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

by FX Holden

  He grunted with satisfaction as the missile passed his machine and detonated in a cloud of chaff about two hundred yards behind it. He put the Okhotnik immediately into ‘hunter-killer’ mode, lighting up its phased-array radar and directing its energy at the air below, where the Fantom had to be lurking.

  First, the hunt. Now, the kill.

  Bunny’s missile shot had been part of a decoy ploy. She’d faced Okhotniks over Turkey in her F-35 and seen what they were capable of. No human pilot could match them for reaction speed and she didn’t plan to try.

  She locked the target, sent a missile up at the circling Okhotnik and then lit one Fantom’s tail and blasted it vertically into the sky behind the Okhotnik as it spun away, twisting and turning like a manic eel to avoid her missile. She wanted to get above and behind it, out of direct line of sight from the Okhotnik’s search radar, and attack it from a quarter its human pilot would not expect.

  She sent her other Fantom toward Israeli airspace, climbing slowly, hoping it would be detected and seen as the source of the attack.

  It was a risky maneuver as both of her birds might be picked up by one or other Okhotnik, but it was her best shot. Maybe her only shot.

  She watched the attacking Fantom’s altimeter climb up above 20,000 feet as the other cruised leisurely back toward Israel at 5,000 feet and 600 nerve-wrackingly slow knots.

  Imbecilic. That was how Bondarev saw the American pilots’ half-hearted defense of the no-fly zone. The Americans had made a show of firing a missile at Bondarev’s Okhotnik and now were beetling back into Israeli airspace, no doubt congratulating themselves on making a symbolic effort at protecting Golani airspace, while preserving their own aircraft by pulling it back to safety.

  Well, war didn’t work that way. Not when Yevgeny Bondarev was fighting it. And not when he was fighting it on behalf of a young kid called ‘Rap’ Tchakov who had died trying to make this patch of sky his own. Bondarev’s order was to achieve air superiority over the Golan Heights and if he was attacked, no ceasefire line drawn in 1949 was going to prevent him defending himself.

  With two taps of the buttons on his flightstick, his Okhotnik locked up the fleeing Fantom from less than ten miles away and fired two K-77M missiles at it with two seconds separation.

  “Well, that’s just rude,” Bunny exclaimed. “Shooting a girl in the back?” She triggered the fleeing Fantom’s missile defense routine and left it to fend for itself as she focused on her target, the Okhotnik that had just fired on her.

  Her other bird was plummeting down on it from above like an osprey falling on a juicy salmon, directing itself with optical-infrared sensors so that it didn’t alert its prey. The Okhotnik’s pilot had pushed its nose down, following its missiles down toward her now-frantically-maneuvering decoy Fantom, but she quickly hauled it in and at 2,000 yards laid her guns’ crosshairs on the enemy drone, locked the target and ordered her second Fantom to engage.

  Its four-barrel gatling autocannon spat once, sending a volley of one hundred 25mm high-explosive armor-piercing shells into the path of the Russian drone, before correcting its own aim and firing again, sending another three hundred rounds at the Okhotnik, stitching it from nose to tail, its fragmentation shells splitting the bat-like aircraft in two as though cleaving it with an axe.

  Bunny and Kovacs watched the attack through the Fantom’s forward-mounted situational awareness camera and Bunny was surprised to see it didn’t explode … the two halves of the drone simply fell away from each other and started twisting through the sky toward the ground below like autumn leaves from a tree.

  Bondarev started. The attack had caught his Okhotnik in its blind spot. Unlike the Felon, it had no rear-facing infrared or optical sensors.

  A US Fantom had suddenly appeared on his targeting display, above and behind his Okhotnik, but there had been no time to react. Worse, as the Russian aircraft firing them went dark, the missiles it had fired lost their targeting data. They switched to autonomous target-seeking mode, but the interference from the jamming radiation being blasted at them by their target Fantom prevented them getting a radar lock and they went wild.

  Ti durak, Bondarev. You idiot.

  Adding insult to injury, the two American Fantoms dropped off his radar screen and disappeared as their pilot dragged them back down into the ground clutter of the Golani hills and valleys.

