GOLAN: This is the Future of War (Future War)

by FX Holden

  Nor on another human being. Captain Binyamin Ben-Zvi and First Officer Ehud Mofaz were the only crew aboard the 2,000-ton submarine, a fact that in itself was one of Israel’s best-kept secrets. But then, everything about the Gal was secret. She was the first and only boat in the Dolphin III class, an upgrade of the German-made Dolphin II class which had been delivered to Israel in the mid 2020s and then substantially modified in secret by the IDF Navy after delivery. The first thing Israel had done was to take the 30-person crew out of the Gal. By automating all systems and making them triply redundant, they were able to turn the crew space, which took up about 20 percent of the space inside the hull, into housing for a new hydrogen fuel cell air-independent propulsion system that would allow the submarine to travel submerged for several weeks at a time if needed.

  Only two crew were needed to crew the Gal – the captain and a systems engineer/first officer whose job it was to manage the communication, environmental, propulsion, navigation and weapons systems. They could take turns sleeping if a human was needed on watch, or even grab some shuteye together, leaving the boat’s AI to pilot the submarine and watch for threats. There was no helmsman or weapons officer, the AI responded to natural language commands. The Gal’s active and passive sensors gave the two men a 360-degree view of the water around them, out to a distance of twenty miles submerged and fifty miles above the waves when surfaced.

  Israel had not announced its modifications to the world. No foreign officer had set foot aboard the Gal, and very few members of Israel’s submarine service, and even fewer politicians, had been indoctrinated into its secrets. Israel had gone to great lengths to hide the new capabilities of the Gal even from friendly navies. Theoretically based at Eilat, whenever it sailed on its months-long covert missions, it was replaced in dock by a floating steel shell that mimicked its shape and size perfectly and would fool anyone who didn’t actually climb into the water underneath it and rap its empty hull with a hammer. The patrol around Africa and into the western Med had been its longest operational patrol since being commissioned.

  There was good reason for all the secrecy around the Gal. It was Israel’s most potent hunter-killer submarine. In its forward section it carried four near-silent hydraulically served torpedo tubes capable of firing torpedoes armed with five-kiloton nuclear warheads, or submarine-launched Popeye Turbo cruise missiles armed with 20-kiloton nuclear warheads. It was not only designed to kill any enemy ship against which it deployed its weapons, it was designed to kill entire fleets.

  That nuclear strike capability was the main reason there were two crew members aboard the Gal. To initiate a strike, both had to enter and validate the nuclear launch codes. Both had to verify the launch with infrared retinal and voice print identification. Only 22 officers were rated to serve on the Gal-class submarine, and they were not allowed to sail more than two patrols together in any three-month period, to avoid forming personal loyalties. There was an additional failsafe. Both officers’ bio-signs were continually monitored and if both officers were registered as dead, all human interfaces would be locked down, the weapons systems disabled and the boat would pilot itself back to the nearest IDF naval base.

  Curiously it wasn’t the four nuclear weapons in his forward section that made Binyamin nervous as they rose to communication depth. It was the simple risk of detection by one of the dozen navies whose ships could be plying the waters above him. The Gal was not a powerful weapons platform in itself. A Russian Laika submarine displaced 8,000 tons to the Gal’s 2,000 and had 16 vertical launch missiles against the Gal’s 10 torpedo tubes. Fitted with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warheads, a single Laika could take out every major city on the US East Coast. Even an Indian Arihant-class sub could launch 12 ballistic missiles. But the Laika and Arihant were political weapons, supposed to act as deterrents to other powers against nuclear aggression. Their power lay in their very public existence.

  The Gal, on the other hand, was a ghost. A cipher. The world knew Israel possessed nuclear weapons. It had hypothesized that Israel had fitted nukes to its submarine-launched cruise missiles or land-based Jericho ballistic missiles. But it had never confirmed its suspicions and while it knew Germany had built at least three new Dolphin II submarines for Israel, it had never confirmed that Israel had upgraded and armed any with nuclear weapons. The longer the Gal stayed a ghost, the more real power it had. The power to strike unexpectedly and devastatingly against any ship or submarine in any navy.

