Ralph Peters (2 page)

"
Goddamnit, we're being jammed.
"

Taylor realized instantly that the chief was right, and he felt stupid for missing the obvious, as though he had been half asleep. No one had expected hostile activity.

"
All ponies,
all
ponies, open order.
Now.
Prepare for possible contact,
"
Taylor commanded. Immediately, he could feel his troop's formation spread itself across the sky.

The radar screens remained useless. But no enemy appeared to the eye. Taylor wished he had a few scout aircraft out front, but the scout flights had been discontinued as unnecessary, since there was no real threat of hostile action.

"
Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner, over,
"
Taylor called, trying to raise flight operations back at the field site.

Static.

"
Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner.
Flash traffic.
Over.
"
Nothing. A low whining that might have been nothing more than engine bleed.

"
Sierra
—
"

On the periphery of his field of vision, an intense flash replaced one of his helicopters in the sky. Lieutenant Rossi. In the wake of the flash, the distorted flying machine plummeted to earth as Taylor watched. The autorotation failed to work, and the ship dropped straight down and hit so hard that sections of the fuselage and subassemblies jumped away from the wreck, lofting back into the sky, as the frame disappeared in a cloud of fire.

Taylor's eyes dazzled, and the world seemed to crack into a mosaic. His voice continued to pursue a previous thought,
"
Sierra six-five
...
"

"
Jesus Christ,
"
a voice shouted over the troop's internal net.
"
Jesus Christ.
"

Taylor frantically scanned the horizon.

Nothing. Absolutely empty. Clear hot blue.

"
Allponies. Take evasive action.
Countermeasure suites
on.
"
The control panel reflected the anxious actions of his weapons officer, a new boy Taylor hardly knew.
"
One-one,
"
Taylor ordered,
"
break off and check the site for survivors . . . break
...
"
Taylor radioed the chief warrant officer in the trail bird.
"
One-three, what do you have back there? Somebody on our six?
"

"
Negative
.
Negative.
"
The chief's voice was high-pitched with excitement. It was the first time in their year-long acquaintance that Taylor had heard the least emotion in the man's voice.
"
Niner-niner, that was a frontal hit. And there ain't no survivors. Rossi and Koch are dead meat, and we're going to need One-one if we get into a dogfight.
"
Taylor felt a surge of fury at this questioning of his authority. But, in a matter of seconds, he realized the chief was right.

He felt so helpless—there was no enemy to be seen, either in the air or on the ground.

"
One-one, disregard previous instructions. Rejoin formation.
"

"
Roger.
"

Apaches aren't supposed to crash like that, Taylor told himself. Apaches don't burn. Apaches don't break up. Apaches don't—

"
Where the hell are they?
"
Taylor demanded of the microphone.
"
Does anybody see anything?
"

"
Negative.
"

Negative, negative.

"
One-four, can you see anything?
"

"
My eyes are fucked up.
"

"
Somebody's got a goddamned laser out here.
A
big
goddamned laser,
"
the chief interrupted, his voice impassioned with the suddenness of the revelation.
"
That was a goddamned
laser
hit. I seen that shit out at White Sands.
"

Impossible. The South Africans did not have laser weaponry. Nobody had tactical lasers, except for a few specialized blinding devices. Nonlethal stuff. Killer lasers were for stationary space defense, strategic shit. No one had yet managed the power source miniaturization required to make the weapons tactically feasible.

Taylor felt lost in the big, empty sky. All he could think to do was to continue flying. Even though he felt very afraid, flight suit soaking with sweat and his skin rashed red and white. He wanted to turn and scoot for the safety of the field site. But that was not the way cavalrymen behaved.

He tried again to raise flight operations.
"
Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner. Possible enemy contact, I say again—
possible enemy contact.
"

With no further warning, another of his aircraft flashed white and gold, then tumbled crazily out of the sky. This time, the Apache began to disintegrate while it was still in midair.

"
Down on the deck,
"
he ordered his remaining helicopters.
"
Get right down on the goddamned grass.
"
He hoped that he could hide his ships from the unseen enemy by flying absolute-minimum nap-of-the-earth.
"
Taking her down,
"
he told his weapons officer.
"
Hold on.
"

He wanted to shoot back. To fire at something. He even had the urge to fire into the empty sky. Anything not to passively accept the fate of the two lost aircraft.

"
There they are,
"
the old chief warrant officer called over the net.
"
Two o'clock high.
"

When he looked up through the canopy, Taylor could barely make out the distant black specks on the horizon. His eyes hurt, tearing, reluctant to focus.

They were out of range. And they had already knocked down two of his birds.

He could feel his remaining crews waiting for his decision, the order that would decide all of their fates.

