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

by FX Holden

  Damn show off. Bunny had already decided she didn’t like her. Yet.

  As they emerged into the cooler night air, Bunny’s nostrils flared. She could still smell that heady alcohol-to-jet (ATJ) fuel smell coming off the chopper crouched on the deck, see the shimmer of the heat over those turbine engines. The thing was matt black, with the White Star Lines logo in plain white on the doors. It wasn’t a copter, wasn’t a plane. It reminded her a little of a Bell-Boeing Osprey special ops aircraft, but those jet engines at the rear … not an Osprey.

  “You like?” D’Antonia asked, pausing as they reached it.

  “Can I touch?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Bunny walked closer and ran her hand over the angular wheel housing and got her first surprise. It felt like rubber.

  “Stealth coating?”

  D’Antonia smiled and nodded, folding her arms and watching O’Hare with interest. “Si.”

  She walked around the rear of the aircraft, D’Antonia following. “Twin General Electric TF40 turbofans.”

  “Correct.”

  A sliding door to the interior was open and Bunny peered inside. It wasn’t fitted out like an executive ride. The compartment inside was very spartan, with everything that might move either strapped down, locked in or stowed in netting-covered racks. “Modular payload bay,” Bunny guessed. “This one is a personnel module. There are other modules?”

  “There are,” D’Antonia confirmed.

  Bunny walked around to the front of the machine. She was too short to hop up and see inside the cockpit and the door was locked (she tried it), but on the nose of the aircraft she spotted two round ports. They were barely visible to the eye, marked only by a circular break in the smooth metal of the aircraft’s skin. She looked under the nose of the aircraft, at bulges in front of the forward wheels.

  “These are gun ports,” Bunny decided.

  “They could simply be concealed landing lights.”

  “Yeah, they could. But they’re not.”

  “Mr. Sorensen is waiting.”

  The Italian woman led them off the deck, past the lap pool and into a poolside salon with tiered birchwood benches around the jacuzzi, which thankfully was both empty and switched off. Bunny imagined the effect the designer was going for was ‘Finnish sauna’. A trolley with iced water stood at the end of the pool and one of the sailors who had met her down at the waterline and followed them up poured Bunny a glass and set it down on a bench, which Bunny took as an invitation to sit.

  “I’ll be back,” D’Antonia said, disappearing deeper into the ship.

  D’Antonia found the elderly owner of White Star Lines standing in his oak-paneled office, flipping through mail on a tablet PC. She’d only been working for him for six months and still wasn’t easy in his presence. He’d never once engaged in small talk, even on a recent 10-hour direct flight from Hong Kong to Moscow in his executive jet. He’d sat across a coffee table from her and not said a single word except to reply politely if she asked him a question.

  Karl Sorensen was 78 years old. He was the 25th richest man in the world and his White Star Lines was one of the leading mercantile shipping and port management companies on the planet. What made it a very sustainable company was that since the early 2000s it had been the cargo carrier of choice for the US military. Whenever the US went to war, it was White Star Lines that transported the Seabees, the dozers, tanks, trucks, and materials to make it happen. Containers bearing the White Star Lines starburst logo were almost as ubiquitous as the Stars and Stripes wherever the US was constructing its bases.

  He looked over at her as she walked in. “She is here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s make this quick. I don’t like Australians. Noisy.” He flipped the leather cover of the paper-thin tablet shut in his idiosyncratic way. It never left his side; in fact, it rarely left his hand.

  D’Antonia suppressed a smile and followed him aft, finding O’Hare standing on the deck with one foot up on a bench, looking back on the chopper on the flight deck.

  Well, she was focused, D’Antonia gave her that. About shoulder high to me, cropped, dyed platinum hair, pierced nose, eyebrow, lip and no doubt … elsewhere. Tattoos on both arms where the black t-shirt stopped, also on her neck and ankle; the ankle tattoo just visible above combat boots. She had a pleasant face, but apparently an abrasive personality, which Roberta had been warned she might need to ‘manage’ if the next few minutes were to go well.

