Target Utopia (6 page)

Which in turn meant it must be the UAV they were looking for.

“Kick ass,” he muttered, turning the F-35 in its direction.

The bogie was roughly forty miles away and closing fast. Under other circumstances Cowboy could have launched an AMRAAM with a high probability of a kill. But not only was he prevented from doing that by the ROEs—he hadn't been threatened, nor had the bogie apparently turned on its weapons radar—his job was to gather as much information about it as possible. And that meant getting up close and personal.

“Two, you seeing this?” he asked his wingman, Lieutenant John “Jolly” Rogers.

“Roger One.”

“Like we talked about,” said Cowboy. “You're high.”

The two planes increased their separation, Cowboy moving eastward as his wing mate angled to the west. Cowboy wanted the UAV to come after him; Basher Two would cover him from above and take it down if necessary.

“No radar, no profile like anything we've seen out east,” said Jolly. “Not Malaysian. Not standard Chinese either.”

“Roger.” Cowboy dipped his nose, pushing the jet for a little more speed.

The UAV was coming at him almost straight-on. Cowboy plotted a simple roll and turn to line up for a Sidewinder shot as it passed. That would give his sensors the maximum amount of time to pull data before he downed the aircraft—assuming it did something to allow him to do so.

“Basher One, what's your situation?” said Greenstreet from the ground.

“We have the UAV on our screens. At least we think it's him,” added Cowboy. “Preparing to engage.”

“Observe it first. Visually confirm it's hostile before firing.”

“Yup. Acknowledged.”

Cowboy calculated the intercept—a minute and thirty seconds. The UAV still wasn't using a radar against him.

“Come on,” he whispered to himself. “Light me up so I can take you down.”

The bogie was flying about 5,000 feet above him. Cowboy got ready to turn. It would be in visual range in a moment.

A minute twenty.

Suddenly, the UAV disappeared from his radar screen.

“What the hell?” muttered Jolly over the squadron frequency.

A
S SOON AS
he heard the Marines chattering about the UAV, Turk switched his communications to the Cube, where Tom Frost was coordinating the data gathering.

“You getting all this?” he asked Frost.

“I have the F-35 data,” said Frost. “Global Hawk elint aircraft isn't picking up anything.”

“Nothing?”

“I'm resetting the frequency scan. The aircraft is a little too far east. We were worried about the Chinese detecting it earlier.”

A few seconds later Frost told Turk that the computers were synthesizing a possible profile for the UAV. It didn't appear armed.

“Also looks like it might be different than the earlier ones,” said Frost. “Check out the model.”

Turk put his glasses into 3-D mode and spun his hand around, examining the enemy aircraft. It had small stubby wings that reminded him of the Cold War era F-104 Starfighter, a high-speed aircraft. At the rear, the UAV was a very different beast, with a much thicker, wedge-shaped body, a Y-tail, and some sort of directional-vector thrust system—it suddenly cut a nearly ninety-degree turn in the sky.

The turn caused the aircraft to disappear temporarily from the F-35s' radars, a variation on the old trick of beaming a Doppler radar. The American system was too smart to stay blind for very long; the F-35s' redundant systems were able to find it again quickly. But the second or two of confusion, along with the course change, gave the little SUV just enough of an advantage to duck into the ground clutter near the coast, camouflaging itself in the irregular radar returns caused by the ground. It was a command performance, and the fact that Turk had dealt with exactly that sort
of maneuver from attacking Flighthawks in simulated combat didn't make it any less impressive.

“Basher, your bandit is two sixty off your nose,” said Turk, telling the Marine pilot that the UAV had tucked down to his left. “Ten miles. He's going to try popping up behind you.”

“Uh—”

“Trust me. Put your plane on your right wing and look for the bogie to cross your nose in twenty seconds. It's going to be low—he's in the weeds and trying to get behind you. Break now!”

W
ITH HIS
F-35 bleeding off speed, Cowboy knew he was a sitting duck for any aircraft that came up behind him. But what Turk was suggesting was very counterintuitive. It seemed almost impossible that the drone could spin around quickly enough to get behind him, let alone get underneath him.

