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

by FX Holden

  Impact.

  The Gal rocked with the primary blast wave from the explosion of the torpedo’s 500lb. warhead in their wake. Like the hand of God, it lifted their stern, throwing Binyamin and Ehud forward in their seats, only their emergency safety belts saving them from smashing their heads on their instrument consoles. But it was the secondary shock wave that would really hurt them. A result of the cyclical expansion and contraction of the gas bubble from the explosion, it sent a ripple of shock waves through the Gal’s hull, shaking it like a rattler in a baby’s fist.

  Sensing imminent catastrophic damage, Gal’s AI shut down the engine and drive train, cut all power except emergency current and immediately flooded all non-personnel spaces with inert gas to dampen any fires that might break out. She did this before Binyamin could even register that he was still alive.

  He let go of Ehud’s half-crushed hand.

  Two minutes to torpedo impact, torpedo has acquired target and is homing. Target has moved to flank speed, turning to 180 degrees relative. Target jamming. Initiating jamming and decoy countermeasures.

  “Ehud, run a damage analysis.”

  “Already running, Benny.”

  “Gal: cue another Seahake.”

  Aye Captain. Seahake armed, bearing to contact loaded. Torpedo systems check complete. System nominal. Shall I shoot?

  “No, hold fire, Gal.” They had only six conventional torpedo tubes – two facing aft – and one of the drawbacks of his otherwise amazing new boat was that without crew, and without an autoload mechanism, he had no reloads. So he had only five remaining conventional torpedoes and he needed to conserve his ordnance for their real mission.

  One thing working in their favor, however, was that though it was slower, their DM2A4 torpedo had a better guidance system, better jamming countermeasures, and Gal could assume manual control of the torpedo if she felt it was being decoyed off target.

  And Gal was a very, very good torpedo pilot.

  “Damage report,” Ehud said, running his eye across a screen. “Hull integrity: flooding in portside fuel cell compartments F4 to … F6; flooding in sail from level five to level three. Overall hull integrity 94 percent. Propulsion: one engine offline, two undamaged. Fuel cells: power output at 67 percent and stable. Shaft: no reported damage. Screw: no reported damage. Weapons: no reported damage. Steerage: rudder and planes showing full movement range. Sensors…” Ehud paused. Binyamin didn’t need to be psychic to know that wasn’t good.

  “Sail damage has impacted the periscope and antennas?”

  “You could say. If I had to guess, I’d say we have catastrophic damage to the top third of the sail. Periscope non-functional. Antennas non-functional. We still have sonar or Gal wouldn’t be able to track the contact and steer that torpedo, but we can’t get a visual on a target, we can’t send or receive radio signals and our buoy, well, it’s either dead or gone. Hull integrity is 83 percent, hull collapse depth revised to … 500 feet.”

  One minute to torpedo impact. Target locked, torpedo maneuvering.

  “Weapons?”

  “Weapons systems green across the board. Looks like the portside midsection and the sail took the brunt of the shock wave.” Ehud looked up ruefully. “And if we want to get out of here before we reach harbor again, it’s going to have to be through a torpedo tube.”

  Another of the sacrifices the designers of the Gal had made in automating her and replacing her crew compartments with batteries and fuel was that they had eliminated the aft escape hatch. The only way out of the submarine was either through the sail overhead, or forward, through one of the 650mm torpedo hatches.

  Thirty seconds to torpedo impact.

  The Iranian Fateh-class boat was one quarter the size of the Gal. Iran called it a ‘semi-heavy’ submarine. A less generous navy might call it a ‘mini’. It carried only six torpedoes to the Gal’s ten, weighed only 500 tons to the Gal’s 2,000, and had a speed of 14 knots submerged, versus 25.

  But it was nimble.

  And as the Gal’s torpedo approached it was traveling at flank speed, rudder full right, and had deployed its last-ditch defense – a towed decoy that mimicked the electromagnetic and acoustic signature of its host to try to trick an incoming torpedo into thinking it was a larger and much more inviting section of the submarine.

