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

by FX Holden

  “They…” Kovacs protested. “That attack is going to be logged, O’Hare. You can’t just call it a ‘guns test’ and expect it to be ignored.”

  “Aren’t you the one who pulls those logs?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Are you going to write me up?”

  “No. Those Marines are in big trouble, I get that, but…”

  “Guns test, Shelly.”

  Sheer luck had seen all of his men survive the onslaught of HE rounds that had poured into the road around the already burning Namer IFV. It rocked and bucked with hundreds of impacts, shrapnel ricocheting into nearby walls, splintering almond trees and wooden power poles. The earlier drone attack and destruction of the IFV had driven any remaining townsfolk out of the nearby area, but anyone who had been unlucky enough to have been caught out in the open would have been shredded.

  When the jets had first appeared, he had almost dismissed them, assuming they would not dare attack targets near a densely populated civil district. He’d revisited that assumption.

  What kind of Army was this that dealt such destruction so casually?

  One to be taken seriously. He’d become too used to the passivity of the UNDOF troops. These Marines were not cut from the same pale blue cloth.

  He had been smoking a cigarette, but he stopped and threw it on the ground. He looked around for the radio operator, mind working at a mile a minute. He may just have come upon a way to neutralize the American presence in Buq’ata and make them pay for what they had done here today.

  “Get me Iranian liaison on the radio.”

  Iranian Quds Force base, Damascus, Syria, May 18

  Abdolrasoul Delavari relished calls such as the one he had just received from the Syrian captain in charge of Quds Force support for Operation Butterfly.

  The man had laid a map on a table and pointed to a small town sixty miles south-west of Damascus. Buq’ata.

  “This is the situation. An allied Syrian Druze unit has been engaged with US Marines at this position…”

  “US Marines? In the Golan?”

  “You heard the US President’s speech? We think these are the US UNDOF troops he was talking about. As far as we can tell, they were not here a week ago, but they are here now.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Not for them. They got into a firefight with our Druze allies and are holed up in a villa on the outskirts of town here using some residents as human shields. The Druze tried to free the civilians but were driven back. They took casualties.”

  Delavari raised his eyebrows. “And?”

  “And we need to win the hearts and minds of the Druze in Buq’ata. If we can free those civilians it will be a major coup. We will transport you to Buq’ata by chopper. You are to reconnoiter the area and despatch their commander…”

  Delavari smiled. “Ah. Thank you. Just the kind of mission I like.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you. He’s just a Sergeant, apparently. If that is not enough to persuade them to abandon the civilians and flee for the UN outpost, then take down a couple more. They’ll soon see their situation is hopeless.”

  Delavari smiled. “They are with the UN observer force, you say?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m surprised they even know how to use a rifle. UN troops are usually more proficient at waving white flags.”

  He’d left the briefing in the best of moods. Even a Sergeant was a worthy target, if he was commanding this American force. Cut the head off the snake, it was always the quickest way. Just like his hit on the Golani Brigade commander, Tamir. His was just one of a series of coordinated decapitation attempts all along the Golan ceasefire line. If even half of the attacks he’d been briefed about had been successful, the Golani Brigade would now be rudderless, floundering in a leaderless vacuum. Israel itself was in chaos thanks to cyber attacks. Syrian media said Israeli spy satellites had been brought down too by ‘Syrian strategic missile forces’. Syria and Iran had no anti-satellite missile capability, so he assumed that had been done with Russian assistance.

  Operation Butterfly was proceeding nicely, as far as he could see.

  And he had a new mission. A mission that befitted his skills. A mission he could tell his children about one day. The time he freed ten innocent civilians from the brutish Americans. Fifty civilians, perhaps, by the time he was finished telling the story.

  He’d been given GPS coordinates for the target dwelling and gone back to his tent and studied his own maps. Over the last three months he’d just about walked every single mile of the ceasefire line from the slopes of Mount Hermon in the north to Al Asbah, thirty miles to the south. He knew all the routes into Buq’ata, from roads a car could travel, to narrow paths barely suitable for goats.