Instinctually, it seemed a dumb move, and not least of all because it would leave him vulnerable to a plunging attack from above, the direction he expected the drone to come from.

Did he trust the Air Force pilot?

Cowboy leaned on his stick, driving the F-35B hard and sharp, exactly as Turk had suggested. The g's hit him hard, pushing him back into the fighter's seat.

A black bar appeared at the right side of his windscreen. The targeting radar was going wild.

Mother!

“Can I fire?” asked the Marine, pushing to stay
with the UAV. But before anyone answered, the black aircraft turned its nose abruptly in his direction and sliced downward, moving and turning at a speed Cowboy didn't think possible. He made his own abrupt turn, losing so much altitude that the Bitchin' Betty warning system blared that he was too low. He scanned his radar and then the sky, but the slippery little UAV and its tiny radar cross section had once more disappeared in the weeds.

Damn.

T
URK REALIZED WHAT
was happening as soon as Cowboy got the altitude warning. There was no way the Marine was going to catch the other plane now.

Still, they needed as much data as they could get. And they were going to get it by going home.

“Your bandit's heading west,” he told the Marine.

“Yeah, we're following.”

“You have it on radar?”

“Negative.”

“Did he turn on weapons radar?” Turk asked.

“No.”

“All right.”

“We're going to search this area. Once he's over the water he should be easy to find.”

“Easier, maybe.”

“Yeah. You see where he launched from?”

“I didn't. I'll check back with my people,” added Turk, though he could already guess that the answer would be no: they would be giving the F-35s a vector to the site if they had.

Turk signed off with Cowboy and continued down the slope to the mining area. His boots sank into the soft ground. The place smelled like dirt, and death.

While considered “small,” two-hundred-pound GBU-53s still made an absolute mess of anything they hit; the three guerrillas who'd been holding this part of the perimeter had been obliterated. Twenty yards away, half of one of the trucks lay on its side, blown over by an explosion.

A severed leg lay on the ground. Turk stared at it for a moment, frowned, then kept walking.

Three months ago, that would have turned my stomach, he thought. Now it's just one more ugly part of the landscape.

An island in the Sembuni Reefs, off Malaysia

F
INALLY, THEY'D COME
.

Lloyd Braxton stared at the console, even though the displays were blank. He had been waiting for this moment for many months. In a sense, he'd been preparing for it for years.

It was intoxicating. Kallipolis was becoming a reality, precisely as he had envisioned. The days of nation states were passing before his eyes; the elite was ready to take over.

He clenched his fists, controlling his excitement.

There was a great deal to be done. This was just one small step in the evolution.

The next step was to defeat the Dreamland people—Special Projects, Whiplash, whatever the hell bs code name they were using. Defeat them and take their technology, the last piece of the puzzle.

Defeating Dreamland would be sweet. Rubeo and his web of sellout scientists, technodrones for the governments of the world, would finally be put in their places.

Braxton scolded himself. If this became a quest for revenge it would fail. He had argued this many times with Michaels, Thresh, and Fortine—especially the ship captain Fortine—who while still being true believers, bore personal grudges against their governments and a host of officials who had wronged them. Braxton didn't blame them, exactly, but he knew that Kallipolis was a movement of history, a phenomenon like the Renaissance or the Reformation, not something to be sullied by personal grudges.

Kallipolis was both a goal and a philosophy. The philosophy was perfect, unfettered freedom: true dependence on the self, and a true unshackling of the governmental binds that kept men and women from reaching their potential, both personally and as a race. Kallipolis would do away with national borders and provide those who were worthy of it complete freedom and the unrestricted ability to achieve.

The people who made up the Kallipolis movement—aside from the very small group of people he employed, there were over a hundred in close communications with Braxton, and a few thousand more beyond—were members of the intelligentsia, scientists and engineers, and those who had done something with their lives, people who were the builders, not the takers; what they had in common was the ability to see things without emotion and act on them. They acted as he must act: entirely on the scientific principles that had gotten him this far.

