by FX Holden
“This is more than a one-woman operation.”
“Yes. I usually have three junior engineers working with me. They have an apartment in town. But they were pulled back to DRD in Tel Aviv when the security situation got worse.”
Jensen looked around him at racks of parts, computers and technical equipment. “Aren’t you worried about the Syrians rolling in here and just taking all this stuff?”
“No. There is…” she reached for the door to close it behind them, “… a, how you say, contingency plan.”
The shed was nothing less than a sophisticated weapons manufacturing plant. In the center of the floor stood a piece of equipment that Jensen immediately recognized. But it was five times the size of anything he had seen.
“That’s a 3D printer?”
“Yes. I keep the feedstock in barrels under the floor.”
It was a huge metal and glass cube, with computer terminals down one of the support pillars that controlled it.
“You could print a tank with this damn thing,” he said admiringly.
“Actually, I could. If you gave me the plans, enough steel alloy powder … and about three years.”
“What else have you got in here?” he asked. The side and rear walls were lined with heavy metal cabinets, all with combination locks. There was Hebrew writing on the front of them.
She pointed to each in turn. “Small arms, pistol parts and ammunition. Drone parts, engines, propellers, batteries, cameras. Explosives, fragmentation and stun grenades, miniature air-to-ground rockets, unguided … no Javelin missiles, sorry.” On workbenches around the 3D printer were drones in various states of construction, or deconstruction.
“Holy hell.”
“My specialty is tactical drones for IDF Army use. Surveillance, counterinsurgency, tactical precision fire support…” Amal shrugged. “In the DRD they call me The Toymaker.”
“Yeah? If Santa delivered his presents in a B-21 bomber. You said you had an idea for that tank out there?”
“Yes!” she said, skipping over to a bench and lifting a quadcopter drone. “You said you had thermite grenades?”
“Yes. Couldn’t be many. And I should be chewing out Buckland for taking them aboard the flight with her.”
“These drones can carry two 40mm grenades. They are designed to provide a crude but effective anti-defilade weapon to our troops if they are faced with an enemy firing from cover.” She showed a small digital display on the drone. “It’s pretty simple. You enter the distance to the target, and this display shows you how many seconds to dial into the grenade timer. You guide it to the target with the onboard camera, or if the enemy is jamming, it can home on the spot from a laser target designator. The camera is low light, and infrared. I call it the Nightwalker.” She stood on her toes and held the drone over his head. “Boom. You’re dead.”
“Cute. And how does this…”
She turned it upside down, where a small payload bay was nestled. “We mount thermite grenades. I’m thinking you fly them into the tracks, they melt the rollers, destroy the tracks. The Namer can’t move.”
“But it can still shoot. Could you land a drone on the turret and burn through that?”
“No. The Namer is built on a Merkava main battle tank chassis. Very tough reactive armor, even on top.”
Jensen thought about it, picturing the tank in his mind’s eye. “Have you ever been inside a Namer?” he asked her.
“Yes, why?”
“How do the troops get in and out?”
“By a ramp at the back. Hydraulic; it can be raised and lowered by the driver, or from the outside of the vehicle. What are you thinking?”
Jensen reached out and took the drone, inspecting it carefully. “I’m thinking we’re going to find out just how good a drone pilot you are.”
Zeidan Amar looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes, and no word from his lookouts that the Americans were showing any signs of forming up and pulling out. No signs of civilians being prepared for release. If it hadn’t happened by now, it wasn’t going to.
He turned to the squad lined up behind the Namer, twirling his finger in the air, leaning inside the rear ramp door as he yelled forward to the driver and gunner. “Alright, start up and mount up!”
With a throaty bellow, the engine on the IFV burst to life. The driver sat up front on the left, the gunner on his right, both controlling their systems via large flat panel screens, so that the crew and troops inside the IFV could be completely sealed off from attacking projectiles or chemical weapons. There were yellow metal seats around the inside of the IFV for eight troops. Other variants of the Namer could seat nine troops, but the 30mm cannon required an autofeed magazine that took up one seat place.
