Lion Resurgent (8 page)

“They hid us. The villagers hid us.” The head of the missionary group, a man called Houghan, was speaking to Geldenhuys, shakily, still unable to believe that he was alive and safe.

“You think you are a brave man because you are a soldier, jongmens?” Lehmkuhl spoke quietly to Dippenaar who was watching the scene with horrified fascination. “With your uniform and your tank around you? With your comrades to cover your onderkant? Well, jongmens, look at what real bravery is. Those poor bastaards there have nothing to fight with. Perhaps some farm tools, if they are lucky and if the militias haven’t stolen them. If the militias found they had hidden those people, the entire village would have been wiped out and their deaths would not have been pretty. Yet hide them they did because they thought it was the right thing to do. And then they lived with it, for who knows how long, afraid every day that something would give them away or one of the other villagers would try to buy his life by revealing the secret. Those people have more guts than you or I ever will. And don’t forget they saved those people, not us. We screwed up. The officers won’t admit it but we did. Our clever plan all went wrong and it was those villagers who pulled our nuts out of the fire as well. So remember this next time some siviele tells you that the stams up here aren’t worth anything.”

The missionaries were being pushed, none too gently, into the back of one Ratel. It was a tight fit, but it was just possible and it was a whole world better than the hiding place they had just left. Around them, the villagers just stared at the armored vehicles. The faces of the men were stoic. Some of the women, especially those with the babies, cried quietly.

“Captain, the militia we drove out, they must be watching. You know what will happen here when we leave.”

“Of course, van Huis. But what can we do?”

“Take them with us?”

“That is forbidden. You know that. There will be hell to pay if we bring an entire village over.”

“It will be worse than hell if we leave them here.”

“Respectfully Sirs.” Staff Sergeant Randlehoff spoke quietly, “the men believe it is the right thing to do. The only thing to do. They saved our people, we should save them.”

“On nine armored vehicles? How many are there?” No officer worth his salt ever ignored a warning from his sergeant that the men had strong feelings on something. Geldenhuys spoke quickly to the chieftain through de Wilzem. “He says there are about a hundred including the babies. There were more, but that was before the militia came.”

“Tell him that all those who want to leave can come with us. We can put some inside your Ratels. More can ride on top and on my tanks. The rest can walk with us. We’ll put three of my tanks in front. The other two can bring up the rear. Your Ratels in the middle. That way the lead tanks will explode any mines buried out there. We can get out to the south of this place, there is good ground there to the border. And the border is open. We should know that it is for us to hold it closed.”

Geldenhuys nodded slowly. “Very well. De Wilzem, tell the chief we will take the women who have babies inside the Ratels. Order the boys to squeeze up. If there is not enough room, they can walk. Our new jongmens could use the exercise. The old and the very young can ride on the tanks and Ratels. The rest walk between the vehicles. Tell them to step only in the tracks made by the tanks and Ratels.”

De Wilzem spoke to the chief who relayed the words to his villagers. As the word that they were going to escape from this militia-plagued hell spread, there was first disbelief and then incredulity. The Afrikaaners were going to take them to something that approximated safety. The Ratels filled up and then overflowed with the crowd of people mounting up. The younger men and women started bringing out what was left of the village’s livestock, some pigs, a few scrawny, half-starved cows. The women held chickens under their arms. Geldenhuys looked at the display with something approaching awe. This was an exercise he’d never learned at staff college.

“Sir, the headman asks, can we set the huts on fire? The way we did with the militia kraal. They don’t want to leave the thugs anything.”

Geldenhuys could understand that feeling. He gave the order. The 23mm cannon on the Ratels snapped out bursts of incendiaries. The burning huts provided a weird, flickering orange backlight as the strange convoy of tanks, armored personnel carriers, civilians and livestock moved out. He shook his head sadly to himself. “If there is an ark waiting in the river when we get there, I will know this all just a bad dream.”

