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

by FX Holden

  “Control, Akula, ready to receive.”

  “Akula, you are to proceed to sector echo alpha niner four and provide air cover for a Syrian armor element moving from Quneitra to Buq’ata. The Syrian air controller frequency is one zero niner dot four. Call sign ‘Frog’. The mission is area denial over Buq’ata airspace, the objective is for the armored element to reach Buq’ata without hostile air interference. Acknowledge.”

  “Roger, Control, Akula is buster for sector echo alpha niner four to cover Syrian armor column. FAC frequency one zero niner dot four, call sign ‘Frog’. We’ll clear the sky for them. Akula committing. Out.” He rolled his head on his shoulders, flexed his fingers. Show time. “You get that, virgin?” Rap asked his wingman.

  “Yes, Comrade Lieutenant.”

  “Stay sharp, keep your separation, follow my lead, and you just might break your cherry tonight. We are going into hostile airspace and they will not appreciate our presence. Watch for ground radar painting you, watch your threat display, watch the damn sky and listen for my commands. And Second Lieutenant Oligov?”

  “Yes Lieutenant?”

  “Don’t get yourself killed tonight. Or me. I have an unopened bottle of Arak on my dressing table and we can crack the lid on it when we get back and have a glass with our eggs.”

  “That’s a deal, Akula leader.”

  Bunny O’Hare was thirsty. But Kovacs was still out somewhere throwing up and she’d taken their last bottle of water. Note for future missions, O’Hare. Keep a damn camel pack in the trailer.

  For some reason an image flashed into her mind from a couple of nights before. She’d handed over to the incoming pilot, brought her birds home through the airborne chaos of Israel’s night sky, and after she got off the phone to Hatzerim she’d gone back to the tent she’d had an airman set up near their trailers and tried to get some sleep, but it was pointless. She’d been too keyed up. Instead, she’d rolled off her cot and stood outside the tent flaps, staring up at the night sky. It was a cool, cloudless night.

  Kovacs had been sleeping. Bunny envied her that. She’d gone down to the flight line to check on her babies, and then gotten a lift back to the Akrotiri USAF billets for some sack time.

  Bunny couldn’t do it. Two hundred miles to the east those Marines were in deep trouble. She was grateful to Kovacs for allowing her to finish out her tour at the stick of a fighter plane – six fighter planes – but she wasn’t there. She couldn’t feel the fear or smell the danger like she could in the cockpit of a Panther, looking down on the battlefield.

  She’d thought back to her encounter with that Russian over the Med after three days of fighting over Turkey, when they were bugging out for Akrotiri. Wiping that cheeky damn grin off his face but then lining up behind him for the kill shot and not taking it. That face-to-face kind of encounter would never happen behind the stick of a Fantom.

  If that had happened today, with her sitting in the trailer, he’d just be a target on a digital display to her. Not a stupid grinning kid taking pictures with a cell phone. And he’d be dead.

  And maybe that’s how it should be.

  A chime sounded in her ears, breaking her out of her reverie. Ground-to-air missile radar? It was painting her recon bird, but it didn’t have a lock. She thought the Israelis had just about knocked out every Growler or S-300 unit for a hundred miles around her. So this … she ran a quick database lookup.

  Ah. There was at least one anti-air configured Armata down there. It made sense for the Russian ‘private security force’ to include a mobile anti-air unit to protect the ground pounders they were sending into the Golan. Ordinarily, she’d just order her machine to climb above 15,000 feet, out of range of the guns and Verba missiles the anti-air Armata carried. But due to the Israeli Air Force traffic overhead, she had a hard ceiling of 5,000 feet she had to stick to.

  She pulled up her nav screen and played with the waypoints she had set around the Syrian column to make more use of terrain to screen the reconnaissance machine she had following it. The Syrians had sat with their engines running hot for nearly forty-five minutes inside Quneitra before they finally pulled out, formed up in a line and made for a crossing through the ceasefire line tank traps, wire and ditches that they’d obviously prepared well ahead of time.