  Roberta D’Antonia was used to managing people. She’d managed oil sheiks, KGB interrogators and government ministers. So she was sure she would be able to…

  “Hey, you. Do you have anything other than water?” Bunny asked Sorensen as he approached her.

  He frowned. “Yes. Of course. You wish for…” He snapped his fingers at the young sailor standing discreetly against a wall.

  “Ginger ale, lots of ice,” Bunny told the sailor. “Because what I really wish for…” she looked back at the chopper, “is to fly that thing.”

  D’Antonia inserted herself between the smiling Bunny O’Hare and the billionaire with the embarrassed expression on his face. “Ms. O’Hare, this is Mr. Sorensen, the owner of White Star Lines.”

  Sorensen held out his hand tentatively, and O’Hare shook it. D’Antonia breathed a sigh of relief. Alright, so she had some basic social skills, that was a plus.

  “It looks like an Osprey, but it’s not,” Bunny continued. “What it really looks like is an A10 Warthog and an Osprey had sex and that is their ugly love child. You must have some kind of heavy duty helo deck if you can land that thing on it.”

  Sorensen still looked confused, but D’Antonia was glad to see he didn’t dismiss O’Hare out of hand. “Sit, please,” he said, as O’Hare took her drink from the sailor. “I have some questions.”

  “So do I,” Bunny told him.

  “I am sure. But this is my ship, I get to ask my questions first.”

  “That’s fair.”

  D’Antonia took a glass of water and sat on a bench at a discrete distance. Far enough away so as not to intrude, close enough for another intervention if it was needed.

  Sorensen opened his tablet cover and tapped the screen. “Why were you discharged from the Royal Australian Air Force without privileges?”

  “Assaulting an officer.”

  “Insulting?”

  “No, ass-aulting. With a flight helmet. To the jaw.” She pointed at her face.

  “What does it mean, a discharge without privileges?”

  “No severance pay, no pension.”

  “I see.” He flipped through some tablet screens. “Then Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, field-testing unmanned weapons systems in combat theatres: Syria, Alaska, Okinawa, Florida.”

  “Yes. Totally classified. And none of those jobs after Syria were supposed to be in combat theatres, by the way. The wars started after I got there.”

  “Yes. Do you love war, Ms. O’Hare?”

  D’Antonia saw O’Hare flinch. “I hate war. But it seems war loves me. And look, I love flying fast jets, I love testing new systems and making them work so that only the bad guys feel the pain when they are used, and they don’t turn on their owners or innocent bystanders like some kind of robotic Armageddon death machines.”

  “Robotic, Armageddon…”

  “Death machines, yeah. If it was up to the politicians and generals of most armies, including your customers, most wars would be fought in cyberspace, or space space, and if a war was forced out into the open, the skies and seas would be full of machines fighting each other with no soldiers, pilots or sailors getting killed, which sounds just dandy except it never works that way and the people who end up dying are old women, mothers with kids and young guys from Detroit who just signed up because they needed a job to pay their father’s medical bills. But people like you don’t need to worry about that because you can just get in your chopper with your ginger ale on ice and…”

  In
tervention time. “Mr. Sorensen and I would like to know, what is it you believe in, Ms. O’Hare?”

  O’Hare didn’t hesitate, she didn’t hum and haw. “I believe I am the best damn pilot of anything that can swim, crawl or fly. That’s what I believe. And if I can put that to use in a way that lets me go to bed with my conscience and wake up in the morning still good friends, it’s a good day.”

  “You are a mercenary,” Sorensen said.

  “My arse,” O’Hare replied.

  “Sorry?” Sorensen frowned.

  “She means no, Mr. Sorensen,” D’Antonia explained.

  “I mean no. I was a combat pilot. Now I’m a test pilot. I am a coder, proficient in about six computer languages. And, on Okinawa, I learned Ikebana.” D’Antonia thought she caught O’Hare winking at her.

  “That is some form of the martial arts, I assume,” Sorensen said, nodding. “I learned karate, in Copenhagen in my youth.”

