[b]Hrazdan, Armenia[/b]

	A spinning drill press dipped into a plate of stock steel, clamped to a workbench, spraying cutting fluid and stringy metal chips onto the table. Under a machinist’s watchful eye, Jon’s steady hand raised it a bit before punching deeper into the piece. After three solid presses, he felt the drill bit break through and reset the machine. The motor spun to a stop before Jon came down to pry the piece out of its clamps and inspect it. It was the fourth hole for rivets on a plate designed to go inside one of the landships, designed and machined as an engine cover. Jon peered through the holes and ran his finger over the rough edges before turning to the older machinist watching his work. “So, I’m going to want to… deburr this now, right?” he asked, mentally following the checklist in his head. The instructor nodded and pointed him towards the toolbox. Jon went looking for the sandpaper, which he could use to grind down the sharp bits of metal around his newly-pressed hole.

	While he did this, the door to the machine shop swung open and Andrei appeared with a clean-cut man in a green Army uniform. His shoulder bore a white brassard with “Reserve Affairs” stenciled across it, and he held a folder with paperwork in his hand.  Andrei scanned the busy shop, with most of the machinists focused on their own pieces, and spotted Jon receiving his instruction. He led the man over and excused himself for bothering the lesson. The machinist nodded and turned back to his own station, letting the manager step up to speak to his intern. “How are you, Jon?” Andrei asked, sticking his hands in his pocket before nodded his head over to the soldier. Without asking for an answer, he added: “This is Sergeant Derzorian, part of the Hrazdan Garrison Reserve Forces. He wanted to speak to you.”

	Jon’s heart dropped as he saw the papers in Sergeant Derzorian’s hand. Draft papers, from the seal. They could be sending him to Georgia. A million things raced through his mind as he looked up to the ambivalent soldier’s face: was the operation really going that bad? Was the going to the insurgency? Why are they authorizing reserve call-ups already? The Sergeant noticed this, shaking his head and placing an arm on the student’s shoulder. It felt awkwardly like he was trying to be paternal, but the sentiment didn’t quite line up. “Don’t worry,” he said matter-of-factly, “this isn’t about calling you up. Well, it is, but it’s for a temporary duty.”

	He handed over the papers. They weren’t draft papers, but orders to a Category G assignment: activated Reservist troops. Jon flipped through the two front pages explaining what this meant as the soldier talked him through it: “You’re being activated to serve on a special task force of investigators here in Hrazdan,” he announced, much to Jon’s relief. “The orders give a brief description and we’ll give you a briefing later, but you were picked based on your ongoing education at Hrazdan University of Industry, current Reserve qualifications, and your current job in a military-related industry. We’re taking you and sending you with some other like people to the Nazarian Metalwork Facility, which has been contracted to produce steel helmets. These helmets were supplied to troops in Georgia and we’ve been noticing an increased failure rate in this factory’s batches. You’re looking into it, and the uniform is just there to give you a little more authority.”

	The Sergeant asked if Jon had any questions, which he didn’t. Andrei shrugged when the reservist turned towards the door and said: “We’ll sort out your pay later. This isn’t that big of a deal, but we do have those laws to go through with reserve activations and all.”

	Jon nodded. Even though this was more of a temporary summer job, the activation orders meant that management couldn’t fire him for being away from the office for however long the assignment took. Parliament passed protective laws a few years prior after a group of Artsakh veterans, many of them reservists returning from combat, struck in Yerevan to put heat on the politicians to correct the oversight. The government back then cowed and folded, as that administration had already gained a reputation for abandoning Armenia’s military in the conflict. The Artsakh, after all, had not been saved by an Armenian military defense: the Persian Shah’s [i]deus ex machina[/i] of an invasion turned the tide on numerically superior Azeri forces.

Jon folded up the papers into quarters and put them in the linen shirt pocket on his chest, turning his attention back to the machinist. He finished up sipping his coffee at a station in the back and returned: “Reserve Affairs?” he asked inquisitively. He seemed almost hesitant to ask the next question, like he was convinced Jon was going off to some sort of frontline meat grinder: “Is everything alright?” 

	“It’s not a big deal. Temporary duty in Hrazdan for some investigation. I’m not a cop though, so I’m still a little hazy on it.”

