Out of the Dark by David Weber Read Free Book Online Page A

Afghan soldiers they’d been working with this time around seemed motivated to keep it that way. For that matter, they were even acquiring the rudiments of genuine fire discipline! They weren’t as good as
Marines,
of course, but then, who was?
    His lips twitched at that thought, which he reminded himself to keep
to
himself. At the moment, Bravo Company—
his
company—had been detached from Battalion and sent back up into Paktika yet again, this timetasked as backup for the Army’s 508th Parachute Infantry while the Army tried to pry loose some of its own people for the job.
    Despite all the emphasis on “jointness,” it hadn’t made for the smoothest relationship imaginable. The fact that everyone recognized it as a stopgap and Bravo as only temporary visitors (they’d been due to deploy back to the States in less than three months when they got the call) didn’t help, either. They’d arrived without the logistic support which would normally have accompanied them, and despite the commonality of so much of their equipment, that had still put an additional strain on the 508th’s supply services. But the Army types had been glad enough to see them and they’d done their best to make the “jarheads” welcome.
    The fact that the Vermont-sized province shared six hundred miles of border with Pakistan, coupled with the way the political situation in Pakistan had once more become “interesting” (in the Chinese sense of the word) and the continuing upsurge in opium production under the Taliban’s auspices (odd how the fundamentalists’ onetime bitter opposition to the trade had vanished when they decided they needed cash to support their operations), had prevented Company B from feeling bored. There was always a large-scale trade in opium, and the recent upsurge in weapon-smuggling, infiltration, and cross-border attacks by the jihadists based among the Pakistani hill tribes hadn’t helped, either. Still, the situation was beginning to show signs of stabilizing, and Buchevsky still preferred Paktika to his 2004 deployment to Iraq. Or his more recent visit to Helmand, for that matter.
    Now he looked down through the thin mountain air at the twisting trail Second Platoon was here to keep a close eye on.
    All the fancy recon assets in the world couldn’t provide the kind of constant presence and eyes-on surveillance needed to interdict traffic through a place like this. An orbiting unmanned reconnaissance drone wasn’t very good at intercepting a bunch of
mujahedin
backpacking in rocket-propelled grenades, for example. It could spot them, but it couldn’t
suppress
the traffic. Not even helicopter-borne pounces could do that as well as troops permanently on the ground with good lines of oversight . . . and infantry wasn’t likely to be downed by MANPADs, either. Not that anything was ever going to make the job simple. It was probably easier than the job Buchevsky’s father had faced trying to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail—at least his people could see a lot farther!—but that wasn’t saying very much, all things taken together. And he didn’t recall his dad’s mentioning anythingabout lunatic martyrs out to blow people up in job lots for the glory of God.
    He found himself thinking about the odd twists and turns fate took as he gazed down at the serpentine trail. His father had been a Marine, too, serving two enlistments as a combat infantryman before he got his divinity degree and transferred to the Navy to become a chaplain. Buchevsky the Younger, as he’d been referred to by his dad’s buddies, had grown up on one Marine or Navy base after another, so if anyone should have known the truth when Uncle Rob spoke his seductive lies, it should have been Stephen Buchevsky.
    Face it,
he told himself.
You
did
know what you were getting into, and you’d do the same thing today. Which probably proves you
are
an idiot, just like Trish says
. He smiled sadly, thinking about that last conversation.
You could’ve