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

by FX Holden

  Their only ace in the hole had been the British Astute-class submarine HMS Agincourt. It had managed to come around behind the Russian-Iranian fleet undetected and was right now nestled deep in the Karpathou Strait, waiting for the Iranian ships to pass overhead and ready to disable one or both with torpedoes if ordered. Ideal for intercepting the Iranians, not so useful for helping them slug it out with a Russian Black Sea fleet steaming right off their bow.

  USS Canberra and USS Porter had been increasing their separation to allow the Russian ships to pass between them unhindered. Ears felt the Canberra lean to starboard as it came around to point its bow at the incoming Russians and minimize its exposed flank.

  He couldn’t see how that would really help when they were completely and utterly surrounded.

  Right then, his thoughts went to his brother Calvin. The guy was probably sitting poolside in Kuwait, pulling on an ice cold no-alcohol beer with a plate of buffalo wings in front of him fit to feed a family of four.

  Were the nuclear alert sirens already starting to sound where he was?

  In the command center of HMS Agincourt, fifteen miles from the epicenter of the explosion, the situation was no less fraught, though a little more restrained.

  They had been watching on their screens as the two Iranians completed their turns toward them, but then they had suddenly accelerated, one breaking to port as the other increased to flank speed, headed straight toward the Agincourt.

  The move had mystified Puncher Courtenay. His sonarmen had picked up nothing to explain why the Iranians had suddenly, apparently, gone crazy. But it smelled to him like a rehearsed maneuver.

  “XO, what would explain what we’re seeing?”

  “The Iranians are under attack, sir. Either for real, or they’re still exercising with the Russians.”

  “Exercising? Not with American destroyers so close. That would be idiotic,” Courtenay replied.

  “Then it can only be missiles, or a torpedo…”

  The answer came milliseconds later as every sonar screen in the command center began flashing warnings showing a massive explosion right in between the two Iranian frigates. Sonar operators began reporting what they were seeing, hearing, but Puncher had no doubts. It was a thing he had hoped never, ever to see.

  His XO gave it a name. All formality went out the window. “Nuke, Puncher. Has to be. Someone let off a bloody nuke!”

  Fifteen miles away. Courtenay quickly scanned the latest sonar readouts. It looked like the explosion had taken place underwater. Seawater was very, very hard to displace in great quantities, even for a nuclear blast. They should be safe, shouldn’t they?

  That depended how many kilotons or, god forbid, megatons the weapon was. And whether it was a one-off, or just the first shot in a bloody full-scale nuclear war.

  He felt sick to the stomach.

  “Pilot, ahead full, right full rudder please, take us down to maximum safe operating depth.” He wanted to put as much water as he could between that nuke and themselves, and get himself as far as possible from any surface shockwaves that would be rippling outward. He reached for the intership tannoy. “General quarters, general quarters. All compartments, this is the Captain. All personnel will secure themselves and brace for impact.”

  Buq’ata, Golan Heights, May 20

  Calvin Bell was also a tad worried. He was worried whether Gunnery Sergeant Jensen would survive the next thirty minutes until their ride out of there arrived.

  As they tracked out of the quarry he’d stumbled, nearly losing his grip on Jensen’s stretcher, and then had to quickly stoop forward to grab the bag of Stevens’ blood the Marine Gunnery Sergeant had resting on his chest to stop it falling. The bag was nearly empty and Jensen was still losing blood. Stevens was the only one with his blood type, and it was technically too soon to tap the guy again.

  There was a very real chance the blood loss could kill the Indiana farmer’s son.

  “Hey, easy there, slave!” Jensen said weakly. “These goods are fragile.”

  “Kept you alive this far, Gunny,” Bell told him, putting the plasma bag back in place as they walked. “Don’t make me regret it.”

  They’d taken longer than the Israeli corporal had expected to negotiate the narrow goat track leading down the cliff into the quarry. She’d told them it was two men wide, but in places they’d had to go single file, which meant Bell and Stevens had to bear Jensen’s entire weight on their own a few times. And he was not a small man.

