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 afterward, 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.
Merry Meredith had just finished praying when Taylor squeezed into the operations center. Neither the assistant S-3 captain nor the two NCOs who shared the crowded chamber with Meredith had realized that the intelligence officer was praying, since Meredith did not join his hands together or kneel or close his eyes. Meredith's prayers were simply moments of silence aimed in the general direction of God, along with a few unspoken pleas. Just let me get through this. Let me see Maureen again. Let me hold her. Let me get through this. Please. And that was it.
Meredith was not a religious man. But, following repeated experiences in Los Angeles and Mexico, he had come to accept this particular form of cowardice in himself. In times of peace, he would never have dreamed of wasting a Sunday morning in church. But, on the edge of battle, God invariably loomed large.
"What's up, Merry?" Taylor asked, holding on to an overhead brace with one hand. His shoulder holster stood away from his uniform, and the reddish light from the control banks and monitors made the colonel's scarred face appear to be on fire.
"We're looking good, sir," Meredith said. "The bad guys are still just sitting there, fat, dumb, and happy." He tapped at a button. "Look at this. It's the target array at Objective Ruby. If the M-l00s just work at fifty percent of capacity…"
"Still no indication that the enemy have picked us up?" Taylor asked.
Meredith understood the wonder in Taylor's voice. It was hard to believe that the regiment had made it this far. From Kansas to the edge of hell. Their luck only needed to hold a little longer now.
"Not a sign, sir. No increase in comms. No enhanced air defense readiness. No interceptors up. No ground force dispersal. It's almost too good to be true."