by FX Holden
“Alright, that’s a bigger prize. SSC, turn that quadrotor around. Put it over contact Charlie one two and start prosecuting. I’ll call it up to the bridge and see what they want us to do.” Drysdale wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he knew better than to ignore the instincts of Chief Goldmann.
Goldmann smiled and clapped Bell on the shoulder. “You’re wrong, this is going to cost you more than your liberty, Ears.”
RAF Service Custody Facility (‘The Jug’),
Episkopi Garrison, Cyprus, May 14
Flying Officer Karen ‘Bunny’ O’Hare had just set a record for the longest time served by a woman in ‘the jug’ at RAF airbase Akrotiri.
Forty days. That was the penalty for smacking a Squadron Leader in the jaw with your flight helmet. That and, of course, an administrative discharge without privileges – suspended. Bunny would have been shipped back home on the first available flight if the situation in Syria had been any different, but Coalition forces didn’t have the luxury of saying goodbye to a combat-tested pilot like O’Hare. Not with all hell about to break loose two hundred miles south-west in Syria.
Forty days and then she’d be moved to a new unit for the duration of her tour. Which was fine by O’Hare. If she never saw her former CO, ‘Red’ Burgundy, again, it would be too soon. She’d just landed after a six-hour combat sortie in which she’d damaged a Russian Su-57 Felon stealth fighter and destroyed three Syrian ground units, and Burgundy had stalked across the apron to her machine and accosted her as she climbed down from her cockpit, barely able to stand, let alone take in what he was saying. She registered that he was angry at her though (again), which she decided was a bit rich considering she’d just flown her third combat sortie in 48 hours, so she had, in the words she’d used to the Defense Force Magistrate, ‘gently prodded him in the face’ with her 5lb. flight helmet and stalked off. Burgundy had been knocked out and lost a tooth, so probably it had been a little more than a gentle prod.
She had only two more days left to serve, however, and then she’d walk out to learn her fate. She had no idea what had been happening in the big wide world for the last five weeks. When she’d been put away, Coalition forces inside Turkey had just beaten back a Syrian armor attack on the NATO base at Incirlik in southern Turkey. In a serious escalation, Russian air force units supporting Syria had taken their gloves off and gone toe to toe with Coalition fighters in the skies over Turkey. It was the first time western and Russian stealth fighters had faced off against each other in combat, and she was pretty interested to find out what the final kill count was. When she’d touched down at RAF Akrotiri after her last mission, she’d have called it a Coalition win, but only just. The western Coalition fighters of the UK, Turkey and Australia had claimed a handful of Russian Felon stealth fighters and four Okhotnik stealth drones. The Felons had destroyed two Coalition F-35 Panthers and more than a half dozen of their ‘BATS’ drone wingmen. But the Coalition stealth fighters had proven highly effective in ground attack with standoff weapons, blunting the Syrian armored push right on the perimeter of Incirlik before US B-21 strategic bombers laid waste to the remaining Syrian tanks and troops with a blizzard of cruise missiles.
She’d heard Syria and Turkey had signed a ceasefire, but what did that mean? Was the conflict done? Would she be shipped back home in disgrace and demobbed now? She’d been bugging the British guards who delivered her food and led her out to the showers or for exercise to give her a radio at least, but they were annoyingly uncommunicative. She’d had a few phone calls from her mates at 3 Squadron and they had shared a rumor that the Turkish action was just a warm-up for something bigger, maybe a faceoff between Syria and Israel. But that couldn’t have kicked off yet, or she would have heard a lot more activity in the skies over the garrison holding cells. She’d passed the time in her windowless cell trying to identify the aircraft flying overhead by the growl and whine of their engines. She’d picked up F-35s and F-15s, Tempests and Typhoons, some heavier transport and rotary-winged aircraft. The arrival of the F-15s was interesting. The RAF and RAAF didn’t field F-15s, only the USA or its Middle East allies. If there were F-15s at Akrotiri now, maybe some of the F-35s she was hearing were American too. In which case, it was a clear sign the US had decided to have a little more skin in the game. Which told her maybe it wasn’t all peace and harmony outside her cell.
