GOLAN: This is the Future of War (Future War) by FX Holden

Author:FX Holden [Holden, FX]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-24T22:00:00+00:00

RAF Akrotiri Air Base, Cyprus, May 19

Shelly Kovacs had trust issues. She knew that. She’d put eight years of her life into the Marine F-47B Fantom project, and she’d fought like a wildcat to prevent her precious prototypes being suborned to the Air Force 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, but she’d been told it would be good for fostering Marine Corps Aviation-USAF joint operations, good for DARPA and good for her project.

“You will get more data in a few weeks of real combat than you could possibly get in a year of exercises and simulations, Shelly,” her program manager had told her, as she called to bitch again.

“Yeah, except they don’t expect my babies to last one week, let alone a few,” she’d replied. “I’ve lost two machines already. They aren’t ready for combat and you know it. I have five pilots who fly them like they’re hobby drones and one pilot, one, Matt, who flies them like she’s possessed and none of the other pilots can come close to matching her skills. She’s a coder, a hacker, a gamer, a fighter pilot and frankly, she’s either the worst or the most inspired recruitment I’ve ever made.”

“She’s the one who rewrote your aggressor routines? It doesn’t matter the others you’ve already got can’t do what she can do, we’ll find more like her.”

“Not sure that’s even vaguely possible, Matt.” She hung up.

They were flying into a literal shitstorm. As the last no-fly zone mission had been withdrawing from the UNDOF DMZ, Israel had launched a full-scale air offensive into Syria. There had already been dozens of aircraft in the air over Israel, but O’Hare had been forced to find a way through what seemed like the entire Israeli Air Force for her six Fantoms, avoiding the ire of Israeli military air traffic controllers who no longer seemed to care that she was on a mission to protect UN troops in the Golan. After repeated orders to withdraw her aircraft or be shot down, O’Hare had pushed them down to ground level to get them off Israeli radar and barged across the countryside following river valleys and highways in southern Lebanon to the Golan.

Kovacs watched from the jump seat as the woman in the pilot’s chair beside her in the trailer scratched the stubble on her close-shaven head and reached for an energy drink at the same time as she plugged in the coordinates that would keep her six-plane hex of Fantoms hugging the nap of the earth over the Golan Heights as soon as they got on station. O’Hare was wearing her headset and heads-up display eyepiece and noticed that Kovacs was looking at her. She pulled an earbud out of her right ear. “Sorry, you talking to me?”

“No, I was on the phone.”

“Cool, because I was just getting in the zone, you know. You want to say something, just tap me on the shoulder or get on comms.” O’Hare pointed at a tactical map that showed their aircraft approaching the UNDOF DMZ.

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