabilities. It transmitted urgencies and imperatives, overlays, and orders. She didn’t think the mystery of who she was would have survived the night’s meticulous planning, but he figured her out far faster than she expected. He seized the initiative, but that’s what men like him did.

“My name is Grace. You must be Hoplite,” she replied. “How did you know?”

“My name is Thomas, Tom, and you’re just as I imagined you to be.” He held out his hand.

She thought his statement an innocent lie fashioned as a disarming compliment. The disarming part concerned her. She took his hand and assessed. It was warm, his blood pressure elevated, as was his pulse. A cocktail party was a battleground where the combatants used words and posture and money. The situation might be less fatal than physical combat, but it was even more fluid than contact with armed enemy forces. His self-inhibited fight-or-flight response was normal. She felt the same way.

His handshake was respectfully firm. Many men took a light and loose grip with a woman as if dealing with an inferior. She got a decent read on his blood sugar. Normal. But the bizarre chemical cocktail of his recent demilitarization fogged the remaining parameters. Some of the enhancements, such as the virally delivered augments that rewired his cells for greater speed, strength, stamina, and cognition, were permanent. Anything soft-wired into his nervous system, such as the electroplaques and bioelectronic support measures, were removed. He was probably in some level of pain, though he did not show it.

“Should I be flattered?” she asked. “I hope so.”

“You should,” he said. He released her hand and she let it linger for a moment. He kept his attention on her face and eyes.

Charming, confident, and gracious by nature, she thought. His responses didn’t have the hard-polished edge of training. His file indicated he was raised in a solid middle-class environment. His mother and father were alive and still married to each other. Discretion and courtesy probably played an important role in his upbringing, but it was best not to jump to conclusions. He was a highly refined killer, steeped in a chemical cocktail that soaked up 12 years of worth of regret and remorse accumulated in the service of policy. If she failed this mission, he would probably die.

And perhaps she would, too.

_______________________________________

Grace had gone to school for accounting. Her father had told her that she needed to choose a professional degree and accounting suited her tendency toward introversion and satisfied her aptitude with data. The profession had a generally agreed set of conventions, but a clever individual could bend numbers to suit purposes. While she was in school, breakthroughs in quantum computing gave rise to machine intelligences that could perform all but the most creative human intellectual work. She delayed entry into a soft economy and pursued a master’s degree, but still graduated obsolete. Powerful thinking algorithms perfused across the white-collar landscape. Despondent from the continuous rejection, she stopped at the campus military recruiter.

“The machine minds do damn near everything,” she complained to the recruiter.

“Not everything,” said the recruiter. “There are a few things humans do better.”

“Name one.”

“Art, any of the arts, really. Music, literature, painting, war. You get the picture. No pun intended.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have any talent in those areas.”

“If you have some time, we can find out.”

Since graduating summa cum laude from a highly respected program into a licensed profession was no guarantee of economic success, all Grace had was time. A practical eternity of pointless service work stretched before her; still, she wanted to leave. Sitting across from a military recruiter didn’t seem like such a good idea. Destructive power had concentrated so acutely that highly dedicated subnational actors could kill tens of thousands and the Western response was to engage in perpetual low-level warfare. Chasing down fanatics with homemade polio or sarin gas held little appeal. She liked to think she could hold herself apart from the world she lived in.

“Okay,” she said.

“Well, come this way. We have a testing room through here.” He stood and she followed.

“How long will this take?” she asked.

“It takes as long as it takes, but you can leave at any time. That is part of the evaluation.”

The room was small but comfortable, with a testing station on a modern wooden desk. She sat. He printed a form that explained her rights and told her that testing was voluntary and would not guarantee acceptance. If she scored well enough, the military would contact her and make an offer.

“You can’t have any devices while testing,” said the recruiter.

 She handed over her phone and jewel and signed the forms. The recruiter smiled with faint embarrassment when he picked up her forms.

“Military,” he said. “We love our paper.”

When the recruiter left the room, the workstation spoke to her, not in the clipped machine manner of the university work stations, but natural language.

“Hello,” said the machine.

“Hello,” she replied.

“Shall we begin?”

The machine offered mathematical problems and asked her opinion on current events and literature. It asked her about life in the sorority house and her parents and little brother. The conversation ebbed and flowed. She felt perfectly relaxed and at ease, as if she was talking to her mother or girlfriends. They talked philosophy and ethics. It showed her images, both gorgeous and grotesque, and asked for her comments. It homed in on her hopes and fears. It knew too much about her.

The machine paused and for a moment, and she thought that it had glitched. She sat in the quiet and waited.

“Do you care?” asked the machine. Its sudden voice in the quiet was like a bullet shot.

“About what?” she replied.

“Do you care?” repeated the machine.

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Do you care?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Damn it, I don’t know. Someone has to.”

“Tell me about love.”

“You’re just a machine,” she said.

“You’re just a human,” said the machine.

The workstation went dark and she sat in the cool quiet. The lights seemed dimmer and she felt very tired. The recruiter opened the door.

“I have been authorized to tender you an offer.”

“For employment?” she asked.

“For further testing at the Special Programs Office.”

“Is that good?”

“I don’t know. I have never met anyone qualified for Special Programs.”

_______________________________________

“Can I get you a drink?” he offered.

“Yes, just water. I like to be clear-headed,” said Grace.

He left and came back and handed her two glasses and poured an equal measure of Pellegrino into each. He set the bottle aside and took a glass back. “To us,” said Tom.

They touched their glasses together.

“Do you want to go on the patio? It’s cooler.” Grace gestured to the crowded room. “Less intimidating,” she said.

He looked around and determined that he would not be missed. Most everyone at the party was completely involved in whatever they were doing. The general who invited him was nowhere to be seen. “Yes, definitely.”

They exited through a set of French doors. The cool breeze set the gauzy curtains billowing. A few irritated glances turned their way. He pulled the door closed, trapping the sounds of the party within. The phosphorescent fruit hanging from ornamental-splice cherry trees cast a cool blue glow, splitting shadows from the light of the moon. He followed her across the stone patio to the raised seating at the perimeter. They sat.

“I told myself that when I made it back, I would find you, and say, thank you, so . . . Thank you,” he said.

“You’re very welcome. Aren’t we supposed to thank each other for our service?” she asked, smiling almost imperceptibly.

“Don’t you have the bumper sticker? I thought cars were supposed to come with them,” he said.

“No, it’s an expensive option.”

“I don’t even have a car, but when I get one, it will have a sticker.”

“Good for you,” she said.

She reached out and touched his lower chest, left side, where the round had penetrated.

“I was there when . . .”

“I know.” He wrapped his hand over hers.

_______________________________________

Her stomach heaved and she vomited all over the floor. She hit the kill switch and gasped for air.

“That’s perfectly normal,” said her instructor. “Actually, you lasted much longer than most first-timers.”

“It’s so disorienting.” The world was a stunning chiaroscuro of sights and sounds. Data flowed and overfilled buffers, clotting her synapses. Vision and hearing and touch were not in the eyes and ears and skin. It was in the brain, and her brain was overloaded from the attempted exchange. She didn’t even recognize the tactical package, much less move it to its destination.

The problem was assertion and resistance. Consciousness, the product of quantum vibrations emanating from protein microtubules in the human brain’s neurons, asserted its worldview and resisted the imposition of another. The conscious mind liked to filter and interpret its own data, and the Q-link made an end run around it. The Q-link bored past the resistance and mediated, smoothing over disparities and implanting intelligence data from one person to another in such a fashion that it was perfectly understood and instantly integrated.

“Have some water.”

She gulped the glass down, unconcerned with appearances. Water dribbled down the corners of her mouth.

“Is it always like this?”

“No, it gets better with a permanently assigned operative. An accommodation is reached. Two become one. It takes a little bit of time to find a rhythm. And, yes—it can get much worse when the operative is engaged.”

“Engaged?”

“In combat, there is feedback. You can feel it. The adrenaline rush, the fear . . .”   

“Your operative was killed, wasn’t he?” she asked the instructor.

“Yes.”

“What did it feel like?”

“It hurts. It still hurts.”

“Did you love him?”

“I don’t know. I never met him. I think so.”

_______________________________________

 “Yasser Arafat had a problem,” said the Special Programs recruiter. “Yes, he could have killed Black September, at least he could have tried, but instead he had a party.”

“A party, sure, why not?”

“He set them up with beautiful women who would become their wives. He provided them with well-paying government jobs and homes. He gave them the possibility of children and a future that did not involve a bloody death.”

“He gave them something to lose,” she said.

“Exactly. They took it. These were men optimized for war. They knew nothing else, and later, he tested his program and tried to recruit these men for further operations. To a man, they refused.”

“Why is this important to me? Are you saying that part of this special program is to marry one of your operatives?”

“Yes, it is a possibility.”

“I think it’s too much to ask.”

“You don’t watch much reality TV, do you? Of course, it is your decision. Participation is voluntary. But consider this, your marriage will enjoy the fullest support of the United States Government, in the form of substantial immediate and lifetime benefits. Understand, that arranged marriages are often more successful than voluntary ones.”

“Why is that?”

“The stakes are higher.”

_______________________________________

Hoplite chased a loose nuke. The Western response to the limited Indo-Pak nuclear exchange was swift. Coalition nuclear forces promised massive retaliation on the next government that used a nuclear weapon. Despite the support of the United States, the remnants of the Pakistani civilian government collapsed and a deeply aggrieved military ruled from underground bunkers. Coalition Special Forces moved swiftly to seize surviving Pakistani nuclear weapons lost in the chaos.

They didn’t get all of them, and fragmented Pakistani forces promised to put surviving nukes back into play. It put the United States in the curious position of having to conduct operations against a nominal ally to prevent catastrophic escalation.

Topsail linked data-fused radiological and topographical satellite maps. A neutron source moved along the M1 motorway between Islamabad and Peshawar. A Deep Black Intelligence satellite rose over the horizon, and she accessed its sensors. The low initial angle was useless, but as it rose higher, she fed a continuous tactical view of a six-vehicle Pakistani convoy a mile and half ahead of the Alpha commando team. The convoy stalled at a massive pileup of disabled and burned-out refugee vehicles. She linked the identities of probable combatants and capabilities.

The pursuit team slalomed among the broken vehicles. Radiation-poisoned bodies of civilians burst under the impact of heavy run-flat tires. Fairy dust—nanoscale sensors deployed over the battlespace—billowed into gray clouds with the vehicle’s passage.

“Hoplite, this is Topsail. One of the vehicles has stopped. Technical activity. Probable IED. Delaying action. They are trying to kill your pursuit.”

The tactical package filled his head. He knew where all the players were and what they were doing—probabilities, capabilities. An artificial intelligence with supernatural power integrated satellite sensor data and fairy dust returns into a comprehensive picture of the fight.

“Copy.” It was less a voice in his head. It was impressions, feelings, intuitions that he had learned to trust. It was like acknowledging yourself, but the verbalization gave it weight and meaning.

“Space it out,” he said to his team. The vehicles were bunching. A single weapon could take them all out.

The vehicles opened, but they couldn’t slow down. Otherwise, they would risk a 100-kiloton warhead detonation. They pushed the Bulldog Light Tactical Vehicles as hard as they could. An IED exploded adjacent to the lead Bulldog and sheared it apart with the force of the blast. Icons and statuses winked out in his mind. His vehicle hit debris and came up on two wheels and rolled. Airbags deployed, pinning the crew in position. The Bulldog slid into abandoned civilian vehicles and came to rest. The bags deflated.

