The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  “There’ll be an amazing clusterfuck,” said Lanza to Carrera, “as the enemy tries to improvise out of the routine schedule they let themselves fall into. Within the next several hours, they’re going to have to recover two packages they didn’t expect to have to, cancel several more, remove ordnance already loaded from the ones they had to cancel, scramble fuel tankers they didn’t think they’d need from airfields already operating at capacity.

  “Oh, and they’re going to have to explain to the press and their governments just how a bunch of jungle runners like us managed to smack around their best, brightest, most sophisticated, and most expensive.”

  “What was the butcher’s bill?” Carrera asked.

  Lanza pointed at the display screen, explaining, “It’s only a preliminary but, near as we know, so far, we got twenty-three of them for thirty-seven of us, plus some air defense trashed. ’Course, we had surprise this time, so you could expect a better performance than the planes’ quality would suggest. Next time will be tougher, if there is a next time.”

  “No matter,” said Carrera. “They’re going to have to take us seriously from now on, lest they get embarrassed again. That means big packages, time to assemble, fuel instead of bombs, wear and tear, lots of air-to-air and SEAD ordnance, and virtual attrition bad enough to cut them down to about half as effective.

  “This is . . . it’s a victory, Miguel. Tell your boys and the duckhunters, both, ‘well done’ from both the president and me. I’ll see about convening a quorum of the Senate to make some kind of unit commendation. But don’t wait for it; tell them now.”

  Arnold Air Base, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Ordoñez and his three remaining pilots, surrounded by ground crew not needed for the moment, poured cheap sparkling wine over each other’s heads. Even the loss of Timoteo and De Rosa couldn’t dampen the mood.

  The other ground crew busied themselves with cranking the planes back up the launch rail and the extension that, when erected, led to the ground, refueling them, and mounting new rockets to their undersides. When that was finished, the truck drivers loaded up the men needed, and took the Mosaics to the lines of bunkers east of the airfield, where ammunition rats mounted new missiles and filled the cannons’ magazines.

  Then it was off to a hide in the jungle far less comfortable than the one they’d hidden in before. That had to be considered compromised at this point.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  You are Athenians, who know by experience the difficulty of disembarking in the presence of an enemy, and that if a man is not frightened out of his wits at the splashing of oars and the threatening look of a ship bearing down upon him, but is determined to hold his ground, no force can move him. It is now your turn to be attacked, and I call on you to stand fast and not to let the enemy touch the beach at all. Thus you will save yourselves and the place.

  —Demosthenes, at Pylos, 425 BC

  Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  In the lulls between the enemy’s aerial shitstorms, the Balboans had managed to tow away the unpowered training carrier to one of the docks at port. This wasn’t to keep it from being sunk, necessarily, but to make it possible to recover it after it was sunk, something that would have been much tougher in the deeper water off the island. There was another reason, too, but that awaited events.

  The big attacks on the island only came twice a day, now, but they were big, containing as many as two hundred and fifty aircraft, with as much as fifteen hundred tons of ordnance being dropped in the matter of an hour or so. Sometimes, in fact, the ordnance came down from planes flying in tightly controlled, but large formations, with the bulk of it landing within seconds. Those raids set the island to shaking as if undergoing an earthquake. They also tended to collapse trenches, set off mines, rip apart belts of barbed wire, and displace caltrops by anything up to miles.

  Even so, except for people’s nerves there were comparatively few casualties. Most of the positions on the island were too small to justify using a deep penetrator on, either as a matter of comparative cost or as a matter of operational effectiveness. A sortie that might drop a single deep penetrator could have, instead, carried several times that in more conventional tonnage. Though there were a few targets worth using a deep penetrator on.

