John Ringo: Unto the Breach

“Very good time indeed.”

“Fuck me.”

Mike Harmon, AKA Michael James, AKA Duncan Michaels and currently Mike Jenkins or “Kildar”, was thirty-seven years old, brown of hair and eye, medium height with a muscular build and a face that, while slightly handsome, was also so “normal” that he could pass as a local in just about any Indo-European culture from the US to Northern India. That trait, and an almost prescient talent for silent-kill, had earned him the nickname “Ghost” while on the SEAL teams. After sixteen years as a SEAL, most of it spent as an instructor, he had found himself unable to readjust to team life, gotten out and gone to college. Since then his life had taken so many weird turns that he had ended up as a feudal lord in the country of Georgia. With a harem, no less. Oh, and with every terrorist on earth searching for his head. Which was why he never used the name “Ghost” or “Jenkins” except around a very few, very close, friends.

Mike was sitting on the summit of Mount Sumri, drinking in the cold, heady air of the high mountains and just taking a look around. He’d taken to climbing the mountain every few days as a way to get exercise and some time away from his various duties.

The Keldara called it “Mount Raven” for the flocks that gathered on its slopes. It was the highest peak of the many surrounding the valley and the birds apparently liked the viewpoint. So did Mike: one of the reasons to climb it was to take a look around.

As he’d been examining the mountains to the north, a source of constant low-grade anxiety, a flash of movement caught his eye. The hills had small herds of deer, wild pigs, mountain goats and even a few wolves. But this shape was different. Low-slung, slow-moving and… predatory.

He steadied the binoculars by resting his elbows on his knees and engaged the digital zoom. The picture tended to pixellate but he could zoom to a hundred times normal view magnification at the maximum. He zoomed it out to about seventy times and then controlled his breathing instinctively, trying to catch the shape again.

It was a tiger. A young male Siberian if he wasn’t mistaken. Which was just flat impossible. The last tiger in the Caucasus Mountains had been killed off nearly a century ago. The Keldara still had a few preserved skins, but that was the only remnant. And the nearest breeding group of Siberians, which were themselves threatened with extinction, was, well, in Siberia . Eastern Siberia, which was about as close to the Caucasus as Southern California was to Nova Scotia. There was no way a tiger could have just walked all the way from Siberia.

But the evidence was there before his eyes. He wasn’t about to dismiss it. Even if it was impossible.

The tiger only remained in sight for a moment then disappeared over the crest of the ridge. It was as if it had come into sight just to show say: Hey! Yo! Here I am!

“Cool.” Mike whispered. But he made the decision, immediately, to keep quiet about it. There was no way he was going to mention the sighting unless other evidence turned up. Nobody would believe it. Oh, they’d be polite enough about it. He did, after all, employ or, basically, “own” just about everyone he met on a day to day basis.

While he couldn’t be said to “own” all he could survey from his lofty aerie, he did control it. The valley below, the valley of the Keldara, he did own. He had bought the valley, and the caravanserai that came with it, more or less on a whim. He had gotten lost and found himself in a remote mountain town with the strong possibility of being stuck there all winter. Since the only available living quarters, an unheated and bug infested room over the town’s sole bar, were less than pleasant, he had needed some place to stay. And, frankly, he was tired of traveling. So, thinking that he could always sell the place if he had to, he had “bought the farm”, mostly for the caravanserai, a castle like former caravan hostel. The “farm” was in the valley below, a fertile high-mountain pocket valley about five miles long and two in width stretching more or less north to south.

The farm came with tenants, the Six Families of the Keldara. The Keldara were, at first, a pretty mysterious group. They were said to be fighters but on the surface they were much like any similar group of peasant farmers Mike had encountered in over forty other countries.

The valley also came with problems. The farm had been terribly neglected for years and the Keldara still used, essentially, dark ages equipment: horse and ox drawn plows, hand scythes and threshed the grain by running oxen over it. The farm manager was a blow-hard who had all the farming and management skills of a rabid badger. And the Keldara had little or no motivation to improve things.

Mike had solved that problem early on by finding a new farm manager, a former Keldara who had been university trained as an agronomist and then “exiled” from the families for challenging the farm manager’s authority. The other fix was just throwing money at the situation: he had bought new equipment, tractors, combines, chainsaws and everything else a modern farm needs. Together with modern seeds, fertilizers, herbicides and farming techniques, the direct farming aspects were coming together. The fields below were yellow stubble from the largest bumper crop any of the Keldara had seen in their lives. The harvest festival scheduled for tomorrow was going to be a happy event.

The other problem, though, looked to be more intractable. Right over the mountains to the north was Chechnya, where the Russians were fighting an ongoing insurgency that had continued without relief for over fifteen years. The Chechen resistance used the Pansiki Gorge, less than sixty miles from where Mike sat, as their primary basing area. Technically part of the country of Georgia, Georgian forces, limited in number, under-trained and funded and with other serious problems to handle, didn’t even consider trying to contest it with the battle experienced and well-armed Chechens.

The battles spilled over to the region of the Keldara. The Chechens used the area as a transshipment point, sending drugs and kidnapped women out to be sold or traded for weapons and ammunition and bring the ammo and weapons back. The constant trade was a source of anger on the part of the Russians who regularly threatened the area with outright invasion.

The Chechens didn’t just wander through the area. They often extorted food and girls from local farms or, in some cases, raided and burned them. Whole towns had been raided within the last few years.

It wasn’t the best security situation in the world.

Mike’s response was simple: Turn the Keldara retainers into a militia. He had, in his time, seriously pissed off every terrorist on earth. If he was going to be right next to Chechen Central, he wanted some shooters at his back. He hired a large number of trainers from the US and Britain, shipped in top quality gear and set out to turn the “simple farmers” into a group capable of, at the very least, securing their own homes and his.

The Keldara had 120 males available between the ages of seventeen and thirty. Mike’s goal was to turn them in to a decent company of militia, period. He wanted them to be able to maneuver against an enemy force while the younger women, who were trained in positional defense, held the homes. That was it.

What he found out, as the training progressed, was that the Keldara were far from “simple farmers.” They took to military training as if they had been born with a rifle in their hands. Enthusiastic didn’t begin to cover it; he realized, quickly, that he had unleashed a monster.

The reason for their response trickled out, slowly. He still wasn’t sure he knew the whole story. But one part he found out even before the training began: the Keldara were not “true” Georgians; they were a living remnant of an ancient elite force called the Varangian Guard. The Varangians were Norse, mostly from Russia, hired by the Byzantine Emperors as their personal bodyguards.