by Dale Brown
“I believe something lighter.”
“There were no weapons used in this last encounter,” said Reid.
“True. Maybe some carry weapons and some don’t. Or they weren’t correctly positioned for attack. Or many other possibilities,” said Rubeo. “But planes were shot down previously, and we have to assume that if they have the base technology, they can weaponize it. The Gen 4 Flighthawks would have carried lasers. And the Gen 4 Flighthawk appears to be an excellent model.”
He waved his hand for the next slide, which showed an artist’s rendition of the unknown UAV next to a Gen 4 Flighthawk. The Gen 4’s wings were a little longer, its tail a bit stubbier, but the airfoils were very similar. The Gen 4 had not gone into production, superseded by the smaller and faster Sabres, which were capable of distributed autonomous control—they made real-time decisions on their own.
“Lasers small enough to be on that class of UAVs are too impractical for combat,” said Reid. “The Air Force studied the matter in great depth.”
“They’re impractical only in a high-threat environment,” answered Rubeo. He had strongly disagreed with the Air Force’s assessment of small weaponized lasers, though the decision to choose the Sabres instead of the Gen 4s made the point moot. “And the report didn’t consider the latest evolutions.”
“It was a cost problem as much as anything,” said Breanna. “Outfitting a fleet of UAVs with lasers was a budget buster. The Flighthawks and the Sabres have proven that lightweight cannons are enough in aerial combat, and have an advantage in ground attack. For the foreseeable future, at least, they make a lot of sense.”
“All right. We need to tell the President that we need more data,” agreed Reid. “And we need it quickly. Clearly, it’s a critical threat. And it’s not coming from China.”
“No,” said Rubeo. “Ultimately, I’m afraid, we are probably the source of the technology.”
“We?”
“Dreamland, Special Projects, or my companies,” said Rubeo. “The links may seem vague, but their sum total is unmistakable.”
5
Malaysia
THE MALAYSIAN UNIT had been hit hard, with four of their men wounded and four dead. So Turk was surprised when Captain Deris came and told him he wanted to get back into the field immediately.
“There are only two places they could be now,” the captain told Turk after asking for his help. “If we can get flyovers we can see where they came from and strike at dark.”
“There were a lot of rebels. Most of them got away. Are you going to have reinforcements?”
“If the planes back us, we have more than enough.”
Deris sketched out a plan on a map of the area, then asked Turk to take it to the Marine squadron for approval. Turk, unsure what sort of reaction he would get from Greenstreet, decided to discuss it with Danny before doing anything else.
“I was worried you’d be sleeping,” he told the colonel when he spotted him in the mess tent.
Freah held up his coffee cup. “Not with the coffee these guys brew. I won’t be sleeping for a month. What’s up?”
“The Malaysians want to attack. They think they have the rebel bases figured out.”
Turk explained the plan to Danny.
“They’re brave, but that’s no substitute for firepower,” said Freah. “They don’t have enough people to do all this.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think so either,” said Turk. “But they want to get these guys.”
“The Marines are talking about finding the rest of the rebels who attacked them,” said Danny. “Maybe we can figure something out.”
CAPTAIN THOMAS HAD asked for a platoon of reinforcements to be sent in from the MEU to go after the rebels who’d attacked. With three rifle sections or squads, the unit totaled forty men, and would be there by nightfall.
“We could send two squads with the Malaysians,” suggested Thomas. “That will be more than enough to deal with these guys, as long as we have air support.”
Greenstreet was in a better mood, or at least one that allowed him to ignore Turk when he saw him. Reviewing the plan with Cowboy, he gave a grudging nod, then said he was handicapped with Rogers still sick.
“I’m down to three pilots,” said Greenstreet. “I can only get three planes up.”
“We can do it with two,” said Thomas.
“You have to worry about the UAV showing up,” said Danny. “Are two planes enough?”
“You’d want two planes to deal with it,” suggested Turk. “So really, two planes handle the attack, and two fly cover.”
Greenstreet bristled, but didn’t contradict him.
“Then one jet on the attack, if we only have three,” said Thomas.
“It’s tight if they’re at both spots,” said Greenstreet. “It’s just a question of how much ordnance we can bring. Maybe we mix the loads, have one flying CAP and the other two attacking but ready to tangle with the UAV.”
CAP was an old acronym for command air patrol, meaning that the single aircraft would fly top cover for the others when they attacked.
“What about Turk flying?” asked Danny. “He did pretty well.”
“These are Marine aircraft,” snapped Greenstreet. “Marine aviators will fly them. I’ll work it out.”
Danny and Thomas exchanged a look, but there was nothing more to be said. Greenstreet stomped off, Cowboy in tow.
“He’ll come around,” predicted Thomas. “He’s just protecting his turf. Some guys are like that. Even Marines.”
“WE’RE MARINES, NOT pussies,” complained Cowboy as soon as they were out of earshot. His anger and language were calculated, though his sentiments were not. “I’ll go up and help them.”
“Relax, Lieutenant,” said Greenstreet. “I fully intend on doing the mission.”
