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

by FX Holden

  Many, many innocent Iranian civilians would die in the chaos that was about to be unleashed on Iran, just as many Israelis were already dying from the attack on Israel.

  Oliver Henderson had not unleashed Operation Illumination lightly. But with Iran in possession of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that could reach Europe, and its President raging at the world, the Iranian leader had left him few options, none of them good.

  Ears Bell shared the despair of President Oliver Henderson.

  The Canberra had just received an ultimatum from the commander of the Russian Black Sea fleet over the maritime Guard Channel. “US vessels, we are proceeding to port at Tartus at flank speed. You will do nothing to interfere with the passage of our vessels. If you take any action we regard as threatening, you will be fired upon.”

  Well, so much for international solidarity. Two Iranian crews might be out there swimming in a radioactive sea, but the Russian Black Sea fleet was making steam for Syria.

  The gas turbine engines of the Canberra that had been thrumming through his feet as the Canberra accelerated into a turn to put itself in the best position to meet possible incoming fire from the Russian cruisers and frigates died suddenly away as the warship’s Captain took the Russians at their word and backed his speed off, then turned slowly to port to give the Russian fleet more room to pass through the blockade.

  There was still no guarantee the passage of the two forces was not going to end in blood and fire.

  On the Canberra’s 360-degree tactical display around the walls, Ears could see the massive Russian ships, the Admiral Makov, Admiral Essen, Moskva and Pyotr Morgunov, only five miles to starboard, each of them twice to three times the tonnage of the Canberra and together carrying five times as many missiles as US Destroyer Squadron 60. Behind the Canberra and closing on them again were the two Karakurt-class corvettes, the Mytischi and the Sovetsk, either of which by themselves carried enough Kalibr missiles to threaten the Canberra or any of the other ships in the US squadron.

  And that didn’t even take account of the Russian Kilo and Iranian Fateh submarines that were probably also circling them.

  Against all of these threats, the USS Canberra had one 5-inch gun, eight naval strike missiles, and 24 vertically launched Hellfire missiles it would probably never get away. If missiles started flying and torpedoes were exchanged between the US and Russian ships, the battle would be decided in seconds, and Ears was not at all confident the US ships would survive it.

  Not for the first time in history, a sailor in a warship was quietly cursing the politicians who had put him in harm’s way.

  “Vampires! Three … no, four now. Bearing 348 degrees, heading zero four eight, range five miles, speed 1,300 knots, target unknown!”

  Enemy missiles! The shout galvanized the CIC, but all Ears could do was watch his comrades in action. His job was to detect submarines, not protect his ship from supersonic anti-ship missiles.

  He could see on his tactical display the missiles were coming down the bearing of the Iranian frigate. One thousand three hundred knots? That was twice the speed of sound. Bell knew his anti-ship missiles, every sonarman had to. He had to be able to detect the sound of a missile launch tube popping open, of the gases inside exploding into the water as the missile was punched up out of the sea, into the air above before its rocket boosters ignited.

  If the Iranian had fired them, these were Yakhonts. Had to be. And judging by their heading, not fired at the Canberra, fired past them.

  Inside the insulated walls of the CIC, the automated response of the Canberra’s close-in weapons system was inaudible. With an interception window that was measured in milliseconds before the missiles passed, Ears could only hope the Canberra was firing every damn thing it had at the enemy cruise missiles.

  Agincourt rose to sensor depth like a blue whale coming up for air and put up its sensor masts. The data flowed in quickly.

  “Surface contact, bearing 348 degrees, congruent with contact Golf two, IRIN Sinjan.”

  “Target data uploaded, Perseus missiles primed and ready to fire.”

  “Vampires!” his sensor officer called out, voice loud in the confined space. “Missiles outbound from the Sinjan. Heading … calculating track … they’re headed straight for Tel Aviv.”

  Puncher froze. His worst nightmare was unfolding right before his eyes. A nuclear detonation, and now a shooting war. And they were surfacing right in the middle of it.

