Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  "Sir. We have been unable to report our situation to Tokyo. Or to anyone. Something ... is wrong. None of the communications means works. Except for the main computer link, which will not accept plain voice text. We're working to format an appropriate automated message, but . . . everything was so unforeseen."

  What were the Americans up to now? Noburu shuddered. Perhaps he was the fool, the one who had been living in a dreamworld. Perhaps Akiro had been right all along, perhaps this insurrection was American-sponsored. No. He still could not believe it.

  Then what was wrong with the communications? Even at the height of yesterday's attack by the Americans, the high-end communications links had continued to function flawlessly. The only communications problems had been within or immediately adjacent to the combat zone. What was happening?

  "Akiro? What does Colonel Takahara think? Is it possible that our communications have been sabotaged?" Akiro shrugged. He knew how to operate command consoles. But he was not a signals officer, and he personally had no conception of what might be occurring. "Colonel Takahara says it is jamming."

  Jamming? Then by whom? It had to be the Americans. Only they possessed strategic jammers. Yet... the Americans had not employed their strategic systems in the combat of the day before, and the omission had baffled Noburu. The situation made little sense to him.

  Were the Americans attacking again? Despite the employment of the Scramblers?

  "Akiro. Listen. Tell Colonel Takahara to transfer all automated control of military operations to the rear command post in Teheran. That can be done easily enough through the computer. But it must be done quickly, in case the enemy has found a way to jam our automation feeds, as well. Just tell Colonel Takahara to transfer control. He knows what has to be done."

  "Is he to shut our computer down?" Akiro asked.

  "No. No, absolutely not. The transfer of control is strictly temporary. The rear will control the battle until we get the local situation under control. But our computer will remain in full readiness. I want to be able to resume control the instant the jamming lifts and we . . . discourage this demonstration."

  But he did not believe. It was all a matter of form, of the prescribed gesture. He had lost his faith. The shadow men beyond the wall had stolen the last of it and turned it to their own ends. In an instant's vision, the dark, chanting men covered the earth.

  "Sir. Colonel Takahara says that the jamming is of such power that many of our communications sets have burned out."

  "It doesn't matter. I can fight the entire battle through the computer, if need be." Noburu caught an external glimpse of himself, as if his soul had briefly left his body. How far removed he was from his ancestors who had led the way with wands of steel.

  The huge background of chanting continued. His ancestors, he knew, would have understood that sound. The dream warrior understood it.

  A few stray rounds pecked at the facade of the building, and Noburu just managed to hear a soft exchange between the South Africans.

  "What's junior on about, sir?" the ammunition carrier asked Kloete.

  Kloete snorted as though his sinuses had been ruptured. "He's telling the old man we can't talk to anybody. And that we're out of bloody bullets."

  Akiro lifted off his haunches to go.

  "Akiro?"

  The younger man turned obediently.

  Noburu held out the aide's forgotten rifle.

  "Sir," Akiro said. Noburu could feel his aide blushing through the dark.

  "And, Akiro. Above all, Colonel Takahara is to safeguard the computer."

  "Sir."

  Noburu watched the younger man's back as Akiro scooted across the helipad. Yes. The computer. There were some things about it that even Takahara did not know. Aspects of the machine's capabilities that were known only to full generals and a handful of technicians back in Tokyo. The main military computer system, Noburu considered, resembled a wealthy man's beautiful wife—possessed of a secret that could destroy the man whose bed she shared.

  Suddenly the chanting stopped. The silence was painful. Dizzying. Then Noburu registered the aural detritus of the attack—the unmistakable sound of badly wounded men who had not had the good fortune to lose consciousness.

  An enormous howl erupted from the world beyond the wall. The chanting was over—this was simply a huge, wordless wail. It was the biggest sound Noburu had ever heard.

  "Here they come," Kloete screamed.

  A section of the perimeter wall disappeared in fire and dust. The blast wave tipped Noburu backward with the force of a typhoon wind.

  "Fire into the smoke, fire into the smoke."

