Authors: Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice
Southeastern Sudan
L
i Han heard the aircraft changing direction, its engines straining. He had counted on more time than this.
The motorcycle was twenty yards away. There was no sense running for it.
He stopped and turned, looking at the UAV tracking him. Its black skin stood out clearly in the blue sky. Barely a thousand feet away, it looked like a vulture, coming for its prey.
There was another nearby. This one was more common, a Predator.
Two aircraft. There was some consolation in that, he thought. He warranted more than the usual effort.
Western Ethiopia
A
warning buzzer sounded as the computer confirmed Mao Man’s identity. A missile had been launched from the interior of the mine he’d been using as cover.
The Raven immediately broke contact with its target. Flares fired from rear of the aircraft. The UAV shut off its engine and fell on its wing, sailing to the right to avoid the missile. Still without power, the UAV twisted on its back and folded into a three-quarter turn, clearing the area so quickly that the shoulder-launched SAM tracking it had no chance to react.
Instead, it locked on the heat signature of the flares. In a few moments it was past them, and realizing it was about to miss, detonated its warhead. Shrapnel sprayed harmlessly in the air.
Raven had already computed a course back to Mao Man. Interestingly enough, the hostile action had no effect on its evaluation of the target. It remained locked at 98.2.
Melissa turned to the Predator screen to watch the aircraft come around. There was a second SAM warning, this one from the Predator.
Then a proximity warning blared.
“Watch out!” Melissa yelled. “You’re too close!”
But it was too late. A black tail filled the Predator screen. Then the video went blank.
Melissa looked back to the Raven panel. It was off-line.
Southeastern Sudan
L
i Han threw himself to the ground, knowing he was dead.
There was a loud explosion high above him—the missile fired from the cave.
Then a second sound, closer, though this one softer and longer, more a smack and a tear than a bang.
Another explosion, farther away from the others. A loud crack similar to the first sound.
Li Han lay on the ground for several seconds. He knew he wasn’t dead, yet he didn’t entirely believe it. The aircraft had been so very close to him this time. Finally he pushed up to his knees and turned around. The sky was empty; the aircraft that had been following him were gone.
Once more, Li Han had cheated the Americans. Or God. Or both.
He took a few steps toward the car, then stopped. The aircraft must have been hit by the missiles. If so, their parts would be nearby. There would certainly be something worth scrounging or selling.
One of the Brothers ran from the cave, yelling at him in Arabic. The Brothers—they were all members of a radical group that called itself the Sudan Brotherhood—used Arabic as their official language of choice. It was a difficult language for Li Han; he would have much preferred English.
But the gist of what the man was saying was easily deciphered:
Praise Allah that you are alive.
You fool, thought Li Han. It was God who was trying to kill me.
“Where are the planes?” he said to the man in Arabic.
The brother shook his head. Li Han couldn’t be sure if he didn’t know or couldn’t understand his Chinese-accented Arabic.
“The airplane,” he said, using English, and held his hands out as if they were wings. The brother pointed toward the hills.
“Let us take a look,” said Li Han.
The brother began to protest.
“Don’t worry. The Americans never send three planes,” said Li Han, starting away. “We are safe for a while.”
CIA Headquarters Campus (Langley)
McLean, Virginia
J
onathon Reid frowned as soon as he entered the director’s dining room. Reginald Harker was sitting at the far end of the table, holding his coffee cup out for the attendant.
Worse news: there was only one other place set. When Reid had received the “invitation” to breakfast with CIA Director Herman Edmund, he assumed Edmund would actually be there.
As an old Agency hand, he should have known better. Reid’s official title was Special Assistant to the Deputy Director Operations, CIA; in fact, he ran his own portfolio of projects at Edmund’s behest. Officially “retired” and back on a contract basis, Reid was the grayest of grayhairs in the Agency.
“Jonathon.” Harker nodded, but didn’t rise.
Reid pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down. Harker had been with the CIA for a little over twenty years. In the old days, he’d been a Middle East expert, and had done his share of time in the region. Reid wasn’t sure what he’d done in the interim, but at the moment he was a deputy in the action directorate, a covert ops supervisor in charge of restricted projects. Reid didn’t know what they were; in fact, he didn’t even know Harker’s formal title. Titles often meant very little in their line of work.
“Just coffee,” Reid told the attendant. “Black.”
“I was glad you could make it,” said Harker after the woman left.
“I was under the impression Herman would be here,” said Reid.
“Very busy morning,” said Harker.
“We have business, then?”
