Dmz this is the future o.., p.14
DMZ: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 7), page 14
Lomax decided. “All right. OOD, make your course zero one zero degrees, speed ten knots. We’ll move Cody closer to the contact’s former position. I want to hear from sonar the second the contact changes course.”
As though the very words had jinxed them, a message was flashed from the control center and the OOD turned to Lomax with a look of consternation. “Contact lost! He must have changed depth. We…”
Lomax cursed, then recovered his composure. “Sonar, project a track based on last known position, course and speed. Send it to Bougainville.” He drew a deep breath. “Go active on the Sea Hunter.”
“Enemy close!” Dokgo’s sonar officer called, though every man in the submarine could hear the sudden and terrifying ping ping of high-frequency soundwaves striking their hull anyway. “Permission to engage active sonar?”
Dokgo baulked. An enemy ship? And within a few miles, if the frequency of the sonar pings was anything to judge by. Why had they not heard its screws on their acoustic array or picked up its emissions? He checked their depth. Eighty meters, heading for a hundred. They were twenty meters below the thermocline now. If the enemy was already so close, the refractive layer would offer no real protection.
He had only two choices. Go active with his own sonar, try to detect the enemy ship overhead and engage it with a Chinese-made torpedo. Or cut power, change course and glide deep, hoping for the density of the colder water and extra distance to hide him.
They were not real choices, though. His was a strategic ballistic missile submarine, not an attack submarine. His core imperative was to keep his boat operational until the moment he was ordered to launch his missiles. So that, he would do.
“Sonar, permission denied. Propulsion, engines stop. Helm, ten degrees right rudder. Make your depth two hundred meters. XO, rig for silent running and arm countermeasures.”
Instantly the normal murmur of voices in the control room was stilled, his orders were urgently passed by whisper. Hand on the hull between control panels, Dokgo felt the comforting vibration of the engines die away as power to the screws was cut and only the momentum of their 3,000-ton boat and the inclination of their diving planes drove them deeper.
“Contact Sierra one reacquired,” Cody’s sonarman declared. “Bearing nine three two degrees, range four miles, heading for the thermocline. I’d guess he’s going deep and turning…”
“We still have data link with Bougainville’s helos?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Sonar, do you have an acoustic ID on the contact?”
“No, Captain, insufficient data.”
Lomax would dearly love to know what they were dealing with. The Sea Hunter’s cloud AI-supported acoustic detection system could take data from the towed sonar array and analyze the sounds coming at it through the water to determine how many and what type of screws the submarine was using, what noises it made moving through the water and, added to an estimate of its mass from the active sonar, an informed guess could be made.
He checked his map plot and saw the Bougainville’s helos were closing on the contact now. “Comms, bridge, you have voice feed from the pilots of the Fire Scouts?”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Put it on the bridge speakers.”
The pilots of the two submarine hunting drones were sitting aboard the USS Bougainville, flying their aircraft in virtual cockpits, their commands relayed at the speed of light from their ship to a satellite overhead and back down to their aircraft. Lomax wanted to know what their orders were. Were they just hunting, or had they been authorized to attack the unknown target? If it wasn’t a US or South Korean boat, it could really only be Chinese or North Korean. In the current circumstances, they might legitimately engage a North Korean boat, but risk engaging a Chinese submarine? That would indicate the situation was much more serious than Lomax imagined.
He need not have worried. The audio feed from the Fire Scout pilots – using the call sign Greek one and two – quickly told him what he wanted to know.
>>… two deploying sonar. Sonar in the water. No contact. Starting three-ray search.
>Roger, Greek two, approaching search grid echo four, deploying sonar…
>>Still nothing.
>Greek two, Greek one, contact! Bearing zero niner zero, range two hundred. Target locked. Sending to you.
>>Good copy, one. Moving in … firing acoustic charge.
The Fire Scout pilots had orders to harass the contact and try to drive it to the surface, but not to destroy it. Right now, the buddy of the pilot who had located the submarine would be moving his aircraft right over the top of the diving submarine. From a tube-like launcher under the nose of the Fire Scout between its torpedo pylons, it would fire a heavy ball-shaped 40mm noisemaker grenade, timed to sink to within fifty feet of the fleeing contact and detonate with an unmistakable thud that would be clearly audible through the hull of the boat below it.
It sent a very clear message. We know where you are and the next sound you hear could be a homing torpedo tearing you a new one.
The usual response from a submarine captain in such a situation in peacetime would be to blow ballast, rise to the surface and radio for assistance from his own navy or air force. With the situation on the Peninsula so fraught, that couldn’t be assumed.
The next few minutes would tell Lomax a lot about the Captain of this particular submarine. And their intentions.
As Colonel ‘Keys’ Ban wrestled his crippled KF-21 Boromae toward Yanggu airfield, his wingman ‘Magenta two’ was making his attack run, ten miles out and ten thousand feet above the North Korean jammer truck hiding in the ruins of the old church. His HARM targeting screen showed a satellite image of the church and he put his targeting crosshairs right on top of it, sending its GPS coordinates to the missile on a pylon under his wing. In ‘GPS pre-briefed’ mode it didn’t need a radar emission to home on, it simply flew to the coordinates it had been given and dove into the ground.
