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

by FX Holden

  Among the last items to be shipped out was one of the two Legged Squad Support System LS3 Hunter units that he’d been sent to Syria to put through their combat trial paces. His two semi-autonomous ‘dogs’ as he called them – armed with a variety of projectile weapons and utility attachments – had acquitted themselves well, but only one of them had made it through. One had fallen in combat during the assault on the outpost. But the data they had collected in Syria had impressed the team back at Marine Combat Development and Integration enough for them to recommend the Hunter systems transition into full-scale production and deployment phase; so his job was done.

  All that had remained were their personal effects, and a minimum of weapons and ammunition they’d kept for themselves in case of ‘unforeseen events’. For Jensen that meant his sidearm and an M27 carbine. He soon learned they each had a different understanding of the concept ‘minimum’. Corporal Patel, for example, had lugged three duffel bags of hardware out of the bunker, including a 15lb. Barrett Mark 22 MRAD sniper rifle with accompanying swappable barrels, bolts and assorted .308 Winchester, .300 and .338 Norma Magnum ammunition.

  “Where in hell did you get that beast, Lance Corporal?” Jensen had asked Patel as he swung his duffel bags into the chopper and laid the heavy rifle on top of them.

  “Card game, Gunny,” he said. “Won it off a CIA contractor didn’t know the butt from the barrel. But I was allowed to keep it because I am the best damn marksman in the 3rd Battalion. Get back Stateside, I’m booked into Camp Pendleton, training for Scout Sniper.”

  Each of the several Marines on the chopper had their own plans for what they were going to do when they got out of Kobani. Jensen was looking forward to some liberty at Joint Base Eagle in Kuwait before heading back to Quantico Station, Virginia and his next weapons development assignment. He had no idea yet what that might be, but after his tour in Syria he sincerely hoped it involved something much, much less interesting than testing robot combat dogs in a Middle Eastern war zone. He’d heard there was a project evaluating which powder to use in the newest .338 rounds for the Marines’ new Mark 13 sniper rifles. That sounded perfect.

  “Where are you headed after Kuwait?” Jensen asked Bell.

  “Kaneohe Bay, Sarge.”

  “Got family?”

  “Parents are dead, but I got a brother in the Navy. He’s in the Red Sea right now but being sent to Pearl once he’s finished the patrol he’s on now. Got some catching up to do, you know…”

  “I bet.”

  “How about you, Sarge? Anyone waiting?”

  Yeah. How about you, Jensen? There was a reason he’d re-upped and gotten himself sent to Syria. And not one he felt like discussing with Bell. After twelve years, and a final promotion to Gunnery Sergeant, James Jensen had been ready to get out. He’d put a little money away, had a wife and two kids he wanted to spend more time with, who didn’t seem to mind the sight of him too much, and a buddy back in Indiana who could get him a job as a crew boss on a team installing wind turbines. He’d even had the interview and made it through that and their damn psych test, which was worse than the interview itself.

  He’d been two weeks from his pre-separation counseling session when he got word that his wife and kids had been walking a trail to Manoa Fall on Oahu when a rockslide had killed them and four other hikers. After burying his family he walked into the pre-separation interview still in a daze, and came out having re-upped instead of getting out. He’d just lost his wife and kids, he couldn’t stand the thought of saying goodbye to the only other family he had left in this world, the Corps. There were times – especially under fire – he felt he’d been too hasty, and others, like now, he knew he’d done exactly the right thing. Sure, Bell wasn’t going home to a wife and kids, but going home to the noise and smells of K-Bay was better than going home to a dark, empty house.

  James Jensen was pretty damn sure if he hadn’t re-upped, he’d probably have shot himself by now. So every day he spent above the ground was a win, even if he’d spent it in Syria.

  “No one special, kid. Envy you.” He leaned his head back against the column behind him and closed his eyes. Man, he was tired.

  Bell had been watching the sandy dirt and scrub flowing along a few thousand feet beneath them, and he frowned. “Kuwait is south-east, isn’t it, Sarge?”

  “Two hours, son, settle in,” Jensen told him, without opening his eyes. He could feel he was about two minutes from a well-deserved nap.

