Deep War: The War with China and North Korea - The Nuclear Precipice

by David Poyer

  Teddy got the idea. It was programmed to avoid harming the computers. It couldn’t even enter the computing area, since apparently there were cable runs under the thin flooring. The thing was dangerous as hell, but could only navigate on the concrete pavement of the main tunnels, or maybe outside on firm ground.

  But what was directing it? The monster was big, but not large enough to have a man inside. So it was either self-directed or remotely controlled.

  If the latter, who was at the controls?

  Or … what?

  He had no idea what all these computers were doing, but they were active. The omnipresent hum, the dancing LEDs, told him that.

  Could they be piloting their guardian? Obviously that wasn’t all they were here for, but could that be part of it?

  If so, there might be a way around this thing.

  At last, a door. He motioned the others back and went through first, sweeping the muzzle of the carbine left, then right. But encountering only chill air, the queer diffuse light, the same acoustic tile overhead, the same smooth, perfectly clean plastic underfoot.

  Another door. He took that one fast but cautious, and emerged into what looked to be a maintenance area. Grounded stainless-steel workbenches. Racks of test equipment. Boxes of spare cards, ready to plug in when a blade failed. The air was cold and still here, too, and no one, white-coated or otherwise, was in sight.

  Staying low, he crab-walked back toward the main tunnel. Best guess, they were abreast of where the access and logistics tunnel intersected the crossbar of the T. Depending on how smart this thing was, it either would be waiting for them there, or had left for the bunking area to clear out Nasrullah’s platoon.

  He didn’t want to think about how many casualties his insurgents might have taken. He hadn’t heard any firing for a couple of minutes now.

  A couple of minutes … oh shit. He checked his phone. The glowing numerals nearly stopped his heart. 11:29 … 11:28 … 11:27.

  If he didn’t get cracking, they’d still be bottled up in here when the Package went off.

  Behind him, Qurban gripped his shoulder. “Lingxiù al-Amriki … where are you going?”

  Sucking a breath, Teddy handed him the carbine. “Just follow me. And stay out of the way.”

  A shattered window and a wash of white light told him the corridor lay ahead. He shifted left and right, but couldn’t spot the robot. To the left, right, or downtunnel, between them and escape? He’d have chosen the latter course, but did a machine think like a human?

  No way to tell. Seizing one of the steel rolling worktables, he pushed it forward, ready to topple it for cover if the monster suddenly lurched into sight, and unslung the beam gun. It whined softly as it powered up.

  When the LED went to orange he kicked the table rolling out the door, took four quick steps, yelled “Hooyah!” and leaned around the jamb, pointing the antennaed muzzle.

  The Iron Monster was facing him forty meters away, slightly crouched, as if waiting to spring. Bodies lay at its feet like sacrifices to some terrible juggernaut. As the table rolled out the oculars rotated, locking onto it, then onto him.

  It straightened, striding forward as it raised its weapons.

  Teddy caught the spinning oculars in the reflex sight and pressed the Fire stud. The LED went from orange to red, then began blinking. The circuitry had identified a command signal and was jamming. But the thing was still moving. The machine gun steadied its aim on him. The robot leaned forward, bracing itself against recoil. Teddy stared into the multiple open mouths of the Gatling gun, waiting for the flash, the impact of the slugs.

  Instead the beast halted. The oculars kept spinning, but the joints seemed to lock. It seemed to relax slightly, to settle, as if it had suddenly grown even heavier.

  He waited another second, but it didn’t move. Just squatted there, immobile, as if paralyzed.

  Which the fucking thing might just be, if its control system was jammed and there was no onboard intelligence. He kicked the heavy table over and took a knee, resting the forestock of the beamer on the folded steel edge, and thumbed the power stud to Off for a second.

  The huge green machine flinched, and tried to stand again. Teddy rethumbed the stud. Green, to orange, to blinking red.

  The thing stood immobile, its uncanny mechanical simulacrum of life processes halted, in abeyance.

  Then his gun’s Battery Low light came on.

  At the same moment, from down the main hallway a second gigantic form came striding forward. It hulked between his men and the exit, nearly filling the arched space of the corridor. And this second monster was if anything even larger than the first. “Fuck,” he muttered. “What is this, Grendel’s fucking mother?”

