Maury liked to travel, but he also liked to work. In truth, he never seemed to stop working. Certainly, one element that underpinned his detailed knowledge of the terrorist world was sheer application.
So far he had spent just one hour at the exhibition. He had done a lightning tour and then returned to his mobile burrow. Military gadgetry was all very well and he kept himself informed, but what really turned Maury on was the live game. Thanks to modern satellite communications, he could play that anywhere – and he did.
Fitzduane found Maury watching the fax for incoming nuggets in the utterly focused manner of a cat monitoring a mouse hole and brought him, protesting, into the meeting with Don Shanley.
Shanley impressed Fitzduane, and he wanted to put the Magnavox man under some additional pressure. Maury was rather good at asking awkward questions.
"What do you guys want to achieve?" said Shanley. "The more I know, the better I can help you."
"You just want to sell hardware," said Maury aggressively. "I hate salesmen."
Fitzduane groaned inwardly. This was not the best way to start. He had in mind awkward technical questions. Downright bad behavior would not be helpful. Still, the only thing now was to go with the flow.
Shanley smiled. "We all have some position to advance," he said. "Personally, I like to think of myself as a problem solver."
Maury glared at Shanley. "What do you know about combat?" he said. "Have you ever served?"
Shanley was tired, Fitzduane had observed. At Maury's question he went pale, as if the remark had struck deep. Given Maury's aggressive approach, Fitzduane would not have been surprised by an angry response, but the Magnavox man showed restraint.
"I know more about my field than most," he said quietly. "I hope that will be sufficient for you gentlemen. As I understand it, your application relates to FAVs. Perhaps we can take it from there. It might be helpful if you work from first principles."
Fitzduane caught Kilmara's eye and made an almost imperceptible gesture. Kilmara took the point and cut in.
"Don, my unit came into being as a counterterrorist force," he said. "Subsequently it was expanded to have an offensive capability. That meant we needed to deploy heavier firepower to deal with armor and other special situations, and pretty soon we ran into problems. Quite simply, our Rangers, no matter how physically fit, could not carry the weight of weaponry and equipment which we considered necessary to do the job. I am sure you now the figures."
Shanley nodded. "A fit soldier is supposed to carry only about one-third of his body weight if he is to remain combat capable – say, sixty pounds odd. In practice, by the time you have added spare ammunition and the modern tools of his trade, the guy – or girl these days – is staggering under a hundred pounds or more. That restricts his mobility and he tires faster. Worse again, he still is not carrying what is required in combat today. The days of a rifle and sixty rounds of ammunition are long gone. Now he is laden with four hundred rounds of ammunition, antitank weapons, explosives, claymores, laser range finders, and-" he smiled – "thermal sights. And there is more. Radio batteries are a real curse. And then there is his NBC kit."
"You've got the picture," said Kilmara. "A single special-forces soldier has never been better equipped or more potentially lethal in the history of warfare, but he cannot carry what he needs.
"Well, I tossed the problem out to Colonel Fitzduane. Hugo has a talent for this kind of thing."
Fitzduane could see that Maury was getting hooked.
"Back in World War Two," said Fitzduane, "my father was one of the founding members of the SAS in North Africa. Stirling's idea was to raid behind German lines using heavily armed jeeps."
"Did it work?" said Shanley. "As I understand it, the German Army in North Africa was heavily armored. Jeeps against armor does not seem much of a deal."
"A few dozen SAS destroyed more German aircraft on the ground than the entire Allied Desert Air Force, which contained thousands of men," said Fitzduane. "As to armor, the idea was not to go head to head. In those days, you couldn’t destroy a tank with anything you could carry in a jeep. But jeeps were faster and they could hide. And they were devastating against light armor and trucks. As a tactic it worked brilliantly."
"But surely the casualties were heavy?" said Shanley.
