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

by FX Holden

  Agents like Zeidan Amar.

  “Ignore that. We have been ordered to urgently reinforce Northern Command. Find a way around Kfar Blum. Other units will take up our positions in the Golan. Clear?”

  “Yes, Colonel.” The man put the handset back on the radio. He signaled to his men. “All right, mount up! Turn it around!”

  Zeidan had returned to his vehicle and sat watching in silence as the trucks reversed, painfully slowly, inching around on the narrow road until finally they were pointed west and began moving off again. Once the junction was clear, he pulled onto the road and headed north. He crawled along, passing military and civilian traffic going in both directions, and stopped at a farmhouse outside Buq’ata where he’d arranged to meet with his men – Druze loyalists who shared his vision of an independent Druze homeland.

  They’d worked into the night and through the next day, finalizing their plans, and then dispersed. In the morning he’d risen, set a pot of coffee to boil on a gas ring and then heard the civilian emergency alarm on their radio. “…has declared a national emergency. Stay indoors unless ordered to leave by police, armed forces or emergency services. All armed forces personnel or reservists are to report in person to their base immediately. This is not an exercise, this is not a rehearsal. This is a government of Israel civil defense emergency broadcast…”

  He smiled. Operation Butterfly. It had begun.

  He poured himself a mug of scalding hot coffee and went outside to take a deep breath of fresh early morning air. It was so quiet here. The search for him would be well underway by now, his disappearance so soon after the death of Colonel Tamir sowing maximum confusion and doubt among the remaining commanders of the Golani Brigade. All over the Golan, the Brigade would have been packing up and moving out, only to be challenged about what the hell they were doing by other units moving west. The roads would be jammed with military traffic going in every direction. And at the peak of all that confusion, a nationwide cyber attack of a scale the world had never seen.

  Not his main concern right now, however.

  Throwing his coffee mug on the ground, he climbed into his Storm, turned on the emergency hazard lights, and pulled out onto the road. Traffic was light, but he sounded his horn at any car or truck too slow to get out of his way.

  After about five hundred yards, he heard a large explosion, then saw a column of white smoke rise into the air from the center of town, still a mile ahead. Their drivers startled, three cars in front of him slammed into each other, blocking the narrow road. He was still a mile out of town.

  Damn, he thought to himself, pulling to the side of the road and jumping out. He grabbed his sidearm from the car and broke into a jog. Too soon! They were to wait for me!

  “Orders, Sergeant?”

  “Park your butts while I see where our ride is, Private.”

  Gunner James Jensen had just alighted from the quadcopter and was standing in a field next to Highway 98 outside Buq’ata, watching the Big Boy copter lift off into the air again in a storm of dust and scrap paper. He ducked his head to avoid the flying gravel and surveyed their situation.

  He’d seen no troop transport trucks or buses on the road as they’d come in to land. And most definitely none that looked like they were in white and blue UN livery. The roads were strangely deserted, especially given it was early morning and farmers were usually early risers. Walking to the vine-lined wire fence at the edge of the field bordering the highway, he saw the outskirts of the township, roughly built two-story houses of concrete slab and tile making up the bulk of the dwellings. Across the highway were two couches that had been dumped by the side of the road under a road sign with Hebrew characters on top and ‘Buq’ata Center’ underneath, pointing to a narrow road that led between two-story civilian houses.

  It was starting to get warm. And he was thirsty, and hungry, so he assumed his squad was too. ‘His squad’. He turned and looked at them, squatted on their haunches in the dirt field. Seven exhausted men and women, comprising a medical corpsman, four riflemen, privates, and two corporals, both of whom were communications techs who had stayed behind at the outpost at Kobani to ensure no sensitive equipment was left behind.

  Jensen guessed why the dilapidated couches had been dumped under the road sign. It was an informal pick-up point and people needed somewhere to sit while they were waiting. It was as good as any place. He decided he’d leave most of the squad by the road sign in the shade of a very weird white concrete sculpture that looked like an upended bowl with a chickpea in it, and take a man into town with him to find some water and food.