She looked at her watch and then at the cell door. Eleven a.m. You could say what you liked about the Brits, but they were civilized. Eleven a.m. was morning tea time. The nice Corporal Georgiou of the Sovereign Base Areas Police Service would be along any minute with a mug of hot sweet tea and a biscuit. She stood and stretched, doing a few wall push-ups as she waited so that her muscles wouldn’t completely atrophy. She looked at her watch again. Eleven oh seven. He was late.
Bunny heard the scuffle of feet outside and the beep of the lock. How many pairs of feet? Georgiou usually came alone. Something was up.
As the cell door swung open, she saw what. Georgiou was standing there with two mugs alongside a woman in her fifties, her hair tied back in a bun, with a curious look on her face as she peered around the door into the cell. She was wearing a white cotton blouse, blue jeans and sneakers.
“Flying Officer, ’ow you doin’ this mornin’?” Georgiou asked in his best Greek Cypriot imitation of a British accent.
“Fine, Corporal, you?”
“Dandy, thank you. ’Ere you are, ma’am,” the Corporal said, handing the civilian the two tea mugs. He walked in and placed a plastic plate with two cookies on it on the only other furniture in the cell apart from her bed, a fold-down plastic stool fixed to the wall. “’Ere you go, enjoy.” He walked back to the door of the cell, where the woman was still standing with the mugs of tea, as though deciding whether this was a good idea after all. “You can go on in, she don’ bite.” Georgiou winked at O’Hare as he stepped out of the way, closing the door behind the woman as she stepped into the cell.
“Hi, I’m Shelly Kovacs.”
American. She pronounced it Ko-vach. O’Hare wasn’t an expert at American accents, so all she could tell was the woman wasn’t from Texas or the Deep South. O’Hare lifted the plate of cookies from the stool and indicated Kovacs should sit. “Hello Shelly Kovacs, I’m Flying Officer Karen O’Hare.” The woman stepped awkwardly forward, offering her one of the mugs of tea, and O’Hare took it. As she sat on the stool, O’Hare looked at her again. She didn’t look military. So not anyone’s air force. US Defense Intelligence maybe? No. CIA? Definitely not. If anything, she looked like a poorly paid lawyer, a public defender perhaps. That thought did not cheer O’Hare up. “I haven’t been allowed any visitors, Shelly Kovacs,” O’Hare told her. “So how did you get through?”
Kovacs sipped the tea, then wrinkled her nose and set the mug down on the floor. “Well, actually, I’m a bit of a fan, Flying Officer.”
“Uh huh.”
“I mean … not the whole whacking your CO on the noggin thing. But I’ve been going through the data from all the air-to-air engagements of the Turkish conflict…”
“War. When countries are trying to solve their differences by shooting missiles and tank shells at each other, it’s war.”
“The Turkish war, yes. And I was particularly intrigued by a combat patrol you flew on April 2, defending the airspace over Incirlik. Maybe you remember it?”
O’Hare frowned. She’d flown a lot of missions in a short space of time, but of course she remembered April 2. The reason she was frowning was because she was wondering why Shelly Kovacs was interested in a mission Karen O’Hare had flown on April 2.
“You didn’t really introduce yourself, Shelly.”
“Oh, right, sorry!” The woman stuck out her hand awkwardly. “I’m a project lead on the DARPA UMS program…” She paused, noticing that O’Hare was still frowning at her. “Uhm, Defense Advanced Research…”
“… Projects Agency, yes, I know,” O’Hare told her. “The guys who develop the secret weapo
ns.”
“Well, not so secret. You can look up UMS on the internet. Unmanned systems. I’m on the unmanned combat aerial systems team. You’ve heard of the F-47?”
“The Navy drone?” Bunny nodded. “I heard of it. Haven’t seen one. It’s like the Russian Okhotnik, right?”
Kovacs leaned forward, a gleam in her eyes. “You engaged an Okhotnik flight, didn’t you? I read your combat report and pulled the data logs. You…”
“I know what I did. I nearly got killed by one of those bat-winged mothers.”
