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

by FX Holden

  He quickly checked the gate in the rear wall that let out onto a sheer cliff face leading down to the quarry. They would not have gone out that way. The sheer cliff looked unscalable in the dark, especially bearing wounded civilians, and if they had skirted it to the east or west, they would have run into the men he had positioned around the villa.

  They were inside the big metal shed. Ready to make their last stand. Amar was determined to make sure it was indeed their last.

  He motioned to Labib to join him by the door. “Do we have bolt cutters?” he whispered, pointing at the lock. “The bastards are sure to be holed up inside.”

  “I don’t think so. But we can tape a grenade to the lock.” Labib looked along the heavy metal walls. “Why not just wait for the Russians? A tank could level this dump with a single shot.”

  “No. I told you, I need those civilians for…”

  He never finished his sentence. With a ripple of blasts so close together they sounded like a single explosion, Amal’s twelve C136 demolition charges inside the workshop went off, bringing down the roof of the shed and triggering the other explosives and ammunition in lockers inside the building.

  In moments, nothing was left of Amal Azaria’s drone workshop.

  Or of the aspirant to the Governorship of the new Syrian Golani Governate, the late and formerly very frustrated Lieutenant Colonel Zeidan Amar.

  “Whoa!” Bunny exclaimed, a sudden flare in the night vision of her recon drone catching her eye. She swung the camera around to the location of the Marine compound at the outskirts of town, a sinking feeling in her gut.

  It was no longer there. All she could see was a huge rolling cloud of fire with a pillar of smoke rising high into the air over the town.

  Had the Russians managed to get armor into the town without her seeing it?

  “Marine JTAC, Marine JTAC, Angel. Come in Patel…”

  There was no reply.

  “What’s up?” Shelly asked. She had her eyes fixed on her two Fantoms, now maneuvering to set up an attack on the northernmost Okhotnik over the Golan.

  “That house our boys and girls were sheltering in – it’s … it’s…” Bunny zoomed her camera. The smoke was still obscuring her view, but she could see a little more now and what she could see didn’t help the feeling in her stomach. “It’s half gone, the whole eastern side. It’s like someone took it out with a 500lb. bomb.” She also saw a large number of combatants milling around the explosion site, some clearly dragging wounded from the area.

  “Could the Russians have hit it with an air strike?” Shelly asked. “Cruise missile?”

  “That would have been cold. Even for Ivan. There were civilians in that building with those Marines.”

  As Bunny was speaking, the radio crackled to life. “Angel, Angel, IDF JTAC.”

  IDF JTAC? A woman’s voice. “Uh, IDF JTAC, go for Angel.”

  “Angel, I am sorry but Corporal Patel is dead. My name is Corporal Azaria, Unit 351, Palhik Company, Golani Brigade. It was my radio Corporal Patel was using. I am not trained in your close air support protocols.”

  “That’s … what is your situation, Corporal? I saw an explosion, possible enemy troops inside your compound.”

  “Yes, we had to abandon my house. We would not have been able to defend against an assault supported by Russian armor.”

  “That was your house? I’m sorry to tell you, Azaria, it looks like either the Russians or Syrians put a 500lb. bomb through a window.”

  “No. That was me,” the woman said, very matter of fact. “We are now withdrawing through the quarry to the LZ in the fields to the east. Do you know how far out the evacuation flight is?”

  Bunny pulled up her tactical display and zoomed it out to show her the area to the south-west. The Marine Big Boy flight was being tracked by the Bombardier AWACS over Cyprus and was clearly marked on her map. “It’s over the Sea of Galilee. Showing an ETA of 0348.”

  “We will be at the LZ around … I think around 0330. There is little cover there. We will be out on open ground for some time.”

  “I will patrol your evacuation point and let you know if I see any hostile activity.”

  “Thank you. I need to go now.”

  “Roger. Angel out.”

  I lost one, was Bunny’s next thought. The filled-crust pizza guy. That was all she knew about Patel. She felt sick.

  “Fantoms engaging,” Kovacs said. “Enemy radar lock. Why don’t they react? No. What?”

