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

by FX Holden

  “Not sure that’s even vaguely possible, Matt.” She hung up.

  They were flying into a literal shitstorm. As the last no-fly zone mission had been withdrawing from the UNDOF DMZ, Israel had launched a full-scale air offensive into Syria. There had already been dozens of aircraft in the air over Israel, but O’Hare had been forced to find a way through what seemed like the entire Israeli Air Force for her six Fantoms, avoiding the ire of Israeli military air traffic controllers who no longer seemed to care that she was on a mission to protect UN troops in the Golan. After repeated orders to withdraw her aircraft or be shot down, O’Hare had pushed them down to ground level to get them off Israeli radar and barged across the countryside following river valleys and highways in southern Lebanon to the Golan.

  Kovacs watched from the jump seat as the woman in the pilot’s chair beside her in the trailer scratched the stubble on her close-shaven head and reached for an energy drink at the same time as she plugged in the coordinates that would keep her six-plane hex of Fantoms hugging the nap of the earth over the Golan Heights as soon as they got on station. O’Hare was wearing her headset and heads-up display eyepiece and noticed that Kovacs was looking at her. She pulled an earbud out of her right ear. “Sorry, you talking to me?”

  “No, I was on the phone.”

  “Cool, because I was just getting in the zone, you know. You want to say something, just tap me on the shoulder or get on comms.” O’Hare pointed at a tactical map that showed their aircraft approaching the UNDOF DMZ. “We’ll be going live in five.” With that, she put her earbud back in. “Lava Dogs, Lava Dogs, this is Marine Air aka the Golani Angel, do you read?”

  “That’s not your call sign,” Kovacs pointed out. “And technically you aren’t Marine Air, you’re USAF.”

  “They don’t want to hear that,” O’Hare said, putting her hand over her throat mike. “It’s a morale thing.” She released the mike again. “Come in, Lava Dogs. I got that pizza for you.”

  “Uh, Golani Angel, this is Corporal Patel. You got good news for us? Because ma’am, we need it.”

  “Depends what you call good news, Patel. I got rations, bottled water, enhanced combat helmets with inbuilt headsets, ammunition and medical supplies coming your way by tilt rotor, courtesy your friends at Hatzerim Air Base. ETA 0400.”

  “Awww. No pizza?”

  “Nope. SITFU, Corporal. And the bad news, no cavalry coming to the rescue. The message is ‘do what you can, where you are, with what you have’.”

  “We expected that, ma’am. But we got civilians here. Israeli citizens, mostly. My Sergeant wants to know, do the IDF know that? Maybe they can break through here.”

  Bunny looked across at Kovacs. “How much you think we should tell them?”

  Kovacs didn’t hesitate. “They deserve the full picture.”

  O’Hare nodded. “Not happening, Corporal. Whole of Israel is under intensive cyber attack. IDF ground forces are in disarray. Infantry pulling out of the Golan for no apparent reason, while armor tries to push in. Reserves being called up and stood down at the same time, no one can tell them where to report. Roads are chaos. No one seems to be in charge. In the air, it’s the opposite. Any thunder you might hear is Israeli Air Force jets pounding Syrian positions to your east, or Israeli jets plowing dirt as they get hammered by Russian and Syrian air defenses. It’s a much more even fight than Israel is used to and it isn’t going to plan.” She looked across at Kovacs and covered her mike again. “I forget anything?”

  “Navy.”

  “Oh yeah. And the US President drew a line in the Mediterranean over the Iranian nukes and challenged the Iranians to cross it. They’re protected by some heavyweight Russian missile cruisers, so it looks like they’re going to call his bluff. You got anti-radiation pills, Corporal?”

  “Not unless you included them in our Walmart order, ma’am.”

  “Oh well, you’re a Marine, you probably don’t need hair anyway.”

  “I do like it nice and short, ma’am.”