  They’d tried bombs guided by the Global Locating System before, both on the mainland and on the island. Six times they’d tried using the rare and expensive bombs with GLS guidance. Six times the bombs had gone anyplace but where they were supposed to. Finally, some clever analyst had done a check of certain radio broadcasts coming out of Balboa and determined that, at least during air raids, they were capturing the GLS’s encrypted signal, delaying, it amplifying it, and rebroadcasting it. This voided the need to break the encryption. Figuring this out had been especially difficult because the Balboans used half-rhombic directional antennas to both boost the signal to overpowering strength and limit it to a couple of narrowly focused—about three degrees—broadcast areas. Outside of that area, or in its opposite direction, even detecting the stolen GLS signal was unlikely and difficult. The analyst who’d figured that out had deserved every accolade and commendation she had received.

  The GLS itself, to include with the encrypted signal, gave off a time stamp, from each of its twenty-seven geosynchronous satellites. A comparison of the time stamps, each, in effect, saying, “At the tone, the time will be” gave one a precise location on or above the surface of the planet. What the analyst had discovered was that, in effect, the Balboans were changing the GLS’s “At the tone the time will be” to “at the tone the time will have been,” for systems that simply couldn’t tell the difference between present, future, or future perfect tenses. With those differences, moving at the speed of light, for all the poor bomb knew it was over Taurus. Of course they missed their targets.

  Bombing the half-rhombics hadn’t done a bit of good either. They were cheap and plentiful, largely locally made out of spare commo wire and plastic what-nots.

  Then the Taurans had tried inertial guidance, both on its own and as a check on the GLS. The problem with using it on its own was that errors built up in the guidance package. Sometimes these cancelled each other out, but more often they multiplied. For a large area target, inertial guidance was . . . acceptable. Balboa had precisely no targets that really suited. Nor did using it in conjunction with GLS help much; lost is lost. The best that inertial could do was get a bomb into the right general area.

  They’d tried radar, very briefly. Something in the trees made it almost impossible. Some Anglian major, so said rumor control, insisted that the Balboans had been laying precisely cut strips of aluminized plastic in the trees for years, for precisely that purpose. Nobody believed it, though; who really thought that far ahead?

  What had worked, finally, was the use of laser guidance and closed-circuit television guidance, either active or preprogrammed, depending on the precise circumstances of the targets. Laser was good—dangerous, because the plane had to stay exposed, but good—wherever the target could be targeted by laser. Triple canopy tended to screw those to the point where what should have been science was largely art. TV camera was also good, even through the jungle, but depended on having an identifiable reference point, which wasn’t always available.

  Still . . . sometimes it was.

  The Tauravia Hurricane was about as capable a fighter bomber as existed anywhere on the planet. It was not ordinarily capable—rather its heavy hardpoints were not capable—of carrying the heavy, two-and-a-half-ton, deep penetrators. For that, a small number of planes had been modified, perhaps two dozen between the Anglian, Sachsen, and Tuscan air forces, together, of which a fraction had been sent to the war. These had their centerline hardpoints replaced with much heavier duty ones, which were affixed to the aircraft differently from normal heavy duty hardpoints. Those were for the two-and-a-half-ton penetrators.

  Squadron Commander Halpence kept well out to sea on his flight from Julio Asunción Airport, in Santa Josef
ina, to the big fortress island the Balboans called the “Isla Real.” Higher headquarters had demanded it, now that the Balboans had shown both teeth and the willingness to bite in painful and humiliating ways. Still, with only the five thousand pounds of ordnance carried, which left plenty of capacity for two drop tanks, the only cost was time and a little wear and tear.

  Where previously, Halpence and his squadron had had a semi-independent existence directly supporting Marciano’s little pocket division, now, with the advent of whole wings at Julio Asunción and other airfields in Santa Josefina, and with those wings more group captains, air commodores, vice marshals, air marshals, colonels, generals, and at least two admirals, Halpence’s brief sojourn into the joyous Never-Neverland of independent command had come to an end. Now, the only refuge from the idiocies of the higher command were in flight, and that in more senses than one.

