There Will Be War Volume IV

by Jerry Pournelle

  Inside the screening room, Farley ran a videotape of the morning’s action, the villagers hitting the street, reeling and spinning under the impact of the bullets. To Ken it seemed even more unreal now.

  There, intact, was the shot of the one-legged boy, crawling, that Hansen had shot in the head. Farley informed them that the clip was being used on all three network newscasts.

  As Private Ken MacCarter watched, he felt no animosity toward Farley, nor Hansen, but thought, oddly, of—it was only an image—the bawling face of his son Kevin superimposed on the film. He turned away. “There must be a better way than this,” he pleaded.

  “True,” agreed Farley. “On a clear day, the choppers can drop gas. That’s relatively painless. But with heavy winds, or this rain, it has to be this way. Those people were warned to evacuate. They had to be eradicated. That land is needed. It’s a race against time. Those people, they resigned themselves to dying.” He looked at MacCarter. “You haven’t been here long enough. You don’t know the whole story, the way it is.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Farley replayed the clip of the crawling boy. “See that? The missing foot, I mean.”

  MacCarter nodded. He felt sick inside, as though his soul had left him.

  “The city syndicates, they buy these kids. They maim them in various interesting ways to look pathetic when they are begging. It’s a bizarre operation, picking them up and distributing them in the cities each morning, collecting them at night. Don’t you think that kid is better off where he is?”

  “I don’t know,” said MacCarter. He imagined Kevin’s tiny face again, saw him crying for all humanity.

  Morning came gray and wet. Today the objective was Dahkangar, a village three miles northeast, across the Khari River. Like the others, a pesthold of bleak starvation and disease, a population blight that had to be eradicated.

  The procedure was the same. When the shooting began, some of the villagers ran into the streets. You picked them off first. Then you hit the shacks.

  MacCarter was working with Hansen again, and they had already run up a good kill in the street. Hansen was likely to meet his K.Q. and be relieved this week. He envied Hansen that.

  MacCarter kicked a door, was about to fire the M-19 when he saw the baby.

  Two thin, feminine hands lifted a crying infant beneath its arms. A memory, an image, impelled itself on his mind.

  The baby seemed to be floating toward him.

  He couldn’t shoot.

  The baby’s wet, open mouth sucked air.

  The baby screamed. MacCarter’s hands reached to take the child when, suddenly, the baby was flung to the ground like an empty box.

  He was conscious of watching the baby strike the floor, instantly still, but did not see even the glint of the knife as it entered beneath his breastbone. Sharp pain exploded inside him and his mind collapsed under the pressure.

  Life at the Rehabilitation Center was pleasant enough. The staff was friendly, almost solicitous. Best of all, Private Ken MacCarter knew that in a few days he would be going home. It was a good feeling. Occasionally the thought of the heart transplant bothered him, but they all said he was doing fine. He hadn’t been confined to bed for over two months. He did feel good.

  One thing, his memory, seemed a bit confused. He no longer remembered how he had been hurt, but the doctors told him it didn’t matter. They explained they had helped him to forget; something about memory probing. He did remember Hansen coming to visit him the first days after the operation.

  Hansen, knowing that it wouldn’t matter anyway, told MacCarter everything that had happened. He told Ken how he had caught and wounded the bitch who had knifed him, how he’d gotten help, and how it was her very heart that was now beating in Ken’s chest. That seemed just in a way. But it didn’t matter, the doctors would help MacCarter to forget.

  Private George Hansen returned to Wisconsin and work at a fish hatchery, and he tried to forget about India and MacCarter and looked for a girl to marry.

  Private Ken MacCarter came home to Iowa, to Nancy and Kevin, to his job at the printing plant. All his friends in Ferndale told him he was looking just fine. A few inquired about where he had been and what he had done, but when he declined to answer, no one pursued the matter.

  For five sweet days Ken resumed his old life. Everything was falling into place. In the fall he would begin studying at the state technical college. The company was sponsoring him.