  O’Hare’s voice softened. Kovacs could tell that for all her banter, O’Hare was full of feeling for the men on the ground below her. “Just like me, Corporal. I’m overhead now. Those Druze boys give you any trouble, you let me know, alright mate?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Good, and Corporal? I’m too young and hot for anyone to call me ma’am. You call me Angel, alright?”

  “Roger, Angel, Lava Dogs out.”

  Bunny had not stopped scanning her tactical and system screens, her heads-up virtual cockpit displays and the physical cockpit around her all through the conversation, but she stopped now and gave Kovacs a long look with her intense green eyes that made Kovacs forget what she was about to say. That look said what they were both thinking.

  Those poor bastards.

  Buq’ata, Golan Heights, May 19

  ‘Those poor bastards’ was the thought going through Lieutenant Abdolrasoul Delavari’s mind at the same time, in more or less the same place, but for an entirely different reason. He was squinting through the sight on his Saher anti-materiel rifle at the second floor of the target compound and he could see the civilian ‘human shields’ shuffling about inside. He had counted no fewer than ten civilians so far, and several were sporting bandaged limbs or heads, indicating they had been wounded. It was obvious why the Americans had taken the civilians with them – it was the only thing preventing the Druze militia from mortaring the building into rubble.

  The sight filled him with purpose. A single goal. Their freedom.

  The Syrian chopper had dropped him at the outskirts of Buq’ata four hours earlier, and after a quick briefing with the local commander – a Druze officer – which had taught him nothing new, he had started scouting shooting locations. He had identified four, and none of them he found totally satisfactory. The enemy had chosen their location well, occupying a hillside on the highest part of the low-lying town. It had the appearance of a civilian house, but his experienced eyes saw through that veneer. It was a veritable fortified compound; on cleared ground at least two hundred yards from any cover, surrounded on three sides by a waist-high reinforced concrete wall, a metal gate only wide enough to admit a single adult and, at the rear, a long vertical drop to an old quarry site. A Spetsnaz squad could probably scale the cliff face, but it was not something a regular infantry squad could easily assault through.

  The construction site with an elevated water tower had proven itself to be his best lie. It was more or less level with the compound’s wall, allowing unobstructed vision into three sides of the compound and anyone standing in windows on the second floor. But too easy for the occupants to shelter behind the concrete walls, below window level or around the unobservable rear of the house. So he would only get one shot, maybe two, before the Marines found cover and started returning fire. By then, he would have moved on to his next hide. An inferior one, and the third, worse still.

  The biggest issue with all three sites was that none gave him a line of fire to the men he knew were on the rooftop terrace. There was a small safety wall with a concrete base and wire runners around its outer edge, broken in places due to disrepair, and the breaks were being used by a sniper team. But they were careful. He could see the muzzle of their rifle occasionally poking out of one of the breaks in the wall, but they never raised a head or limb. He had photographed the rifle muzzle, zoomed and examined it, but couldn’t make out the type. The bore told him it was a large caliber, though. All three of the hides he had chosen would be within the range of a good marksman with a rifle like that.

  There would be no value in trading shots with anyone on that roof. He would have to fire and move immediately to a flanking position. He had no chance of taking the rooftop shooter out. The Druze officer said he had access to a mortar team north, in the town of Mas’ada. He’d intended to use them to support Syrian troops entering from the north, if needed, but he suggested they could be brought down to Buq’ata, to mortar the roof. Mortar the compou
nd too. But Delavari didn’t like that option. A mortar on a suburban roof could crash through and kill the hostages immediately below it. A mortar intended for the compound, poorly aimed, could hit the building’s façade, killing anyone near a window.

  “I’ve been sent here to save those civilians, not massacre them,” he told the officer.

  The man had looked bemused. “You are the specialist,” he’d replied. “But do it quickly. Or I will bring that mortar crew here and get it done.”

  Delavari looked at the sky. “It will be dusk soon. I will have the setting sun behind me. That is my window. US Marines have excellent night vision equipment. If we wait too long, they will have the advantage.” He already had his ammunition belt and water bottle in his webbing, so he lifted his rifle, holding it across his chest. “It will be done by nightfall, or it will have to wait until daylight. I make the shot. God determines the outcome.”

  James Jensen had learned in the siege of Kobani that if you wait for the enemy to come to you, he will oblige; at the time of his choosing, in ways unexpected, and usually with overwhelming force. He had no intention of allowing the Druze colonel that luxury.

  Lying flat on the rooftop terrace behind his sniper team, Jensen and Amal Azaria had been guiding a recon drone around the town, mapping the Druze roadblocks, troop concentrations, garrisons and what seemed to be their base of operations in a high walled villa near the center of town. They found two marksmen on nearby roofs with radios, keeping an eye on their compound and reinforcing the need for the Marines to keep their heads down and the civilians to stay away from the front and side windows. Luckily the second-floor bathroom was at the rear of the house. And thankfully, they hadn’t seen any other armored vehicles, just jeeps and trucks, so another armored assault seemed unlikely, for now. Jensen and his few Marines couldn’t take on an entire Druze garrison, but he could reduce the threat to his squad and the civilians by persuading the Druze colonel to pull his marksmen further back.

  Having marked the GPS coordinates of the two Druze riflemen, they crawled down from the roof and went out to Amal’s workshop. Jensen watched, fascinated, as she pulled drone parts off shelves and started building a small drone about a third the size of those they had used to take the Namer apart. Not satisfied with the rotors she had on hand, Amal started her generator, moved to the 3D printer, called up the specs for slightly larger propellers and quickly printed them before fitting them to the drone and powering down the generator again. After a quick test flight with a dummy weight, she fitted cameras, a miniaturized guidance system and a battery pack.

  All this she did while whistling absently to herself. Jensen decided not to disturb her with questions.

  She turned the drone on its back, belly up, and opened a compartment about the size of a teacup, with two studs visible inside it. From a locker in the floor protected with a thumbprint coded lock, she pulled something that looked like a half baseball, studded with ball bearings. It fitted exactly into the teacup-shaped compartment and she pushed a detonator into the soft half-ball, connected the detonator wires to the studs inside the compartment and closed the compartment door, screwing it shut.

  Letting out a big breath, she turned the drone the right way up and stepped back.

  “Always happy I don’t kill myself when I’m doing that,” she said with a smile, pushing a black lock behind her ear.

  “That was explosive?” Jensen asked. “C4?”

  “BCHMX bonded C4,” she told him. “Higher detonation velocity and blast heat.” Putting the first drone aside she picked a second drone frame from off a shelf. “Unfortunately, also slightly more sensitive. Don’t sneeze.”

  Jensen was about to pick the drone up to examine it, but stopped in his stride.

  She looked over her shoulder. “Just joking, Sergeant. It is more sensitive, but feel free to sneeze. Gently.”

  As he watched from behind her, she went to her workbench and repeated the process, building a second identical drone.

  The entire job had taken under thirty minutes.

  She sat the second drone on her bench next to the first, and then went to the door of the shed, pulling it wide. Late afternoon light spilled in, highlighting her silhouette, and he saw her straighten her back, roll her shoulders. She returned to the bench, leaning on it with arms wide, either side of her drones.

  “What is easier?” Jensen asked. “We want to hit them in daylight or dark?”

  “The cameras have both daylight and infrared modes,” she explained. She picked up the same control unit she had used to send the first wave of drones against the Namer IFV. “But it will be better to attack now, in low light, while we can still see to fly around any obstructions.”

  “How loud is it?”

  “In here, it will sound louder because this is a large open space with metal walls. In the open air it is no louder than a small battery-powered hand fan. The Druze riflemen won’t hear it coming until it’s too late.” She fished in a cabinet and brought out another control unit. “Are any of your men qualified to fly these sorts of drones? It would be better to attack the two riflemen simultaneously.”

  Jensen considered. “Patel is, but I want him on overwatch while we do this. It may flush out other shooters we haven’t spotted.” He held out his hand and took the control unit, looking it over. “This looks a lot like the controls I used to command the Legged Squad Support Systems I was testing in Kobani. This one here is direction, these are…?”

  She pointed at the various controls on the unit. “Altitude, attitude, speed, power on/off – don’t touch that – and trigger.”

  “I can work this.”

  “Good. You take the control units, I will carry the drones,” she said, implicitly not trusting him not to blow them both up. He was fine with that.

  He followed her out of the shed and she put the drones on the ground in the middle of the concrete apron in front of the shed, sliding the shed door closed behind her and locking it. He watched as she crouched to move the drones further apart, wincing as she thoughtlessly scratched the wound on her forehead, making it bleed again.

  “‘Toymaker’. How did you … you know?”

  “Get my nickname, or how did I get into this line of work?”

  “Well, the first one is kind of obvious. The second one.”

  She stood, taking a control unit from him. “In the movie they make about this war, this is where I would tell you about how my family was killed by terrorists and this is the best way I found to use my talents to avenge their deaths…”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t be. They weren’t.” She hit a switch on the drones and their rotors started spinning. “I do this because the IDF paid for my university degree, and I was recruited by the Defense Research Directorate based on a paper I wrote about the potential military applications of facial recognition technologies. My obsession with drones and robotics came later. I tell myself that my work will one day save Israeli soldiers’ lives, because instead of sending them out on potentially life-threatening patrols, we’ll be sending out my drones instead.”

  “We could have used these in Kobani, that’s for sure,” Jensen said.

  “Yes. But that’s just what I tell myself. Between you and me, Sergeant, I do this because I just love building little winged messengers of death.” She winked at him and bent down again to fuss with one of the units.

  “I’ll go topside and tell Patel what’s about to go down. Bell can let the others know.”

  “Don’t be long, we only have another thirty minutes of light.”

  Little winged messengers of death? OK, she was messing with him. Wasn’t she?

  Delavari settled on his stomach on the platform of the water tower. He’d brought two wooden boxes up with him and placed them in front of him to hide his silhouette, laying the muzzle of his Saher between them. Using a small laser rangefinder no larger than a pencil torch, he measured the distances to the rooftop, the surrounding walls, the front gate
, and the front door of the house, and dialed them as presets on his scope so he could quickly flip between them if the Sergeant showed himself.

  Around two thousand, two hundred yards. At one and a quarter miles into an elevated target, probably one of the longest shots he’d ever attempted. It would be an almost impossible shot with the Degtyarev’s normal 12.7mm rounds, but a Saher with 14.5mm Klimovsk smart rounds had a maximum range of nearly two miles, the bullets able to artificially sustain their trajectory by flying high and then gliding toward their target for longer-range strikes before a final burst of acceleration. His bullets would take around two and a half seconds to cross the distance between himself and the villa and all he had to do was keep his crosshairs on the man’s torso.

  The Saher could be magazine-fed if chambered for standard 12.7mm rounds, but not when fitted with the barrel and bolt needed for the Klimovsk smart rounds. With those it was a single-shot weapon. Reaching to the pouch by his right hand, he took out a round, inspected it and loaded the rifle.

  He estimated he had thirty, maybe forty minutes of light. A very small window in which to strike. But he didn’t like being out in the cold Buq’ata night. In an environment like this, even a heat signature-reducing ghillie suit wouldn’t make him invisible to the Marines’ night vision.

  But Abdolrasoul Delavari had a secret talisman, one that had kept him safe on battlefields from Chechnya to Syria. Around his neck, on a gold chain, was a rabbit foot from a rabbit he had shot in a field near his home as a boy. As he settled in, he touched it once, for luck.

  Movement, on the target rooftop.

  He leaned to his sight, pulling the stock in against his cheek, the forestock resting on a folding bipod. He had definitely seen movement, but now, nothing. They were very disciplined, these Marines. It suggested to him that they had been under fire before. Learned the hard way.