Ralph Peters (40 page)

The Trial

14

November 2020

night 2—3

Down the hill from the suburban home where
George Taylor passed his childhood lay an orchard. Lost between some dead farmer's dreams and a developer's vision, the untended trees had gone wild. When you walked down from the careful plots of television-neighborhood houses, through the no-man's-land of cleared fields yet unbuilt, the paved road turned to gravel, then to red dirt. The last sewerage connection guarded the edge of civilization like an undersized cement and steel pillbox. Birds rose at your footsteps, and, in the summer, dull snakes sunned themselves in the dust. The tangled orchard encompassed a ravine that was perfect for rock fights (no rocks above a certain generally acknowledged size, and no aiming above the waist).

This little wilderness was unkempt, as are the very young and the very old. The trees were very old, and the denimed warriors who ran howling between them were very young. George Taylor was the youngest of the tribe, and one of the wildest, driven by his fear that his fears might be discovered by his older companions. Looking back with the genius of an adult, he could only shake his head at the terrified recklessness he had tried to pass off as a bravery he had never, ever felt.

When George Taylor was very young, the oldest mem
ber of the band with whom he explored the world was
a
strong, loud boy named Charlie Winters. One of Taylor's first clear memories was of being together with other males drafted by Charlie for a special expedition down to the orchard. Armed with sticks, the file of boys passed out of the brightness of the morning into the golden-green twilight of the grove. Charlie went first, searching through the brambles and tramped paths for the way he had gone the afternoon before. Amid the gnarled branches with their spotted, unworthy fruit, Charlie had discovered a perfect apple. But there were problems: the treasure dangled from a forbiddingly high branch and, still worse, no climber could retrieve it, since it grew very close to the gray pulp of a wasps' nest.

Each of the boys came from homes where select apples lay disregarded in decorative baskets. Candy was by far the preferred sustenance of the tribe. But the apple in the orchard was a jewel, not least because Charlie claimed it to be such. The chief had spoken, and the wild fruit took on something of the mystery of lost worlds, dangling in the wild grove where there was just enough sense of danger to thrill a boy's heart.

Charlie had devised a plan. At his command, they would all throw rocks at once, knocking the apple off the branch. It was a good combat plan, brutal and direct, save for a single hitch: one boy would need to position himself immediately beneath the branch, in order to catch the fruit and make off with it before the surprised wasps could strike.

The leader looked around for volunteers.

Not one of the bold band stepped forward.

"
Come on,
"
Charlie said.
"
It'll be easy. We can do it.
"

All eyes rose to the high branch and its treasure. The wasps' nest swelled with a terrible splendor, and the lazy local activity of its guardians began to seem far more menacing than any of the boys had previously realized.

"
Georgie,
"
Charlie said.
"
You're the smallest. The wasps'll have more trouble spotting you. And you can run fast.
"

The last claim was a lie. He always came in last in the sudden races with the older, longer-legged boys.

Taylor did not answer. He simply looked up at the hideous sack of the wasps' nest. Afraid.

"
Ain't afraid, are you?
"
Charlie demanded.

"
No,
"
Taylor replied. He wanted to run away. To go home and immerse himself in some other game. But he feared being called a baby. Or a puss.

"
Well, prove it.
I
think you're chicken.
"

"
Yeah,
"
a third voice joined in,
"
Georgie Taylor's a chicken.
"
The attack came from a gray, indefinite boy whose name Taylor would forget over the years.

"
I'm
not
chicken,
"
Taylor said.
"
You're
more chicken than I am.
"
And he forged his way down through the briars and thirsty brush.

He positioned himself as directly below the apple as he could, staring up to keep his bearings. It was very hard. The sun dazzled down through the leaves, blackening the boughs and making him faintly dizzy.

"
You ready?
"
Charlie called.

"
I guess so,
"
Taylor said. But he was not ready. He would never be ready. He was indescribably afraid.

"
Get ready,
"
Charlie commanded.
"
Everybody, on three.
"

The boys clutched their rocks. Taylor shifted nervously, trying to see the apple clearly up in the tangle of brilliance and blackness.

"
One . . . two . . .
three.
"

Everything happened with unmanageable speed. Shouts, and the whistle of projectiles. A blurred disturbance in the world above his head. Cries of alarm as far too much came falling: a spent stone clipped his shoulder and the apple fell just beyond his grasp. Beside it, the cardboard waste of the wasps' nest landed with a thud.

