Ancol (Dream) Park, Jakarta
2323 Hours; Zone Time, October 31, 2008
Ancol Park was the playground of the city of Jakarta. A complex of amusement rides, sports fields and public gardens, it stretched for over a mile along the shore of the Java Sea, east of the city’s port facilities, its broad yellow beaches a favorite escape for the city’s populace when the environment became too sweltering for even the tropic born to cope with.
In proper, sane times it was a crowded, happy place, meant for pleasure and relaxation.
Of late however, it had been a place of desolation and emptiness, occupied only by shadows, a handful of fearful squatters displaced by the fighting inside the city and an occasional rebel military patrol.
Now an ominous set of newcomers intruded. The Shenandoah’s AAAV platoon snarled out of the surf. Their tracks redeployed, the big amphibious fighting machines bulldozing aside the occasional picnic table as they scrabbled up the sand to the firmer ground of the soccer fields beyond the beach area.
Once on the grass, their line abreast formation bowed outward into a defensive arc, the vehicles positioning so that their heaviest armor and armament would bear on any intruder approaching the beach head.
The point was proven within seconds as an Indonesian Army motor patrol tore onto the soccer field from inland, investigating the growl and chatter of engines and treads. The Indonesian Land Rover skidded to a halt as its headlights fell on a massive, sleekly angular camo-painted shape crouching on the grass. The corporal commanding the patrol reached for his radio microphone, but never completed the move as the AAAV’s bushmaster turret whipped around and spat out a quick-draw burst of 25mm fire.
Tailgates dropped and a mixed team of US Army Rangers and Force Recon Marines poured down the ramps. The majority of the troops fanned out to establish a wider defense perimeter beyond the arc of the vehicle line. The remainder began to hastily offload and deploy the base plates, tripods, and tubes of a pair of 120mm heavy mortars. Cases of shells followed, and ordnance men carefully began to lay a series of ugly black sausage shapes on the ground, each finned projectile having a glassy, quarter-sized lens inset in its nose.
*
“The landing force reports perimeter secured and mortars up!” a Marine force SO reported. “Ready to commence firing.”
“Very good,” Amanda replied. “Mortars may commence firing as they get designation. Drone control, start
trolling. You are cleared to fire and designate at will.”
*
In the drone control center, twelve young men and women sat encased in a computer synthesized world. Each manipulated a pair of throttle and controller grips and each wore a blank-visored video helmet that turned and nodded as they scanned an environment ten miles distant.
They were of a generation that had teethed and grown up with videogames. Now, they were turning their skill with an amusement into a grim profession. They were the first generation of warbot warriors. Many others would follow.
Peering through the telepresence eyes of their robotic airborne alter-egos, they peeled off and dove recklessly into the streets canyons of Jakarta. As they descended, they flicked on the navigational strobe lights of their RPVs. They wanted to be seen. It was their mission to be shot at. It was their expectation to die, at least cybernetically.
Tracer streams shot up at them. Even with their brigade command-and-control networks knocked out, the individual rebel commanders at the company and battalion levels were convulsively reacting to the attack.
A Scorpion light tank sat parked on the bridge where the Samanhudi Boulevard crossed the Ganung Sahari canal. The vehicle commander elevated his anti-aircraft machine gun and blazed at one of the impudently blinking sets of lights in the sky.
The targeted RPV’s operator, a nineteen-year-old “geek goddess” from Cleveland, Ohio, responded as she had in a thousand games of “Unreal Tournament” and “Doom III”, bobbing, weaving, evading and countering with one of her drone’s brace of radar-guided Hellfire missiles.
The hundred-and-ten-pound Hellfire had been designed to deal with armored fighting vehicles much larger than the Scorpion. Consequently, the little British-built scout tank was flattened like a tin can.
Satisfied, the Geek Goddess from Cleveland went back on the hunt.
*
Farther east, an Eagle Eye operator stalked a previously spotted target, a pair of Rhinemetal 20mm anti-aircraft twin mounts emplaced in one of the open display areas of the Jakarta Fair Grounds. His recon RPV carried no weapons of its own, only something just as deadly: a laser designator pod.
Gingerly, the Eagle Eye operator “hovered up” over the roof of the Airport International Hotel and “started the music,” the invisible infra-red beam of his designator whipping out to paint the first of the anti-aircraft guns.
In the Landing Force Operations Center, a Marine fire control officer had been “piggybacking” the Eagle Eye operator, accessing the video feed from the RPV’s low-light television cameras. As the targeting crosshairs settled on the anti-aircraft gun and the active designation box snapped into existence on his telescreen, he spoke a command into his hot mike.
Ashore, inside the beachhead in Alcol Park, an Army Ranger let a 120mm round slide down the throat of his mortar, ducking back to avoid the muzzle blast as the shell struck the firing pin at the bottom of the tube.
The mortar had been pre-registered on the general area of the Fair Grounds. As the shell, a creation of the superb Swedish munitions firm of Bofors, pitched over the high point of its trajectory, the laser sensor in its nose went active. It sought for, and found, that one particular speck of modulated coherent light reflecting off the designated target. Its guidance fins trimmed as it adjusted its course.
Wham!
One round fired. One target eliminated. The ultimate in military efficiency.
The designator beam traversed and pointed accusingly at the second gun.
*
To the west, another Eagle Eye, its propeller/rotors tilted up into helicopter mode, stalked down the Jalang Torman Raya, keeping below the roof lines of the high-rise buildings along the boulevard. Focused on his precision flying, its operator was taken totally by surprise when a pickup truck load of Indonesian infantry darted out of a side street.
A light machine gun and half a dozen automatic rifles hammered up at the slow, low flying drone. Bullet streams ripped through the Eagle Eye’s structure and its systems operator swore as scarlet battle damage warnings flared around the perimeter of his vision field. As the fatally damaged drone began to plummet from the sky, its SO gave his controls one last savage wrench.
The cheer froze in the throats of the Indonesian infantrymen as the death plunge of the RPV they had downed changed into a flaming kamikaze dive straight into the bed of their truck.
Aboard the Shenandoah, the systems operator tore off his virtual reality helmet in disgust. Game over, for him and for others.
Back and forth over the city, the RPVs worked the target, provoking responses, building distraction, running risks manned aircraft couldn’t dare. And the robots paid for it, absorbing casualties from the growing volume of ground fire as they sterilized a corridor for men to follow.
*
In what had been the headquarters of the Jakarta Polici Harbor Patrol detachment, an officer hunched over the shoulder of the enlisted operator of a field radio, making said operator even more nervous.
“Damn it private! Can’t you get through that jamming? I need brigade now!”
“I’m sorry major, but this is something more than the jamming. I’m getting fragmentary traffic from the other tactical units, but brigade is completely off the air! There’s nothing on either the primary or the backup channels.”
