now on, we’re dark. Only the four other people in Trident know our plan, plus a few on the other end, along with the two of us—not even your mother can know what’s going on. Nothing is being written down, entered into any computer, or spoken on any open comm line or channel. We intend to keep this new loop as tight as possible.”
She thought that over. It still felt like they were running away. “Gunny, I think we should stay here and fight whoever they are. Instead you have us going on a cruise? It’s like we’re scared.”
“Just the opposite, Beth. We’re moving toward the real fight. The cause of all of this trouble obviously is in Pakistan.”
“The bridge.”
“Yes. The bridge.”
“And Task Force Trident is able to lay on a private jet and a yacht to get us there?”
Kyle pressed a button on the console to activate a device that showed no radar was painting them, then accelerated. The Land Rover jumped forward in response. “The yacht is just a way station for us, a secure position where we can get ready in private for the final move. The plane is owned by the same corporation that is providing the yacht.”
“Your General Middleton has some pull, huh? He trusts the civilian owners?” She looked quizzically at him and saw the flicker of a smile.
“He should. It’s my family.”
AFTER A HEARTY DINNER, Chief Engineer Mohammad al-Attas took Sergeant Hafiz along on his final inspection for the evening. They buzzed through the big central tunnel in an electric cart, dodging around workers and technicians. In a subsidiary corridor, the engineer halted the cart and led Hafiz into what looked to the sergeant like the pictures he had seen of America’s space mission headquarters in Houston, Texas. Tangles of wiring hung loose from the false panel ceiling, and the temperature was a comfortable sixty-five degrees. Al-Attas stepped onto a raised platform and took a seat in a cushioned high-backed swivel chair, wrapping his hands around a pair of computer joysticks that rose one from each arm. He faced an array of flat computer screens mounted side by side and stacked in rows on wall brackets. Hafiz stood beside him, silently impressed, keeping his arms crossed. The colors on the electronic devices were crisp, the resolution perfect, and the largest single monitor in operation was divided into four sections, each showing an identical room.
The only furnishing in any of the narrow rooms that were featured was a slender Type 85 12.5 mm heavy machine gun, a belt-fed, gas-operated, air-cooled weapon that was a staple of the Chinese army and could fire up to six hundred rounds per minute. The long tubular weapon did not rest upon the usual tripod in their special caves but on a sturdy articulated arm of lightweight titanium that reached out from thick cylinders bolted into position in the stone floor. The barrels faced what appeared to be a blank rectangle of painted steel.
The chief engineer explained, “From my position here, a controller will be in command of a dozen separate weapons systems, a mix of machine guns, rockets, and missiles.” Al-Attas nudged the joystick in his left hand, then squeezed a green button, and one of the steel walls before a gun slid open to reveal a section of the valley facing south. The engineer eased the joystick straight ahead, and the robotic arm obediently moved forward, pushing the nose of the machine gun through the firing slit. Another control movement and the image of the machine gun dissolved into a wide view of the area it covered, directly ahead of the open window.
“Certain adjustments have been made to the machine gun, including replacing the manual trigger and spade grips.” Al-Attas shifted the angle to point the gun at another area. “It will be fired from here, and will continue firing as long as the trigger is depressed, or until the belt is empty. You can use it against a single target or sweep a sixty-degree sector. Then you pull it back in and shut the blind, which is camouflaged on the outside.”
The machine gun automatically pulled back into its original position with the smooth assuredness of a robot doing an assigned task. “Forgive me, Chief Engineer, but that does not seem particularly threatening,” Hafiz observed. “A single man gets close enough and takes this whole thing out with a grenade or a handheld missile.”
Al-Attas laughed. “A lone soldier may be lucky enough to get that close only if his unit is sacrificed. Our controller will be fighting with all of his other weapons at the same time, or he can slave the systems to the computer to fire automatically at targets picked by sensors and cameras hidden in the valley. Interlocking fields of crossfire will force the enemy into mined areas. When the gun is empty and retreats, and the chamber sealed and safe again, a loader who services several weapons will put in a new magazine, check the gun, and then leave to service another. Then it becomes part of the battle again.”
“Maximum firepower with minimal human loss potential,” Hafiz said. “Still, if the enemy starts hitting this place with smart bombs and cruise missiles, this gun will be gone.”
“True, but that would take a number of direct hits, and I have an automated air defense system that will make even that almost impossible. Jamming devices will turn the space above and all around into an electronic wasteland: Their pilots’ radios won’t work, false returns will replace real targets on their displays, lasers cannot lock on, cruise missiles will fly off course, and all the while, our own antiaircraft guns and missiles will be shooting down enemy aircraft to panic the remaining crews. I understand, Sergeant Hafiz, that no defensive system is totally immune to attack, but a few trained technicians at the video control stations here can put up a terrific fight—I estimate that one controller and a half-dozen loaders can hold off at least an entire battalion for three days of hard fighting, and we are planning twenty control stations. When all of the weapons are finally silenced, most of the operators will have survived and should be able to leave safely. When our wireless system is perfected, the controllers will not even have to be on-site. They can guide the action from miles away. Any sort of attack—by ground or by air—is going to be a very long process, and extremely costly for the attackers. My cameras will capture the carnage and feed it to the cable networks.”
“You
Mohammad al-Attas rose from his seat, turned off the display, and shrugged his shoulders. “We must face reality. Put yourself in the mind of the enemy commander. After a week of hard fighting, nothing seems to work and you have suffered horrendous losses of men and materiel. Is that a victory? So your troops finally make it in, wading through more mines and booby traps and the occasional sniper or counterattack at designed choke points. They will think they are in the devil’s toilet, sergeant. Then, just when the general thinks it is over, that he has won, internal bombs explode, and it all collapses around his ears.”
Hafiz had been told little of this when he was given the assignment of watching over the engineer. He said, “Nuclear bombs?”
“Possibly, but those would not really be necessary, and the radioactivity would create a wasteland for centuries. This land belongs to us, and might someday be transformed into a fertile breadbasket. Anyway, there are things worse than a nuclear bomb.”
“What could be worse?”
“Breaking the will of the enemy. Our most likely attackers would be the Americans, and maybe some of their European allies. The Pakistanis will never try to take this fortress, because they are helping to pay for it. Let us not be coy, Hafiz. Important lessons were learned from the tragic death of the grand martyr Osama bin Laden, and I won’t make those mistakes. There were no real defenses at the house in Abbottabad, and it was too easy for the Americans to take him out with an extremely small force. That could never happen here.”
Hafiz pondered that statement. “So you are confident that Commander Kahn would be safe in this futuristic cave dwelling? Would you bet your own life on that?”
“I deal in facts, Sergeant. Anything is possible. But let’s look at the scenario in which they try to come after the Commander. After suffering staggering losses, the infidels would be under immense pressure from their governments to stop the slaughter. Remember, I will be televising the images of dying Americans. Generals would be replaced, elections could be influenced, politicians ruined. Commander Kahn would be totally safe during the attack and have plenty of time to be safely evacuated to another prepared position, and the enemy would understand that now they will have to do it all over again; take out the next bridge, and the one after that, and on and on, all with equally abhorrent body counts. Airpower and cruise missiles simply will not do the job, and the Americans always stop short of using nuclear weapons.
“Eventually, when the Americans leave Iraq and Afghanistan, they will focus even more on Pakistan. We will be ready. In the coming years, we are going to have a long road across the top of our country, Sergeant Hafiz. There will be a lot of bridges and tunnels, and each of them will be a sharp fang in a gigantic death trap. Would you want to fight that fight?”