  He pulled up his tactical map at the same time as getting on the radio to his pilots. “Koshka flight, report.”

  “Koshka three, splash one Israeli F-35.”

  “Koshka four, Okhotnik four lost to enemy air-to-air missile.”

  “Koshka two, on station sector D, no targets.”

  He drew a bitter breath. “Koshka leader has lost Okhotnik one. Stand by.”

  Not bad. Not good. Two Okhotniks lost. One Israeli F-35 downed, a high-value prize. He briefly considered pulling Koshka two off station to his north to search for the US Fantoms, but he had to focus on the main game. There was still at least one Israeli F-35 lurking.

  “Koshka flight, Koshka leader. Engage search radars, narrow beam mode. Optimize search algorithms for Israeli F-35 and US Fantom signatures. We have at least three hostile aircraft still active in our patrol area.”

  Bunny wasn’t concerned with the Russians anymore. Not those in the air, anyway. She was much more concerned with those on the ground. Her recon aircraft, automatically following the Russian Armata tank and its ‘wingman’, had reached the outskirts of the town and she could see its commander conferring with troops at a roadblock.

  “I need to focus on what’s happening on the ground,” Bunny told Kovacs. “We need to put those two air-to-air Fantoms into autonomous mode and let them go to work.”

  Shelly Kovacs bit her lip, one foot pulled up underneath her on her chair. Then she uncurled, putting both feet on the floor as though grounding herself. “Alright. The code is control, aircraft ID, alt, B-O-T.”

  Bunny smiled. “That’s original. Would never have guessed that.” She pressed the keys, and in her helmet display the green frame around the small icons for each of the air-air Fantoms was highlighted with a red flashing box. Without any guidance from Bunny, they converged on each other like doubles partners in a game of tennis aligning their game plan, and then as one, turned west toward the waypoints she had already preassigned in the DMZ.

  “OK, that was spooky,” Bunny commented. “You keep an eye on them, alright? Let me know if they go off-reservation.” She put two windows up on the panel in front of Kovacs, showing the two drones’ sensor and instrument feeds and simulated cockpit displays.

  “I’ll do more than that,” Kovacs said, pulling a keyboard closer to her, her right hand hovering over it. “I’ve got a kill code and I’ll use it to bring those Fantoms down if I have to.”

  “Kill code? You never mentioned a kill code.”

  Shelly shot her a slightly annoyed look. “I didn’t think we would ever need it.”

  Bunny shook her head. Focus, O’Hare.

  She switched her radio to the JTAC frequency. “Marine JTAC, Marine JTAC, Marine Air Angel. Marine JTAC, Marine JTAC, this is Angel.”

  Buq’ata, Golan Heights, May 20

  Bell had left Amal’s field radio on a workshop bench for her to monitor. It was, after all, her radio and with Patel gone, she would have to take over contact with the US Air Force aircraft overhead, or the Marine Big Boy when it arrived.

  She’d gently deposited the body of the American Marine in darkness on the concrete apron at the back of her villa. There was no time for sorrow.

  Private ‘Rooster’ Johnson had quickly seen his presence wasn’t needed inside the workshop as Amal began pulling pre-made demolition charges out of a locker and fixing them to the support beams at each corner and in the middle of the shed.

  “You can go up to the roof, guard us from up there. If they still have scouts watching my villa, it won’t take them long to see it is empty. We can escape out the back if they move on us.” She’d
put a hand on his arm. “You will need to take Corporal Patel.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Johnson had replied, putting one foot up on the iron ladder that led to the roof, carbine slung across his back. “Uh, you won’t forget I’m there? Managed to make it through this tour without getting kilt, be a shame it happens just as we’re bugging out.”

  She pushed some hair back from her eyes and stood up. It occurred to Amal he was just a big kid, really. He should be in a bar back home, watching a football game, laughing with his buddies, making goofy moves on girls, not here in Buq’ata with an M27 carbine strapped around his neck, worried about dying today. She gave him a smile. “You have my word I will not blow you up, Private.”

