The War in 2020

by Ralph Peters

  The War in 2020

  Ralph Peters

  In Soviet Central Asia, 2020, a decaying Soviet Union is on the brink of disaster. Their only hope is America's Seventh Cavalry, who plunge into the horrors of war in the new millennium.

  "The military counterpart of Orwell's 1984… is not for the fainthearted… "

  Ralph Peters

  The War in 2020

  To the memory of EMORY UPTON

  One watches things that make one sick at heart.

  This is the law: No gain without a loss,

  and Heaven hurts fair women for sheer spite.

  — The Tale of Kieu from the Vietnamese

  Prologue

  In the year of our Lord 2005, the United States made a terrible mistake. In the course of yet another internal crisis in post-Mobutu Zaire, South Africa had seized extensive mineral-laden tracts in Shaba Province. Bound by half forgotten treaties, ignorant of the details of the local situation, and anxious to convince a doubting world of our continued importance as a superpower, we deployed the XVIII Airborne Corps to Kinshasa. The operation proved awkward, and slow. The Army had been gutted during the euphoric reductions of the nineties, when standing ground forces had come to seem as anachronistic as they were extravagant. But we still had faith in ourselves.

  The XVIII Airborne Corps limped onto a sick continent. Africa had been largely written off by the solvent nations of the world. Unable to feed its people, unable to pay its bills, and annoyingly incapable of governing itself decently, Africa had nothing more to offer than occasional troughs of minerals and dwindling animal herds that had come to seem far more valuable to the civilized world than the continent's emaciated millions. The continent was dying. First, the AIDS pandemic had taken the joy out of photo safaris, then, shortly after the turn of the century, a new plague had begun to stray out of the African bush.

  Such considerations did not bind Americans. We believed we heard the slightly off-key call of duty, and we sent the best we had. Wheezing from the effort, our forces raised the flag in the heat of a country for which they were ill-equipped, ill-trained, and about which they were blithely ill-informed. But none of this seemed to matter. The Americans had landed, and, really, the deployment hardly seemed more than a formality to the men who made the decisions.

  No one seriously believed the South Africans would fight.

  PART I

  The Journey

  1

  Africa

  2005

  You came in over the grasslands, with animals bolting then turning again and again beneath the sound and shadow of the metal birds. It was punishingly hot in your flight suit and helmet, and you already had a water debt, but at least the patrols were a break from the monotony of life at the bivouac site. You came in over the light brown sea of the grasslands, skimming over islands of twisted shrubs, and the distant flight controller's voice tinned sleepily in your earphones. Then the country began to rise. Just slightly. You could see the hills of mining waste from a long way out, and you hardly bothered to glance at the controls. You wanted to fly. You always wanted to fly. It was the only life in the languid days. But now, with the squadron's African home in sight, a duller side of you was anxious to get back down on the ground.

  You patterned in around the tallest waste bank, and the metal roofs of the mining complex mirrored the high sun of southern Zaire. Shaba Province, alias Katanga. You cursed and turned your head slightly. The glare quit, leaving you a view of military tentage and perfect rows of helicopters at rest in the dappled shade of the camouflage nets. A red and white cavalry guidon stirred to life atop the only two-story building in the settlement, and the dust began to rise toward you. A hatless soldier in aviator sun-glasses, his mouth and nose protected by an olive drab bandanna, raised his arms. Come to Papa. Africa disappeared in a brown storm.

  You were home. Walking off the flight stiffness amid the familiar fixtures of a field site anywhere in the world: fuelers and lines, warning markers, portable guide lights, wind streamers, GP-medium tents with their sides rolled up to show neatly ranked cots with sleeping bags rolled or canoed, soldiers in T-shirts, dog tags hanging like macho jewelry. The torn brown envelopes of field rations. Texan heat. No war.