The plan for overwhelming the Marine position was simple enough. The Namer would charge through the gate and lay down suppressing fire, taking out any ground-level resistance. Then it would throw out a barrage of smoke grenades and the troops inside would spill out and move into the house to flush out any Marines on higher floors. He had a second squad in reserve if extra support was needed to clear the compound, but he doubted it would be. Some civilians would die, that was inevitable, but his Druze troops were veterans of house-to-house combat in Lebanon, including hostage rescue operations. As the Americans liked to say, ‘this wasn’t their first rodeo’.
As the last man stepped inside and took his seat, Amar looked at his watch again, then thumped the side of the vehicle. “Alright, move out!” He stepped back as the hydraulic ramp at the rear of the IFV juddered and began to rise.
With the noise of the engine and the ramp hydraulics, he never heard the two drones approaching. The first flew past him at chest height and right over the ramp into the front of the IFV interior. It was so unexpected that he stood there like a fool looking at it as it crashed to the floor of the tank between the driver and the gunner, its engine still whining and propellers drumming on the deck.
Then there was a hiss and brilliant light filled the interior of the IFV.
Men started screaming. Two or three jumped for the ramp door, but it was closing fast, sealing everyone inside.
Amar threw himself to the ground and saw the second drone approach, aiming for the shrinking gap between the ramp door and the top of the IFV as it closed. With an evil whine, the drone slipped through the last thirty centimeters at the top of the ramp before it shut, and Amar heard another hiss of molten fire triggering inside the vehicle.
Getting to his feet, he staggered backwards and then, as the 30mm cannon ammunition inside the IFV started exploding, he ran.
Thermite grenades are not effective anti-personnel weapons. Producing a white-hot torrent of fire that can melt metal, they are usually used for destroying equipment so that it cannot be used by an enemy – like cannon barrels, vehicle engines or computers. That had been Corporal Buckland’s job back at Kobani – to ensure there was nothing left behind could be used by the Syrian army if their hilltop outpost was ever abandoned by the Kurdish militia who would be taking it over from the departing Marines.
But almost anything that wasn’t bolted down had been given to the Kurdish forces in Kobani for their own use, including most of the tools and equipment in the outpost’s machine workshop. She had used the thermite to destroy the 3D printer for which the Kurdish troops had no use, because it required a constant supply of raw materials they didn’t have access to. She also used the thermite charges to destroy the outpost’s small rack of communication computer servers because they had been left in place for use right up until the last Marine was lifted out. By the time the thermite charges burned out and the smoke had cleared, they were nothing but melted metal and silica.
The remaining M-14 THT grenades Buckland took with her out of Kobani were triggered in a two-step process – first the operator set the fuse delay, for anything from three to thirty seconds. Then they removed the safety pull ring, and finally the secondary pull ring. Then they got into cover.
Mounting two M-14 grenad
es on Azaria’s Nightwalker quadcopters was simple enough; she just had to swap out the recon pack in the belly of the drone for a ‘freight pod’ and fit the two grenades in place with heavy-duty rubber ties. They used the Leopold scope on Patel’s Mk22 MRAD marksman rifle to measure the distance to the rear of the IFV and allowed a few extra yards for the drones to overfly the vehicle and make a handbrake turn.
And then, with only the drone’s low-resolution wide-angle forward-looking camera to steer by, Amal set the timers, pulled the pins on the grenades and sent them on their way to the target in quick succession. She only had to actually ‘fly’ one of the drones. One of the features she had added to their guidance software was that they could be placed in a crude ‘swarm’ mode so that one just followed the other at a set distance, which was useful if delivering small packages to troops in difficult to access locations, because multiple drones could be chained together. Six drones could quickly deliver 20lbs. of ammunition or equipment.