  He realized every face in the command center was turned toward him.

  “Captain? Orders, sir?” his XO prompted.

  “Weapons…” The words of the commander of the US flotilla rung in Puncher’s head. If you hear anything go boom, then I was wrong and we’d probably appreciate an assist. “Weapons … match generated bearing on contact Golf two, and shoot.”

  Hossein Rostami saw his missiles spear overhead, one after the other, arc toward their targets in the Israeli city to the east and accelerate away from his ship. He checked his feelings.

  Elation. Conviction.

  Remorse?

  No. It had to be done.

  He followed the missiles on his aft view display, now icons as much as physical things, data peeling out from under the square marking them on his screen, but real nonetheless. He watched them move from first phase to second phase boost, puffs of white smoke as the first phase rockets fell away and the second phase rockets ignited, pushing the Yakhont missiles to more than twice the speed of sound as they maneuvered to pass between two of the US ships and angled themselves toward Tel Aviv.

  He may be dead already – his nation too – but they would not die a meek death. He put his hands behind his back and smiled.

  But that smile was all Hossein Rostami had time for. The two Perseus missiles launched by the Agincourt had already closed the gap to the Sinjan.

  Popping up from wave height just a mile out from the Sinjan, they locked it with onboard lasers and released two submunitions, which gave them three warheads, each targeting a different part of the ship. With two missiles fired, it meant that six hypersonic projectiles slammed into the thin skin of the Sinjan and detonated deep in its interior. The Iranian frigate didn’t so much sink as explode into a hundred pieces.

  Hossein Rostami died believing his entire nation had gone to its death before him, bathed in nuclear fire. And he had been the only one with the guts to avenge it.

  The close-in weapons system of the Independence-class littoral warship USS Canberra had been through multiple upgrades since it was launched in 2025. The most recent was the installation of an autonomous 11-cell SEARAM missile launcher. Based on the venerable AIM-9X infrared homing air-to-air missile, the SEARAM automatically detected, identified and then engaged any airborne threat within ten miles of the Canberra.

  There was no greater threat to a US ship than a Yakhont missile, and though they were not coming straight at the USS Canberra, the SEARAM system classified the approaching projectiles as high-priority targets and launched all four of its ready missiles at them. Though the targets were flying at twice the speed of sound, the Canberra’s missiles were just as fast and didn’t have to chase them, they just had to cross five miles of sea into their path to intercept them.

  Guided by Canberra’s radar and their own infrared seekers, the four missiles swarmed toward the interception with the line of four Yakhonts.

  The first and second SEARAM missiles overshot.

  The second and third turned one of the Iranian missiles into a ball of flame.

  The fourth smacked another Iranian missile in the fins and knocked it into a flat spiral that sent it spinning into the sea, where it disintegrated into a thousand small fragments.

  Two Yakhont missiles got through the barrage from the Canberra and powered toward Tel Aviv.

  Ears heard Drysdale’s tightly strung voice in his headset, “Comms, alert that Israeli AWACS, they have incoming!”

  No-Fly Zone, Golan Heights, May 20

  “Falcon, I can see two
Russian Felons south of Damascus and I am willing to bet they are maneuvering for a long-range missile intercept of my Big Boy,” Bunny announced.

  She was alone in her trailer again, since the rapid departure of Shelly Kovacs. But she was never alone, not really. She shared her trailer and the sky to the east of her with hundreds of allied aircraft and ground fighters.

  Bunny O’Hare felt more plugged in sitting in the seat of her drone station inside this trailer than she had ever felt in the cockpit of an F-35 Panther. She had the data of three aircraft flowing through her eyes, ears and fingertips. She had the voice of the AWACS controller in her ears. She had the sight of a hundred Israeli Air Force aircraft still swarming over Israel, Lebanon and parts north and south, not to mention a host of Russian aircraft milling around inside Syria, tagged by AWACS, US satellites and long-range radars inside Jordan, Cyprus, Qatar and Iraq.