  It sometimes made Ken nervous when Kevin cried, but Nancy did not notice anything. His return had had an exhilarating effect on her.

  On the sixth day after his return, Ken MacCarter came back from the plant—he would begin work the following Monday—and he looked for Nancy to tell her the good news. He found her in the kitchen giving Kevin his afternoon bath in the portable bassinet.

  The inexplicably sensual image ripped hard and uncontrollably through his mind: tearing, violent glimpses of dead faces, hot fires, screams, rain, an open mouth…

  It happened exactly when Nancy lifted a protesting Kevin in her fine, thin, feminine hands to show Ken his pretty baby.

  Editor's Introduction to:

  THE MAN IN THE GRAY WEAPONS SUIT

  by Paul J. Nahin

  The weapons of war are forever changing. We are today engaged in a technological war which could of itself be decisive; which is why military research is so vital to our survival. The Falklands War demonstrated two things: that wars cannot be won without good soldiers; but good soldiers are not enough. One needs high technology, particularly computers and electronics.

  When a truck broke down during World War II the British and French had little choice but to send for mechanics. Automobiles were much more common in the United States, and in any truckload of American soldiers there was generally at least one with sufficient experience to fix the vehicle unaided. Those familiar with technology are generally best able to use and maintain it. It will be so with computers and electronics; which poses an interesting dilemma for the Soviet Union and other tyrannies.

  When Germany invaded Poland, the first thing the soldiers did was to disable the telephone system. Control of communications is vital to modem totalitarian states. Soviet citizens must register their typewriters with the police, and possession of an unregistered mimeograph machine is an offense worth five years in a labor camp; but how can communications be controlled if small computers are widely distributed? The Soviet economic system desperately needs computers—but the political system probably can’t withstand their side effects.

  Whatever the effect of the computer on the totalitarian, the technological war continues. Artificial Intelligence, “fifth generation” computers, and “expert systems” may well be the decisive weapons of the future.

  Dr. Paul Nahin, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, has worked in weapons system design and evaluation, and is well qualified to show us this picture of the future at war.

  THE MAN IN THE GRAY WEAPONS SUIT

  by Paul J. Nahin

  The warrior gently ran his hands over the smooth flanks of his love. She responded not in any physical sense, but still he knew that deep within, under the flawless skin, she felt his presence. With a single flowing, graceful motion, he mounted her. She opened wide and he slipped inside. The fit was narrow: his bulk squeezed tightly against her sides. But to the warrior, it was cozy, snug, warm. The plexiglass cockpit housing slid back down over his helmeted head with barely a hissing of its electric motor.

  He inserted the digital communication umbilical cable from his biosensor body box into the female connector on the floor and became as one with Red Striker Five.

  Snapping the throat mike down against his neck, he called the Combat Information Center on the nuclear carrier. “CIC, this is Red Striker Five. All weapons stores on board, fuel topped off, and set for launch. Give me your ready-status readouts.”

  “Roger, Red Striker Five, we have you on first launch. For your ready status—wi
nd over the bow at forty-two knots, sea state at level three, cloud cover starts at five thousand, solid to eight thousand five hundred, and clear from there up. You are initially on weapons tight, with a required visual verify of a bogey before authorized to perform a weapon release. No voice communication in the clear allowed—perform all data transmission to the fleet on GPS LINK Ninety-nine. Set your security-level switch to antijam position three. Ship radars show a clear screen out to one-five-five miles. Prepare to launch.”

  The warrior felt the passing of a momentary irritation. Weapons tight, with a visual verify! Damn! His air superiority platform could detect, lock on, and track twenty-three simultaneous targets out to three hundred line-of-sight miles. His frequency hopping, pulse-doppler, lock-down radar could pick enemy infiltrators out of the massive clutter background echo of the ocean, even if they attempted to penetrate fleet defense by coming in 100 feet off the deck at Mach two. His “fire-and-forget” Eagle-Six missiles, with home-on-jam radiation-seeker heads, could attack and kill with probability point nine, nine, nine at 170 miles, at hypersonic speed.