  Her surprise drew Bunny’s thoughts back to the present. She quickly set up some recon waypoints around the evacuation position for the Marines and their civilian charges, along with alerts to warn them of ground or armored combatants approaching the evac zone. Then she turned her attention to the screen Kovacs was watching. It took her a moment to assimilate all the data flowing across the screen with what she was seeing in the drone ‘cockpit’ view windows.

  The two Fantoms had positioned themselves immediately below the circling Okhotnik over the mountain ranges in the north of the Golan Heights and were rising almost vertically to intercept it. But it had spotted them, and its remote pilot had locked them up.

  A human pilot, with an enemy radar lock warning warbling in his or her ears, knowing a missile launch alert would be next, would either have fired their own weapons, or evaded, or both. But the two Fantoms simply kept climbing at the target.

  “Order them to evade!” Kovacs yelled at Bunny. “They’re sitting ducks.”

  But Bunny wasn’t so sure. She’d never seen a Fantom fly a fully autonomous intercept. “No! Let’s watch. We might learn something.”

  Multiple events seemed to happen simultaneously. As expected, two missiles lanced down from the Russian aircraft directly at the US Fantoms 20,000 feet below it. And now the Fantoms reacted, spinning around each other like the arms of a gyro, at dizzying, literally breakneck speed. As they did so, they fired flares and foil chaff into the air around them and their gyroscopic motion created a spray of decoys in the air that was sucked into a tornado-like funnel by the force of their combined wake. Bunny’s eyes flicked to their countermeasure readouts and saw they were both jamming too, and at the last millisecond before the missiles struck, they split out of their climb, like water bursting from the top of a fountain.

  There was no way for the Russian missiles to react quickly enough to follow them. In any case, they were looking at a dense cloud of radar-reflecting foil and enticing heat and light in the funnel of decoys the Fantoms had created and they kept powering past the US drones, into the funnel of foil and heat, detonating harmlessly two hundred feet below their targets.

  Which had now reversed their banking turn and oriented on the Okhotnik again from different points of the compass. In a heartbeat, they both locked guns on the Russian drone and fired at point-blank range.

  The Russian aircraft dissolved in a burst of light and metal.

  “Did you program that … that chaff and flare vortex thing?” Kovacs asked Bunny, her mouth still agape.

  “No,” Bunny replied, equally stunned. “I assumed you did.”

  “No, I … I mean, it’s a learning system. The AI is supposed to learn from every mission flown by every drone and optimize its tactics based on … on … but that…”

  As O’Hare watched, the two Fantoms joined formation again, pointed their noses at the earth and headed immediately toward the last remaining Okhotnik over the Golan. They clearly preferred close-quarters combat. “Well, Shelly, I guess they learned.”

  US blockade line, Mediterranean Sea, May 20

  “Incoming torpedo, bearing one eight niner, speed 50 knots, range four point four miles, Sinjan is the target,” a junior Officer of the Deck announced. “It has just passed under the Amol.”

  Captain Rostami did a quick mental calculation. The Sinjan was now flying across the water at its maximum speed of 45 knots, directly away from the torpedo. It was closing on them at a relative speed of just five knots. He relaxed. If they did nothing, the
homing torpedo would catch them before it ran out of fuel, but there was a chance it could be decoyed off course.

  Or forced off course by the Amol, which had maneuvered to put itself between the source of the attack and the Sinjan. Rostami had great confidence in the Amol’s Captain, having seen his sister ship perform during the exercises of the last two weeks, exercises which were in reality full dress rehearsals for exactly this type of attack.

  As they watched a virtual rear window of the bridge – essentially a large flat screen showing the view behind the ship with tactical data overlaid on it – the Amol steadied and two exhaust plumes spat out of its superstructure-mounted horizontal tubes. “Amol firing ASROC,” his OOD advised.

  “They are attacking the contact?” the Admiral asked. He was a cleric and politician first and foremost, and left warfighting strategy to his professional officers.