  Nasrullah and six other insurgents—Christ, was that all that was left of his platoon?—rolled out from cover and began firing. As Teddy had already discovered, though, small-arms projectiles just irritated the things, like honeybees stinging a grizzly bear. This one wasn’t even firing back. It just came rolling forward, intent on ripping them to pieces with the hydraulically driven, pincerlike appendages it extended in front of itself.

  Teddy wavered. He could jam one or the other, but not both. The smaller one was to his left, uptunnel; the larger to his right, blocking their escape.

  The Battery Low light began to blink.

  He was still paralyzed himself, as indecisive and immobilized as the machine he held entranced, when the snarl of a diesel at high revs echoed from downtunnel. It neared rapidly, the transmission shifting gears higher as it accelerated.

  The hulking machine dipped a shoulder, glancing backward. It started to twist around.

  So it was momentarily off balance when the uparmored Wrangler slammed into it from behind at full speed. The momentum instantly transferred to the inelastic steel of the guardian like a cue ball to a billiard ball, catapulting it headfirst past Teddy, missing him by inches, to slam through the flimsy partition of the computer bay. The monster immediately crashed through the flooring, which parted under its weight. It fell through first one level, to judge by the fade of heavy crashing and banging. Then another. And perhaps even a third.

  Teddy marveled. Other floors of computers, deep below this one? Then glanced at his phone.

  3:14. 3:13 . 3:12 …

  They weren’t going to get out of here. Not in time.

  But he still had to try.

  He sprint-limped past the crumpled hood of the Wrangler, peered inside, then reached in. Qurban and the others gave him a hand, and together they extracted a dazed Guldulla, mouth and face bloody, from the driver’s seat and through the window. His second in command was mumbling something incoherent.

  Teddy squeezed his shoulder. “You done good,” he told him in Uighur.

  But the exit was still two hundred meters away. Nope, we ain’t gonna make it, he thought.

  Then he frowned. Looking at the line of dusty vehicles.

  * * *

  THEY followed their headlights, tearing down the road at a hundred kilometers an hour, the other jeeps and sedans slewing wildly behind them. Weird, taking the wheel after so long. A moment of nostalgia for his old Shelby Mustang … then he concentrated on driving.

  Excited chatter broke out in the backseat. The car was crammed with the remaining insurgents, some bloody, all smeared with burned powder and gabbling with excitement. Then he remembered, too. Somewhere along here, his boys had planted mines in the road. They had to get away from the Package, but he didn’t want to blow them all up doing it.

  He twisted to look back, and asked if any demo guys had made it out. One guy raised his hand. “Okay, great. Where’d you put the mine?”

  The rebel shrugged. “It was at night, Lingxiù. Somewhere along here?”

  “Just … fucking … great,” Teddy growled. He glanced at his watch, did a quick calculation, and took his foot off the accelerator. When the speedometer dropped he pulled off onto the berm. The surface here was firmer than the surrounding sand, but still the
tires slipped, the car sideskidded. He checked the timer again. 0:21 … 0:20.

  “Debark!” he yelled, and braked so hard the Wrangler spun, coming to rest in a cloud of dust. They piled out and dropped to the sand, digging in, pushing up small hillocks between them and whatever cataclysm was going to happen behind them. At the last possible moment, he turned off his phone and buried it, too.

  The ground quaked. Not heavily, but a chilling shiver that disquieted his genitals, which were pressed into the sand. A queer crisp squeak or crackle, maybe individual grains of sand shifting. Head down, he didn’t see a flash. Maybe there hadn’t been one.

  When he came up for air the desert was dark. Then, as he blinked, the stars came out. Passionless and remote, barely twinkling in the fine high desert air. They watched his men as they crawled out from their nests and brushed sand from their weapons.

  Teddy didn’t get up. He lay shaking, and couldn’t stop. Rolling onto his back, he stared up at the silent constellations.

  Remembering another night, high in the Tien Shan. When Something had spoken to him.

  Beside him Qurban muttered, “Lingxiù … you all right?”