There were only two choices. Run . . . try to outrun them ... or attack, closing the distance in the hope they could at least get off a few in-range shots.

"
Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner.
Confirmed enemy contact.
Two friendly ponies down. We are moving to attack.
"

He knew without doubt that his aircraft were outclassed. He had always had faith in the old Apache, with its reliable multipurpose missiles and its good old Gatling gun with the depleted uranium rounds. But he knew now that somebody had changed the rules, that he was little better off than if he had been mounted on a horse, with a saber and revolver.

"
Chief,
"
Taylor radioed, forgetting the call signs,
"
you move wide to the right and fly cover. We're going straight for them. The evasion drills aren't worth shit.
Let's go, Bravo Troop.
"
He watched the black dots growing unmistakably larger.
"
Let's get those bastards.
"

But there was already little left of Bravo Troop. Another flash of light punched his wingman into the baked earth. The rotors slashed at the scrub, catapulting the fuselage wildly into the sky, then slamming it down to earth.

The chief warrant officer ignored the orders Taylor had given him, climbing fast toward the enemy, head-on, firing off a missile at a still hopeless range, as though to frighten the enemy away by a display of ferocity.

Before Taylor's ship could climb into the sky, an unseen blow sent it spinning brokenly against the rotors, and, although Taylor could still feel his hands on the controls, his eyes saw only shimmering ivory. In the instant before the aircraft skidded into the brush, Taylor screamed at his weapons officer:

"
Fire, goddamnit, fire
!
"

He did not know whether the gunner could make out any targets, whether he could see at all, whether he was still alive. Taylor just knew that he did not want to die without hitting back, and the last thing he felt before the force of the crash knocked him unconscious was a fury as big as the sky itself.

No one had really expected the South Africans to fight. It had all appeared to be a matter of calculated risks, of posturing, blustering, of marching up and down. The wisdom in Washington was that the South Africans were just calling the world's bluff. Figuring that the Europeans had neither the will nor the forces to do much, and that the United States would not have the guts to send troops. Washington had confidently dispatched the XVIII Airborne Corps, certain that it was all just a matter of flexing muscles. The intel boys knew that the South Africans had an arrangement with Japan to put the latest generation of Japanese military equipment through its paces. But that was assumed to be merely a sales showcase. And the one Toshiba gunship that the U.S. technical intelligence community had gotten its hands on showed some interesting evolutionary features, but nothing that was likely to change the overall equation on the battlefield. In retrospect, it became obvious that the United States had been duped with a dummy model, stripped of its key systems. But no one had suspected anything before the intervention.

The South Africans had allowed the laborious shuttling in and out of Kinshasa required to deploy the barely mobile U.S. corps. And the U.S. Army had done its best, scrambling at the last moment to beef up the corps with troops from other units stationed throughout the country, juggling to avoid calling up Reserve units. The defense cuts and troop reductions of the nineties and the starvation budgets of the turn of the century had left even those formations at the highest readiness level short of everything from medics and linguists to ammunition and spare parts. The deployment was chaotic, with Air Force transports unable to fly, while the Air Force nonetheless insisted on deploying B-2 bombers to Kinshasa, even though no one could define a mission for them. The Navy sent two carrier battle groups, but neither jets nor missiles nor guns proved targetable against an enemy who lay dispersed and out of range in the heart of Africa. No one really expected a fight, of course, and everyone wanted to be on the scene. Military Intelligence threw up its hands. The collection systems worked, more or less. But there were no analysts capable of interpreting the data, since the Army had moved to maximum automation—and the automated systems were not programmed for so unexpected a contingency as a deployment to an African backwater. But the shortage of medical personnel trained for catastrophe soon proved the greatest deficiency.

With each passing day, the decision makers grew more convinced that the South Africans would never fight. It became a joke in Washington, if less so on the ground in Kinshasa, where confusion, shortages, and Murphy's Law kept attention focused on matters closer at hand. Still, even the corps command group reasoned that, had the South Africans wanted to put up a fight, their only chance would have been to strike while the U.S. was establishing its initial airhead—not after the entire corps was on the ground.

At first the South Africans had remained down in Shaba Province, noncommittal, while the United States threatened to deploy forward into the province itself. For a time the two sides simply postured, armies of observation, since no one on the U.S. side had quite figured out how to attack across half a continent where the road and rail network was either broken-down or nonexistent.

Slowly the XVIII Airborne Corps began to feel its way forward, attempting to threaten without actually forcing a confrontation at the tactical level. But there was an increasing sense of urgency now. For a new and terrible enemy had appeared.

