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

by FX Holden

  After about twenty minutes, he saw a movement. Just the smallest of changes in light and shadow. It looked like the top third of a boot. He couldn’t see the leg it belonged to, but as he watched, the boot was pulled back out of sight, and then there was nothing.

  That told him a lot. The Daesh sniper was careful, he had chosen his hide well, but he was dumb, or lazy, or overconfident. A smart man with initiative and just a little humility would not still be shooting from the same position in which he had already scored one kill. No matter how comfortable he was, no matter how safe he felt. Yes, the sun was going down behind him, making his hide an even better spot to shoot from now than it had been earlier. Yes, he had a good line of sight to a position in which he knew enemy troops were located. But Delavari’s Quds Force trainers had taught him never to stay too long in one place, never to assume he was invisible, never to trust that just because he couldn’t see an enemy, the enemy could not see him.

  Looking at the layout of the rooftop, the angle down to the window below him through which he’d shot the last sniper, the fall of the shadow in which the man must be hiding, Delavari decided he needed to be two houses further over to the north. So he climbed fences and ducked through shattered walls until he reached the position he thought would give him the best line on the Daesh shooter, and he climbed a jagged wall, a staircase of blasted bricks leading up to a second floor that wasn’t there anymore. There wasn’t anything to hold on to. The remaining brick wall was like a one- or two-brick staircase to nowhere, with the rubble of the house to his left, and bare ground to his right. But moving up slowly, brick by brick, he eventually got to the top and placed his rifle carefully, so carefully, up on the topmost brick where he would have a good view toward the rooftop with the red clay chimney. And with his head down below the level of his rifle, he waited for the shot to come.

  But it didn’t.

  Delavari had learned patience, hunting rabbits. Sometimes an hour would pass before the sound of his footsteps was a distant enough memory for a rabbit in a warren to stick its head above ground again, and if that’s what it took, Delavari would wait. He waited now. If the sniper across the rooftops had seen him put his rifle in place, he would shoot. He had to. Just to be sure that what he was seeing was what he thought it was. And if he didn’t shoot … well, then maybe he hadn’t noticed.

  He was patient, but back then Delavari was also green. After what seemed like an hour, but was probably only several minutes, when there was no shot, Delavari cautiously lifted his head so that he could put his eye to his scope.

  The bullet came silently. He never heard the crack of the rifle. He felt a burning sensation in his temple and jerked back, too late … his rifle fell and he grabbed for it, losing his balance and falling heavily onto the ground beside the building he’d perched himself on.

  Out in the open.

  He should have got up and run, immediately. But he was shocked, stunned by his fall, bleeding from the bullet that had grazed his temple, gouging a deep canal through his scalp. Before he knew it, he realized he’d been laying there for nearly a minute, and the time to flee was past. His enemy must have his scope trained squarely on him now.

  He lay stock still, waiting for the kill shot to come, feeling the blood pool around his head.

  His rifle had fallen beside him, within reach of his outflung arm, but he knew that the moment he reached for it, he was dead. There could be only one reason he wasn’t already, and that was because the enemy sniper was waiting for help to come, either to rescue him or drag his body away – a chance for another kill.

  But no one came.

  By pure chance he had fallen with his head facing toward the rooftop with the red clay chimney. Lying on the ground, he could not see it so well, and certainly couldn’t see the sniper’s hide. But he had no doubt the sniper could see him. Through shuttered eyelashes, he tried to keep his gaze fixed on the rooftop. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he may have passed out a couple of times, because the sun overhead seemed to move in small jumps through the sky. The next time he was conscious, or at least consciously thinking about it, he realized it was starting to get dark, and the rooftop opposite was in complete shadow. The ground between buildings in which he’d fallen would soon be in shadow too. Across the city, he could hear the rattle of small arms fire, and the occasional crump of a grenade or rocket.