  He had just turned to call out to the Marines to form up on him when he heard a loud crack followed by a booming echo, car alarms started beeping all over the town, and a column of white smoke rose up into the sky. Birds scattered into the air in all directions.

  Seriously?

  He crouched down and turned to look at the Marines behind him again. Like himself they had reacted instantly to the now familiar sound of a mortar round or improvised explosive device and had cautiously lowered themselves to the ground, rifles cradled in front of them, fanned outward to cover all approaches with overlapping fields of fire. After six months on a Syrian hilltop facing daily mortar fire and a final battle against Syrian troops which they’d fought hand to hand inside their perimeter, it wasn’t so much training anymore as hard-wired instinct.

  An open field in the baking sun was no place for seven US Marines in combat fatigues and their piles of personal gear. Directly across the highway from him was a two-story house, still under construction, no windows or doors yet installed. It would do.

  “Everyone up!” he called out, running back to them. “Grab the gear. On me.”

  When they were all ready, duffel bags over their shoulders, rifles in hand, he pointed to the construction site on the other side of the suddenly empty highway. “We’re moving to that building. Set up inside and stay alert. I’m taking Bell and going into town to find out what the hell is going on.” The cloud of smoke was boiling up into the air now, something burning underneath it. He grabbed the most senior of his corporals, Patel. “Probably just a house demolition or something, you stay here, stay cool, and for Chrissake don’t shoot anyone unless they start shooting at you. Got that? Now go.”

  He watched them run across the road and pile into the vacant house, then clapped Bell on the back. “Alright, Corpsman, let’s move out.”

  “Aye aye, Sergeant.”

  Both had their rifles and helmets, ballistic vests and field gear, Bell also carrying his medical pack and the standard M27 automatic rifle, Jensen the 6.8mm bullpup next-gen squad weapon and accessories that he’d taken to Kobani for field trials. It had already been adopted by the US Army, but the Marines of course wanted to run their own evaluations.

  Strange. There was no traffic on the highway at all now. Like a tap had been turned off either side of the town. Car alarms were still sounding up ahead, but a few people had started emerging from their homes and onto the street, looking terrified. Jensen couldn’t help notice that a lot of the houses appeared deserted, but that at least made some sense. With 2,000 Syrian tanks parading up and down the border a few miles away, he’d probably have gotten his family as far away as he could too.

  There were a few people walking or running toward the source of the explosion though, others gathered in small groups at their fences to talk. They shot suspicious or worried glances at Jensen and Bell, but no one stopped them. Though he would never have worn it inside Syria, Jensen pulled his US flag patch out of a pocket and slapped it onto the Velcro tape across his right breast where it was easy to see. He indicated to Bell to do the same.

  After winding through a couple of narrow streets, they emerged at an intersection shrouded in dust, smoke and the sadly familiar smell of violent death. Jensen saw immediately what had happened. A pickup parked outside a shop on a corner had detonated, destroying the shops behind it and the cars that had been driving past it, which were bur
ning furiously too, adding to the smoke. Civilian casualties lay strewn across the road, a few shocked casualties were still crawling around.

  “Get to it, Bell,” Jensen said, but Bell needed no direction, he had already run to help a man pumping the chest of a woman who lay unconscious and bleeding on the road in front of them. Looking around himself, Jensen saw a woman in a military jacket and jeans, leaning inside a doorway, with a hand to her bleeding forehead. There was a rifle, bag and utility vest at her feet. She looked like she was still in shock.

  He ran over to her. “Hey, are you alright?”

  She stared at him uncomprehending, then took her hand down and saw the blood.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked.

  She focused on him for the first time. “Yes, of course.” Then she spun around. “Yozam!” She ran back into the ruined shop. Jensen followed her in and found her crouching behind a tumble of shattered furniture. She was speaking frantically in Arabic, shaking the shoulder of an old man who lay in a crumpled ball against the back wall.

  Jensen didn’t need to be a medic to see he was dead.

  Jensen crouched beside her. “Ma’am?”

  She ignored him, trying to turn the old man over.

  “Ma’am, he’s dead, and you’re bleeding. You need to get help.”

  She put a hand up to her face and it came away covered in blood. She had a gash just under her hairline, but as far as he could see it wasn’t too deep. She put her bloodied hand on the shoulder of the dead man.

  “Yozam. Poor Yozam.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Come with me. My corpsman is outside.”

  “Corpsman? You’re American?”

  “Yes. American.”

  He helped her rise to her feet, but before they could start moving toward the door again, Jensen heard the crackle of small arms fire as an automatic weapon opened up outside. There was screaming and yelling, and more automatic fire, somewhere outside and to their right. The woman reacted instantly, running to the front door and scrabbling under fallen furniture and glass. From underneath it she pulled what was clearly a military assault rifle. Putting the strap over her head and shoulder, she flattened herself against the door frame and peered around it. Jensen crouched down at knee height behind her, doing the same.

  “I can’t see him,” she said. “The shots are coming from down by the café.”

  Jensen’s mind was racing. It was a classic terrorist action. Detonate an improvised explosive device to cause carnage and confusion. Wait until first responders arrive or the scene is packed with civilians trying to evacuate the dead and wounded, then open fire on the crowd. There would be more than one shooter. He looked for Bell and found the Marine sheltering behind another white concrete statue, this one in the middle of the roundabout, a big blocky structure with what looked like an arm extended into the air, holding a crown. Bell signaled with his hands. Two shooters. One at his ten o’clock, the other at his four o’clock, opposite sides of the street. When he saw that Jensen had seen him, Bell swung out of cover, sent four quick rounds toward one of the shooters, and then rolled back behind the statue.

  Jensen tapped the woman’s leg. “There. Behind the blue metal sign.”

  As he watched, the shooter stood up from his crouch and returned fire at Bell. Further down the street, where he had no view, he heard the second shooter, also firing. Chips flew off the sculpture Bell was hiding behind. He was pinned.

  “Is that weapon loaded?” he asked the woman.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “I am an IDF reservist.”

  “When I tap your leg, can you fire at the shooter behind that sign? Keep his head down. I’m going to get further down the street, try to flank. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Jensen gathered himself, trying to remember the layout of the street outside. He couldn’t. He had no idea what he was running out into.

  He thumped her calf. “Go!”

  With calm, methodic discipline, the woman swung out and began firing at the shooter down the road behind the sign, in short, two-shot groups. If she was shocked or angry, she was good at controlling it. He ducked behind cover, then signaled to Bell, who also rolled out of cover and began firing.

  Jensen ran out the doorway, hugging the wall to his right. Beside the clinic a small alleyway led away from the roundabout. Without hesitating, he legged it down the alley, away from the shooting, looking for a path or road that would parallel the main street and allow him to get around or behind the two shooters. He ran twenty yards, got to the corner of the next building, saw a path into a yard strewn with building rubble, a fence on the other side of it he could vault, and went that way. He was moving through the back yards of the houses and shops that lined the main street, under washing hanging on lines in the sunshine, scaring cats into cover, bolting past a small child standing in a yard alone, crying.

  Tumbling over a corrugated iron fence he gathered his breath, trying to work out how far he had come. Fifty yards? Seventy?

  He heard rifle fire again, but this time it was close.

  Very close.

  Looking up at the building into whose yard he’d fallen, he saw it looked like a shop of some sort. An air conditioner in a rear window thumped noisily, and the back door was open.

  On the tiled floor inside the door, he saw a body, unmoving.

  As quietly as he could, he approached the door, flattened himself against the rear wall and looked inside. It was a hairdressing salon. A woman lay on the floor in front of him in a pool of blood. Dead.

  Further down, another person. Face down. Not moving.

