Did I get my tubes cleaned?
Dude, I was the base commander.
Her name was Shadi. She was eighteen. The reason I know is that I had a conversation with Hollywood.
"How old is this young lady, Hollywood? She's eighteen, right?"
"Uh, sir, she said she thinks she's . . ."
"Eighteen, right?"
"Yes, sir! She's eighteen, sir!"
She was eighteen and she looked, even after all that time in that fucking place, like a god damned model. Long legs, gorgeous face, high cheekbones, aquiline nose, gigantic dark eyes and very nice hooters. She was, by a smidgeon admittedly, the best looking of the young ladies who had chosen to enter the employ of the United States Army.
She was my "personal maid." She kept my quarters straight, shined my shoes, cleaned my clothes, made sure I ate . . . Stuff like that. She also, yes, participated in the general housekeeping chores for the unit. That was the point of it, not to get a personal concubine.
Butterfill got one too. Rank hath its privileges. The lieutenants, four, had two. The senior sergeants I'm not sure how it broke out. And really don't ask me about the troops. I know there was a rota of some sort but I did not get into it. That's what first sergeants are for.
Were there "issues?" Oh, hell, yeah. Guys in their twenties fall in love with anything that's got pussy. But the issues paled before the benefits. I'm not talking personally although the benefits were nice. I'm talking about troops who were more alert and with soaring morale. My morale was better than it had been in a year. And, hell, the girls weren't exactly unhappy.
By the way, did the boys have problems with "rank hath its privileges"?
I'd just stood there cool as a cucumber in the middle of a firefight. The boys do love someone with big brass ones. Those who hadn't previously served with Bandit Six had heard the rep and might have believed it and might not. They knew it now. Big brass ones, calm as hell when the shit hits the fan. Bandit Six rocks.
(I did not tell them I was nearly peeing myself. There'd been a lot of reasons, including the above, that I did it that way. Didn't mean I liked it. Rank has way more to it than privileges.)
Did the boys have problems with "rank hath its privileges"? No. They would have for the fucking battalion commander who hardly ever left the fucking FOB and created no end of trouble when he did. But not for Bandit Six. Or Fillup who was a stand-up guy.
We eventually dipped further into the well for some more for the Nepos. The girls that "assisted" them were getting a bit ragged.
Some of them had kids. Their kids? I dunno. Didn't care. Some of them, despite my best efforts (there was a supply of birth control pills on the base, naturally, and I kept telling guys to use fucking condoms) got pregnant. Or were pregnant when we brought them in. Deal with that bridge when we came to it. Hell, we were bound to get "relieved" . . . more relieved sometime.
Or were we?
Look, the U.S. was a shambles. The military, Army, Air Force, Marines, even the damned Navy, was stretched to the nth degree trying to keep things from coming totally apart. People thought they were apart. They weren't. Hell, television stations were still broadcasting. CNN was up. Fox was up. Networks were mostly showing repeats but if you had satellite and power you could pretend things were normal if you didn't watch the news.
Civilization in the U.S. was hanging on by a thread. Civilization everywhere was hanging by a thread.
Europe looked as if it might survive or it might not. Besides all the shit the U.S. was going through, its average mortality, despite an I'll admit better distribution of the vaccine, was higher than that of the U.S. See that long bit about why and pick what you're willing to believe. Bottomline, they'd gotten hit massively.
Oh, yeah. Might be time to talk about how effective the vaccine really was. They had distributed vaccine. And gotten a goodly part of their population. Type one vaccine. Turns out that the strain of H5N1 that actually broke out almost all had mutated binding proteins.
(What the hell? Mutated what? You mean it stalked around growling "Braaaains . . ."?)
Here's what a flu virus does. A flu virus is a little packet, it can't really be called a cell, that looks sort of like a robot and acts a lot like one. Depending what kind of cell it's "targeted" on, it finds that type of cell and hooks on with proteins that look remarkably like hooks under an electron microscope. Then it shoots a package of DNA into the cell. The package of DNA first tells the cell to make a shitload more viruses then kills itself (lyse) so they're released.
This is the way that immunization works.
Immunization doesn't attack the flu. It tells your body's defenses what the flu is going to look like when you get it. It's sort of like giving the body's policemen a picture of that flu bastard and telling them "Shoot to kill." So when the flu attacks, your body produces a bunch more policemen (antibodies) which attack the flu.
The problem with most flu vaccines is that the "picture" that the antibodies get only describes those hooklike proteins. And it, chemically, describes them precisely. If the antibodies see different proteins, they ignore them. Otherwise you can get what's called an "autoimmune" disorder where your antibodies are attacking you.