  He thought about moving, about trying to roll away. Surely the Daesh shooter would have given up by now. If those bastard Syrians hadn’t come for him already, they weren’t coming now. They must have heard the shot, must have heard the thump of his body hitting the ground. But they were probably still squatting in their back room, cooking bloody lentils and rice over a gas ring, smoking and drinking coffee and arguing about whose job it was to go out there and find a wheelbarrow so they could take the dead Iranian snipers back to their Raqqa base.

  He slowly tensed and released his left leg, then his right. Did the same with his arms. Trying to do so invisibly, he flexed the muscles of his shoulders. Nothing felt broken. There was just the heavy thud of a headache, probably as much from the bullet that had creased his skull as from his awkward landing. His rifle still lay about a foot from his outstretched arm. In his mind’s eye, he practiced his next move. Roll right, grab the rifle, keep rolling into the lee of the wall over there. If you are still alive, jump up and run back, out of the line of fire.

  Now? He looked up at the rooftop, and it looked back at him, just a dark, jumbled mess.

  No. A dark, moving jumble. As he watched, one shadow detached itself from the others. A man, rising into a crouch, his day’s work finished. His silhouette momentarily outlined by the sun setting behind him.

  Delavari rolled right, grabbed his rifle, but he didn’t keep rolling. He put his eye to his scope, steadied the barrel of the Degtyarev in his extended left hand and felt for the trigger with his middle finger. Delavari was a middle-finger trigger shooter, a quirk from the days he had learned to shoot as a boy and his forefinger was too short to comfortably reach the trigger of his father’s old British Lee Enfield rifle. The range to the rooftop with the red clay chimney was still dialed in from the sighting he’d taken before climbing the brick wall, and there was still a round in the chamber, but he had no idea of whether the scope was still aiming true or had been knocked out of alignment. He had one chance, one shot.

  He took a breath, put his sight on the dark, hunched figure, and pulled gently on the trigger.

  The crack of the rifle was louder than he expected, echoing off the walls beside and ahead of him. He should have rolled immediately to his right, not waiting to see the result, using the cover of his own fire to make his escape.

  But he lay still, with his eye glued to his scope. And watched as the dark silhouette froze. Then slowly rose up. And, with slow-motion stillness, toppled forward, rolling down the roof and off the guttering at the edge, to disappear from view into the street below.

  Finally, Delavari scuttled backwards and away.

  He’d left his first mission with a kill, and a coin-sized notch in the top of his ear from the Daesh bullet that had earned him the nickname of the Iranian cheese with holes in it: “Lighvan.” He’d thought it pretty funny, but his wife hadn’t.

  So long ago now. So many battlefields. So many kills.

  In the field opposite Mount Hermonit he looked at his watch again. Five minutes. Launch time.

  From the duffel bag at his feet and screened from the bunker by the thick vegetation, he removed what was quite the most unusual weapon he’d ever deployed. He’d been given it by a Druze captain who told him it was a top-secret prototype. To Delavari it looked more like a child’s toy than a weapon of war. First, he lifted out the body of a small electrically powered airplane, the fuselage no longer than his arm. Then he pulled out the wings, about the same length and two hands wide. He fixed these onto the fuselage with rubber ties and tested the battery. Green light.

  He’d already fitted the payload, a qu
adrotor microdrone, held in place with clamps that would automatically retract and drop it on command. He pulled out the command module and put it on the ground beside him.

  Facing away from the bunker, legs splayed out in front of him, he fitted the airplane into a rubber slingshot, keeping his movements slow and to a minimum. This was the most dangerous part of his mission, for Delavari. If he was spotted from the bunker, he could find himself running for his life through a rain of Israeli mortar fire. He pulled back on the slingshot and fired the plane into the air. It swooped up, and before its weight took it to the ground again, he pressed the engine starter button on the command module and the rear propeller started whirring, pushing the little drone silently higher. He left it to do what it was programmed to do – climb to about 1,000 feet and loiter, one and a half miles out from the target.