So . . . it was on to the next move. Provoke the Americans into showing themselves, and get Whiplash to expose the tech he needed.

He needed to talk to the rebel leader on Malaysia immediately. The sooner the Americans were provoked, the better.

Suburban Virginia

B
REANNA ROLLED OVER
in the bed, aware that she had to wake up but unsure why. She was in the middle of a dream, caught in an incomprehensible tangle of odd thoughts and a snatch of memory. The setting was her childhood, a home near the railroad tracks. She was running to catch the train. Her father, dressed in his Class A uniform,
was yelling at her to stop. The train was a steam locomotive, a huge nineteenth century bruiser stolen from a Christmas display and multiplied a hundred times . . .

Up,
she told herself, and she slipped off the covers, grabbing the vibrating phone on her bed stand.

Zen snored as she grabbed a robe from the end of the bed and walked to the hallway.

“Breanna,” she said into the phone.

“Need to talk,” said Danny Freah.

“Give me two minutes. I'll call.”

Pulling on the robe, Breanna went down to the kitchen and glanced at the clock. It was two-thirty in the morning. Indonesia was a day and an hour ahead, making it three-thirty there.

She hesitated for a moment, then hit the button on the coffeemaker. As the water started to heat, she went to the kitchen table and pulled her daughter's laptop open. The Web browser came up; she checked the news headlines on her home page quickly, making sure nothing important had happened in the roughly two hours since she'd gone to bed.

Coffee in hand, she went to her office in the basement. Two minutes later she was talking to Danny over the Whiplash com network's secure link.

“No video from your end?” asked Danny when his tired face appeared on the screen.

“I have it off. Commander's prerogative.”

“I have an update on the UAV we encountered today.”

“OK,” she said, yawning.

“Turk was looking at the flight patterns that were reconstructed by the team Frost heads,” said Danny. “He says it followed a defensive pattern he recognized from the Flighthawks, to the letter.”

“Is he sure?”

“I had him go over it a couple of times. He looked at everything—the approach, the maneuvers, the way it got away. He said he's flown against that attack a lot.”

“Is it a Flighthawk?”

“No. Turk compared it to a late model Flighthawk with stubbier wings.”

Breanna tapped on her keyboard, tying into the Cube's computer system. Within a few minutes she had a video of the reconstructed encounter.

“I see what he's saying,” she told Danny. “But we still don't have any elint data.”

“Turk had a theory about that. This is a preprogrammed pattern, something you could tell the Flighthawks to do. They wouldn't need to be in full communication.”

“That's right. Have you talked to Ray about this?”

“He'd gone home.”

“I'll talk to him,” said Breanna.

“If it is following the Flighthawk's program, the source might be—it could be—”

“Us,” said Breanna.

“Yeah. Someone who worked on the Flighthawks.”

While there had been Flighthawk crashes and shoot-downs over the years, the aircraft were equipped with a series of fail-safe devices for completely scrubbing the memory and destroying
the chips. There was no indication that the systems had ever failed. There hadn't been a crash now in several years.

“This thing gets worse and worse,” said Danny before hanging up.

Z
EN OPENED HIS
eyes as soon as he smelled the coffee. He glanced at the clock—it was a few minutes before three.

He lay in bed, listening to the house. He couldn't hear Breanna; that meant she was downstairs in her soundproof office. She wouldn't have left the house without kissing him good-bye, which inevitably woke him up—though he would never tell her that, for fear she might stop doing it.

Their daughter Teri was sleeping down the hall. He could hear her light breath. The child could sleep through a train crash without waking, something that never ceased to amaze Zen.

The coffee smelled good.

Zen made a halfhearted attempt at drifting off; a grand total of thirty seconds passed before he threw the covers off and pushed himself to the edge of the bed for his wheelchair.

Breanna had grabbed his robe when she'd gotten up, so once he was in the chair he wheeled to the bureau and pulled out a sweatshirt. Then he rolled down to the kitchen. He was pouring milk into his coffee when Breanna came up from her office.