  “Well, it’s a form of art, but not so martial,” Bunny explained. “Japanese flower arranging. I rock it.” She pointed at a spray of orchids on a table and fake-shuddered. “That, for example, is just vulgar.”

  Sorensen stood, flipping his tablet cover shut. “I do not believe in assertions of competence, Ms. O’Hare,” he said. “I believe in demonstrations.” He turned and walked off.

  Bunny watched him go, then turned to D’Antonia. “So, I take it I didn’t get the job?”

  D’Antonia stood, motioned to the sailor who had been tending to them, and he disappeared out a side door. “That will depend,” she said.

  The sailor reappeared with a man who was clearly a pilot. He was carrying an extra flight suit.

  D’Antonia explained. “You will have one hour with the pilot to familiarize yourself with the machine out there on the flight deck. And then you will be given a mission to execute…”

  Bunny’s eyes narrowed. “What mission?”

  D’Antonia took the flight suit and handed it to Bunny. “Oh, I think you’ll enjoy it. You will take off from this ship, fly Mr. Sorensen’s aircraft directly over the People’s Liberation Army Guangzhou East Air Base at no more than 10,000 feet, and then return here.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “No drug running, no picking up shady guys with wraparound sunglasses, no taking video of secret Chinese army weapons…”

  “No. But I will be honest. The Chinese government does not allow civilian aircraft to overfly its bases. Guangzhou East is protected with Qianwei-2 vehicle-mounted infrared homing missiles and radar-guided 57mm anti-air cannons.”

  “OK.”

  “Plus, a Russian-made S-400 anti-air radar and missile system.”

  “Right. Not OK.”

  “No. But if you make it back here alive, we will check your flight data, and if you did indeed overfly Guangzhou East and make it back, you will get the contract.”

  Bunny sat, thinking about it. “You coming on this flight too?”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  “I’ll be alone.”

  “Yes.”

  “I could just steal Mr. Sorensen’s nice stealth chopper and disappear.”

  “I doubt that. I mean, you could probably steal it, but you couldn’t disappear. There is nowhere on the planet Mr. Sorensen couldn’t find you.”

  “I was just joking. And I would do this, why?”

  D’Antonia sat again, close to O’Hare, lowering her voice.

  “Because I know you can. I was the one who tracked you down, who ran your background check, who got Mr. Sorensen to agree to this little test, because I know you will ace it. And if you do, a new world will open to you that will quite simply blow your mind.”

  “I have a pretty well-armored mind,” Bunny told her. “It is not easily blown.”

  D’Antonia leaned even closer. “Mr. Sorensen has been buying up military prototypes from all over the world for the last five years. Near-production systems that competed for weapons contracts and narrowly lost, or were … como se dice … discontinued because of politics, or budget cuts.”

  “Systems … like that tilt-rotor out there?”

  “Si. Aircraft, naval vessels, weapon systems, land, sea and underwater drones, Chinese, American, Russian, Indian … and the technical crews to sustain them. You may even have worked on one or two…”

  “Why? I thought he was a shipping magnate, not an arms dealer.”

  “Not to sell. To deploy, for the protection of his fleet. It is an uncertain world – Mr. Sorensen’s very expensive ships sail dangerous waters.”

  Bunny O’Hare had a feeling that the big brown eyes, olive skin and sotto voce Italian voice of Roberta D’Antonia probably worked on 99.9 percent of people, male or female. Not to mention her perfume, which if Bunny were a perfume person, she would totally ask for the name of.

  But Bunny was more a deodorant person than a perfume person, and sultry sotto voce voices were just annoyingly hard to hear, especially on the deck of a yacht out in the middle of Hong Kong’s Repulse Bay. There were a million reasons why she should just ask to be driven back to the ferry terminal and only one reason why not.

  It was sitting fifty yards away, still ticking as it cooled down in the heat, and it was calling to her: come on, are you pilot enough?

  “I’ll do it,” she told D’Antonia. “What happens if I get killed?”

  “Then you won’t get the contract.”

  “Right. That’s fair.”