	They finished up their lesson, focusing on going through the motions with the drill press again. He didn’t have enough time or experience to maintain qualifications as a machinist, of course, especially now that the job was becoming increasingly more regulated by occupational safety and standards-oriented organizations. The exposure was mostly an attempt to get him familiar with the work processes for fabrication and maintenance so he could better manage the supply situation in a managerial role. Basic “literacy” with the machines would at the very least stop him from looking like a fool if he said the wrong things to his shop workers or tried to order difficult or impossible-to-produce parts. Overall, shop work was more interesting to him than the paperwork he had been doing in Andrei’s office or the inspections on workflow and the tank assembly line in the main hall of the factory. Already bored with college in his third year, he wanted to do things with his hands. Time in the shop scratched the itch for him. He washed his hands and hung his apron up on the rack by a row of lockers outside of the workshop floor. Nothing short of a shower would quite get the smell of cutting oil and grease out of his clothes and hands.

	Jon checked out with his supervisor before heading home. He checked out his punch card, putting the stiff piece of paper back into its wooden holder with the eight hours he worked that day clearly logged. On a coatrack, his light leather jacket dangled. The summer was ending, and the chills of autumn had been whispering now that they were a week into September. The nights were getting cold enough for a light outer layer. A bicycle was chained up to a rack beside the entrance, where a factory worker was taking a smoke break. He wished Jon a good evening as he flicked his cigarette butt into the ashtray and looked up at the gathering clouds. The man remarked about how Jon should probably hurry home, before it started raining too hard. The student agreed, unlocking the chain around his bike’s frame and straddling the seat. With a kick forward to get him going, Jon cycled through to the front of the employee entrance and waved at the security guard in his booth before shooting past the gate and making a turn to head down the hill.

	Tsaghkadzor Heavy Industry Plant quickly shrank into the distance as Jon coasted down the hill, past the murals on the walls surrounding the plant’s land that were so familiar to him. He had just about two weeks left of full-time employment before school started again, but Mr. Bagruntsian had wanted him to stay on part-time to handle administrative work. While his schedule wasn’t as busy this year, Jon told him that he would think about it: after all, he wanted to be with his social circle before graduating and moving on. Some of his friends were getting jobs in the west, especially in the burgeoning shipping and transportation centers like Trabzon or Van. Jon was content staying put in the military industry in Hrazdan: at least it was close to home. He mulled over these thoughts as the hill flattened out and the city began densifying again. Small warehouses and workshops gave way to progressively taller apartments. The street widened into its two-lane main road, one that connected the Hrazdan city blocks. The offshoots became more rigid and square: west Hrazdan had been extensively planned in the 1940s and 50s, with concrete block apartments that everyone thought looked the same.

	He parked his bike at the rack by the student apartments. He duly chained it up again and shouldered his cloth rucksack, feeling a droplet or two of cold water splash onto the back of his neck. He wiped it away and looked up at the grey skies, receiving another drop of water straight to his forehead for the trouble. With a sigh, he unchained the bike and moved it to another rack underneath an awning, where he locked it up again. He spent good money on a commuter bike: too much to let it rust out in the rain. The student hustled back to his apartment on the second floor before he could get caught in the rain himself, barely making it to the covered walkway before the drops turned to a consistent sprinkle. He jingled his keys on the keychain again, this time looking for his house key. He got in, tossed his rucksack to the old blue sofa that he had inherited from his grandmother, and greeted his roommate who was sitting on the other sofa in his undershirt and boxers drinking a beer. “What’s going on, man?” Jon said. “Isn’t it getting too cold out to sit around with no clothes on?”

	His roommate shrugged and took a swig out of the bottle. “Shit, man, I’m glad it’s cooling off. I’ve been sweating my balls off at the job site for months now. Shoveling fucking dirt in the sun all day… I deserve a beer in my underwear.”