He reached for the apple. But it was no good. The wasps were already at him. He ran. The world exploded with disorder. He swung his arms, howling at the living fires on his skin. A wasp flew at his mouth.

Everyone else was gone. He ran through the wilderness alone, scrambling through a world of relentless terror that would not stop hurting him. He raced through thorns and sumac, batting his paws at the wasps, at the air. Crying, screaming, he clawed his way up the dirt bank of the ravine and burst from the poisonous gloom, imagining that the wasps would have to quit now that he had escaped their domain and regained the freedom of the clear blue day.

But the remarkable pains would not stop. The creatures droned, plunged, pelted him. Far ahead, nearly back to the world of paved streets and perfect houses, he saw his comrades in full retreat.

Charlie slowed briefly to yell,
"
Come on, Georgie.
"

The older boy was laughing.

Seated in the cockpit of his war machine, leading his grown-up warriors into battle, Taylor found himself wondering to what extent he was still the boy standing under a wasps' nest, while other, distant figures threw the stones.

Things had already begun to go wrong. The United States Air Force had been scheduled to fly a strategic jamming mission along the old prerebellion Soviet-Iranian border, wiping out enemy communications over tens of thousands of square kilometers. But the ultrasophisticated, savagely expensive WHITE LIGHT aircraft remained hangar-bound, grounded by severe weather at their home base in Montana. Taylor's regiment and the electronic warfare support elements from the Tenth Cavalry would be able to isolate the operational battlefield with the jamming gear available in-theater, but the enemy would retain his strategic and high-end operational communications capability. An important, if not absolutely vital, part of the surprise blow would not be delivered.

Locally, a lieutenant in the Third Squadron had disobeyed the order to lift off with his automatic systems in control. Hotdogging for his crew, he had attempted a manual lift-off in the darkness and had flown his M-100 into mercifully inert power lines. Thanks to the safety features built into the M-100, the lieutenant and his entire crew had survived the crash with only some heavy bruising, some missing teeth, and one broken arm. But the regiment had been robbed of another precious system before the battle had even begun. Controlling his temper over the incident, unwilling to exchange the image of control for the brief pleasure of public anger, Taylor nonetheless promised himself that the lieutenant would soon have the opportunity to seek a new line of work, if he and his regimental commander both survived the war.

Things had already begun to go wrong. But they were not yet sufficiently fouled-up to rattle Taylor. One of the very few truths that his long years of service had taught him was that military operations were simply fucked-up by their very nature. The selective maps and decisive arrows that made everything appear so obvious and easy in the history books and manuals were invariably instances of radical cosmetic surgery on the truth. Behind those implacable graphics lay scenes of indescribable confusion, misunderstanding, accidents (both terrible and felicitous), and the jumbled capabilities, failures, fears, and valor of countless individuals. Warfare was chaos, and the primary mission of the commander was to impose at least marginally more order on that chaos than did his opponent. The reason that military discipline would always be necessary was not simply to ensure that the majority of men in uniform would fight when ordered—that was only a small part of it. Discipline was necessary because every military establishment existed constantly on the edge of disaster, from the humbler inevitabilities of crushed fingers in the peacetime motor pool to the grand disasters of war.

Taylor would not receive the promised support of his nation's air force, and he had lost one of his war machines to the antics of a uniformed child. But his regiment was largely in the air—forty-six M-l00s had lifted off, thanks to the last-minute achievements of Manny Martinez and the regimental and squadron motor officers. The electronic warfare birds from the Tenth Cav were on station. And there was still no sign that the enemy had discovered the American presence. In less than ten minutes, the First Squadron would cross its line of departure, followed quickly by the Second Squadron, then by the Third. So far, the untried war machines seemed to be working just fine, and their electronic suites enriched and thickened the darkness through which they would pass to strike their enemies. No recall order had arrived from the nervous men in Washington, and soon the Seventh United States

Regiment of Cavalry would have slipped its last
tether.
Somewhere behind a welter of new enemies, the old enemy waited.

Overall, Colonel George Taylor considered himself a very lucky man.

"
Take the wheel, Flapper,
"
Taylor told his copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Five Elvis
"
Flapper
"
Krebs. Since Zaire, Taylor had always chosen his personal crew from the oldest, toughest, and sourest men available.
"
I'm going back to the operations center.
"

"
Got it,
"
Krebs said in an offhanded southern voice that implied that Taylor's presence was superfluous. Like Taylor, Krebs had served long enough to remember the old days when the U.S. Army still held Cobra gunships in its inventory. The two men had grown up on the Apache, but they could remember the look of the Cobra's deadly panatela fuselage in flight. They had seen enormous changes in the technology of war, and the coming hours would either inaugurate yet another new stage, or mortally embarrass their nation.