  And he had to identify a hostile visually before weapon release! Even with his electro-optical visual aid, that meant a maximum attack range of ten miles. Maybe fifteen if he used the narrow-field zoom lens with autovideo tracking. Damn! It was his ass on the line, not those of the political toadies who soiled their pants at the thought of a mistaken ID. Having to close that near to a potentially deadly hostile dropped his survival probability by at least ten percent.

  But maybe the hunting will be good today. The use of the Global Position System satellite, and its antijam, encrypted digital data link meant that something was up. His pulse rate elevated and the surface of his skin wetted slightly with perspiration. Small biosensors in his body box picked these reactions up and routinely filed them away in the on-board flight computer. The gray weapons platform called Red Striker Five would need to know everything if it was to help the warrior survive.

  The flight-deck tractor was already hooked up to his aircraft, and the warrior waited as the twenty-one-ton Red Striker Five was attached to the steam catapult. Eight hundred feet ahead, just faintly visible in the dim, early glow of daybreak, was the edge of the flight deck. From there it was 93,000 feet straight up to his operational limit and possible death, and ninety feet straight down to certain death. No in-between. Just up or down. He briefly thought of what it would be like, sealed in his cockpit as he made that short, yet long fall into the water, and then he imagined the essentially infinite inertia of the 87,000-ton CVN as its stately mass crushed him under at thirty knots. No real need to worry about that—the fall alone would kill him all by itself, without any help.

  His eyes and mind turned to the red-glowing cockpit displays. Soon, as he climbed out of the cloud cover and burst into sunlight, he would turn the night-vision lights off. As the final seconds before launch slipped away, he made the last run through his checklist. Red Striker Five was ready, a deadly air and near-space machine of precise, electronically guided death. Her companion tensed as CIC warned him of launch, and he braced for the high gee acceleration that would fling them up to takeoff speed. Theoretically, it would take only a bit more than half the flight-deck length. But the warrior had witnessed launches that hadn’t worked. His mouth felt dry and his heart pounded as he brought the throttle levers up to sixty percent of full military power. More than that would dangerously stress the catapult mechanism. Red Striker Five roared her pleasure as she gulped the JP-4/nitro mix.

  The blast of launch pressed him back into the body-contour seat, the details of his peripheral sight faded in a tunnel-vision readout as blood flowed away from his optic nerves, and the edge of the flight deck rushed toward him at incredible speed. And then, as Red Striker Five lifted free of the launcher coupling, the warrior’s left hand shoved the throttles forward, his right pulled back on the stick, and he accelerated up and away. Pulling a thirty-degree attack angle, he rode the twin jet-engine exhausts at an initial climb rate of 20,000 feet per minute.

  He could feel the whining turbine shafts under his buttocks, one cheek over each roaring monster. He used the feedback through his backside to even-up the shaft rpms to balance out the engines. Balanced engines gave better handling, less fuel consumption, and minimum vibrational abuse to his spine.

  The rear-view closed-circuit screen showed the carrier rapidly falling behind and below him. As he hurtled toward the clouds, the massive ship was soon no larger than a postage stamp, and then, as he flicked on the afterburners it disappeared in seconds. He was riding a tornado now, each engine thundering 42,000 pounds of thrust. At two pounds of thrust per pound of platform weight, Red Striker Five was like no aircraft that had ever flown before. Her limits were set by the endurance of the warrior, not by technology.

  He punched through the top of the cloud cover with a vertical velocity vector of 30,000 feet per minute, and the airspeed needle passed the Mach-one line. His only indication of breaking the sound barrier in a climb was the funny behavior of the altimeter—first it lurched upward 2,500 feet, and then wiggled its way back to normal. The engine vibrations on his butt, the pounding roar in his ears, and the instant response of his craft to the stick, throttle, and foot controls gave him the same pleasures a passionate woman would have. Except that no woman could ever be so perfect.

  When Red Striker Five passed 30,000 feet, the warrior returned to normal engine power as the afterburners wasted too much fuel for just cruising. He nosed the craft over gently until he was in level flight at 33,000, with an indicated airspeed of 1,200 knots.