Or two drones, like the ones she sent down from the terrace atop her house, could deliver 8lbs. of thermite into the interior of a Namer IFV loaded with ammunition.
Up on the terrace roof, Amal saw the second of her drones follow the first into a maw of incandescent flame and then the vision went down. In the distance, they could hear muffled explosions.
My god, what did I just do? Amal thought to herself. She’d expected to be flying the grenades into an open, empty IFV. But the last image she’d seen from her first drone was the shocked expression of the Namer’s driver, looking down at the drone that had just landed beside his chair.
As though reading her mind, Jensen leaned over and pushed down the screen on her command unit, putting his hand on her shoulder. “They were coming to kill us, Corporal. Kill us, and do god knows what to you and those civilians. Remember that every time you think about today, alright?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Now take five, get some water and start cranking out the rest of the drones we discussed.” He patted her shoulder.
“Right. Yes.”
Jensen went down the stairs to the gates, joining Wallace and Lopez. He was glad to see they were letting Bell up on the roof of the house do most of the watching, sticking their heads up only occasionally to check the situation in front of the wall. As he reached the wall, the sound of high-explosive rounds cooking off inside the Namer died away.
“That racket was the Druze tank?” Wallace asked him. “The drones nailed it?”
“They did.”
“Freaking ace,” Lopez said.
“They’re going to be pissed, looking to hit back,” Jensen warned them. “They may try to rush us. If you see us losing the walls, get back to the house. We don’t have radio comms, so use your own judgment, don’t wait for my order. They get inside this compound, you pull back to the house, got it?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” they replied in unison.
He gave the same message to Johnson, Buckland and Stevens, then ran into the house. Amal had opened the windows but pulled the drapes across to hide their movement, and he leaned up against a wall looking out the front of the house. The IFV was smoking, but the troops that had been around it had evaporated. Pulled back, he guessed. There was no movement. For now. There was a telephone on her sideboard, and he automatically picked it up. It was still dead.
Amal came in through the back door, joining him at the window, X-95 rifle over her shoulder again. She put a bag at her feet. “I have prepared two reconnaissance drones, and four loaded with anti-personnel grenades. I have also distributed grenades to all of your people. We have parts for four more drones – after that, I will need to start printing parts. But power for the printer is the problem.”
“You only have mains power?”
“No, I have an old diesel generator as backup. The power supply to Buq’ata has never been that reliable. But it makes a racket. If we start it up, our enemies will become curious about what we have in that shed.” She lifted a drape aside. “How long, do you think?”
“Before they regroup and attack? They’ll probably be tending to the dead or wounded from that IFV. The pressure to counterattack immediately will be high. It depends how cool the head on your Colonel is. If it’s him, if he’s really the kind of guy who would be made an acting Brigade Commander, he’s not going to be the hot-headed type. He’s got some kind of plan for this place, and we weren’t part of it. He needs to work that through.” Jensen nodded at the radio she was lifting off her shoulder and sitting on the ground. “But we can’t sit here waiting for him to make the next move. We have to keep the initiative.”
“What are you thinking?” she asked, sitting down against a wall.
“IDF can’t help us, I get that. UN doesn’t want to help us. I don’t get that, but it is what it is. I need somehow to get in touch with US forces.”
“The only US base I know of in Israel is the Hatzerim Air Base in the Negev Desert.”
“Is that near here?”
She laughed. “It’s one hundred and eighty miles from here. My radio has a range of about ten miles. If I’m on high ground.”
“But your unit could get a message to them.”
“Perhaps.”
“Call in the intel on that latest engagement. Druze militia attacking US Marines? That has to make them realize this situation is six kinds of wrong.”
She didn’t look optimistic. “I was told there is a national emergency. That’s one step short of full-scale war. What is happening here today is happening precisely to sow confusion, to divert attention and distract our armed forces. Should I contribute to that?”
“You’re telling me to suck it the hell up.”