A virus can only mutate in a host, therefore who it infects is as important as how—certain human genes control how and when the virus mutates—a blended genetic culture such as U.S. is much less likely to produce a uniform mutation that could spread (see Patient Zero discussion)—so the monocultures in the rest of the world were much more likely to be infected by a resistant mutant that was practically tailored to wipe them out.
Okay, so sometimes there's a point to multiculturalism.
H5N1 had been mutating fast. It had to to become as lethal as it was. Part of that mutation (just minor changes in genetics; not weird zombies) was in its binding proteins.
Slippery little sucker.
Type Two, on the other hand, described the coat proteins of all flus. The outer case of the robot if you will. They all "look" the same. (Bit like R2D2. With claws.) It worked on just about any flu. I haven't had the flu since that one injection that I was bitching about.
That's why I was such a fucktard. I was bitching about the only immunization that really worked.
All the H5N1 that spread didn't have the mutated binding sites. There were, it was later determined, six different "strains" of H5N1. Did they all come from Jungbao? Probably not. They probably mutated later by cross cellular chain mutation . . .
(What's . . . ?)
Look, I'm not going to give another fucking class in virology, okay?
The point being, even when people got the vaccine, it didn't always work.
Europe got hit hard.
But that was only the beginning of their problems. Europe had been "aging" for quite a few years. That is, they had less and less native population peoples to keep up that elaborate retirement pension plan and socialized medicine. More and more of them were retiring.
The bright plan to take care of this was to bring in immigrants. Might have worked, if they'd worked a little harder on being a melting pot. Instead, the immigrants had often created their own internal communities that were reflections of the "Home Country." The U.S. had that a few times, too, but never to the degree that Europe was experiencing before the Plague.
This had created . . . issues. On the surface the Europeans were very kumbaya. That was the official line and nobody was allowed to stray from it. "Multiculturalism is good because we say it's good. Alles in ordnung!" Underneath, however, was the very European mindset that there were US and THEM. No matter how many generations you family had been in Germany, you were not granted full German citizenship if you weren't ancestrally German. France had a slightly different way of segregating the minorities. The basic lesson was clear; you're here to take care of us in our old age but that doesn't make you important.
I don't like radical Islamics but doing something like that would make me radical. It did so in Europe. That was causing problems, bigger and bigger problems, well before the Plague.
Europe, Western Europe, had had a very European response to the Plague. Not "new Europe" which was all sweetness and light. No, it was an "old Europe" response. You know, the one that gave us words like "pogrom" and "Holocaust."
Germany and France, what was called often the Franken-Reich, were the centers of power in what was called back then the European Union. Each had their own way of dealing with the Plague and their "restive" immigrant population.
France dealt with it by how it distributed the vaccine. It didn't go to every clinic, everywhere, all at once. It went to selected clinics on a "trial" basis. This dissuaded some people from seeking it out. But the point was, they weren't doing the "trial" on the Wogs. They were doing the "trial" in clinics that were in primarily native French regions, down to neighborhoods. And there was a shortage of the vaccine. Gosh, before the Plague hit they never did get around to those Moslem neighborhoods!
Germany's was a doozy. It was a very German approach. On certain days, everyone with last names starting in, say, F to H were to go to their local clinics for vaccination. Alles in ordnung! But. The first round of the vaccine was to go to persons with "full German citizenship."
Hey, why didn't you just put a yellow star on them for Christ's sake?
Germany was having riots before the Plague. Which they put down with Teutonic efficiency.
But when it swept through, they hadn't gotten most of their "native" population vaccinated, anyway, what with one thing and another and almost none of their "immigrant." Between that and the fact that the vaccine wasn't all that functional, Germany and France were both hit hard. And the remaining immigrants had gotten really untrusting. There also wasn't much of a military in either country to help out. Germany had a "social service" obligation that was supposedly the same as the draft. But most of the people serving in it did "social services" rather than military service. And most of them were less than available in a disaster.
They were sort of hanging in there. Sort of having a civil war along with eveything else but sort of hanging in there. All the Western European powers were sort of hanging in there. Worse than the U.S. or better? At that point, nobody could tell. It was all a toss-up.
Eastern Europe . . . Poland was doing pretty good. Lower level of immigration and higher trust levels. Pretty good vaccine distribution. Death rates about like the U.S. In the late summer of 2019, Poland looked a good bet to make it.
I could go on. I won't. The "European Union" was hanging by a thread. But it was hanging. They might or might not go into a thousand year night.