  “That’s what I thought. But unless I’m going crazy, we’re headed west, is all.”

  Sighing, Jensen opened his eyes reluctantly and focused on the shadows on the ground below them. He frowned. The kid was right. Their machine was pointed west.

  Freaking typical. Another screw-up.

  Their quadrotor was pilotless. It had a Marine Corps Aviation crewman, but only for loading and unloading personnel and equipment.

  “Hang tight,” Jensen told Bell, unbuckling himself and heading forward past a small group of men and women already either sleeping in their metal bucket seats, or well on the way.

  Jensen tapped the shoulder of the aviator, a corporal. The man was also dozing.

  He started awake. “Sorry. Yes, Sergeant?”

  “Something’s up. We’re supposed to be headed for Kuwait. South-east. We’re headed west, across Turkey.”

  The man leaned to his right, looking at a panel display at the front of the crew compartment. “You’re right. Must be a detour for operational reasons, that’s not unusual. Let me get onto the sector controller, Sergeant.”

  “You do that.”

  The airman reached for a radio headset and jammed it on his head, then tapped some icons on the flat screen panel on his right. He spoke for a few minutes and then pulled the headset off his head. “Someone to speak to you, Sergeant,” the man said.

  Jensen fitted the headset over his head. “Jensen.”

  “Gunnery Sergeant, this is Captain Fernandez…”

  Jensen frowned. Fernandez was a Lava Dogs company commander, but as far as Jensen knew, he was back on Hawaii, not in Syria. “Yes, Captain.”

  “I want to confirm something first. The personnel you have with you … I have a list here … just let me get it. Alright, Johnson, B.; Patel, R.; Stevens, D.; Buckland, R.; Wallace, B.; Lopez, M.; Bell, C. And yourself. Did I miss anyone?”

  Jensen had been checking off the faces inside the drone as Fernandez had read them off. “Just the airman we’re flying with, Captain. You want his name?”

  “No. Look, here’s the deal. We’re rerouting your aircraft. Your liberty will have to wait. We urgently need to put some boots on the ground on the ceasefire line between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights and…”

  “Sorry, sir, did you say Golan Heights?”

  “That’s right, Sergeant. You’ll be joining the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, UNDOF, to supplement the observers already there.”

  Jensen lowered his voice and turned toward the empty front of the quadrotor. “Captain, with all respect, the Marines on this aircraft have just come off the line after six months of continuous combat operations. I’m not sure they’re capable of…”

  “It’s peacekeeping duty, not combat duty, Sergeant,” Fernandez said. “We’re already working on a plan to relieve you within the week. But the order for this came from the highest level, and I mean the highest. We had to find a platoon-sized force that could deploy in the Golan yesterday, and your aircraft was already airborne. So it’s you. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” Jensen felt the fatigue in his bones flow down and into his boots at the thought of even a single day longer in Syria. Let alone a week.

  “Good. You’ll put down at a town called Buq’ata. UNDOF will meet you there with transport and drive you about ten miles north-east to an observation post on Ceasefire Line Alpha where you’ll join a Dutch unit manning the OP. You’ll get your blue helmets and take your orders from the Dutch Lieutenant there, Willem Cor
t, C-O-R-T. You got that?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Sorry for the bad news, Gunny,” Fernandez said. “Trust me, we’re working on getting you out of there as quickly as we can.”

  That’s what they said about Kobani, Jensen thought, but kept the thought to himself. “Appreciate it, sir.”

  “Fernandez out.”

  Jensen peeled the headset off his head and handed it back to the airman. “You pull up a map on that thing?” he asked, pointing at the multifunction panel on the wall beside the aviator.

  “Sure,” the man said. He switched the screen to show a map of the border region between Turkey and Syria that they were currently crossing. “Just pinch and zoom, or you can tap this icon…” the man pointed at the screen, “… to show our new route and follow it to our destination.”