  A smaller blast shook the floor beneath them. Grenade launcher, Noburu realized. Either they had stolen it, or rebel regulars had joined the mob's ranks.

  The first shrieking figures left the pall of smoke. Someone inside the compound ignited a crossfire of headlamps and spotlights to help the machine gunners, and more flares lit the sky. But the flares were perceptibly fewer this time, and most of the light was provided by the section of the city that had begun to bum in the background.

  Waves of dark figures swarmed through the gate and rushed through the broken wall. The volume of defending fire seemed to hush under the weight of the storm, overcome by the screaming energy of the mob. More banners trailed, falling and then rising again, as the attackers clambered over the ridges of the dead.

  Kloete raised himself so that he could angle the machine gun into the oncoming tide.

  The South African NCO to Noburu's side crumpled and stretched himself back across the helipad. In falling, his fingertips just grazed Noburu's cheek, drawing the general's attention after them. The South African lay with his face shot away, lower jaw tom nearly all the way off. He somehow continued to give off moans that were almost words.

  Kloete wheeled about, eyes demonic. He took one close, hard look at his subordinate, unceremoniously drew his pistol, and shot the man where once the bridge of his nose must have been. The NCO twitched and then lay still.

  The South African colonel met Noburu's eyes and evidently mistook what he saw there for disapproval.

  "It's that kind of situation," Kloete said.

  Noburu nodded, then automatically took up the dead man's rifle and leaned over the ledge. As he took aim, he saw the first hint of individual features on the darting shadows. They were very close. The war was coming to him.

  Noburu opened fire. The kick of the weapon was instantly familiar, even after decades of wielding only a ceremonial pistol. He aimed carefully, remaining in the singleshot mode, trying to buy value for each round spent.

  The Azeris fell in waves. But each next wave splashed closer.

  A ripple of close-in blasts caught the forwardmost attackers. Noburu felt a blow on the side of his head. But, whatever it was, it was of no consequence. He remained upright, sentient, firing.

  "Banzai."

  A wave of high-pitched Japanese shouts broke over the cries of the attackers. The sound of close automatic weapons increased to a blurred roar.

  "Banzai."

  In the dying firelight, Noburu saw his men charging into the oncoming mass of Azeris. The Japanese fired as they ran, and Noburu caught the glint of fixed bayonets. A miniature sun lit up in the courtyard. Noburu recognized Colonel Takahara at the forward edge of the charge, samurai sword raised overhead, its blade wielding the power of light. With his left hand, Takahara fired a sidearm.

  "Banzai."

  The leading tentacles of the mob began to retract at the unexpected counterattack. Noburu fired beyond the ragged line of his men, helping as best he could. He knew his days of gallant charges were behind him. But he would do what remained to him.

  "Fucking Japs," he heard the surviving South African NCO say. It was half a complaint, half admiration. "They're just as crazy as the wogs."

  Noburu saw a fallen Azeri rise suddenly and fire point-blank into Takahara's stomach. The staff officer fell backward, staggering. It seemed to Noburu that Takaha
ra was less concerned with staying on his feet than he was with holding the sword aloft. Its blade shone unblooded. Then another burst punched Takahara to the ground. The sword shimmered and disappeared amid the litter of corpses. Noburu held his rifle up to fire, but another Japanese beat him to his prey, bayoneting the man who had shot Takahara. The soldier remembered his bayonet drill well enough, planting a foot on his victim’s back and twisting out his rifle.

  The assault faded away, leaving two-dozen Japanese upright in the courtyard, firing across the parade ground toward the main gate and the breach in the wall. A last flare helped them, and Noburu realized that he had never seen so much death so close at hand. The broad space between the headquarters building and the main gate writhed like a snake pit with the wounded. But, when you looked closely, you saw a great ragged stillness around the hurt, waiting to accept them all. A man could have walked from the headquarters entrance to the main gate by stepping from corpse to corpse, without ever touching concrete or cobbles.

  A Japanese voice commanded a return to the headquarters building defenses. On the way, the men pawed over the fallen, checking for ammunition with which to continue the fight. The smell of gunpowder burned in Noburu’s nose like dried pepper.