  The unit had quickly settled into a normal field routine. Regular patrols flew south, inspecting the emptiness. There was an unmistakable feeling of disappointment among the men who had been primed for combat, but there was relief, as well. Soldiers cursed the weather, the godforsaken landscape, the insects and meandering snakes, the rations, and the brass who never knew what was going on and never got anything right. Some swore that the U.S. Army was on the wrong side again, that the Zaireans were worthless motherfuckers. The few books that had been tossed into rucksacks or kit bags for the trip were read, passed around, reread.

  "Hey, George," a fellow captain called, passing down the lines of cots, "what the hell're you reading now?"

  Taylor held up the cover of the paperback so his friend could see.

  "That some kind of horror novel, like?"

  "Not exactly," Taylor answered, lazy on his bunk.

  "Heart of Darkness." The man laughed. "Sounds like one of my old girlfriends. You want a beer, George?"

  "Got one."

  The captain smiled good-naturedly. "Captain George Taylor, troop commander. The guy who has everything." And he headed off toward the field canteen.

  Taylor and his comrades spent their nonflying hours getting magnificent suntans and listening to the English-language South African radio station that broadcast the most powerful signal in the region and played the best music. The female disc jockeys with their fantasy-inspiring off-British accents never said a word about crisis or plague or their own troop deployments, but as the situation seemed to normalize, they began dedicating songs to the "lonely GIs up north." Everyone's favorite announcer was a woman named Mamie Whitewater, whom the troops quickly renamed Mamie Skullfucker. When there were no missions to fly and the sun made it too hot to remain under the canvas, Taylor loved to lie in a jerry-rigged hammock with a can of beer chilling a circle on his stomach muscles, browning his skin for the girls back home and listening to the teasing radio voice. He knew she had to be blonde. And morally unsalvageable.

  There was no war. Only the sun, boredom, and bad food. Taylor's unit had not been stricken by Runciman's disease, and the reports that filtered down through the staff of mounting RD casualties closer in to Kolwezi or back in Kinshasa held little reality for the aviators in their isolated cocoon. It was all somebody else's nightmare, less important than speculating about how long it might be before they all went home. They argued about whether or not there had ever been elephants in this part of Africa, and bored young pilots broke flight discipline in their efforts to take snapshots of the lesser wildlife they encountered on patrol. Occasionally, Taylor would get a flash that these long, hot days were idyllic, paradise before the fall. But his inspirations never lasted long, and most of the time he simply felt weighed down by the empty, uncomfortable drudgery of it all.

  Once, he flew over a village where corpses lay at random intervals in the dirt street, bloating in the sun. Plague. His hands jerked at the controls. But the effect was ultimately no more than that of watching a troubling film clip. He simply banked his helicopter away, rising into the clean blue sky.

  The last morning seemed especially clear, and the air still had a freshness to it when they took off. The mission was as routine as could be. Patrol south along the Lualaba River trace toward Zambia. No wild-assed flying. The squadron commander had delivered a stem lecture to all of the pilots the day before, after a lieutenant had nearly crashed his Apache trying to get a photo of what he swore was a cheetah. So it was going to be a day of dull formation flying, with n
o reason to expect anything out of the ordinary. The squadron S-2 had even stopped delivering regular threat updates.

  Taylor was in a down mood, and he was unusually snappish with his subordinates over the radio. He had received word that one of his classmates from Fort Rucker, a man who was almost a close friend, had died of Runciman's disease back at the lOlst's main command post. The death was absurd, since Chuckie Moss had the least dangerous assignment imaginable — chauffeuring general officers around in the best-maintained helicopter in the division. Chuckie was recently married, a bit of a clown, and not yet thirty years old. For him to have died, when there had not even been any combat, seemed absurd and inadmissible.