“You took my robe,” he told her. “Yours was on the chair.”

“Sorry, I just grabbed what was there.” She leaned into him for a long kiss. “I'm sorry I woke you up.”

“Worth getting up for,” said Zen. He took his coffee and went over to the table. “Problems?”

“Eh. Just the usual.”

He knew from the tone in her voice that whatever had gotten her up was particularly sticky, but he also knew that he couldn't push her for details.

“Kinda strong,” said Zen, sipping his coffee.

“No more than usual.”

Breanna sat down at the table across from him. “Couldn't sleep?” she asked.

“A lot going on.”

“Thinking about what Todd said?”

“Oh . . . no. I don't think I'd want to be President.”

“Why not? You could do a hell of a lot.”

“Maybe . . .” He took another sip. Bree was right—the coffee wasn't any stronger than normal.

“What are you doing today?”

“Committee stuff. And fund-raising.”

“Your favorite.”

“Worse than that. I'm meeting with Jake Harris.”

Harris was an entrepreneur who'd made three fortunes and lost two before he was thirty years old. He'd held on to the latest, and over the last few years had become one of the most important political fund-raisers in the country.

“Count your fingers and toes before you go in.”

“It's after that I'm worried about. I'd have to do this all the time if I ever ran for President,” he added.

“The price you pay.”

“Yeah.”

Lifting his coffee mug to his lips, he realized he'd nearly drained it. He took a last gulp, then wheeled over to the machine for a refill.

B
REANNA WATCHED HER
husband wheel across the floor toward the coffee. For just a moment she saw him as he was before the accident at Dreamland that had taken the use of his legs—a brash young pilot, skilled and already wise beyond his years.

He was extremely bitter after the accident. Even so, it didn't change what was vital about him—the need to strive, the urge to compete and be the best at what he did. The tragedy hadn't made him a better person, but his will to keep going, his struggle to keep contributing to Dreamland and the Air Force and above all his country—those things had made him into a man to be admired, a real leader.

He would make an excellent President.

But should she urge him to run? He'd have to give up a lot, from the trivial—his skybox at the Nationals—to things that had no price, like time with their daughter.

Breanna curled her feet under her, then tucked the robe around her. It was thick and warm, and reminded her of him.

She hadn't taken it by mistake.

She felt an urge to tell him about the plane—he'd know right off if the maneuvers were the
same as those programmed into the Flighthawks. He also might have a theory on why that was. Just a coincidence? Or much more?

But she couldn't.

If he ever did run for President, how many things would they never be able to share?

“Need a refill?” Zen asked.

“No, it's full.”

Zen balanced the cup between his legs and wheeled himself back to the table. All these years, and he still insisted on an unpowered chair. There was more than a little macho masochism in him.

“Whatever you do, whenever you do it,” said Breanna, “Teri and I are with you.”

Zen smiled. That was one thing that hadn't changed, ever, and the way his eyes shone, it was clear it never would.

“Thanks, babe,” he told her. “You think we can go back to bed?”

“You think we can sleep after all this coffee?”

“Who said anything about sleep?”

“Hold that thought,” said Breanna, rising. “I have to make a phone call.”

D
ESPITE THE HOUR
, Ray Rubeo answered on the first ring.

“Ray, it's Breanna. I—I'm sorry to wake you.”

“You didn't. I'm working.”

“Oh. OK. Listen I just talked to Danny. He said that Turk Mako has a theory—”

“Let me guess. He sees parallels between the UAVs and some of our aircraft.”

“Well, yes,” said Breanna, surprised. “Did you talk to him?”

“No. But I've noticed the parallels myself. I understand the implications,” he added. “I'm taking it very seriously.”

“I'm sure you are,” said Breanna. Rubeo took everything seriously.

“Is there anything else? I am in the middle of constructing a model.”

“No, that's it. I'll talk to you in the morning at the Cube.”

“Very well,” he said, hanging up.