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

by FX Holden

  Ehud looked like he was about to say something, but then rose from his seat instead. “Aye, skipper. Going forward. Gal: monitor and report any system anomalies.”

  Aye, XO. Monitoring all systems for any readings outside normal range.

  Binyamin watched him go. He shouldn’t have snapped at him. He would apologize later, when their mission was complete. He pulled up a nav screen and dropped a waypoint square in the middle of the channel exiting the Karpathou Strait, the exit from the Aegean Sea, and assigned an arrival time to it. It was almost the only point through which the Russian fleet could sail and still maintain a tight formation. The Gal needed to get moving again, not just to get into position, but to put some distance between themselves and the battle that had just taken place. Anyone within twenty miles could have picked up those explosions on sonar, and having survived an attack from a Fateh, he did not want to have to face a Russian Kilo captain who also thought it might be a nice opportunity to degrade Israel’s attack-submarine strength without the world knowing.

  “Gal: proceed to waypoint gamma 94, engines at your discretion, optimize for stealth but get us there inside the hour.”

  Aye captain. Proceeding to waypoint, optimizing for stealth within waypoint timeframe parameter.

  He planned to lie at the bottom of the channel leading out of the Strait, wait for the main body of ships in the Russian fleet to pass and then…

  From deep in the guts of the ship, one level down and about fifty yards forward, Binyamin heard a crack, like a rifle shot, then a shout.

  Catastrophic leak in central fuel cell inspection area. Sealing compartment hatches. Rebalancing ballast.

  “No, Gal: wait!” Binyamin said, leaping from his chair and running forward. He ducked through a narrow inspection corridor, dropped down a ladder holding only onto the sides and slammed into the deck below hard, turning an ankle. Spinning around painfully, he saw the hatchway leading into the fuel cell inspection area had slammed shut. He tried opening it, but it was sealed tight.

  Beside the hatch was a ship comms handset and he snatched it from the wall, hitting the code for Gal. “Gal, open hatch Charlie 42!”

  There was no response.

  “Gal: open the hatch!” Binyamin yelled. Ehud was on the other side. He probably still had air in his lungs.

  But it didn’t open. Of course it didn’t. Opening the hatch would have doomed the rest of the submarine. With the flooding compartmentalized, they were still mission capable. Binyamin put one hand against the hatch, feeling the vibrations as the water on the other side filled the space behind it. “Gal: open hatch Charlie 42,” he said softly.

  Flooding contained. Proceeding to waypoint gamma 94.

  Binyamin looked at the comms handset and started hammering it against the door until it shattered in his hand, wires and speakers dangling uselessly from the cord.

  He kept hammering until his knuckles started to bleed.

  Buq’ata, Golan Heights, May 19–20

  Amal weighed her choice carefully. She could lay her last belt in the path of only one of the two reversing tanks as they were moving on opposite sides of the highway verge. One had a turret with a 120mm cannon and 12.7mm heavy machine gun. The other had a 30mm cannon and six-tube Verba anti-air missile pod.

  “Patel, which should we try to hit?” she asked quickly. “Their anti-air unit or their assault tank?”

  Patel was back on his scope, scanning rooftops for snipers. “Since that assault tank is going to be assaulting us, I vote for the assault tank.”

  “What I was thinking. But if we stop the anti-air unit, the aircraft overhead can do their work without being molested.”

  “Angel said she’s out of missiles, down to guns. I’m not hopeful she’ll do anything but tickle those Armatas. I still vote assault tank.”

  “I agree,” Amal said. She was already on the right side of the highway to lay mines behind the reversing Armata. Skimming her Turtle across grass and stones to a point fifty yards behind it, she quickly dropped the first mine and hopped the rest in a ten-yard line in the dirt and grass right in the path of the tank, before pulling her drone 100 yards out and dropping it in the middle of the highway with its camera fixed on the gap in the trees and the maneuvering tanks ahead.