  The power, at any time, to strike deniably.

  A Kaved torpedo fired by the Gal could travel up to ten miles to its target, guided by an onboard inertial navigation system to a pre-determined point before detonating. Set to explode 150 feet below the surface, its nuclear warhead would create a wave of storm-surge height out to 6,000 feet, and a column of water 5,000 feet high. The vaporized gas ‘crater’ it created would be 3,000 feet in diameter. Any submarine or ship within the crater would be capsized or disabled by the shock wave. But that was not the Kaved’s only potential use.

  The scenario Binyamin and Ehud had rehearsed most often, and which they had even successfully simulated by sailing the Gal right into the mouth of Syrian and Egyptian naval harbors, was one in which they would use a subsurface nuclear explosion to take entire enemy harbors, and all the ships in them, out of action. If fired into a harbor, the irradiated waterspout from their five-kiloton torpedo would drown and contaminate infrastructure and ships, requiring weeks or months of destructive decontamination. As importantly, unless the Gal was detected and forced to surface, it would be nearly impossible to attribute the attack to Israel. Israeli politicians could claim the explosion was an accident aboard the nuclear-powered vessel of a hostile nation … Russia, for example.

  The Popeye anti-ship cruise missiles on the Gal were less ‘subtle’. Gal was not a strategic ‘second-strike’ boat, she was put in the world to kill other submarines and ships, and the short-range, supersonic Popeye could be fired with either conventional or special warheads. The conventional variant had a higher risk of being successfully intercepted but was fine against the navies of less advanced nations. Against more sophisticated adversaries and in extreme circumstances, the 20-kiloton nuclear warhead could be detonated at a greater range from the target ship or fleet and still achieve target destruction.

  With great power came great responsibility. Binyamin was the only officer aboard who could authorize Gal to fire a special, and he could only do so with a launch code provided by his fleet and political masters, which had to be updated every two hours. Which was the main reason why, now that they had reached their patrol sector, they were coming to communication depth.

  “Depth 100, Benny.” Like all branches of the Israeli Defense Forces, titles were reserved for occasions that demanded them. Three weeks inside a 2,000-ton tin can sailing halfway around the globe had given Binyamin Ben-Zvi and Ehud Mofaz an easy informality.

  “All stop.”

  “Gal: hold at depth 100, engines astern, slow to stop.” The small creaks and groans of the boat’s passage through the water went silent.

  Holding steady.

  “Deploy sensor buoy.”

  Ehud called up a utility screen and tapped an icon. “Deploying.”

  The Israelis had already carefully scanned for nearby submarine or surface traffic using their passive sensors, but there was still an element of uncertainty about what awaited them above. Drones or aircraft were their biggest threats right now. A single well-placed sonar buoy dropped on top of them now would uncloak them completely.

  From the top of the submarine’s ‘sail’ or conning tower, a football-shaped buoy detached and floated to the surface on optical fiber cable. It was capable of satellite, VHF and UHF radio transmission, as well as infrared and radar sensing. Even as it neared the surface of the sea, it started feeding data to the tactical display in front of Ben-Zvi. In seconds, he had a radar, electronic and infrared picture of nearby shipping which the Gal’s combat
AI immediately began classifying by type and nationality and plotting on a 2D grid. Naval warships and surveillance drones or aircraft were flagged red, but there were thankfully none of those within detection range. The nearest vessel was a cargo ship ten miles to port, moving away from them.

  “Clear to transmit.”

  “Transmitting, aye. Message sent. And … incoming traffic downloading. Recovering buoy.” The multipurpose sensor buoy could both send and receive. It could be recovered, if time and operational conditions allowed, or fired to the surface untethered from any depth to send a one-way message, after which it would sink again and be lost. Unless that message was a mayday, in which case it would continue to float and transmit an emergency GPS locator signal.