  Turning around, he rolled onto his stomach and crawled back into position in the bush. He was looking at a screen on the command module now, and swiveled the camera on the drone so that it was zoomed on the wide slit that opened into the bunker. There was more movement inside. It was slowly filling, as he’d expected, for the coming inspection. More and more uniforms with shoulder boards on them, their caps tucked through them in that typical Israeli way. Delavari smiled. Unless they were in combat fatigues, the Israeli officers usually wore light green shirts, unbuttoned, decorations above their left pockets. It marked them out clearly from the enlisted men around them in khaki and green. Gassan Tamir was also notable for his observance of orthodox practices, including wearing a green-fringed light-green yarmulke cap that matched his uniform.

  Commotion in the bunker now. Delavari triggered the release of the microdrone. And now, the attack was out of his hands. The mother drone would be turning back into Syria and gliding to a landing near a Syrian army outpost where a GPS signal would enable it to be recovered. The microdrone, now freed, was closing halfway to the target, almost invisible to a naked eye, totally silent at a distance of more than a couple of hundred yards. He was seeing inside the bunker through the lens of the microdrone now, and his screen showed the Israelis had set up short-range jamming equipment to block radio and drone signals during the VIP visit. But the drone no longer required commands from him.

  One minute.

  He could see the faces of the men inside the bunker on his screen, some standing looking through binoculars. The drone laid a green facial recognition mesh grid across each of them as they moved into view, cycling constantly between them faster than Delavari could follow. Now the soldiers at the front moved aside as a new group of four men moved up to the front of the bunker. Their deference indicated this was the group he was waiting for. He started scanning the faces of the officers himself, looking for Tamir. He wasn’t there. An enlisted man was pointing, an officer next to him leaning in attentively. Not Tamir. Had their intelligence been wrong? Was Tamir not here?

  The drone panned its camera across the soldiers at the front of the bunker. Left to right, right to left. Searching autonomously for its target. And then it locked and turned red. Not on an officer at all – had it misidentified the target?

  Oh, you clever bastard, Tamir.

  In a sergeant’s uniform, standing next to the other officers, was Gassan Tamir. He had changed his uniform, but he couldn’t change his facial features, and he hadn’t changed the yarmulke perched atop his receding hairline.

  One minute.

  That’s how long it would take the 100 mph drone to close the one and a half miles from where it was hovering to the entrance of the bunker. As he watched on the screen, the bunker zoomed closer with dizzying speed. The target lifted binoculars up to his face. It made no difference, the drone had locked on.

  Delavari pushed the guidance unit aside and grabbed his telescope, focused on the bunker again. He saw a shadow, like a sparrow diving through the opening of the bunker, then a flash of light beside the Colonel’s head.

  Tamir’s head snapped sideways, and he dropped. Chaos ensued inside the bunker.

  With a grunt of satisfaction, Delavari quickly packed his gear. Chaos was a sniper’s friend. Trusting no one would be looking his way in the moments after the attack, Delavari stood and began walking down the hill, into a gully that would hide him from observers in the Israeli outpost as he worked deeper into Syrian territory.

  As he walked, he pushed the drone controller into his backpack and took a swig of water. It was a good machine, the Israeli drone. He was no romantic, wedded to his old Degtyarev rifle through some idiotic ideal of how the work of a sniper should be done. He knew other snipers in the Quds Force who shunned modern methods. They refused to have anything to do with laser-guided loitering missiles, remotely controlled gun stations, or drones … especially drones.

  Abdolrasoul Delavari embraced them all. He’d learned one lesson lying in the dirt of Raqqa: the only successful mission was one you came back alive from. And whatever increased the chances of that was good. To hell with the souls of idiots with ideals.

  Inside the bunker atop Hermonit, the hell that had broken loose was breaking around Lieutenant Colonel Zeidan Amar, Reconnaissance Battalion Commander, Golani Brigade. A blast like a shotgun going off, Tamir had fallen at his feet, his head a shattered mess, and Amar had dropped to a knee, cradling the body in his arms as others shouted for a medic, shouted orders sending out patrols to find the shooter, or just shouted in shock and fear. Amar could see there was nothing a medic could do for Tamir; the head he was cradling was missing one side of its skull and the mess that was once Tamir’s brains had fallen out into Amar’s lap.