  Bunny O’Hare was also watching closely. She’d taken the risk of pulling her four machines up to an altitude of 5,000 feet, out of the range of the low-level Verba missiles, still under the height at which most Israeli Air Force traffic was crossing over, to where her recon bird could get good low-light and infrared vision of the vehicles below. Each of the reversing tanks had pulled itself out of the tangle of wrecked, burning and disabled hulks around them, pointed themselves back down the highway, and were now maneuvering their Udar unmanned ‘wingmen’ into position.

  As sacrificial mine detectors.

  Bunny saw with dismay that the Armata drivers had learned their lesson and were putting the tracked Udars out in front of them to trigger any mines that might still litter the highway. They’d already traversed the ground they were retreating back over, but they were taking no chances. Controlling the Udars from within their capsules inside the Armata, they crept forward until…

  On the southern side of the highway there was a blast … Bunny’s low-light screen flared and the Udar there was flipped up onto one side by the force of the mines detonating beneath it.

  All three remaining tanks jerked to a halt. Crews who had abandoned their vehicles earlier came running up to them, and a brief conference was held as the Russian tankers argued about what the hell they should do next. Bunny decided to help make their decision easier for them.

  She laid a targeting crosshair on the anti-air unit below. If she could knock that out, she’d have clear air. “Merit two, four and five slaved to Merit one,” she told Kovacs. “Beginning strafing run.”

  “This is going to hurt, I know it.”

  “Them more than us,” Bunny told her. She hit a three-button combination on her stick and the four Fantoms started falling almost vertically from the sky in line abreast formation, all four 25mm cannons trained on the Armata anti-air tank below which had just lost its Udar wingman. She had no illusions, it would be tracking her Fantoms overhead, its Verba missiles and 30mm cannon would be trained on her birds as they fell through the night sky – but what choice did she have?

  “Passing eighteen thousand, sixteen, now in Verba range…”

  Amal had cursed when the unmanned vehicle had triggered her mines. It had been a Hail Mary play, as the Marines who had bunkered down in her house liked to say, and it had claimed a victim, but not the one she wanted.

  As she watched, the 30mm cannon turret on one of the Armatas swiveled upwards, muzzle pointing almost vertically into the sky. But it kept swiveling, the barrel unable to raise further to align itself on the targets falling on it from directly overhead. The Verba missile battery behind the turret had no such problems. Its operator had a radar lock on the four Fantoms and he had five missiles remaining in his launcher.

  As Amal watched, four white streaks of light lanced out from the tank in a roiling cloud of smoke and arced straight upwards.

  “Jamming, firing chaff and flares,” Bunny said. She thumbed her stick, ordering the Fantoms to roll as they fell; a sickening, spiraling maneuver that would have completely disoriented a human pilot, crushing them against the side of their cockpits with spinning g-force, but the silicon brains of the drones were impervious.

  The Verba missiles were on them in seconds and the four Fantoms and four Verba missiles met with a combined speed of three times the speed of sound.

  Two of Bunny’s Fantoms were swatted from the sky, becoming balls of tumbling fire and metal that continued down toward the troops and tanks below.

  But two survived the Verba salvo and aligned their guns on the thinner top armor of the Armata. At ten thousand feet, they unleashed a twin four-second barrage of Nammo tungsten-tipped armor-piercing explosive 25mm shells, both aircraft hammer
ing the same target simultaneously at a rate of 3,300 rounds a minute.

  Desperately, the crew inside fired a volley of fragmentation shells at the incoming salvo, but succeeded only in knocking out the first dozen or so. Its dual-explosive reactive armor absorbed the impact of the next dozen or so rounds, exploding outwards to protect the thinner armor underneath, but it only accounted for the next twenty or so rounds, and behind them were two hundred more.

  He was a tough tank, the Armata. But no tank yet designed could have survived the abuse Bunny’s twin aircraft barrage was visiting on it. And no human pilot could have kept their aircraft in the unpowered near-vertical dive the Fantoms were in, all the way down to the safe pullout altitude of 5,000 feet. They fired their last one rounds into the top of the Armata as they hit 1,000 and then, in a maneuver that would have snapped the neck of any human pilot inside, hauled themselves level and screamed away west at nap of the earth height.