  There was no subtlety about the move. As soon as they got over the first mile of rough ground they headed for route 98, the main north-south road through the Golan, and put the pedal down. Right now they were parallel with the UN post on the heights at Merom Golan, but showed no sign that was their objective. Trying to capture the heights would make sense in a full-scale armor and infantry attack, but this had more of a ‘police action’ feeling about it, and Bunny had a pretty good idea who the Armata gunners wanted to get in their sights.

  “Merit leader, Falcon Control, we have an update for you.”

  “Go ahead, Falcon.”

  “Israeli Air Force has put together a strike package based on your intel. Pull your machines south and hold near the Sea of Galilee. They are five minutes out.”

  Bunny hesitated. “A no-fly zone technically goes both ways, Falcon.”

  “It’s been signed off by Central Command, Merit. Israel has four F-16s inbound and you now have four minutes to avoid getting caught in the blast wave.”

  Bunny had already twitched her stick to send her recon machine a command to join with the other drones holding south of Buq’ata, but she was still troubled. “Falcon, there are Russian stealth fighters in the sector. Those tanks are Armata T-14s, with anti-air radar and at least one missile vehicle, those Israelis are flying into…”

  “Not your problem, Merit. Pull back. Falcon out.”

  Pull back? Sure. I’ll pull back just far enough to be able to watch this freaking disaster unfold, shall I?

  “Akula two, Akula leader, I have a data uplink from Frog force. They are tracking four fast movers, inbound their position, requesting assistance,” Rap told his wingman. The Syrians twenty miles west had picked up Israeli fighters headed for them and sent the data from their radars through to Rap. He was able to engage at much greater range than their short-range Verba missiles or guns, before the Israelis reached standoff anti-tank missile range. “Arm K-77s. Allocate one missile to each target. Home on data, active seeker.”

  “K-77s armed, home on data mode, active seeker,” Oligov replied. “I have tone.”

  Rap checked his own weapon status. Green across the board, four missiles armed and targets locked. “Shoot, shoot, shoot,” he said. His helmet visor darkened automatically to protect his night vision as the four missiles dropped out of his weapons bay, lit their tails and streaked ahead into the night sky. Five miles to the north, he saw the missiles of his number two burning their own path through the sky toward the Israeli F-16s at a combined closing speed of nearly six times the speed of sound.

  A two-tone warning sounded in Bunny’s helmet as her Fantom picked up the active homing radar on the eight Russian missiles. Her combat AI immediately decided the missiles weren’t aimed at her, but it reverse engineered their point of origin and immediately shot two narrow bands of radar energy back up the bearing of the missiles.

  Felons!

  The anti-air weapons on the Syrian tanks were the least of those Israelis’ problems.

  With a sinking feeling in her gut, she watched as the four blue boxes marking the Israeli fighters and the red dots with trailing direction indicators that were the Russian missiles converged. The Russian attack had been near perfect. Attacking from two bearings with a blizzard of missiles as the Israeli jets were beginning their attack run.

  They were bloody brave, those Israeli pilots. They must have seen the incoming Russian missiles too, must have had missile warnings screaming in their ears, but they didn’t break off their attack.

  Bunny couldn’t watch. She closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, the Israeli aircraft icons were gone. All four.

  “Splash four!” Oligov called out. �
��Hot damn.”

  “Shut up,” Rap told him. They’d been painted by a US AN/APG-81 radar. That meant only two possibilities. An Israeli Panther, or a US Fantom, like the ones that had bushwhacked him two days earlier. Forcing him to back off.

  Well, he wasn’t bloody backing off this time. He had a bearing on that radar signal.

  “Akula two, turn to bearing 197, drop to 10,000 and accelerate to supercruise, there’s a bastard Panther or Fantom hiding in the weeds down there.”

  “Lieutenant, that’s inside Golan airspace.”

  “I know that, Oligov. Our orders are airspace denial. As long as there is a hostile aircraft in the vicinity of Frog force, then our mission is not complete. They still have five miles to run. Weapons status please.”