“You destroyed one. Your CO destroyed two. But in your final dogfight you used an unorthodox evasive maneuver that went directly against the algorithm your AI was telling you to follow, and it…”
“Would have got me killed, if that Okhotnik had been carrying missiles. But it wasn’t.”
“How could you know?”
“The flight profile of that Okhotnik flight suggested they were recon birds.”
“Suggested?”
“Yeah. It was a gut thing. We bet on them not carrying missiles.”
Kovacs looked disappointed.
“You DARPA types don’t like pilots telling you it’s a gut thing, am I right?” O’Hare guessed. “You can’t program that.”
“Oh, we can. Except it isn’t gut. It’s probability theory, not gut or instinct. Or you can call it what it is, a wild ass guess.”
O’Hare laughed. “Fair enough. But you aren’t here to talk about those Okhotniks. That mission was on April 3. Not April 2.”
Kovacs looked suddenly serious. “You’re right. I’m here to talk about how on April 2 you overrode the command and control protocols for six Boeing Airpower Teaming System Loyal Wingman drones, took command of them and then used them to engage a wave of Russian OVOD cruise missiles.”
“I was out of missiles myself. They were the only platforms airborne and available.”
“You commandeered six drones by hacking my software mid-flight!”
“That was your software? Sorry. If you didn’t want me to, you shouldn’t have built it so I could.”
“You shouldn’t have known how! You used a diagnostic routine to open a command channel. How did you…”
O’Hare drew her legs up under her. “Shelly, do you own a car?”
“What? Yes.”
“What is it?”
“A GM Zap.”
“Don’t know it. But I’d bet you if you gave me a beer, the manufacturer’s handbook and a half an hour, I could get you an extra fifty miles per charge on the battery.” O’Hare had finished her biscuit and took the other woman’s without asking. “If you put me in the driver’s seat of something, I want to know how it works so if it breaks, I can try to fix it. I read all the maintenance manuals, I go deep into the diagnostic menus, I get up in the weapons bay and learn how to mount the ordnance. I borrow testing tools from the Quality Engineers and I dig into the code…”
“You can read computer code?”
“Read and write. I know Java, C, C++ and Ada.” Bunny gave her a tight smile. “But enough about me, you still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
“Well, like I said, I was going through the combat logs of all the F-35 pilots who fought over Turkey. Yours caught my eye because most pilots follow the AI cues in combat, and you didn’t, most pilots don’t hack their own comms system mid dogfight, and you did.” Kovacs looked around the cell. “And then when I approached RAAF liaison for permission to talk to you, I found out you were in here…”
“Two more days.”
“Then what?”
“Haven’t been told. I’m not going back to 3 Squadron, that bridge has been burned. I’m guessing a transfer to 75 Squadron until my tour is done. They’re due to rotate in from Qatar last I heard.”
Kovacs shook her head. “No. They’re putting you on a desk. Operational Liaison, Coalition Air Ops, Nicosia.”
Bunny crossed her arms. “Liaison? Seriously?”
“What they told me.”
Bunny leaned her head back against the cell wall and closed her eyes. “Oh, God. A firing squad would have been better.”
“What if I could keep you flying, in a sense?”
Bunny narrowed her eyes. “What does that even mean, in a sense?”
Kovacs got a gleam in her eyes again. “We have a development hub at Al Azraq Air Base in Jordan. Field testing a new F-47B for the US Marines…”
“Drones.”
“Armed drones, able to carry 2,000lb. of ordnance. You’ve flown against the Okhotnik? The F-47 packs more punch per lb., flies faster, has a smaller radar cross-section, can see further…”
“It has shorter legs,” Bunny said, arms still crossed. “And … did I mention? Drone.”
Kovacs tried coming at Bunny from a different direction. “You like flying the F-35 Panther?”
“Sure.”
“But when you fly a Panther, you’re only flying one fighter.”
“With a BATS wingman, two.”
“How would you like to fly six at a time?”
“Six?”
“I’ve written experimental code that would allow a single pilot in a trailer on the ground to command up to six F-47s in combat. Just like you did when you commandeered those BATS over Incirlik, but with command and control routines designed to enable you to adapt their offensive or defensive postures on the fly, set them free to follow semi-autonomous guidance, break them into smaller flights each with their own sub-missions and targets…” – Kovacs was talking quickly – “… a single pilot, flying a hex of aircraft, together more lethal than any F-35, even with a BATS wingman.”
“A hex.”
“What I’m calling a flight of six F-47s. In a hot war, the losing side rarely runs out of airframes. Pilot attrition is the killer. You kill one plane, you kill or capture one pilot. Pretty soon the losing side is running out of pilots and morale is shot. But with a single pilot controlling six fighters, and that pilot safe and sound behind friendly lines, you might lose a fighter or two, but you have no pilot attrition, no POWs being paraded in front of the cameras on network news, you save on pilots, training…”
Bunny was listening now, biting her lip in thought. “You could plan a broader range of missions, be bolder, take more risks.”
“Exactly! We’re in combat testing phase, conducting some Red Flag missions against the Jordanians. But I don’t have a pilot on the team with your combat experience or your … creativity,” Kovacs said, and then grinned. “Of course, if you’d prefer to sit at a desk in Nicosia behind a laptop…”
“You could get me assigned to this DARPA project?”
“I’m pretty sure. Your CO didn’t sound exactly unhappy when I raised the idea with him.”
“I bet he didn’t.”
“So? Can I tell my Program Manager you’re in?”
Bunny held out her hand and shook with Kovacs. “With bells on, mate.”
US Pentagon, May 14
“Mister Secretary, I think we need to go to DEFCON 2,” Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Austin Clarke, said with barely disguised urgency as the US Secretary of Defense, Harold McDonald, walked into the National Military Command Center Emergency Conference Room sixty feet under a Pentagon parking lot.
“Easy, Admiral,” McDonald said, sitting down heavily at the mahogany table ringed by the other members of the Joint Chiefs, who had already been in session for several hours. “It’s only 48 hours since I agreed to take Navy and Air Force in Central Command to DEFCON 3. That used up just about all the credit I had with the President. I’m about tapped out, unless you’ve got something dramatically different to tell me.”
Clarke had prepared for exactly this response. He knew McDonald well after nearly two years in which they had both been in the same chairs. He was never quick to act, never made a move without confirming it with President Henderson first, and he had a tendency to meddle at the operational level, instead of leaving the war fighting to his generals and admirals.
Across the back of the room, specialist operations officers were arrayed behind communication screens and Clarke motioned to the Assistant Deputy Director for Operations to bring up the first map on the wall-to-floor screen at the other end of the room.
“Force dispositions, current at…” he looked at his watch, “… 2300 hours local, 0600 in the Eastern Med. Syrian Daraa military district on the border of Lebanon and the Golan Heights UN Demilitarized Zone or DMZ. So far we have positively identified units including the Russian trained and armed Syrian 4th Assault Corps, 4th Armored Republic Guards Battalion and an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps ‘Quds’ special forces battalion. What’s changed since yesterday, they’ve now been reinforced by 60 T-14 Armata tanks and personnel belonging to the Russian Strauss Security Group, but our intelligence indicates all tanks and support personnel were drawn directly from the Russian 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division…”
“A private security company fielding Russia’s most advanced main battle tank? They expect us to buy that?” McDonald scowled. A fifty-eight-year-old former four-star Marine General, he still dragged his 220lb. frame around a running track twice a week and his scowl had been known to wreck lesser careers than Clarke’s.
“I don’t think they worry overly much what we think, sir,” Clarke said in his mild South Carolina drawl. He shifted his pointer to the Israeli side of the border. “Israel has mobilized every unit in its Northern Command facing Lebanon and Syria. Last night it pulled a heavyweight unit out of Gaza, the 1st Golani Brigade, and moved it into defensive positions near the Golan, just outside the UN DMZ.”
“Defensive. They’re not planning a pre-emptive strike?”
“It’s possible, though we’d expect to see the tanks of the Israeli 7th and 36th Armor Divisions moving up to the ceasefire line if that was the case. They’re still inside their bases.”
“So Russia has beefed up its ground support. Any change in Russian air operations?”