At that moment, he heard the boom of a jet aircraft flying overhead and some cheering outside.
“What the hell?” Jensen said, looking up. Keeping low, he ran to the doorway and saw Johnson pointing. As he watched, a bat-winged drone banked onto its left wing, flattened out and then zoomed into the clouds overhead.
“Johnson, what was that?”
“I don’t know, Sarge,” the man called back. “But it had US markings!”
Amal had joined him in the doorway. Jensen grabbed her by a shirt sleeve and pulled her toward the stairs. “Get on the roof! We need to try to contact the pilot of that aircraft!”
All Domain Attack: Political
5,000 feet over Buq’ata, Golan Heights, May 18
Bunny O’Hare was nearing the end of her patrol. For the last two hours she’d been playing whack-a-mole over the Golan with the Syrian Growler and had nearly had her Fantom shot down twice as a reward for her efforts, but she was still showing only one loss for the mission, which was a victory in her books. Russia had also held back from sending more aircraft to challenge the US no-fly zone, for now.
Like any close air support aircraft, her Fantom was equipped with an onboard radio transceiver that monitored local radio frequencies so that she could coordinate ground strikes directly with a joint terminal air controller or JTAC, embedded with troops on the line if needed. She immediately noticed a new icon blinking in her heads-up display to show that someone was hailing her on a US JTAC frequency. But it was unencrypted, meaning that the radio hailing her was not a US military unit.
She put the hail through to the speakers inside the trailer. “… of the IDF Unit 351, Palhik Company, hailing US aircraft over Buq’ata, I am with US Marines of 1st Battalion and we are in urgent need of air support, over. This is IDF Corporal Amal Azaria, Unit 351, Palhik Company …”
She quickly patched the call through to the US Bombardier Global 6000 aircraft. “Falcon Control, Valor flight leader. We are being hailed in the open on UHF 243 megahertz by a unit claiming to be IDF. Patching through to you now.” As she spoke, she dropped a waypoint over the town of Buq’ata in the Golan and peeled two of her reserve aircraft away from their holding pattern, sending them to circle the town at low level so they’d be hard for the Syrian Growler to detect, but within range of whoever was hail
ing them down there.
“Thank you, Valor leader, we have your signal. Analyzing now. We need to run this back through ops intel at Akrotiri. Please maintain contact with the sender but do not respond. Supporting Israeli forces is not in our Operations Order.”
“Valor confirms, out.” Bunny turned to Kovacs. “Weird. The whole damn Israeli Air Force is airborne right now, why isn’t she calling in air support from them?”
“Because it’s the Golan? Or maybe the cyber strike knocked out their comms?”
“I guess. She is using UHF … but this feels like something else.” Bunny pulled up the waypoint for Buq’ata and fine-tuned it. “I’m bringing down our decoy bird and sending it to reserve. I’ll get the two Fantoms circling Buq’ata to do a recon pass, give us a look at what is happening down there, let whoever is down there know we’re still in the neighborhood.”
“What if it’s not IDF? What if it’s Syrians, trying to lure you in so they can take a shot at you with low-level anti-air missiles or guns?”
Bunny raised her eyebrows. “Kovacs, where is your trust in human nature?” She prepped her decoy flares and chaff though, because of course the DARPA engineer was right. It could be a trap.
“No response,” Amal said, putting the handset back in its cradle. “Are you sure about the frequency?” she asked Patel.
“UHF 243 megahertz,” he said. “It’s the international air emergency frequency. You want me to try? That radio is pretty much the same as the ones I was trained on.”
“It’s like I can still hear a jet though, Sarge,” Bell said. “Moving east to west.”
“If it’s out there, it isn’t hearing us, or it isn’t responding,” Jensen agreed. He turned to Amal. “Can we try another frequency? Is there an IDF Air Force frequency you can use? Maybe it’s one of yours.”
“I mean it, Sergeant, I can hear it, and I think it’s coming over again,” Bell said. “Listen!”