Fitzduane shook his head. "Ironically, you were a lot safer in the SAS than the regular army. It was a case of brute force versus speed, maneuverability, firepower, and brainpower. Anyway, with the SAS experience in the back of my mind, I started exploring the idea of a fast, light unarmored vehicle equipped with light but powerful weapons. And pretty soon I was pointed this way. The U.S. Army might have gone heavy, but some people were pushing at the envelope."
"Chenowth," said Maury. "They made the dune buggies that did so well in the Baja. The U.S. Army formed an experimental division and started playing with converted Chenowths equipped with grenade launchers and TOW missiles and the like. It was political dynamite, because field evaluation showed that a fast attack vehicle, a FAV – which was what they called these things – could, in many cases, outkill not just armored fighting vehicles, but also tanks. I've heard kill rates like nine to one and four to one."
Fitzduane nodded. "It gets complicated when you are talking combined arms, because armor does not operate in a vacuum. Add helicopters into the equation and FAV's might not have done so well. Also, the Abrams tank and the Humvee programs were well advanced and big money was involved, and no one wanted to lose them. So, for all practical purposes, the FAV experiment was killed. I hear the marines bought a few, and the SEALs certainly took them on board with success, but major development, which was what the program needed, never happened. It should have, because FAV funding would have been chicken feed in comparison to most military programs, but it didn't. That's the trouble with inexpensive programs. There is not enough money in them."
Kilmara smiled. "Well, since we don't have any real budget by American standards, we picked up on the U.S. experience and some work in the U.K. and produced our own machine, but decided to try a slightly different direction. Both the Chenowth and the Saker are wheeled vehicles, excellent for some terrains but no good in marshy ground or snow.
"But we don't have the money to have different vehicles for different conditions, so we decided to go for an unarmored high-speed tracked machine that could do most of what the Chenowth and Saker could do but could operate worldwide. Sand, mud, rocky shale, snow, ice, marshy ground – the Guntrack can go just about anywhere. The intention is to equip it with enough firepower to knock out a tank and handle any immediate aerial threat, and it is the weapons aspect that we are still working on. Want to see it, Don?"
Shanley was not used to generals being this informal. He was a courteous man by nature and had found that around the U.S. Army, a crisp "Sir" did not go amiss. "Yes, sir!" he said.
Kilmara looked at him. "We're an informal culture these days in Ireland," he said. "First names are normal. I'm Shane. He's Hugo, and he-" he indicated Maury – "I think he is mellowing."
"Maury," said Maury. He was looking downright agreeable.
Fitzduane slipped in the video.
The group turned toward the screen.
The terrain was rocky undulating ground covered with outcrops of heather and patches of rough grass. In the background there was a line of hills under a lowering sky that was a surreal mix of menacing clouds and shafts of light.
It was a bleak but dramatic landscape that encompassed an extraordinary variation of shape and line and shade and color. It was stunningly beautiful, and Shanley suddenly realized that this was not just some foreign land.
This was where his roots lay. This had once been home.
A dark shape appeared in the distance. It was hard to make out the details. The silhouette was low and indistinct. The vehicle approached following a zigzag course and across land that would have been impassable in a wheeled vehicle. The sound track suggested it made surprisingly little noise.
The vehicle came closer and drove parallel past the camera so it could be seen in profile. As it did so, it could be seen that although the tracks were riding over rocks and a generally uneven surface, the upper portion of the vehicle was virtually stable.
The driver locked one track and the Guntrack did a 360-degree turn on its own axis and then came to a complete halt.
It was like nothing either Don or Maury had ever seen. It was a small, low black box on tracks with a wedge-shaped front and what looked like folded-up forklift prongs on the rear. A driver and a gunner equipped with twin 5.56mm Minimi machine guns sat in the front.
The vehicle was steered by left-hand drive. To the right of the front gunner, a Stinger antiaircraft missile was clipped into position. Behind the two front seats was a gunner with an M19 belt-fed 40mm grenade launcher mounted on buffered soft mount attached to a turret ring. As they watched, the rear gunner's station rose on a hydraulic mount to give him a wider field of fire. The entire station then rotated 360 degrees. It then retracted and a slim mast mounting a miniature FLIR monitor rose up and panned in a circle.
