John Ringo: Choosers of the Slain

Lasting good, that is. He’d done many things that he defined as “good” over the years, but they mostly involved killing terrorists or finding wayward weapons of mass destruction. But more terrrorists always seemed to arise, hydra-headed, and WMDs were here to stay. There was always some Russian guard willing to sell his soul for a bagful of cash or some muj with a high school knowledge of chemistry whipping up a beaker of Sarin. To put all of them out of business would require changing the world, and that was too big a prospect for any former SEAL.

He cleared the valley and ascended the switchbacks at the north end, heading into the mountains. He was glad the road was clear this time of year. The first time he’d come to the valley of the Keldara he had been lost and the road had been an ice-covered nightmare of a drive. On an early summer night it was simply pleasantly winding.

He reached a good debarkation point where a small parking area overlooked the river foaming through the gorge below and got out, stretching. The night was clear and black as pitch, perfect for a walk in the woods.

He loaded up his assault ruck and picked out an SPR for the trip. The teams were on their last exercise of Patrol Phase One, a two-day hike with various mission objectives. Patrol Phase One was designed to train them in various missions in patrolling in large groups, rotating members of the teams through leadership positions. It was straight out of the Ranger Handbook, which fit the mission of the Keldara better than SEAL training. After they’d gotten used to patrolling in large groups they’d move to Phase Two, which would train them in small unit patrolling over large distances, the only way that they would be able to fully interdict Chechen movement in the area.

He deliberately hadn’t looked at the particular mission of this patrol. They might be in movement or set up for ambush; it was up to him to find them and determine their mission.

He had to be careful about it, however. The teams were loaded with blanks but carried a full load of combat ammunition; the area was unsecure and their “training” might involve hitting a Chechen group at any point. The Chechens had to know by now that this region wasn’t safe. His people had stopped a snatch and wiped out a full battalion attack already in the area. But the Keldara area had been a major path for Chechen groups for some time; the passes in the Keldara AO were the only way through the mountains short of entering the much better protected area around Tbilisi. It was one of the reasons that the Russians, and therefore the American government, were looking for him to shut down Chechen operations in the region.

He first had to cross the rather sizeable stream. While that sort of thing was easy with a group, by himself it required a bit more care. He hunted around for a good ford but there was none in the immediate area. And even getting down to the stream bed from the road was tricky.

Finally, he found a reasonably negotiable spot and slid down the hill on his butt, ending up with his feet planted on a rock that was actually jutting out of the stream. He secured a climbing rope to the rock and hooked off to it, then slid into the stream.

The current was powerful and bloody damned cold, glacial melt coming straight off the mountains. The rocks were also slippery as hell. He made his way carefully across the current, planting his feet and using the hard point of the rope to stabilize.

He got to the far side and pulled the disconnect he’d tied into the rope, retrieving it and then coiling it and putting it away. He thus was starting off his hunt dead wet, cold and nigh on to miserable. Which was all to the good; he’d been having it too easy lately.

The team had last been placed on the far side of the ridge above him, so he headed up the steep slope. In places he had to push himself up using the trees on the ridgeline but it only took him thirty minutes or so to ascend the ridge and get a good hide.

He pulled out a thermal scope and started scanning the area below him. When he didn’t see anything in the spot he’d noted the team in, he scanned around. There didn’t seem to be anything in the valley below so he kept scanning around.

The valley the team had been in was a narrow V heading down from the north and more or less paralleling the road at about two hundred meters of elevation. There was a small stream running down the center. It joined with a slightly larger valley that curved in from the east and finally joined the gorge the road wound up, adding the contents of both streams to the river that cut the gorge.

The team was nowhere in sight in the first valley so he kept panning back and forth looking for hot points in either valley. He finally spotted a hot point coming into the larger, perpendicular, valley, but it was coming from the east and nowhere around where the team had been. They’d have had to run like hell to get up to that point and the figures were moving wrong. As he watched, more and more figures came in view and some of them had the distinct outline of horses or mules. It wasn’t one of the Keldara teams, that was for damned sure. In fact, unless he was much mistaken, it was a Chechen supply convoy.

He considered for a moment where he’d left the Expedition. Supply trains like this one generally met up with trucks somewhere along the road that he’d parked on. The damned Expedition was directly in view of anyone driving down the road, which was one hell of a note.

He didn’t know why this sort of thing always seemed to happen to him. He was like a terrorism fuck-up magnet. All he’d wanted to do was go watch the Keldara doing ops and here he was dealing with a damned Chechen supply convoy. It was such a pain in the ass.

He pulled out a map and slid down the hillside out of direct view. The maps, a new improvement by Vanner, were fluorescent in ultraviolet, so he set the Night Observation Device to UV, slid it down over one eye and opened up the map.

The valley the Chechens were moving down was marked as 415 and, sure enough, there was a narrow trail running along the south side. There was also a ford marked. It was a good thing he hadn’t taken a better look at the map or he might have used both and run right smack dab into them coming the other way.

The trail was snaking on the hillside and, based on their movement, they were going to take a good hour to reach the road. Depending on where the Keldara team was, it might be able to get into ambush position. But groups like this usually met up with trucks coming down the road and they’d be coming from the north; even the Chechens weren’t stupid enough to run up the valley of the Keldara, and all the sources they used were to the north. That was the whole point of running through here.

Ergo, there was a truck or trucks coming down from the north to meet them. It would rendezvous with them near the ford, transfer cargo and go back north. Guns and ammo coming in, drugs, girls and what have you going out.

This was a mission for more than one of the teams. And he still couldn’t find the team he was looking for, so he’d have to call in.

“Keldara Base, this is Kildar,” he whispered over the radio. “We have a situation.”

Gildana Makanee keyed her headset and waved at Sergeant Vanner as the call came in.

Gildana was seventeen years old, blue-eyed and long-legged with long blonde hair she regularly braided in a thick rope that hung to her lower back. Until a few months before, Gildana had envisioned a life just like her mother and her grandmother and great-great-great grand, dating back to medieval times. She would soon marry, many of her friends had married already, and the man she was to marry, Givi Ferani had already been chosen. Then she would have as many children as she could manage until she was old and gray and worn out from working the farm.