	Jon wasn’t about to argue with him about it, simply shrugging himself and agreeing. He mentioned that he was going to shower, to which his roommate informed him that the water heater was broken and the apartment’s landlord was in no evident hurry to fix it. So Jon took a cold shower, cursing the college for hiring such an asshole to run the student apartments. He finished quick, wrapping a towel around his shivering body and shook in front of the mirror, inspecting his hair as he wiped the water out from his thickly matted scalp. He had to trim his beard sometime soon, at least, since he needed to get into uniform and wasn’t sure how relaxed he could take the grooming standards. He shrugged, leaving that decision for another time and went into his bedroom. There was one last thing on his list for the day before he could go, drink a bit, and fall asleep reading a book: Farah had given him her number after a bit of flirting on his part, last time they had seen each other. She popped in and out of the [i]Hollywood Hayer[/i], each time engaging him in a conversation. The student, realizing this, decided to take advantage of the conversation.

	He rang the numbers in on the black receiver of the telephone, waiting for the ringtone to sound. She lived in the student apartments as well, somewhere on the other side of campus: the telephone exchange redirected him automatically to the number. After a few moments, the phone clicked and Jon heard a muffled female voice with her Persian accent: “Hello?”

	“Hey, Farah, it’s Jon,” the student began. After a moment, she giggled and greeted him back.

	“Hey! How are you?” she asked. “You finally managed to call me.”

	“I did,” Jon replied playfully. “Long day at work, you know. And lots of interesting things are happening.”

	“Oh?”

	“Yeah,” he said, absently stroking his beard while he talked. Here goes it. “Maybe I can tell you about it with dinner sometime.”

	Farah laughed again, and he could picture her rolling her eyes flirtatiously. “Sounds like the perfect way to set that up. Alright, you made me laugh so I will accept.”

	Jon, feeling quite lucky, hid his breath of relief from the speaker with his hand. Of course, he hadn’t thought of the specifics beforehand and needed to improvise something quickly. “Well,” he stuttered, trying to think quickly. A few options passed through his thoughts almost like scanning a rolodex of phone contacts. “How about… Karas?”

	“I don’t think I’ve been there before,” Farah replied. “I don’t think I’ve heard anything about it either.”

	At this point, Jon had to make things up on the fly: “Well, the byorek appetizers are quite good and…”

	“Well, we can try it out. How does Thursday at seven sound? I figure I can take over some of the planning for you,” she said with a soft laugh.

	Jon agreed, and they talked for a few more minutes before they said their goodbyes and hung up. He walked back into his living room where his roommate still laid splayed out on the couch, beer in hand. “What was that all about? I heard you on the phone,” he asked casually. He took another sip from his bottle and put it on the coffee table with a dull clink.

	“I got a date, apparently,” Jon boasted. His roommate raised his eyebrows.

	“That Iranian lass from the bar? Huh. Good job.”

	Jon shrugged and poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on his counter. “We’ll see how it goes,” he said, taking a drink. Outside the rain was starting to get worse: the sky was darker and the rain has gone from a trickle to a steady pour. He forgot what the weather forecast was supposed to be, but he wasn’t going anywhere for the rest of the day so it didn’t matter too much. Finished, he put his glass back down and wiped out the inside. He left it to dry, and went over to a shelf where his beer was. Two of the bottles of lager were missing, his roommate already having a few: he silently cursed him and opened up a third. Jon then grabbed his book from the nearby table, a history of the Great War’s Middle Eastern theater, and sat down on his couch along with his roommate. Outside, the rumble of thunder in the distance lightly shook the windows. He opened up to where he had dog-earned the chapter he was going to read and began to page through. It was a small subsection of the Anatolian conflict: the Persians fighting the Kurdish tribes in the south of the region. He would read until he fell asleep on the couch a few hours later.

[b]Sochi, Kuban Unorganized Territories[/b]

	The rumbling of an explosion shook the wall that Anton and Natasha had taken cover behind. Another wave of gunfire rattled off in the distance. They were in the north end of town where the fighting had not reached. The streets were deserted, everyone having taken to hiding in their cellars while the pirates and bandits fought it out with the Armenian marines near the docks. The two scanned the street ahead and Anton leveled his rifle down towards the most likely avenue of approach. “We gotta go find the commander, he’s our ride out here,” Natasha said. Her radio was not picking up anything: she was worried that the marines had either changed their frequency in the pre-mission planning or that the NSS had accidentally given her the incorrect ones. Either way, they had to link up with the marines and not get shot on their way there. Not being able to let them know they were coming was going to complicate things. Both of them had donned orange armbands over their fatigues, which had been pre-briefed to the Armenian marines as identifiers. Anton secretly hoped that they were visible enough.