"The Guntrack," said Fitzduane, "is the vehicle that the Irish Rangers are beginning to use for special operations. It is not armored in the traditional sense, but it is made from a special plastic that will withstand small-arms fire, and the tracks are a Kevlar and artificial rubber blend. Hell of a good power-to-weight ratio. Accelerates like a rocket and does up to eighty-five miles an hour with a full payload. The weapons fitted can, of course, be varied, but fully equipped with something like you see, it should cost no more than five percent of a tank. As to maintenance, if I can exaggerate just a little to make a point, it can be maintained by the three-man crew with their Swiss Army knives."
The video continued for another fifteen minutes as the camera focused in close-up on individual aspects. Everything from fuel consumption to changing an engine was covered. In fact, it was the attention to detail that was most impressive and ingenious.
The fuel tank, for instance, was of a honeycomb design that could be penetrated by an incendiary round without igniting. The forks at the back could be lowered to pick up a standard NATO pallet holding up to a ton. Guntracks could be linked so that if the engine on one went, the second could pull the first under power.
Shanley and Maury watched with fascination. The sheer logic of the thinking was impressive. The Guntrack had been designed by people who knew the reality of combat.
Maury could still see a problem. "Artillery will make mincemeat of you," he said. "Potentially, there is a terrifying amount of unfriendly metal on today's battlefield, and much of it will cut right through your plastic box."
"The Guntrack is not the ultimate weapon," said Fitzduane. "It is no more than one more useful tool. It is designed for a shoot-and-scoot approach to survival. It is primarily a better way, we think, to get around when you are on the ground on some special operations missions. The underlying idea is not to be detected at all, but if you are detected, to have enough firepower to make the enemy back off while you hightail it out of the area. It beats the hell out of dying."
Shanley had been thinking it through. "How do you use Guntrack tactically?" he said.
"We've found that the minimum practical deployment is two vehicles," said Fitzduane. "Then fire and movement. One covers the other like a fighter pilot and his wingman."
Kilmara turned to face Shanley and Maury. "Well, gentlemen," he said. "Now you know what we are working on. The next question is what you can suggest. Any ideas?"
"More than a few," said Shanley. His mind was racing. What he had seen, if properly developed, was not just interesting. It was tactically significant.
"This idea of a small, inexpensive fast attack vehicle taking on tanks reminds me of something that happened in Africa. The Libyans tried to grab their neighbor to the south and assembled an invading army of hundreds of tanks. They were beaten by Chadians driving only Toyota pickup trucks equipped with Milan missiles. The pickups maneuvered faster than the Russian tanks could move their turrets. Also, they were so small they were hard to hit."
Kilmara, who had been in Chad advising the Chadians at the time, did not say anything but looked at Shanley with renewed respect. This was a man who did his homework.
"You should look at Dilger's Baby," said Maury cryptically.
Fitzduane and Kilmara looked at each other blankly.
"How does a baby fit into all this, Maury?" said Kilmara carefully. Maybe Maury had finally flipped.
Maury beamed. "You'll see," he said.
*****
When the meeting broke up, Fitzduane checked the switchboard to see if Kathleen had checked in. If she went on an expedition, she normally called during the day to say roughly when she would be back.
There was no message. It was not significant, but Fitzduane could not help feeling vaguely uneasy. He looked at his watch. It was heading toward 5:00 P.M. The exhibition would close at 6:00, and soon after was a barbecue and some entertainment planned by the exhibition organizers for 7:30. The posters announced that there would also be some entertainment and dancing afterward.
Fitzduane had never seen country-and-western line dancers and was mildly curious. Certainly Kathleen, who loved dancing, would like it. As to the parachuting, there was always something morbidly fascinating about watching fellow humans jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Would the parachutes open? Where and how would they land?