  Rap knew they had each fired four of their six missiles at the Israeli attack aircraft. But the missile mounts in the Felon’s internal weapons bay had a nasty habit of shaking during a launch, which could knock a missile out of alignment.

  “Two missiles armed, systems check green,” Oligov reported.

  “Same,” Rap replied. “Alright, engage active search radar. Let’s flush this zalupa out.”

  Buq’ata, Golan Heights, May 19–20

  After Bell had finished cleaning and re-dressing Amal’s wound, there had been a slightly awkward silence, which the Marine Corpsman broke by saying he’d come to tell her the Russian armored column was still heading their way.

  There was a chance it was moving on Merom Golan to take the UN outpost there which had a commanding view over the Valley of Tears, but given the pain and grief they had inflicted on the Druze colonel and his new Governate of the Golan Heights, she somehow doubted it. As Bell left to tend to the other wounded, she climbed down off her work bench, ran a sleeve over her eyes to dry the last of the tears, and started pulling parts out of drawers. Engines, guidance systems … propellers, never enough damn propellers, the things shattered so easily. Tail fins too. She didn’t have the bodies she needed either. Amal walked outside, started the generator and got the 3D printer working to print the parts she needed.

  Russian T-14 Armata tanks. She’d been to a DRD workshop six months ago at Camp Rabin which had discussed potential attack vectors for killing or disabling an Armata tank. The challenge was the Armata was designed specifically for survivability. Armata tanks had been deployed toward the end of the Syrian war and they had shrugged off rocket-propelled grenades, roadside bombs, even Javelin missile strikes.

  Most of its systems were automated, it had a crew of only three, and they were housed in a double-armored capsule deep inside the tank chassis. Both the chassis and turret were protected with explosive reactive armor. Every tank had two types of radar – an Afghanit millimeter wave system to detect and defeat incoming projectiles up to Mach 5.0 and a phased-array radar to track and engage surface and air threats.

  But they weren’t invincible, the DRD workshop had concluded. There was one photo from the Syrian war of an Armata that had been disabled. A low-tech mine had caused it to throw a track. And its radar was housed in panels around the side and top of its turret. Concentrated fire aimed at the turret from a 30mm autocannon could overwhelm the hard-kill defensive fragmentation weapon launchers that protected it and knock out the Armata’s radar and electronic warfare systems. Without radar, the gunner would be relying on last-generation optics and infrared to find targets and the tank would be vulnerable to air attack.

  Amal couldn’t fly a drone at an Armata and drop a thermite grenade on its turret. If it could pick up a shell flying at five times the speed of sound and destroy it, it would detect and kill her drones without breaking a sweat. But at the conference she had found a drone-based attack vector, and for the last six months she had been working on it as a side project, which was why she didn’t have the parts right to hand.

  She called it the Turtle.

  RAF Akrotiri Air Base, Cyprus, May 19

  Kovacs stepped back inside the trailer and into a fug of sweat. She picked up on the tension immediately.

  “Oh no, what now?”

  Bunny’s hands were dancing across her keyboard and controls like a concert pianist as she focused on whatever she was seeing in her helmet-mounted display. “Did you bring any water?” she asked.

  “What? No, sorry.”

  “Forget it.” Without pausing, she pointed quickly to the tactical screen monitor. “We’re being hunted by two Felons, inside Golani airspace. They’re flying cover for a Russian armor convoy and just took down four Israeli F-16s. I have an intermittent lock on both from our recon bird. We have one recon, one ground attack and four air-to-air Fantoms on station. I am pulling the ground attack kites back, moving our air-to-air aircraft up.” She punched a comms icon. “Falcon, Merit. Hostile aircraft inside Golani airspace. They just destroyed those Israeli F-16s. I have a solution, permission to engage?”

  There was no hesitation. “Merit, Falcon, you are cleared to engage hostiles in Golani airspace.”

  “Wait, what?” Kovacs said, quietly, struggling to catch up.