  Amal watched the Russian missiles rise into the night sky, saw two explosions in rapid succession and then twin streams of ghostly laser-like light began pouring out of the darkness and down into the tank below. They weren’t lasers, Amal knew that, but the shells from the drone’s guns were fired at such a rate that the tracers marking their passage burned their image into her screen and showed as two continuous lines of fire both converging on a single point below.

  The engineer inside Amal watched with dread fascination. The Americans had found a way to coordinate the fire of their unmanned aircraft so that multiple aircraft could simultaneously pound a single target! It was a force multiplier that had staggering implications for future war … increasing the hitting power of not just guns, but onboard lasers, rockets – a host of lighter weapons.

  The Armata bucked and rocked as the shells poured onto, then into it. As the stream of cannon fire stopped and the attacking aircraft pulled away – just black on black shadows in the night – ammunition stored in the rotary magazine under the tank’s turret started cooking off and then, in a mighty explosion, the entire turret blew off, a volcano of fire jetting into the air.

  Amal watched in disbelief as the front hatches on the Armata popped open and the three-man crew, protected from the inferno by their armored capsule but no doubt in fear of being roasted alive, tumbled out of their crew compartment, rolling off the front of the tank and stumbling to a nearby ditch. Amal shook her head slowly. No other tank crew could have survived an onslaught like that. It might not be invulnerable, but the Armata was a piece of work.

  “Splash two more,” Amal told Patel. “Your ‘Angel’ just took down an Armata and without its mothership, the Udar is out too. But it looked like they lost two drones. How many were up there?”

  “Uh, six.”

  “Then there can’t be many left. And there is still one Armata with an Udar wingman on the move. Nothing I can do about it. I am out of mines and they can be here inside twenty minutes.”

  “It’s still an hour until our evac flight arrives,” Patel pointed out. He put his head down, resting his head on his forearm, showing his fatigue. “Screw it. We need to bug out now. Get out through the quarry, hide in the fields near the evacuation point while it’s dark.”

  Amal put her last Turtle, which was now serving as an observation drone, down on the ground and powered it down. Then she closed her console. “Yes. You take the civilians. I have to rig demolition charges on my workshop and the ordnance containers. I can’t risk my prototypes and weapons falling into Syrian hands.”

  Patel looked across the roof at the other Marines, making a calculation in his head. “I need people to carry Gunner Jensen and mind the civilians, but I’ll leave Johnson with you to watch your back while you work. When you’re done, you get out through the quarry and join up with us.”

  As he spoke, from a rooftop about 500 yards away, a machine gun opened up on their compound, bullets chipping away at the concrete rampart around the rooftop terrace. They both hugged the tiles. “Stevens, Rooster, keep down!”

  “Negev NG7,” Amal told him. Another volley of fire come their way, this time striking the windows of the villa below them. “That feels like cover fire for an assault.”

  “Warming up for the arrival of those damn tanks,” Patel guessed. He lifted his head and put his rifle into the gap in the lip of the terrace. “You take Johnson and Stevens, get downstairs, tell Bell to get the wounded ready to move.” He bent his eye to his scope and began looking for the source of the incoming fire. “I’ll deal with this asshole and join everyone downstairs as soon as I can.”

  US blockade line, Mediterranean Sea, May 19–20

  Binyamin couldn’t remember walking from the forward inspection area back to the Gal’s command center, but he must have. When he came to his senses again, he was lying on the deck between his and Ehud’s chairs, staring up at the metal stairwell that led up into the sail. The crushed and sealed sail.