“Out,” he ordered. He climbed out, following the driver. High-velocity rounds snapped and whined around him. Three others egressed the vehicle, took cover, and returned fire. He pinged the battlefield LAN and assessed his casualties. He put them out of his mind.

“Hoplite, this is Topsail. The nuke is stalled, half a klick ahead.” A God’s eye view of the tactical situation filled his head. Wrecked vehicles, heat signatures, topography.

He cast subvocalized orders to the surviving members of the team, and they abandoned the relative safety of cover and ran with inhuman speed, leapfrogging each other, avoiding the worst of the massed fire. He saw the stalled Pakistani convoy. A bulldozer worked to clear a path.

“Topsail, this is Hoplite. Alpha strike?” he asked. The quickest way to end this was for a Lightning II or Pegasus to drop a few JDAMs. It wasn’t likely—too much pressure on intelligence. The only way to know the nuke was out of play was to see it destroyed and make a report. An airstrike could not make guarantees.

“Negative, S-600 missile system is active.” The S-600 missile system covered the entire performance spectrum, from hypersonic glide vehicles to super-agile stealth targets. Nothing but an overwhelming saturation attack would neutralize it. That wouldn’t happen until after the nuke was confirmed destroyed.

His team moved. Leapfrogging forward. Seeking cover. Suppressing.

He selected targets and shot them on the move. He shot the bulldozer driver and the vehicle spun, riding up on vehicles and crushing them. It stopped. He checked his sleeve tab. Radiation had attenuated in the weeks since the exchange, but he still soaked up fallout Roentgens, not quite a lifetime dose, but close enough for a painful course of antirads if he survived the day.

A penetrator round hit him in the lower chest, knocking him backward to the ground.

_______________________________________

She felt the full magnitude of the hit as if someone had shot her below her left breast. She screamed and arched her back, breathless with phantom pain. The tungsten-tipped penetrator had bored through his outer body armor, exploded flesh, and shattered against the layered polysaccharides shielding his organs. The straps in her chair kept her from falling to the floor. A technician rushed to her.

“Stupid, stupid,” said the technician. He dialed the link fidelity to its minimum.       

“I need it. I need it”, she gasped. She reached out and set link fidelity to its original setting. “I’ve never been shot before.”

“You still haven’t,” said the technician.

The pain faded to a dull shadow of its original intensity.

“Are you still in the fight?” the technician asked.

“Yes,” she said.

_______________________________________

The shattered chunks of bio-armor beneath his skin ground together. The pain shunt turned off the agony. He ripped open a trauma bandage with his teeth, peeled back the exterior spiderweave armor plate and fabric uniform, and slapped the bandage on. He felt cool relief.  

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Someone cared, he thought. Someone is watching over me.

_______________________________________

The watch officer spoke to her.

“Failsafe,” he said.

She linked the code word. She had no choice. Once spoken, it was in her head. It was in his head. The situation was spiraling out of control. The stakes were too high.

He acknowledged. Failsafe invoked operational necessity, but he had figured that out the moment the mission came their way. No one wanted a loose nuke in play. The command was unconcerned with his life. The only thing that mattered was mission success. The order just formalized the process. He cast the order over the battlefield LAN.

Reserve stimulants filled his body. Adrenaline and Synthamines dumped into his bloodstream.

“Running Hot,” he said. The clock had started. The human body had its limits. He broke cover and pressed. He reached the target vehicle through heavy fire and blew the door off with demolition charges. The weapon sat in a cradle tied down with thick nylon straps. Outside, his surviving teammates took defensive positions to allow him time to work. They went dark one by one as they fought off the small army arrayed against them.

He took his remaining demolition charges and stuck them over the casing. An external explosion would not result in a nuclear blast, just a radiological one. It would shatter the pit, spreading toxic plutonium across the area, but rendering the weapon useless.

The last member of his team went dark. His relayed info packets bounced back unanswered. There was no one left to receive. His only connection was his Sensor and she was thousands of miles away.

Unimpeded, enemy forces converged.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her.    

He leaped from the truck and ran, directing fire with superhuman accuracy despite trembling, overtaxed muscles. Another round hit him in the back and he spun and fell. The truck exploded and she felt muted white-hot pain.

The connection severed.

_______________________________________

She gripped the Q-link technician’s arm and squeezed, drawing blood. The watch officer loomed over her.

“Hoplite is down,” she said.

With enough bandwidth, you could rule the world or feel it die. She felt crippled, blinded, as if part of her had been stripped away. Not the return to self, the controlled takedown of the Q-link, but a sudden flattening of the world. Color desaturated. Sense attenuated to something dull and lifeless. She started the reboot process.

“Did he finish? Is the nuke destroyed?” asked the watch officer. “Global Strike needs to know now, or they’re calling in a FireFall mission.”

“Yes,” she said, but she didn’t know for sure. “Are they going to get him?”

“I don’t know,” said the watch officer.

The machine rebuilt the connection. She felt him, crumpled against the side of a car, dusted with hot ash of a burst nuke, a penetrated lung filled with blood. Radiation levels rose such that in an hour or two even the clever little nanochines couldn’t repair the damage. A rescue drone orbited outside the engaged area, waiting for Aerospace Force hypersonic glide vehicles to obliterate the S-600 site.

“I’m here,” she said.

“I know,” he replied.

_______________________________________

He leaned forward. Closer, she saw the immense fatigue smothered with radiation medicine and pain killers from his recent demilitarization. Left to his own, he would transgress. He was too strong, too quick, too violent. Too misunderstood by the people he had protected. Violent death was a high probability for his kind.

She met him halfway. How could she not? He had killed so many and she had been with him every step of the way.

She leaned forward and kissed him, and he felt it. He was helpless against it.

So was she. Participation is voluntary, said the Special Programs recruiter. That was not exactly true. Each of them knew means and methods. Each of them had a king’s ransom of cutting-edge technology integrated into their bodies. Each of them was far too dangerous to return to the world unaccompanied. They needed to watch over and keep each other safe. Her heart raced and breath quickened. She didn’t even attempt to resist the cascading reaction. It was too beautiful to be believed.

Even without the drugs, she thought that maybe they could love each other, but nothing was left to chance. The stakes were far too high. Any emotion at all could be chemically catalyzed. Fear. Anger. Hope.

But the greatest of these was love.

Michael Barretta is a retired naval aviator who flew SH-60B Seahawk helicopters. He has master’s degrees in strategic planning from the Naval Postgraduate School and in English and government contracting from the University of West Florida. He is currently employed as a maintenance test pilot at Naval Air Station Whiting Field.

Featured Image: “Black Kit” by René Aigner (via Artstation)

Fiction Contest Week

3rd Place Finisher

By Hal Wilson

The world was burning. Or so it seemed from the after-deck of the MV Rawalpindi.

Whipped from Java’s farthest edge, scorched by the hundred thousand forest fires in-between, the westerly winds rushed at them. From beyond Bandung, beyond even Jakarta, they ran like scalded dogs until they came here, the Lombok Strait. Even out at sea, sweat evaporated the moment that it beaded; lost into air that was dry-baked, as if from an oven. The sky was shaded like thick terracotta, backlit by a disc the color of bleached bone.

Leaning on the ship’s guardrail, First Officer Larissa Barr gave silent thanks for being offshore. The air here tasted like the burnt phosphor of a struck match; inland, it could only be worse. She jerked as she felt a splash of warmth on her neck. Another. On her forearm, now. It was the hot, hard touch of over-cooked rain. She scowled: the water, blackened with ash from the fires, offered no respite from the heat.

“First Officer Barr,” a monotone voice issued from the ship’s speakers. “First Officer Barr to the AI cabin.”

She pushed from the railing and headed amidships, taking the ladder up from the aft deck.  As she went, she glimpsed the Rawalpindi’s funnel, branded with the stylized wolf-head of the Wolverhampton Wanderers: a black outline with two harsh, white eyes. A quixotic quirk, courtesy of the ship’s master, but the 5,000-ton platform support vessel was otherwise outwardly rigged for its last job: supply runs to Indonesian oilfields in the Java Sea.

Boatswain Shekhar Magar saluted her at Rawalpindi’s davit, where he and a workparty fussed over the ship’s rigid-hulled inflatable boat.

“Any problems, Bosun?” She did not slow her pace.

“Just readying for launch, ma’am.” Belying his salt-and-pepper hair and faint paunch, Magar’s dark eyes were as stoic as a younger man’s. She waved him to carry on as she turned at a hatch, stepping with relief into the air-conditioned passageway.

The deck-head inside loomed low and the old fluorescent lamps flickered. But in here, at least, she could breathe. At the AI cabin, a technician greeted her with a dismayed face. Server stacks waited behind him like soldiers on parade; the air was suddenly close again.

“Bad news, boss.” His voice was that of a man accustomed to nothing else. “It’s the heat again. The cooling systems keep dropping out. We’ll have to keep the AI at minimal capacity, unless you want us melting the bloody thing.” Despite the promise of last decade’s futurists, AI technology had still not achieved miniaturization. Rawalpindi’s AI, hastily installed barely three weeks ago, occupied this entire cabin. Barr fanned herself to no avail.

“Will it still be able to run the spike-wedge?”

“Yeah,” the tech nodded, “just tell the captain we’ll need Head Office to cover the rest.”

Barr continued to the ship’s bridge, where the other half of Rawalpindi’s deck department was at work. Captain John Cresswell was a giant of a man, an ex-Royal Navy commander recruited onto this voyage after retiring some years ago. His broad frame was topped with greying hair and a face like a granite cliff—all craggy, harsh edges. He waved.

“Number one.”

“Sir,” she said, “AI cabin reports we’re down to spike-wedge ops only for the duration.”

Cresswell reached for an old-fashioned satellite phone, his face darkening.

“Cressie here. Hark up. The AI’s down to spike-wedge only. Get on with upstairs, will you? They’ll need gap-filling meantime. Get those joint-effects types to earn their keep. Sound.”

“Are we aborting?” Barr asked as the call ended. “We can’t run horizon sims without the AI.”

“Bloody ‘ell we ain’t,” Cresswell snapped. The pressure of the moment betrayed itself as his clipped Naval College tone slipped, replaced by the lilt of his native Black Country accent.

He gestured at the terracotta gloom beyond the Rawalpindi’s generous bridge windows.

“Hainan Bonanza is almost in the Strait. We’ll ‘ave ‘em inside the hour, as planned.”

She stepped closer, imploring him. “If we wait to restore coolant to the AI, we can still make contact as it transits the Java Sea.”

“You saw the algorithms,” Cresswell scoffed. “With each hour we run north, our risk profile skyrockets. This here’s our only shot an’ you know it.”

Barr bit her tongue. She knew he was right. Cresswell held out an e-paper. He jabbed at the flexible polymer screen.

“Now look here: Head Office has our quad-copter arriving in five. Is Bosun Magar ready aft to receive it?”

“Aye, he’s finishing prep with the RHIB meantime.”

“Sound. I’ll hold course and speed: you go back aft and join Magar and his party. With the AI down, I want some senior eyes-on through this op. Keep it on the straight and narrow.”

She took a breath to protest—then relented.

“Aye, boss.”