  “Sit down, Shelly,” Bunny said through gritted teeth. “Strap in.” She splayed her fingers on the touch screen in front of her and four wall-mounted 2D screens lit up, showing a cockpit simulation display for each of the four Fantoms Bunny was vectoring toward the Russian aircraft. They were already within knife-fighting range, just ten miles apart. Each of her four aircraft had four Peregrine air-to-air missiles in its weapons bay, and she quickly ordered the four machines to take two miles separation.

  “Four birds going to active search and track,” Bunny said. She didn’t have to control each individually, they were paired and set to duplicate their flight leader’s actions. In essence, she just had to point them at their targets and tell them to shoot when they got a solution.

  As Kovacs’ eyes swept from screen to screen, she saw the two red boxes marking the Russian Felons on the screens turn from red stippled lines to solid lines, then a cross appeared in each and a loud tone sounded in the trailer.

  “Targets locked, Fox three by four,” Bunny said, her finger twitching on the trigger on her flight stick. “Oh, crap.”

  “Oh crap? What’s ‘oh crap’?!” Kovacs exclaimed.

  “Missiles away,” Rap grunted with satisfaction. The aircraft below were drones. They didn’t have a decent lock on his Felon, their radar was sliding over and only briefly locking on before sliding off again. Fantoms. Small and usually hard to detect but easier to pick up from above and at near point-blank range … that Arak was already starting to taste good.

  “Incoming!” Oligov called. “Evading!”

  What? Milliseconds before his combat AI took the decision for him, Rap rolled his Felon onto a wingtip and pulled hard toward the incoming missiles, trying to make them maneuver as he punched flares and silver radar decoy foil into his wake. There were two missiles coming at him, two at Oligov. Despite the speed and g-force of his turn he was shaken in his seat as a missile exploded just fifty yards behind his machine and a second corkscrewed wildly underneath him, its guidance system jammed by the Felon’s automatic missile radar-jamming response.

  “Not this time, robot,” Rap shouted out loud, keying his mike. “Akula two, come around to 220 degrees, targets are … Akula two?”

  There was no response. No icon on his tac monitor showing his wingman’s position either. He was gone. The tac monitor was showing two enemy Fantoms down, two still maneuvering. But no Oligov. No emergency beacon indicating he’d managed to bail out either. The kid was just gone. Like he’d never existed. Boiling with fury, Rap tightened his turn further and switched to guns. He was out of missiles, but he was still in this fight.

  “Two Fantoms down and one Felon,” Bunny said as two of the 2D screens on the front wall of the trailer went black. “Two Fantoms re-engaging. That Felon is coming around again, he’s not bugging out this time. Ideas, Kovacs?”

  Shelly’s head was spinning with the speed of the dogfight but she’d wargamed scenar
ios like this a thousand times in developing her algorithms.

  “You programmed a drag and bag into your console?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Use it. He’s down to guns and you are more maneuverable.”

  Bunny hit a three-button combination on her flight stick. “Merit four dragging, Merit six bagging. Putting six on passive arrays only, no need to let the Felon know what’s going down.”

  A ‘drag and bag’ was a fighter tactic as old as World War Two. The fighter flying lead would extend out in front of the target, offering an irresistible target, looking like it was trying to flee. If executed well, its wingman would sweep in behind the enemy unseen and knock him down.

  If not executed well, the lead aircraft was, however, a sitting duck…

  Rap watched the tactical icons in his helmet display carefully. One of the remaining two enemy drones was breaking away, headed for Israel. The other was about five miles to port, but had lost radar lock and was not actively tracking him.

  Once again Rap offered a silent thanks to the designers of his magnificent airplane. They had made it nimble, they had made it deadly and, more than anything else, they had made it as slippery as an eel. The American drones’ radar just slid across its skin without finding purchase, allowing him to focus on the job at hand.

  Killing one of the Fantoms that had killed Oligov. Before it could kill the troops in that armored column behind him.

  Yes, the enemy plane was just a machine. But behind the stick was a pilot. And that pilot was about to be completely demoralized.

  Pulling his own flight stick back and shoving his throttle forward, his Felon leapt forward, eager for the kill.