It promised to be a pleasant enough evening.
*****
The North Carolina State Police duty officer contemplated the message slip. A citizen had reported seeing a woman being manhandled into a helicopter that had been parked in a remote clearing in the wooded land that bordered the freeway. The woman had been struggling and then she had gone limp, the witness thought. The helicopter had taken off immediately. Direction? Unknown.
Color of hair? Unknown. She had a bag or something over her head, he thought. Color of skin? The citizen did not know.
Descriptions of the assailants? There had been two – or maybe three. They had been casually dressed.
He could not really tell much else. How close had he been? He had been hiking in the woods and had seen all this as he was walking back. He was fifty to seventy-five yards from the clearing. Something like that. He wasn't real good at estimating distances.
The duty officer called in the dispatcher. "This is pretty thin. What did he sound like? Citizen or crank?"
The dispatcher shrugged. "Elderly, a little vague, but he definitely believes he saw something."
"Why was he hiking in the woods?"
"He said he is a birdwatcher. He was looking for the red cockaded woodpecker. He's sure about that."
"So he saw all this through binoculars?" said the duty officer, somewhat encouraged. He had been wondering how much an elderly man could see at fifty yards when peering through the gloom of a forest. Or was it seventy-five yards? It could be a hundred. It could be thirty.
Could you really tell the difference between a woman being helped aboard and pushed aboard? A bag over the head sounded more like a head scarf to retain some semblance of a hairstyle under the assault of a rotor wash. Not a clear picture.
"Apparently not," said the dispatcher. "They were hanging around his neck, but he just forgot. He said he was too surprised, but he insists that he saw what he described. Adamant would convey the degree of emphasis. This guy was all fired up."
The lieutenant smiled and checked the report again. The incident had happened – if anything had happened – forty minutes ago. His nearest patrol car was a good fifteen minutes away. And he was short two men.
"What kind of chopper?"
The dispatcher was getting a little irritated. "I asked him. He's into birds, not aircraft. Single rotor. Civilian paint job, something pale. That's all he knows."
"Did you ask him why he didn't report his earlier?" said the lieutenant. "I don't know what he expects us to do after forty minutes. The helicopter
could be sixty miles away by now."
"He had to get to a phone," said the dispatcher. "And then he said he found he hadn't a dime."
The lieutenant shook his head. Where did they find them. He was tempted to log the call as requiring no further action, and then a thought occurred to him. He checked the map again. He knew that clearing. He'd patrolled that area. Hunted around there, too.
"If this is about a kidnapped woman, what would a helicopter be doing in that clearing? It's only about a hundred feet across." He looked at the map again and racked his brains. "There's a shitload of other places in the area you could land in more safely."
"Unless you didn't want to be seen," said the dispatcher. She waited a beat before adding, "sir."
The lieutenant looked at her. He was good at looks. This one connected. Whatever the witness had said, given FortBragg's proximity, it was most likely a military chopper on some damn fool exercise. Still, maybe not. The red cockaded woodpecker was a protected species. The military, much to their chagrin, had been instructed to give the bird a wide berth. The word was they were even printing maps with little woodpeckers printed all over them. Hell of a note.
"Who is the closest?" said the lieutenant. "Richardson?"
The dispatcher nodded. "Sergeant Richardson," she confirmed.
"Tell him to go to the clearing and have a look around. He's got a good eye, and who knows… maybe the Russians are invading."
The dispatcher grinned and shook her head. "North Carolina in all this heat and humidity. No chance."
*****
State trooper Sergeant Andy Richardson had a reputation for thoroughness. He was not academically bright, but he had learned you could go a long way in police work by just being organized, methodical, thorough, and healthy. And common sense did not hurt either.
He was completing his notes on a minor traffic accident when the call came in. It was not urgent, so he finished the cup of herbal tea he had resting in the cup holder and completed his notes.
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