Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

  The Azanians went back to missiles. By way of revenge, they hit and destroyed the Mormon Temple and Amphitheater in Salt Lake City. Not only did that bring swarms of Mormons to our recruiters, the state of Utah declared war on Azania. That put the superbly trained Mormon Legion at our disposal. I had planned to send military training teams from the N.C. to teach the newly-recruited Azanian exiles and Rocky Mountaineers, but when Utah entered the war they volunteered to take over that task.

  Back in Augusta, I felt events were moving well and, more important, quickly. It was time for me to get in on the action. On July 3, with the rest of the General Staff, I boarded an Ilyushin at Portland for Salt Lake City.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  An endless, howling rain of cruise missiles had obliterated Salt Lake City’s airport. The tower and hangers were rubble. The terminal building somehow still had one wall standing. Through its gaping windows showed the smoke-blackened artifacts of early 21st century travel, heaped like broken toys in a bad boy’s toy box.

  Nonetheless, we landed. Using pushcarts, the Mormons filled holes in the runways as fast as Azanian missiles could make them. All you really need for an airport is a runway. It was the oft-repeated story of high-tech warfare. It kicks the enemy in the shins, not in the head.

  A couple of Mormon Legion trucks were waiting for us. We piled in and they hauled ass out the urban danger zone, then began a long, slow climb on dirt roads up into the mountains. Toward evening, we turned off into a Mormon cattle ranch, pulled into the barn and stopped. We had arrived at the Legion’s headquarters. To a satellite, one cow barn looks like another, and the Zanies didn’t have enough missiles to hit all of them.

  The Legion was a first-rate infantry outfit, and we quickly established a good working relationship with them. Our strength was staff work, so that’s what we did: refine the campaign plan, issue the necessary orders, organize the logistics, schedule the deployments. They focused on training our newly recruited troops.

  The time schedule was tight. Our army had to be through the passes before the snow came. D-Day was set for September 1. But the work went smoothly, despite the Azanian reprisal weapons. The relatively few casualties they caused in the small, dispersed training camps helped harden the troops.

  Dano’s boys continued to collect enemy sensors, and our skunk works had little trouble developing ways to fox them. Compared to men, even the most brilliant machine is stupid.

  But boys will be boys, and ours didn’t stop with collecting. They started clearing the sensors from key passes. Usually, the devices were poorly camouflaged and easy to find. Women have shitty field craft.

  One afternoon early in August, Sergeant Danielov turned up at my headquarters, which for the moment was in an abandoned silver mine outside Virginia City, Nevada. I’d gone forward to check on the supply build-up. The reports said it was going well, but I’d long ago learned that reports had to be checked by personal inspection. In this case, thanks to Mormon honesty, most were accurate.

  Dano sauntered up to the old farmhouse table that was my desk, stopping briefly on the way to stomp a visiting rattlesnake. “Want him for dinner?” he said, holding up the still-twitching snake with its bloody head ground into a disc by the heel of the jungle boot.

  “No thanks,” I grimaced. “I don’t eat snake unless it’s in aspic. Besides, Mormon country is rich in victuals. There’s turkey, ham, and fresh bread sitting on top of a barrel over there. Make yourself a sandwich, unless you prefer rattlesnake tartare.”

  “I’ll save him to scare a POW with,” Dano replied, tossing his kill aside. “Besides, I just ate an MRE.”

  “Ugh. Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. If that’s the alternative, I’ll take the snake. Anyway, I assume you came back here for more than a bad meal. What’s going on?”

  “The Zanies are starting to re-seed sensors in areas we’ve cleared.”

  “How are they doing it? They’re not sending out the Dykes on Bikes, are they?”

  “Nope, not yet. Hope they do. I’ve always wanted my own Harley. For now, they’re sending in teams by helicopter, in broad daylight.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Yeah. But maybe a good opportunity.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “It’d be nice if we could whittle down their air strength before we go in. Even with a broad flying it, an airplane is smarter than a missile. Since they tried that F-35 strike and lost their asses, their Air Force has stayed in the kitchen. Maybe we could use this to draw ‘em into some more furballs.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “My guys can put more effort into collecting sensors. Since the Zanies don’t have any infantry, we can push on west of the passes, policing up their gizmos along the way. Then, when they send their helos out, our F-16s can ambush them. They’ll have to stop re-seeding the sensors or give the helos fighter escort. Either way, we win.”