  He flipped off the night-vision lights, set the surveillance radar to its long-range search mode, and turned his MARK XII/IFF beacon transponder on. The beacon could be interrogated by coded transmissions from properly equipped observers, and Red Striker Five would automatically broadcast her mission number, altitude, bearing, and airspeed. Her echo would also be enhanced on the observer’s radar screen. Failure of an interrogated aircraft to respond to such requests could bring an infrared missile up the tailpipe!

  “CIC, this is Red Striker Five. I’m at start of mission run. Going now to GPS LINK Ninety-nine.”

  “Roger, Red Striker Five, we have a solid track and now going with you to LINK Ninety-nine.” There was a pause, and then, “Good hunting, Red Striker Five. Take care.” The warrior heard the strange metallic bang on the voice circuit as the digital link took over—he was now in direct communication with CIC’s computer. It would talk to him by audio tone cues through his headset, which he could react to faster than an oral command. He was now getting the situation normal cue of a continuous up-down frequency sweep from one kilohertz to five kilohertz each three seconds. The sound was comforting to the warrior, like the humming of a mother to a baby. He snuggled happily in his seat.

  Red Striker Five flashed through the sky, serving as the eyes of the mighty naval fleet miles below and behind. Part of the always-flying combat air patrol, CAP war missions were top-priority tasks. A billion-dollar carrier, and its hundred-million-dollar companions of missile destroyers and cruisers couldn’t afford to let the enemy get close enough to launch a tactical nuclear-tipped cruise missile. CAP missions extended the fighting reach of the fleet from the fifteen-mile range of naval gunfire to the hundreds of miles that were Red Striker Five’s combat radius.

  Ten minutes after launch, the warrior heard the audio tone cue in his ears change to a frequency-sweep period of one second. The first-stage alert cue. Three bogeys were beginning to edge onto his cockpit radar screen, and the pre-engagement weapons program in the fire-control computer switched the radar from surveillance to track-while-scan. All of Red Striker Five’s radar updates were now being automatically fed up to the GPS satellite, 22,000 miles over his head, and then back to the CIC computer. There, integrated with sensor data from surface, subsurface, airborne, and space platforms, CIC had an accurate, realtime picture of everything that moved in a water-air-space volume of over 2,000,000 cubic
miles.

  The bogeys were flashing red on the multicolored radar screen now, the computer’s visual cue to the warrior to pay attention. His left hand punched the Mark XII interrogate button—seconds later, the flashing red switched to the steady yellow of a friendly response. Good. But the enemy had been known to spoof the IFF by making recordings of friendly replies and then retransmitting them when their penetration aircraft detected the interrogation request.

  The warrior went to the HOARSE GOOSE mode and hit the interrogate button again. Now a new, special-coded signal was included that would inhibit a friendly from replying. A reply would be a fake. But these were friends, as their images on the screen now changed to green and the audio tone cue reverted to three seconds. The radar returned to routine surveillance, the tracking computer dumped the stored trajectories of the identified bogeys, and the fire-control computer relaxed its electronic finger on the trigger. Red Striker Five streaked on.

  Four hundred miles out, with the radar’s constantly searching fan beam picking up nothing, the audio tone cue went into a continuous ping-ping-ping. LINK Ninety-nine was calling. The warrior pushed a red button next to the cockpit video screen, normally displaying a rear view of the aircraft. The screen cleared of the flashing sky, and an encrypted digital message streamed down from the GPS. LINK Ninety-nine was a spread spectrum, time-division, multiple-access channel, with hundreds of users tied into it on a time-sharing basis. With a spectral width of four gigahertz, and a signal level forty db below the background noise, there was no way the enemy could jam it, even if he could find it in the infinite electromagnetic spectrum. Unless he was willing to devote the entire electrical output of a 2,000-megawatt nuclear power plant to the task—a highly unlikely event. The decoded message scrolled in milliseconds onto the screen: