Stephen Coonts - Combat

Wearing BDU trousers and a flak vest over a khaki tee shirt, she carried an M9 service pistol on her right hip. However the 9mm Beretta automatic was carried in a left-handed holster, butt forward in the old dragoon’s draw. She, too, wore a battered terai cocked low over her brows.

“What’s up, Lieutenant?” she inquired, leaning back against the rear bulkhead. “Are we in contact?”

“With something,” Bolde replied, rotated his seat so it faced the systems operator’s station. “How about it, Brid. What do we have out there?”

“A single battlefield-surveillance radar,” the systems operator replied, her attention still focused on the telepanels of her console. “With our mast up, I’m receiving an identifiable side lobe from it. Emission ID file indicates a Ukrainian made Teal/Specter system …. Multimode … About five years old … And it matches a unit type known to be in Algerian service.”

She sat back in her seat and looked across at Bolde. “We are indeed in contact with the enemy, sir. And given the emission strength and beam angle, the unit must be operating from an elevation.”

“Hell!” Bolde permitted himself the single short curse. “They beat us to the pass.”

Terrain defines the battlefield. Unfortunately, for all intents and purposes, northern Mali doesn’t have any. No rivers, no mountains, no forests, no swamps. Just extensive, arid plains of baked earth and fesh fesh intermittently blanketed by the migrating sand dunes of the Sahara.

The one exception was the El Khnachich range. A line of low, rugged hills arcing from east to west, midway between Algerian border and Timbuktu, it was the sole high ground in an ocean of flatness.

The Taoudenni caravan track, the closest thing to a road that existed in this part of the world, ran southward through a pass in the range. For centuries, the Taoudenni track had been a link joining Algeria with the Niger River valley. Thirty-six hours before, when the Algerian army had stormed across the undefended and indefensible Mali border, one entire mechanized division had been vectored down this beaten sand pathway, its mission to seize that route southward into Mali’s fertile heartland.

In a countermove, Troop B, First of the Seventh had been ordered north from its patrol base in Timbuktu to meet the thrust, a fanged and venomous mouse charging an elephant. For the first time in modern human history, the hills of El Khnachich were important.

The systems operator called up a tactical map on her main display. The hill range and the pass lay perhaps twenty-five kilometers ahead on the section’s line of advance. Blue IDed unit hacks glowed near the bottom of the map, indicating the position of Saber section’s dispersed elements. A single hostile target box pulsed in the southern mouth of the pass.

“Darn!” Mary May yanked off her hat and slid down the bulkhead to sit on the pebbled rubber antiskid of the vehicle deck. “I thought the noon sitrep said that the Algies were still watering up at Taoudenni oasis.”

“The bulk of the division was,” Bolde grunted, his angularly handsome features impassive. “But they were already starting to push their lead elements south. I suspect they rammed some fast movers forward to play King of the Hill. Any sign they’ve got anything over on our side yet, Brid?”

The SO shook her head, her firefall of hair brushing the back of her neck. “Nothing’s indicated. CHARLIE didn’t spot anything, and I’m not picking up any tactical communications on the standard Algerian bands. If they have any units fanning out on this side of the slope, they’re running an extremely tight EMCON, and that’s not like them. We’ll have to go eyes up to be certain, though.”

“Then let’s do it. Get off a contact report to Bravo six then put up the Cipher. I want to see what we have crawling around out there.”

The Cipher reconnaissance drone was literally a flying saucer. Or perhaps to be even more precise, a flying doughnut, a flattened discoid aeroform four feet in diameter with two contrarotating lift fans in its center. A puff of compressed air launched it out of its docking bay on ABLE ’s broad back. Bobbling in a hover for a moment over the dry wash, it autostabilized then darted away to the north, skimming an effortless ten feet above the desert’s surface.

The drone rotated slowly as it flew. The television camera built into the rim of its sturdy stealth composite fuselage intently scanned the surrounding environment, the imaging being fed back via a jitter frequency datalink to its mother station in ABLE ’s cab. There, in turn, a slender hand on a computer joystick clicked a series of waypoints onto a computer-graphics map, guiding the little Remotely Piloted Vehicle on its way.

On the main screen, the rusty red wall of the Khnachich range rose above the dune lines.

“I’m not seeing anything moving out there,” Mary May commented from her position, seated cross-legged on the deck.

“Nothing as big as an armored column at any rate.” Bolde glanced at the ECM threat boards. “And nobody is emitting except for that one radar on the high ground. Brid, take the drone out to the west a ways and then take it up to the ridgeline. We’ll move it back east along the crest and have a look down into that pass.”

Shelleen nodded her reply, her expression fixed and intent on the drone-control readouts.

Even at the Cipher’s best speed, it took over a quarter of an hour to maneuver the drone into its designated observation position. At one point, as the RPV climbed the jagged stone face of the hill range, the video image on the display flickered and the datalink inputs faded as line of sight was broken between the drone and its controller. Instantly, Shelleen’s hands flashed across the keypads, rerouting the links through one of the flight of Long-Duration Army Communications drones orbiting over the Mali theater at a hundred thousand feet.

The imaging smoothed out and Bolde rewarded his SO with a slight, appreciative nod of his head.

In due course, the drone’s position hack on the tactical display and the image on the television monitor indicated that the drone was approaching the gut of the pass. Shelleen eased the RPV to a hover just below the crest of the last saddleback. “No closer,” she advised, “or they’ll hear the fans.”

“Okay. Blip her up. ‘Then we shall see’ as the blind man said.”

The systems operator tapped a key. Twenty miles away, the drone’s motor raced for an instant, popping the little machine an additional hundred feet into the air. For a few seconds before dropping back out of sight below the lateral ridge, the RPV’s sensors could look down into the mouth of the pass.

“Oh yeah,” Mary May commented. “They beat us here all right.”

Bolde reached forward for the monitor playback controls and froze the image.

It was the usual multinational hodgepodge of military equipment that had become commonplace in the post — Cold War Armies of the Third World.

The previously detected Teal/Specter radar track and its generator trailer sat parked in the center of the road. Mounted on the hull of a BMP 3 Armored Personnel Carrier, the radar unit’s slablike phasedarray antenna swung deliberately in a slice-of-pie scan of the desert below.

Backed deeper into the cut behind it, deftly positioned to blast any radar-hunting fighter-bomber or gunship making a pass on the Teal/ Specter unit, was a massive, tracked antiair vehicle, its rectangular turret bristling with multiple autocannon barrels and missile tubes. A Russian 2S6M Tunguska or, more than likely, an Indian-produced copy of the same.

Then there were Scylla and Charybdis, a pair of eight-wheeled Otobreda Centauros parked out on either flank of the pass entry. The longtubed 105mm cannon mounted in the turrets of the big Italian-built tank destroyers angled downward, covering the narrow road that switchbacked up from the flats.