  They’d made it down without spilling him from the makeshift stretcher, though. The Israeli corporal had taken point as they wound through the quarry, with Johnson bringing up the rear, Patel’s body across his broad shoulders.

  At the wire fence marking the entrance to the quarry, they’d paused as Amal checked in with the Marine drone pilot.

  “Down slowly, folks,” Bell told the other three stretcher bearers, Stevens, Buckland and Wallace. “Bend your knees, not your backs.”

  As the stretcher settled on the ground, Jensen coughed. “Rock.”

  Bell sighed. “Up again, move him to my right a half yard.” Yeah, alright, there was a big rock where they’d dropped him. “You heard the story of the princess and the pea, Gunny?”

  “I’m assuming you’re the pea, Bell?” he came back straight away. Alright, he might have lost a couple quarts of blood, but it hadn’t broken his not-very-funny bone. Bell walked over to Stevens, who was stretching his back, and put an arm over his shoulder. “How you feeling?” he asked, his voice quiet.

  “Weak. Like a damn vampire sucked me dry. Why?”

  “That Big Boy will have medical supplies, plasma and such. But if it doesn’t get here soon, I might need to take another quart.”

  Bell clapped Stevens on the back and walked over to where Lopez was squatting on the ground, her arm cradled to her chest.

  “It’s bleeding again,” she told him, holding out the hand she had cupped under her elbow. It was wet with congealed blood. “Didn’t want to leave a trail behind us,” she said. “You know, when it gets light.”

  He pulled a cloth from a pants pocket and soaked up the blood in her palm, then checked and tightened the bandages around her elbow. It wasn’t anywhere near as dangerous as Jensen’s wound. It needed to be cleaned and re-dressed, and she needed her humerus reset pronto, but none of that was going to happen before they got out of here.

  “What you think happened up at the house, Corporal?” Lopez asked him. “You think that explosion got any of them?” As they’d been making their way down the cliff face, they’d all heard the impact of the RPG and the sustained barrage of small arms fire that must have been an all-out assault on their former hiding place. Right before the ground shook with the force of the workshop demolition charges.

  “Hard to imagine it didn’t,” Bell said as he retightened her bandages. “Sounded like it could have flattened a city block.”

  “I hope we hurt them. Bad.”

  “Me too.”

  “For Patel, I mean.”

  Bell looked over to where Johnson had lain Patel’s body, still standing beside it with his rifle at the ready, looking for all the world like he was daring the devil to come take it. “Yeah, I know. You need more painkillers?”

  Lopez was one of the few in the squad who carried a sidearm, because back in Kobani she had manned the besieged unit’s sandbagged M2 .50-caliber machine gun. She patted the holster on her thigh with her good hand. “Prefer to stay sharp. In case.”

  Bell nodded, thinking to himself that a one-armed Marine with a Sig Sauer M18 pistol wasn’t going to be much use if any of those bloody great Russian tanks came at them when they were out in open farmland … but he kept that to himself.

  US blockade line, Mediterranean Sea, May 20

  The Sinjan’s Captain, Hossein Rostami, hadn’t had time to fully process what he’d seen on the frigate’s aft view screen – the huge gaseous bubble rising from the depths, the Amol tumbling into the crater it made before the c
rater collapsed, the sea closing right over the top of their sister vessel, their own crazy seesaw ride across the sea, shoved forward, pulled back, and finally propelled forward again on wave after wave flowing outward from the explosion…

  But as the huge waterspout tower above his ship collapsed and the air around them congealed into a milky, salty mist, the radiation alarms started ringing out across every deck of the Sinjan and Hossein Rostami knew with a horrible certainty exactly what had happened.

  As the men around him rose from the deck of the bridge where they’d been thrown, Rostami walked to a locker on the rear bulkhead and pulled it open, pulling out NBC – nuclear, biological and chemical – warfare suits before throwing them to the members of the bridge watch. He doubted they would do much good. The waterspout that had collapsed right on top of the Sinjan had probably contained enough radiation to kill anyone who had been out on deck already, and every exposed surface would probably now be lethally radioactive. But inside the bridge they may have been less exposed. He climbed awkwardly into his own suit.