  Gal fell for none of it. She assumed manual control of the torpedo in the last thirty seconds of its run, kept the torpedo pointed at the fore-section of the Iranian Fateh and steered it to a perfect interception.

  Impact. Analyzing acoustic data… target destroyed.

  Binyamin let out a loud sigh. Ehud was a little more enthusiastic, and quite a lot more profane.

  Buq’ata, Golan Heights, May 19–20

  “Yes!” Amal yelled, watching as there was a ripple of explosions across the highway and one of the dark forms in the convoy bucked into the air and fell onto its side. To have that effect, it must have been one of the smaller Udar unmanned ground vehicles, but for her, it was proof of concept. Her Turtles worked!

  The convoy broke left and right as the vehicles behind the Udar swerved to avoid it and there were more explosions. It became impossible to see what had been hit and what was still moving as her infrared vision flared.

  “You got a kill?” Patel asked, hopefully.

  “No,” she said. “I got two … three … maybe four.”

  “You are a freaking legend, woman,” Patel said.

  She restarted the engines on her last Turtle. It was at the maximum range of her VHF transmitter, so she was scared the thing wouldn’t restart, but she saw all four engine lights turn green on her console and the camera jerked as it lifted into the air. Now her dilemma was simple. To lay the last belt of mines ahead of, behind or beside the convoy, which had come to a sudden and very violent halt.

  As she watched, a vehicle at the rear of the convoy lit up and what looked like a laser beam of light stretched from the tank up into the sky.

  “My god, what was that?”

  “Missile,” Bunny said to Kovacs, calling the engagement out loud again. “Verba. No lock. They’re firing blind.” She ran her mouse across the screen, designating targets for her JAGM missiles. “Desperate. But they’re awake.”

  Kovacs watched her work, fingers dancing, eyes flicking from her helmet display to the screens in front of her and the virtual sky around her before she hit her mike control. “Falcon, Merit. Targets locked. AI confirms Armata and Udar ground vehicles, inside the ceasefire line, three miles from US Marine position. Requesting permission to engage.”

  “Merit, Falcon Control. You are cleared to engage. Good hunting, Merit.”

  “Roger. Merit out.”

  This is it, Shelly thought. All of this, today. All our work. To put this woman in charge of these machines, at this moment, to save the people in that house.

  “Rifle, rifle, rifle,” Bunny called. The video feed on the 2D screen in front of Kovacs had been showing the stalled Russian convoy, several vehicles already burning. Others backing, pulling onto the roadside verge, trying to find a way around them. Bunny’s Fantom carried four of the larger JAGM air-to-ground missiles and they appeared on the screen as four momentary streaks of light, lancing toward the shadowy forms on the highway, dancing in the light of the fires of vehicles starting to burn from the explosion of mines beneath their hulls, crews spilling from disabled or canted vehicles as the four missiles raced toward them.

  The Udar unmanned ground vehicle was a kludge. A rushed attempt by Russia to keep pace with NATO development of remotely piloted and autonomous armored vehicles, the first prototype seen in 2016 was just an Epoch remote turret with 30mm cannon mounted on a decades-old BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicle frame. Its ‘driver’ had to have line-of-sight to control it and situational awareness proved a huge problem because it had only one pair of human eyes looking through multiple hull-mounted cameras by which to spot and engage enemies.

  But subsequent generations deployed throughout the 2020s had
beefed it up into a formidable weapons platform in its own right. Of the four Udar vehicles accompanying their motherships from Quneitra to Buq’ata, three were ground assault variants featuring either 30mm autocannon turrets or anti-tank guided missile launchers and 7.62mm coaxial machine guns. The fourth was an anti-air variant that mounted not only Verba optical-infrared missiles – able to take its targeting either from their own sensors or the sensors of its mothership – but also a very capable electronic warfare suite that allowed it to jam and misdirect incoming missiles.

  To eliminate the problem of blind spots, recent models of the Udar featured the same battlefield radar system as the Armata and could independently track and engage multiple ground and air targets.