From well outside the range of the shoulder-launched missiles below and ahead of him, the pilot triggered his missile. “Magnum,” he announced calmly, as it dropped off its pylon and then boosted away ahead of him as he rolled into a banking turn that would take him safely back inside South Korean airspace.
The supersonic HARM missile caught the jamming truck’s crew standing out in the open beside the church, mouths agape as they watched the contrails of dogfighting jets and air to air missiles swirling through the sky above them. It didn’t miss this time. As Keys had projected, it flew straight into the collapsed end of the church hall and its 150 lb. warhead detonated against a pile of rubble beside the hidden truck.
The North Korean mobile jamming defense in the Hwacheon DMZ sector disappeared in a flash of light and an angry red and orange ball of high explosive and diesel fuel.
After landing back at Osan Air Base, Bunny O’Hare shut down her engine and sat quietly in the cockpit, staring ahead of her. The only sound was the tick of engines cooling and flight surfaces expanding in the hot afternoon sun.
Bunny O’Hare did not deal well with defeat. And she had just had her ass handed to her. Her default setting was to assume that she would always overcome, always survive, always win. Some called it arrogance, other more kindly called it ‘irrational overconfidence’. This time, that overconfidence had cost her wingman’s aircraft, if not his life.
“That was not good, Noname,” she said carefully. How the hell did you bawl out an AI?
“I know. We lost Snake. The ground radar was not detectable until it started radiating but I should have been able to pick up the missile launchers on optical-infrared sensors. At the very least I should have detected the missile launch blooms quicker than I did. I believe there may have been a sensor malfunction,” he said.
She hammered the screen in front of her with a gloved fist. “You do not blame your equipment, Noname.”
“I am running a diagnostic now, but I believe…”
“Shut up!” Bunny said. “If you lose a man, it is always your own fault. Do you understand that?”
“No. If the DAS system…”
“Screw the DAS!” she said. “Systems fail. Weapons fail. Flight controls fail. Engines fail. And they will always fail at the worst possible time. Straight after takeoff, during a landing, in a bloody storm, or right in the middle of combat…”
“I don’t think that’s actually…”
“Systems fail, Noname!” she yelled. “Your job is to expect them to fail, to never rely on them to save your life or your wingman’s life. To always have a plan B, a plan C. You were supposed to be watching our back. If you were getting nothing on DAS, that in itself should have made you suspicious.”
“But the DAS system was giving no error messages …”
“DAS failed, Noname. It failed. And now Snake is down in the DMZ. We aren’t on exercises anymore. These aren’t Red Flag missions. There is zero margin for error, do you get that? Zero!”
“I understand we are now flying combat missions. But for me there is…”
“Shut up. Just shut up. Say, ‘Yes, ma’am’ and review what I just said from now until we get airborne again, looking for flaws in my logic all you like because you will not find any. Snake is down not because DAS failed, Noname. Snake is down because you failed.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bunny punched the button that opened the cockpit bubble and saw Salt waiting for her.
Whatever was coming, she deserved it. The loss of her wingman wasn’t Noname’s fault. Not really. Noname was a bunch of quantum chips and a cloud link. It was a system, and systems failed. She was the pilot. If Snake was down, it was her fault and hers alone.
All her fighting life, the Gods of War had looked kindly on Bunny O’Hare. She was starting to wonder if their love for her was beginning to wane.
‘Snake-eater’ Besserman heard the explosion to the west, but he had other worries now. He was sitting on his butt, wrists resting on his bent knees as he glared at the drone.
“So, tell me you have a plan for dealing with that thing, Navy,” Snake said as Kronk jogged back after fetching his duffel bag from upriver. He pointed across at the Chinese-made drone.
Kronk hefted the duffel bag containing his laptop and transceiver.
“Well, it can’t follow both of us, so how about I try to get its attention and you sneak around behind it …”
“That’s stupid. It can just go higher,” Snake pointed out. “Keep an eye on us both.”
“So what’s your idea?” the Navy officer said petulantly.
Gonna sit here on my mopey ass and wait to be captured is what. Snake hung his head. Get it together, man. He looked up again. “We need to get moving south, get help,” he said. “Unless you have a radio?”
“Well, Lieutenant, I tried to connect with our Shikaka…”
Snake perked up. “That drone we were escorting is still up there? And armed?”
“Armed, yeah. But I haven’t been able to get through. Transceiver damaged in the crash maybe, or some kind of interference.” He looked around him. “I thought maybe if I could get higher, I might be able to get a signal, use the Shikaka’s radio to call a rescue flight.”
“Yeah, but here’s the better option,” Snake told him, and explained what was happening up and down the DMZ. “You and me book it south on foot and we try to find somewhere high up you can get a signal out. Every mile we put between us and the North is a bonus.”
“I’m not really the hiking type. You serious?”
“On my mother’s virginity,” Snake nodded. “But our little friend over there could bring us a world of harm if the North Koreans can scrape up a helo or a wheeled patrol. I’d sure love to be able to call down some harm with that Shikaka of yours.”