  “Helm, engines full astern, bring us back to slow ahead, five knots. Radar, watch for nearby surface contacts. Damage reports. I want full reports on all damage!” he called out to the stunned watch crew. “Get to it! There is a submarine out there somewhere still, I want it located! I want to know what happened to the Amol. And someone get me Bandar Abbas on the radio.”

  As his shouted orders were being relayed, he looked around him.

  Admiral Daei was slower rising from the floor, and Rostami crouched beside him to help him up. “This is … it is…” the old man was saying, shaking his head. “Rostami?”

  Rostami lifted the Admiral up and propped him against the rear bulkhead. He looked out the bridge windows and at the aft view screen, but all he saw was milky fog.

  His junior OOD was listening to a report from below. “Amol is not responding to our hails. CIC reports a contact at 174 degrees, range 11 miles. It could be the Amol, but the return is very small. They suspect the ship may have capsized.”

  “Get two Zodiacs out there to explore the contact visually, tell them to wear NBC suits, take life preservers and look for survivors. Where is that call to Bandar?!” He held out his hand impatiently and waved it at the man. “Switch to ship’s intercom.” When the man was ready he grabbed the handset. “This is the Captain. The Sinjan and Amol have been subjected to a tactical nuclear weapons attack. We are attempting to contact Bandar Abbas for orders. Radiation levels are high. NBC suits are to be worn at all times in all areas of the ship. We are still at action stations. Your priority is to report and repair any damage to our propulsion, combat, communication or sensor systems and prepare to engage hostile forces on my command. Captain out.”

  The communications officer held out a headset for him and he jammed it onto the hood of his NBC suit, indicating the man should turn up the volume. “Bandar?”

  The man nodded.

  “This is Captain Rostami of the Sinjan, who am I addressing?” he asked.

  “You have reached the duty officer of IRIN Bandar Abbas, Lieutenant Larijani.”

  “Lieutenant, listen carefully. Sinjan and Amol have been attacked with a tactical nuclear weapon, I suspect a torpedo from an Israeli submarine that was detected just before the attack. Damage is currently unknown, but the Amol is not answering to communications. This action is outside my rules of engagement. I require immediate instruction about how to respond. Is that clear? Immediate.”

  “Yes, Captain. I will relay your message at once.”

  Rostami handed the headset back then turned to his junior OOD. “Tell the CIC to ready the ASROC launcher in case we get a lock on that bastard Israeli. And ready the Yakhont missile in VL tube one. Set to sea-skimming mode with terminal pop-up. The target is central Tel Aviv.”

  Binyamin Ben-Zvi had registered the detonation of his special weapon through the hull of the Gal as a rumble like a far-off thunderstorm. Gal had given the boat right full rudder and kept it turning as it rode the underwater shock wave that rocked them roughly from side to side and then the smaller follow-up shocks that hammered the hull as they powered away from the explosion.

  The power of even a nuclear explosion was quickly dissipated by the mass of water between them and the trigger point. The ASROC torpedoes that the Amol had launched at them just before the explosion had lost their track, their acoustic homing systems overwhelmed by the noise of the atomic blast, and the Gal was soon riding in clear water as it pulled away.

  Gal began reading off a checklist of system states to him but Binyamin ignored the AI, got up from his chair and went back to his stateroom. In the locker under his bunk, he found what he was looking for and lay down on the bunk with a photograph of Ehud, which he held in a shaking hand in front of his eyes.

  Then he placed the barrel of his Jericho 9mm pistol into his mouth, and fired.

  All Domain Attack: Counterstrike

  No-Fly Zone, Golan Heights, May 20

  “Merit, Merit, Falcon.”

  “Falcon, go for Merit,” Bunny responded to the Bombardier AWACS over Cyprus. She and Kovacs had just watched their two-drone element of air-air combat Fantoms despatch the final Okhotnik over the Golan Heights. Now the question was whether the Russian’s piloted aircraft, probably Su-57 Felons, would try to force the issue themselves. But even if they did, what Bunny had seen as the two AI-piloted aircraft had worked in perfect harmony together, had given her confidence they could deal with just about anything the Russians tried to throw at them, if they just gave their Fantoms a little rope.