	Anton tapped Natasha’s shoulder and pointed to what appeared to be an undamaged pickup truck on the shoulder of the road, parked by a shop where the windows had been cracked by the vibrations of a larger seaplane-dropped bomb. “We can take that,” he said.

	Natasha agreed, and he nudged her to start running towards it. She sprinted as fast as she could with her rucksack and kit bouncing around on her. Reaching the truck, she called over for Anton and covered him while he made the same awkward run to their new piece of cover. The two looked around the truck for any obvious signs of damage and found none, so Anton dropped his bag and smashed the glass window to reach inside and open up the door. Natasha watched him hotwire the vehicle’s ignition system, finally hearing the engine rumble to life with a hearty thrum. Anton called out that the gas was fine, and Natasha scrambled into the back.

	They started to drive off, but Anton stopped a few meters down the road. “Wait a minute,” he called out. “Get me that flag in my pack.”

	A flag was pulled from the side pocket of Anton’s ruck and unfurled. He had gotten out of the still-running truck with a bundle of nylon parachute cord. He cut four pieces and looped them through holes poked in the corners of the flag with his knife, then tied it to the truck’s side windows and down to the grille so it lay across the hood. Stepping back, he looked at it with a hint of satisfaction on his face. He turned to Natasha and gestured for her to get back in. She took up a spot in the bed of the truck, weapon over the roof, and they sped off. They took a tight turn to get out of the neighborhood and onto a main boulevard, just as deserted from the ongoing combat. Anton swerved it out of the way of an abandoned horse-drawn cart, a load of vegetables in the back presumably heading to market. The tires hit cobblestone, knocking down Natasha onto the bed of the truck while the aged and stiff suspension did little to cover the shock.

	If the pirates had seen them, they never fired. The spectacle of a truck zipping through the streets of Sochi, Armenian flag tied to the front, while gunfire echoed through the waterfront was strange more than anything else. Anton sighed and prayed quickly as he turned to where the naval infantry was supposed to land. Just to be sure the marines wouldn’t shoot him, he grabbed his carbine and stuck it out the window to show them another piece of Armenian equipment, bashing on the horn to get any sentries’ attention. It seemed to have worked: two marines poked their heads out from behind an overturned dumpster to scan the movement that had just broken through their security line. They looked at each other as Anton drove furiously past, but never swung their weapons to engage. Ahead of the NSS scouts were the four landing craft that had dropped their loads of troops in the marina and were waiting patiently as the rescue team was going in to raid the pirates’ prison. The sounds of battle had since migrated eastward, leaving it safe for the Armenians to set up a command post on the docks, safely behind a canal wall. Two figures were hunched over a map, but one of their soldiers alerted them to the NSS operatives.

	The commander of the Armenian naval infantry unit was a peculiar officer by the name of Colonel Victor Maghakian. The 44-year-old had been born in Chicago, but immigrated back to Armenia along with many other Armenian-Americans fleeing the chaos that had enveloped Middle America. To make matters even stranger, his Gunnery Sergeant was from Rhode Island: Harry Kizirian. Somehow, the unlikely duo had both found their homes in the naval infantry and had made themselves a name as being skilled, aggressive, and most importantly assertive warriors. Parliament had more than once questioned the legitimacy of the naval infantry program, arguing that they could just cut them and arm sailors to perform ship boarding and security operations. It was no secret that Colonel Maghakian had pushed the brass to let them perform a sea landing, if only to prove that the marines were more useful as a tool of force projection than the glorified sea police that the National Assembly made them out to be. He appeared quite pleased that the operation was going to plan.

	“NSS?” inquired Colonel Maghakian, matter-of-factly.

	“Yeah, finally managed to find you guys. You’re laying down one hell of a bombardment,” answered Natasha.

	“Was that you in the truck?” the Colonel asked immediately, pointing to his brick-like radio that sat on a crate near his maps and staff members coordinating instructions. “Damn near got you killed, pulling a stunt like that. You’re lucky that flag trick saved you. Sentries were about ready to shoot.”