By the time of the Zaire intervention, the AIDS epidemic was on the wane. Wide stretches of Africa had virtually been depopulated, since the effective vaccines were far too expensive for use on the indigenous populations. But the Western world felt safe, and even in Africa, the disease appeared to be sputtering out. Only Brazil continued to host an epidemic of crisis proportions, while the rest of South America appeared to have the situation reasonably under control. Few had paid serious attention to the reports of a new epidemic ravaging the surviving populations of backcountry Uganda and Tanzania, and even the World Health Organization at first thought they were simply seeing a virulent cholera outbreak. The difficulties in assessing the extent of the situation were compounded by the reluctance of image-conscious African nations to admit the extent of the problem in their hinterlands.
The
disease reached Mozambique. International health officials began to tally the losses in health-care workers and found that the rate of fatalities was unprecedented. Soon, much of East Africa seemed to be dying.

The rest of the world remained unmoved. International quarantines were imposed on the stricken nations. The epidemic remained just one more African problem.

In Uganda and Kenya the people called the disease Ash-bum fever, because of the bu
rn
like scars it left on the skin of those lucky enough to survive. But it soon acquired a civilized name, when Sir Phillip Runciman isolated the startlingly new vims in a laboratory in Mombasa. Runciman's disease managed to combine viral potency and effects with symptoms normally associated with bacterial infections. Initial signs did resemble cholera, with rapid depletion of bodily fluids through diarrhea and vomiting, but there was an accompanying assault on the nervous system that appeared completely new. The disease quickly passed into a stage where the skin withered and died in discolored patches, while, in the worst cases, the brain began to separate, causing extreme pain, and, in most cases, death. Victims fell into three broad categories— fatalities, which ran as high as eighty-five percent without treatment, survivors with permanent brain damage and various degrees of loss of control over basic bodily functions, and the lucky ones, who were merely disfigured.

The issue of Runciman's disease had come up during the hasty planning phases of the deployment to Zaire, as one of the many matters of concern to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But there was a sense in the government of no time to lose; there were fears of yet another countercoup in Kinshasa, which might put a legitimate face on the South African occupation of Shaba. And the Department of State assured the President and the National Security Council that the ruling Sublime Democracy Party in Zaire had given guarantees that there was no evidence whatsoever of Runciman's disease along the middle or lower reaches of the Zaire—or Congo—River or in southern Zaire. There was certainly none in Shaba Province.

The U.S. ambassador to Zaire sent a supporting cable stressing that both the image and national interests of the United States were irrevocably at stake and that, although, frankly, there were some cases of Runciman's disease reported in the backcountry, the disease did not present an immediate threat to U.S. personnel, given sensible precautions.

The U.S. forces began their deployment.

The Department of State had worked out a special arrangement with the government of Zaire to
"
facilitate the efficient and nondestabilizing deployment of U.S. forces.
"
Those U.S. forces were to remain confined to the general vicinity of the Kinshasa airport until they further deployed southeast to Shaba Province. A State Department spokesman told the press that the agreement was designed to prevent the appearance of some sort of American invasion of Zaire, of an unacceptable level of interference in the nation's internal affairs. But it did not take the arriving U.S. troops long to discover the real reason for the restriction.

The slums of Kinshasa were haunted with plague. The situation was so bad that, when ordered to dispose of the bodies of the victims of Runciman's disease, the Zairean military had mutinied. The back streets of the capital recalled the depths of the Middle Ages.

The U.S. Army command group on the ground immediately reported the situation. But the fundamental sense of mission, of commitment, did not waver. With a
"
can-do
"
attitude the XVIII Airborne Corps and the Air Force's Forward Command, Africa, instituted rigid quarantine procedures. Yet, exceptions had to be made. U.S. commanders and planners had to meet with their Zairean counterparts, U.S. and local air controllers had to work side by side, waste had to be disposed of beyond the confines of the airport, and senior officers had social responsibilities that could not be ignored without deeply offending local sensibilities.

By the time the U.S. Army began its wheezing deployment to the disputed area downcountry, it had become apparent that Runciman's disease—or RD, as the soldiers had quickly renamed it—was not strictly a disease of the African poor.

Still, operations seemed to go well enough. The Second Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division conducted a flawless combat jump into the grasslands near Kolwezi, the heart of Shaba Province. They found the South Africans had abandoned the town, after setting it ablaze. Quickly, the paratroopers secured a sizable airhead. And the next wave of transports began to land. The South Africans made no move to interfere. They could not even be located. It appeared that they had backed down, evacuating the province.

The forward deployment of U.S. forces continued, having become little more than a strenuous logistics exercise. On the scene in Shaba, at corps headquarters in Kinshasa, and in Washington there was jubilation. It was decided that U.S. forces would remain on the scene just long enough to tidy things up and to make our unequivocable support of the present Zairean government clear to all interested parties.