Cresswell saw her look and a miniature smile quirked at his lips. His accent slipped back in.

“Now get gooin’—and don’t do it for us. Do it for the prize.”

_______________________________________

“What if they just shoot us all?” Boatswain Magar stood with Barr as the oversized quad-copter drone emerged from the terracotta haze. Out there, somewhere, a company-owned Hybrid Air Vehicle mothership was serving as their floating armory.

“You saw the briefings,” she spoke sidelong at him. “It’s a tanker. And not like mine in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. No guns. 20 crew. And millions of barrels of light, sweet crude.”

“This is a bad idea.” He mused. “Having you fly out with us, that is.”

They raised their hands against the downdraft as the delivery drone approached the deck, its four torso-sized rotors accelerating the moment it detached its cargo container. It raced back into the haze at once, pilot-lights glinting. Magar waved for his party to start unpacking.

“Cressie’s orders. And,” Barr moved to help, “with the AI down, it makes sense. Anyway, I’m on the Letter.” The Letter, with a capital L. There was no need to elaborate further.

“Did you even train to fly these things?” Magar grunted with exertion. Barr pulled away packing tape and retrieved one of the cargo pods from within. Matte-black carbon-fibre frames lay inside: a flight-suit, visored helmet, backpack, and two twin-turbine wrist mounts.

“I trained, Bosun,” she nodded. “And I know better than to get in your way. You go in first.”

The Fairbarn-Sykes knife tattooed onto Magar’s forearm flexed as he hefted the contents of another pod: a shining-chrome tubular barrel, with a pistol grip and a cable-linked backpack. It rested in his arms like a baby.  

“Why join up anyway, ma’am?” he asked abruptly. “On this mission. Why volunteer?”

“You ever try buying a decent house in Berkshire with two kids and this job market?”

“No.”

“It was rhetorical, Bosun.”

Barr started shrugging on the matte-black kit from the cargo pod. Magar said nothing, and she regarded his dark, impassive eyes.

“How about you? What made you sign on as our foreman?” She was curious: was Magar a mercenary, or an adventurer?

“My old man was a Gurkha. All sorts of stories from back in Helmand. Me? 20 years in the fleet with nothing more than bar fights ashore in Singapore.” He shrugged, looking at the haze. “They promised it would be an interesting job. We’ll see if they were right.”

Barr frowned. An adventurer, then. She would definitely let him go in first.

_______________________________________

The Hainan Bonanza loomed from the blood-orange haze as a mountain pierces through fog. The ship’s stark white flanks, streaked with rust and ash like so much war-paint, were as sheer as an iceberg and twice as stern. Its fat, broad bow crushed the waters like a slow-motion avalanche. At some 670,000 tonnes’ displacement, with a hull longer than the Empire State Building, it was the largest floating vessel in human history. And, nestled in its guts, four million barrels of oil lay as snug as a clutch of robin’s eggs.

For a ship so vast, entering the Lombok Strait, just 12 miles wide, is an exercise in discipline.

It is also the ideal ambush point.

Approaching the Bonanza head-on was the Rawalpindi’s RHIB. At barely 26 feet in length, it raced over the waves like an insect on a pond. Stung by the salt spray, chilled by the 30-knot wind speed, Barr looked up at the Bonanza. It filled her helmet visor, looming ever-larger until she felt that this towering vastness was the only thing on all the oceans. Her gorge rose in her throat and her guts knotted tighter than a banker’s grip. Not for the first time, she wondered if they were tilting at windmills: would they be like so many ants, dashing themselves hopelessly against this boulder?

“Final check!” Magar cried over the roaring winds, looking at the four other passengers.

Anonymous behind their matte-black helmets, they each gave thumb-ups. Pulled back from her reverie, Barr noted the green icons on her visor-screen and gave the same gesture. Magar nodded and pulled down his own visor. He used one hand to describe a lazy, vertical rotation. All five passengers got to their feet. Their remote-driven RHIB killed its outboard engine. The thundering motion beneath their feet died away. And each passenger leapt from the craft.

But like marionettes on taut strings, they stayed aloft: on each outstretched arm they wore twin, miniaturized gas-turbine jets—and another on their backs. Engines flaring, they tilted ahead on the final stretch to the Bonanza. Barr, teeth gritted in concentration, kept pace with the rest. But simply holding flight-posture demanded close mental focus and a tense physical core. With the weight of the equipment buckled to their chest rigs, the challenge was doubled. She darted her eyes across the visor, overlaid with a wireless feed of altitude, speed, and fuel data. Magar and the others were beetle-black shapes against the haze.

Riding the 1,000-horsepower thrust, they each made for the planned drop-point: the Bonanza’s distinctive, spread-eagle bridge wings. Unfurled to each flank of the ship, the bone-white protrusions dominated Barr’s vision even as she blinked away nervous sweat. They grew larger, larger, larger, as the jet-suits gained altitude until—at last—they leveled. Crewmen, the size of toy-soldiers against their leviathan ship, dotted her vision. One waved.

Another fired a gun.

Ahead—maybe Magar, maybe another—one of the black-clad figures jerked like an epileptic, lost his flight-posture, and dropped from the air as if dive-bombing the waves. More flashes issued from the bridge-wing: a single point of light, a semiautomatic strobe. Barr bellowed a helpless curse.

She was too close to abort. And the jet-suits carried fuel for only one approach.

Body tensed for an inevitable bullet, Barr accelerated in. Almost there…

_______________________________________

Impact. As hard and fierce as a prize-fighter’s gut-strike. The world goes black.

Then a tang of copper in the mouth. Barr coughs blood, splashing it across her visor interior. She realises that sun-kissed decking rests underneath her. She tenses her body. No spasms of pain from a sucking gut-shot. No jarring of broken bones grinding together. She raises her head from the deck. A silhouette is ahead of her. A figure in coveralls, reloading a pistol with practiced hands.

The clip enters the receiver. The silhouette racks the slide; raises the pistol to take his shot.

Barr lifts her right arm, pulls the thrust-trigger to full depression. The twin engines, still hot, scream into life. They give enough thrust to send her racing along the deck. And to lift the silhouette off his feet, tumbling with a scream over the bridge-wing and clean out of sight. Disoriented and sickened, Barr struggles to her feet. The thought of her children fills her mind.

Nearby, another figure is climbing up the ship’s ladder. In a moment of perfect adrenaline clarity she takes in his every detail. A thickset Chinese man, in blue fatigues with a red star on his heavy-duty Kevlar vest. He needed a shave this morning, and the morning before. OCEAN DRAGON is emblazoned across his shirt-sleeve in crimson. For a big man, he does a good job getting the pistol off his hip—so fast it looked as though the barrel had always been there, staring her down like the mouth of a Tube tunnel.

But he disappears in a blur of smoke and vapor, as if struck by a tidal wave. Barr blinks.

“Thought you said you wouldn’t get in my way?” Magar appears besides Barr, hefting the fire-fighting shotgun he had collected from his cargo-pod earlier. He works its vertical grip with a satisfying clunk, reloading another pressure charge from the tank across his chest. Firing at almost 250 miles per hour, Magar’s concentrated blast sent the Ocean Dragon guard sprawled against the railing. Or, rather, almost through the railing—the force of his impact bent the metal. Passed out mercifully, the guard slumps down to the deck.

“Thanks for that,” Barr murmurs, slipping off her engines. “Who got hit on the way in?”

“Singh, I think. Poor bastard. Come on, we’re not finished.”

_______________________________________

Together, they hustled to the exterior hatchway of the Bonanza’s bridge.

Alarmed, the crew had already locked it. Magar gestured at the adjacent bridge-window.

“Fireball up.” Barr unclipped a spherical device on her rig and lit its fuse. Magar held the shotgun against the window and fired. The impact-proof glass shattered against the intense, concentrated force. Barr tossed in the sphere. Seconds later it exploded with a dull thud. White foam erupted from the shattered window. Magar vaulted through at once, sweeping the bridge. Barr followed immediately. A modified fire-fighting device, the ‘fireball’ had detonated expanding foam laced with percutaneous muscle-relaxant. Incapacitating on skin contact, Magar and Barr were safe enough in their full-body jet-suits. The bridge crew, however, lay about the deck in crumpled shapes—alive, but helpless.

“Spike-wedge!” Barr snapped, and Magar pulled a simple USB from his webbing. He tossed it across to Barr, standing by a console. She jabbed it into a receiving port, letting the intrusion software automatically get to work while they swept the bridge.

“Clear!” Magar barked at length, after policing the crewmen for weapons and injuries.

“Sending the good news,” Barr pulled a flare gun from her webbing. Emerging onto the bridge wing, she fired two green star-shells in quick succession. Caught on their parachutes, they drifted slowly off to starboard, twin emerald smudges among the haze.

She watched them go, chambering a third flare. Red. Abort. Just in case.

In the minute that it took to do so, the spike-wedge software had established a handshake with a dormant Windows machine eleven decks below, down on the middle engine plates. An old unit, long-forgotten, it had been installed under a now-expired third-party agreement—but had never been removed. An ancient TeamViewer application within the machine was activated. Simultaneously, the intrusion software autonomously hijacked the ship’s control network and locked out the main operating panels in the bridge itself—as well as every operator station across the ship. No hidden crew could attempt to retake the Bonanza now.

By then, Barr had fired her star shells.

High above, lost among the haze, the quad-copter drone which had delivered the Rawalpindi’s equipment picked up the infrared signatures of the two flares. It immediately deactivated the blanket electronic jamming it had been laying down since Barr and Magar lifted off from their RHIB. The hijacked TeamViewer application was now able to reach out to the Rawalpindi’s AI. Bypassing the Bonanza’s Engine Interface Control Unit, it afforded remote control of the ship’s navigation, steering, and 100,000-horsepower engine block.

And so, firewalled against outside cyberattack, the world’s largest ship fell to a single USB.

Barr felt the deck shifting as the Bonanza increased revolutions and came hard to starboard. Good: it meant that, despite running hot, Rawalpindi’s AI could still implement the getaway. She toggled her throat-mic radio and spoke to the remaining members of the boarding team.

“Airwaves now clear, people. Magar, you and me are sweeping the containers—the rest of you, secure the prisoners in the bridge.” She unspooled a length of carbon-fibre cabling, tightly coiled in a loop about her waist, and then secured it to the railing. By then, Magar was with her.

“I hate bloody heights,” she muttered as she clipped her automatic anchor to the cable.

“You literally flew here,” Magar quipped, readying his own autoanchor.

“This is different.” Barr clambered over the railing, her mouth sandpaper-dry. Above-deck containers were arrayed below. From up here, they appeared as pieces on a chessboard.

Vertigo cloyed her as she tightened her grip on the autoanchor. Then, with a last gasp, she pushed from the railing, and let gravity take her.

Tied to her chest rig for safety, the autoanchor jolted in her hands as it detected her increasing speed and applied brakes for a slow descent. As she went, the gusting winds from the fires ashore batted her, as a cat might play with a strung-up toy. Glancing about, she spied the guard who had first had her at gunpoint: he painted the deck. She averted her eyes. Instead, she kept the cable between her legs and in a loose hold above with her spare hand. Better safe than sorry.

By the time Barr finished the descent, Magar was halfway behind her. She swept the area.