  No way out up there. No aft escape hatch. No way forward to the torpedo tubes past poor dead Ehud. Drowned, disappointed, yelled-at Ehud. Shame welled up in him, and it quickly turned to anger. Anger at himself for ordering Ehud forward, but more, anger at Gal for being so cold-bloodedly logical and sealing him in. Much more, anger at the enemy for striking without warning, without reason. A quote from scripture came to him, and he extended his arms out to his sides like wings. “If anger and wrath are the angels of destruction, then fear me, for I Am Wrath!” he said out loud, paraphrasing the Talmud. Then he laughed until he coughed, rolled to his knees and crawled from the command room on hands and knees toward his stateroom.

  What Binyamin Ben-Zvi didn’t know was that he had passed his last psychological fitness assessment by a metaphorical whisker. The psychologist conducting it had shared the results with a colleague.

  “He seems stressed, wouldn’t you say?”

  Her colleague had flipped through the pages of test results, both from physicals, surveys and interviews, and his service record.

  “He says he was frustrated the sea trials of the Gal overran by two years. Worried that it went straight from sea trials to commissioning with only the simplest of combat systems trials. He told you he doesn’t feel the ship’s decision support systems have been thoroughly pressure tested and early in the test cycle he questioned the idea of sending such a potent weapons platform to sea with only a two-man crew. His physical fitness is good.” The man nodded. “So yes, he’s cautious, but he scored in the normal range on all the usual instruments.” He handed the file back to his colleague. “I see a man who is cautious, thoughtful and dedicated, which is the profile we want. Besides, he’s not alone out there. Ehud is solid as a rock. I tested him myself.”

  Forty minutes to interception waypoint, Gal announced.

  The announcement went unacknowledged. Binyamin Ben-Zvi was curled in a ball on his bunk. Moaning quietly.

  Situation Room, White House, May 19

  The White House press announcement went out at 2030 DC time, 0330 in the Golan Heights and Moscow, and 0530 in Tehran.

  It was titled ‘Readout of President Henderson Historic Call with Ayatollah Takhti of Iran’ and the wording agreed between Washington, Tel Aviv and Iran was very brief.

  President Oliver Henderson spoke this afternoon with Ayatollah Takhti of Iran. President Henderson affirmed the United States’ unwavering support for Israel’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of the ongoing cyber attack against Israel by unknown actors. Both leaders agreed to work toward lasting peace and stability in the region. In subsequent discussions, the Governments of Israel and Iran agreed to begin arms control negotiations in Stockholm in October, within the framework of the United Nations Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Other Security Council Members will be invited to participate.

  As Tonya watched the news break across the 24-hour news channels she also had one eye on the large wall-mounted monitor that showed the positions of US Destroyer Squadron 60 and the main body of the approaching Russian fleet. She had just
updated ExComm on the latest information on the cyber attack on Israel. It was deep in the night in Israel and there was hope the cell phone network would be partially or fully restored by mid morning, relieving the burden on the military radio network. By rerouting all internet traffic to a commercial satellite internet provider, many of the international internet links needed for commerce and banking were expected to be restored, at a cost only slightly less ruinous than the cost of being shut down. Electricity was still patchy, with the systems that distributed power across the grid still under active attack, which meant air traffic was restricted to military flights only, being directed by airborne radar warning aircraft.

  None of the people in the room had left the basement office except to shower or nap in the last 36 hours. Changes of clothes had been brought by their aides, and food delivered in abundance, along with an endless supply of hot coffee. Tonya didn’t doubt some of the cabinet members were using other stimulants to stay on top of their game.

  Personally, she was on the edge of a very, very public and probably catastrophic attack of agoraphobia. If she could not escape the hot house environment of the situation room, and soon, she was going to say or do something that would finish her career.

  The mood had been febrile when Carmine Lewis had returned and reported that the US President had unilaterally decided to approach the Iranian regime.

  “It’s capitulation!” Admiral Clarke had declared. “Israel was knocked on its ass by Russian and Iranian hackers, its air force badly attrited by the Russians and now the Iranians have got their damned nuclear arms limitation conference.” He pointed up at the monitor on the wall. “All the while their ships are planning to steam straight through our blockade. With respect, Mr. President, we sold the family cow and came home with a beanstalk.”