  “Yes, Admiral. The incoming torpedo is almost certainly wire-guided. Even if they don’t destroy the contact, they may force it to maneuver so radically that it breaks the guidance wires.” Rostami looked at the plot again, and then thumped the railing beside him in frustration. “Why this? Why now? We are pulling back, don’t the damn Israelis know that!?”

  “I suspect they did not get the message, Captain,” the Admiral observed.

  Torpedoes in the water, range two miles, sonar active … sonar lock, they have acquired the Gal, the AI announced impersonally. Time to impact, one minute 33 seconds. Initiating acoustic jamming, deploying decoys. Recommend defensive maneuvers.

  Binyamin was listening to Gal as though through the distorting lens of a fairground looking glass. He had launched a nuclear torpedo at an Iranian ship. He should be horrified at the thought. Instead, all he wanted was for it to reach out and pull the already dead bodies of the men he had aimed it at into the depths of the Aegean, so that they could share the same waterlogged fate as Ehud.

  That the Gal would also be destroyed was of secondary importance to him. But even through the fog of his despair he realized one thing. The Gal had to stay alive long enough for the torpedo to reach its target.

  “Options?” he asked.

  Emergency defensive maneuver. We may lose wire guidance of the special weapon but it will go autonomous and attempt to locate the target with its own sensors.

  “If it does not?”

  It will go inactive and sink to the sea floor.

  “No, Gal. Another option.”

  Detonate the torpedo now. Due to the wide area of effect, there is a 95 percent chance of destroying the IRIN Amol, which will disrupt its torpedo attack. There is a 68 percent chance of destroying the IRIN Sinjan, which is our mission objective. There is a 13 percent chance of damage to the Gal, which is lower than the chance of destruction from the incoming torpedoes.

  He didn’t hesitate. “Much better.” Leaning over to the same console he used to initialize the nuclear torpedo, he reached for the screen and swiped left to a large red icon with Hebrew writing that simply said, “Commit.”

  He tapped it, lay back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  On the Sinjan, Captain Rostami grabbed the railing that ran around the inside of the bridge with white knuckles, watching the aft view screen in horror as the sea between the Amol and the Sinjan expanded into a huge, gaseous bubble of unbelievable girth. It rose with incredible speed, the Amol disappearing from view behind it.

  A giant hand lifted the stern of the Sinjan and pushed its bow under the surface, threatening to send it spearing below the waves, but then the bubble collapsed into itself, a crater appeared in the seawater behind them and he just had time to see the Amol tumble like a toy yacht down a hillside as it disappeared into the raging foam at the bottom of the crater before a plume of seawater bigger than any sea spout he had ever seen shot up from the depths, towering hundreds of feet above them.

  The sea around the Sinjan began rushing past at the height of the bridge, pulling the 3,000-ton frigate out of its forward, downward plunge and sucking it backwards, into the gaping gaseous crater.

  Until the rising plume of seawater collapsed back into the crater and propelled the Sinjan forward again with a violence that threw any of the crew who were not belted into their action stations, like Captain Hossein Rostami and Rear Admiral Karim Daei, to the deck with bone-crushing force.

  Mississippi Road, Russett, Maryland, May 20

  Tonya Dupré had listened to the President’s press conference from her Russett apartment.

  She thought it had gone pretty well. She wanted to get an update on the military situation on the border now. With Iran pulling its ships back, she’d hope to see signs the ground war phase of the All Domain Attack was also being wound back, with Syrian and Iranian forces on the border with Israel being pulled back to their bases, and the heat going out of some of the Iranian-backed insurrections. She swung her legs down off her sofa as her cell phone buzzed. Nothing unusual in that, it did that a hundred times a day. But it buzzed with the S-O-S rhythm that she’d set up for alerts from HOLMES.

  She read the text with a horrified chill.

  Cheyenne Mountain reports subsea nuclear detonation in the Aegean Sea in vicinity of Iranian vessels.

  Her mind raced … vicinity? There were warships of at least four nations in the ‘vicinity’ of the Iranian vessels and every single one of them would right now be coming to a full nuclear conflict alert. In seconds she was at her table, ripping the laptop on her dining table open. It took an agonizingly long time to boot, scan her face and connect to her Directorate ID. When the Cyber Directorate logo flashed up she sat down and pulled her laptop closer.

