SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

It had many names; Lord Flatline, King Cancer, Old Man Darkness, Mourning Glory, The Great Beast, Baphomet, The Pale Rider, and others. There were more, many more, but they didn’t matter. Luke had heard them whispered at family funerals, and in evac choppers, in med tents and on burial duty. Every man was born with a death, and one day he’d have to look it in the eye. Luke stood, and stared. The thing lifted its veil. Luke pulled his cross over his head with his bloody hand, and kissed it once. He threw it at the king’s feet and it tinkled like a broken bell. Luke took a single step forward, and fell into the fire. He had enough time to wonder if he’d pissed himself, and then he was gone.

Show of Force A Jack Sigler / Chess Team Novella Jeremy Robinson & Kane Gilmour

“Show of force operations are designed to demonstrate resolve.

They involve the appearance of a credible military force

in an attempt to defuse a situation.”

— Joint Publication 3–0, Joint Operations

1

The helicopter set down a half mile from the raging storm, which made the desert look as if it were being sucked up into space. A twisting cloud of dust, sand, dirt and snow spiraled into the sky and covered a region that stretched for miles, engulfing most of the so called ‘Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area.’ Six bodies slipped from the rotary-winged vehicle and began a fast march toward the howling blizzard.

The region had been set aside as an International Biosphere Reserve in 1991, but in practice, that just meant there was very little there. Mongolia had agreed to the classification of the rarely-used land in exchange for developmental aid. Stretching over 3000 square miles, the place was a combination of drab-colored desert steppe and low, craggy, arid mountains.

The paramilitary team arrived at the leading edge of the storm, and was swallowed by the blinding whiteout conditions. Bursts of sand and ice particles, propelled to 100 mph by roiling winds, blasted across the landscape in thick, nearly solid slabs, buffeting their bodies. Unwavering, the soldiers pressed on. The radio earpieces and speakers inside their helmets, hidden beneath hoods, blocked external audio unless they were switched on. Without that block, they wouldn’t have been able to hear each other over the mechanical, high-pitched whine of the rampaging weather.

When the gusts of the storm periodically cleared, they could see each other in their full-body, white environment suits, trudging across the patchy scrub-grass-coated ground. The suits looked like the bastard children of environmental hazmat suits and yetis. With full-plate face masks, and tight, fur-coated hoods, they might have easily been mistaken for small polar bears missing their snouts — polar bears with plastic-coated automatic weaponry. The synthetic fur on the exterior of the suits repelled the sand and snow. Each member of the team also wore a tactical climbing harness that covered chest and pelvis, which could be used for rappelling or climbing, but more often was used for attaching equipment to the body. Underneath the outer suits they wore gel-heated full-body wetsuits to help maintain a comfortable internal body temperature.

Outside the environment suits, the mercury would be hovering around -40 degrees Fahrenheit, without the wind chill. Scrubbing filters could provide exterior air if their self-contained tanks ran out, but they anticipated being on the ground for less than twenty minutes.

The land was barren rock and jutting hardy grasses — until unexpectedly, it wasn’t. The hard ground gave way to treacherous sand dunes, and then just as seamlessly merged back into more crumbly rock and clumps of pale-green vegetation.

“Charming. Like New Hampshire in the spring,” one of them said, breaking the silence on their internal comms.

“Nah,” the burly man in the lead said. “Spring is mud season. It would be like this, but we’d be caked in mud, too.”

The slightest of the group groaned and said, “Golf alpha romeo.” It was shorthand for ‘get a room.’ It was a common thing for the man and woman to bicker while in the field, but the other team members all knew how they really felt about each other.

“Hold up here,” the slim man in the rear said. He squatted, and the others paused in their march without protest, dropping into similar crouches. They all held specially-designed, plastic-coated FN SCAR rifles, capable of withstanding the grit from extreme sandstorms. Even the weapons’ muzzles were covered in a thin layer of plastic that would be ripped away once they opened fire, should it come to that. But they expected it wouldn’t. This mission would be a cakewalk compared to what they normally faced.