  They both checked the incoming message traffic. There were only two messages. One reconfirming their former mission orders, and one containing the updated launch codes for their special weapons.

  “Take us down again, Gal. Under the thermal layer, ahead slow, random course changes but keep us in this sector.

  Aye, Captain. Ahead slow, optimize for stealth.

  “Ehud, I’m going to get some food, take a shower and grab some sleep. You should too.”

  “No problem. I’ll set it up and join you in the galley.” ‘Galley’ was a grand term for the small eating space forward of their command center under the sail. They had a microwave oven for heating food, a kettle for tea, and a fold-down table with bench seating for two. Under the floor was enough food storage space to support a three-month patrol. Forward of that were their crew quarters and, on the other side, a shower and toilet side by side, fed by the desalination plant that also gave them their drinking water. Twenty square yards of domestic bliss; luxury by any submariner’s standards.

  Ehud had queued up the data for their report in a single high-frequency microburst transmission and squirted it to Eilat. It was of course encrypted, but it contained everything you might expect, from latitude, longitude, depth, speed and heading to the Gal’s fuel, fuel cell and backup battery state. However, it also contained a message that might have caused a little alarm if it had been intercepted by an unintended recipient.

  Unit 604 is in position and awaiting attack command.

  All Domain Attack: Assassination

  Mount Hermonit, Golan Heights, May 16

  Quds Force sniper Abdolrasoul Delavari was very, very good at waiting. He had been waiting for the order to begin executing his mission after months of reconnaissance. He had been waiting for delivery of the very unusual weapons system sitting at his feet for nearly a month. He had been waiting in the bush on the hill just inside the Syrian border in the chill of night and now the baking hot morning sun for nearly twenty-three hours.

  He was waiting to fire the first shot in a new war.

  It would not be a technically difficult shot. He checked the distance for the hundredth time against the glowing numbers in his telescopic rangefinder. Three miles, give or take a few yards. The difficulty would come with the fact he was using a new weapons system he had only had two weeks to train on, and the fact the target would give him only a tiny window of opportunity in which to make his kill.

  He checked the time in the scope. Fifteen more minutes, if their intelligence was correct. And it seemed it was. There was a great deal of activity at the IDF observation post on the hilltop at Mount Hermonit. More importantly, there was a lot of activity overhead as well. He had so far counted one fighter patrol of three aircraft, two helicopters and one drone. The helicopters and drone sweeping the countryside around Mount Hermonit were no doubt using thermal infrared cameras to scan the ground, but he wasn’t worried about them. The protective lining in his ‘ghillie suit’ would shield him from simple infrared. Now he could see soldiers gathering inside the bunker. From this position low on the plains in front of the bunker, he would never have been able to make a conventional shot, but today was not going to be a conventional attack.

  Delavari had been preparing for this mission for two months, scouting a half dozen possible locations based on his target’s known and planned movements. Several of the other hides he’d scouted would have been better than this one if he’d been using, say, his favored Degtyarev rifle chambered for the new Russian Klimovsk smart 12.7mm ammunition. But even with Klimovsk rounds he could never have made a shot from three miles out. Delavari was good, but not that good.

  His target on this mission was Gassan Tamir, an IDF colonel and currently the commander of the Golani Brigade. Delavari did not have an overly exaggerated idea of his own importance, nor was he impressed by the number of stars on the shoulder boards of his target. But he did believe in the influence a single person could have on the outcome of a battle, and history was full of examples of that. Not least the history of this place, which Delavari had studied with interest. The Syrians called it the Quneitra Gap: the flat plains between Mount Bental and Mount Hermonit through which the Syrians had tried to channel their invasion of the northern Golan Heights in 1973. Opposing 500 Syrian tanks had been a small force of 50 tanks led by a 29-year-old Lieutenant Colonel called Avigdor Kahalani. Two days later, Kahalani’s force was down to seven tanks, but 260 Syrian tanks lay burning in the valley around them, giving the gap its Israeli name – the Valley of Tears. The Syrians withdrew, and Kahalani was called ‘the savior of Israel’ when he was presented with his Medal of Valor. As he had lain on his bunk reading Kahalani’s story, Delavari couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened if Kahalani had not been in this place, at that time.

