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Fog rolled in as the sounds of the forest night began to transition into the aural bustle of the coming day. Even as small bugs and frogs quieted themselves, their nightly compositions coming to a close, countless birds awoke in their nests and boughs to begin their own melodic whistling. The air was redolent with the beguiling odor of living freshness as countless millions of dew drops extracted from each living thing it’s most verdant scent.

Jānis breathed deep and continued watching the empty forest from the turret of the Combat Reconnaissance Vehicle, “CRV” for short. To the symphony of the forest Jānis added only the persistent base rumble of the CRV’s idling engine and the staccato check-ins over the radio every 15 minutes. All the while Andris was sleeping uncomfortably in the CRV’s steel belly. Periodically during his watch Jānis could hear the younger man twist and turn uncomfortably.

The forest had finally cooled. Yesterday had been scorching hot, from sunrise to sunset. They were not allowed to leave the CRV, but without air conditioning the interior of the armored transport was stifling. Andris opened both the top turrets and front hatches, and set up a mostly ineffectual electrical fan, but even hours later Jānis could still feel sweat adhering his uniform to his skin.

Jānis’s watch was from Midnight to 8, and, as ever, it had so far been uneventful. Looking out on the pine forest of Vecumu meži, the old forest, a national park without so much as a single high quality road passing through it, Jānis could not help but question their orders. Why carry out reconnaissance at such a remote location in the first place? If they came it would be with their tanks straight down A13, after their planes dropped bombs and devastated poor, evacuated Grebņova. The idea of a Russian army secreting itself North through the wilds of the park struck Jānis as absurd.

But it was not Jānis’s job to question, only to watch. And watch he did. With the sun barely breaking over the trees, it’s dawning beams slowly ridding the forest of darkness, Jānis removed the night vision goggles he had been wearing for nigh on six hours and allowed his eyes to readjust. Slowly, the brightening, formless mass of the world congealed into browns and greens and blues again, and soon Jānis was peering at the empty spaces between the shadowed trees, darkening voids barely visible through a veil of mist.

The smell in the air reminded Jānis of his little brother Valdis, not yet thirteen. Valdis would be waking up any moment, rubbing sleepiness from his groggy eyes, pushing himself to get dressed and drag the family’s small boat down to the beach, into the briny waters of the Gulf of Riga. The brim of the small vessel was studded with wooden outcroppings along its edge, six hollow cylinders into which a half dozen fishing rods could be secured. All awkward, long teenage arms and legs, Valdis would do as Jānis had taught him – carefully baiting each line and casting them far out, always at angles, one to the other, so as to avoid tangling them together.

It made Jānis smile to think of Valdis. The two were close, despite their age difference. When their father died, and Jānis took up the yoke of his family’s fate, Valdis turned to him for guidance. Jānis did his best to teach his younger brother, though at 18 Jānis felt as much a student as a teacher. Luckily, Valdis had a keen mind and sharp instincts, and before long he was as good or better a fisherman than Jānis would ever be – so good that Jānis gave Valdis the nickname zivju zēns, the fish boy.

Valdis hated the nickname, and Jānis knew it – but hadn’t their father given Jānis a nickname of his own – sēņu zēns – mushroom boy – when Jānis had proven adept at finding edible mushrooms in all the places they hide? Jānis had disliked his nickname as well, until their father explained to Jānis, after several years, that the nickname was a token of pride and distinction rather than shame – a measure of his father’s appreciation, not derision.

In time, Jānis would have explained as much to Valdis, but fate intefered. Zemes Balsis – the rest of the world called it The Signal – and then Zemes Milzis – the Behemoth – and finally Cairo. With all these things came the draft, and Jānis found himself enrolled in the Sauszemes Spēki, the Land Forces, at the other end of the country.

Ostensibly, the original mission of the drafted Land Forces was to protect Latvian sovereignty from the Behemoth, should it seek Latvian blood. In reality High Command instituted the draft because the only other thing they could think of doing was nothing at all, and everyone agreed that was entirely unacceptable. So Jānis and fifty thousand other young Latvian men drilled and waited, posted up at the various ass-ends of nowhere.

Now, at least, the plan was real and the enemy human.

From inside the guts of the CRV Andris stirred early. He was a light sleeper for a corporal.

“Jānis, you awake?” Andris’s voice was muffled from Jānis’s vantage on the turret. Rather than yell back at him, Jānis picked up the radio which lay on the steel floor of the turret, on top of the closed hatch upon which Jānis stood.

“I’m awake Andris.” Jānis spoke softly into the radio. “How about you? Sleeptalking?”

There was another bout of clanks and clonks from inside the transport and then the radio came alive with Andris’s groggy voice. “I don’t talk in my sleep.”

Jānis laughed at that. “You’re right Andris, you speechify in your sleep. A much rarer disorder.”

Andris didn’t respond at first and so Jānis continued. “Why are you awake Andris, you’ve got another two hours before watch.”

“Something woke me. You see anything?”

Jānis lazily scanned the forest again. It remained as quiet and devoid of any sign of people as it had been for the last 6 hours.

“I see trees. Trees incoming Andris.” Jānis joked.

Andris came back over the radio, “you kid, but I felt something. My mother always said I had a sense for danger.” Andris’s voice paused over the radio and then returned. “See, there it was again.”

Jānis had no idea what the other man was talking about. He was about to say so when it came screaming out of the deep of the forest, cutting through the dense fog with a siren’s screech and landing with an explosive impact less than a hundred meters away. The shock wave shook Jānis in the chest, knocking some of the air out of his lungs, with the rest following close behind in the form of a scream.