  Right now, though, she was only concerned by the two that had just popped up on her sensors south of Damascus, flying a very careful parallel track to the 1974 DMZ line. It was like they were drawing a line in the sky that matched the DMZ border about twenty miles inside Syria and she could think of only one reason for that.

  Bunny also knew that in any other situation than a recently declared DEFCON 1 she would have been blowing thistles to the wind trying to ask for permission to engage aircraft that deep inside Syria. But they were at DEFCON 1, and it was not a time for playing nice.

  “Merit, you are cleared to engage. Repeat, you are cleared to engage the identified targets inside Syria. Good hunting. Falcon out.”

  Yes.

  The enemy Felons had no idea she could see them. It was one of the beauties of the smaller F-47 that it could see much further than it could be seen. She had three missiles, and two targets. And for every mile she could sneak her Fantoms closer to the Felons, her odds of success improved, so she pushed her three drones down to camel hump height and sent them west toward the contacts. She couldn’t afford too much play time – they could fire at the slow, unarmed Big Boy at any time and it would have zero to no chance of evading a K-77 missile.

  Three seconds. Two. One.

  She sent a beam of active radar energy down the bearing of the two contacts and got an immediate return. Locked.

  “Fox three by three!” she announced to herself. It was pointless, but it was hard wired into her training.

  Three active radar homing Peregrine missiles dropped out of the weapons bays of her two air-to-air Fantoms and streaked west. The two Felons reacted immediately to her locking them up on radar, breaking high and low to try to split her attack.

  It might have worked. For at least one of them.

  Behind the missiles, Bunny had pushed her long-lived recon Fantom. It only had guns, no missiles. But at 800 miles an hour it followed the supersonic missiles to their targets and, as one Russian disintegrated in a ball of fire, even though the other managed to dodge the missile fired at it, Bunny’s recon fighter closed on the desperately maneuvering Felon and with silicon efficiency drilled it with a stream of 25mm APEX rounds from a range of 1,200 yards, sending it tumbling into the sand below.

  “Fark yes!” Bunny yelled. She jumped in the air, tearing the connecting cables for her helmet from their sockets in the armrest of her seat and nearly snapping her own neck in the process. “Ow, bloody hell.”

  She stood there, gently rolling her head on her shoulders and watching the Big Boy continue its slow progress to the Marine evacuation zone, completely oblivious to how close it had come to destruction at the hands of the Russian Felons.

  But that was war, wasn’t it? What didn’t kill you only made you happier.

  “Canberra, Agincourt, stand down, Agincourt!”

  The order from the commander of the US flotilla had come not a second too soon. In the command center of the British submarine, the sensor officer had just announced that the massive Russian helicopter landing ship, the Pyotr Morgunov, had just been reacquired and a targeting solution loaded into the next two Perseus missiles in his tubes.

  But Puncher Courtenay had hesitated again. Just momentarily. Because it didn’t appear the Russians were actually firing at anyone at all. Nor were the Americans. So he’d reached for his headset and had his comms officer patch him through to the Canberra.

  For World War Three, it was really looking rather quiet.

  But someone had detonated a nuclear weapon. And the Iranians had fired a supersonic cruise missile toward Israel. Of that he was certain. Of course, it was highly likely the Russians hadn’t picked up his Perseus missiles before they struck the Sinjan. They had only been in flight for a few seconds, traveling at such a speed they might have registered on Russian radar as a single transitory blip before they struck the Iranian frigate and were gone, the Sinjan along with them. It was likely the Russians were as confused as the Americans and the British about who, exactly, had just detonated a nuclear weapon. And why their Iranian comrades were no longer answering their hail.

  So it did seem possible they were holding their fire, until they were certain. Or that they did not really consider it worth starting World War Three over the loss of a couple of Iranian frigates, after all. Or, more likely still, that they did not wish to expose how vulnerable their aging Black Sea fleet really was to modern NATO guided missile destroyers and hidden submarines.