  Hmm. The Americans had chosen well. The house was isolated, with a clear field of fire for about two hundred yards around. It was on a small rise with forest at the bottom. He had shot from nests in trees before, but these would probably be too low. He checked satellite imagery of the town to the south of the target. Most of the houses there were two-story, too low. But … here. Someone was building a three-story house by the look of it. With a water tank on the roof. That might give him the elevation he needed. He got out an old wooden divider he’d had since he was a recruit and measured the distance to the target. One and a quarter miles.

  Well, it seemed the Zoroastrian engineer was about to get his wish. It wasn’t a shot he could make with his Degtyarev. But with a Saher anti-materiel rifle and a few Klimovsk 14.5mm smart rounds, he’d be able to sight on just about anyone on the western side of the compound silly enough to expose themselves above the walls … maybe even get an angle into the windows of the house. Depending on the thickness of the walls, the heavy-caliber Saher might even be able to punch through them to any troops hiding inside. He would explore other sites, but it was good to have somewhere to start.

  Something caught his eye on the satellite photos. Aha. A rooftop terrace. He wouldn’t be able to get up high enough for that. A drone with a frag could do it, if he could scrounge one up. But if the Marines put a shooter up there…

  If Delavari had been the kind of man who licked his lips, he’d have been licking them right then. A worthy cause, and the chance of an opponent, in a superior position, looking for him. But he was going to battle with a new weapon in his hands that tipped the balance cleanly in his favor.

  What more could a lowly tailor-turned-sniper ask for?

  After she got out of her trailer and wrote up her mission report, O’Hare went back to her barracks and spent two hours on the telephone from RAF Akrotiri to multiple officers at the Lava Dogs headquarters in Kaneohe Station, Hawaii. She spoke with a lot of people who had no idea how to help Jensen, several who had no idea what a country-wide civil emergency meant and told her she should be calling UNDOF headquarters in Israel, and several others who insisted she should call the IDF commander responsible for the Golan Heights and speak with him.

  After that last piece of advice she slammed her cell phone down on the table and screamed. “Oh, right, just call the guy trying to kill your Marines?! Because that makes sense!” She had one more lead. A second lieutenant called Gudinski who had served in COP Meyer in Kobani with the 1st Marines 3rd Battalion but who had been wounded and evacuated before the rest of the unit.

  “Yeah, I heard,” the man said. “The Corpsman who patched me up is with them, Bell. Helluva thing. He owes me money from a card game.”

  “Well, if you ever want to collect, you’re going to have to work for it because right now he’s in a tough spot, out of luck and out of friends.”

  “Let me make some calls.”

  Post-adrenaline fatigue hit O’Hare as she put the phone down, and when it started buzzing again she found herself fast asleep at the small desk in her quarters, face stuck by sweat to a piece of paper under her cheek. She pulled it off and grabbed the phone. “Ow, bloody hell.”

  “Sorry, is that Flying Officer O’Hare?”
>
  “Yes, in person. You have news I hope, Lieutenant Gudinski?”

  “Not so good. There is a reason you were getting the runaround. Those troops are supposed to be there, and they have to stay there. There are reasons we can’t pull them out.”

  “What bloody reasons?”

  “Well, if you’re a pilot patrolling the no-fly zone, you’re the reason. It’s a political thing. That no-fly zone is supposed to be for their protection. If we pull them out, there’s no one to protect.”

  “Tell your Air Force that. I was overhead, guns hot, and they pulled me out.”

  “That just ain’t right.”

  “No, it ain’t, Gudinski.”

  “I’ll get back to you, O’Hare.”

  She decided a shower and cup of tea and some toast would be the trick. Luckily Akrotiri was an RAF station, so they had decent tea in the NAAFI canteen, but the only spread they had for toast was an evil black goo called Marmite. She was just about dozing off again, though, when Gudinski called back. She looked at her watch in panic … 1930 hours! She was due back on the flight line in an hour. The Marine officer had good news.