“What?”
“I said I would work it out.”
“You kinda sounded—”
“Pissed off? Yes. We want two planes to deal with a UAV—what was that about?”
“He’s just being careful,” said Cowboy.
“You think he would have said that to an Air Force pilot?”
“Turk’s pretty straight up.”
“And another thing. They’re not sharing everything they know. That UAV is the entire reason we’re here. What do we know about it? Jack shit.”
“They say they’re here to get intel.”
“They’re spoon-feeding us information. That’s what I think.”
Cowboy didn’t think that was fair, but it was really beside the point. They had to fly the mission.
“We had casualties on the ground,” he told his commander. “That means we get out there and get some payback.”
“We’ll get payback.” Greenstreet folded his arms. “But we’ll do it right.”
“That’s why I’m here,” replied Cowboy. “It’s the only way I know how to do things.”
6
The Cube
THE APPEARANCE OF the advanced UAVs in an obscure third world guerrilla battle had set off alarms within the American intelligence community. The immediate consensus among the tech people was that China had leapt several generations in UAV development and was testing the equipment in a place where few would notice. The fact that China had no ties to the rebels who were benefiting—and in fact had every reason not to support them—gave rise to another theory that Russia was actually the country behind the aircraft. This was backed by a smaller group, who had even less evidence on their side. Outlier theories—that Japan or Israel were involved—had occasionally been floated, only to be quickly shot down.
None of the theories tied the aircraft to either Dreamland, which had originally developed combat UAVs, or Rubeo’s different firms, which had worked on the AI and some of the avionics and body shaping.
But Rubeo knew they would. And for that reason alone, he had to figure out exactly what the aircraft were and who was flying them.
Of course, that wasn’t the only reason. The combat UAVs had revolutionized air
combat. And as dangerous as they were in the hands of China, they could be even more dangerous if controlled by someone else. From what Rubeo had seen so far, they were still being tested. Give whoever was handling them a few more months and they would be even more formidable.
Technically, Rubeo was no longer a government employee, but as the head of the firm that had designed most of the Cube’s systems and had an extremely close relationship with the Office of Special Projects, he’d been allotted an office in the deepest basement of the bunker, next to the situation room—convenient, since it allowed him to go back and forth quickly when he wanted. The office was spartan—a wooden desk, a very old, barely padded chair, a single lamp—but that was the way Rubeo liked it.
If he needed to sleep and wanted something more comfortable than the chair, he had a small bedroll tucked next to the desk.
The furniture was spare, but his communications and computing gear was state of the art. The desk sagged under the weight of four different sets of screens and hand-built CPU units, each more powerful than the standard IBM mainframe of only a generation ago.
He’d uploaded data from the UAV to one of his units, where he ran flight and computation simulators, trying to divine what the unidentified UAV was capable of. The parallels to the Flighthawk Gen 4 were striking. But as Rubeo looked at the data they had gathered so far, he went back to the destroyed chip.
He’d called it a processing chip during his briefing, but that wasn’t entirely correct. It seemed to actually function as a gateway between other processing chips, or at least that was his engineer’s theory. And Rubeo’s team had managed to extract a long piece of code from a memory unit embedded in the fuselage remnant.
The code sequence matched sequences used in the early Flighthawks, with an additional “tail” added for the brains used in the Gen 4 version.
There was no way that was a coincidence. While the “tail” solved a number of common problems that might be arrived at independently, appending it to the other sequences had been a matter of expediency—why reinvent the wheel?
The sequence had a command syntax: had it been words rather than numerals, it would have had a specific grammar and punctuation indicating that it was a command. But it was encrypted—though it was clearly a command, it was impossible to tell which command it was. To use the sentence metaphor, it was as if all the letters in the sentence had been exchanged for others.
The exchange wasn’t random, of course. And since Rubeo had a database of all the Gen 4 commands, breaking the encryption, while not trivial, was not impossible.
The computer back at his New Mexico lab had just done that. The command initiated a “flee” sequence, directing the aircraft to leave the battle ten minutes after the start of the encounter. It had been intended as a fail-safe if the controlled UAV lost its connection to the base; here it was probably being used to get the aircraft home.
But it wasn’t the command that interested Rubeo—it was the encryption. The Gen 4 Flighthawks used a software process for the encryption that took advantage of the nano-architecture of hand-built chips off the main circuits. There were advantages to this approach, most notably since it allowed for a more complicated—“robust” was the preferred term—system of encrypting the data in real time, which in turn made the UAV brains harder to hack. The process turned out to be too cumbersome for large-scale production; they could never get the chip count high enough to make it practical. Now, advances in manufacturing made that problem trivial; at the time, though, the process had been a breakthrough. DNA snippets were used as keys.
So here was a fingerprint—the DNA might reveal who had stolen the work, or at least whose work had been stolen.
“Compare vector in cycle Mark 56Z through Mark 987AA7 to typical DNA pattern,” Rubeo told the computer.
He waited as the mainframes back in New Mexico churned.
“Pattern would fit on X chromosome,” declared the computer.
