Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  … DO THE BEST YOU CAN WITH WHAT YOU HAVE, JER.] [SABER 6-BRAVO 6***IF IT WASN’T A CHALLENGE, SIR, IT WOULDN’T BE THE CAVALRY. SABER-6 DOWN]

  Bolde secured the transmitter and retracted the roof antenna. For a long moment, he studied the last glowing lines on the communications screen. After a moment, he chuckled with soft self-derisiveness. What was that line George C. Scott had said in Patton? The one just before El Guettar, “All of my life I have dreamed of leading a large number of men in a desperate battle.”

  Well, while he had no large number of men, the desperation level was certainly adequate. Brid Shelleen, with her somewhat “different” worldview would say that he had created this moment and this situation for himself. He had asked and the universe had given.

  For he, Lieutenant Jeremy Randolph Bolde, had dreamed of being a warfighter, not merely a soldier, or a career army officer, but a combatant. For as long as he could recall, Bolde had hungered for what Patton had called the “sting of battle,” for the chance to test himself in the ultimate crucible.

  Such concepts and attitudes were decisively not “PC” these days, not even within the Officers’ Corps, or within his own old Army family. But they had smoldered on deep down in his belly where he lived, and they flared hot and bright now.

  Hail, Universe! If this night is your gift to me, I thank you for it.

  Bolde called up a large-scale tactical map on the big screen. Tilting the seat back, he studied the display, absorbing each terrain feature and deployment point.

  They would be overwhelmingly outnumbered, but that was almost an irrelevancy. Classically, cavalry almost always fights outnumbered. But then again, the cavalry trooper almost always had three good allies ready to ride at his side: speed, shock, and surprise. Utilize them properly, and they could go a long way toward leveling the odds. He must use them in precisely the right way tonight.

  Also, while the modern armored cavalry section was, pound for pound and trooper for trooper, the most tactically powerful small military unit in history, he must dole that power out one critically metered spoonful at a time to maximize its effect against the enemy. Definitely a most interesting exercise.

  Without Bolde realizing it, his lips pursed and a whispering whistle drifted around the command cab.

  “For seven years I courted, Sally,

  Away, you rollin’ river.

  For seven years she would not have me.

  Away, I’m bound away, crossed that wide Missouri …”

  Mary May Jorgenson stood beside CHARLIE in the twilight, putting the gun drone through a systems check cycle. As with the section command vehicle, CHARLIE was an MM15 Shinseki Multi-Mission Combat Vehicle configured for armored cavalry operations, a sleekly angular boat-shaped hull the size of a large RV, riding on eight man-tall tires. Unlike ABLE, it carried a decisively different payload of systems and weapons. CHARLIE, and his brother BAKER, were the dedicated stone killers of the team.

  Configured for robotic operation, CHARLIE’s cab windshield and crew gunports had been plated over. Squat sensor turrets were mounted in the driver’s and commander’s hatches, giving the drone a slightly froglike appearance. A low casemate had been fitted atop the aft third of the hull, the mount for a Lockheed/IMI 35mm booster gun. The slender, jacketed tube of the hypervelocity weapon extended the full length of the drone’s spine to a point five feet beyond its nose.

  Using the trackball on the remote testing pad, Mary May tested the fifteen-degree traverse and elevation of the booster gun, then cycled the chain drive of the action, carefully keeping the magazines and propellant tanks on safety. Her head tilted in the dimming light, she critically listened to the clatter of the rotary breech mechanism, trusting her own judgment as well as the pad displays.

  The blip of another key tested the twelve CMM artillery rounds slumbering in their vertical-launch array in the drone’s forward compartment. The touch of a third verified the readiness of the Claymore reactive panels scabbed onto CHARLIE’s composite armor skin. Checks done. Boards green. Mary May unjacked the remote pad from the drone’s exterior systems access. They were ready to rock.

  Boots crunched on the gravel of the qued as Nathan Grey Bird trudged up from BAKER’s parking point. Her assistant scout leader had been running an identical testing cycle of the second drone. “How’s Mr. B looking, Nate?” Mary May inquired.

