by David Poyer
“Korea,” Szserenci prompted.
“That was my next sentence, Ed. That plan’s been looked at by the refugee government and approved by the interim head of state. Toppling one of the Opposed Powers will weaken morale of the others. Leading, again, to possible coups.”
The chairman steepled his fingers. He too looked sleepless and tormented. But also grimly determined. “We’ve come back from where we were. And we have a path forward, in the near term. But this war could still go either way, if home front resolve weakens and production drops, or there’s a major defeat on the battlefronts. Or if some unforeseen unknown clobbers us on the back of the head.
“That brings us to war termination. Which Dr. Szerenci and the SecDef are going to get asked about in Jakarta. I asked Dr. Glancey to give us the historical perspective first. Professor?”
Beside her Glancey stood. He cleared his throat, looking around. “As I’ve told many of you before, we’re in unexplored territory here.”
The professor locked each of their gazes in turn, as if at a graduate seminar. “Modern conflicts don’t terminate when both adversaries are balanced. Unless both are exhausted. Their economies wrecked. And usually, not even then. After lives have been sacrificed, atrocities alleged, populations propagandized and mobilized for total war.
“What’s worked before? Overwhelming force has to be demonstrated by one side. But that’s not all; a corresponding requirement is for the other side to accept the impossibility of victory. Operation Barbarossa demonstrated overwhelming force. But Stalin refused to accept defeat. So termination did not result.
“In World War I, termination occurred through a combination of military exhaustion, famine, propaganda, and psychological collapse. In World War II, pure military defeat and loss of territory, in the case of Germany, and blockade and bombing, including nuclear weapons, in the case of Japan. In the Cold War, economic collapse and a yearning for freedom.”
He sighed and looked away from them all. “Unfortunately, there will be no more one-sided nuclear wars. We’ve gamed this over and over, at the War College and at Stanford. In ninety percent of the runs, there proved to be no way to terminate hostilities short of a nuclear exchange.”
Blair leaned forward, so he could see her. “What happened the other ten percent of the time?”
He looked down at her. “A coup. Followed by total collapse.”
“A military coup. In China?”
Glancey looked away again. “Not always, Blair.”
She waited a moment, but apparently no one else was going to ask. “You mean … here?”
“Let’s not go there,” Vincenzo cut in. “We may not agree with the administration. But we still operate under civilian control.”
“The overthrow didn’t come from the top,” Glancey said. “We don’t see it, in this room. We have enough to eat, drivers, personal protection. But people are angry out there. They’re afraid. It only happened once in our simulations. But that one occurrence came from below. Something more like … a revolution.”
Murmurs of protest, shaking of heads. Vincenzo frowned. “So how do we end this, Professor? You keep telling us what we can’t do, how impossible termination is. But every war has to end. How the fuck are we going to tie up this one?”
Glancey spread his hands. “I could give you some song and dance, General. Or insist no one knows. But, really, I just told you how it ends. Ninety percent of the time, with central nuclear war.”
More silence. Blair shifted in her chair, only now acknowledging the ache in her injured hip. She caught Oberfoell’s eye across the table, and cleared her throat. “Nadine, can you help out at all? You said Battle Eagle could slow their responses. Can it possibly disable their heavy missiles completely, now Jade Emperor’s out of action?”
“We’re working on that,” the cyber director said. “Believe me. As I said, we can degrade their command. But we haven’t found a way in to the missiles themselves. Before it was destroyed, Jade advised them to isolate everything. But, as I said, we haven’t given up.”
“Cybersabotage is worth pursuing,” Szerenci said. “But if nuclear war is the foreordained end, we need to strike first. With EP Heavy, followed by a massive counterforce laydown from all three legs of the triad. All out. Nothing held back.”
Blair reached for the carafe, and sipped water with a suddenly dry mouth. “That’s a dark vision, Ed.”
“It’s not one I wanted, Blair. Contrary to what you seem to think.”
“Maybe now’s the time to make a peace offer, Ed. Ricardo. At Jakarta? Let’s at least … perhaps an armistice proposal. A cease-fire. There are elements that might respond.” She almost said I talked to them in Zurich, but didn’t. Only Szerenci knew that, and it would be all too easy to get branded as a traitor if that meeting became known.
But Szerenci shook his head. “No, Blair. I understand. Believe me. But it’s too late to talk peace.
“The Allies made that mistake in 1918. Letting the enemy survive, but humiliated, so he could come back twice as strong.
“It’s time to bring China to its knees, forever. Leave it a scorched wasteland. Like Sherman said, leave them only their eyes to weep with. Kill so many people they’ll never dare threaten us again.”
Into the shocked silence that followed he said calmly, “Does that sound ‘dark,’ Blair? We’ve known since the test at Alamogordo this moment would come someday. That’s how this war will end. The only way it can end.”
He reached for the carafe, and the chill tinkle of ice was the only sound in the room. “We can wish all we like,” he added, “But the only thing we can do now is make sure that when it’s over, more of us are left, than of them.”
4
Taiwan
SERGEANT Hector Ramos is riding a motorized ammo cart north after three days off the line at Battalion Aid. He’s twenty. An E-5, even though he’s been in the Corps for only two years. He’s not tall, but he’s muscular. His black hair’s buzz cut under the helmet. His right temple is shaved and microstitched under a sprayed-on bandage. He wears an eagle, globe, and anchor tattoo, a red plastic rosary around his neck, and fresh, spanking-clean battle dress. The backs of his hands as he grips his carbine are slashed with dark scars from the kill room of the chicken plant he worked at before ICE gave him a choice: enlist, or be deported.
The burns on them, though, are from battle. He’s a two-island Marine now. The first was Itbayat, northernmost of the Philippines. There he earned a Purple Heart, the Combat Action Ribbon, and the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal.
Right now he’s riding a robotic weapons carrier down a winding road onto the plains of northern Taiwan. A lanky white woman in battle Cameleons and a smart helmet is clinging to the handgrips in the passenger seat. Intermittent blasts flicker and rumble on the horizon ahead.
The front. Where he’d fought for weeks, before being sent back with the walking wounded.
He’d caught a bullet in the helmet and blacked out. When he came to again he couldn’t remember his name. The platoon commander interviewed him brusquely, snapped photos of the helmet and his bleeding scalp, and told Iron Dream, the sexy-voiced intersquad AI the troops called Wet Dream, that Staff Sergeant Hector Alfonso Ramos was going to the rear for evaluation. And also, to put him in for his second Heart.
Hector had protested, and been told that he’d just gotten an order.
The next thing he remembered was a field shower, then a metal framework clamped to his head. A needling pain as a spiderlike machine click-click-stitched his torn scalp. A bandage. A shot. Then a hot meal.
Followed by an instantaneous toppling, under a tent pocked by the endless rain, into a sleep like death itself.
* * *
THE battle had ground on longer than anyone had expected, fueled by a sense on both sides that this might be the climactic campaign of the war.
Operation Causeway, the invasion of Taiwan, began with battle drones and submarines cutting off enemy reinforcements and resupp
ly. Then the Marines landed. The first wave seized an airfield and port on the east coast. Once that toehold was covered by missile support, air defense in place, armor landed, and logistics coming in, they’d driven inland. Linking up with resistance forces, they’d punched west into the central mountains. The Army landed in the south, but was stalled by AI-controlled autonomous armor.
Since then, the Army had pinned the bulk of the enemy as the Marine Third and the Nationalist 905th went toe to toe with the Chinese First Amphibious Mechanized and the 45th Airborne Mechanized. After the first days hardly anything digital had functioned. Both sides were jamming and emping from the Ka-band down. The clouds of drones vanished, dropped like dead buzzards by the rain, the mountains, and raptor UAVs that soon expired in their turn.
The Marines cowered in the mud under furious barrages. Charlie had better artillery than the Allies and more ammo stockpiled than Intel had predicted. The result was head-to-head butting, a deadly, grueling ground game. The platoon had taken heavy casualties, dead, wounded, blown apart by creeping mines, brains scrambled by microwaves, blinded by ocular interruptors, both Marines and their robotic counterparts.
Ramos had fought side by side with one of those robots, immortalized now in Division tradition as the Last CHAD. C323 had thrown himself on a grenade, then, with wires hanging from a demolished chest, manned a machine gun post until it was overrun.
Now all the Combat Humanoid Autonomous Devices were gone, “dead” or broken. The human marines had taken heavy losses too. But they’d finally punched through the mountains, and were hitting the enemy’s last reserves. At least, Intel said these were the last.
Operation Causeway was reaching a desperate climax. From where he stood, even Hector could see that.
* * *
BUT now he’s heading back to the front, and trying to find the platoon. Scanning the sides of the road as he and Patterson jostle and bump along. Rivulets of blood, diluted by rain, slide this way and that under the cans of ammo in the cargo bed. “Why does it just fucking rain and rain,” she mutters through gritted teeth. “Have we seen the sky since we fuckin’ landed?”
Ramos doesn’t answer. He’s concentrating on the road. Looking for ambush sites, IEDs, and the creeping mines that sense movement and home on body heat.
Lance Corporal Patterson, beside him in the jolting cart, was a girls soccer coach in Pennsylvania before the war. He’s seen her broken-field sprint through barrages in two sets of jelly armor, carrying ammo and freeze-dried plasma. Today her dirty face is streaked with rain. “So how’d he get it?” she asks him.
Hector can’t remember what they were talking about. He shakes his head carefully, so as not to dislodge anything. “I don’t know, Wombat.”
“You don’t seem to know fucking shit-all these days, Sergeant.”
“Not first ’a tell me that. I thought—”
He’s interrupted by a skinny marine at the side of the road flagging them down. The guy looks shaken. No rank insignia, but no one wears them in combat. “Pull over. Halt,” Hector tells the cart. He casts a wary glance past the loner, but sees only paddies. “What’s the deal, jarhead?”
“Harlen, PFC. First ’a the Third. You got comms back to Higher?”
“Not right now. Why?”
The marine shoots an apprehensive glance over his shoulder. “Might wanta call this in. Or at least, go see.”
Hector frowns. “See what?”
“Right down this road. Half a klick?”
He glances at Patterson. She shrugs. “Climb aboard,” he tells the PFC.
He unslings his weapon and checks the seating on the magazine as the cart jolts and whines, threading a blasted village of smashed homes. The rutted road, once asphalt-paved, has been chewed into mud again by treads. It’s littered with the usual trash of war. The unmistakable possum-stink of rotting meat, garbage, shit, and smoke makes the air the cart shoves him through somehow thicker, almost liquid. A smell he barely notices anymore.
“There it is,” yells the PFC, pointing.
“Slow down,” Hector tells the cart.
“Oh, fuck me,” Patterson breathes.
A river’s engraved a shallow groove across the land, framed by perhaps four hundred meters of swampy soil on either bank. Cupped by long arcs of barbed wire, topped by rusting concertina, on the shores lie hundreds of bodies. No. Thousands. Motionless, except for the stir and flutter of quarreling crows and gulls. But atop slim steel towers, barrels still sweep the fence line.
“Halt,” Hector snaps to the cart. “Those are facial-rec MGs on those pylons.” He searches the sky, but doesn’t see anything up there. The dronehawks have done their job.
“We gotta call this in,” the joe says again.
“I’m getting video.” Patterson holds up her battle phone.
“I’ll call it in, dickhead,” Hector says, “but you need to rejoin your unit.”
“I lost them. Got separated.” The guy looks desperate. “Can I come with you?”
“Only if you wanna fight,” Hector tells him. “’Cause that’s where we’re headed.”
He nods, and Hector tells the cart, “Reverse, retrace to main road, return to loading point.” Motors whining, tires spinning in the mud, it obeys.
* * *
IT’s still raining when they get back to the platoon. The Marines are marching forward. Marching. On foot. Along a muddy, shell-blasted, waterlogged sunken road between bare paddies whose dikes have been blown apart by shells and trampled by retreating Chinese armor. Rifles and Gussies slung, a long, swaying, trudging line of men and women.
Like the Romans, Hector thinks. He didn’t learn much in school, but remembers a picture of the legions on a road. Little Lieutenant Ffoulk hikes with them, dirty as the rest, her oversized butt swaying as she marches. Blown over a cliff in the mountains, she refused evacuation. When she spots Hector she squints and signals him up. Her gaze sharpens on his uniform. “Sergeant. What, they’re not issuing Cameleons anymore?”
He doesn’t salute. That would mark out leaders for drones, for snipers. “Lieutenant. No, just these left.”
“Who’s this mutt?”
“Lost his unit. Wants to fall in with us till he can rejoin.”
“Fine by me, take him. You back in battery, Ramos?—Hey, Patterson. Lance Corporal, you stick with me.—Ramos, I say again, you with us, Sergeant?”
“Affirmative, Lieutenant. Where’s my squad, ma’am?”
“I gave Karamete your squad. We lost Glasscock. I’m gonna need a new platoon sergeant.”
“How about … how about Clay?”
She squints again. “The Top got his legs blown off back in Chishang, remember? Sure you’re okay, Marine?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I forgot.” He shifts his boots in the mud. “Uh, Dolan’s senior to me.”
“Blinded by an ocular yesterday. You’re getting the platoon, Staff Sergeant. Like it or not.”
“Uh-huh. Aye aye, ma’am. Uh, we brought ammo in the cart.”
“So I see.” She nods to the vehicle. “Cart: Drive up the column. Stop every hundred yards so the troops can pick up ammo. When you’re empty, return to your charging point.” The AI beeps acknowledgment and moves out.
She brings Hector up to date as they trudge on. “Armor punched through up around Heping. The Japanese allies are hitting the beach at Yilan, up to the northeast. Higher think this thing might be breaking loose.
“Here’s the plan. Pei’s trying to withdraw to the capital. If he can dig in there, make it a three-block war, we’ll pay in blood. Division wants us to drive northwest and cut him off. We get behind them, this thing’s over.” She readjusts her pack, wheezing. “So about two klicks, we’re gonna mount up and see how far we exploit the breakthrough. You and Wombat stick with me. Got a special mission if we get there. Oorah?”
“Oorah,” Hector says. But really, he cares not at all. Suddenly his head aches, and once again, he can’t remember exactly who he is.
* * *
>
TO his astonishment, the tanks really are waiting. Smoke rises ahead, between the green steep mountains, and the hollow high roar of jets and the crump of bombs reverberates down the valley. The rain pelts down steadily as the company climbs aboard, second platoon in the lead. No trucks, no thin-skins. Just the tanks, gray and scarred with whatever the slants have been throwing at them.
They push northward through heavy rain and desultory shelling all that afternoon. The pace isn’t exactly breakneck. The road twists and switchbacks like a fleeing rattler. The tanks growl and lurch and skid around shell and bomb craters. The marines cling like lice to the rusty rebar hastily welded on as handholds, Red Army–style. They wait while combat engineers repair a bridge. Then push on through deserted hamlets, terraced paddies, above a river that foams and swirls brown as melted chocolate as it rushes south.
They dismount in front of an enemy roadblock at some nameless crossroads. Hector sets his squads, trying to figure how the old Top would have done it. They lay down fire, but before they can advance the resistance melts, pelting away into the paddies, or just dropping their weapons and standing along the road, hands up and mouths open.
Most of these guys aren’t even in uniform, just dirty civvy clothes with red armbands. Locals? Volunteers? Hector wishes the Marines had some friendlies with them, to figure out who’s what.
Ffoulk gestures angrily for the newly surrendered troops to pick up their rifles again. She calls up an app on her tablet, and speaks into it.
“Zài dàolù shàng reng wuqì,” a speaker on the tank bellows. They hesitate, staring at the pudgy black woman perched on the Abrams. She gestures again, peremptorily, with her carbine. The turret begins to rotate toward them. They scramble to pick their weapons up and throw them into the mud.
The tank revvs again, its steel track plates crunching over rifles and machine guns, reducing them to scrap. Disarmed, their recent enemies squat along the road, hands up. Some grin and wave as the tanks speed by, though they quickly recoil, ducking, as the tracks blast mud into their faces.