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

by FX Holden

  No. If someone was there, they were keeping low. He had no shot. He quickly scanned the walls of the compound. A possible shot on a man near the eastern wall, but in a private’s uniform. Not a sergeant. He ran his scope over the doors and windows to the house. Civilians only, second floor, rear, no uniforms. He scanned over the rooftops between himself and the villa. The Druze officer had told him he had two marksmen already in place, keeping an eye on the Marines, but they weren’t visible to him. He’d arranged that they would hold their fire while he got into position even if they had a target, but if he had not taken his shot before 1930 hours, they would start firing into the compound and try to provoke return fire and movement.

  It was 1904. He settled in to wait.

  Delavari did not work with a spotter. He preferred to reduce the risk he would be seen and one man was always safer in that respect than two. He also preferred hides that made unlikely attack vectors because they were small, high, narrow … things that often precluded taking a second man along.

  If he had worked with a spotter, though, he may have seen the two small drones lift off from behind the target villa, rise high in the air above it, and then zoom south and west. And he may have wondered why.

  Jensen and Amal were seated in the rear courtyard, butts on the concrete apron, backs against the metal shed, eyes fixed on the small screens in front of them. The drones automatically steered to the GPS coordinates Amal had fed them based on the observations they’d made of the Druze shooters’ positions. Once there, they hovered a hundred feet overhead.

  Amal had also sent a surveillance drone to loiter between the two shooters, even higher, and watch for any other movement in the streets below. Its wide-angle vision showed in a small window in the corner of the control units’ main screens.

  “Contact. I have my target, seated behind a laundry line. Looks half asleep,” Jensen said.

  “Mine is … I’m going to infrared,” Amal said. “Mine is a little more careful. Lying down behind a planter box. There is a roof overhang partially obscuring him. I will need to make an angled approach.”

  “Clear to engage?”

  “Yes. Watch your speed, don’t approach too quickly. Trigger the bomb at about four feet for best effect.”

  “Roger.” Jensen watched the zoomed image of the man below him. The guy was very relaxed. Reaching for what looked like cigarettes now.

  Amal nodded to Jensen. “On three. One, two, three…”

  Jensen kept the crosshairs of his camera centered on the man’s head and shoulders and gently pulled back on the altitude control from the drone. Amal was right, it responded immediately, diving straight down, covering fifty feet in milliseconds. Easy, JJ! He eased off the stick a little and slowed the descent … twenty feet, ten, five…

  Now!

  Delavari jerked his cheek from his rifle as the first explosion briefly lit the sky directly ahead of him, about halfway between himself and the target villa. It was high, somewhere on a rooftop. A grenade, it sounded like.

  Then a second, further west. The same small bright explosion, the same sharp grenade-like report.

  What… he bent to his scope, watched the compound carefully, thought he saw someone behind the wall pump a fist in the air and pull it down again.

  No small arms fire. No movement.

  From the street below he heard a car moving in the direction of one of the blasts and then saw it pass between buildings. Shouts of alarm. A jeep, going to check what had happened, perhaps. A few faces appeared at windows around the area of the explosions, but they were only a few because it seemed most of the townsfolk knew to keep their heads down and their curiosity in check right now.

  Delavari didn’t like to speculate without data, but right now he was willing to speculate that the Druze officer had just lost his two forward scouts.

  The frustration with blowing up their drones was that as soon as they did, they were blind. But Amal switched her screen to the surveillance drone and took control of it with her unit as soon as she had triggered her bomb.

  Jensen leaned over to watch as she maneuvered the drone over the Druze rifleman’s position to the east. It was Jensen’s … the man in the nest of laundry.

  “He’s down,” Amal said, pointing to shredded, blood-stained sheets that obscured an unmoving body. A rifle was visible on the ground beside it, and a leg.

  “Call that a kill,” Jensen said dispassionately.

  “Yes. Now the other.”