Harker made a face, then looked to the door as the attendant knocked. The woman had worked for the Agency for nearly forty-five years, and undoubtedly had forgotten more secrets than either man had ever been told. But neither Harker nor Reid spoke until she finished laying out Harker’s meal and left a fresh pot of coffee for Reid.
“I understand you’re working with the Office of Special Technology,” said Harker finally. “Heading our half of it.”
“Mmmm,”
said Reid noncommittally.
“We need help on an assignment.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
Harker put his elbows on the table and leaned forward over his untouched egg. This was all just show and posture—exactly the thing Reid hated about the Agency bureaucracy. The man obviously needed a favor. He should just come out and say it.
“I’ve been working directly under D-CIA,” said Harker, meaning Edmund. “It’s a special project.”
“So far you’ve told me nothing.”
Harker frowned, then changed tact. “I thought you were retiring, Jonathon.”
“I am retired. Back on contract. At my pleasure.”
Harker picked up his fork and took a mouthful of egg. Reid could now guess what was up: something Harker was in charge of had gone to crap, and he needed help from Whiplash.
“How is it?” asked Reid.
“Cold,” said Harker, putting down his fork.
“So what went wrong?” said Reid finally.
“Why do you think something went wrong?”
“Reg, I have a lot of things to do today.”
“We have a project called Raven,” said Harker. “Have you heard of it?”
“No,” said Reid.
“Well that’s good, at least.” Harker rubbed his face. His fingers pushed so hard that they left white streaks on the skin. “It’s a follow-on to the Predator program. In a sense. We lost one of the planes last night in Africa. We need to recover the wreckage. One of our agents is headed there now. We wondered—the director wondered—if it would be possible for Whiplash to back her up.”
Brown Lake Test Area, Dreamland
C
aptain Turk Mako stretched his arms back and rocked his shoulders, loosening his muscles before putting on the flight helmet for the Tigershark II. For all of its advanced electronics and carefully thought-out interface, the helmet had one serious shortcoming:
It was heavy, at least twice the weight of a regular flight helmet. And the high-speed maneuvers the Tigershark II specialized in didn’t make it feel any lighter.
Then again, the brain bucket did keep the gray matter where it belonged.
“Ready, Captain?” asked Martha Albris, flight crew chief for the test mission.
Though standing next to him, Albris was using the Whiplash com system, and her voice was so loud in the helmet that it hurt Turk’s eardrums. Turk put his hand over the ear area of his helmet and rotated his palm, manually adjusting the volume on the external microphone system. The helmet had several interfaces; besides voice, a number of controls were activated by external touch, including the audio volume. It was part of an intuitive control system aimed to make the Tigershark more an extension of the pilot’s body rather than an aircraft.
Turk gave her a thumbs-up.
They walked together to the boarding ladder. The Tigershark II was a squat, sleek aircraft, small by conventional fighter standards. But then she wasn’t a conventional fighter. She was designed to work with a fleet of unmanned aircraft, acting as both team leader and mother hen.
Turk went up the four steps of the ladder to a horizontal bridge, where he climbed off the gridwork and onto the seat of his airplane. He folded his legs down under the control panel and into the narrow tunnel beneath the nose of the plane, slipping into the airplane much like a foot into a loafer.
Albris bent over the platform to help him. As crew chiefs went, she was particularly pleasing to the eye, even in her one-piece coverall. Turk had actually never seen the civilian mechanics supervisor in anything but a coverall. Still, her freckled face and the slight scent of perfume sent his imagination soaring.
Maybe he’d look her up after the postflight debrief.
Turk’s fantasies were interrupted by a black SUV that pulled across the front of the hangar, its blue emergency lights flashing. The passenger-side door opened and his boss, Breanna Stockard, emerged from the cab.
“Turk, I need to talk to you,” she yelled. “There’s been a change in plans.”
Turk pulled himself back upright.
“Flight scrubbed, boss?” he asked. The helmet projected his voice across the hangar.
“The test flight is. But you’re still going to fly.”
“Really? Where to?”
“We’ll discuss it inside,” said Breanna.
B
reanna watched Turk climb out of the plane and run over to the truck. That was the great thing about Turk—he was enthusiastic no matter what.
“Another demo flight for visiting congressmen?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said, turning toward the hangar. “We have to go downstairs to discuss it.”
The Office of Special Technology used a small area in the Dreamland complex to house Tigershark and some related projects. Besides a pair of hangars, it “owned” an underground bunker and a support area there.
The Office of Special Technology was an outgrowth of several earlier programs that brought cutting-edge technology to the front lines. Most notable of these was Dreamland itself, which a decade and a half before had been run by Breanna’s father, Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian. But the walk down the concrete ramp to the secure areas below held no special romance for Breanna; she’d long ago learned to steel herself off from any emotion where Dreamland was concerned.
