The War in 2020

elsewhere. He had to oversee the move into the new assembly areas, the rearming and re-fitting process… well, the rearming would be problematical. The last functional calibration device for the M-100s' main armament had been on the transport back at Omsk with Manny. They would have to fight on with the weapons systems in whatever condition they were in at the end of this day's combat. Taylor had already programmed the master computer to restrict further targets regiment-wide, attacking only the most valuable. But they would need to take stock, to see what remained in terms of immediate combat capability. It was always this way, somehow. You built the finest war machines in the history of military operations. Then you failed to supply an adequate number of the small tools that enabled them to carry on the fight. It was an imperfect world. He would do his best with what he had. And who could say? The day's combat had been so successful that everything just might grind to a halt. You could never be certain. Perhaps Merry was right. And maybe their luck would hold a little longer.

He had an impossible number of tasks to fulfill. There would be little rest, and the wide-awake pills ultimately carried a price in deteriorating judgment, in a collapsing body. The pills merely delayed the mind and body's failure but could not prevent it.

He knew that a better officer would never have turned to take revenge on nine aircraft that had already disposed of their ordnance.

But there were some things a man could not leave undone.

Taylor worked his way into the cockpit, dropping himself into his seat. He motioned to his copilot to remove the three-quarter flight helmet the old warrant officer wore in his dual role as copilot and weapons officer.

'Flapper, you've been working with these birds since they were scribbles on a blueprint. Tell me honestly — will we be wasting our time going after those fast movers?'

Chief Krebs made the face of a careful old farmer at an auction.

'Can't say for sure. Nobody ever figured on M-l00s getting in a dogfight with zoomies. That's blue-suiter work. I mean, helicopters, sure. Knock 'em out of the sky all the day and night.'

'But?'

The old warrant officer smiled slightly, revealing teeth stained by a lifetime of coffee and God only knew what else. 'Well, I don't see a damned reason why it can't be done. If we get a good angle of intercept. The guns are fast enough. And we've got plenty of range. The computer don't care what you tell it to kill. And these babies are pretty well built. They'll take a hell of a shaking. Superb aeroelastics. No, boss, I'd say, so long as we can get a good vector… I mean, no forward hemisphere stuff… those Mitsubishis have a very low radar cross-section head-on. And they're fast. No, if we can just sneak in on them between, say, nine and ten o'clock, we just might take them down.'

'I can mark you down as a believer?' Taylor asked.

Krebs shrugged. 'What the hell. Anyhow, I'm anxious to see what these babies can really do.' The old warrant grinned, a savvy farmer who had just made the bargain he wanted. 'If nothing else, it's going to give them Air Force hot dogs something to think about.'

Taylor settled his hand briefly on Krebs's shoulder. The old man was nothing but gristle, bone, and spite, as sparse as the hill country from which a spark of ambition had led him decades before. Then Taylor went back into the operations cell.

'We'll have to go max speed,' Captain Parker, the assistant S-3, warned him. 'Our biggest problem's going to be fuel.'

'Can we make it?' Taylor asked.

'Barely. We'll have to divert into the nearest assembly area.'

'First Squadron's site?'

'Yes, sir. We'll be running on empty after the interception. We'll have to stop off at Lieutenant Colonel Tercus's gas station at AA Silver.'

'Silver. That's the one by Orsk, right?'

'Yes, sir.'

Taylor nodded. All right. 'Anyway, I like the sound of it. Omsk to Orsk. Sounds clean.'

'Actually,' Merry Meredith interrupted, 'the assembly area's offset from the city. It's near a little hamlet called Malenky-Bolshoy Rog.'

'Whatever,' Taylor said. 'Lucky Dave and I are going to need to talk, anyway, and he's riding with Tercus.' Taylor straightened as fully as he could in the low-ceilinged compartment. 'Now, let's get the bastards who got Manny.'

* * *

Captain Jack Sturgis of Bravo Troop, First Squadron, Seventh United States Cavalry, felt a level of exhilaration he had not known since his high school basketball team won the game that took them to the state semifinals. He had been in combat. And not only had he done everything right — he had not even been afraid. Not really. Not once things got going. Basically, in Sturgis's newly acquired view, combat was a lot like sports. You got caught up in it, forgetting everything: the risk of personal injury, even the people watching you. Something inside of you took over. It was an incredible thing. He had read novels in which the heroes always felt sad and kind of empty after a battle. But he felt full of life, bursting with it. He had seen combat. And he had come through it just fine.

His troop had its major engagement well behind it. Now they were simply flying picket duty over empty expanses, keeping an eye on the regiment's left flank and steadily making their way toward their follow-on assembly area. They had flown out from under the snow, and the sky was clear at the southernmost edge of the regiment's deployment. Everything was perfect.

'Two-two, this is Two-seven,' his wingman called. 'So where's this place again? Over.'

'This is Two-two. Orsk. Orsk, for God's sake. And don't get lazy on me. We're going to be flying back into the snow when we turn northwest.'

'Think they'll cut us loose, if things quiet down? I'd really like to meet a couple of Russians before we go home.'

Sturgis knew exactly what the lieutenant meant. He wanted to meet a few Russian women. Just to check them out. Sturgis had nothing against the idea himself. But he felt he had to maintain a mature face before his subordinate.

'Just keep your mind on the mission. Anyway, Orsk isn't exactly Las Vegas, near as I can tell. And you know the old man. He'll give you a medal before he'll give you a break. Over.'

'We kicked some ass, though. Didn't we?'

'This is Two-two. Save the bullshitting for when we're on the ground. Maintain basic radio discipline.'

Captain Jack Sturgis, former member of an Ohio State semifinalist basketball team and presently a United States Army officer, meant well. He wanted to get it right, and he had no way of knowing that the encryption device on his troop internal net had already failed over an hour before. His set could still receive and decode incoming encrypted messages, but, whenever he broadcast, his words were clear for all the world to hear. The state of encryption devices had become so advanced that none of the design engineers working the 'total system' concept for the M-100 had considered building in a simple warning mechanism to indicate such a failure.

The engineers were not bad engineers, and the system's design was a remarkably good one, overall. The M-100 had proved itself in battle. But it was a very, very complex machine, of the sort that legitimately needed years of field trials before reaching maturity. The United States had not had the years to spare and, all in all, we were remarkably lucky with the performance of the M-100, although Captain Jack Sturgis might not have agreed, had he known what was waiting for him.

* * *

'Orsk,' Noburu said.

'Sir,' Colonel Noguchi barked through the earpiece, 'I can have my aircraft off the ground in a quarter of an hour. We can complete the mission planning while airborne.'

'That's fine,' Noburu said. 'The intelligence department will pass you the frequency tracks on which the Americans are broadcasting. You will have to pay close attention. We still cannot detect them with radar or with any other means. Their deception suites are far more advanced than any of us would have believed of the Americans. It may be hard to get a precise fix on them until they are actually on the ground.'

'It doesn't matter,' Noguchi said. 'The Scramblers are area weapons. If they are within a one hundred nautical mile radius of Orsk, the Americans will be stricken.'