  “Pretty much good,” the stocky, bronze-skinned trooper replied. “One of the secondary link aerials was acting sort of shorty, so I replaced it. And that first wheel motor on the right side’s leaking oil again. I topped it up and we’ll be okay for tonight, but for sure we got a busted seal on that unit.” Mary May nodded. “I’ll write it up. The next time we see the shop column, we’ll get it pulled.”

  “Whenever that might be.” Grey Bird grinned, white teeth flashing. “We pulling out soon?”

  “The LT says as soon as we hit full dark. I’d say that’ll be inside the hour.” Mary May passed Grey Bird her testing pad. “Secure that for me, will you, Nate. Then go on up to ABLE and kill some rations. We’ll eat, then switch off on picket with Johnny and Lee so they can get a not-on-the-move meal, too.”

  “You got it, Five. You comin’ along now?”

  “In a minute. Save me the pizza MRE if Rick hasn’t already snagged it out of the box.”

  Mary May caught up her carbine from where it leaned against one of CHARLIE’s wheels and started back down the wash. Warrant Officer Shelleen had walked down the draw a few minutes before, and the scout wanted to verify that everything was all right with her. Or at least that was the excuse Mary May gave herself.

  In actuality, she was motivated by a continuing and nagging curiosity about Saber’s systems operator. When Mary May had elected to join the Army, one of her reasons had been to see new things and meet new people. Never in her wildest imaginings however had she ever visualized herself serving beside a genuine, spell-casting, card-carrying witch.

  A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She never mentioned Warrant Officer Shelleen’s religious preferences in any of her letters home. Mary May’s family were all hard-shell Lutheran, and she didn’t need Uncle Joseph and Aunt Gertrude writing their congressmen.

  Mary May lightened her footsteps as she approached the shallow bay in the wall of the wash that she had seen Warrant Officer Shelleen enter, not desiring to disturb, yet aware that she might. In the growing shadows she noted a slender figure kneeling on the sand of the qued floor, facing away to the south. A palm-sized splash of diesel oil burned bluely on the ground before her, and the silver-hafted dagger the SO carried lay on the sand at her knees, its blade aimed at the heart of the flame. Bridget Shelleen’s arms were uplifted shoulder high, and her head was lowered, a soft whispered pattern of words escaping from her lips.

  Mary May hesitated, a ripple of unease touching her, the discomfort sometimes felt by the average person when in the presence of a truly and genuinely devout individual.

  Shelleen’s whisper faded away and the whicker of the wind in the wash was the only lingering sound. For a long minute, the systems operator continued to kneel, statue-still. Then, gracefully, she leaned forward and scooped up a double handful of sand and poured it over the patch of flame. Lifting the dagger from the ground, she made a decisive gesture with it as if she were slashing through some invisible line or thread that surrounded her. The blade disappeared into her boot sheath and the redhead rose and turned to face Mary May, her movements an effortless catlike flow.

  Unnerved at so suddenly finding herself regarded by those large and level green eyes, Mary May asked with a forced lightness, “Casting a spell on the Algis, Miss Shelleen?”

  A wisecrack wasn’t at all what she had wanted to say but she’d had to do something to recover her equilibrium.

  “Oh no,” Shelleen replied with a calm seriousness. “The Law of Return would make that a very bad idea.”

  “The Law of Return?”

  “Yes. One of the root laws of all magic,” the sys
tems officer replied, picking up her flak vest and pistol belt from where she had set them aside. “‘So as you conjure, so shall you receive back fourfold.’ Invoking a negative conjuration, a black magic if you will, against the Algerians could come back and hit us far harder than it would the enemy. I was only addressing the Lord and the Lady, asking them for strength, protection, and wisdom for us all this night.”

  Mary May tilted her head questioningly. “You mean like you were only praying?”

  “Essentially.” Shelleen smiled back.

  The two women started back up the ravine to the vehicle hide through the deepening shadows. Overhead, the first star seeped through the darkening blue of the sky.

  “War,” Mary May asked eventually. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, the word is that you were once a model in New York or something. How did you ever become … a soldier?”