“Not a bad dream Sir.” De Wilzem also spoke quietly. “We have done good work here tonight.”

Six hours later, the sun was rising. The villagers had already started to build themselves a kraal close to the infantry company’s base. Geldenhuys had received an ominous message saying the brigade commander wanted ‘reasons in writing’ by 0900. And van Huis had re-read his wife’s letter, then settled down to send her a reply.

“Things are pretty quiet here on the border,” he started.

Briefing Theater, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida

“Settle down. A team from Hughes Electro-optics is here to introduce you to some new equipment we will be testing in the near future.” That caused the room to quiet quickly. “Doctor Kailie, if you would like to start?”

“Thank you General. Gentlemen, I’m here today to discuss the topic that has been of concern to us all ever since the B-70 first entered service. I refer, of course, to bombing accuracy.” A ripple of hostility ran around the room. The B-70 crews were well aware that their average bombing error from the Valkyries was substantially greater than that from the old B-52s. In fact, the surviving BUFF groups still won the bombing accuracy contests at Red Sun, year after year. Doctor Kailie seemed oblivious to the reaction. “Of course, this is quite understandable. The Valkyrie flies at three times the speed of the B-52 and twice the altitude so a degradation of accuracy when using gravity bombs is only to be expected. We note that in the bombing of the Caliphate biological warfare facilities a decade ago, some of the bombs dropped missed their targets by between three and five miles.”

Doctor Kailie looked at his audience, blissfully unaware that he was being measured for a lynching. “That’s worse than an ICBM, you know.”

This time the hostile growl was unmistakable and couldn’t be easily ignored. Kailie suddenly realized he was trampling all over very tender corns. “Since then we have managed to correct the situation to a great extent. The new generation of gravity bombs have an inertial stabilization system that detects deviations from the planned ballistic arc and corrects for them. This eliminates errors from varying cross-winds and other atmospheric disturbances. However, this does not change the degree of error built in by the use of higher speeds and altitudes.”

“Then give us bigger bombs!” A voice called out from the increasingly restive audience. In a dimension humans know nothing of, deceased General Thomas Power smiled affectionately.

“That is only a temporary solution, and in any case there are many cases where the use of larger nuclear devices would be inappropriate. In fact, it would be of great benefit if, in some cases, we could replace nuclear devices with extremely accurate conventional weapons.”

“We’re not going to ask the ladies to haul trash!” A different voice, but equally hostile. The audience was beginning to surge forward in reaction to Kailie’s remarks.

“The ladies?” Kailie was confused.

“The B-70s. Most of them are female.” General Carson looked at his assembled crews severely. “Settle down, right now! We have a problem here and, while it might have been addressed more tactfully,” now Kailie got the severe look, “it is, nevertheless a serious problem that we have to face. So hear Doctor Kailie out.”

Kailie wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “As I was saying, the problem is a combination of speed, altitude and the reaction time of the bombing system. These are fixed constraints and, as you gentlemen have shown, even the finest training and most highly developed skills in the world cannot compensate for them.” He took a chance and looked at his audience. They seemed a little more mollified that they had a few minutes earlier. He heaved a quiet sigh of relief.

“Since the source of error at the drop end is beyond the control of either the crews or the - ahem - ladies, then the answer is obvious, we have to find a way of changing the course of the bomb on its way down so that any errors at the drop point can be corrected as the weapon descends. It is to achieve this end that we at Hughes have been working for the last few years.

“Attaining this end is of ever-increasing importance. Faced with the threat of our bombers, those who would challenge world peace have undertaken to make your tasks as hard as possible. They have hardened installations, buried them deep underground, made the vulnerable areas of them as small as possible. This is why just using devices of ever-increasing yield is no longer a viable approach. If the area of the target is halved in each of its dimensions and the same amount of material is used to build it, then that target will be four times harder. If the amount of material used to build it is doubled also, then that target will be 16 times harder to destroy, meaning the destructive force exerted upon it must be increased by the same proportion. Assuming that accuracy remains unchanged, that means the explosive power of our devices must be increased by a factor of more than four thousand. That means we would require devices that generate destructive power in the gigaton range. Obviously, this is not possible or desirable.”