The Hainan Bonanza had undergone modification to allow above-deck container storage, as well as the vast oil tanks under her feet. She began calling off the ISO container numbers. The briefings had left one particular container code burned into her mind: HNS-U-305438-3.

“Eyes peeled for the precious cargo,” she said. Head Office had given them assurances about the rough location of the container—but it was still down to them to find the bloody thing.

“Head Office was wrong about the guards.” Magar came to a rest behind her. “They could be wrong about this, too.”

“Only one way to find out.”

Down here, the stacked containers were like valleys, funnelling the dry wind from inshore so that it whipped around them. Metal groaned in a discordant, nonsense chorus.

“Movement!” Magar barked, gesturing down a steel canyon. “Two of them.”

Rounding a stack, they found two Ocean Dragon guards coming to a halt at a nondescript container. The first carried a bolt cutter. The second, a rifle.

“Hold it!” Barr snapped. The first ignored her, using the bolt cutters on the container’s padlocked chain. The second pivoted on the balls of his feet. And brought his rifle up to fire.

Magar beat him to it. The concentrated blast hit the guard with such force that he left a matted clump of hair on the container from where his skull struck against it. A spasm passed through the guard’s hands, and his rifle spat a single round with a flat, crisp report. The bullet lodged itself in the meat of Magar’s thigh. He went down hard, snarling. The first guard, finished with the chain, pulled something free from his belt. Barr acted on reflex. Reached for the first thing to hand. The flare gun. She sighted and fired. The red flare crossed the space between them like a crimson lightning bolt, trailing sparks as a comet leaves a spiralling tail. It caught the guard on his collar bone, lodging in his webbing. Dropping whatever he held, he screamed and scrabbled to unclip his webbing—and to dislodge the burning flare. In a moment of tragic comedy, the flare’s parachute automatically triggered. Barr ran to the guard and helped him out of his webbing, tugging away the polyester parachute before it could catch on the searing magnesium.

“You alright?” Barr shouted back to Magar, still sprawled on the deck.

“Never better.” Magar bellowed in pain as he fixed a memory-plastic tourniquet over his leg.

Barr felt the pulse of the Ocean Dragon. Steady enough, despite the burns to his chest. Perhaps already in shock, he did nothing to stop her taking his sidearm.

“You were armed,” Barr mused, “but you didn’t reach for it.” She looked across the deck.

To where an egg-shaped grenade lay waiting, patiently.

“Grenade!” Barr threw herself behind the nearest container, mouth opened, to save the detonation blowing out her eardrums. Not that it would help if it caught the fuel below-decks, then it…

Nothing. There was nothing at all. Barr let the seconds tick past in mounting disbelief. Each one was a blessing. Or a farce. At length, she gathered her wits and got back up. She found Magar, limping and peering down at the grenade.

“Nerves of steel, boss.” He pocketed the explosive. “Hotshot over there didn’t even get a chance to pull the pin.” Barr hesitated, unsure if the quip was earnest or barbed.

“I thought you were shot.”

“Looks that way. Now I’ve got a story to tell my old man, for sure.” Barr shuddered.

“What kind of maniac takes guns on a fuel tanker? Let alone a bloody grenade?”

Magar looked at the freshly unlocked container, reading off the stamped ID code.

“HNS-U-305438-3,” he announced. “Maybe he was planning on tossing it inside this thing.” Together, they opened the container.

Though dark inside, there was no doubting the contents.

“Bosun, tell me you’ve got a camera?”

_______________________________________

“Rawalpindi, we have ship control. Be advised: resistance encountered and cleared. One friendly overboard, one wounded. Two hostiles dead, two injured.” Barr flinched at a pain mounting in her ribs: the adrenaline was wearing off. Her injuries were biting back.

“Chrissakes,” Cresswell’s voice crackled back. “The plan was no guns. No fire risks aboard!”

“Tell that to the home team.” An exasperated sigh issued from the far end.

“Sound, Bonanza. I’ll get Head Office to airlift the injured and run SAR for the overboard. Our AI’s running hot, but the boffins say it’s got your new course locked fine.”

“Getaway is clear, then?” Cresswell made an affirmative noise.

“Joint-effects department cooked up a trick so that any virtual-reality user is going to see Chinese crew topside only; they’re even replicating the crew’s social media like normal.”

“And the AIS?” Barr referred to the automatic identification system for location tracking.

“Spoofed,” he said. “You’re hidden. As far as a ship that big can hide at sea, anyway.”

Cresswell paused. His voice was husky as he asked: “What about the precious cargo?”

“Sending you photos shortly.” Another positive grumble, before he changed subject.

“One last thing: Legal wants you to read the Letter to the crew. Summat about due process.”

“Really? Bloody formality.”

“Legal says just read it. And give ‘em the Mandarin copy. That’s why they wrote it.”

Barr turned from where she stood on the bridge wing. Magar sat nearby, helmet off and teeth gritted with the pain of his wound.

“Medical airlift inbound.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. “And thanks for the quick aim. I owe you.”

He waved her off with a smile. “No fuss.”

She stepped inside the bridge, still shattered and foam-flecked from her forced entry. The bridge team lay about from the muscle-relaxant; their guards were ashen-faced. She picked out the eldest-looking of them, who looked up from his cable-tied wrists with equal parts fury and fear. He stiffened as she lifted her visor and reached into her webbing. Then beetled his brows as she produced two fine vellum deeds. Attached to each was a red-wax pendant seal.

Barr handed one to him before breaking her own seal. The handwritten penmanship was of a sort long-since thought extinct, like some exotic animal. She read the document aloud:

“King Charles III, by the Grace of God, King of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland and Our other Realms, Head of the Commonwealth of Nations, Defender of the Faith, charges and requires John Cresswell and Larissa Barr, of the M/V Rawalpindi, to operate on behalf of J.R. Enterprises S.A., a Corporation with a registered address in Zürich, Switzerland. 

Whereas We are aware of the present hostilities between the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America, by these Documents We see fit to empower the apprehension and seizure of such Vessels carrying Warlike Materials for use by the People’s Republic of China. 

Appended herewith are Our full Terms, and a Secondary Document in Mandarin.

Now therefore know ye that this Letter of Marque is made Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm on the Sixth Day of July.”

Barr folded the vellum, adding: “We hereby take possession of this ship. God Save the King.”

_______________________________________

London

Yang Cixin rolled into Grey’s Club like a stormfront—all dark menace and bluster.

Under the lobby’s vaulted ceiling and the flaxen light of gilded lanterns, Yang marched past the patrician portrait of the club’s founder, Viscount Grey. He ignored its weighty stare, as well as that of the maître d’ standing watch by the Club’s ornate iron elevator. Waving off the uniformed man, Yang strode into the club dining room. The space was vacant. All bar one table, by the tall windows that look into the leafy park of St. James’ Square.

Yang went to it as a knight would have gone to battle: with a hungry stride and clenched fists. At the table, a man looked up from his chateaubriand and claret, glimpsing Yang over his half-moon spectacles. Brushing back his thick fair hair, he waved for Yang to sit.

“Mr. Yang,” he swallowed his mouthful of steak, “please, won’t you have a seat? If I’d have known you were visiting, I would have ordered a whole carafe to share.”

“Explain yourself, Lewis.” Yang snapped.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to be rather more specific.”

“The Hainan Bonanza. I just heard that your firm won’t honour the insurance claim.” Yang leaned across the table, letting his voice drop an octave. “Hainan Shipping pays me to be their man in London. The man they trust to know things. To handle things. Why the hell didn’t you come to me first?”

Easing back in his chair, Lewis put his palms up in a laconic shrug. “Open-and-shut case, Mr. Yang. Terribly sorry.”

“Pirates stole the biggest vessel in the Hainan Shipping portfolio—in the whole fucking world—and you say ‘sorry’?” Lewis made a pained face, as if dealing with a truculent child.

“This would be easier if you sat down.” Yang scowled, and took the empty chair opposite.

Lewis reached into his suit pocket, producing a flexible scroll of e-paper. He placed it on the table so that it faced Yang, showing a series of still photos.

Specifically, the contents of an ISO container: ID code HNS-U-305438-3.

Inside, loaded high, were fat-bodied missiles with odd, stubby winglets and flanks daubed with strange, alien script. Yang felt his stomach sinking. He realised the script was Persian.

“Paperwork aboard shows these—and several similar such containers—were transhipped during the Bonanza’s recent visit to the Chinese-owned port of Gwadar, in Pakistan. Silkworm missiles. Stockpiles that China sold to Iran in the eighties. Very retro, I’m told.”

Lewis flashed a toothy smile, lacing his hands together. “But then, I suppose your military fired off so many missiles lately that they’ll take whatever they can still find on the shelf.”

“Why does it matter?” Yang jutted his chin. “And why does it allow you to breach contract?”

“Well,” Lewis frowned, as if it were obvious. “We were forced to activate our illicit cargo clauses. The Bonanza policy was sadly voided.”

“Who sent you those photos?” Yang demanded without pause. “Why do you have them?”

“The new owners were very considerate in sharing them with our firm. And in renewing the vessel’s policy with us.” Lewis splayed his long fingers. “At double your rates, I should add.”

Yang jolted upright so fast that his chair clattered to the floor.

“The Board will transfer the whole portfolio,” Yang spat. “COSCO survived it. So can we.”

“As is their right.” Lewis nodded. “Once they pay their early termination fees, naturally.”

“Do you people realize you’re playing with fire? Supporting this attack on Chinese shipping? We went to war with America for less.”

Lewis sipped his claret. “Yes, I suppose you might drop an EMP, as you did with Taiwan. Although, I hear London is your foreign currency lifeline now—so perhaps you won’t. Awful lot of money at stake.”

Yang stood gaping, almost lost for words. “You really think you can have it both ways. So brazen, so shameless!”

Another shrug. “Someone in Downing Street clearly thinks so.” The maître d’ appeared to one side, discrete.

“Is this gentleman troubling you, sir?” He asked, glancing at Yang. “Shall I ask for security?”

“I’m afraid so, Peter. Please see him out. And then another glass of the claret, thank you.”

Mr. Wilson is a member of the Military Writers’ Guild and specializes in using fiction to explore future conflict. His published stories include finalist contest entries with War on the Rocks, West Point’s Modern War Institute, The Forge, and the Atlantic Council’s Art of the Future Project. He lives in the United Kingdom, where he works in military aerospace.

Featured Image: “Shipping Ports” by Javier Lazo (via Artsation)

Fiction Contest Week

By Zach Sanzone 

David pulled his jacket off and threw it on the floor as Hugh hanged his jacket on the back of his bedroom door.

“Tell me why you volunteered us for this project again?” Hugh said.

David belly flopped onto the bed as Hugh looked around his room for the Roku remote.

“Because I need the A, and since you’re the brains in this relationship, it’s your duty to make sure your boyfriend graduates on time.”

Hugh smirked. “Yeah? If I’m the brains then what are you?”

David flipped himself onto his back, grabbed the fluffy pillow he always managed to wrestle away from Hugh, and placed it behind his head.

“That’s easy. I have the looks,” replied David, winking at Hugh.

It wasn’t anything Hugh hadn’t heard before, but it didn’t annoy him like it had when they’d first started dating sophomore year.

Hugh flopped down on the bed next to David, who rested his head on Hugh’s chest. “It’s not like it’s hard anyway.”

“Yea but it’s still work. Hey, don’t fall asleep,” Hugh said as he nudged his boyfriend. “You have to do some too!”