	Anton looked at Natasha with wide eyes, a small grin on his face. Inside, a wave of stress washed over him briefly. He was just now realizing what a gamble he had made trying to push through the Armenian security bubble in a stolen pickup truck. “Well, sir, I don’t want to be doing that again.”

	Colonel Maghakian shrugged that off and continued: “Well it’s a good thing you’re here now. Our team has broken in and is getting the crew out. Apparently they need to stretcher a few back here. We’re taking them back, but I need you two to help out with the other phase of our operation.”

	Natasha raised her eyebrows. She thought they were catching a ride home with the marines back to the ship. “There’s another phase?”

	Colonel Maghakian nodded and pointed to the [i]Breadwinner[/i] that was docked nearby. A rocket whizzed by overhead, harmlessly spiraling into the harbor before exploding and splashing a whitecap of sea water onto a nearby moored boat. “We’ve watched the pirates fix her up and we think she’s ready to go. We don’t want to lose our investment and let the Russians keep our ship, or so the politicians told me. That was the deal they offered me for the marines taking this mission: they want us to steal it and sail it out of here. I told them I could do that, so we’re not about to disappoint my bosses.”

	The marines had brought with them a team of sailors and Merchant Marines, specially outfitted for ship recovery. Spies and observers had reported that the captured sailors had been fixing the engine and other damaged parts of the ship, and had fueled it for a voyage. The Sochi pirates were fixated on using the [i]Breadwinner[/i] as a mothership, to strike at cargo further out into the Black Sea. Armenia, however, was terrified of letting this make their fledgling maritime industry look like a pushover and were pursuing almost nonsensical means of taking their ship back. The marines had been fighting for a few hours, so the ship was almost ready to leave as well: luckily, most of the pirates had fallen back outside the security bubble. All the NSS scouts had to do was push out and help secure the ship while the crews worked it. Anton and Natasha were perfectly suited to sniping pirates from the bridge. With no room to argue, they shouldered their gear and were ordered out by the Colonel.

	Under the imposing suppression of the firefight around them, the NSS scouts trudged through the dock towards where the [i]Breadwinner[/i] was laid up. The blown-out buildings were enough to provide cover for them as they navigated through the landscape of spilled cargo crates, abandoned trucks and wagons, and broken machinery. They saw the remnants of what was once a prosperous city-state in the collapsed Russian empire. Carts of goods, food from the countryside, and consumer items were now scattered about the empty spaces of the docks. Corpses of dockworkers, pirates, and even uninvolved civilians lay out in the open after they had been hit by the initial airstrikes. Fire and smoke burned the neat European blocks of the city, throwing Sochi into disarray. It looked like every Armenian’s perception of Russia: an apocalyptic mélange of death and destruction. Natasha and and Anton carried on, towards the ship.

	Ahead of them, the [i]Breadwinner[/i] was a ragged, broken shell of its former self. It bore the scars of bullets and fires from its raiding. On its railings were improvised fortifications of sandbags, mattresses, furniture, and other barricades designed to repel attacks or further boarding actions. Armenian marines manned these barricades, sitting low behind the safety of their cover with their rifles peeking over the sides. Natasha and Anton found the only gangway up to the ship, passing through the guard before heading aboard. In the distance, the firefight appeared to be getting closer to them. Maybe crew had been rescued. They navigated through to where the leadership of the marine detachment lay, on the forecastle of the cargo ship. A small tactical operations center had been set up with a radio and a battle tracker of the surrounding area: only the platoon leader and his NCO remained inside, desperately talking to Colonel Maghakian about their departure schedule. The NSS scouts, interrupting the exchange, barged in and asked where they would be most useful. With the direction of the commander onboard, Natasha and Anton were ordered to the bridge of the ship and told to man the sniper nest atop the highest point of the superstructure. 

	The two took up their positions and settled in behind a wall of sandbags. They dropped their equipment off and took a good look at the surrounding city. Gunfire and explosions continued in the distance, but they took aim at the one likely place they needed to observe and cover: the approach from the pirates’ prison complex to the east. The pair racked their weapons: Anton peered in through his sniper rifle’s scope while Natasha pulled out her binoculars to watch closely over the maze of roads and alleys across from the docks. They were ready: it was time for the Armenians to leave Sochi and head back to safety.