  Again, “soldier” wasn’t what she’d meant to say, but that’s how it had come out. The warrant officer shot her a knowing glance and smiled again.

  “Yes, I did have the start of a modeling career once,” she replied, slinging her flak vest over her shoulder. “I also had the start of a very unhappy, meaningless, and self-destructive life. So I started to look around for something to hold on to. Eventually, I found the beliefs of my Celtic ancestors, Wicca or Paganism as it is known to some. It was something that worked for me, giving me a degree of peace although not of contentment.

  “I continued my studies and, upon my becoming a priestess, I elected to confront my destiny once and for all. I undertook a time of fasting and spiritual seclusion, a spirit quest as it is called by the American Indian. During it, I asked for the Lady to show me the path I should be following during this stage of my life.”

  “Did she?” Mary May asked, intrigued in spite of herself.

  Shelleen nodded. “She did. She came to me as the Lady of the South Wind, armor-clad, the guardian and the woman warrior. I had my answer. So, I went back to New York, fired my agent, tore up my contracts, and joined the Army.”

  She smiled a sudden impish grin. “And yes, there are any number of people who think that I have gone totally and completely insane.”

  Mary May chuckled. “A lot of my family think the same thing about me. What do you think now? Was it the right call?”

  Bridget Shelleen paused just short of ABLE’s tail ramp and swept her arm around the vehicle hide. “Here, I find I am centered,” she replied, looking into the scout’s face. “Here, for the first time in my life, I can say that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. If you can do that, I suppose you aren’t doing so badly.”

  Mary May Jorgenson could not disagree.

  The South Face of the El Khnachich Range Three-quarters of a Mile West of the Taoudenni Caravan Road 2335 Hours, Zone Time; October 28, 2021

  The only illumination within the cab came from the glow of the instrument displays, that odd gray-green unlight that is compatible with night-vision systems. The only light beyond the sloped windshield issued from the cold and distant stars.

  At the walking pace of a healthy man, the three vehicles of Saber section ground upward toward the saddleback, the two gun drones trailing ABLE nose to tail, like obedient circus elephants. Normal operating doctrine called for an unmanned vehicle always to be out on point, cybernetically scouting and taking the initial risk. However, the rugged irregularity of this night’s drive mandated that a human intelligence break the trail.

  As ABLE hunched and clawed her way upslope, Rick Santiago relished the feel of handling the big war machine. As a kid back in Arizona, there wasn’t a tractor pull, off-road race, or monster truck bash within a hundred miles of Wickenburg that he hadn’t attended. By the time he’d graduated from high school, he’d built up both a perilously hot Ford F150 pickup and a terror-of-the-desert reputation.

  Unfortunately, few job prospectuses listed driving crazy in the dirt as a prime desired attribute.

  Then came the day when an enterprising Army recruiter brought a transport variant of the Shinseki Multi-Mission Combat Vehicle to a hill climb outside of Yuma. Rick and a lot of other young people stood by in awe as that magnificent eight-wheeled monster shamed some of the best ATVs and 4X4s in the Southwest, Rick had filled out his enlistment papers that day, sitting in the Shinseki’s cab.

  “Okay, people,” Lieutenant Bolde murmured over the helmet intercom. “We’re getting in close. Column stealth up and go to batteries.”

  Miss Shelleen replied with a soft verbal acknowledgment as she dialed the command into the drone datalinks. Rick answered by clicking a switch sequence. The breathy whine of ABLE’s twin turbogenerator sets faded away, leaving only the purr of the multiple drive motors and the crunch of the mountain rubble beneath the mushy all-terrain tires.

  The key to the Shinseki’s amazing flexibility and performance was its composite electric-drive system. Two lightweight UMTec 1000 ceramic gas turbines spun a pair of electrical generators. The generators pumped power into the banks of rechargeable iron-carbide batteries under ABLE’s deck plates, and these batteries, in turn, fed the 150-horsepower radial electric-drive motors built into the hubs of each ground wheel. No gears, no clutch, no driveshaft, just instant power on demand.