  "Jesus Christ," a voice said. Noburu turned and saw the ammunition handler bent over the cavity of his comrade’s skull.

  Kloete lit another cigarette, then offered the open pack to Noburu.

  "I don’t smoke," Noburu said.

  The South African nodded as though he understood perfectly.

  "Good show, that," Kloete said. He spoke the anglicized phrase with his mudlike accent. "Your boys, I mean."

  "Yes."

  "Christ. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig."

  Noburu did not understand.

  "The side of your head," Kloete said, raising a hand partway to indicate the location of the wound. The man’s fingers stank of spent cartridges.

  Noburu remembered the blow on the side of his head. And now, magically, he could feel the blood oozing warmlyfrom the wound, losing temperature as it wandered down his neck. He did not need to test the wound with his land.

  "It's of no consequence," he said.

  "You'll need to have that seen to," Kloete said firmly.

  But Noburu no longer cared. He realized that he had been relieved, almost overjoyed by the attack. Toward the end he had not needed to think of anything else. The dream warrior was smiling.

  "It's of no consequence whatsoever," Noburu said truthfully.

  Colonel Johnny Tooth, United States Air Force, was a happy man. The four big WHITE LIGHT electronic warfare birds under his immediate control were onstation and functioning perfectly, exactly twenty-four hours late.

  But lateness was a relative thing. The goddamned nearsighted Army ground-pounders didn't understand that you could not risk expensive aircraft and their crews in hopelessly bad weather. Technically speaking, of course, he was a little behind schedule—but his aircraft had made it into the war after a direct supersonic flight from the States and they were performing flawlessly, jamming an enormous swathe from the Caucasus east across Soviet Central Asia and northern Iran. There wasn't going to be any chitchat down on the ground tonight.

  The WHITE LIGHT aircraft had the capabilities of flying at speeds above Mach 3 or of slowing to a near hover. In either case, they were invisible to any of the air defense systems known to be deployed in-theater. A long association with the WHITE LIGHT program gave Tooth the sort of warm, safe feeling a man had when he held good investments while the economy was going to shit for everyone else. Personally, Tooth had put his money into select real estate during the plague years, and he had no retirement worries.

  "Don't you think we should try to contact the Army guys?" his copilot asked over the intercom.

  Tooth could hardly believe his ears. "You nuts, Chubbs?"

  "Well," Chubbs said more carefully, "I just thought we ought to let them know we're onstation. You know?"

  Tooth sighed. So few people understood the interrelationships. "Maybe on the way out," he said, always ready to compromise. "But first we're going to run a complete mission. Nobody's going to be able to say the U.S. Air Force didn't do its part." Tooth shuddered inwardly, picturing some rough-handed, semiliterate Army officer testifying before a congressional subcommittee, claiming that the weight of military operations had been borne by the Army alone. The Air Force didn't need that kind of heartache, with budgets as tight as they were. Tooth understood clearly that the primary mission of the U.S. Army was to siphon off funding from vital Air Force programs.

  The Air Force had gone through a run of bad luck. It began in Zaire, where the South Africans had cheated and attacked the B-2 fleet on the ground—now that had been a royal mess, and a man could only be thankful that nobody in the press had ever been able to sort out the real unit cost of the stealth bomber. Then the Army had started grabbing all the glory, whether from their dirty little police duties during the plague or from their primitive rough-necking down in the Latin American mud. Why, you could have hired off-duty policemen to do the Army's job and you would have saved the country billions. And, all the while, it had been embarrassingly difficult to find appropriate missions for the state-of-the-art manned bombers, which Congress had finally come around to funding in the nineteen nineties—thanks to contractor programs that spread the wealth across congressional districts in practically every state in the Union. The minor action the Air Force had seen had shown, to widespread horror, that the oldest, slowest planes in the inventory were the best-suited to joint requirements. The underdeveloped countries simply refused to buy first-class air defense systems for stealth bombers to evade. Worse, they refused to provide clear-cut high-payoff targets. Then there was the humiliation with the Military Airlift Command's transport fleet. Naturally, lift capability had been put on the back burner in the quest to acquire sufficient numbers of high-tech combat aircraft to keep fighter jocks and bomber crews in uniform.