"
Send you up a cup of coffee, Chief?
"
Taylor offered as he finished unstrapping himself from his padded seat in the center of a display of electronic riches.

"
Naw,
"
Krebs said.
"
I'm about as wired as I need to be.
"
The studied casualness of the man's tone always brought Taylor to the edge of laughter. Krebs was overdue for retirement—he had been extended to assist in the formation of the Army's first regiment of M-l00s, having served for years in the developmental process and as a test pilot. To Taylor, he was one of the last of a vanishing breed, the crusty, mean-mouthed, generous-spirited old warrants who made the Army fly. Their shared experiences laid down a bridge between Taylor and Krebs that few other men in the regiment would dare attempt to cross. Bad times that added up to a life well-spent.

As a young warrant, Krebs had seen his first combat in Panama, in December of eighty-nine. There was a story that he had overflown the barracks of a holdout Panamanian Defense Force unit, dropping homemade leaflets that read:
"
Merry Fucking Christmas.
"
Not long after
ward, the Army had sent him to Saudi Arabia during the great deployment of 1990. Old Flapper had been through it all.

Taylor squeezed his shoulders through the short passageway that led back into the command and control center. Where the standard M-l00s had a compartment for a light squad of dragoons equipped for dismounted fighting, the command-variant ships had been outfitted with a chamber crammed with the latest miniaturized communications and information-processing systems. The compartment was environmentally controlled and stabilized. Entering it, you were treated to a spectacle of colored lights from nine monitor screens of various sizes displaying everything from real-time images of the battlefield relayed from space reconnaissance systems to graphic depictions, in glowing colors, of the war in the electromagnetic spectrum. It always reminded Taylor of a magic cave where the invisible world became palpable. You could
see
the ferocious demons that hid in the air, invisible to the naked eye, or you could call up distant lands of wonder. Even the first-level secrets of life and death became available here, in the displays of enemy systems targeted, of friendly systems lost, of available ammunition and deadly energy sources. The commander, with his skeletal staff, could use radar imagery to erase darkness, clouds, or fog, allowing him a god's-eye view that penetrated the witch's sabbath of the battlefield. The commander could monitor the sectors in which his subordinates fought with greater ease than a civilian could watch television. Changes in angle, in levels of magnification, in enhanced color contrasts, and the visual evocation of waves of energy, it was all there lurking under a button or a switch. The voice of God had its source here too. Alternative-use laser systems allowed instantaneous encrypted communications with similarly equipped stations anywhere in the world, and huge volumes of data could be entered into or transmitted from the M-l00's standard on-board computers in the middle of combat.

It was a marvelous machine. The on-board and external integrated target-acquisition systems were so capable and versatile that, during training flights, playful crews used them to track small game on the prairie from a distance of dozens of kilometers. The miniaturized
"
brains
"
were so powerful and so crammed with both military and general knowledge that they could be ordered to fuse data from all available reconnaissance systems in order to search for any parameter of target—such as the pinpoint location of each blue 2015 Ford on the highways of North America in which two adult occupants were riding and the fuel tanks were less than half full. The microsecond sort capabilities were so powerful that none of the experts in the regiment had been able to enter a problem which could stump the system. You could charge the target-acquisition system to locate distant plantations of yellow roses—or every enemy combat vehicle with a bent right front fender. The system was so swift that human beings simply could not handle the target volume without extensive automated support, and the M-100 was designed to fight on full automatic, relying on its human masters for key decisions, for overall guidance, for setting or revising priorities, and for defining operational parameters. Every on-board system could be employed under manual control, if necessary, but such a reduction in the system's overall capabilities would only be accepted, according to the draft doctrine, in the most exceptional circumstances. Technically, this most potent air-land warfare machine ever built had the capability to carry on the fight indefinitely even after its human crew had perished. Taylor once overheard a young pilot joke that the M-100 made every pilot a general. What the pilot had meant was that the M-100 let every man who sat at its controls play God without getting his hands dirty.

Taylor was willing to admit that he himself could not fully imagine all the implications this untried system might have for the battlefield. But he was certain of one thing: despite the technological wonders under the modern warrior's hand, that hand would manage to grow very dirty indeed.