In many places civilization was gone. Iran was one. Most of the Middle East. China, southeast Asia except Thailand and Singapore which were just very bad. Vietnam, it depended on which station you listened to. It sounded sort of like they were going back to North and South. Russia . . . depended on if you believed the government or the few news reports still coming in from refugee interviews. I believed the refugees.
China, a Tier One nation, was gone. It had gotten hit brutally by the Plague and it never was really high function anyway. All it had had going for it was a lot of people and some of them very bright. The Plague hammered them.
Japan was hanging. It had been distributing vaccine while the Plague actually spread. (It got hit early.) High death rates. But the Japanese are sort of used to that. They were consolidating in the way the Japanese always do. Economy wrecked but, hey, look at where they were in 1946. At least this time they didn't have atomic ruins to deal with.
The point to all of this being, the U.S. military may care for their troops but the last thing on anyone's mind, right then, was a company of infantry left in fucking Iran.
Problem was, things in Abadan were starting to shape up. And not in a good way. Actually, things in the region were shaping up in an ungood way.
We first got wind of this from refugee reports. We were in contact, now, and stayed that way. Refugees were still trickling out of Abadan and we knew, more or less, what was going on in there.
There were three factions holding various parts of Abadan. The Mahdi Army, The Warriors of Victory and Shia Liberation Front. All three had been at their core local "militias" we'd been fighting and trucing with since we'd been in Iran. Well, most of the Warriors of Victory were the remnants of the local "security forces" (Army, police and such) we'd been training. But we also knew they were connected with the Warriors at the time. Such is the nature of the Middle East.
When the Plague hit, the Warriors had a problem. They were not a family grouping. We'd worked hard on breaking up the clan structure in the "security services." But when the shit hit the fan, they didn't have their old, tried ways to fall back on. So they broke up into small bands.
The Mahdi Army was a family based structure. Oh, it had peripheral families allied to it, but it was mostly clan based. So it had coalesced faster than the Warriors and eaten up some of their little bands.
The Warriors reunited, sort of, in defense against the Mahdi.
The Shia Liberation Front was a minor faction. Very hard-core Islamicists, more hardcore than the Mahdi, who were more interested in secular power. The SLF thought this was the Apocalypse and the 12th Imam was coming any day and they were preparing to fight the great fight, blah, blah.
I think the first guys in the trucks were probably a Warrior faction. But who knows or cares?
Basically, what it was were three gangs controlling the city. There was some fishing going on in the Shat and out in the Gulf. That was where most of the food in the city was coming from along with a little bit of agriculture that was getting going again.
Every now and then there'd be some open fighting in Abadan between the gangs. We'd hear about it in time, but we always knew it was going on when refugees picked up on the road from Abadan.
The SLF were the smallest faction, but they were going to be our biggest problem.
Started off with a probe. A group of three "military style" vehicles came out of north Abadan across the plain. Nothing to stop them; it was really flat. There were a couple of small wadis but nothing you couldn't negotiate.
Now, we could see Abadan. By the same token, they could see us. They had watched us put in the perimeter fencing and decided they had a way to breach it.
As the three vehicles approached the fence, the drivers jumped out of the lead truck and ran. The other two stopped. The truck hit the fence, knocked down a big chunk and then blew up.
The reaction platoon Strykers were rolling out of the gate by then. I mean, they'd had to cross nearly six miles of desert. We had time to get the reaction platoon up and going.
The truck bomb probably took out most of the mines. It also tore up the fence and some of the internal concertina. Guys jumped out of the other trucks and tried to make it up the berm.
We had guard posts on the top of the berm for a reason. They were taken under fire.
By that time we had the mortars up, too. Oh, you think we forgot indirect fire? Hell, no. We'd even set up some Paladins, 155mm tracked artillery, oriented on Abadan just in case we needed it.
Point was, the guys trying to climb the berm came under fire from the machine guns on the berm guard posts just about the time the first mortar round was starting to fall. The mortars never got properly adjusted but they were falling.
The guys on the berm got slaughtered despite the bunker being damned near a klick away. The reaction Strykers were faster across the desert, and much more heavily armed, than the trucks.
Game, set, match.
The next stage was negotiations.
A Humvee (we'd provided quite a few to the Iranians) came rolling up the road from Abadan with a white flag on its aerial. It stopped for the refugee guardpost then came rolling up to the outer gate.
We rolled out the Gate Stryker. I got called.
There was an officer in Iranian Army dress uniform. Think Hussar in an opera but gaudier. Had the epaulets and such for a colonel and covered in awards. I could read the rank but not the awards and didn't care about the latter. The uniform was a bit big for the guy but one thing or another he might have lost weight.