  There had been about two hundred yards between the two riflemen and the vision dipped and swayed a little as Amal steered the drone over the second site. Jensen saw the roof overhang she had been talking about, and some blasted planter boxes and furniture. A long-barreled rifle. Their target was not there.

  “Here,” Amal pointed at the screen. “Blood. A lot of blood.”

  Jensen squinted. “Looks like he dragged himself back under cover. Into a door or window maybe? Or someone came out and dragged him in.”

  “I tried to get in under that roof but I may have triggered it too early.”

  “You tagged him, that’s for sure. A soldier doesn’t leave his rifle behind unless he’s hurt badly and can’t hold it.” He held out his hand for a high five.

  She looked at it sadly. “I don’t feel like celebrating.”

  He pulled his hand back. “No. But that will give them pause for thought. Force them to pull their scouts further back. The greater the distance, the harder the shot, the less accurate they’ll be if we…”

  As he was speaking, there was a crack of a far-off shot and a cry from the front of the house.

  “Corpsman!! Bell!!”

  Delavari had decided that if the Marines had taken out his fire support, as he suspected they had, then he would need to create movement inside the compound himself.

  He had a shot on what looked like a man’s elbow or part of an arm. Between the gatepost and the wall. A man sitting with his back to the wall, head well below the top of it, thinking himself safe. Thinking about food or sex, no doubt. Or maybe sharing a moment of celebration with his comrades over whatever had just transpired.

  Delavari had put his crosshairs on the small scrap of desert-colored uniform, took a breath, held it, and pulled gently on his trigger with the tip of his right forefinger.

  He kept the crosshairs on the elbow in the gap between the wall and the gate until the round slammed home and the target disappeared. Then he worked the bolt of the Degtyarev, ejected the spent round, reached for his ammunition pouch and loaded another, scanning the front of the villa as he did so.

  Movement on the roof. No shot.

  Movement in the compound, behind the walls. No shot.

  Movement inside the house. A shadow by the front door. Two shadows.

  Ah, good. Hello Sergeant.

  Jensen stood well back inside the hallway of the house and surveyed the situation in the front yard of the compound. Lopez was curled in a ball on the ground, clutching a bloodied arm. Wallace on the other side of the gate, head down, yelling for Bell. Buckland, Stevens and Johnson on the north and west walls also had their heads down.

  “Anyone hear where it came from?” Jensen yelled.

  “West. A long way,” Wallace yelled back.

  “Lopez, talk to me!”

  The private lifted her head. “Hit in the arm, Sarge. Need … a tourniquet.”

  They had to generate covering fire so Bell could get out to Lopez without being shot too. But unless they had a target, they would just be exposing themselves and spraying at nothing.

  Bell was tucked in behind Jensen, who put a hand behind him to stop Bell moving up. “Wait.” Jensen turned toward the stairs behind him. “Patel! You see anything? Look out a mile or more…”

  He didn’t hear the bullet, but he felt it. It slammed into his upper thigh just to the left of the dangling groin protector of his body armor. He staggered back into the hallway, collapsing onto Bell and pulling him to the floor with him.

  Delavar
i watched with satisfaction as the Marine Sergeant was punched backwards.

  Mr. Klimovsk, please take a bow, he thought to himself as he jacked the empty smart bullet casing out of the chamber and put it in a pocket in his trousers. Pushing himself backwards, he reached the rear of the water tank platform, worked his legs over the back of it and dropped the four feet to the unfinished concrete roof. He was back in cover now, no way he could be seen from the villa.

  The shot had gone precisely where he’d aimed. The man had been wearing body armor and, at such extreme range, he needed a soft body part to seriously wound, but the man was in shadow and moving his upper body. The head and torso were not high probability shots. So Delavari had chosen the upper right thigh, beside the groin, where the 14.5mm copper-jacketed bullet would bury itself deep in the flesh, flattening as it struck and tearing through skin and muscle to the deep femoral artery beneath. A blood highway directly from the heart to the leg, as thick as the tip of an index finger, blood loss would be quick and massive. A tourniquet was near impossible to apply and, unless plugged, the victim could lose just about every pint of blood in their body within five minutes. Blood pressure fell dangerously low, the body tried to get blood to vital organs, and then the body’s temperature dropped. Put together, it was called the ‘shadow of death’.