  There were other advantages as well. Spinning constant speed at their most efficient RPM setting, the turbines drew the maximum power potential from each liter of fuel consumed. And for those times, such as now, when stealth was at a premium, the turbines could be shut down. Operating on battery power alone, the armored cavalry vehicle’s thermal and audile signatures were greatly reduced.

  Through his night-vision visor, Santiago noted a change in ground texture ahead. A shale patch on the hillside angled down to the left. He eased the all-wheel steering over, hunting uphill for better traction.

  But not quite far enough.

  Rick felt the hill shift beneath ABLE, the deck slewing and tilting as loose shale slid away beneath the left-rear tires. The cavalry vehicle lurched, threatening to twist crosswise and slide in the beginning of its own avalanche. Santiago’s foot rocked forward on the accelerator, slamming 1200 horsepower into the ground. ABLE responded like a hardspurred cow pony. Lunging upgrade, she scrabbled to solid ground, tire cleats paddlewheeling in the stone fragments.

  Rick Santiago grinned into the night. ¡Hijole! And they’re paying me for this! “You’re gonna want to edge the drones over to the right a few yards, Miss Shelleen,” he called back to the systems station. “We got a little patch of soft stuff here.”

  And then they were at the crest of the saddleback with only the downslope and a great darkness before them. Bolde cycled through the vision modes of his helmet visor and surveyed that darkness. By standard light, there was only the starblaze of the sky and the black horizon line of the not-sky. By switching to the night brite option, he could use the starlight to make out another great expanse of gravel pan and sand dune stretching out from the northern face of the range.

  Here and there, well out into the desert, were also occasional flickers and flares of transitory illumination. Bolde recognized them as light leaks caught by his photomultipliers: dashboard glow, lantern gleam escaping through a gap in a tent door, a sloppily used flashlight. Hints of the presence of a bivouacking army.

  It was not until he switched from the gray world of the night brite vision to the glowing green one of the thermographic imager that all was made clear. Glowing cyan geometries like the patterns on a snake’s back stretched across the horizon. Other individual dots of light and stumpy luminous caterpillars crept and crawled between them.

  This was the infrared portrait of an army at rest. Each geometric was a company-sized laager point, each dot of light the signature of a parked armored fighting vehicle. The steel hulls stood out as they radiated the heat absorbed during the day back into the chilling night. No doubt the Algerians had anti-IR tarps deployed, but insulation could only do so much against the vivid thermal contrasts
of the Sahara environment.

  The moving green points of light would be liaison and supply vehicles bringing up the food, the fuel, and the thousand and one other things an army on the march required. They were like the red corpuscles of a bloodstream, carrying oxygen to the muscles of a limb, giving it strength. And as with a bloodstream, if that flow was cut off, gangrene and death would rapidly follow.

  “Column … halt,” Bolde said lowly.

  ABLE crunched to a stop, BAKER and CHARLIE following suit in robotic obedience.

  “Okay, Mary May. We’re at drop point. Your people set to take a walk?”

  The scout leader moved forward to crouch beside Bolde’s seat, her tall and rangy frame bulked out by full field gear.

  Curved ballistic plates of bulletproof ceramic had been slipped into the plate pouches in her BDU shirtsleeves and trouser legs and snugged tight with Velcro strap-tabs. An interceptor flak vest shielded her torso as a combat helmet protected her head. In addition to its integral squad radio and night-vision system, spring-wire leads connected the helmet’s HUD (Heads-Up Display) with the SINCGARS Leprechaun B communications and navigation system clipped to Mary May’s load-bearing harness and to the BattleMAC tactical computer strapped to her left forearm.

  This night she would be carrying thirty-five pounds of body armor and personal electronics alone, without the consideration of weapons, ammunition, incidentals, and the gallon of water in her MOLLE harness reservoir. Such was the reason females were still rare within the Ground Combat Specialists’ rating. Even in the twenty-first century, the foot soldier still required a healthy dose of pack mule in their genetic makeup.

  “Set, LT,” she replied. “Ready to go down the ramp.”

  “Acknowledged, Five. You’ve got the drill. Get into position. We’ll coordinate the strike and recovery as the situation develops. You’ve got the satellite beacons with you?”

  “Two of them, yes, sir.”