  As he ascended the ladder she turned back to her work, finishing tying the last demolition charge to a support column. The charges were General Dynamics C136 explosives, essentially a plastic container filled with 5lb. of explosive made up of 80 percent TNT and 20 percent aluminum. Each had a digital timer on it that could be synchronized with the other charges around it wirelessly. She’d trained on the use of the charges along with all her other ordnance before relocating her lab to the Golan Heights and was taught it could cut structural steel ten inches in circumference. The support columns in her shed were basically tubular steel and would fly apart under the force of explosives like these, bringing the roof down on what was left of the workshop.

  She then opened all of her munitions cabinets, both wall and floor mounted, and placed a charge in each of them. Finally, she rigged a charge to the 3D printer in the middle of her workshop – that one was the one that hurt the most. She and that damn printer had created wonders of flight and robotics together. But as she gave it a last fond pat, she remembered that in the last two days, it had also been a machine that had helped her deal death and destruction at a scale she had never imagined for herself, and she stepped back. Perhaps it was not such a bad thing it was being destroyed and could not be used by anyone else to do what she had done.

  She walked to the bottom of the ladder. “Ready down here, Private!” she called up.

  His boots appeared at the top of the ladder. “Not a moment too soon, ma’am. We got movement out front. At least platoon strength, with RPGs. Looks like they’re waiting for those tanks to roll up but we don’t want to be here when they do.”

  Amal took one last look around her workshop, moved to the 3D printer and the explosive charge she’d fixed to it, set the timer for fifteen minutes and hit ‘synch’. Around the shed, on supports and inside ordnance lockers, small red lights began counting down. She quickly pulled on the radio backpack.

  They moved outside and she slid the heavy shed door shut and padlocked it.

  The big Marine walked over to his dead comrade and lifted him gently onto his shoulders. He looked at the gate in the back wall leading out to the quarry. “How are we going to get Gunny Jensen down that cliff on a stretcher?”

  “There is a track. Only goats use it now, and it’s covered in shrub, so if you didn’t know it was there, you would miss it. But it’s wide enough for two people to walk abreast. I will lead you down.” She looked ruefully at her house for what might be the last time. “Come, let’s go,” she told him.

  Lieutenant Colonel Zeidan Amar was pacing the room he’d commandeered on the top floor of the house in the center of town, glowering occasionally over a map of Buq’ata on the wall. He had decided to lead the assault on the makeshift Marine compound personally. After the fiasco at the intersection in the center of town where a platoon of his best men had been decimated by a hobby drone, he was determined to be rid of the pestilence that was the Marine squad once and for all. If they had just retired to the villa and bunkered down, he might have found a way to allow them transition in safety to their UNDOF headquarters on Merom Golan. But no. They had treated the villa not as a safe haven but as a fire base for conducting offensive operations throughout Buq’ata. The attack on his Namer IFV, his observation posts, the squad in town – an attack which also claimed his prized Russian sniper.

  When the Russian armor arrived he would…

  “Zeidan.” One of his men put his head through the door. “The men got in position and began harassing fire as ordered, but there was counter-fire from the villa. Our MG squad was just eliminated by a sniper on the roof.”

  With a feral roar, Zeidan reached out and tore the map from the wall, balled it up and threw it on the floor. This was not the plan! After the ‘terrorist’ attack he should have been welcomed into the town as a liberator and spent the last 24 hours on the radio with his people in the other Druze townships across the Golan Heights, shoring up support, paving the way for the entry of Syrian police and armed forces. Not this – urban combat – in the future capital of the Syrian Golani Governate. Forty-eight hours ago, as he’d conferred with his commanders, with his Syrian contacts, there had been no damned US Marines in the Golan Heights, and certainly not in Buq’ata. Just docile, passive UNDOF observers camped on their little hill overlooking the Valley of Tears and rarely venturing outside it.

  Enough. Tanks or no tanks. It. Ended. Now.

  Grabbing his X-95 bullpup rifle from a hook by the door, he took the stairs down to the ground floor two at a time and doubled through town the short distance to the road leading to the Marine compound, approaching it through a dark side alley packed with his men. He found the man he had assigned to move the platoon up and get them in position for the coming assault, a former Druze Sword Battalion captain.

  “Labib, what is the situation?” he demanded as he walked up behind the man, surprising him in the act of surveying the villa with binoculars.

  “The … we are repositioning the MG,” he stuttered. “It was poorly sited, too exposed to fire from that damned rooftop. But now I don’t … we have seen no movement in the villa for at least five minutes.”

  “Give me your binos.”

  He tore the light-intensifying binoculars from around the man’s neck and fixed them on the villa. It was dark, and ominously quiet.

  “What about the armor, how far out are they?”

  “They got hit by Israeli air outside Hermonit. Several vehicles were disabled, a couple destroyed. Two are approaching Buq’ata now, the rest will follow when they are repaired.”

  “Just two?” Goddammit. The man was right, there was no sign of life inside the building at all. “Bring up a man with an RPG.”

  A minute or so later, he got a tap on the shoulder and turned to see an infantryman he recognized, with a grim expression and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher cradled against his chest. “Ah, Assad. I want you to put a rocket through the top window of that villa, on my command, understood?”

  The man nodded and moved forward.

  “Labib, tell your men that when the RPG hits, I want one minute of suppressing fire on the windows of that villa from all three sides. Let’s see what shakes loose. And have your assault squad ready to move up to those walls once we start laying down covering fire. They will breach and clear the building.” He grabbed the man’s arm. “And tell them, keep civilian casualties to a minimum. I can’t use dead Israeli hostages.”

  “Yes, Zeidan.” He moved off to pass the word.

  When Labib returned, Zeidan sought out the RPG gunner. He was crouched at a corner, weapon loaded, ready to step out and aim. “Now, Assad.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Top window, center.”

  The man rose from his crouch and lifted the launcher to his shoulder. “Ready!” he called and then swung out, legs wide, planting himself in the middle of the alley. “Shot!”

  The rocket lanced out of the alley, covered the 200 yards to the villa in under a second and detonated against the window frame, sending masonry and timber flying. It wasn’t a clean shot, but anyone near the window or in the room behind it would have taken a pasting. Before the rubble even hit the ground, small arms fire erupted from the south, west and north of the villa, a blend of 5.56 assault rifles from IDF armories and 7.62mm A
KM rifles supplied by his Syrian contacts. Chips of concrete and plaster filled the air with dust as bullets smacked into the façade, shattered glass and tore wood away from the window frames.

  Faces blackened, a squad of ten men ran, crouched low, from the cover of the trees to the south-west and flattened themselves against the chest-high walls surrounding the villa. The sergeant commanding them showed great courage and initiative. Not waiting for further orders, after lifting his head to check the situation on the other side of the wall, he signaled his men and rolled over the top of it, moving up to the front door of the house himself as he sent half his squad around to a door on the western side. Both teams were wearing night vision goggles and had rams with them to deal with the doors.

  There was no return fire.

  As the cacophony of suppressing fire died away, the breaching teams hammered the doors down with their rams, threw grenades inside and followed them in.

  Zeidan expected a firefight to erupt inside the building, but instead there was a disquieting silence, broken only by the occasional muffled shout in Arabic.

  Moments later, the sergeant appeared at the front door. “Clear!” he yelled. “No contact.”

  Damn it to hell. They had waited too long. Zeidan shouldered his rifle and ran forward, over the open ground, vaulting the wall. Stepping inside the building, he could see almost nothing as it was filled with dust and smoke from the barrage of small arms fire and the aftermath of the grenade blasts. But he could see it was empty. No dead or wounded Marines, not even any civilians.

  He didn’t need to check upstairs, his men had done that. He strode straight through the house to the rear courtyard. It had been walled in, hidden from view, and now he saw it for the first time. Potted olive and citrus trees lined the walls, and across a concrete apron there was a large shed. He signaled to the men following him to spread out and cover him as he approached the heavy sliding door, and saw it was padlocked from the outside. That didn’t mean there was no one inside. It could be serving as a redoubt, a refuge of last resort that the Marines had retreated to under the weight of fire on the front of the building.