Rubeo leaned back from the screen. He wasn’t sure whether to go on or not.
“Compare the possible encryption key to DNA contained in all personnel files for present and past employees, and in the Dreamland archives.”
It took twenty minutes—less time than he had thought.
“Match discovered,” said the computer.
“Identify,” said Rubeo.
“Gleason, Jennifer. Now deceased.”
7
Malaysia
NONE OF THE Malaysians had ever been in an Osprey before, and while Turk kept telling them it was no different than riding in a helicopter, they approached the aircraft with expressions similar to those of four-year-olds queuing for a pony ride. The wide-eyed stares continued once aboard the aircraft, whose interior was surely no fancier than the Eurocopters and Sikorskys they were used to. The Marine crew chief winked at Turk as they took off, joking that he could have charged the Malaysians for the ride and made a killing.
Dusk had fallen a few hours before. The sky was clear and there was enough light from the moon and the stars to see a good distance, though the jungle would make that far more difficult. But the darkness favored the Marines, who were not only equipped to fight in it but had practiced extensively to do so.
Sitting between Captain Deris and Private Isnin, Turk checked his gear. The Marines had outfitted him with an M-16 assault rifle and night vision, as well as body armor and a helmet. He had his own smart glasses, which not only tied into Whiplash but also to the Marines.
Though officially the Marines were “assisting” the Malaysians, in actual fact the operation was far more American than Malaysian. The Marines were not only supplying more men, they had redrawn the game plan from start to finish. It was better in any number of ways, and not simply because they had more men at their disposal.
A small group of rebels had been spotted at one of the clearing areas southwest of where they mounted the mortar attack. Apparently exhausted, they had stopped there to rest and restock; the rebels typically cached weapons in different areas for just such an occasion. Located some twenty miles from the base, the area lay along a dirt road that wound up on the side of a ridge. The nearby jungle canopy was too thick for the sensors on the Marine RQ7Z Shadow UAV to penetrate, but the Marines assumed that lookouts had been posted both near the road and at local high points, which would make any force moving on the road itself easily detected.
Their attack plan took advantage of that. Split in two, the assault teams would be dropped at two different landing zones four miles from the rebels, one northeast and one southwest. The group dropped to the southwest would move into a blocking position straddling the road a mile south of the rebels. The other would advance toward the camp from the north along the road. The idea was simple: the rebels would see the advancing unit and move to get away, running into the group at the bottom. They would be “encouraged” to move by an air attack just as the northern force came into sight.
There was a possibility, of course, that the rebels would stand and fight, even though their position was not well chosen for defense. In that case, the hammer and anvil attack would turn into an envelopment, with the southern group pressing most of the attack. This would be a slower operation but it would still allow the Marines to bring overwhelming force against their enemy.
Turk and most of the Malaysians were with the southern group; only Sergeant Intan was with the northern group, providing Malaysian presence more for legal reasons than strategy.
The Osprey taxied for a few seconds then lifted off, flying more as an airplane than a helicopter. Only a few moments seemed to pass before the Marine crew chief walked down the aisle at the center of the aircraft and held up two fingers.
“Two minutes,” he said. “Two minutes.”
DANNY FREAH DUCKED his head involuntarily as he ran toward the rear of the Osprey. The rotors, just starting to spin, were nowhere near him, but there was something about the windmill sound overhead that triggered the ducking reflex.
“Hi, Colonel, what’s
up?” asked Corporal Mofitt. The corporal was with Group North, the augmented Marine rifle squad that would attack the rebels first.
“I decided to come along for the ride.”
Mofitt gave him a thumbs-up, then turned to the officer next to him. “Sir, do you know Colonel Freah?”
“We met,” said the lieutenant, Tom Young. The squad leader got up from the nylon fabric bench to stick out his hand. Danny had met him during the mission brief.
“Hey, Tom,” said Danny, sticking out his hand to put the young man at ease. “Don’t mind me. I’m just along for the ride. It’s your show.”
“Yes, sir, thank you,” said Young.
Danny knew that the lieutenant would feel a little uncomfortable having a senior officer looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t here to criticize or even supervise; he just wanted to be where the action was.
“I’ll try to stay out of your way,” he told the Marine officer, whose square chin looked a little too wide for the rest of his face. “I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d make myself useful.”
“Yes, sir.”
Danny took a seat across the aisle and scanned the rest of the faces in the aircraft. A few were expressionless, eyes locked on some invisible point in the distance. A few looked worried, not fearful exactly but apprehensive. Danny recognized the look, common in men who had never faced combat—concerned that they might let their buddies down.
The majority had nothing to fear in that regard.
There were also a few expressions that spoke only of eagerness. These belonged to men whose adrenaline was already raging, for whom danger and excitement were life itself.
Danny suspected his face looked very much like theirs, even though he did his best to hide his emotions.
Combat was an unforgiving and uncompromising master; it extracted things far more valuable than the momentary adrenaline high. People he loved had died, and worse. That there were many worse things than death was still something that shocked him.
And yet he went to it willingly. More—he sought it out.