  “HOLMES, give me everything you have on the nuclear incident in the Aegean Sea, from the last fifteen minutes.”

  Yes, Director. At 0340 hours Mediterranean time, the early warning system at Cheyenne Mountain registered seismic activity in the Aegean Sea area, confirmed by satellite thermal imaging showing a high temperature anomaly in the sea. The data is consistent with the detonation of a five-kiloton tactical nuclear weapon. DIA and NSA intelligence puts the detonation almost exactly midway between the two Iranian missile frigates IRIN Sinjan and IRIN Amol…

  “Do we have a damage assessment on the Iranian ships?”

  No, Director. The incident is ongoing and a large vapor plume is preventing imaging. Shall I continue?

  “Yes.”

  Signals intelligence analysis by NSA indicates an immediate increase in the volume of traffic between the Russian fleet and Sevastopol, indicative of the fleet being ordered to a higher level of alert. Central Command has also ordered all US forces in the Command to DEFCON 1.

  Tonya’s mind and body went numb. DEFCON 1. ‘Nuclear war is imminent or has already started.’ No, it can’t be. Never before … no one has ever gone this far, we always pull back from the brink. Always. We have the weapons, but no nation has ever dared use them.

  Until today. Because no nation has ever faced the prospect of total destruction in an All Domain Attack. Israel … isolated in space, crippled in the cyber domain, decimated in the air, facing internal unrest and the prospect of a full-scale ground invasion…

  So Israel had appeared to capitulate. It had agreed to meet in October and discuss arms limitation. All the while, it was preparing to remove the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons at sea in a dramatic demonstration of its nuclear power. A desperate and misplaced negotiation tactic? The actions of a single submarine commander and crew? Or just the first shot in a nuclear conflict with Iran that could tip the world into Armageddon?

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was preventing the coming avalanche with a well-placed demolition charge.

  “HOLMES, put me through to the President, and send an alert to General Poznam at Cyber Command to prepare to initiate Operation Illumination as soon as I secure Presidential authority.”

  US blockade line, Mediterranean Sea, May 20

  Aboard the USS Canberra, the CIC had erupted.

  It had started, perhaps not surprisingly
, with Ears tearing his headphones from his head before the screaming whine in his headphones deafened him. He didn’t need them. The acoustic signal translator screen in front of him told its own story. He pushed it through to the command alert screen for the attention of Drysdale and Goldmann, but he also stood and called it out verbally.

  “Subsea detonation, bearing three one five degrees, range twenty miles. Right between those Iranian ships. Acoustic analysis is calling it nuclear!”

  For once, Drysdale wasn’t asleep at the wheel. “On your toes, people! SRO, update positions on those Russian surface combatants. Weapons, spool up close-in and anti-air defenses. I want naval strike missiles assigned to every Russian vessel. Prepare to launch on Captain’s command. This is about to get real, people.”

  They were still at general quarters, waiting to see whether the Iranians were really pulling back or just planning to sail around in circles for a while. Their tactical situation was, in a word, dire.

  The four destroyers and the LCS of Squadron 60 were east of Rhodes, stretched out across the entrance into the Mediterranean from the Aegean Sea, with five to fifteen miles separation. It was a formation designed to allow them to maximize the chances of detecting Russian or Iranian submarines, and for any two destroyers to intercept and halt the Iranian ships if they tried to force the blockade line.

  It was not a formation designed to optimize their ability to fight a major surface battle with the Russian-Iranian fleet. They had two Russian corvettes behind them. Barely five miles ahead and still steaming toward them was the core of the Russian fleet … two frigates and the cruiser Moskva, with enough firepower to take on a carrier battle group. With them were believed to be at least two Kilo-class submarines and the remaining Iranian Fateh, two of which were still undetected. The only Kilo they had located with their airborne dipping sonar was also behind them, and probably coming to missile launch depth right now.