  “Now I remember why we put a sergeant on the General Staff. That’s a shit hot idea! The airedales will eat it up. I’ll get a courier off to them right away. If this works, Dano, I’ll see you get the Air Medal for it.”

  “Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to trash up a good infantry uniform.”

  It took just over a week to put all the pieces together. The long-wave radars were too big to move forward, and their continuous emissions would bring HARMs. But our flak outfit also had some small, single-ping radars adapted from the MiG-47 for ground employment. They put a few on peaks just west of the passes. They would pick up stealth because they'd be looking straight up at the F-35's huge, flat bottom.

  The Boys from Utica, now unofficially the Condor Legion with Utah Air Guard markings and uniforms, cheered when they heard Dano’s plan. They figured a game of aerial grabass against women pilots among the peaks of the Rockies would be a demolition derby. As one fresh-faced lieutenant pilot put it to me, “If you think women have any sense of spatial relationships, next time you’re in a supermarket, see who always leaves their shopping carts in the middle of the aisles.”

  The challenge was bringing aircraft forward into Nevada without making them missile targets. Our aviators knew they’d have to keep the numbers down. They finally decided to go with just eight F-16s, for four two-ship rotte. By flying them in at night, letting the engines cool down, then hauling them into hides with horse teams, they effectively hid them from eyes in the sky, even eyes with thermal imaging. Meanwhile, Ron’s guys laid land lines back from the radars to an improvised GCI site, which communicated to the fighters from dispersed burst transmitters.

  On the bright, clear morning of August 12, one of those days where you could see fifty miles around from any peak, the Zanies fell into the trap. They sent a flight of two big, fat CH-53 Echoes out to run down the passes, north to south, installing new sensors.

  Two Condor Legion F-16s caught them right over their second LZ. They shot down only one, making sure the witches in Dash 2 got a clear look at them. We wanted them to go home and tell their tale.

  Three days later, another sensor replacement mission came out. This time, there was just one helo, but it had four F-35s as escorts. We hit them with all eight of our forward F-16s. Again we left one survivor to go home and weep her debrief.

  We didn’t need superior numbers to pick Azanian grapes. But we had used them for a reason. The last thing feminists could admit was that women couldn’t fly fighters. So the problem had to be numbers.

  Two days later, one helo had sixteen F-35s along for the ride. Our F-16 jockeys were happy as Irishmen at a distillers’ convention. Five of the F-35s didn’t even require an AIM-9 or cannon shells. Two had a mid-air and three flew into mountains. Again, we let one get home, the same little lady our boys let go the first time. Her aircraft was easy to recognize. She’d had the whole fuselage painted up as a cut-off penis.

  It took the witches five days to figure out what to do next. On August 22, they came out with two helos and twenty-four F-35s. So many more little figures on broomsticks to paint
on our F-16s, our pilots figured. Then, just after our diamond formations had foxed their barrage of AMRAAMS but before the merge, our pilots got a warning from one of Dano’s boys that he had a visual on four fighters, high and fast, behind us and starting to turn. GCI didn’t have them. I was listening on the net, and we all knew at once what the report meant: F-22s, the old U.S. Air Force’s ultra-hot stealth fighter. We didn't know the Zanies had any.

  So our F-16s ran away. Holding their diamond formations to guard against AMRAAM tail shots, they turned, dove for the deck, went to afterburner and fled all the way back to Utah.

  Our SIGINT heard the Azanian pilots giggling and cackling as the helos made their inserts in safety. They’d given those pricks a licking, all right. Hi-tech had triumphed over testosterone.

  One of the most basic rules of warfare is, don’t fall into predictable patterns. But women don’t understand war, and high technology does the same thing over and over.