  Teddy tongued gritty sand from his mouth and spat. The constellations lurched above him. “Yeah … yeah, I’m … fucking great,” he rasped.

  “Is it done? What we came for?”

  He panted fast and hard and finally got back a little control. He rolled to his knees. His head reeled. He coughed out more dust and spat, long drooling strands, noticing vaguely only now that the eastern desert was graying. Light was revisiting the world. They had to get out of here, off the road and under cover from the air.…

  “Is it done?” The squat scarred man beside him repeated, shaking Teddy’s shoulder.

  “Fuck, get off me.… It went off. That’s all we had to do, get it there and set it off.”

  He dug out the phone, but didn’t turn it on. Touching his side gingerly, he winced. The wound had clotted. He felt dizzy, feverish. Well, they had antibiotics, no problemo.

  He forced himself up and gazed around, tottering, knees shaking. All too few other forms were shaking themselves off, staring around as he was doing. And probably counting the survivors, like he was. They’d gone in with eighty men. Fewer than a score stood around him, and many sagged or sat down again in the sand, exhausted, wounded, bleeding.

  Mission accomplishment, check. But with 75 percent casualties.

  He hoped whatever they’d destroyed was worth the cost.

  Beside him the old hajji was kneeling. Teddy glanced down. The others knelt too, in a neat line on the sand. Most had spread scraps of carpet, or their shemaghs. They faced Mecca, all together.

  “Dawn is coming. Time for morning prayer.” Qurban smiled up at him, face smeared with black blood and sand. “You fight beside us. You are one of us, in all but faith. Will you not surrender, at last, al-Amriki? And gain the peace you have always sought. Your very name, you know. Theo-dore. It means gift of God, does it not?”

  Teddy’s world lurched. The sky tilted again. He jackknifed, holding his stomach, shaking, recollecting not the desert before his eyes but something beyond description, beyond reality, beyond Time. A revelation, when he’d expected only more suffering. A Presence, where through his whole life he’d assumed there was nothing.

  All things were of Him.

  All things were foreordained.

  There was no chance. Choice was an illusion.

  You have always done My will.…

  A sensation, inside his chest, of many small parts long locked but now unlocking … dropping out of alignment, then rotating minutely and rising again to reengage. Remeshing into a different combination. One that changed not the outside world but the process, the eye, the I, that perceived it.

  And in so doing, altered all Creation.

  Teddy Oberg fell to his knees among his men as Qurban led the prayers in a loud voice, exultant, triumphant. He didn’t know the words, but he could follow the prostrations.

  One among others now, the Lingxiù rose to his feet, bowed, then knelt again. “Allah,” he murmured, when he could not follow the words. “Allah. Allah. Allah.”

  Yes, a voice whispered in his inmost ear in reply, a word more intimate by far than any he’d heard in mortal life.

  Whatever you do is right. This has all been written by Me.

  “God is great,” the Lingxiù whispered.

  Then he shouted it aloud, dancing, yelling up into the rosy dawn over and over as the others chuckled, patting his back. They joined in the chorus, firing their weapons into the air in long ripping bursts that floated away across the desert. “Allahu akhbar! Allahu akhbar!”

  God is great.

  God is great.

  22

  Taiwan

  HECTOR Ramos huddled mute and motionless in the mud at the bottom of his fighting hole, gripping the plastic rosary in his cargo pocket. The barrage had been going on so long he could no longer formulate thoughts. Descended into the mute suffering no-self of a tormented animal, he lay with head tucked, helmet locked under his other arm.

  Rain pelted him. The ground quaked. The soft dirt when it burst apart was orange, like the guts of a broken melon. Under that was rock. Fragments of steel hissed overhead. Shattered stone and the red soil clattered down, half burying him and Corporal Karamete. They lay curled together like twins before birth in six inches of slime and splintered rock from entrenching explosive and then the bombardment. He wheezed into the gas mask, hoping dully that the filter would take out the explosive residue that blew over them in invisible clouds, but no longer caring if it didn’t.

  The other guy in the hole with them was a replacement. Hector didn’t remember his name. Fresh out of boot camp, without even School of Infantry. The assistant squad leader was holding him down, making sure he didn’t lose it and jump up during the barrage. On the boot’s other side, also holding him, was the last Chad, C323.