  ‘Archipelago’ will be released for the holiday season 2021

  Set in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, Archipelago is an action-packed thrill-ride. Featuring future weapons technologies and characters you won’t easily forget, ‘Archipelago: This is the Future of War,’ looks at one of the lesser-known wars of our times – between modern-day pirates and merchant shipping lines – and explores what might happen as pirate operations become more technically advanced, and shipping magnates decide they can no longer rely on the goodwill of friendly navies to protect their billion-dollar empires.

  While you wait for ‘Archipelago’, why not read other books in the Future War series?

  Bering Strait: “Impossible to put down. The action is intense and the plot unique. It soars along at a fast pace. This story is unmissable.” – Anne-Marie Reynolds for Readers’ Favorite- (Available as an audio book)

  Kobani: “Kobani is a high octane drama of land and air combat fought with the best in futuristic weaponry … Holden balances this with intricate backstories and motivations for his capable and steadfast characters, offering up fleshed-out human stories amid all the high-tech toys. Military thriller fans, war buffs, Middle East politics junkies, and sci-fi enthusiasts will immerse themselves in Holden’s epic tale of regional politics and potential for worldwide conflict.” BookLife. (Audio book out September 2021)

  Golan: “Strap in and hold on for the ride of your life.” Readers’ Favorite

  Okinawa: “A riveting take on the near future of warfare.” Publishers Weekly BookLife Editor’s Choice

  Orbital: “Explosive, ingenious and thought provoking. I was not able to put this novel down because I had to find out what happened next…” 5 Stars Readers’ Favorite

  Glossary

  Please note, weapons or systems marked with an asterisk* are currently still under development. If there is no asterisk, then the system has already been deployed by at least one nation.

  3D PRINTER: A printer which can recreate a 3D object based on a three-dimensional digital model, typically by laying down many thin layers of a material in succession

  ADA*: All Domain Attack. An attack on an enemy in which all operational domains – space, cyber, ground, air and naval – are engaged either simultaneously or sequentially

  AI: Artificial intelligence, as applied in aircraft to assist pilots, in intelligence to assist with intelligence analysis, or in ordnance such as drones and unmanned vehicles to allow semi-autonomous decision making

  AIM-12
0D: US medium-range supersonic air-to-air missile

  ALL DOMAIN KILL CHAIN*: Also known as Multi-Domain Kill Chain. An attack in which advanced AI allows high-speed assimilation of data from multiple sources (satellite, cyber, ground and air) to generate engagement solutions for military maneuver, precision fire support, artillery or combat air support

  AMD-65: Russian-made military assault rifle

  AN/APG-81: The active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar system on the F-35 Panther that allows it to track and engage multiple air and ground targets simultaneously

  ANGELS: Radio brevity code for ‘thousands of feet’. Angels five is five thousand feet

  APC: Armored personnel carrier; a wheeled or tracked lightly armored vehicle able to transport troops into combat and provide limited covering fire

  ARMATA T-14: Next-generation Russian main battle tank

  ASFN: Anti screw fouling net. Traditionally, a net boom laid across the entrance of a harbor to hinder the entrance of ships or submarines. Fired from a subsea drone to

  ASRAAM: Advanced Short-Range Air-to-Air Missile (infrared only)

  ASROC: Anti submarine rocket launched torpedo. Allows a torpedo to be fired at a submerged target from up to ten miles away, allowing the torpedo to enter the water close to the target and reducing the chances the target can evade the attack.

  ASTUTE CLASS: Next generation British nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) designed for stealth operation. Powered by a Rolls Royce reactor plant coupled to a pump-jet propulsion system. HMS Astute is the first of seven planned hulls, HMS Agincourt is the last. Can carry up to 38 torpedoes and cruise missiles, and is one of the first British submarines to be steered by a ‘pilot’ using a joystick

  ASW: Anti Submarine Warfare

  AWACS: Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft, otherwise known as AEW&C (airborne early warning and control). Aircraft with advanced radar and communication systems that can detect aircraft at ranges up to several hundred miles, and direct air operations over a combat theatre