  Our recon troops quickly cleared the fresh Azanian sensors, so two days later, early in the morning, the ladies came to replace them. They had two helos, just eight F-35s, and four F-22s again protecting the whole gaggle.

  High over the Nevada desert, at the max altitude an F-16 could fly and as slow as they could go, two of our fighters waited. Behind them, at low altitude, two ancient F-4 Phantoms of the Utah Air Guard were circling. Both our aircraft and the Zanies used old USAF IFF. Early that morning, Patel had personally hacked the day’s Azanian squawk code, which was entered in the F-4's boxes.

  As the four F-22s swung back west, fat, dumb, and happy, the two F-16s came slashing down, huns in the sun, blowing past the rearmost F-22s and pouring cannon fire into their cockpits. The witches were blown into dog meat before they could utter a syllable. Typical of bad pilots, the other two F-22s never bothered to check six. The F-4s, which had moved up on burner as soon as the F-16s began their attack, slid in behind them. They stayed there all the way back to the Zanies' base.

  War after war, air force after air force lines its aircraft up wingtip to wingtip. They look so pretty that way. Ladies especially like things neat. Two thousand-pound cluster bomb dispensers on each F-4 turned the whole Azanian F-22 inventory into scrap metal in thirty seconds.

  Women always fight dirty, but they are surprised when men do. It had never crossed the minds of Azania’s aviators that our skedaddle on the 22nd had been a set-up. As John Donne wrote, “Hope not for mind in woman; they are at their best, but mummy possessed.”

  Drawing the Zanies’ attention to the air battle helped cover our deployments, which by mid-August were well underway. Ten thousand troops were positioned forward in Nevada to advance through the Donner Pass; five thousand were set to go through the Feather River Canyon, following the old Western Pacific Railway, and another five thousand waited to move down the valley of the Tuolumne. Each had an Operational Maneuver Group behind the lead elements: a high-quality unit, all Northern Confederation troops, mounted on dirt bikes for speed. Like the prototype Soviet OMG, they were to be injected early to collapse the enemy operationally while the tactical battle was still underway.

  All indications were that getting through the passes would not be a problem. Dano’s recon troopers had cleared out most of the sensors, and the skunk works had provided us with counters for the few that might remain.

  Still, my German-educated gut was uncomfortable. What we were doing was predictable. The geography left us little choice. Only high-quality mountain infantry could hope to enter California except through the major passes, and we didn’t have much of that. Our Azanian exiles had grown up in cities and suburbs, and two months of training was far from enough to make them into good infantry, much less mountain troops. The Mormon Legion was broken up in small units to provide stiffening to the exiles, and most of Dano’s boys provided the core of the OMGs.

  There was one unit left: the Jefferson Davis Brigade, a 3,000-man unit of volunteers from the Confederacy. Paid and equipped by ladies of the South, who reviled the Azanians as strongly as our own women did, the Brigade had asked if it could join our war. The men were all well-trained regular soldiers from the Confederate Army, and they were in Light Armored Vehicles, the most operationally mobile weapon system on the market. The campaign plan envisioned using them as the operational reserve.

  Instead, on August 25, I ordered them to move north. A phone call secured permission for them to cross into Cascadia, and I directed the Brigade to laager around Goose Lake. When the balloon went up, they were to advance as rapidly as possible down the difficult valley of the Pit River to Lake Shasta, then drive south through the Sacramento Valley. It was the long way around into northern California, but it was also Azania’s back door.

  X-hour on September 1 was 04:00. The missile threat meant our forces, though in range of the passes, could not mass until the night of the 31st of August. Satellite imagery told the Azanian fusion center what was up. Our forces could disperse, shift, and dig in sufficiently to avoid most of the missiles, but we could not conceal the fact that we were there.

  On August 30, I had moved forward to a small OP set up by Ron’s guys overlooking Donner Pass. That was the initial Schwerpunkt, and I needed to see what happened there. The sensors in Donner had all been cleared. No Azanian missiles had been fired at the pass itself in more than ten days. Our radars on the peaks hadn’t seen an F-35 within 75 miles since August 24th. If we could get through the passes with small loss, the game was over.