  And as long as the American destroyers were not actually threating them…

  “Weapons, stand down!” Puncher ordered. “Missiles to safe.”

  A sudden, eerie quiet descended over the control room, after several minutes of frenetic activity. So, this is war, Puncher. A few moments of horror and violence, followed by the even more horrifying sound of silence.

  Puncher Courtenay felt like throwing up. But that would not bloody do. It would not do, at all.

  “Canberra, this is Agincourt. We are standing down.”

  Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile shield was designed to knock down ballistic missiles and even artillery shells or rockets. Continuously upgraded since its go-live in 2011, it had shown it could intercept 90 percent of projectiles fired into Israel by its enemies in Lebanon or the Gaza Strip. But only 90 percent. It had two weaknesses – it could be overwhelmed by a blizzard of rockets, and it could not intercept what it could not ‘see’, such as the low-flying stealth cruise missile the Yakhont.

  The Aegis radar-equipped ships of the US destroyer squadron could see the Yakhonts, but they had no ability to patch their data directly through to the Israeli Iron Dome batteries.

  Even though the missile launch alert from the Americans reached them almost immediately, the Iron Dome batteries outside Tel Aviv did not detect the supersonic Yakhont missiles until they were five seconds out. The newly deployed, last-resort defenses of the Iron Dome system were a series of close-in 10-kilowatt laser batteries located on the northern and southern perimeters of Tel Aviv facing Lebanon and the Gaza Strip – the source of most missile and rocket attacks – and several in the east around the Ben Gurion airport.

  There was only one laser battery primed and ready to defend against a stealth missile attack from the sea, and that was the battery located on a spit outside Tel Aviv seaport, protecting the port and the light aircraft airport behind it. Despite only having five seconds to detect and react to the incoming Iranian missiles, the battery crew was ready and had handed engagement authority to their laser’s automated ‘lock and fire’ control system. From several points along the spit, beams of high-intensity laser energy locked onto the first of the incoming Yakhont missiles and burned through its outer casing, frying its guidance system and sending it plunging into the sea a mile short of the harbor.

  The second missile was flying past the battery before it could recharge and engage; over the marina, where it popped up from sea level and started climbing, aiming itself directly at Tel Aviv’s tallest building, the 1,000-foot-high Spiral Tower at the Azrieli Center. Or more specifically, at the thirtieth floor of the spiral tower, where Iran’s engineers
had calculated it would cause maximum structural damage.

  A nuclear weapon detonated at that height above ground would completely destroy all four skyscrapers at the Azrieli Center and create a crater of radioactive rubble out to two miles from the explosion’s epicenter. A large part of Tel Aviv’s downtown area would be critically damaged or destroyed.

  But the warhead on the last of the Sinjan’s Yakhont missiles was not nuclear. That warhead was now lying on the sea floor somewhere abeam of the USS Canberra, and the warhead that smashed through the steel and glass façade of the Spiral Tower was 500lbs. of high explosive, similar in effect to the two airliners that hit the World Trade Center in New York in 2001.

  The whole tower shook with the impact: glass, concrete and steel rained down on the streets below and dark black smoke began billowing from the gaping holes in the façade.

  But the people of Tel Aviv were no strangers to rocket and missile attacks. The emergency sirens had begun wailing as soon as the American missile launch warning was received, and the citizens of Tel Aviv had run to their bomb shelters, as they had done so many times before. An unexpected benefit of the cyber chaos still impacting the country was that most companies and government offices had ordered their employees to remain at home, so the Spiral Tower at the Azrieli Center had been largely empty when the Sinjan’s missile struck.

  It was no comfort to the 28 civilians and six first responders who lost their lives in the attack, but it could have been much, much worse.

  Buq’ata, Golan Heights, May 20

  Could be worse, Private Calvin Bell decided, surveying the low hilltop that was their evacuation point. A stand of scrubby trees around the crown provided some cover from which they could survey the fields below, and the top of the hill was a cleared space big enough for a tilt rotor to land.