There Will Be War Volume X Read online

  Copyright

  There Will Be War

  Volume X

  Edited by Jerry Pournelle

  Published by Castalia House

  Kouvola, Finland

  www.castaliahouse.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

  Copyright © 2015 by Jerry Pournelle

  All rights reserved

  Assistant Editor: Vox Day

  Cover Image: Lars Braad Andersen

  Version: 002

  The stories contained herein were first published and copyrighted as follows:

  THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE by Gregory Benford was previously published in Cosmos (August 2005). Copyright © 2005 by Gregory Benford.

  SEVEN KILL TIGER by Charles W. Shao is published by permission of the author. Copyright © 2015 by Charles W. Shao.

  THE 4GW COUNTERFORCE by William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiele was previously published in The 4GW Handbook, Castalia House, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiele.

  BATTLE STATION by Ben Bova was previously published in Battle Station, Tor Books, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Ben Bova.

  THE WAR MEMORIAL by Allen M. Steele was previously published in Asimov's September 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Allen M. Steele.

  RULES OF ENGAGEMENT by Michael F. Flynn was previously published in Analog March 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Michael F. Flynn.

  WAR AND MIGRATION by Martin van Creveld is published by permission of the author. Copyright © 2015 by Martin van Creveld.

  THE LAST SHOW by Matthew Joseph Harrington is published by permission of the author. Copyright © 2015 by Matthew Joseph Harrington.

  FLASHPOINT: TITAN by Cheah Kai Wai is published by permission of the author. Copyright © 2015 by Cheah Kai Wai.

  WAR AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT by Douglas Beason was previously published in The E-Bomb: How America's New Directed Energy Weapons Will Change the Way Future Wars Will Be Fought. Copyright © 2006 by Doug Beason.

  BOOMER by John DeChancie was previously published in Space Cadets, SCIFI, Inc, 2006. Copyright © 2006 by John DeChancie.

  THE DEADLY FUTURE OF LITTORAL SEA CONTROL by Commander Phillip E. Pournelle, USN was previously published in the July 2015 issue of Proceedings Magazine. It is reprinted here by permission of the author and the United States Naval Institute. Copyright © 2015 by Phillip E. Pournelle.

  THE FOURTH FLEET by Russell Newquist was previously published in Make Death Proud to Take Us, Silver Empire, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Russell Newquist.

  CANNY by Brian J. Noggle is published by permission of the author. Copyright © 2015 by Brian J. Noggle.

  WHAT PRICE HUMANITY? by David VanDyke is published by permission of the author. Copyright © 2015 by David VanDyke.

  FLUSH-AND-FFE by Guy R. Hooper and Michael L. McDaniel was previously published as “Fighting with Fires” in the Winter 2000-01 issue of Joint Forces Quarterly. It appears here by arrangement with the authors. Copyright © 2000 by Guy R. Hooper and Michael L. McDaniel.

  AMONG THIEVES by Poul Anderson was previously published in Astounding Stories June 1957. Copyright © 1957 by Poul Anderson.

  “FLY-BY-NIGHT” by Larry Niven was previously published in Man-Kzin Wars XI, Baen Books, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Larry Niven.

  There Will Be War

  Volume X

  Edited by Jerry Pournelle

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Introduction to Volume X by Jerry Pournelle

  The Man Who Wasn’t There by Gregory Benford

  Seven Kill Tiger by Charles W. Shao

  The 4GW Counterforce by William S. Lind and LtCol Gregory A. Thiele, USMC

  Battle Station by Ben Bova

  The War Memorial by Allen M. Steele

  Rules of Engagement by Michael Flynn

  War and Migration by Martin van Creveld

  The Last Show by Matthew Joseph Harrington

  Flashpoint: Titan by Cheah Kai Wai

  War At The Speed Of Light by Col Douglas Beason, USAF, ret.

  Boomer by John DeChancie

  The Deadly Future of Littoral Sea Control by CDR Phillip E. Pournelle, USN

  The Fourth Fleet by Russell Newquist

  Canny by Brian J. Noggle

  What Price Humanity? by David VanDyke

  Flush-and-FFE by Lt Col Guy R. Hooper, USAF, ret. and Michael L. McDaniel

  Among Thieves by Poul Anderson

  “Fly-By-Night” by Larry Niven

  There Will Be War Riding the Red Horse

  Castalia House

  New Releases

  Editor’s Introduction to:

  THERE WILL BE WAR

  Volume X

  When the There Will Be War series began, the Cold War was on with a vengeance. Twenty-six thousand nuclear warheads were aimed at the United States. Marxism had faded within the Communist Party, but Marxist/Leninist doctrine remained the official ruling principle; and it held that the worldwide establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat—Communist rule—was inevitable. Détente was possible, but never peace; class war always continued. Most of the Nomenklatura—the inner ruling circle of the Communist Party—might be skeptical, but all of them had compulsorily taken many hours of Marxist theory in University, as well as the usual doctrines taught in grade and high school, and all claimed to believe in the scientific truth of Marxism.