  Taylor's thoughts strayed in disorder. Remembering Chuckie on a wild weekend down in Panama City, Florida, his thoughts tumbled into bed with an old girlfriend. Joyce Whittaker. An absolute wild woman. He could remember Chuckie, beer in hand, laughing about the noise and declaring that old Joyce was a gal of considerably more energy than judgment. And he remembered Joyce's body glazed with sweat, her eyes closed, as the scrublands slipped away under the belly of his aircraft. The sunlight began to dazzle through his face shield, and he wriggled out of his survival vest in preparation for the impending heat.

  They were barely ten minutes out of the field site when the radar on Taylor's bird milked out, its screen frothing with pale discolorations. Taylor assumed it was an equipment malfunction, since the new electronics on the A5 Apaches were finicky on the best of days, and the dust of the field site was hard on them.

  "One-four, this is Niner-niner," Taylor called to the aircraft flying echelon right to his own. "My radar's crapping out. You've got sky watch."

  "This is One-four," a worried voice came through the headset. "I'm all milked out. What the hell's going on?"

  Suddenly, the voice of an old chief warrant officer cut into the net from one of the trail birds:

  "Goddamnit, we're being jammed."

  Taylor realized instantly that the chief was right, and he felt stupid for missing the obvious, as though he had been half asleep. No one had expected hostile activity.

  "All ponies, all ponies, open order. Now. Prepare for possible contact," Taylor commanded. Immediately, he could feel his troop's formation spread itself across the sky.

  The radar screens remained useless. But no enemy appeared to the eye. Taylor wished he had a few scout aircraft out front, but the scout flights had been discontinued as unnecessary, since there was no real threat of hostile action.

  "Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner, over," Taylor called, trying to raise flight operations back at the field site.

  Static.

  "Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner. Flash traffic. Over." Nothing. A low whining that might have been nothing more than engine bleed.

  "Sierra—"

  On the periphery of his field of vision, an intense flash replaced one of his helicopters in the sky. Lieutenant Rossi. In the wake of the flash, the distorted flying machine plummeted to earth as Taylor watched. The autorotation failed to work, and the ship dropped straight down and hit so hard that sections of the fuselage and subassemblies jumped away from the wreck, lofting back into the sky, as the frame disappeared in a cloud of fire.

  Taylor's eyes dazzled, and the world seemed to crack into a mosaic. His voice continued to pursue a previous thought, "Sierra six-five…"

  "Jesus Christ," a voice shouted over the troop's internal net. "Jesus Christ."

  Taylor frantically scanned the horizon.

  Nothing. Absolutely empty. Clear hot blue.

  "Allponies. Take evasive action. Countermeasure suites on. " The control panel reflected the anxious actions of his weapons officer, a new boy Taylor hardly knew. "One-one," Taylor ordered, "break off and check the site for survivors… break…" Taylor radioed the chief warrant officer in the trail bird. "One-three, what do you have back there? Somebody on our six?"

  "Negative. Negative." The chief's voice was high-pitched with excitement. It was the first time in their year-long acquaintance that Taylor had heard the least emotion in the man's voice. "Niner-niner, that was a frontal hit. And there ain't no survivors. Rossi and Koch are dead meat, and we're going to need One-one if we get into a dogfight." Taylor felt a surge of fury at this questioning of his authority. But, in a matter of seconds, he realized the chief was right.

  He felt so helpless — there was no enemy to be seen, either in the air or on the ground.

  "One-one, disregard previous instructions. Rejoin formation."

  "Roger."

  Apaches aren't supposed to crash like that, Taylor told himself. Apaches don't burn. Apaches don't break up. Apaches don't—

  "Where the hell are they?" Taylor demanded of the microphone. "Does anybody see anything?"

  "Negative."

  Negative, negative.

  "One-four, can you see anything?"

  "My eyes are fucked up."

  "Somebody's got a goddamned laser out here. A big goddamned laser," the chief interrupted, his voice impassioned with the suddenness of the revelation. "That was a goddamned laser hit. I seen that shit out at White Sands."

  Impossible. The South Africans did not have laser weaponry. Nobody had tactical lasers, except for a few specialized blinding devices. Nonlethal stuff. Killer lasers were for stationary space defense, strategic shit. No one had yet managed the power source miniaturization required to make the weapons tactically feasible.