  Or how Israel would cope with what was to come, without Gassan Tamir.

  Ten minutes.

  Delavari had not been briefed on the bigger picture. He had no idea if Syria really intended to try to take the Golan Heights back as the rumors in his unit said, or if there was some other strategic goal. Like everyone else, he had seen the activity on the plains south of his current position, as Syria, Russia and Iran maneuvered their combined ground and air forces in so-called ‘training exercises’. For all he cared, the Syrian objective could be Lebanon, or Golan, both, or neither. Delavari was just a tradesman, plying his trade. If he was not here, he would be in the north, helping the Syrians deal with troublesome Kurds or Turkish commandos.

  Abdolrasoul Delavari had been at war a very, very long time. He had started working with the IRGC during the Syrian war against Daesh in 2013 at the age of 30, and since that time had claimed more than 150 Daesh, Kurdish and Turkish officers. Officers were his preference. He saw little point in killing ordinary soldiers or their corporals and sergeants. He could have a squad of infantry in his sights, but he would happily wait a half day in the baking sun for an officer to appear, because he would rather cut off the head of the snake than its tail.

  He had several nicknames. ‘One-Man Brigade’ was one of them, but he didn’t acknowledge it. Another was ‘Assad’s Hunter’, but he didn’t like that one either because the Syrian leader was not his master. He served the Islamic Republic, and was in Syria only because his country wanted him there. There was one nickname he answered to. Among the Quds Force soldiers he shared a mess with, he was ‘Lighvan’: the name of a Persian sheep’s milk cheese filled with holes. It was a nickname he had earned the hard way.

  Delavari was a tailor from Isfahan. He had moved there from the provinces as a young man and his relatives had helped him find work. With the money he’d saved over several years, he’d opened a clothing store. At the time he joined the IRGC he was married, with seven children. He had learned to shoot as a young man, hunting rabbits to help feed his family, and growing up in a large family with little money, he had to make every bullet count. In Isfahan he soon learned he was a better hunter than he was a businessman. So he brought his brother in to run the clothing store and joined the IRGC because it was offering a bonus to soldiers who volunteered to serve in Syria.

  His talent with a rifle was soon noticed, and he was sent to the Quds Force for sniper training. And it was during his field training, on his very
first mission in Islamic State-controlled Syria, that he received his nickname. A Daesh sniper had been troubling Syrian troops trying to dislodge both Islamic State and Syrian rebels from Raqqa. After the sniper was spotted camped on the rooftop rubble of a destroyed building, Delavari had been dispatched to try to take him out.

  He’d found the Syrian troops crouched on the ground floor of a villa, smoking cigarettes and talking quietly as he’d been shown in. In the corner of the room, on the floor under a curtain, he saw a dead body. A long rifle was leaned up against the wall beside the body.

  He stood looking at the boots sticking out from under the curtain.

  One of the Syrians walked over to Delavari and stood looking down at the body for a moment. “That was the last guy your people sent,” he told Delavari in broken Persian. He gestured to Delavari to follow him into the next room, and pointed at a shoulder-high window looking out to the east. “He’s out there, two o’clock. You’ll see a roof with a red clay chimney. He’s somewhere up there.” The man nodded at the window. “You can rest your rifle on the window pane, it’s a good spot to shoot from.”

  Delavari saw pock marks in the wall behind the window from shots the sniper had apparently already sent into the room. And a patch of not-very-well-mopped blood on the floor. “I don’t think so,” he told the Syrian. Lifting his Degtyarev onto his shoulder, he walked out of the room to the rear of the villa and found a courtyard. Pushing some barrels up against the rear wall, he crawled up onto the roof of the villa and slid forward on his stomach until he could see around a TV antenna toward the east. He quickly saw the rooftop the Syrian had talked about and, pulling the scope off his rifle, settled in to watch it.