“Point it at a plane or a copter,” the sergeant told him. “Use the screen to see with—it will see in the dark. Wait until it makes a sound like a bell, and pull the trigger. After that you can run for cover—the rocket will follow the target, and blow it up.” Mtesi had rolled his eyes, but none of it mattered; Moses Olokumbe was up there next to the .50 cal, and all Mtesi had besides his assault rifle and his bush knife was the Chinese toy and two spare rockets for it.
All at once Olokumbe hauled himself to his feet, staring north the way they were going, the way a leopard does when it scents gazelles. Mtesi turned and listened, and a moment later, caught the sound—the rhythmic drumming of helicopters in flight.
They all knew the drill. The technical shut off its headlights and pulled off the road, into the bush, and everyone on board but that lucky bastard Olokumbe jumped out of the truck and scattered. All the other squads were doing the same thing, and Mtesi nearly ran into a Zambian soldier with a light machine gun who was heading for the same thicket he was. Mtesi gave the man a grin, swerved into another clump of trees and brush, got himself settled. He liked the Zambians; his company had been right up next to a Zambian unit at the siege of Likasi, and they'd been good hard fighters, men you could trust to stand beside you.
The pounding of the helicopters was close now. Mtesi got himself settled in among the brush, shouldered the Chinese toy. Whether the thing was worth anything or not, it was what he had, and he meant to see what it would do.
The little screen showed the branches of the trees above him, clear as day, and the sky beyond them. Mtesi swept the Chinese toy back and forth, waiting for something he could hit. After a moment, he got a ’copter into the screen's view, high overhead, lean and angular as an animal that hadn't eaten in too long. He got the crosshairs of the screen centered on its body, heard the sound like a bell next to his ear, and pulled the trigger.
The rocket jumped out of the tube faster than fast, straight for the helicopter. The ’copter veered, as though trying to escape, but the rocket followed it and ran right up into the middle of its body. A moment later the helicopter was gone in a great blossom of flame.
Mtesi blinked, then jumped up and sprinted for a different clump of brush—the Americans would have night vision gear, he knew, and the place where the rocket came from would no doubt take some fire from them shortly. Once he got into the next thicket and made sure he could see the sky from it, he considered the rocket launcher. Toy or not, he decided, he could learn to like something that did that much harm, that fast. He loaded another of the rockets into it, got the thing set so that the little green light went on in the right place, shouldered it again and waited for another helicopter.
3 August 2029: Tsavo, Kenya
“Call off the attack,” Seversky said. His voice was heavy.
“Yes, sir.” Staff officers hammered on keyboards, sending the orders that would send the surviving helicopters back to their bases and tell American and Kenyan ground units to stay put.
Seversky glanced at the computer screens in the makeshift command center. He'd planned the assault on the Tanzanian forces surrounding Mombasa by the book, making the most of the 101st's weapons and standard tactics in the main assault while the Kenyan Army and the Marines backed it up and kept the enemy pinned down. It should have worked—but nobody told the enemy that, and they were waiting with state-of-the-art shoulder-launched missiles and a defense in depth that crippled the helicopter assault and left the rest of the plan in shreds.
Twenty-two ’copters down, the screens told him. No firm number on casualties yet, but it was going to be ugly—and that meant trouble, big trouble, when the news hit the media back stateside. He shook his head; that it would also mean the end of his Army career was the least of his worries just at that moment. The critical question was how to salvage the situation.
Movement at the command center door caught his attention; it was Colonel Joe Becher, the 101st's intelligence chief. Seversky signaled him with a sharp upward move of his head, and walked over to a disused corner of the big room, where Becher joined him.
“They were waiting for us,” Becher said in a low voice. “We've still got a lot of photo intel to go over, but it looks like the Tanzies started getting in position to meet us as soon as they got on this side of the border.”
Seversky gave him a bleak look. “And we walked right into it.”
“Basically.”
“Could they have been tipped off by the Kenyans?”