  Taylor felt lost in the big, empty sky. All he could think to do was to continue flying. Even though he felt very afraid, flight suit soaking with sweat and his skin rashed red and white. He wanted to turn and scoot for the safety of the field site. But that was not the way cavalrymen behaved.

  He tried again to raise flight operations. "Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner. Possible enemy contact, I say again—possible enemy contact. "

  With no further warning, another of his aircraft flashed white and gold, then tumbled crazily out of the sky. This time, the Apache began to disintegrate while it was still in midair.

  "Down on the deck," he ordered his remaining helicopters. "Get right down on the goddamned grass." He hoped that he could hide his ships from the unseen enemy by flying absolute-minimum nap-of-the-earth. "Taking her down," he told his weapons officer. "Hold on."

  He wanted to shoot back. To fire at something. He even had the urge to fire into the empty sky. Anything not to passively accept the fate of the two lost aircraft.

  "There they are," the old chief warrant officer called over the net. "Two o'clock high."

  When he looked up through the canopy, Taylor could barely make out the distant black specks on the horizon. His eyes hurt, tearing, reluctant to focus.

  They were out of range. And they had already knocked down two of his birds.

  He could feel his remaining crews waiting for his decision, the order that would decide all of their fates.

  There were only two choices. Run… try to outrun them… or attack, closing the distance in the hope they could at least get off a few in-range shots.

  "Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner. Confirmed enemy contact. Two friendly ponies down. We are moving to attack."

  He knew without doubt that his aircraft were outclassed. He had always had faith in the old Apache, with its reliable multipurpose missiles and its good old Gatling gun with the depleted uranium rounds. But he knew now that somebody had changed the rules, that he was little better off than if he had been mounted on a horse, with a saber and revolver.

  "Chief," Taylor radioed, forgetting the call signs, "you move wide to the right and fly cover. We're going straight for them. The evasion drills aren't worth shit. Let's go, Bravo Troop." He watched the black dots growing unmistakably larger. "Let's get those bastards."

  But there was already little left of Bravo Troop. Another flash of light punched his wingman into the baked earth. The rotors slashed at the scrub, catapulting the fuselage wildly into the sky, then slamming it down to earth. />
  The chief warrant officer ignored the orders Taylor had given him, climbing fast toward the enemy, head-on, firing off a missile at a still hopeless range, as though to frighten the enemy away by a display of ferocity.

  Before Taylor's ship could climb into the sky, an unseen blow sent it spinning brokenly against the rotors, and, although Taylor could still feel his hands on the controls, his eyes saw only shimmering ivory. In the instant before the aircraft skidded into the brush, Taylor screamed at his weapons officer:

  "Fire, goddamnit, fire!"

  He did not know whether the gunner could make out any targets, whether he could see at all, whether he was still alive. Taylor just knew that he did not want to die without hitting back, and the last thing he felt before the force of the crash knocked him unconscious was a fury as big as the sky itself.

  No one had really expected the South Africans to fight. It had all appeared to be a matter of calculated risks, of posturing, blustering, of marching up and down. The wisdom in Washington was that the South Africans were just calling the world's bluff. Figuring that the Europeans had neither the will nor the forces to do much, and that the United States would not have the guts to send troops. Washington had confidently dispatched the XVIII Airborne Corps, certain that it was all just a matter of flexing muscles. The intel boys knew that the South Africans had an arrangement with Japan to put the latest generation of Japanese military equipment through its paces. But that was assumed to be merely a sales showcase. And the one Toshiba gunship that the U.S. technical intelligence community had gotten its hands on showed some interesting evolutionary features, but nothing that was likely to change the overall equation on the battlefield. In retrospect, it became obvious that the United States had been duped with a dummy model, stripped of its key systems. But no one had suspected anything before the intervention.