  Back in the Azanian photo analysis shop, a witch had been putting the puzzle together. She saw hundreds of platoons swarming east of the passes. She made their call: we would come through on the night of the 30th.

  At about 01:00 on the 31st, a barrage of at least one hundred missiles hurtled down out of the clear night sky. The pass was scoured of every living thing in one tremendous barrage, a barrage out of the Somme or Passchendaele. Absent an unlucky round, we were safe enough in our OP, if soon somewhat deaf. But I offered a quick prayer of thanks that the Azanians had gotten it wrong by a day. Our infantry would have been slaughtered.

  I soon got calls from similar OPs in the Feather River and Tuolumne valley passes. The Blitz was underway there also. I heard nothing from the Jefferson Davis Brigade: they were under strict radio silence.

  As my mind began to recover from the first barrage, I noticed a couple of interesting things. First, the missiles were ballistic, not cruise. Second, while the barrage lightened, it didn’t stop. As I continued to observe, I saw a pattern: the bombardment would let up, almost stop, grow a bit, dwell, then yield to another tremendous surge, which would last about fifteen minutes, then diminish. It was like a rolling barrage from the First World War.

  I wasn’t overly worried. The Azanians' timing was wrong. They were shooting their wad, and we weren’t under it. Hi-tech missiles were expensive, slow to build, and inevitably available only in small numbers. In fact, the bombardment was an act of desperation: their sensors destroyed, all the Azanians could do was use their smart weapons like dumb ones and fire them in barrages. We just had to wait for them to run out.

  At around 06:00, just after first light, a missile came into our OP. It wasn’t a lucky hit for the Azanians. It was carried in by six of Ron’s boys, with Ron himself holding up the tailfins. The warhead was missing, or seemed to be until I saw another N.C. recon trooper, a Maine boy I recognized, following along behind holding it and grinning.

  “Afraid they were going to miss us up here?” I asked Ron

  “Yep,” he answered. “l thought you ought to see one of these up real close. Corporal Eakins here spotted it, a dud, got some friends to help haul it back and took the front end apart.”

  “Nice to see you still among the living, Eakins,” I said to the corporal with the warhead. “You sure you got that thing disarmed?”

  “No, sir,” he replied, “but I don’t plan to drop it either.”

  “And just what qualities of this rocket do you wish me to admire?” I asked Ron.

&
nbsp; “What it isn’t. It’s not hi-tech. There’s no homing device, no fancy guidance system. It’s a FROG, Free Rocket Over Ground. A Katyusha, in effect.

  Eakins quickly showed me the rocket’s simple front end, just a fuse and a warhead. I got the point at once. A simple rocket like this could be produced easily, quickly, in large numbers. The Zanies could have tens of thousands of them, and they could keep this bombardment up for days, maybe weeks. Maybe even indefinitely if they had production lines going.

  “There’s more,” Ron said.

  “You’re just the bluebird of happiness this morning, aren’t you?”

  “Bad news is still news. Have you been listening carefully to the detonations?”

  “All I’m hearing at this point is lots of ringing in my ears.”

  “The Zanies are also using artillery.”

  “Shit. We didn’t know they had any.”

  “Well, they got some, somewhere.”

  That was bad news indeed. Artillery made it easier for them to keep up a prolonged bombardment. It was clear we’d had a big-time intel failure. It must have been early, months ago, that a voice of sanity had penetrated Azanian high councils and they had decided they needed low-tech as well as hi-tech. We should have picked something up from their computers about this. I’d have a word with Patel later on.

  “You got anything else?”

  “Just one little thing,” Ron replied. “I sent a few of my men in deep, way deep. One team got within ten meters of one of the FROG batteries. The personnel were men, and they’re speaking Spanish.”

  Welcome to 21st century war, I thought. The Mexicans wanted our help against the Aztecs and at the same time hired themselves out to our enemies.

  “Okay, that’s good work, Ron, as always,” I said. “We’ll just have to adjust.”