  As soon as they had detected the Fantom overhead and before it got within range of their own air defenses, the crew of the anti-air Armata had put their Udar into ‘jam and decoy’ mode. It began moving away from its mothership and emitting a blanket of radiation intended to drown out anything coming from the other tanks. It painted a big fat ‘attack me!’ sign on itself and as soon as Bunny launched her missiles, it narrowed its transmissions to focus all that energy at the incoming threat.

  Two of the JAGMs were blinded by the combined jamming of the Armata and Udar and flew wild. One was intercepted by the Armata’s close-in weapons system, which exploded it just twenty yards out from the tank, rocking it in its chassis but doing no blast damage at all.

  The fourth of Bunny’s missiles fell deeply, head-over-heels in love with the radiation being generated by the Udar – which had none of the close-in weapons defense systems of an Armata – and showed its affection by hammering into its hull at supersonic speed and detonating deep in its robotic guts.

  “Splash one,” Bunny said disgustedly. “Four missiles, one measly kill. And it looks like that was an Udar. Slaving all four birds to my stick.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Those Armatas have active defenses that are killing our missiles,” Bunny said in a flat, detached tone. “Let’s see how they handle four streams of 25mm AP. Anyone down there still alive better have a tungsten umbrella because it’s about to start raining cannon fire.”

  The Armata T-14 tank was designed, above all, to be able to survive on a modern battlefield. It featured all-round dual-explosive reactive armor, its front glacis was double spaced and the three-person crew were protected behind a 900mm front block and armored capsule. Its onboard radar was linked not just to the main weapon control system, but also to an active defense system that could intercept incoming projectiles – such as Bunny’s JAGM anti-tank missiles. As the missiles closed, they were picked up by the vehicles’ radars which fired fragmentation shells into the path of the missiles and blew them up before they even reached the tanks.

  They were not indestructible. Amal’s DRD team had identified the armor under the tank, which was not dual-explosive reactive armor, and the tracks as weaknesses and her mines had done a job on the tanks that had rumbled over them, triggering their vibration and acoustic sensors. Of the six T-14s, one was knocked out with engine damage, one was on fire and the crew had baled out because the explosively formed penetrator from the mine had hit the rotary ammunition autoloader inside the automated turret and triggered the ammunition, and two had thrown tracks, which would take time to repair. Two of the four Udar UGVs were also out of action, but the other two were still in commission because their ‘mother tanks’ were still in action. Two T-14s were undamaged and maneuvering to avoid the carnage around them, pick up the crews that had baled and keep pushing into Buq’ata. To do that they planned to back up, get out of the minefield that had been laid across the highway and skirt the forest completely, coming at Buq’ata from the south-west instead.

  But first, they had to get off the highway.

  And deal with that damned Fantom overhead.

  Amal was trying to count the stalled or burning wrecks. The Udar UGVs seemed to have been either hit by mines or otherwise taken out of play. Three were stationary, either hit by mines or stalled because their motherships were damaged, and one was burning. A T-14 was also burning and she saw secondary explosions, indicating its ammunition was cooking off. The crew had made it out and were running back down the highway, away from the blaze. The tank next to them had also stalled and she watched it spin on one track until it realized it had been crippled, a crewman stuck his head out, saw that they were pinned between the burning UGV and the exploding T-14, and soon the entire crew of that tank too were out and running back down the road.

  But two of the T-14s were still maneuvering. Her Turtles had claimed two out of four main battle tanks. Not bad.

  But not good enough. It seemed the US aircraft overhead had not managed to kill anything other than a single unmanned Udar. The crews who had abandoned their machines were watching from the cover of the trees as the remaining two main battle tanks slowly backed out of her kill zone.

  She had to drop the belt from her last Turtle now, while they were still between the trees, but there was no way one belt could disable two tanks. She had a choice to make.

  “Patel, the Russians are down to two Armatas…”

  “Alright! Eight from ten? You and that jet jockey rock!”

  “Uh, except only one of the T-14s and one of the Udars is what I’d call a kill. The others seem to have engine or track damage, but that can be repaired. And your air force attack claimed only one unmanned vehicle. There is an anti-air Armata down there coordinating counterfire and your drone’s missiles are not getting through.