“Hugh Lawrence Glenn Fitzgerald, have I ever blown off work for sleep?” David asked as he yawned and dug his head of blonde hair into Hugh’s ribs before he found a comfortable position.

“Yes! Just about all—”

A sharp knock startled David making him sit up while Hugh continued to lay still. David had grown use to seeing Hugh’s grandfather duck down so he wouldn’t bang his head on the doorframe, but Big’s size still startled him every time.

“Hello, boys! What’s up?” Grandpa Big shouted as he walked in. Hugh smiled as he got up off the bed and hugged his grandfather.

“How was school?” he asked Hugh as he returned the hug.

“Good.”

“Hey David, what’s up?” Big asked as Hugh sat back down on the bed next to David.

“Hey Mr. Fitzgerald, uh we’re just doing a project.”

“I keep telling ya to call me Big!” Grandpa Big kept grinning before asking, “Is my grandson the project?” and cracked up laughing.

“Big!” Hugh said trying to mask his own laughter with feigned annoyance while David buried his face in a pillow. “What’d I tell you about saying shit like that?”

Grandpa Big kept laughing. “I just love seeing both your faces turn beet red!”

Hugh rolled his eyes. “We have to watch a documentary for class and present on it later, so if you don’t mind, Big?”

Grandpa Big stopped laughing but kept smiling. “Okay I’ll leave you to your work. Want any snacks, David, other than my grands—”

Hugh yelled wide-eyed trying to suppress a smile. “Big! Seriously!” David blushed even more and looked down.

Grandpa chuckled again. “I couldn’t help it, c’mon! What are you watching anyway?”

“Nothing, just something for history.”          

David noticed Big’s smile drop from his face when he looked at the screen and saw the Ken Burns Vietnam War credits on Hugh’s TV screen.

“Dinner’s at 6 as always,” Big said in a quieter tone. “Your mother’s making spaghetti. David, you staying for dinner?”

“If that’s all right?”

“It is,” Hugh said. “Thanks, Big.”

Grandpa Big left the room without saying another word, shutting the door behind him.

“He got quiet all of a sudden.”

“Yeah. Don’t fall asleep, David.”
            “I won’t! Jeez, don’t spaz out.”

_______________________________________

“We hated going there…we were terrified of the place…”

“Terrified of what place?” David asked through a shrouded yawn as he opened his eyes. Hugh kept watching author Tim O’Brien on the screen talk about Vietnam.

“I told you not to fall asleep,” Hugh said as he nudged David.

“What place?” David asked again as he sat up.

“This place called Pinkville in Vietnam. They’re talking about this place that American soldiers—are you listening? We have to talk about this later this week—and how the soldiers had lost 28 of their own to snipers and booby traps in the area so finally one day in March 1968 a hundred troops went into this village called My Lai and killed something like 567 civilians, like men, women, and children in—”

“—Kids?” David asked cutting Hugh off as he sat up wide-awake now. “Why?”

“They thought they were bad guys and helping the enemy.”

“But kids? You mean like babies?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Why would they kill kids? Are you sure?”

“That’s what it said.”

David looked at Hugh with his mouth hanging open before turning back to the TV as images of the dead from My Lai streamed across the screen. 

“Dinner!” Hugh’s mother yelled from downstairs.

“Let’s finish this later,” Hugh said turning off the TV as he and David went downstairs.

Mom sat at the head of the table with Big to her right. David and Hugh took the other two sides of the table. Big forced a smile at the boys as they took their seats but didn’t say anything.

“What are you boys watching?” Mom asked as she scooped out some spaghetti onto David’s plate.

“Just something for class,” Hugh said as he sprinkled Parmesan cheese over his noodles.

“We watched this thing about a place called My Lai in Vietnam and—”

Hugh’s mother suddenly started stuttering and cut David off.

“—David, do you have enough? Let me give you some more,” Mom said as she took David’s plate. Big’s head dropped and he stopped chewing.

“Mom, David’s fine. Don’t force feed him.”

“It’s fine, really!” David said. “It’s—”

“Hugh, I thought we’d go to Target this weekend and get your things for college,” Mom continued in a louder tone. “What do you say?”

“I’m not leaving for another four months, Mom,” Hugh replied.

“Oh, Hugh,” Big said quietly, almost in a whisper, before looking up. “Let your mother take you,” he said before he smiled again.

Hugh stopped chewing.

“Ok, Big. Will you come too?”

“Of course,” Big said as his smile grew wider.

_______________________________________

“Want to finish the documentary?” Hugh asked.

David grabbed his jacket off the floor. “I’m going to go home, I’m tired. We can finish later.”

Hugh almost reminded David of the deadline for their project but decided to let it go.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, babe,” David said before kissing Hugh and walked out the door. Before Hugh started on his other homework, he went downstairs to grab a cookie. His mother was standing in the kitchen at the sink finishing the dishes when he walked in. She looked up at her son and smiled.

“Mom?”

“Yes, honey?” she said looking back up.

Hugh pulled an Oreo out of the sleeve sitting on the counter. “What did Big do in Vietnam?”

Mom turned the faucet off and grabbed a towel to dry her hands off. She took a deep breath.

“Hugh, your grandfather’s a very good man. And I’m not talking about how he took us in after—”

“—I know, Mom. But why doesn’t he talk about it?”

“Why do you want to know, Hugh?”

“Well, we’re doing this project on Vietnam and I thought maybe he’d know—”

Mom put the towel down on the counter and took his hand in hers.

“—Hugh, I honestly don’t know. He never talks about it. It was a terrible war, and those who fought in it didn’t always come home the same person they were when they first went. Big was your age when he went over there. But promise me that you’ll just leave it alone for now, okay? Please listen to me when I tell you that your grandfather’s a good man, and that he loves you very, very much.”

Confused, Hugh nodded as she kissed him on the cheek.

“I’m going to finish some homework.”

Before Hugh went upstairs, he stopped at the foot of the staircase and looked into the den where Big was watching TV. He looked at his grandfather laughing at his shows and thought about how someone so kind and loving could have been in Vietnam.

Hugh finished some of his other homework over the next few hours and was about to get undressed for bed when he got a text from David.

David: I went home and read up about My Lai. That was some seriously fucked up shit that happened.

Hugh: Yeah.

David didn’t reply again until Hugh got into bed.

David: Look at this pic.

An image of three soldiers popped up next on Hugh’s phone screen. Two of them were standing there with their rifles aimed down at the ground. The third one, who looked about a foot taller than the other two, rested a bigger machine gun on his shoulders and smiled at the camera. 

David texted again. These guys were at My Lai. Look at the tall one.

Hugh took a good look at the picture, not quite sure what he should be looking at.

Hugh: What are you getting at?

David: Your grandpa was in Vietnam, right?

Hugh got up, swung his feet around onto the floor, and called David.

“Why’d you send me that pic? And what’s Big got to do with anything?”

“What? I was just showing you some pics we could use for the project.”

“Well it’s not funny, David.”

“I didn’t say it was funny! I wasn’t trying to be funny! I just thought you’d want to see some pictures since you were all pissy earlier because you didn’t think I was going to do any work!”

Hugh put the phone down and sighed. He hated it when David did half-assed work like this. He put the phone back to his ear.

“Ok. I’ll add them to our project. But just—nevermind. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow,” David said in an annoyed tone.

Hugh threw his phone onto his desk from the bed and tried to go to sleep, but he couldn’t get the image of the smiling soldier out of his head until finally falling asleep well past midnight.

Hugh recognized that smile.

_______________________________________

Hugh woke up to his alarm, and a text from David. All it said was “Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division.” He was a little surprised that David was getting into this project as much as he was; David usually didn’t get into much of anything school wise. Hugh was even more surprised when he saw David at study hall in the library working.

“You’re really focused on this project all of a sudden,” Hugh said to David, who was too focused to respond. Hugh shrugged and started his online research. The sight of blood and carnage had never really bothered Hugh, but the photos of the dead bodies at My Lai he saw online bothered him. As Hugh continued to review the details of the massacre on PBS.org, his eye caught a detail he recognized.

Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment…

Hugh went back to the beginning of the paragraph and started reading.

“…a group of soldiers known as Charlie Company, departs for Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province. Charlie Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division is comprised of five platoons (three rifle and one weapons and one headquarters.) Leading the group, the well-known and well-respected Captain Ernest L. Medina had earned the nickname ‘Mad Dog’ from his high expectations and his quick temper when these expectations were not met.”

Hugh read about how women were raped before they were shot in the head. How could anyone do that? he thought as he read about how these soldiers, American soldiers, casually carried out orders to kill men, women, and children like they were taking out the garbage or watering a plant.

“Soldiers begin killing the civilians without pretext. Men are stabbed with bayonets or shot in the head. One GI pushes a man down a well and throws an M26 grenade in after him. Over a dozen women and children praying by a temple are shot in the head by passing soldiers. As they move into My Lai the men shoot many fleeing Vietnamese and bayonet others. They throw hand grenades into houses and bunkers and destroy livestock and crops. Sergeant Willie ‘Big’ Fitzgerald, his nickname given his 6’7 tall frame, leads the first squad…”

Hugh thought he was going to throw up.

He mentally closed the window to the information and logged out before quickly getting up. His forehead broke out in a sweat as shivers ran throughout his body. He felt like he was hyperventilating.

Sergeant Willie Fitzgerald…

He felt like he could barely walk. Hugh stood still for a few seconds looking around the library at his classmates who were busy working on algebra and English. They weren’t reading about how their grandfather probably held a rifle to the head of a baby before blowing its brains out.

“Hugh?” David asked looking up from the screen. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Hugh responded before turning to leave.  

Hugh remained in a daze for the rest of the day, barely able to focus on much of anything at all. When the final bell rang, Hugh went back to the library, pulled up the PBS website he’d been reading, and printed out a single picture. He took the picture, placed it in a folder, put it in his book bag, and walked home.

_______________________________________

Mom wasn’t home from work yet, but Big was in the den reading the paper.

“Hugh! How was school?” Big called out. 

Hugh didn’t answer him and he placed his book bag down on the kitchen table and took out the folder.

“Hugh?” Big called out again.

He slowly walked into the den where Big sat in his favorite leather chair.

“You okay? What’s the matter?”

Hugh opened the folder and pulled out the photo of Big and the other two soldiers that David had texted him earlier.

With tears welling up in his eyes, Hugh held up the picture for a few seconds before letting it fall to the floor. Big’s face turned to stone. Hugh fought back tears.

“Big? That’s not you, right?”

Tears were now forming in Big’s eyes and he stared at his grandson quietly.

“Answer me, please. Tell me that the Sergeant Willie Fitzgerald who led a group of men into My Lai and killed innocent people isn’t you! Tell me it’s not you!”

“Hugh,” Big said sobbing. “I can’t—”

“Big, just tell me it’s not you”—his voice began to crack—“and it’ll be the end of it. Just tell me it’s not you.”

Big looked down, tears dripping onto the newspaper.

Hugh pulled his phone out and pulled up the photo David had sent him the night before as he stepped closer to Big.

“Tell me that’s not you, Big! Tell me it’s some other tall guy who smiles like you that was there. Please! Just say it’s not you!”

Big’s voice cracked as he spoke.

“I can’t tell you what you want to hear. But plea—”

Hugh stormed out of the den and ran upstairs.