  Tall stolid Sergeant Clay was dead, killed by a creeping mine that had guided on his body heat west of Chishang. Little Lieutenant Ffoulk was gone, blown over a cliff and missing, presumed lost. Four of Hector’s squad were out of action, one KIA in a barrage, one blinded by a laser dazzler, and two others wounded. The Chads had broken down one by one—the C models were smarter, but didn’t seem as durable as the Bs—or gotten wasted in one way or another. All except for 323, which just kept going. He hoped he’d expended the others in ways that had kept down the Marine body count.

  The load-bearing exoskeletons were pretty much useless too, after the first couple of days. The platoon had quietly surveyed them, just leaving them behind as they’d advanced, along with a lot of other gear that hadn’t worked out.

  They were a week into the campaign, with no end in sight. It had started low-key, with only the lightly opposed securing of the airhead. The assault grew bloodier as the Marines pushed north along the beach road. They’d fought an encounter battle near Chishang with elements of a second-line Chinese infantry division. After demolishing that unit, the general had wanted to keep pushing north, toward Taipei. But the Army needed help. Higher had turned the axis of advance left and started them slogging up along the mountain road, intending to break through and emerge behind the enemy line of resistance.

  But there was no room to maneuver in the mountains of central Taiwan. Highway 20 led west across the island, following the river. The division had managed to link up with the Nationalists, though Ramos hadn’t seen any yet. The insurgents, hastily reequipped with U.S. weapons and stiffened by Force Recon teams and close air support, had driven slowly up the right side of the valley, taking hill after hill. Meanwhile the grunts advanced on the left, in rough step, along ridges that built higher and higher until only this single pass remained.

  These mountains were rugged, wild, scabbed with jungle. The maps showed only one village. The armored columns had dueled in the pass for three days, the largest tank battle in Marine history. Until losses got too high, and word had come d
own to wait for the Army to chew up more enemy before the Marines mounted another push.

  The next day both flanks had shouldered forward, to gain the high ground on both sides of the valley. If they got lucky and locked the enemy into a defensive position, the Air Force could drop MOABs on them. But within a day and a night that advance had stalled too. The narrow, switchbacked two-laner was more difficult than anyone had expected for heavy American vehicles to negotiate. The Chinese blew bridges and toppled a cliff. As the lead elements left naval gunfire support behind, and exhausted the fleet’s land attack missile inventory, they’d had to depend on organic artillery and air. Both used up ammunition and fuel far faster than anyone had expected. After a couple of miles, this had stopped the flank advances, too.

  Now the Marine Third and the Nationalist 905th were hammering away toe to toe with the Chinese First Amphibious Mechanized and the 45th Airborne Mechanized divisions. The battle had gone on day and night, with only brief pauses of mutual exhaustion. Both allies were in contact, fighting to hold the heights to either side. If they buckled, the enemy could break through the middle, and overrun the battered forces holding the valley.

  Only Charlie had heavier artillery than the Marines and a lot more of it than Intel had predicted. Right now they were hurling shells as if they had freight trains running right back to the mainland. Probably, the captain said, to soften them up for a renewed assault.

  It would be head-to-head butting, a ground game in the mud. So now, huddled in his hole with tac gloves locked over his helmet, Hector lay empty as a seashell while the earth jolted and earthquaked around him. His ragged Cameleons displayed only brief swatches of color, since the dirt was so ground in by now that the men were the color of the dirt. He lay atop an M240, the new lightweight model printed out of titanium. Trained as a machine gunner, he felt safer behind it than with a rifle.

  A heavy blast blew more rock and dirt over them. The recruit groaned loudly. The assistant squad leader was talking to him in a slow calming monotone, hugging his waist. Hector pushed his head up. Shuddering, he tried his Glasses again. They were dead, though the opticals still worked. No calm dulcet voice advised him now. To pass orders he had to use hand signals or yell. After the first couple of days hardly anything digital had worked at all. Both sides were jamming and EMPing from the Ka-band on down. The clouds of hand-launched drones had vanished, sucked up by the rain, the mountains, and the raptor UAVs that soon fell in their turn.