The War in 2020

'Banzai.'

A wave of high-pitched Japanese shouts broke over the cries of the attackers. The sound of close automatic weapons increased to a blurred roar.

'Banzai.'

In the dying firelight, Noburu saw his men charging into the oncoming mass of Azeris. The Japanese fired as they ran, and Noburu caught the glint of fixed bayonets. A miniature sun lit up in the courtyard. Noburu recognized Colonel Takahara at the forward edge of the charge, samurai sword raised overhead, its blade wielding the power of light. With his left hand, Takahara fired a sidearm.

'Banzai.'

The leading tentacles of the mob began to retract at the unexpected counterattack. Noburu fired beyond the ragged line of his men, helping as best he could. He knew his days of gallant charges were behind him. But he would do what remained to him.

'Fucking Japs,' he heard the surviving South African NCO say. It was half a complaint, half admiration. 'They're just as crazy as the wogs.'

Noburu saw a fallen Azeri rise suddenly and fire point-blank into Takahara's stomach. The staff officer fell backward, staggering. It seemed to Noburu that Takahara was less concerned with staying on his feet than he was with holding the sword aloft. Its blade shone unblooded. Then another burst punched Takahara to the ground. The sword shimmered and disappeared amid the litter of corpses. Noburu held his rifle up to fire, but another Japanese beat him to his prey, bayoneting the man who had shot Takahara. The soldier remembered his bayonet drill well enough, planting a foot on his victim’s back and twisting out his rifle.

The assault faded away, leaving two-dozen Japanese upright in the courtyard, firing across the parade ground toward the main gate and the breach in the wall. A last flare helped them, and Noburu realized that he had never seen so much death so close at hand. The broad space between the headquarters building and the main gate writhed like a snake pit with the wounded. But, when you looked closely, you saw a great ragged stillness around the hurt, waiting to accept them all. A man could have walked from the headquarters entrance to the main gate by stepping from corpse to corpse, without ever touching concrete or cobbles.

A Japanese voice commanded a return to the headquarters building defenses. On the way, the men pawed over the fallen, checking for ammunition with which to continue the fight. The smell of gunpowder burned in Noburu’s nose like dried pepper.

'Jesus Christ,' a voice said. Noburu turned and saw the ammunition handler bent over the cavity of his comrade’s skull.

Kloete lit another cigarette, then offered the open pack to Noburu.

'I don’t smoke,' Noburu said.

The South African nodded as though he understood perfectly.

'Good show, that,' Kloete said. He spoke the anglicized phrase with his mudlike accent. 'Your boys, I mean.'

'Yes.'

'Christ. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.'

Noburu did not understand.

'The side of your head,' Kloete said, raising a hand partway to indicate the location of the wound. The man’s fingers stank of spent cartridges.

Noburu remembered the blow on the side of his head. And now, magically, he could feel the blood oozing warmlyfrom the wound, losing temperature as it wandered down his neck. He did not need to test the wound with his land.

'It's of no consequence,' he said.

'You'll need to have that seen to,' Kloete said firmly.

But Noburu no longer cared. He realized that he had been relieved, almost overjoyed by the attack. Toward the end he had not needed to think of anything else. The dream warrior was smiling.

'It's of no consequence whatsoever,' Noburu said truthfully.

* * *

Colonel Johnny Tooth, United States Air Force, was a happy man. The four big WHITE LIGHT electronic warfare birds under his immediate control were on station and functioning perfectly, exactly twenty-four hours late.

But lateness was a relative thing. The goddamned nearsighted Army ground-pounders didn't understand that you could not risk expensive aircraft and their crews in hopelessly bad weather. Technically speaking, of course, he was a little behind schedule — but his aircraft had made it into the war after a direct supersonic flight from the States and they were performing flawlessly, jamming an enormous swathe from the Caucasus east across Soviet Central Asia and northern Iran. There wasn't going to be any chitchat down on the ground tonight.

The WHITE LIGHT aircraft had the capabilities of flying at speeds above Mach 3 or of slowing to a near hover. In either case, they were invisible to any of the air defense systems known to be deployed in-theater. A long association with the WHITE LIGHT program gave Tooth the sort of warm, safe feeling a man had when he held good investments while the economy was going to shit for everyone else. Personally, Tooth had put his money into select real estate during the plague years, and he had no retirement worries.

'Don't you think we should try to contact the Army guys?' his copilot asked over the intercom.

Tooth could hardly believe his ears. 'You nuts, Chubbs?'

'Well,' Chubbs said more carefully, 'I just thought we ought to let them know we're onstation. You know?'

Tooth sighed. So few people understood the interrelationships. 'Maybe on the way out,' he said, always ready to compromise. 'But first we're going to run a complete mission. Nobody's going to be able to say the U.S. Air Force didn't do its part.' Tooth shuddered inwardly, picturing some rough-handed, semiliterate Army officer testifying before a congressional subcommittee, claiming that the weight of military operations had been borne by the Army alone. The Air Force didn't need that kind of heartache, with budgets as tight as they were. Tooth understood clearly that the primary mission of the U.S. Army was to siphon off funding from vital Air Force programs.

The Air Force had gone through a run of bad luck. It began in Zaire, where the South Africans had cheated and attacked the B-2 fleet on the ground — now that had been a royal mess, and a man could only be thankful that nobody in the press had ever been able to sort out the real unit cost of the stealth bomber. Then the Army had started grabbing all the glory, whether from their dirty little police duties during the plague or from their primitive rough-necking down in the Latin American mud. Why, you could have hired off-duty policemen to do the Army's job and you would have saved the country billions. And, all the while, it had been embarrassingly difficult to find appropriate missions for the state-of-the-art manned bombers, which Congress had finally come around to funding in the nineteen nineties — thanks to contractor programs that spread the wealth across congressional districts in practically every state in the Union. The minor action the Air Force had seen had shown, to widespread horror, that the oldest, slowest planes in the inventory were the best-suited to joint requirements. The underdeveloped countries simply refused to buy first-class air defense systems for stealth bombers to evade. Worse, they refused to provide clear-cut high-payoff targets. Then there was the humiliation with the Military Airlift Command's transport fleet. Naturally, lift capability had been put on the back burner in the quest to acquire sufficient numbers of high- tech combat aircraft to keep fighter jocks and bomber crews in uniform.

And the transport fleet had bluntly failed in its initial attempts to ferry the Army in and out of Africa and Latin America. The government had been reduced to requisitioning heavy transports and passenger aircraft from the private sector.

So the opportunity to show what the WHITE LIGHT aircraft could do was a welcome one. The birds had come in just at nine billion dollars a copy in 2015, and the program had required fall-on-your-sword efforts by congressmen whose districts included major defense contractors in order to force it through Appropriations. It would have been nice, of course, if everything could have been synchronized with the Army operation, in accordance with the original plan. But, ultimately, the thing was just to get the birds into action. His superiors had made the decision to launch the mission twenty-four hours late without consulting the other services. There was always the chance that the Army would try to block the Air Force activities with some whining to the effect that there was no