  As he reached ground level, rifle gripped across his chest again, he checked his watch. It was 1914. He would return to the Druze command center, find a bunk and sleep until dawn.

  Then, unless something transpired during the night, it was time to hunt again.

  Amal had heard the cry for help, but she had not run into the house. Instead, she stayed with her recon drone, sending it higher and widening the angle of the lens on its camera so that she could more quickly scan the rooftops below. She saw Druze soldiers on the streets near the buildings where they had attacked the two riflemen. Saw what looked like four men running through town with a stretcher. More soldiers loitering uneasily on street corners, speaking with civilians at a roadblock…

  There!

  A figure with a rifle, climbing off a water tower, about a mile and a half back. Was that him? Was a shot like that even possible?

  Her drones had an optical target lock feature. As long as he stayed out in the open, it would stay high and follow him through town. If he went into or behind a building it would loiter and then try to reacquire him based on the images it had taken after being locked on. But a change of clothing, even a hat, could fool it.

  If the target knew they were being followed.

  She locked the drone onto the figure now walking calmly back through the streets of Buq’ata, rifle held to his chest, and carrying her control unit, thumbed the shed lock, heaved the door aside and ran back into her workshop.

  She hastily pulled out a large, wide drawer that held drone bodies and selected a needle-nosed fuselage with a push propeller. From another drawer she pulled a set of wide wings and clipped them on. The motor, guidance system and battery were in a single unit and she quickly located this, sliding it into the fuselage.

  Warhead.

  This particular longer-range drone had a nose compartment that could be fitted with an extra camera, tear gas, forward-firing one-shot munitions or explosives. She hesitated. She could go with a shotgun payload, a 3D-printed shotgun chamber made to fit into the nose of the drone and able to hold a single shell, loaded with either birdshot, buckshot or a one-ounce slug.

  But if she missed?

  Instead she ran to the floor locker that held the prepared explosives and pulled up a box containing a small metal cone filled with plastic explosive. The metal cone was machined so that it would splinter into red hot metal shards or flechettes when the explosive was detonated. It had a much higher chance of killing or disabling him than if she tried to aim a shotgun blast from a moving drone.

  From a box beside it she also grabbed four small cylindrical canisters, shoving them in her trouser pockets as she slammed the explosives locker shut and checked the display on her control unit which showed the surveillance feed. The shooter was still sauntering through the streets, rifle held ready but with a relaxed, almost jaunty gait.

  Let’s see if we can change your mood, kalba.

  Running back outside again with her drone in hand, she slaved it to her controller, started its engine and threw it in the air the way a child throws a paper plane. Buzzing like a swarm of bees, it swooped, dipped and then started climbing. Amal knew the streets of the small town of Buq’ata very well. It looked to her like the sniper was headed back to the villa near her shop which they’d identified as some sort of command post, which made sense. He was going to report on his handiwork.

  Rather than chase him, she aimed her explosive drone at the end of the street between the sniper and the command post. It could circle there and wait for him, to see which way he was going before she attacked. She had a couple of minutes until then. Setting a waypoint on the screen, she put the controller on the ground and ran into the back door of her house, pulling the four canisters out of her pockets.

  On the roof, Patel had seen Lopez roll to one side clutching her arm before he heard the muted crack of the shot. A sniper’s bullet traveled around twice the speed of sound, so it was normal for a bullet fired from a distance to strike without warning.

  “Find that shooter!” Patel yelled to Bell, who was lying down beside him scanning the rooftops with binoculars.