“Taking fire!” Jānis tried to remember his training, which he knew instinctively was a bad sign. He spun around in the turret, took a hold of the two handle bars connected to the SPIKE and urged it to spin around in the direction of the threat, its electric engine whirring angrily. Andris must have jumped into action himself because the CVR’s engine came to roaring life and the whole armored vehicle began to spin in place, trying to straighten out in order to race back along the path of crushed vegetation which had gotten them to the remote post to begin with.

As Jānis scanned the forest line for a visual target, he changed the frequency on his radio so that the signal would be sent back to the Regional Headquarters. Frantically grabbing for the radio with one hand while scanning the distance with the launcher, Jānis managed to get the boxy thing up to his face and depress the trigger.

“Reconnaissance Unit ED13. They’re coming through Vecumu meži. Repeat, the Russians are coming through Vecumu meži.”

From deep in the murky forest there was a dull flash of light, like a terrestrial lightning strike, and then another shell came flying at them faster than they could see. It struck much closer, perhaps 20 meters north, shattering an old pine tree into splinters. The shock wave shook Jānis’s teeth. Jānis shut his eyes defensively as Andris finally got them turned around and picked up speed down their ersatz road.

When the sound of the explosion died down, Jānis looked back toward the forest and saw the first encroaching tip of a Russian tank’s primary cannon breaching the thick wall of fog. Jānis locked the SPIKE anti-tank missile launcher onto the location of that target, marking the spot with a laser. With the press of a button Jānis fired the single armor piercing payload and it flew forward in a chaotic roar of light and smoke. Invisibly, a fiber optic tether un-spooled at unbelievable speeds between the launcher and the missile itself, ready to take Jānis’s commands mid flight should the target shift.

But it did not. The missile hit the Russian tank dead center, right under its primary cannon. The explosion in the mass of fog made the shockwave visible and, for dozens of meters in every direction, in a perfect half circle, Jānis watched as the fog was pushed aside, revealing the fatally wounded steel monster in all its engineered glory. The SPIKE had done its job and pierced through the thick front plating of the Russian tank. Dense black smoke billowed out from the interior through every orifice.

Jānis was so caught up in the moment that he let out a triumphant yell and did not hear the chaos on the radio at first. The wind blew in his ears now as Andris picked up speed on a straightaway.

…repeat, Russian encroachments all along the border. Overwhelming enemy forces from all sides. Fall back to Riga. Defend Rig…

The radio went dead as Jānis looked down at it, his mind racing. Another shell came whizzing by, it seemed to Jānis passing mere feet from his exposed head, and exploded in the mud off in the forest, followed by another in quick succession, this one exploding so close to the transport that the entire reinforced vehicle shook, as if the world itself quaked beneath its treads. Jānis’s ears rang fiercely and something burned his eyes. When he reached up to wipe at them his hand came away bright red.

The near miss must have shocked Andris for a moment because the CVR veered to right, off their makeshift path. Jānis felt carefully at his forehead and felt the jagged edge of a splinter of wood embedded there, how deep he could not tell. He tried to grab at it but his fingers were slick with his own blood and before he could get a grip he saw that the CRV was headed at a sprint straight into an old growth pine tree. With no time to get into the interior, Jānis ducked down as far as he could beneath the lip of the turret’s steel shielding and braced for impact.

A violent crack tore through the air like an army of thunderclaps erupting at the same spot at the same time, as the unstoppable force of the CRV met the immovable object that was a 1.5 meter thick pine tree. The front of the transport assaulted the tree trunk and embedded itself partially into the wood, boring a divot into the butt. For a few seconds the engines still strained to move forward but the treads were unable to overcome the tree’s stubborn will. Finally, as if to seal their shared fate, the tree snapped where the CRV had gutted it and it’s entire massive heft fell down with a woody roar onto the top of the transport. Jānis sat scrunched into a ball, arms around his head, as the trunk impacted the steel bullet shield of the turret, bounced slightly, and then slid off to the side, firmly pinning the CRV in place.

At last the engine died and, for just a moment, in the immediate aftermath, the forest was all but silent again. Jānis remained hunched down in the turret and only stood with great hesitation when he heard the sounds of the birds calling. It took Jānis a long moment to get his bearings, his right eye almost entirely covered in blood, his left scanning his immediate surroundings, assessing the damage. In front of him was the gored tree and, as Jānis gaped at it he wondered at the way the exposed flesh bled pine sap. Right then Jānis wished he’d never been forced to join the military. All at once the futility of violence, its uniform destructiveness, struck Jānis like an arrow to the heart, and he longed to be back home, back in the fishing boat laughing with his brother Valdis, the zivju zēns.

Dizzy, Jānis turned himself around in the turret, his hands holding steady onto the steel edge, bent and deformed from the tree trunk’s immense impact, until he faced the direction from whence they’d fled, toward the Russian border.

Heavy T-14 tanks were approaching, cutting through the forest, dodging the largest trees, crushing the smaller ones, each bearing the same emblem of four orange lines and a white star framed within a red star itself framed in white. Jānis counted at least a dozen.

An unconscious sense of duty urged Jānis to look down in search of his radio to transmit another warning, but the radio was gone in the chaos, and when Jānis looked back up one of the T-14s had stopped dead ahead of him, not 50 meters away, the electric whir of its main gun turret audible in the lush silence.

Slowly, inexorably, the cannon spun around to face him, until Jānis could see straight down the barrel’s black hole. In the final moment Jānis shut his eyes tight and thought of home.

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