“We're looking into that,” Becher said. “But there's something else that's a lot more likely. If they know which units we've got over here—and we can assume that they do—that alone gives them a pretty fair shot at guessing what we're going to do.”
Seversky took that in. “But—oh. Of course.”
“Every unit in the Army these days is so goddamn specialized,” Becher went on. “You want air-cav, you send the 101st. You want standard airborne, you send the 82nd. You want armored cav—well, you can go down the list as well as I can. So all they have to do is figure out which units they're facing, and they know what they have to prepare for. I'm not sure if the Tanzanian military has the chops to do that—but I bet you can name somebody else who does.”
“In which case we may have just walked into a trap.”
“Yeah.”
Seversky considered, and then nodded once. “Won't be the first time the 101st's been in that situation. With a little help from Washington, we can still win this.”
3 August 2029, Silver Spring, Maryland
All across the United States, in the first days of that sweltering August, Americans began to realize that events in distant East Africa had suddenly jumped off the track they'd been assigned by the Weed administration and were hurtling down a new route into unknown territory. Later on, for a while, it became a common social habit for people to discuss just where they'd been and what they'd been doing when they realized that something had gone very, very wrong.
That moment came to Pete Bridgeport late on a Sunday morning in his condo in Silver Spring. He'd slept in past eight, a rare luxury, then made up for it with an hour-long workout at the condo's little private gym three floors down. That, a shower, a shave, and toast and coffee made him feel more or less ready for the day—a quiet day by usual standards, answering emails from colleagues in the Senate and campaign contributors back home, going over the draft texts of three bills his committee would have to consider once Congress started work again in September, drafting plans for the upcoming session.
First, though, the news. He woke his computer, opened a browser and clicked on his favorite news site. Most of the stories were routine to the point of boredom. The fighting in Spain had flared again, with Catalan guerrillas staging attacks on government troops in three districts; Indonesia and the Philippines were quarreling again over gas drilling rights in the Sulu Sea; scientists on the disintegrating Greenland ice sheet reported a speedup of the melting, and warned that coastal cities worldwide would be facing three to six meters of sea level rise by century's end; closer to home, big dust storms had shut down air and road traffic in Oklahoma, Nebraska, and parts of three other states, and weren't expected to die down for at least two days. All in all, it was an ordinary Sunday.
Then he saw the headline in the sidebar: US TROOPS ENGAGE TANZANIANS WEST OF MOMBASA. It was a moment before a bit of half-learned geography from a Pentagon briefing reminded him that Mombasa was in Kenya.
He clicked through to the story: exactly the sort of bland uninformative stuff normally marketed by Pentagon-approved embedded reporters, long on cheery human-interest details about this unit or that officer and short on what was actually happening. It mentioned a couple of place names, though, and Bridgeport opened a new window and looked those up. All of them were in southeastern Kenya.
He cupped his chin in one hand, considering. The scraps of information about the war he'd been able to pry loose from the Pentagon, and from his own sources, said that all the figh
ting was supposed to take place in Tanzanian territory and airspace. Clearly things weren't going according to plan.
Then, a cold realization: and Mel's in the middle of it.
3 August 2029: The White House, Washington DC
As he sat in the White House situation room watching the latest news from Kenya, Jameson Weed didn't have to guess just how far events had strayed from the confident plans he'd approved a few months earlier. One screen on the wall showed the locations of the 101st and the Marine and Kenyan units supporting it, and the probable locations—as close as satellite reconnaissance could track them in the thick coastal forest—of the Tanzanians and their allies. Another showed the locations of American and Chinese air bases, mapped out the ongoing air battle, and kept track on which side had lost how many planes. Neither screen showed any prospect of a quick end to a war that was spinning out of control.
“What are we doing about the air battle?” he asked Bill Stedman. The two of them were alone except for the duty officers; the other members of the National Security Council weren't due there for another thirty minutes or so.