  “Merit, be advised US forces in the Central Command theatre are now at DEFCON 1.”

  Kovacs had been frantically scribbling notes based on her observations of the drone versus drone engagements over the Golan Heights, but now she looked up, shocked.

  “Merit copies. What is the situation, Falcon?”

  “A tactical nuclear weapon has exploded under the sea in the Mediterranean. No further information. We have new tasking for you, Merit.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Your remaining aircraft will escort the Big Boy quadcopter now approaching the evacuation point for the US 1st Marines, 3rd Battalion squad pinned down in Buq’ata. It should be on your tac map already. Make sure those Marines and any civilians with them get away without interference, and then escort the Big Boy back to Hatzerim Air Base in Israel. Medallion flight will take over your patrol in approximately fifteen mikes, they are currently feet wet out of Cyprus.”

  Bunny did a quick check of her aircraft’s fuel and weapons state. She had three Fantoms with between 28 and 32 percent fuel reserve. One was a reconnaissance aircraft with no air-to-air weapons but still a full gun belt. Her two air-air configured Fantoms had three missiles remaining between them, but after two of the ‘vortex’-style attacks on Okhotniks, nothing in their guns.

  “Roger, Falcon, we have just enough juice to be able to accommodate. Can you let Akrotiri know we will be coming back on bingo fuel? We’ll be asking for priority in getting my girls back on the ground.”

  “Falcon copies. Good luck, Merit, Falcon out.” Bunny began laying in waypoints for the escort flight.

  “DEFCON 1? Holy crap,” Kovacs said, standing. “I need to get … I don’t know. Back to my office, I guess, see what is going on?”

  Bunny looked over at Kovacs with a serious expression. “Screw your office. Akrotiri has a nuclear fallout shelter? That’s where I’d be headed.”

  Yevgeny Bondarev had just received a very similar message to the one that had been passed to Bunny O’Hare. A subsea tactical nuke targeting the Iranians? It could only be the Israelis. But the Russian angle on the situation was very, very different. He was to return to Latakia to rearm with anti-ship missiles, re-equip with new drone wingmen, refuel and then proceed with his flight to the eastern Mediterranean to provide attack fighter cover for the Russian Black Sea fleet, which had just been ordered to steam at flank speed for Tartus port in Syria.

>   Any attempt by US warships, or Israeli aircraft, to interfere with the passage of the Russian fleet was to be met with all available force.

  Bondarev was sure his masters in Russia did not really want a naval slugfest in the Mediterranean between US and Russian ships, any more than they wanted nuclear war to break out in the Middle East. But they had clearly overplayed their hand, pushing Israel to and then beyond the brink, and it had reacted dramatically. They had gotten their Israel-Iran disarmament negotiations. By berthing their fleet at Tartus they were sending a signal they did not intend to escalate the situation any more than was already the case, but Bondarev knew it would only take a single slip by a single captain on any one of the nuclear-armed ships to the west, or the Iranian strategic missile forces below him, for the entire situation to spiral out of control, with global consequences.

  For now, at this moment, he was glad he was safe in his cockpit at 30,000 feet over Syria, and not down at a potential ground zero at Latakia.

  A chime sounded in his ears as his passive optical infrared arrays picked up a contact against the cold blackness of the Syrian night. About twenty miles south-west, moving a few hundred feet above the ground, was a single slow-moving aircraft. He focused a beam of radar energy from his phased-array radar on it just long enough to get an identification.

  A US V-22DU Big Boy. Bondarev had met the Big Boy in the air over northern Syria. It was the workhorse of the US Marines and was probably transporting arms, ammunition or reinforcements to the Americans in Buq’ata, which was not good news for the armored column he was supposed to be providing air cover for. He was still smarting from the loss of four of his Okhotniks to US Fantoms over the Golan Heights DMZ and he didn’t hesitate a second before flipping to his interplane channel on the radio.