  He vacated his seat and Jensen sat in front of the screen. He zoomed it out a little and then hit the icon that showed the route they were taking. West across southern Turkey to the Turkish coast and then south out of Turkey, down the coast of Lebanon, past Beirut to Sidon on the coast and then south-east across Lebanon, the northern tip of Israel and into the Golan Heights and Buq’ata. Three hundred and fifty-seven miles, two hours left to run.

  He turned to see everyone in the compartment was awake again and seven pairs of eyes were trained on him. A Marine pretty quickly developed a bad news detector, and could usually see The Suck coming a mile away. After six months under siege in Kobani, which was pretty much all suck, the men and women inside the quadrotor didn’t even need Jensen to open his mouth before they reacted. They just needed to look into his eyes.

  “Ah, man,” Bell said, spitting into the space between his rifle butt and his boot. “Seriously?”

  LCS-30 USS Canberra, The Red Sea, May 17

  “No, seriously, tell me what you really think, Ears,” Watch Supervisor, Chief Petty Officer Goldmann asked with undisguised sarcasm, pulling a chair up beside Bell’s sonar station.

  “Sorry, Chief, but if we fall any further back, we are going to break contact and I can’t see us catching this guy again if he makes it through the Straits of Tiran and into deeper water.”

  It had been a fraught couple of days. Bell and the other sonar operators had found and then lost the small submarine several times in the warm and flukey waters of the Red Sea. Whoever was driving the Iranian boat was either very lucky, or very skilled, at playing with the thermocline – the shifting plane deep in the sea where warm water met cold and sonar waves bounced back to the surface without revealing the submarine beneath it. But a thermocline was neither reliable, nor predictable, and the USS Canberra had gotten lucky itself a few times as the Besat had broken above the thermocline and shown itself to its pursuer again.

  The Besat wasn’t headed for the upper reaches of the Red Sea, that much was obvious. After passing the Canberra it had sailed north toward the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, with Egypt to the west, Saudi Arabia to the east, and Israel dead ahead. To get into the Gulf, it had to make a run through the only deep-water channel, at the entrance of the Gulf. A channel that was only two miles across, at a point called the Straits of Tiran.

  The Straits of Tiran were the ideal place for the USS Canberra to either put itself, or a quadrotor with dipping sonar, so that they were right on top of the Besat when it hit the deeper water on the other side. Instead, they had reduced speed and were now trailing the Iranian sub by nearly ten miles. They had pulled their aerial assets back, recalled their Sea Hunter unmanned surface vehicle, and the only system still tracking the Besat was Bell’s towed array sonar.

  “Don’t worry, son. We have our reasons. Just tell me what he’s doing.”

  “He’s heading three two three, depth three hundred, fifteen knots steady as a rock, Chief,” Bell told him. “Not even bothering to change depth or course now, engine note is steady, no extraneous noises … with us falling back like this, I’d say he probably thinks we’re giving up the chase, and right now he’s settling down to a nice glass of mint tea.”

  “Well, we’re about to spill his tea,” Goldmann warned Bell. “We’re going to general quarters in a few. Stay sharp.” The Chief patted his shoulder, got up and went along to the next man in the circle.

  Bell swallowed hard. An exercise? It had to be an exercise. There was no apparent reason to…

  “General quarters, general quarters. All hands man your battle stations. The route of travel is forward and up to starboard, down and aft to port. Set material condition ‘Zebra’ throughout the ship. Hostile subsurface contact. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

  Bell jammed his headset on tighter and adjusted his throat mike. Hostile subsurface contact? There was nothing hostile about the Iranian submarine’s posture, unless sailing under the water in a straight line was suddenly defined as a hostile act.

  Drysdale was wide awake this time. The general quarters call on the loudspeaker had barely finished ringing around the CIC before the Tactical Action Officer’s voice came over Bell’s headset. “Target is contact Charlie one one. Air Detection Tracker, I want a UAV five hundred feet over the target, optical tracking only please. Weapons, ASROC, load Swarmdiver, warhead ASFN, prepare to engage.” He took an audible breath. “Ladies and gentlemen, our objective is simple. We have been ordered to disable that Iranian boat. You’re aware, I trust, how rare such an action is … in fact I can’t remember the last time a US warship stopped any Iranian warship at sea in this way, let alone a submarine. This is a high-risk operation and I need you all a hundred and twenty percent on your game.”