The Secretary of Defense opened a portfolio, shuffled papers. “We've rotated two more fighter squadrons to the Gulf, and four additional squadrons are on twenty-four-hour alert; they'll be joining in as soon as the logistics get sorted out. The Chinese are still ferrying squadrons of their own to East Africa—the latest intel is that they've sent J-31s to support the J-20s.”
“Ouch.” The J-31, smaller and more maneuverable than the long-range J-20, was designed for interception and air defense, and a squadron or two protecting the airfields in South Sudan would make the Air Force's job that much harder.
“We've also sent additional B-1s to Bahrain and Diego Garcia,” Stedman went on. “As per your orders, they're going to keep hitting the Chinese air bases in South Sudan and Tanzania. That's a calculated risk—with J-31s and air defense systems guarding them, we could lose some planes.”
“Get them more fighter cover,” Weed said.
Stedman glanced up from his papers. “We've already allocated every operational F-35 and F-22 we've got. If anything happens right now in another theater, we're going to be in deep trouble—practically all the Air Force has left that's capable of flying are obsolete planes, F-15s and F-16s. At current rates of attrition, there's a real chance that we could run out of first-string fighters before this thing is over.”
Weed simply stared at him.
“Jim,” Stedman said, “the Chinese still have factories turning out fighters for the PLAAF. We haven't had fighters in production since the F-35 program wound up in ’23. You'll have to ask Greg Barnett about how many fighters the Chinese can build this month, but I can tell you exactly how many we can—and we're losing three for every two of theirs. It's not pretty.”
4 August 2029: Camp Pumbaa, Kenya
“A mess,” Mahoney said. He and the other lead officers of the 33rd were in his office, leaning over computer screens with maps of southeastern Kenya and the latest messages from the 101st's HQ at Tsavo. “A real mess.”
It was a fair assessment. Seversky's first assault on the Tanzanian forces—not just Tanzanian now, Melanie Bridgeport reminded herself; Zambia, Mozambique, and Malawi had all sent troops to join the coalition, according to the latest intel reports—had been a costly failure. Ground strikes by the 33rd's Lardbuckets might have made a difference, but every plane the 33rd and the Navy squadrons still had left was committed to the air battle against the Chinese, and that wasn't going well.
“Any word from AFRICOM?” Watanabe asked.
“They say they're still trying.” Mahoney gave him a weary look. “You know the score there as well as I do.”
No one replied for a long moment. So far, though they'd taken losses, the Chinese had the upper hand, and attempts to punch through their combat air patrols had run face first into the same tactics the Chinese had used on the 33rd: throw everything at tankers and AWACS planes first, then hammer the US fighters until they had to break off and return to base. The Chinese fighters could stay in the air much longer than the notoriously short-legged F-35s and F-22s, and the Chinese seemed to have no shortage of planes to throw into the battle.
“Well,” Mahoney said finally, and turned to Bridgeport. “Mel, Seversky's asked me to send someone down to him to straighten out the logistics mess. They've got all kinds of Navy and Marine gear salvaged from the fleet, and it turns out the logistics people from the fleet got evacced to the Gulf right before the Chinese fighters came in. You're probably the best person for that here and now.”
“I can probably take care of it online,” Mel told him.
He shook his head. “Seversky thinks the Chinese can read our communications—and I don't feel like betting that he's wrong. Your staff can keep things running here for a few days, right? I want you to go to Tsavo, get their people up to speed on the Navy system, and come back. With any luck Washington will have figured out some way to resupply us by the time you get back here.”
5 August 2029: North of Ukunda, Kenya
Private Kwame Mtesi crouched behind the tree, waiting, a shadow in the predawn dark. The Americans were less than a kilometer north, maybe much less than that. They had not expected to lose so many of their helicopters to the Chinese toys, or so Mtesi guessed; the first American attack on the Coalition lines had broken off in confusion within a few hours. He was certain, though, that there would be another attack, and nearly as certain that it would not be delayed for long.