“You’re flying to Sudan,” Breanna told Turk when they reached the secure area below. Once a medical test lab, the room was now used to brief missions. It was functionally the equivalent of a SCIF, or secure communications area, sealed against possible electronic eavesdropping.
Breanna walked to one of the computer terminals.
“Less than twelve hours ago, a UAV called Raven went down in a mountainous area in the southeast corner of Sudan, not far from Ethiopia,” she said. “I have a map here.”
“That’s pretty far to get some pictures,” said Turk, looking at the screen. “Going to be a long flight, even supersonic.”
“It’s not just a reconnaissance mission, Turk. Whiplash has been deployed. Our network satellite in that area is down for maintenance. It’ll be at least forty-eight hours before we get the replacement moved into position.”
“Gotcha.”
Whiplash was the code name of a joint CIA–Defense Department project run by the Office of Special Technology. It combined a number of cutting-edge technologies with a specially trained covert action unit headed by Air Force colonel Danny Freah. Freah had helped pioneer the concept at Dreamland as a captain some fifteen years before. Now he was back as the leader of a new incarnation, working with special operators from a number of different military branches as well as the CIA.
Unlike the Dreamland version, the new Whiplash worked directly with the Central Intelligence Agency and included a number of CIA officers. The head of the Agency contingent was Nuri Abaajmed Lupo, a young covert agent who, by coincidence, had spent considerable time undercover in roughly the same area where the Raven UAV had gone down.
Nuri had been the first field agent to train with a highly integrated computer network developed for Whiplash. Officially known as the Massively Parallel Integrated Decision Complex or MY-PID, the network of interconnected computers and data interfaces, the system allowed him to access a wide range of information, from planted bugs to Agency data mining, instantaneously while he was in the field.
The high volume data streams traveled through a dedicated network of satellites. The amount of data involved and the limitations of the ground broadcasting system required that the satellites be within certain ranges for MY-PID to work. The Tigershark II could substitute as a relay station in an emergency.
“You’re to contact Danny Freah when you arrive on station,” Breanna continued. “We’ll have updates to you while you’re en route.”
“All right, I guess.”
“Problem, Captain?”
“No ma’am. Just figuring it out.”
Turk folded his arms and stared at the screen. The target area in southeastern Sudan was some 13,750 kilometers away—roughly 7,500 nautical miles. Cruising in the vicinity of Mach 3, the Tigershark could cover that distance in the area of four hours. At that speed, though, it would run out of fuel somewhere over the Atlantic. He’d need to set up at least two refuels to be comfortable.
“The first tanker will meet you in the Caribbean,” said Breanna. She tapped a password into the computer and a map appeared. “It’s already being prepped. You fly south with it, then head across to the Med. A second tanker will come on station over Libya.”
“How long do I stay on station?”
“As long as it takes. We’ll find another tanker; you can just stay in transmission range if you have to refuel off the east coast of Africa. Obviously, you won’t be able to provide any surveillance, but we’ll have to make do until we get more gear there. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like it’ll even be necessary. The mission looks very straightforward.”
Breanna double-tapped the screen, expanding the map area of southern Sudan. Next she opened a set of optical satellite images of the area, taken about an hour before the accident.
“This satellite will pass back over that area in three hours,” she said. “It’s possible that they’ll find the wreckage before you arrive. If not, you’re to use your sensors to assist in the search. All right?”
“Sure.”
“Colonel Freah will have operational control.”
Breanna looked up from the screen. The frown on Turk’s face hadn’t dissipated.
“What’s wrong, Captain?”
“Nothing.”
“Out with it.”
“Tigershark’s unarmed.”
“And?”
“I could do a much better job with the gun.”
The gun referred to was the experimental rail gun. The weapon was undergoing tests in a second aircraft, which was also housed at the leased Dreamland base.
“The weapon’s not operational. And there shouldn’t be any need for it.” Breanna clicked on another folder. A set of images opened. “This is Raven. It’s smaller than a Flighthawk or a Predator. It’s armed with Hellfire missiles at the moment, but eventually it will be able to house a number of weapons.”
“Looks more like a Tigershark than a Predator.”
“It is. The contractor is the same for both systems.” Breanna closed the file, returning to the map. “It was flying with a Predator, which also crashed. Danny will be working out of Ethiopia. You’ll be able to land there in an emergency.”
“I didn’t think Ethiopia was an ally,” said Turk.
“They’re not.”