  Ears checked his screen. There was nothing more he could do. He still had contact with the Besat on passive sonar and it was as solid as it was going to get at this range. The attack had been timed for the window when the submarine was preparing to squeeze through the Straits of Tiran. As the swarm of undersea drones caught up with them, they would have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  If they even detected them before it was too late.

  ASFN warheads… wow. Usually if you wanted a sub to surface, you’d drop a few Sound Underwater Signal charges into its path to rattle the crew’s eardrums and start jackhammering the boat’s hull with sonar as Ears was already doing. But of course, they could choose to ignore you. Firing a Swarmdiver salvo at the Iranian boat and attacking it with Anti-Screw Fouling Nets was taking the situation to a whole other level. Ears opened a channel to Goldmann. “Chief Goldmann, Sonar.”

  “Go ahead, Ears.”

  “You want me to prep for a Gertrude call?” ‘Gertrude’ was one of the only ways for a surface ship to communicate directly with a submarine, by dropping an underwater ‘telephone’ near the target and hailing it on voice or morse.

  “Not needed. We won’t be moving any closer than we are now unless we need to effect a rescue. But stay alert, Ears. If the Captain of that boat decides it was us who fouled his screw he may just decide to send a missile our way. You’ll hear it before we see it.”

  “Understood, Sonar out.”

  Ears heard other stations report in, including the ASW officer reporting his ASROC loaded and ready to fire, and Drysdale conferring quickly with the Captain on the bridge. “TAO, Weapons, ASROC Swarmdiver salvo, target Charlie one one, match generated solution and shoot.”

  “TAO, ASROC, shot away!”

  Deep inside the superstructure of the ship, ears glued to his headphones, Bell heard and felt nothing as the ASROC launcher punched ten rockets into the air forward of the ship’s bow. The 30-inch munitions inside were in essence small, dolphin-headed torpedoes that used their own onboard sonar to hold formation with each other and guide themselves to the target programmed at the time of their launch. With the Iranian boat ten miles ahead of the Canberra and three hundred feet down, the launch and splashdown were almost simultaneous, and should have been near indetectable to the submarine. Even if the Iranian had picked up the splashes of the Swarmdiver rockets hitting the water five miles behind him, he would have almost
no chance of picking up the sound of their small electric motors over the noise of his own engine and churning screw.

  Almost, but not none. “TAO, Sonar, change in screw revolutions, target is slowing…”

  They’d heard the splashdown.

  Bell had to give it to the Iranian Captain, he had reacted instantly to the sound of the Swarmdiver shoal striking the water behind him. In less than a second he’d cut propulsion and started to drift, to give his sonar operator the best possible chance of hearing what was happening behind him.

  Which was a strategy that would have made sense against conventional torpedoes, turbines powering them loudly through the water at 55 miles an hour. The Iranian had no room to maneuver, but he would have had a good chance of picking up a Mark 48 torpedo in time to be able to change his depth, fire noisemaker and magnetic decoys, even try to jam the attacker’s active-passive acoustic homing system. The much smaller electric engines of the Swarmdiver shoal were nearly inaudible. Ironically, his best strategy would have been to try to outrun the tiny torpedoes, as the Besat had a top speed underwater that was higher than a Swarmdiver shoal. In a straight-line footrace, it could have outpaced them.

  But the Captain of the Besat didn’t fear and couldn’t outrun what he couldn’t hear.

  One mile from the Iranian submarine, the shoal picked up the sound of the boat powering up again, its screw beginning to churn the water, its Captain and crew anxious to keep moving and put the narrow Straits of Tiran behind them. Forming into a long snake-like line astern formation, with a hundred yards separation, the shoal aimed itself at the distinctive sound of the seven-bladed screw of the Besat.

  The first Swarmdiver got to within ten feet of the screw and the compressed air in its warhead fired, shooting a continuous carbon fiber reinforced net at the twenty-foot-wide screw. It caught onto two of the blades and began winding around them as the screw turned. Seconds later, the next Swarmdiver approached and fired its net. And the next … and the next …