  The United States had endured the long and divisive Cold War. Korea, then Viet Nam, claimed American lives, but neither ended in victory parades or peace. The Cold War continued, and both sides kept ready-alert nuclear forces, with bomber crews ready to man their B-52’s, and young men, then young men and women, spent much time deep underground, waiting for the sound of the klaxon and the dread words: “EWO. EWO. Emergency War Orders. Emergency War Orders. I have a message in five parts. Message begins. Tango. X-ray. Papa. Kilo….”

  The protracted conflict came to an end in 1990, and then the Soviet Union itself dissolved. The series, There Will Be War, ended shortly thereafter, and the United States stood down in anticipation of a well-earned era of peace. The Strategic Air Command, the elite force which had existed to fight a world nuclear war, was disbanded, along with Systems Command, whose mission was to design and build the weapons of a future war that would never come. The blitzkrieg of the First Gulf War did little to dispel that illusion. There would be brush fires, world police activities, but the future was clear. The history of war had come to an end. One popular book even proclaimed “The End of History”; it would take time, but it was now inevitable that history would progress to its natural conclusion, a peaceful coalition of liberal democracies.

  That belief vanished on the morning of September 11, 2001. Well before the rubble of what had once been the tallest buildings in America was cleared, the United States had already embarked on what has proven to be the longest war in her history. The armed forces responded splendidly. But what would have been glorious victory in another era became the prelude to endless nightmares as the civilian leadership tried vainly to build liberal democracy in lands that wanted no part of it; asymmetric war in the form of terror spread from Iraq to Syria to Paris to San Bernardino. A new power, dedicated to world peace through world submission, arose from the ashes of Iraq and continues to steadily grow.

  History has not ended. The world has not united in peace and liberal democracy. This series has been revived to again offer stories and essays on the ch
allenges of the future; in a time when There Will Be War. Herewith Volume Ten.

  Jerry Pournelle

  Studio City, 2015

  Editor’s Introduction to:

  THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE

  by Gregory Benford

  I have known Professor Greg Benford for a long time. He participated in the studies that generated the Strategic Defense Initiative, both in the Council I chaired to advise the incoming Reagan Administration in 1980 and many other venues, and he is well known for his non-fiction.

  He is also a well-known science fiction writer. His latest works have been collaborations with Larry Niven on stories of the far future, but he has also paid attention to the news.

  Given the events in Paris last month, this story is timely; but in fact it was one of the first chosen for this book and was accepted well before the Paris massacre. High tech versus low tech in defending the security of Western Civilization; another battle in a war that has gone on since before Charles Martel turned the tide at Tours in 732 A.D. But tides ebb and flow, and still the war continues.

  THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE

  Gregory Benford

  The security ’bots zoomed around the looming mosque like supersonic butterflies in the cold air. Jean watched them with his infrared eyes as their tiny plumes darted over the bare zone, blazing high tech fireflies. They patrolled silently over the wide stone plaza, watching for movement up and down the spectral bands.

  Sentinels of Islam in a suburb of Paris. Around the butterfly buzz hung a weekday midnight silence. Incense flavored the air with a pungent reek.

  “Merde du jour,” he muttered. The Islamic Front could afford the butterflies. They fed on endless money from the Saudis, part of the campaign to restore Islam to Europe after the regrettable Christian Era.

  Not restored by the sword, of course—they were hopeless on a battlefield. But now, in softened consumerist Europe, their shopworn push-pull strategies of terror and political demand still worked. Islamic Front had plenty of followers in the immigrant masses. Their code of strict secrecy—talk and you die, unpleasantly—made them potent. Against them the French government deployed lawyers. Thinking of them, he spat on the floor of the apartment he had rented.

  “Ready, Ajax?” He got a coded blip in answer—OK.

  Time to move. Nobody knew where the Front would strike next with bombs, kidnappings, violent protests. Plus the usual rhetoric about being repressed. Very effective.

  They had made such claims back in Lyon, after a street brawl on Montclair Boulevard. That was years ago, just as the Front started to use advanced technologies. All cameras, videos, and other recording systems near Montclair Boulevard had been blank, so the Front could claim that the fighting and the car bomb that followed were the work of others. So it had gone now for years, an arms race of technologies.

  Unless, of course, the plans of the Islamic Front could be tapped. But that meant getting in fast, silent, deadly. Tonight.

  Inside the shadowy compound ahead, the Head was at work. Under the shield of the looming mosque, he sent agents forth. He hid behind some holy name, but French Intelligence had pinpointed the Head’s movements, and now was the time to strike. Remembering Montclair Boulevard.

  Jean said softly, “Take out the microwaves.”

  Silently, the side teams did.

  The details registered in his left eye, fed from his wearable computer. The Front was using the minarets at the square’s corners to mount their detectors. Jean could see their snouts peeking out of the corbelled designs that wrapped around each artfully curved dome atop the minarets. The surveillance cameras were the usual IR motion-sensing type. But they were all connected to a central security center—the usual control-freak arrangement. They could be defeated by intersecting their microwave links, saturating them, blowing the electronics down the line.