  “Wait one,” Patel said, grabbing the radio handset. “Angel, this is Marine JTAC, you still up there?” He was straining his ears but couldn’t hear the rumble of jet engines indicating the Fantoms were close.

  “Pulled back south, Patel,” the Australian voice replied. “I only have one mud mover in my flight and it just used all its missiles. I’m regrouping, going back in with guns.”

  “Uh, Angel, I have an IDF corporal here with eyes on the hostile force. Maybe you should put your heads together. Putting her on.”

  Amal was busy maneuvering her last Turtle down from the hilltop to the highway in the path of the reversing tanks, so she cradled the handset against her ear as Patel held it for her. “This is Corporal Azaria.”

  “Corporal, call me Angel. Do you have a damage assessment for me?”

  Amal described exactly what she was seeing. “Also, there is a tank with a 30mm autocannon and anti-air missile turret that still appears to be operational. I will try to use my last mine belt to disable it but that will probably not knock out its radar or weapons systems.”

  “It could be enough,” O’Hare said. “The other tanks aren’t likely to move far from their anti-air cover with us buzzing around them. I’ll wait for a report on your attack before moving in again.”

  “Roger, Azaria out,” Amal said and let Patel take the radio handset back.

  “Angel, you good now? I’ll get back when we have a damage assessment from our next attack.”

  “Alright, Patel, good hunting. Get some for me. And I mean that literally.”

  All Domain Attack: Impasse

  US blockade line, Mediterranean Sea, May 19–20

  “Cavitation noise, bearing two seven zero, range ten miles,” Ears announced into his mike. “AI is calling it an Iranian Hoot torpedo. Not targeting the Canberra, repeat, we are not the target.”

  “Who else is out there, Ears?” The Watch Supervisor, Goldmann, asked, standing up and looking across the CIC at him.

  Ears checked the tactical plot. “No surface shipping. Could be the Agincourt. Could be that Israeli … I’ve got nothing but the…” He lifted his headphones away from his ear quickly, then jammed them on tight again. “Explosion, subsea!” he said, watching the acoustic and seismic readouts on his screen as they hopped and skipped.

  “God damn, if they got the Brits…”

  “I’m not hearing secondaries. I think it was a miss. Or hit a decoy. Whatever they hit
, it isn’t breaking up.”

  TAO Drysdale finally woke up and joined Goldmann standing. “Sonar, you have a position on that explosion?”

  “Yes, sir. Patching it through.”

  “Alright, ACO, get a quadrotor with dipping sonar over that position immediately. Whatever the hell is happening out there, I want us to…”

  “Another explosion!” Ears announced. “New position, three miles south south-west of the first. There was no cavitation noise, probably a conventional missile, not rocket powered like the Hoot.”

  “Counterfire,” Goldmann decided. “Whoever got shot at, shot back.”

  “I have hull break indications…”

  “Put it on speaker,” Goldmann ordered.

  Ears patched the sounds he was hearing through to the CIC overhead speakers. To the untrained ear, it sounded like huge iron gates were being thrown and dragged across rocks.

  “Hull collapse,” Goldmann agreed, shaking his head. “Poor bastards, whoever they are.”

  “‘Whoever they are’ fired a Hoot torpedo,” Drysdale reminded him. “So they’re Iranian. It was probably that Fateh boat, so we can save our sympathy. ACO, I still want a dipping sonar over that first contact. Find out who the hell they were shooting at.”

  It was Binyamin’s first time being shot at, and he hoped it was the last. He didn’t think he handled it very well at all. Sure, he made all the right calls, helped not a little by Gal, but what must Ehud think of him?

  “Ehud, get forward and inspect the fuel cell damage. Make sure the flooding is localized and there are no other leaks.”

  “We can check on closed circuit,” Ehud said. “And Gal’s moisture sensors would…”

  “Trust, but verify, Ehud,” Binyamin told him sharply. “You have eyeballs, I would like you to use them.”