Kronk pointed to a hilltop to their south. “So, we hike?”
Snake got painfully to his feet, stifling a groan. “We hike.”
It took them an hour and twenty minutes to get a few thousand yards downriver and a hundred feet up. Staying a good hundred yards away, the North Korean drone followed along behind them like a hungry hyena, stalking wounded prey. They paused at a flat rock, so Kronk could climb up and set up his gear.
“Well, I don’t see any sign of vehicles,” Snake said, scanning the valley to their north and south. He watched as Kronk started up the link to the Shikaka.
>Initiate handshake
>>Data handshake processing
>>Control interface initializing
>>Interface signal not found
>>Retry?
“Do not throw the very expensive drone control system into the river, Kronk,” Kronk told himself, taking a deep breath. Not only was it their only way to get a message out to the outside world, but it was the only chance of getting the nuclear-armed drone down on the water safely – once it had saved their skins, that is.
“Sorry, you talking to me?” Snake asked.
“No, sorry, did I say that out loud?”
“Something about throwing the command unit in the river?”
“Yeah.”
“Then yeah, you said it out loud. Keep trying.”
They both turned at the sound of high-pitched rotors as the drone across the river rose in the air about ten feet, showing them it was still very much on duty. Two sharp reports echoed around the valley.
They jerked their heads toward the sounds. “What was that?” Kronk asked.
“Explosions,” Snake told him. “Hard to say how far away. Not close though.”
“You think things are heating up?”
Snake looked up at the sky. “I’d expect to see a lot more action up there if we were looking at total war,” he said. “Contrails from jets, missiles flying. Which I don’t see. I’d say it’s just more SEAD work.”
“SEAD?”
“Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses,” the pilot explained.
“I’ll see about the uplink,” Kronk said, settling behind the laptop. He ran a new shooting routine, then he started diving into system diagnostic menus he hadn’t used before. The surveillance drone downhill bobbed up and down on whirring rotors, and the noise was really starting to get on his nerves. Seeing a fist-sized rock beside him, he picked it up and hurled it with all his might at the drone.
The rock fell laughably short, hardly even getting halfway to the drone before it thudded into the hillside and bounced away. As it did, there was another loud report from the south. Someone was getting hell down there.
“System isn’t reporting any errors,” Kronk decided. “We should have a clear line of sight from here but there’s definitely something interfering with the signal. I increased the sensitivity that triggers frequency hopping. Here goes nothing.” He punched in the command to initiate a satellite handshake, then bent down to look at the small LCD screen on the transceiver.
>Initiate handshake
>>Data handshake processing
>>Control interface initializing
>>Authorizing. Please wait
“Please wait.” Kronk said. “That’s new.”
With a chime, the small LCD screen flashed and changed to a split screen view showing the Shikaka’s system status on one side and a simulated cockpit view on the other.
>System access granted.
Kronk jumped up and slapped Snake’s back. “How about that, Air Force! And now I’ve got someone who can fly it too!”
Snake winced. “I just got shot out of a burning plane at 500 miles an hour and woke up underwater. Don’t do that again.”
Snake had about a hundred hours on Sentinel drones from earlier in his flying career. He spent a moment familiarizing himself with the Shikaka’s flight controls, which were near identical to the Sentinel’s. It wasn’t a fighter plane – most control was done by setting waypoints, altitude and airspeed and allowing the drone to fly itself to a location where it would set up a racetrack orbit so the operator could conduct surveillance or deploy its payload. And he didn’t have the range of cockpit-style controls a pilot in a fully equipped ground or ship-based control trailer would have. But Kronk’s laptop included two small ‘thumbstick’ style joysticks – one for maneuvering the aircraft, the other for controlling its onboard or payload cameras.
Snake thought back to their earlier mission briefing. “Where were you taking this thing?”
“USS Bougainville, off Sangeo Shoal. It has technical issues, can’t be disconnected from this particular mobile control unit.”
“But it’s armed and fueled?” Snake started paging through payload menus.
“Loaded for bear, fuel for a couple more days,” Kronk confirmed. He was standing looking over the pilot’s shoulder, then stood as something in the distance caught his eye.
“Wait, what’s…?” He pointed.
Snake stood too, eyes following the other man’s extended arm, and then he saw it. A barely visible dust cloud, rising from among the mountains to their west. He watched it for a moment. It was making slow progress, but it was moving.
“That’s a vehicle,” Snake decided. “Maybe five miles out. And it’s heading this way.”
“Friendly, maybe?” Kronk asked.
“There’s an easy way to find out.”
Kronk’s laptop showed their own position and that of the Shikaka. Sitting down again, Snake placed a waypoint over the hills to their west and sent the Shikaka toward it. It could pick up moving ground targets from 20 miles away and 70,000 feet up on a clear day like today, but he would need to get it right overhead to pick up the vehicle among the hills and valleys.
They watched the ground below the aircraft slide across the screen until the picture stabilized as the drone reached its station. Taking control of the cameras, Snake panned across the bare landscape until he caught the small plume of dust. With a click of his thumb, he zoomed the high-resolution cameras in.