  Looking ahead, Halpence saw the island as if shrouded in smoke, as indeed it was. Above the smoke, like flies gathered above a corpse, or perhaps more like buzzards, Tauran aircraft circled, flittered, and more than occasionally dove down to deliver rockets, cannon fire, or bombs.

  As long as you don’t obscure my target, thought Halpence, then, boys, have fun.

  There were eleven aircraft, in total, accompanying Halpence, of which four were modified to carry the heavy and deep penetrators. Of the bombs, themselves, only thirty-two had been delivered, which was very nearly the complete stockpile within all the air forces of the Tauran Union. That number, thirty-two, had been selected on the basis of one per coastal artillery gun turret on the island, of which there were sixteen, plus twelve for the heavy bunkers, and four spares. The number twelve was chosen, despite the fact that there were thirteen known very large and very deep bunkers on the island. One of these, however, the enemy had identified as either a POW holding pen or a medical facility; they refused to be more specific. In any case, that one was off limits.

  Four of the other twelve, though, were in for a pasting today.

  Rocket assist in deep penetration had never entirely caught on. A few heavy bombs used it, but, in the main, the complexity, reduction in payload, and probability of the bomb not being precisely aligned upon the rocket’s firing mitigated against any widespread use. The bomb Halpence carried, for example, didn’t have it. Instead, the bomb relied on mass, velocity, strength, and sharpness to achieve its penetration. A fuse ensured that it would go off somewhere in the depths of the body to be penetrated, generally in an open space as would indicate human facilities. The bomb could also be set to pass through several open spaces before detonating.

  A quick check with the electronic warfare and Frenzied Ferret people confirmed that the Balboans’ anti-GLS measures were not only fully operative, but switching from one emitter to another so quickly that there was essentially no chance to use an antiradiation missile on them . . . or, for that matter, to do anything worthwhile in the slightest to them.

  Halpence mentally shrugged. Right, no GLS-based targeting. And, however much one hates to admit it, it still has to be said, the motherfuckers are getting better the more we fight. So are we, of course, but they started at a lower level and are getting better, faster.

  Still, it wasn’t all bad. Both Frenzied Ferrets and strategic recon (which Halpence was rapidly coming to suspect was code for “Earthpigs”) said the Balboan air defense umbrella was down or, at least, not up. Accordingly, about forty kilometers out he pulled back on his stick to get enough altitude to use his penetrator to some good effect. The other eleven Hurricanes in the flight did likewise, though they spread out a bit more as they rose.

  Halpence activated both the camera on the bomb and his ground attack computer. The enemy’s anti-GLS measures seemed to be fixed along certain axes; if you weren’t within one of those, your own GLS would work as well as ever. Of course, the Balboans also switched off regularly; predicting where GLS would work was always problematic. Still, for now, operating with the aid of the GLS, the computer, for the most part, took charge of both bomb and plane, guiding them in, locking the target image into the bomb’s “brain,” and releasing the bomb at the proper time.

  “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” thought the bomb . . . oh, no, it didn’t. It was just a freaking bomb, not a poet. All it really “thought” was a bunch of numbers meaningful only to it, which numbers gave things like target position, its own speed, altitude and position relative to the target. Some of those numbers created a sort of digital picture that could be matched to the picture seen by the camera in the nose.

  In this case, the match was multifold. The bomb saw a large set of doors, themselves set in a concrete frame. It also saw both a road leading to the doors, and an intersection not far from them. Several trees planted after the bunker had been covered also formed a distinctive pattern. Lastly, a section of the base of the heavily damaged solar chimney that normally provided the island’s electric power was within the camera’s field of view. In short, the bomb had an excellent idea of where the target was and where it was to penetrate.

  Once released from Halpence’s modified Hurricane, the bomb used its own abilities to track down to the target. Its camera sent back a continuous signal to Halpence’s plane, which Halpence could have used to guide it manually. Until it was obvious that the bomb needed that, though, the pilot figured it knew what it was doing.

  The first strike on the earth pulverized the camera. At that point, though, it wasn’t needed anyway. Straight and true the bomb plunged into the dirt and rock over the multistoried bunker. At that point, things got complex. Worse, they got complex in ways that the bomb couldn’t tell anyone about and which would not necessarily be obvious to the outside viewer.

  The first complexity came in the form of twin layers of hexagonal plates, something over an inch thick, that had been laid over the earth over the bunker in the course of covering it, once it had been substantially completed. The bomb’s sharp nose touched one of the plates in the upper layer near its edge and simply tore through that edge at the cost of a little energy.

  That, however, meant that it hit one of the plates in the second layer about ten inches from the center. There was no tearing though that; the bomb’s sharp nose simply impaled itself onto the plate, forcing it to come along on its dive into the depths of the island.

  If it had been a dead center hit, the plate would have increased the cross-sectional area, hence the resistance, by a factor of about three or four, dropping the bomb’s usual penetration from perhaps thirty meters of mixed rock, dirt, and concrete to maybe seven to ten meters or so. Because of where it hit in this case, however, the plate caused the bomb to do something worse; it yawed. It yawed so much, in fact, that the cross section changed from about one hundred and sixty square inches to fifteen times that, for most of its brief subterranean journey. True, there were moments when it was pointed straight down, as it veered back and forth, but those moments were quite brief. And even there, the yawing sucked up energy, too.

  That all sounds much more involved and complex than it really was. In fact, the bomb hit dirt. It effectively missed one plate then picked up a different one. The plate it speared itself to caused it to yaw one way, until resistance caused it to spring back and yaw the other. It slipped into the dirt, wore itself out, stopped, and went boom. A great spray of dirt and hexagonal steel plates was blown up into the air and to all sides. It took a lot longer for one of the plates to reach apogee than it had taken the bomb to go from the final “a” in “Kawabunga” to “Boom.”

  Down on the sixth floor of the bunker’s twelve, a clerk turned to a radio operator and asked, “Did you feel something?”

  Not every bunker of the four attacked had it quite so easy. One of them, dug into the north-northeastern face of Hill 287, and next nearest to the one Halpence had attacked, wasn’t as fortunate. There, the bomb had plunged right in between two of the hexagonal steel plates, then glanced off another in the next layer down without spearing it. Rather, at that angle the
bomb simply brushed the plate aside.

  From there it had sliced through dirt and rock deftly and easily. Indeed, it had been made more easy by the cut-and-cover method of construction the Balboans had used to save time and expense. In short, the dirt and rock had been comparatively loose and soft.

  The three-meter-thick roof of the bunker, all reinforced concrete, hadn’t been able to do much more than slow the bomb down. Its sharp steel point—and steel of the highest grade, too—punched right through concrete and rebar almost as easily as if they were not there. The most that could be said was that the roof slowed the bomb. It never had a chance of stopping it.

  Inside, a massive spray of spalling had erupted into the bunker’s top floor, killing several and wounding almost two dozen. They’d just begun to realize what had happened and to scream when the tail of the bomb passed through the floor. Indeed, while that tail was still about midway between floor and ceiling, the bomb’s sharp nose was sending another spray of spalling into the third floor down, the tenth floor. That spray, however, had little of the energy of the first. The bomb was noticeably slowing. Rather, it would have been noticeable if anyone had had the presence of mind not to be shitting themselves as the bomb passed by.

  Continuing on through the six, seventh, eighth, and ninth floors, in the opposite order, the bomb finally came to rest there, with its nose dug about half a foot into the concrete of the sixth floor’s floor. Thereupon, it met its detonation parameters and promptly set off its six hundred pounds of high explosive.

  The explosion ripped the thick steel casing into shards, even as it drove the nose on a fiery spear downward, though two more floors. The nose itself didn’t kill anybody. The spalling did, but only a few. However, that fiery spear shaft created a concussive shock through the holes into floors four and five sufficient to kill all forty-seven people currently working there.