  “Alright. Our CO has put a rocket up the commander for the 432nd Air Wing. You’ll find them being a little more assertive from here in. The bad news, the nearest US presence to you is at Hatzerim Israeli Air Force Base. There’s a Marine company there from the 1st Battalion, 24th Marines, but they’re a hundred eighty miles from Buq’ata.”

  “That’s not a factor if they can get troops onto a Big Boy. They could be in Buq’ata inside an hour.”

  “Not going to happen. President’s orders, the CO said. No more US boots on the ground in the Golan. But they’re standing by to send supplies.”

  “Do they do cheese crust pizza?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got a list for you. Ammunition first: 5.56mm for M27 carbines, .338 for a Barrett sniper rifle, 40mm grenades…”

  West Wing, Washington, DC, May 19

  Carmine Lewis’ biorhythms were all screwed up. Henderson had kept them talking through the various scenarios until so late in the night/early morning that they’d ordered coffee and omelettes to keep themselves going at about 0300.

  Now it was 0930 and she was back in the situation room for an ExComm meeting and craving pizza. Her biorhythms weren’t the only thing that was messed up. So was the news from Israel as it headed into its first full day of unrelenting cyber warfare.

  “Israel is one of the most digitally connected countries in the world,” Tonya Dupré was explaining to the group around the meeting table. “Small population, high tech, one of the first on board with the internet of everything. The attackers went after their medical system first – every Israeli has a digital patient journal, every hospital, clinic and surgery sends and receives health data and payment information to and from about three major health insurance funds. Knock out the HMOs, you bring the healthcare system to its knees, and that’s what they did.” She had a map onscreen of key data hubs across Israel, with spider lines of connections showing how interdependent they were. “The HMOs were their attack vector into the banking system. Israeli banks process about 27 million transactions with the HMOs hourly – the attackers spiked the data flowing between the HMOs and the banks and brought the bank networks down. From the bank networks the attack spread to the stock market.” Hubs across the map of Israel started going blood red.

  “Nothing military?” McDonald asked. “I thought they’d also lost air traffic control, radar, communications?”

  “They went after the civilian infrastructure first,” Tonya replied. “Which included civil airports. Since most airports in Israel are dual purpose – civil/military – they were pretty hard targets, but knocking out air traffic control compromised both civilian and military operations. It was the satellite attack that was the vector to Israel’s military communication network. Somehow, the attackers were able to insert attack code into an older communication satellite network Israel launched in the 1990s and kept functional mainly as a backup for other, better defended networks. That Kirov cruiser took down just enough of the newer satellites that Israel had to bring their old network online. The minute they did, the attack code was downloaded and started spreading through their land-based comms network.” Two thirds of the map turned red. “We still don’t know how they penetrated the control stations for the electricity grid. We think that attack was Iranian, so it could have been through human agents working inside the utilities, rather than a digital attack vector, but seventy percent of the grid was knocked out within the first four hours.” The map went almost entirely red.

  Henderson turned to Carmine. “What is the status now, Director?”

  “As bad as it can get, Mr. President. Stock exchange was up for about an hour last night, back down again. Queues a mile long outside every bank as people try to pull their cash out, but the government has announced a $100 daily withdrawal limit. No money is moving into the country since international trades are in chaos. Half the electricity grid is back up, but only intermittent since the damage was both physical and cyber. That side of things is a total cluster. The Russians and Iranians must have been preparing this for months, even years. The Israeli military is recovering fast, though. Tel Aviv air traffic control is being managed by mobile military radar, emergency and military traffic only. Haifa the same. Israel’s air defense capacity will be the first to recover, ground and naval will take a little longer.”