His unit had been stationed along a road edged with trees, dug in against the expected assault; out beyond the trees were fields, and beyond that were the Americans. The technicals had been unloaded and taken well back behind the lines, leaving their machine guns and grenade launchers behind. Moses Olokumbe and two others were maybe ten meters off to the left, crewing the .50 caliber machine gun; some of the others had the grenade launchers. Mtesi had used all the rockets for his Chinese toy, and had only his assault rifle and his bush knife. Between brief intervals of sleep, he'd spent some time praying that those would be enough.
“Mtesi.” It was the sergeant, moving quietly along the line, speaking in less than a whisper. “They're coming. Get ready—we've called for help.”
Mtesi murmured an acknowledgment, felt the sergeant move on. He checked his gear, then turned the switch on the tube-shaped thing clipped to the top of his assault rifle: another Chinese toy, some kind of night-vision gear. The little screen on the butt end of the tube lit up, and he glanced down at it.
Through the screen, the scene might as well have been full daylight. He could see a farmhouse in the middle distance, a wind turbine off beyond it, and trees lining another road beyond that—and closer, much closer, masses of men moving across the fields toward him, wearing American-style helmets.
They could see him. He knew that, knew that they would open fire the moment they realized that the Coalition forces could see them. He stayed crouched behind the tree, watched them advance, waiting—.
Someone in the Coalition line, off to the right, opened fire. Reflexively, Mtesi dropped to the ground and started shooting as well. A moment later the Americans’ bullets were whizzing over his head. The machine gun was hammering away, assault rifles rattled, the flash and bang of rocket-propelled grenades added to the din; it was all familiar, more than familiar, from the battles he'd fought in the last two Congo wars. The Chinese night-vision gear gave him an edge he hadn't had then, and the Americans had next to no cover to shield them; he pumped one three-round burst after another into their increasingly ragged lines.
Then all of a sudden he was lying a meter away, no longer holding his gun, and one of his legs was folded under him in a way it shouldn't have been able to go. A moment passed before he realized that he'd been hit; another moment went by before he guessed that it had been a rocket-propelled grenade. He tried to drag himself back to the shelter of the tree, but his limbs didn't seem to be working just then.
Figures ran p
ast him in the darkness, coming up from behind the Coalition lines. He heard their voices, and grinned, recognizing the accent: Zambians, of course, the men he'd fought beside at Likasi. Everything was fine, he told himself.
Assault rifles rattled on, and the machine gun kept up its hammering. One of the Zambians crouched beside him and said something Mtesi couldn't quite make out. The Zambian repeated whatever it was, but by then he seemed a long distance away, as though he was calling from the top of a well and Mtesi was down at the bottom, in the cool water, letting it close gently over his face.
6 August 2029: The White House, Washington DC
“Ellen,” Gurney said.
Ellen Harbin turned to face him with a bright bland look. The morning's National Security Council meeting, with more bad news from Africa, had rubbed her nerves raw, but she wasn't about to show that. “Yes?”
He glanced back over his shoulder, made sure no one else was in earshot in the White House hallway. “I want to know what you really think about this Tanzania business.” He paused, then: “I don't buy it. I want to know why the best military in the world can't seem to win a battle against a bunch of n—” He caught himself. “Natives in trucks.”
Harbin nodded, wondering what the man had in mind. “I've begun to wonder if the real problem isn't in East Africa at all,” she ventured.
“Damn right,” Gurney said. “You know where I think it is? Right across the Potomac.” A sharp movement of his head indicated the river to the south. “In the Pentagon.”
That startled her, though she kept the surprise off her face; she revised her estimate of the man. “The question in my mind is whether it's a matter of incompetence, or…” She left the sentence unfinished.
“Or,” said Gurney. “Exactly.” In a low voice: “If I ever end up in this place, you and me are going to have to do some serious talking.” He seemed to be about to say more, but someone from the White House staff came down the hallway. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and walked away. Harbin watched him go, and allowed a slow smile.
Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 12