“You should be in hell for what you did!” Hugh screamed at Big as he ran up the staircase to his room where he slammed the door shut. He could barely see anything through the tears that wouldn’t stop as he paced back and forth in his room trying to catch his breath before he threw himself down on his bed and pulled his pillow over his head. After a while, he fell asleep.

_______________________________________

Hugh woke up in a ditch outside. The air was humid and the smell of something rotting filled his nostrils. He tried to sit up, but he felt a searing pain in his waist. He looked down and lifted his shirt to find blood flowing out of a bullet wound.

“Hey Sarge! There’s still one alive!” he heard someone yell in a southern accent. He looked around and saw a soldier in green fatigues walk toward him. His helmet was covering his eyes and he was chewing something. When he reached the edge of the ditch, he pulled his helmet up to reveal his eyes.

It was Big, but he looked much younger.

“Big! It’s Hugh!”

“Shut up with that fuckin’ gook talk!” he said before lifting his rifle and taking aim at Hugh.

“Big! No!” he screamed.

BANG!

Hugh snapped awake so hard he almost fell out of bed. It wasn’t a gunshot, but rather the sound of the garbage man banging one of the metal trashcans against the back of the truck that had woke him up. He was still wearing the clothes he’d worn the day before. Looking at his watch he saw he still had a few hours before school, but he couldn’t fall back asleep.

He went downstairs where he saw Big sitting at the kitchen table with his morning tea sitting in front of him. He wanted to go back upstairs but Big caught sight of him.  

“Hugh. Please sit down,” Big said softly.

Hugh hesitated at first but then walked over to the table and sat down a few chairs away from Big.

“Hugh, I can’t expect you to understand what happened at My Lai. Hell, I don’t even know if I understand it myself.”

Hugh looked down at his hands resting on the table.

“So many of my friends had been killed by that point, that I—we—were all angry. We wanted blood. We wanted to get revenge.”

“So you killed babies,” Hugh said as more of a statement than a question.

“Our commander, Lieutenant Calley, he was this real asshole who was always getting picked on by everyone, they called him ‘Sweetheart’ because he was such a terrible leader. He was the one who told us to open fire on those people because he wanted to prove how tough he was. Though rumor was the orders came from officers hovering above us in choppers. He started shooting, and his—me—we did what he ordered. We weren’t trained to think, Hugh, we were trained to follow orders. We were told they were Viet Cong, that they were aiding the enemy, so we needed to kill them all if we didn’t want them coming back to bite us in the ass again. We shot and killed. After a while, it became like a game to us. How many could we shoot in a certain time.”

Hugh listened to Big but didn’t say anything else. They sat there in silence for a long time after Big stopped talking. Beams of sunlight began to shoot through the windows as the sprinklers outside kicked on. Hugh looked down at the table.

“You didn’t see them as people?”

“Not at first. I saw them as what Calley described them: the enemy. At one point we were chasing this group of old men, women, and children across this field near the village, taking pop shots at them with our M-16s. We’d laugh anytime they screamed. Then—”

“Then what?”

Hugh looked out the window towards the morning sky.

“I didn’t hear the chopper at first. Before I knew it this helicopter landed right in between us and the villagers who were running away. The pilot got out and approached Calley. They got to screaming at each other. That’s when I noticed the chopper’s gunner had his machine gun aimed at us. It was hard to hear what the pilot and Calley were screaming about with the chopper blades still spinning but they both looked angry. Then Calley told us to stand down while the pilot ran after the villagers. When I saw the pilot bring all those villagers back to the chopper and put them in and fly away is when I realized what we’d been doing was a sin, a travesty.”

Big broke down sobbing. Hugh fought back tears himself.

“And you were right about Hell, Hugh.”

Hugh looked at Big.

“I am in Hell.”

“What do you mean?” Hugh asked.

“Years went by after I got back, and during that time I didn’t think much about what I’d done over there. Then that day when the state troopers came to my door and told me a drunk driver had killed your father was when it hit me. And when I went down to the morgue to identify his body…”

Big looked out the window at the sunlight again.

“…was when I realized I’d be in Hell for the rest of my life. I killed people that day in My Lai, Hugh. Women, children, babies. People who would never get to enjoy another day on Earth ever again. People who pleaded with me in Vietnamese not to kill them as their children looked at me in curiosity.”

Big wiped his face. 

“And when I saw your father’s body was when I realized that God was punishing me for what I did that day. I took those people’s lives, and as my penance, God took my only child, my son, away from me.”

Hugh sat still.

“That’s when I took your mother in to live here. She was eight months pregnant with you, and I was scared that the stress of your father’s death would make her miscarry. I sat with her every day until you came into the world a month later. You came out of your mother, and when I got to hold you, you smiled at me. Your mother even insisted that I name you for taking you in. God took my son for what I did but gave me a responsibility.”

Big looked up at Hugh.

“It was to take care of you and your mother. And all I’ve ever done since you’ve lived here was do the best I could.”

Big looked back down at his tea while Hugh sat there looking down too. They both sat there for a long time in the silence of the morning before Big spoke again.

“You’d better get ready for school, Hugh.”

Hugh got up and walked toward the stairs without saying anything. He paused at the bottom of the stairs and turned back around. Big sat at the table sipping his tea looking out the window. Hugh wanted to go back into the kitchen, sit down, and talk to the man who’d raised him since birth, but for the first time in his life he didn’t have any words for his grandfather. He went upstairs, showered, got ready for school, and went back downstairs to leave. He didn’t say anything as he walked out the door in the kitchen where Big still sat looking out the window.

Later that day at school, Hugh sat down at a computer in the library to work on the Vietnam War project again. Part of him wanted to go to his teacher and ask if he could get an extension, or present on something else, but he knew it wouldn’t change the truth he’d learned about his grandfather. As he Googled for more information, Hugh came across a YouTube video called Four Hours in My Lai. Hugh pulled out his headphones and plugged them into the computer to listen and watch.

The documentary focused on an interview with a man named Varnado Simpson, another soldier who had also killed at My Lai.

“My mind just went…and I just started killing. Old men, women, children, water buffaloes, everything… I just killed… That day in My Lai, I was personally responsible for killing about 25 people. Personally. Men, women.”

This isn’t real, Hugh thought.

Hugh thought about where Simpson was today, and whether he still felt what he thought was remorse for what he had done. Hugh found a Wikipedia page about him. Toward the bottom he saw a subheading entitled “Suicide.” It read, “After three unsuccessful attempts, Simpson took his own life in his home on Sunday, May 4, 1997, at the age of 48, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.” Right above the subheading, the following caught Hugh’s attention, “For years, Simpson had lived with all his doors and windows locked and shuttered.”

Hugh sat back in his chair and looked down. He thought about Big, thought about what he’d said to him that morning about having a responsibility to take care of him after his father had died. He thought about the Paxil prescriptions he’d picked up for Big for years, never thinking twice about what they were for, until now.

Hugh spent the rest of the day completely revising the project. After David took a quick glance at it and added a few more details, it was ready for presentation.

_______________________________________

On the day the presentation was due, Hugh and David spent about fifteen minutes in class describing the My Lai Massacre in detail, giving their classmates the facts about the event. What year it took place, who was involved, how Lieutenant Calley was the only solider charged for murder, and how President Nixon commuted his life sentence to house arrest, which he only served three years of before going free.

“But that doesn’t mean they weren’t punished,” Hugh told the class. “While the Army charged only one soldier—who was convicted but only served a few years in jail—many of them have had to live with the guilt of what they did that day.”

David looked at Hugh, who continued to talk.

“Men like Varnado Simpson spent the rest of their lives in agony over what they did in My Lai. Simpson killed over 25 people that day. It was as if something’d snapped inside him and he went into kill mode. He did what the Army had trained him to do.”

Some of his classmates rolled their eyes, while others looked disgusted.

“Simpson killed innocent people, and then spent the rest of his life wondering why he’d been ordered to do so. It got so bad for him he was eventually diagnosed with chronic and severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He killed himself in 1997 because he couldn’t stand the guilt anymore.”

Some of the students in class who hadn’t been paying attention suddenly looked up at Hugh as he continued.

“Veterans like Simpson have had to live with what they did that day. They suffer from post-traumatic stress day in and day out. They take meds like Zoloft…and Paxil to deal with the anguish.

“People like Simpson never escaped the guilt of what they did that day. They were guilty of what they’d done but they spent a lifetime paying for it. That’s what I meant when I said many of them have had to live with the guilt of what they did that day.”

The class was quiet for a while before the teacher asked, “Hugh, I’d have forgotten if it wasn’t for your own name, but did you learn about the three American soldiers in a helicopter who saved some villagers from getting killed?”

Hugh had meant to look that up, but David already had and chimed in.

“An army chopper pilot saw what was happening and he landed his chopper in between fleeing villagers and pursuing soldiers. He got out and told the soldiers that if they hurt the villagers he and his two crewmen would open fire on them. He and his crew saved the lives of a dozen villagers that day. He got them to come with him, got them on his chopper, and flew them to safety.”

“What’s Hugh’s name got to do with anything?” a student asked.

“The chopper pilot’s name was Hugh Thompson Jr.,” the teacher said. “His two crewmen were Lawrence Colburn, and Glenn Andreotta.”

Hugh recognized the names and stood there astonished. He could barely speak.   

Some of Hugh’s classmates’ eyes welled up, while others continued to look angry and disgusted.

 “David, Hugh, thank you for that,” their teacher said. “You can have a seat.”

“That was good, Hugh,” David said as they sat down.

Hugh nodded and wiped his face.

_______________________________________

Later that day when Hugh got home from school, he found Big in the den watching TV. He went in and sat down on the couch while he and Big watched the end of The Price is Right in silence. They didn’t say anything to each other for a long time.

“You promised to come with me and Mom to shop for college stuff this weekend.”

Big smiled gently. “I did promise, and I will.”

Hugh and Big settled into their chairs as they watched plinko on The Price is Right.

“Hugh Lawrence Glenn?” Hugh asked out loud without taking his eyes off the TV.

Big didn’t take his eyes off the TV either.

“I needed to remind myself that there’s good people in the world. I wanted that idea to live on in you.”

Hugh and Big sat there watching TV for a little while longer without speaking.

“No David?” Big asked quietly, not taking his eyes off the TV.

“He’ll be coming over later.”

“He staying for dinner again?”

“Probably.”

Big nodded.

“What?” Hugh asked. “Nothing about me being his dessert after dinner or anything?”

Big looked over at Hugh and smiled.

“Not tonight. I just want to enjoy a night with my family,” Big said.

Hugh looked over at Big. “Our family.”

Zach Sanzone has been a writer his whole life. In addition to writing baseball articles and book reviews, Sanzone has published academic articles in the fields of history, literature, and law. Sanzone lives in Boston, MA and teaches middle school history and literature. In his spare time he enjoys reading, writing, and collecting baseball cards and vintage war medals.  

