“Jamming on,” called the electronic warfare specialist in the back seat.
“Very good.” Dortmund, the craft’s commander, turned back toward Thandla. “Soon, you will become quite busy. Their computers will analyze our signals, decode how we are amplifying, distorting, or creating false signatures, and interrupting their communications.”
“And so I will have to adjust our signals.”
“Just so. At first, you should be able to follow the guidelines that we preprogrammed into the computer.”
Thandla smiled. “But if you had such complete faith in those new modulation and propagation protocols, you would have not have needed my services so urgently.”
For the first time since Thandla had met him, Dortmund allowed himself a small smile. “Das stimmt. If my guess is correct, within the first ten minutes, the Arat Kur will begin to see the programming patterns common to all our settings. There will be need for you to improvise.”
“And if I fail?”
“Then we die. Naturally.”
“But we do want them to be shooting at us, do we not?”
“Yes. We want them to realize that they must shoot us down, that if they eliminate us, they can eliminate the jamming and image-making drones covering the general air assault into Java.”
“Which begins when?”
“Look behind you.”
Thandla turned, looked out the rear of the long cockpit blister. Above the dwindling green-gray Sumatran coast, specks were airborne, rising, gathering.
Sanjay stared at the wide blue heavens above them—above which an enemy fleet hovered. “I am unconvinced that we shall last more than a few seconds, anyway. The Arat Kur’s look-down visual sensors seem quite acute, and their laser targeting is most impressive.”
“True, but first they will try to eliminate us with their more numerous rail guns. But the flight time of the projectiles makes hitting a fast, maneuverable craft problematic. Ultimately, they may have to use lasers. But they have far fewer of them, and atmospheric diffusion makes them energy-expensive to use. We project that they will only commit their lasers once they determine that they must act swiftly and decisively against the manned vehicles of our controller flights if they are to eliminate the numerous countermeasure drones we are directing.”
“So the way for them to kill the many-headed hydra of our interference is to hit us: its heart and brain.”
“Just so.”
“All so that the other aircraft can get to Java.”
Dortmund frowned, looked away. “That would be nice.”
Thandla looked harder at him. “But you said—”
“We want it to appear that our primary objective is to ensure that our air assets reach Jakarta. But our true task—both for us and the air units behind us—is to be a decoy. We must keep the Roaches too busy to anticipate or detect a far greater threat that is approaching.”
“Which is coming from where?” Thandla felt foolish doing so, but scanned the skies.
Dortmund shook his head. “The threat is not coming from up there.” He pointed straight down through the VTOL’s deck. “It is coming from down there. From far, far beneath us.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Damn it, get back down here, Little Guy.”
“Coming, coming.”
Opal looked away from where her XO, Miles O’Garran, was affixing another decoy cellular repeater to a street post. Anxious over his exposure, she glanced north. Burning cars, sporadic fire from the AKs of irregulars, silence from the Hkh’Rkh hardpoint that brooded, broad and squat, on the other side of the narrow waterway which constrained the sluggish Ciliwung River. The Hkh’Rkh were probably ranging in the locals, letting them get overconfident in the absence of a reply, and so lull these neophyte warriors into believing that they were safe to continue to fire from the same positions. And there was nothing that Opal could do to warn the irregulars of that mortal error. A lot of brave Indonesians were going to die as a result of their ignorance today. But the hard numbers—the chillingly cold equations of the tactical situation—were that if the Hkh’Rkh lost one trooper for every ten ad hoc civilian insurgents they killed this day, their occupation would be over by nightfall.
She looked north. Nothing to be seen yet, but the Taiwanese with her had vouched for the mainland tunnel rats’ reports that one of the dozens of Hkh’Rkh’s counterattacking units was moving in from that direction. The Sloths were probably looking to come in sneaky-Pete quiet, get in behind the insurgents up the street and take them out on their way back in to the hard point. Best guess was that most of the Hkh’Rkh of that strike force were moderately wounded, although none were what humans would consider critical. Street intel confirmed that the Hkh’Rkh were terminally triaging their true surgical cases out in the field. Less burden on the rear area services, and less need to pull combat effectives off the line to exfiltrate those wounded who were wholly incapacitated. The coldblooded efficiency of it gave the Hkh’Rkh an even more fearsome aspect; for them, “fight or die” wasn’t merely a rousing battle cry. It was a way of life. Even a unit of walking wounded like the one approaching Opal’s concealed positions had a combat mission. The Hkh’Rkh were supremely capable and confident fighters, Opal had to concede, but sometimes they were possibly a bit too confident…
Movement: a shadow in the mists one hundred meters to the north, loping across the street and then gone. Like a ghost.
“Little Guy, get your skinny ass back down here!”
O’Garran was now affixing a small, convex block to the base of the street pole.
“Little Guy!”
“Coming, Mother.” His mutter was more annoyed than jocular. O’Garran played out an arming wire from the back of the block, tossed the lead down the adjacent sewer grate. Behind her, Opal heard the senior mainland Chinese officer—Chou, who spoke almost no English—give orders to fish the wire out of the muck and hook it up to the command switches. At least that’s what Opal supposed he was saying since that’s what his men were doing. She looked sideways at the ranking Taiwanese officer—Wu, an English-fluent detective from Taitung—but he was facing rigidly in the same direction she was. And he’s still not too happy with me. But it’s not like I had any choice. The mainlanders are well-trained and there are five times as many of them. I had to give their CO seniority. Hell, it was hard enough to get them to accept O’Garran as my XO. Wu—the Taiwanese—hadn’t said a thing but she could tell he felt sold out.
O’Garran leaned a mauled street vendor’s sign in front of the convex block and then hopped down through the open manhole, shooting past Opal and almost landing square on the fiber-optic spool.
“Watch it,” Opal snapped. “You want to cut our commo?”
“Wouldn’t think of it. The repeater net is down?”
“Not yet, but the Roaches are doing their best to tear it to pieces.” She looked behind her. Chou, the third in command, was quickly scanning the screen of the palmcomp he had hooked up to one of the spool’s fiber-optic splitter-leads. “According to Wu, Chou’s seeing reports from other infiltration units that the Arat Kur have started using a few smaller-yield EMP devices.”
“They’re trying to burn down the system.”
“They’re getting our decoy nodes, mostly. And a lot of non-milspec electronics along with them. As we expected they would. But soon, we and the other tunnel rats may become the telephone operators for our offensive. Our fiber optics could be the only reliable local commo.”