Colonel Reza Kamaran. He was commander of Iranian security forces in Abadan. And he demanded weapons and supplies to be used in restoring order in Abadan.
I said I'd have to get back to him on that. Not my orders. I'll have to call my boss.
It is as Allah Wills.
He said he'd wait. I suggested he come back tomorrow. He insisted he'd wait.
This conversation took about an hour. That's the way Iranians talk.
I went back to the commo shack. I tried to get ahold of the BC. He was "unavailable." I talked to the duty lieutenant for a while. The battalion was trying to feed Savannah and get the port back up. They had had no luck on either score. Shit was bad. Fucking BC's back at Stewart in the rack. Or just hiding. He's not saying much these days. Casualties from gang fire. Voodoo priests. Shit's bad.
Hmmm . . .
My senior officer is unavailable. Come back tomorrow. In'sh'allah. Okay, whatever.
Note. Time difference meant I had to be up in the middle of the night to talk to the BC and vice versa. Actually, if I called in the evening I'd get him in the morning. I called in the evening. He was in a meeting. I left word that we had been contacted by a local group about giving out free weapons and ammo as party favors and I was thinking about it. (The last part being a lie.)
Fucker called me back at 2AM local time.
Don't give out anything. Secure and maintain.
Says he's a colonel in the Army, yawn. Don't know. Name. Local allies.
Don't give out anything until I check with higher.
Okay. When you getting us home.
Top of my priority list. No transport at this time.
Want a security update?
Send me a memo.
Colonel came back the next day.
Where's my stuff?
It is in consultation among my bosses. Come back tomorrow. In'sh'allah.
I quit going out to meet him. I sent the BC a memo. After a week or two he quit coming out. I don't know if he'd gotten tired of the drive or died. Didn't care.
Here's the thing. The refugees, who I trusted more than this guy, said there wasn't any "Iranian Army" in Abadan. There was the Warriors, who were made up of gangs that had fractioned off the Army and police, but they weren't the Army. They were a fucking gang that didn't even give the pretense of being a formed unit.
I figured the guy was one of the Warriors, probably a lieutenant maybe captain by his age, who'd gotten the uniform and decided to come out and stroke me out of gear.
Absent a direct order, wasn't going to happen.
But it got me thinking. More.
Sooner or later somebody was going to come and try to take this shit away. And although we were supposed to "secure and maintain" it, I wasn't going to have a pocket mech division's worth of gear fall into the hands of these yahoos.
The Nepos were, at that point, just sitting there.
Well, sort of. I'd put Samad in charge of training them for guard duty and such. Not Ghurkas, but somebody that we could use as spare rifles if the crunch came.
That was kind of funny. I told him that they needed to be trained. I had them set up a short range inside the perimeter. I told him to take over. Get them to be reasonable soldiers.
Look, the rest of us were busy. I was busier than a one-armed paper-hanger keeping everything working. Shit was always breaking down, working with Fillup on security, I was finally getting the sort of busyness I prefer. Basically, I'm pretty lazy but I get bored if I'm not given something to be lazy about.
I didn't notice for a couple of weeks that I hadn't heard any shots. Well, the boys were starting to use the range a bit, but I didn't hear the sort of crackle you'd expect to find if sixty guys were being trained in marksmanship.
So I went poking around.
Found Samad and the Nepos in one of the areas that had been emptied out to make the defenses. I think it used to hold concertina.
It had been marked off with chalk in a very precise square. The Nepos were out there in what looked like British combat uniforms (turned out they were, don't know how I missed that line item) doing close order drill.
And they were good at it. Damned good.
Of course, when they hadn't been doing their other duties they'd apparently been out there every day, all day, doing close order drill. For two fucking weeks.
I waited until the end of the day to pull Samad aside. I'd taken some time up to write up a training schedule. I suggested to him that maybe just maybe it was time for his guys to start training on something other than close order drill. Like, you know, weapons training, field sanitation, first aid. Here, I have a list.
He looked at it in puzzlement.
"You mean we will be given live rounds to practice?"
There was the fucking ammunition for a division and thirty days of combat sitting in the ammo dump. There was no way that it was ever going to be "redeployed." It was either going to sit there until it rotted or we blew it the fuck up.
"I think we can spare some, yeah."
"Very good, sahib!"
That grin. Okay, so sometimes you had to give him kind of detailed orders until he got the hang. But he had a great grin.
You can't turn raw recruits into a good reinforced platoon overnight. Not even Nepos. But we got them started on the path.
I gave him two weeks of "additional training" before I started my next little scheme. I mean, the demo was just sitting there.