Featured Image: “Cedar Falls” by Min Guen (via Artstation)

Fiction Contest Week

By Captain Michael Hanson, USMC

Summer 2026

The Marines lay as still as rocks on the jungle floor. Sweat gushed from their every pore as insects crawled across their bodies and buzzed in their faces. But the Marines remained still. Not a single one moved an inch to wipe their brow or swat a buzzing nuisance. They remained as motionless as logs, and they blended in like logs as well. Their selection of excellent micro-terrain for their ambush site as well as their proficient application of camouflage made them undetectable in the jungle shadows. Their bodies covered in foliage, exposed skin and weapons smeared in earth tones, they were indistinguishable from the ground they occupied. Months of sustained combat in this harsh environment taught them that to survive in the jungle you had to be disciplined, or at least more disciplined than your enemy. They learned these lessons the hard way, by losing Marines. “You only make mistakes once in combat,” they reminded themselves while conducting precombat checks and inspections before going on patrol.

So they lay for hours, carefully watching a small clearing less than 50 meters away that widened their visibility in the thick vegetation. Suddenly they heard a faint rustling sound in the woods. A few seconds later they heard more. No one said a word. The foliage across the clearing shook and out stepped a Chinese infantryman. He slowly crept forward, as quietly and carefully as he could. Behind him three more Chinese soldiers came into view one by one, scanning the jungle ahead of them. Across the clearing, the U.S. Marines slowly switched their weapons off safe. They continued to wait.

Rac-kack-kack-kack-kack!

Suddenly the jungle exploded with fury. Dirt blasted up from the ground and tree limbs dropped, as red tracers tore into the unexpecting enemies. They crumpled to the ground and the firing stopped a second later. Leaves drifted to the ground and dust settled around the motionless bodies, the jungle was quiet again. After 30 seconds of calm two camouflaged U.S. Marines went forward, weapons at the ready, and approached the corpses. They were fast, first scooping up the fallen’s weapons before checking their pouches and pockets for anything of value. From one a radio was retrieved, off another a blood smeared map and a weathered notebook. That was going to be it. The search party looked up and nodded at the Marines covering them from the ambush site, before heading back in with the haul. Deliberately, they passed their buddies that were still in the prone, and pushed into the jungle. Slowly and individually, the Marines rose and the squad disappeared into the jungle. They left the bodies in place.

Assuredly there were other enemy patrols out, and undoubtedly any one that heard the burst of fire was heading for it to help their comrades. “Better not to stick around,” Sergeant Rodriguez thought to himself as he motioned to his Marines to head back to base. The point man acknowledged and picked up the pace.

Sergeant Rodriguez was the squad leader, with 10 Marines under his charge. However, he didn’t start out with this billet. When they landed in the jungle, the squad leader was a staff sergeant and had 12 Marines under him. But he had been wounded in a meeting engagement a month before. The squad made a chance encounter with the enemy on a jungle trail. The two opposing squads walked right into each other. The Staff Sergeant was on point, and wasn’t as fast with his weapon as the Chinese point man was with his. He took a burst of fire to the chest, and Sergeant Rodriguez took charge of the squad. They fought their way out of that engagement, taking another Marine slightly wounded. The casualty evacuation was a nightmare. They carried, dragged, and hauled the Staff Sergeant for hours through the jungle, constantly mindful that they could be overtaken by the enemy on their heels until they linked up with a friendly squad that rushed to assist them. It was pure luck that got them out of that one, though luck isn’t always enough in this environment. Skill and discipline are required to survive in the jungle. And in the months since Sergeant Rodriguez took the squad they improved in both. They adapted, they learned by doing, though they lost a few other Marines in other engagements.

They had been in this place for two months, but two months is a long time in the jungle. Plenty of time to learn how to fight and survive there. After two months in the jungle, Sergeant Rodriguez’s point man knew his business. It was hard though, those first several patrols, when he couldn’t get a signal to his wrist GPS device through the thick jungle canopy. They got lost, they wandered around on several occasions, but eventually he figured it out. Today, navigating by map, compass, pace count, and terrain association, he steered the squad on their course like he was driving a car back home. He was a professional, the best point man in the company, though they were all pretty good. One had to be in this environment.

_______________________________________

The war began by complete accident. Neither side was ready for it, but they jumped in with both feet. It started in the waters west of the Philippines. A Chinese naval vessel collided with a Filipino Navy ship after some reckless maneuvers. The whole thing probably could have been defused, but neither side backed down. A tense standoff ensued between ships of both navies, until the Filipinos fired on the next Chinese ship that came too close. The Chinese struck back, hard and fast, and sank several Filipino naval vessels. The shooting war had started and it quickly escalated.

The Philippines invoked its treaty alliance with the United States and American forces raced for the region. What followed was a scramble for key maritime terrain, with both sides attempting to control strategic chokepoints in the region. Long-ignored islands, reefs, peninsulas, straits, and channels became the scenes of posturing to gain advantage, as well as isolated clashes. U.S. Marines scattered across the Pacific to countless strategic points in the first island chain. They went on the surface and in the air. They traveled on small, hard-to-detect transports and in MV-22 Ospreys. They went to establish expeditionary advance bases, from which further operations could be conducted.

For the U.S., speed was crucial in such a distributed campaign, as Marines were quickly dispatched to reach myriad critical places first. There simply wasn’t enough Marine infantry to seize and defend all the key terrain identified. Nor was there time for Marine infantry to secure ground, turn it over to follow on forces, and redeploy in every location. The Americans accepted the risk of seizing ground with support forces in some places and sent their infantry to other places more likely to be contested.

On some locations, the Marines landed High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, to threaten Chinese ships that came within range. On other sites the Marines established forward arming and refueling points, or FARPs, to threaten enemy ships and to serve as hubs to support other EABS from. In other locations, the Marines went to work from existing EABs established before hostilities erupted. A vast network of interlocking and mutually supporting bases designed to contain the Chinese Navy began to take shape.

However, the Chinese had plans of their own, and weren’t content to just let the Americans box them in. Chinese amphibious ready groups landed their own Marines on ground they deemed important as well, including some of the same islands the Americans prized. US Marine artillerymen found themselves fighting to defend their HIMARs sites from Chinese infantry, as did U.S. Marine FARP personnel. Unfortunately, many of these Marines were ill-trained or equipped to fight off attacks by determined enemy infantry. The American Marine infantry met their match as well. In many places they landed and found a bitter fight for control of terrain determined to be important by both sides.

Whether American or Chinese infantry made it to their objective first, vicious battles ensued. In some places, American platoons landed and encountered Chinese companies waiting for them. In others, American company landing teams arrived and secured their objectives, only to have a Chinese airborne battalion parachute in on top of them. U.S. Marines had not been outnumbered on the ground like this since Vietnam.

_______________________________________

The patrol snaked its way through the jungle following the path of a stream. It wasn’t a straight route, but navigating without the aid of GPS relies heavily on terrain association. Sergeant Rodriguez thought back to when his company arrived here. The news of war was sudden and interrupted an otherwise dull deployment. Within hours, his company was airborne in a flight of MV-22 Ospreys. Their mission was to seize a small island in the Philippine archipelago for use by follow-on forces. Whoever those forces were and what their mission was didn’t matter to him, he was going to set conditions for other Marines to exploit.

Sergeant Rodriguez’s platoon had been in the first wave to land on the island. Due to the limitations on space and weight in an air assault, they didn’t bring much. When the Osprey touched down in a grassy clearing, the Marines shuffled off only with what they could carry on their backs. Resupply would come in a few days after they established the preliminary defense for the EAB. Once the initial EAB was established a steady logistics effort would bring in more equipment and Marines until the node was built up and operational. A look at a map showed that this island was key to the network, so it was important that a lodgment be secured quickly. Unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan.

The company landed without interference and seized their objective ahead of schedule. As planned, a few Ospreys dropped some pallets of chow to keep the Marines going until the next wave of resupply came in. Yet something else happened before anyone expected it to: a Chinese airborne battalion landed. The Marines uneasily watched hundreds of parachutes descend onto a relatively open part of the island. Attacking such a larger force was out of the question, the Marines hunkered down and hurriedly set about building a defense.

It was quickly apparent that the Chinese had established a lodgment on one side of the island while the Americans had one on the other, with a no man’s land of harsh wilderness in between. The U.S. Marines knew they were outnumbered and immediately requested reinforcement, but were told there would be none. The enemy had quickly and effectively established local superiority in naval, air, and land assets. These were active, and targeting friendly assets, even scoring a few hits. The loss of some important friendly assets had disrupted plans for this EAB. It would be an undetermined amount of time before any more Americans would be able to get through. The company had to hold on until the situation improved enough to get more support into the area. 

Soon Chinese reconnaissance patrols would be searching for them. To keep them back and provide early warning, the U.S. Marines sent out patrols of their own. What ensued was a series of battles between squad-sized patrols in the jungles. A war of chance encounters, meeting engagements, and ambushes. It was a squad leader’s fight, as only small units could efficiently traverse the rugged hills and thick vegetation. Squads and fire teams could move nimbly and quickly in this environment, anything larger was slow and unwieldy.

Resupply was tenuous. In the first week a few Ospreys made it through to drop off a few pallets of chow and ammo. When they returned a week later a Chinese surface-to-air missile downed one of them, causing future air resupplies to cease. Eventually a system of unmanned cargo boats got through. Every so often, in a method so as not to set a recognizable pattern, a few autonomous boats full of chow and ammo reached the shore, each time in a different location. With their resupplies contested, the Marines were often hungry. Patrols would halt to fill their assault packs with bananas and other fruits. Patrols were dispatched specifically to harvest the jungle’s bounty. They soon learned to live off the land. Patrols went out to fill jugs with small pumps that allowed them to filter water from streams. At the company position Marines erected devices to collect rainwater. They turned to the jungle to survive the enemy’s interdiction efforts.

_______________________________________

As the patrol took a security halt near a pond, Sergeant Rodriguez took an MRE snack out of his pocket. He had been saving it since before the ambush but couldn’t wait any longer. He looked at his Marines, his eyes focusing on their load bearing vests and boonie covers. “It would have been smart to leave all the PPE and bring more chow and ammo when we came here,” he remarked in his mind, thinking of his 40-pound body armor kit staged back at the company’s position, untouched for more than a month. The Marines had long ago abandoned their heavy body armor after the first few exhausting patrols in the jungle and close fights with the enemy. The gear was impractical in this environment. It caused them to move slow, snagged on every branch, and decreased the range of their movements. By ditching it they moved faster, stayed out longer, covered more ground, and fought better. He wished his unit had trained this way before the war began.

The war turned out much differently than many thought it would. Operating and fighting in the jungle had changed the ways the Marines conducted their business. Many of the assets that gave them the edge in previous conflicts were of little use in this one. The thick vegetation, not only on the jungle floor but at the canopy as well, imposed severe restrictions on the Marines. In countless places they weren’t able to acquire signals from global positioning satellites, which forced them to navigate the old-fashioned way with a map and compass, pace counts, and terrain association.

The rugged terrain and foliage also inhibited their communications, acting as a barrier that blocked radio waves. What radio waves did get through were often picked up and traced back by the enemy who sought to locate Marine positions from their emissions. The company lost their 81mm mortars early in the operation when an enemy electronic warfare detachment locked on to a radio transmission from the gunline. The mortars were already limited in where they could set up, needing an opening in the jungle canopy to shoot through. But this did not matter when a salvo of enemy rockets hit their position. The guns were destroyed and the few surviving mortarmen were sent to one of the platoons as riflemen. The combination of the jungle wall and enemy electronic warfare capabilities prompted the Marines to use their radios mostly for listening.