  He heard automatic rifle fire at the front of the building, then saw a shadow, crouched, move across the front of the salon. The sound of glass, shattering as the shooter fired through the front window at something or someone. When he stopped firing, Jensen heard return fire from up by the roundabout, the Israeli woman and Bell no doubt, but they didn’t have a shot on this guy, they were still engaged with his friend across the road.

  Come on, JJ, get in there! Without thinking, he pulled the magazine out of his bullpup, checked it, and eased it back in. OK, go time. Easy, boy.

  Stepping inside the door on the balls of his feet, he nearly slipped in the blood of the woman in the hallway. Crouched low, he waddled slowly up the hall as the shooter fired again, around to his right, out of sight. Now he heard movement again and steadied himself, waiting for the man to move across the front of the salon into a new shooting position. He sighted at the gap at the end of the hallway.

  A silhouette crouched low and running. He fired.

  Before the sound of his shots had died away he was up and running. The shooter was down, spreadeagled on the floor, reaching for the rifle he’d dropped when he fell.

  Jensen put two more shots into his back, ran over and kicked the rifle away.

  He was dead.

  Moving past him to the salon window, Jensen looked out onto the street. The roundabout was about sixty yards back up the road. The café with the blue metal sign was about twenty yards further up, across the road from him.

  He had a clear line on the man crouched behind the metal sign, sheltering from the suppressing fire still being generated by Bell and the Israeli woman and looking about himself as though considering his options. Sighting through his scope, Jensen put his crosshairs on the middle of the man’s back and fired.

  All Domain Attack: Air

  RAF Akrotiri Air Base, Cyprus, May 18

  Bunny O’Hare was starting to like Shelly Kovacs. Beyond the fact she’d saved her from death by a thousand paper cuts, and got her back to active duty at RAF Akrotiri base, she was delivering on all her promises. Together with the other five pilots of the DARPA Marine F-47B unit she’d been attached to the US 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Akrotiri and within a half a day of their arrival, she’d been airborne with a ‘hex’ of six Fantom drones training in protocols and procedures for coordinating operations with Israeli Defense Force air controllers. As the only unmanned
combat aircraft in the theatre, the 12 aircraft of the Marine Experimental Wing were taking point on the newly declared no-fly zone over the Golan. To reach it, they had to fly south-east from Cyprus, avoiding Syrian ground-based military radar at Tartus, and enter via southern Israel near Tel Aviv, one of the heaviest air traffic corridors in the Middle East.

  “Why not here, at Haifa?” Bunny had asked. “Why detour all the way south to Tel Aviv and mix with all that commercial flight traffic?”

  “China,” Kovacs had shrugged. “Israel and a Chinese venture capital fund built a port at Haifa in the early 2020s and we haven’t been allowed to inspect it. No one is comfortable with the idea of letting them get a close look at our Fantoms flying to and from the Golan.”

  “China has a port in Israel?”

  “Yep. So you have to factor in ingress and egress via Tel Aviv for every mission. We’ve set up a dedicated liaison in IDF Air Force air traffic control, and an open channel between RAF Akrotiri control and Tel Aviv, but run a few sorties to smooth out any bumps. The no-fly zone comes into effect tomorrow,” Kovacs had told her.

  Smooth out any bumps? They were going to be flying experimental unmanned combat aircraft, up to two or three times a day, through a civilian and military air corridor. What could possibly go wrong? Luckily given the tensions in the theatre and the US President’s announcement of a blockade and no-fly zone, most commercial airlines had cancelled their flights into and out of Israel. But there were still hundreds of light aircraft and Israel’s own airline, El Al, which refused to ground its aircraft for something as trivial as a ‘border dispute’.

  The dog-legged route added an extra 260 miles to every mission, reducing the Fantom’s time on station by almost exactly thirty minutes. But it still gave Bunny’s hex nearly four hours over the Golan Heights on every patrol. She would be the only one piloting the six-plane formation. When her flight retired, it would be replaced with two pilots each flying two-plane formations.