  It might have broken a lesser man. Might have broken Amar too, except for the fact he’d been expecting it.

  For years, he’d been working for this moment. He had been twenty when Israel passed a law in 2020 declaring itself ‘a Jewish State’. Most of the non-Jewish Druze in Israel shrugged and got on with life. But the twenty-year-old Zeidan Amar had not shrugged. He had been outraged. He had just signed on for officer training at the end of his compulsory service. And now his country was telling him he was a second-class citizen? He posted about his outrage on social media, and was called in by the commandant at Bahad training base to be given a lecture about his attitude. It only made him more angry. He had not grown up in the Druze settlements in the annexed Golan Heights, which still leaned toward Syria, but he joined an underground protest movement that had begun agitating for the Golan Heights settlements to declare themselves independent from Israel.

  There were attacks on police stations, a bus was hijacked and burned, a water treatment plant sabotaged. Zeidan wasn’t actively involved, but he was certainly sympathetic and donated as much of his salary as he could spare to their cause. He graduated from officer school and asked to be posted to the Golani brigade, where he funneled what information he could about Israeli troop and police movements to the Druze independence movement.

  After one of their covert meetings, he had been approached by a man he later learned was a Syrian intelligence officer.

  Under Syria, the Druze in Golan would be independent, the Syrian agent had said. Full citizens of Syria. You are an officer in the Golani brigade. Loyal to your people, not to Israel. You can serve their cause more effectively by helping us restore The Golan to Syrian control. Not now. Not soon, but one day. Forget this amateur stuff with the buses and sewage works. Serve in the Golani brigade, rise through the ranks. We will help you, and then when the day comes, you will truly help your people.

  He’d agreed to cooperate. And his Syrian contact had delivered. Based on a tip from his Syrian source, he had led his company over the UN ceasefire line into Syrian-held territory and uncovered a major arms cache. That success had been followed by others: a missile site identified and destroyed, a convoy of Iranian weapons intercepted and impounded. Then, he had been given a mission which his commanding officer, Gassam Tamir, had told him carried such a high risk, he could not order him to undertake it. All men assigned, himself included, had to volunteer, and
Tamir would not judge those who refused. “If you fail and the mission becomes public,” Tamir warned him, “I will have to say your action was unsanctioned, and you will be censured, probably tried in a military court.”

  The target was a Syrian military outpost just inside Syrian territory up against the DMZ overseen by the UN Disengagement Observer Force, UNDOF. Normally, Israel would have no compunction about demolishing such a brazen provocation, and bragging about it. But there were reported to be Russian ‘advisors’ stationed at the outpost too. If any Russian casualties resulted, it would be an international incident. Together with Engineering Corps commandos, they were to take control of the outpost, neutralize any Syrian or Russian troops there without causing casualties, and then destroy the outpost with explosives.

  The likelihood of taking the Syrian soldiers and their Russian advisors by surprise was regarded as low to zero. The risk of casualties, either Syrian or Russian, was regarded as high. It looked like a no-win mission to Amar. If he was successful, the Syrians and Russians would complain to the UN and he’d be the obvious fall guy. If he failed or there were too many casualties, he’d end up in military court, demoted at best, jailed at worst. It smelled a lot like a test of his loyalty to the Golani commander. “I’ll take it, Gassan,” he’d told Tamir. “We’ll get it done.”

  With the help of his Syrian contact, he did. When they fell upon the troops at the outpost, they found them all asleep, and at only half strength. His contact had made sure the Russians had withdrawn. The Syrian captives did a good job of looking stupid, confused and afraid as Amar’s men tied them up and dragged them outside their newly built emplacement. They did an even better job of looking terrified as the Israeli explosives lit up the night sky and turned the emplacement into a crater full of rubble. One of their captives took a concrete shard in the leg, but that only helped the sense of authenticity that Amar needed.