The company headquarters limited its use of radios to mostly listening purposes for fear of being picked up, located, and targeted. This became the standard operating procedure shortly after a headquarters node on another island was taken out after poor emissions discipline. When the company needed to transmit, mainly to higher headquarters far away on another EAB, patrols went out to quickly set up their communication gear, transmit a bare bones message, break down the equipment, and displace back to the company’s position before they were located. To keep from being predictable, they did so in different locations each time.

Batteries became a significant problem when the resupplies slowed down, there were never enough charged batteries to facilitate continuous communications with so many distributed elements. The company made effective use of portable solar panels camouflaged and installed in the jungle canopy, but this didn’t alleviate all of their demands for recharging batteries. The Marines only solved the problem by decreasing the demand. Due to the environment, radios were rarely able to communicate anyways. When they could, it was a risk to transmit. So the Marines went back to their roots and followed Marine Corps doctrine, using mission command and commander’s intent to give patrol leaders wide but well-defined space to operate in. The system worked quite well.

Patrols took communications gear out but rarely used it. The environment often didn’t permit, and if they wanted to break through the canopy to talk they had to climb a tree to emplace a field expedient antenna, an untimely task. Still, there were rare occasions when this proved necessary, such as when a squad in another platoon discovered a large enemy patrol base and called in HIMARs from another EAB on top of them, destroying an enemy reinforced platoon. There was always the possibility for such targets of opportunity and the Marines searched for them, but most often patrols operated on strict radio silence.

The other rare event when patrols made radio transmissions was to evacuate casualties. The squad would erect a field expedient antenna through the canopy and push a standardized casevac request to the company headquarters. The request simply informed the listener monitoring the company’s radios the number, type of casualty, nature of injury, special equipment required, and the code name for a pre-designated checkpoint rather than a grid coordinate, that way the enemy couldn’t hunt them down. The company would dispatch another patrol with necessary equipment to link up at the reference point and bring the casualty back to the company aid station, which capabilities were significantly increased from when they arrived on the island. If the casualty needed to be evacuated from the island, a small autonomous boat could be arranged to link up at some point on the coast to take the casualty back to a higher level of care on another EAB. It was far from a perfect system, but it was the best the Marines had in this contested environment.

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Before resuming the patrol, Sergeant Rodriguez pulled his radio out of its pouch and looked it over, wondering when was the last time he used it. It was turned off, per current SOP, only to be used in a vitally important situation. Even the last time his squad took a casualty on patrol, he didn’t use it. He sent a buddy team of runners back to the company to guide another squad to a link up point. He thought about the other things they brought that ended up being of little use after sustained operations. Some of it turned out to be junk, like the exoskeletons designed to allow a Marine to carry 200 pounds of gear. Only a few sets had been issued which didn’t traverse the jungle very easily, and didn’t function as designed after a bullet went through it. They didn’t have the support system to repair them, so every set resided in a big heap back at the company position they called “the boneyard.” Worse yet, when the exoskeleton broke the Marines still had to figure out how to carry all the weight it was supposed to help transport. Other equipment they brought was good gear for a different environment, but did not last in the jungle. All the high-tech gizmos and gadgets ran on battery power they couldn’t produce, or had plasma screens that couldn’t handle the humidity, or electronic ports that shorted out in an environment that never dried.

Whether from humidity, rain, or the need to cross water features, the moisture took a heavy toll on the Marines and their equipment. Weapons rusted. Gear came apart. Skin rotted. The Marines took many casualties from immersion foot at first. They never quite cured it, they just learned to cope. Many had trench foot but patrolled anyways, they didn’t want their buddies going out without them. Then there were the snakes and the insects. The snakes were venomous and there was not much that could be done for a Marine that was bit by one. The insects were terrible, but like trench foot, the Marines just dealt with them. Last were the physical ailments the jungle inflicts on its prisoners. Malaria, disease, boils, and sores. No one had felt completely up to par since the day they landed, whether from a jungle ailment or from the side effects of the medicines Marines took to prevent these. Finally, there was the fatigue and stress from operating in this hot, wet, nerve wracking place. This steaming hellhole was in many Marines’ minds a blight on God’s creation. This awful place was enough to drive a man insane all on its own, without even considering the enemy that was somewhere out there tirelessly working to kill them. 

Combat in the jungle turned out to be nothing like anything they had trained for. The learning curve was steep as the jungle demanded much from the Marines. Those that didn’t adapt didn’t survive. A Marine’s discipline is what kept him alive here. Even more so, a Marine’s discipline kept his buddy alive. There were many facets of discipline in the jungle. Whether it was common sense discipline, like not compromising one’s position with excessive noise and light. Or the hardness of body and mind that prevented a Marine from wiping his face or swatting at a bug in an ambush site, or the toughness required to continue to patrol on rotting feet and an empty stomach. This discipline showed itself when Marines continually improved their personal camouflage or that of their position. Though the Marines’ bodies had shed all of their excess pounds and seemed sickly and weak, their weapons were immaculate. Their discipline is what kept their weapons clean and in perfect working order in an environment that degraded anything foreign to it. They did all of these things without thinking, they just performed. In a way, they were almost like robots. The jungle did that to them, they had been programmed out of habit and repetition. The jungle is harsh, war in the jungle is even more so. Warriors in the jungle must be thorough professionals in every way.

Jungle combat was typically at close range and with direct fire weapons. Hasty and deliberate ambushes, counter ambushes, and meeting engagements were the standard action. Marines quickly became masters of the coup d’oeil, able to hear, see, or smell an approaching enemy, instantly recognize advantageous micro-terrain, and quickly deploy into a combat formation on the terrain that maximized their effect on that enemy. They knew how to use cover and concealment not only to hide from the enemy but to stalk him as well. To move through the jungle quickly and undetected, the Marines operated in small units, typically squads and fire teams. They often operated deep, and for extended periods. For long patrols, a platoon went out and established a patrol base. One squad patrolled further while another rested and the other maintained security. Sometimes fire teams split up and went out from the patrol base to cover more ground. They moved light, lived off the land and out of their packs. Every pound they carried was strictly intended for combat or sustainment. Their packs were surprisingly light. Gone were the days when they took enormous packs full to the seams with gear for every possible contingency, anything unnecessary had been discarded long ago. This was by no means a new type of warfare, only the weapons and equipment had changed.

Discipline in individual actions and proficiency in combat skills were key in this battle, and so was leadership. Leadership was the critical force multiplier here because leaders held everyone to the standard, the standard that separated life from death. Due to attrition, many Marines found themselves taking charge at a higher level than when they landed on the island. Riflemen became team leaders, team leaders became squad leaders, squad leaders became platoon sergeants, and platoon sergeants became platoon commanders. Every Marine had to be prepared to step up, and many did. The leaders in this fight had much more authority and autonomy than Marines of the same rank did in previous wars. It was not uncommon for a corporal to lead a fire team into the jungle for a day or two, or a sergeant to take a squad out or three.

Operations like this require trust. Company and platoon leadership could not go on every patrol with every element. Leaders had to trust their subordinate leaders that took units into the jungle. Once in the jungle, Marines had to trust each other, because in the jungle the only thing a Marine could count on was his fellow Marines. This was perhaps the harshest lesson the company learned since landing on this island, and the one the Marines at every level wished they had trained harder for in peacetime: developing effective teams that could operate on their own in distributed fashion. A team was only as good as its leader because strong leaders train strong teams, they hold their Marines accountable until the Marines hold themselves accountable. Unfortunately for many, they learned the hard lessons that made them effective in the jungle after the war began and not before, and they lost many leaders and teammates doing so.

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Sergeant Rodriguez halted the patrol. They were outside the company position. His eyes scanned the perimeter searching for the defensive posts, and he could see none. A complex integrated network of primary, alternate, and supplementary positions lay before him, but due to ingenious methods of field craft devised by the Marines, every post remained hidden in plain sight. The lost arts of field craft were quickly learned anew when the shooting war began. The pervasive intrusion of enemy intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, whether drones or satellites, was omnipresent. At nearly all times and in almost all places there were eyes in the sky searching for anything that might indicate a significant asset or betray a unit’s location. When something was spotted and identified, long range fires rained down on the hapless target. Typically, the discovery was due to poor concealment, most often attributed to a lapse in judgment. However, a temporary lapse in judgement could still lead to a permanent end for those on the scene. All across the Pacific, the combatants on both sides grew wise to the threat of being spotted by the ubiquitous sensors and targeted by long range fires. Thus, the jungle became a refuge to shelter in. Troops on both sides stayed beneath the jungle canopy because it shielded them from detection. Though the sky above was awash with both sides’ ISR assets, these were usually strategic- and operational-level assets. The Marines on the ground had small unmanned aerial vehicles, but these were largely useless as they were short ranged and hard to control with the limitations of radio waves in this environment. If the Marines wanted to use them, they needed to find an opening in the jungle to launch out of and recover from. That could be hazardous. But the main reason why the small UAS was effectively grounded was because they just couldn’t see through the thick jungle canopy, and no one ventured out from under it.

Sergeant Rodriguez gave the near-far recognition signal to one of the posts that guarded the few portals to the company’s position. The post returned the signal, and the patrol moved forward. As they navigated the company engagement area, they passed obstacles designed to slow an attack and channel the enemy into designated kill zones. The ground was covered by machine guns organized into overlapping sectors of fire. Grid coordinates had been recorded for HIMARs targets, should the enemy get close to breaking through. In the event this happened, the forward posts would fall back to successive fighting positions to the rear.

As the patrol pressed further into the company perimeter, the posts came into view. The closer the patrol came to them the more recognizable the posts became. Every fighting position had been firmly hardened and expertly camouflaged. They were dug chest deep into the ground with sandbags rising a meter above ground to form an aperture to fire from. Above this was a roof covered with more sandbags to provide overhead cover. To complete the emplacement, each was thoroughly camouflaged with nets, logs, and living foliage dug up and replanted around and on top of the positions. The only way an enemy would be able to spot one of these positions would be to follow the stream of red tracers pouring out of it, but by then that enemy would be in shock from the combined effect of this defensive network.

“One thing is sure,” Sergeant Rodriguez thought to himself, “There is going to be a hell of a fight here when the enemy finds this location and comes to seize it.” Only by reducing this strongpoint could the Chinese finally seize control of the island and refocus their efforts on the next one in the chain. To the Marines manning this strongpoint, it was a matter of when, not if. Unless they could continue to delay the enemy long enough that American naval and Marine forces could regain the initiative in the near littorals and reinforce them.

Until then, however, he and his fellow Marines would continue to endure the oppression of the jungle and the hardships imposed by the enemy. They existed on a shoestring, far forward, isolated, cut off, in an austere environment, well inside the enemy’s weapons engagement zone, and trying desperately to survive. As he made his way to the command post to hand over his captured items and debrief with the company-level intelligence cell, Sergeant Rodriguez remembered a book he read before the war began. He thought to himself, “This is like Guadalcanal all over again.”

Captain Michael A. Hanson, USMC, commissioned in 2013. He served at 1st Battalion 2d Marines at Camp Lejeune, NC from 2015-2017 as a Rifle Platoon and 81mm Mortar Platoon Commander. Following this assignment, he served at Tactical Training and Exercise Control Group in Twentynine Palms, CA as an Infantry Instructor from 2017-2020. He is currently a student at the Expeditionary Warfare School in Quantico, VA.

Featured Image: “Jungle” by Dan Milligan  (via Artstation)