  And the transport fleet had bluntly failed in its initial attempts to ferry the Army in and out of Africa and Latin America. The government had been reduced to requisitioning heavy transports and passenger aircraft from the private sector.

  So the opportunity to show what the WHITE LIGHT aircraft could do was a welcome one. The birds had come in just at nine billion dollars a copy in 2015, and the program had required fall-on-your-sword efforts by congressmen whose districts included major defense contractors in order to force it through Appropriations. It would have been nice, of course, if everything could have been synchronized with the Army operation, in accordance with the original plan. But, ultimately, the thing was just to get the birds into action. His superiors had made the decision to launch the mission twenty-four hours late without consulting the other services. There was always the chance that the Army would try to block the Air Force activities with some whining to the effect that there was no further need for the jamming support, or that it would interfere with ground ops. You could never trust a grunt. They never understood the big picture, and they thought at the speed of the human foot. Absolutely no grasp of strategic imperatives. And they died broke.

  "How's everything going back there, Pete?" Tooth called to his weapons officer, who was currently sending streaks of man-made lightning through the heavens, destroying billions of dollars worth of enemy electronics.

  "Just fine, sir. We're putting out so much juice we'll fry pretty near every transmitter between here and the Indian Ocean. They'll be talking with tin cans and pieces of string when the sun comes up. Tokyo's going to shit."

  "Well, you just keep up the good work," Tooth said. Then he called the navigator. "Jimmy-boy, you put us back in friendly airspace by dawn, understand?"

  "Got it, sir."

  Colonel Johnny Tooth was fully aware that stealth technology and fifth-generation electronic defenses had rendered his aircraft as invisible in the daylight hours as at night. But Tooth nonetheless preferred flying in the darkness. It mig
ht be unreasonable, but the ability to wrap himself in the ancient cloak of night just made him feel that much more secure. Besides, he wanted to be back on the ground by lunch , since he had to place a very important phone call. Supporting the Army was one thing, but a real estate transaction was serious.

  23

  4 November 2020

  THEY CRUCIFIED THE MEN DURING THE NIGHT AND LEFT the crosses standing just outside the gate. Akiro, who had found it difficult enough to follow Noburu across the sea of bodies, began to gag. The wind flapped the blood-soaked uniforms of the Japanese officers like wet canvas.

  The Azeris had not gotten it exactly right, Noburu noted. Here a spike had been driven through the hand instead of a wrist, while on another cross a leg dangled free. Noburu recognized two of the three men as officers from the airfield. Perhaps the third man was a recent arrival he did not know. Noburu looked up at the lolling faces with their expressions of torment and wonder. Behind him, Akiro finished his dry retching.

  "At least they killed them," Noburu said, lowering his eyes to look down between the ranks of burned buildings, across the human flotsam the mob had left in its wake. "Why?" Akiro begged. "Why did they do this?" Noburu smiled. "They think we're Christians. All foreigners are Christians, you see. I'm afraid our allies are not as enlightened as Tokyo might wish."

  Back inside the gates, the bulldozer resumed its grunting. Moving the bodies, clearing an entryway for the relief column that must eventually come. Otherwise, the city was very quiet. The morning light seemed crippled, misshapen by twisting columns of smoke and the smell of death. The bulldozer added to the stink, disturbing the settling filth that had been a man, its blade wrenching open another corpse's bowels. Underneath the reek of mortality the familiar smell of the oil works came sharply up from the coast. A thousand years after they shut down the derricks and refineries, Baku would still stink of oil. And death.

  They were waiting, Noburu realized. Down in the labyrinth of the old city. On the waterfront. Or, farther out, in the apartment blocks built to give the workers a foretaste of paradise, and in the disease-culled slums, where families lived under worse conditions than had their most distant ancestors. The streets were empty now. The population had been driven indoors by the light of day, by defeat, plague, and exhaustion. But they were still there. Waiting.