  “Medic!!” Wallace had screamed and Bell had rolled on his back, handing the binos to Patel before rising into a crouch and heading for the stairway down from the rooftop. Patel jammed the binos to his eye sockets, adjusting the focus, sweeping the roofs in front of him left to right, trying not to go too fast, looking for any sign of movement. He’d seen the two drones take out the Druze scouts and had cheered inside because he had felt impotent, with no firing solution on them. He saw a soldier on the rooftop where they’d evacuated one man, wounded, but the shot hadn’t come from there. They were to the south, and the shot had definitely come from the west. He was still watching the site of the drone attack, wondering whether the shooter there had been killed or just wounded, was starting to move the binos again when…

  Crack!

  A second shot, and a shout from inside the house. Dammit! He swung the binos wildly, trying to settle, control his breathing, move methodically, taking the houses row by row. The radio chose that moment to interrupt, someone hailing him. He ignored it, tried to focus. Well back, a water tower caught his eye. It was small, not much bigger than a 55-gallon drum, sitting on a platform four feet above an unfinished roof, with a couple of wooden crates sitting on it.

  Yeah, if I was good enough to set up somewhere way, way back, it would be there. He dialed up the magnification on the binos, scanning every inch of the water tower.

  No one. If the shot had come from there, the shooter was gone.

  With a rising sense of failure he was still scanning the rooftops to the west when he heard a shuffling sound behind him and Amal eased up alongside on her knees and elbows. She held two small cylindrical canisters out to him. “Smoke. How is the wind?”

  “About three miles an hour, from the north-east.”

  “Alright. You drop it straight down in front of the house, north and north-east. I’ll drop north, that should give your people below a chance to pull back into the house.” She pulled another two canisters from her pockets.

  “What’s happening downstairs?” Patel asked, getting ready to throw. The radio was still crackling. Whoever it was, was persistent.

  “Not sure. Your Sergeant was hit. Ready? How do you tell it?”

  “We say ‘popping smoke’ or just ‘smoke out’.”

  “Call it and throw.”

  Patel rolled on his back, one grenade in his hand, the other beside him. He took a lungful of air. “POPPING SMOKE!” he yelled, pulled the pin and tossed the first grenade back over his head and just in front of the house so the wind would take it over the heads of the men and w
omen below. Amal did the same, but off to the east of the house.

  “Give it time to spread,” she said. As they saw smoke drifting up into the air over them, she rolled to her knees so she could aim her next throw better. “Again!”

  Patel did the same, saw that his first throw had fallen very close to the wall of the house and was going just about straight up, so he put his second closer to the northern wall. Rolling back onto her stomach, Amal put her hands and mouth to a break in the small wall around the terrace. “Marines! Pull back into the house!”

  She started edging back toward the stairs, and Patel made to follow her, but she put a hand on his back to stop him. “Not you. Stay here and watch for movement. They may take this chance to rush us. If you have air support, ask them to be ready, it may be needed.”

  “Can’t you put a drone up?”

  “I have. I will send a spotter to you when they are all inside, alright?”

  He wanted to know what was happening with Jensen and Lopez, but he couldn’t fault her logic. As the IDF corporal disappeared, he picked up the radio handset and checked he was on the JTAC frequency. “Golani Angel, Lava Dogs JTAC, do you read?”

  No-Fly Zone, Golan Heights, May 19

  Bunny had split her hex so that five birds were patrolling north-south along the length of the Golan Heights on terrain-following mode, while one was holding at around 25,000 feet over Buq’ata. She’d made sure that on this new patrol she had one bird with a recon pod in its weapons bay instead of ordnance, and it was sending her a hi-fidelity image of the whole town that she asked Kovacs to keep an eye on while she focused on trying to identify and mitigate potential air or ground threats.

  The first wave of the Israeli air attack had taken down the closest Growler ground-to-air missile site, so she was free of the constant warbling that indicated a ground search radar was looking her way. But the S-400 Growler had a range of nearly 200 miles and it was possible one of the units she could still see operating further into central Syria would be able to pick up her high-flying recon drone. Not to mention any of the no doubt dozens of Felon and Okhotnik stealth aircraft Russia had patrolling the border, smacking down any Israeli jet or drone incautious enough to reveal itself.