There was a certain level of disagreement about the last word. Kailie chose to ignore it. “If, however, we can ensure that our devices can hit these much smaller targets directly, then the problem goes away. No known structure can survive a direct hit from a 550 kiloton weapon. Who knows? One day we may even be able to drop such a device down a mineshaft or into an air conditioning duct on a building. That would give the occupants food for thought, would it not?”

For the first time Kailie was actually connecting with his audience. “So how do we do it?” It was one of the voices that had been barracking him earlier.

“In theory, the idea isn’t new or particularly difficult. We’ve been using guided missiles for striking targets on the ground for many years. From an operational point of view, there’s very little difference between hitting a target with a guided AGM-76 that can be dialed up to around 100 kilotons and with a gravity bomb that has a yield twice that. In fact, for many targets there’s no difference at all and, as you know, we’ve been hitting strategic targets with defense-suppression AGM-76s for years. So, all we have to do is design what amounts to an engineless missile.

“The Navy has already been working along similar lines. They’ve come up with an idea that is essentially a glide bomb with an optically-guided system. The launch aircraft has a camera in its nose, the pilot or bombardier steers it so the image of the target is framed by the camera and that image is transmitted to the bomb. The bomb is then dropped and the guidance system senses when the target image is drifting away from the center of the frame and applies a correction so it stays in the center. This system will even compensate for the target moving, great for hitting ships. Now, your B-70s have a much better electro-optical camera system than anything the Navy has so this same device should be applicable to your nuclear devices. Note, by the way, that the guidance system actually gets more accurate as the bomb nears its target. Quite the reverse of the normal situation where accuracy decreases with range.”

The hum around the room had changed from hostility to interest. Kailie decided to exploit the moment. “That’s one approach; we’ve got another. How many of you have heard of a laser?”

A forest of hands shot up. SAC crewmembers tended to be very well-read. There was little else to do while sitting in the cockpits of their aircraft while on alert and the chosen reading matter tended to be scientific.

“That’s very helpful. Well, we’ve designed a system that has two components. One is a pod that contains a stabilized laser hooked to the electro-optical camera in your aircraft. Using the pod and camera you can shine the laser on the target. The other is a receiver in the nose of the bomb that picks up the reflected laser light. Again, it keeps the source of reflected laser light centered and flies into the target. Again, the closer it is, the more accurate it gets. The big advantage of this system is that the aircraft dropping the bomb doesn’t have to get anywhere near the target. It can just deliver the bomb into a position where it can see the reflected laser and then drop on the target.”

“So we have to operate in pairs?” A thoughtful voice.

“Perhaps. Or one spotter aircraft can designate targets for several delivery aircraft. The RB-58s could do that for you. Or one aircraft can both designate and drop.”

“How accurate?” Mike Yates spoke for the first time.

“The first system? The Navy can get accuracy of around 50 - 100 feet but that’s much slower and lower. The laser system? Theoretically, we can get accuracies measured in inches. Also, you can drop several bombs sequentially and then designate targets while the bombs are on the way down. You don’t have to drop one at a time the way the Navy do.”

There was a surge of interest and Kailie was bombarded by questions from the interested air crews. After more than two hours of dealing with surprisingly detailed technical questions ranging from how the laser was cooled to where it could be mounted on the B-70, he was allowed to sit down. General Carson took his place.

“Gentlemen, four of our aircraft are to be fitted with an improved version of the Navy system, four with the new laser system. We will fly exercises to compare them and decide which, or whether both, are best suited to our needs. Thank you.”

Yates left the conference room in a hurry. It was running late and he had to stop at the bank on the way home before he found out what his wife had in mind for their evening.