  Jean ordered the teams to open up. Soundless beams lanced instantly into the broad square of the compound. They were aimed at receivers, jamming the link back to the security center that squatted down on the mosque’s roof.

  Simple, really—flood them with a high-powered noise-spectrum signal. Their cameras looked in all directions, their sensors wide open in the winter dark—so they could be attacked from any direction, jammed from any angle. Thank God—whichever version you liked, Jean thought—the Front hadn’t thought to use laser links—easier to find, but far harder to block or saturate.

  “Their links are cut,” came a whispered comm message from a nearby apartment, diagonally across the square.

  “Now the security ’bots.”

  Microwave pulses transfixed each of the fireflies darting around the mosque square. Short bursts of microwaves flooded their diodes. The butterflies abruptly tumbled to the cobblestones.

  He rasped in a short breath and beeped Ajax into action. “Send in the silver,” Jean said. His buddy Ajax was in a silver suit, though why it got that name Jean never knew.

  He switched to another spectrum, far beyond the visible, and searched for Ajax. Silver suits were layers of optical fibers and sensors, ever-watchful in all directions. There—

  Ajax was a shifting blob of shimmering blue light in Jean’s UV goggles, well beyond what ordinary cameras could capture. Each square centimeter of the silver suit took incoming light and routed it through chips, moving the image—say, of a wall—around the body, on its way to the directly opposite side of the suit. There another optical fiber emitted the same image in the same direction. It was as though the ray had passed through Ajax’s body. Any guard looking toward the suit saw only the wall, as though nothing stood between them.

  The silver suit gave Ajax invisibility. Jean watched as the blob flexed and moved across the Islamic Front’s broad open plaza, toward the shadowy, looming mosque. He reached the first barrier, a cluster of concrete blocks, and just walked around them. Up in the minarets Jean could see shifting shadows. The guards had noticed that their gear was down.

  “Here comes the glare,” he sent on comm.

  Searing light swept the compound. Spotlights on the minarets and the main mosque sent blaring beams into every corner.

  Good coverage, Jean noted. Not that it would do them any good.

  Because Ajax was inside by now. “I got it,” Ajax’s voice whispered in his ears.

  Meaning that he had used the tap-and-read gear strapped to his wrist. It sent an electric charge wave through a lock and used the rebound signal to figure out the lock’s codes. The information was buried in the door, so it had to be user-reachable. Almost like a dog waiting for the right signal from its master to go fetch a ball.

  Well, Jean thought, the ball was in play now. “Follow on,” he sent, and two more silver suits started across the compound’s square. They came in from the sides. He could see them moving fast, wrinkled UV ghosts.

  The guards up in the minarets had their hands full, scanning the square and seeing nothing. Not even their motion-sensing cameras could see anything through the smoky frequencies.

  Shouts echoed across the square. Getting the reserve house guard up from their beds.

  Time to get serious. “Blow their electrical.”

  Microwave bursts curled through the chill air. They were vectored in on the mosque’s power source, where their standard external current hookup met their in-house generator. Throw the diodes there into confusion, blowing most of them with thirty kilowatts of bursty microwaves, and kiss your amperes goodbye.

  The spotlight glare vanished. The minor mosque lamps went too. Louder shouts.

  Jean was already running out of the apartment building. His IR took in the sputtering of random gunfire from the minarets. They were shooting blind, chunking rounds into the cobblestones. It was easy to avoid their sweeps.

  But that gave his side all the excuse they needed. Snipers in nearby buildings took out the men in the minarets within seconds.

  Halfway to the mosque, all fell silent. He could hear his own whooshing breath, it was that still.

 
The main gate was still locked but the side door yawned. He went through into utter blackness, dark even to him in IR.

  In his left eye he received Ajax’s map of the interior. It was made by a satellite, integrating the GPS feedback from Ajax and figuring out the implied mosque geometry.

  Here—down a corridor and around a small high-roofed room like a chapel. Two men milled around in the room, shouting to each other. One fumbled to turn on a flashlight and Jean punched a button on his right wrist. It sent a skreeee he heard in the microwave spectrum. That caused flash-over of the filaments in flashlight bulbs. Sure enough, the tall, swarthy man could not get the flash to light up. Jean slipped by him.

  They were saying something in French but Jean didn’t bother to figure out their panicked sentences as they flung their arms about. He skirted around them and down a hallway. More men there, armed but blind. The place reeked of sour sweat and fear.

  Ajax had left bootprints that showed up in crimson in his high-UV spectrum. He followed them through a room crammed with computers, all dead, and down a long corridor lined with AK-47s in steel wall racks.

  Jean had his automatic out in his right hand but didn’t intend to use it. The flash would give the enemy momentary light.

  “Found the Head,” Ajax sent.

  “How is he?”

  “Holed up in a safe room, looks like.”

  “Blow it.”

  “Already set up to. Punched a hole through at the top, wide enough for the percussion grenade.”

  “Go.”

  The boom rocked down the hallway and slapped Jean in the face. As he ran up to it he could see the massive door was skewed on its hinges. Ajax was a shimmer in Jean’s goggles, planting a second charge. They wedged it into place at the top hinge.