  Defense Secretary McDonald saw all eyes turn to him. “The Israeli Air Force is still combat capable. They’ve got their major air bases back up with mobile radar and AWACS units providing command and control and have doubled their already high level of airborne patrols. We understand the Navy is having trouble contacting ships at sea since their satellites went down … they’ve asked for our help and we’re looking into it. Might be able to use our Aegis destroyers to relay their messages but Israel would need to trust us with their comms and intel and they aren’t there yet. Army is able to fight in place, but large-scale maneuvers will be hard to coordinate. They issued a general callup of all reserves, but they don’t have an overview of who is reporting in where. Radio comms are running on diesel backup generators and the cell phone network is down so C3i systems are compromised. They’re estimating another 12 to 24 hours to get everything back on line, assuming the attack doesn’t morph.”

  Tonya had been reading an intel report on her tablet and interrupted. “I don’t think the attack is over yet, Mr. Secretary. Israel is one of the most internet connected nations on the planet. Eight out of ten homes are what you’d call ‘smart homes’; devices connected to the internet, personal digital assistants in every room for ordering groceries and telemedicine appointments, you name it. The hackers got into the personal assistant software – every damn device in every connected home in Israel has just started broadcasting this message, in Hebrew, Arabic and English.” She tapped a voice file and the broadcast filled the room. After a few moments of Hebrew, it switched to English. “This is an Israeli Government announcement. False messages are being broadcast on radio and television calling on reservists to report to their units. These messages should be ignored. All reservists should remain in their homes and await further instruction. Repeating, this is an Israeli Government announcement…”

  McDonald pulled a paper out of the folder in front of him. “Great. And if that weren’t enough, you remember the commander of their Golani Brigade was assassinated? Well, his replacement is missing now.”

  “Who?”

  “The acting commander of the Golani Brigade. Dropped off the grid yesterday morning, not seen since. Israeli brass is worried he’s either been assassinated too or abducted.” McDonald put the report down. “Another two Israeli battalions in their Northern Command have mutinied, refusing to serve alongside women. If Syria was going to move on the Golan, now would be the time to do it.”

  “So what’s holding them back?”

  S
ecretary of State Shrier held up his hand. “I believe I may have the answer to that, Mr. President. After your call to the Russian President, Iranian diplomats approached the Swedes in Tehran. They admitted nothing regarding the ongoing cyber offensive, but said they would be interested in Sweden working with Russia to broker discussions with Israel regarding…” He picked up a note of his own, “… uh, ‘improving bilateral relations, particularly with regard to limits on strategic missile systems’.”

  “No mention of a seat at that table for the USA,” VP Sianni remarked. “What a surprise.”

  At that moment Karl Allen, the President’s Chief of Staff, looked up from checking his telephone. “Sorry to break in. Can we turn on the TV? We need to see this.”

  Henderson waved to an aide and as he brought the TV news feed up on the big screen at the end of the boardroom table, Carmine snatched up her telephone and saw a stream of messages had come in since the start of the meeting. The one at the top was the latest from her people and she opened it first.

  Ignore earlier messages. Here is latest. Israeli Air Force 0900 Eastern launched a massive air offensive against targets inside Syria and Iran. Air-to-air and air-to-ground attacks underway against Syria and Iran. Israeli aircraft also attacking Iran through Turkey. Targets in Syria confined to Syrian and Iranian ground and missile forces and military targets in Damascus. Targets in Iran including suspected missile launch sites and nuclear facilities at Fordo, Bushehr, Natanz, Arak. Russian and Israeli aircraft engaged over Syria. Israel ground forces still in place, no sign of Israeli armor movement, yet.

  The TV screen snapped to life, showing a breathless reporter in nighttime Damascus yelling into a microphone as ground-to-air missiles and cannon tracer lit the sky behind him and a cloud of smoke from a recent ground strike rolled into the air. Tickertape rolling across the bottom of the screen said: Israeli PM blames Iran for cyber attack chaos. Announces retaliatory airstrikes are underway on Iranian forces in Syria and nuclear facilities inside Iran.