Strike Zone

‘You think this thing flew over the Navy task force without being detected?’

Zen shrugged. He didn’t, but he didn’t feel like admitting it to Stoner.

‘My guess is it’s a third-party player,’ said Stoner. ‘Japan, Russia – someone interested, but not directly involved.’

‘My money’s still on China,’ said Zen. ‘I don’t trust them.’

‘And they don’t trust us,’ said Stoner. ‘But that’s good.’

‘Why?’

‘Makes them predictable.’

For an egghead nerd, Rubeo set a good clip, and Stoner had trouble catching up with him as he cleared through the underground maze back toward his laboratories.

‘Doc, can I talk to you?’

‘You seem to be making an effort to do so,’ said Rubeo, not pausing.

‘Who really could develop this?’

Rubeo stopped at a locked door and put in his card. The door clicked and buzzed, but didn’t open.

‘Your ID,’ said Rubeo. ‘In the slot.’

Stoner complied. The door opened. Rubeo stepped through and resumed his pace.

‘We can. The Japanese maybe. The Chinese. Not the Russians.’

‘That’s it?’

The scientist stopped outside one of the lab doors. Despite his high clearance, Stoner was not allowed into the room, which contained the terminals used for work on the Flighthawk control computers, as well as a myriad of other projects. Rubeo frowned at him, then touched his earring. He seemed to be trying to figure out exactly what to tell him. Stoner wasn’t sure whether he was trying to translate complicated scientific data into layman’s terms – or if he just didn’t trust him.

‘Plenty of countries have unmanned vehicles, don’t they?’ prompted Stoner.

‘Forget the mechanical aspects,’ said Rubeo. He glanced down the hallway, making sure they were alone. ‘It’s the computers that are important. Yes, anyone can build a UMV – we could go to Radio Shack and buy a radio-controlled model that’s about ninety percent as advanced as Predator.’

‘Ninety percent?’

‘Well, eighty-five.’ Rubeo smirked. ‘Building the aircraft is not the difficult part. The problem is to transfer data quickly enough to control the plane in aggressive flight. This craft seems to have done that. And if it’s used as a spy plane – well, then you have an enormous data flow, don’t you? Bandwidth – you understand what I’m talking about.’

Stoner nodded. The scientists had emphasized earlier that massive amounts of data flowed back and forth very quickly between the Flighthawks and their mother ships. To be honest, Stoner didn’t completely get it – what was the big deal about some video and flying instructions? But it was enough to know that they said it was significant.

‘All of that is going to take custom-designed chips, both for the communications and for the onboard computer. Because it will have to have an onboard computer,’ said Rubeo. ‘That’s what you have to look for. That’s the defining characteristic’

‘Okay, so who could do that?’ said Stoner.

Rubeo shook his head. ‘Weren’t you paying attention? We can. The Japanese. The Chinese. Not the Russians.’

‘No one else?’

Rubeo fingered his earring again. ‘Maybe India. Some of the Europeans, possibly. There are good fab plants in Germany. They’ve done memory work there as well. The processor, though.’

Rubeo seemed to be having a conversation with himself that Stoner couldn’t hear. He segued into contract factories or fabs that fabricated chips for custom applications. A small number of concerns could manufacture specially designed chips. They needed special clean rooms and elaborate tools, but if there was enough money, existing machinery could be adapted.

‘What if I look for those?’ Stoner asked Rubeo.

‘You don’t really suppose they’re going to tell you what they’re doing, do you?’

‘I’m in the business of gathering information,’ said Stoner.

Rubeo made a noise that sounded a bit like the snort of a horse. ‘There are several facilities in America that could do the work. More than two dozen that I can think of off the top of my head. Any of them would be willing to design the proper chips for a foreign government if the price were right.’

‘I’ll check them first,’ said Stoner. ‘Unless they’re already doing work for us.’

‘Why would that be a limiting factor?’ said Rubeo, the cynical tone in his voice implying that greed would motivate any number of people to sell out their country.

Dreamland Ground Range Three 2100

Sergeant Ben ‘Boston’ Rockland got to his feet slowly. The rest of his team lay around him, officially ‘dead.’ Their objective – carrying a small amount of radioactive soil back from enemy lines for testing – had not been met.

Boston – as the nickname suggested, the sergeant was a Beantown native – picked up the ruck containing the soil. The desert before him was dotted with small rubber balls with nails sticking out from them – simulated cluster bomblets, representing air-dropped antipersonnel mines with proximity fuses. The little suckers worked too – as soon as you got within five feet, an ear-piercing siren sounded, and the range monitor proclaimed you were dead.

Not dead, actually. Just maimed. The range monitor seemed to take a perverse joy in announcing which particular body part it was that had been blown off.

There seemed to be no way across the minefield. Yet to get to the objective – a small orange cone about a quarter mile away – he had to cross it.

As Boston stared, he heard the roar of the returning Osprey gunship. Sergeant Liu had explained earlier that the aircraft was programmed to orbit the test range randomly. He’d also warned that the massive Gatlings were firing live ammunition.

The Osprey swung forward in a wide arc, hunting for a target. Boston had seen from the exercises earlier that it would home in on small reflectors that the people running the exercise had planted around the field. It wasn’t clear to him whether the red disks had some circuitry inside, or if the weapons directors on the M/V-22 could actually home in on the glints of light. Whichever it was, flinging the little disks drove the gear batty, as one of the Whiplash team members had proven yesterday when morale had started to sag.

Maybe he hadn’t flung the disk as a joke, thought Boston. Maybe he was hinting at the solution.

Boston threw himself back down as the Osprey approached. The computers controlling the guns were programmed to avoid hitting anyone, but they didn’t miss by much. As the guns began to fire, the tilt-rotor aircraft seemed to jump upward in the sky.

The burst lasted no more than three-quarters of a second. When it stopped, the Osprey settled back down and flew in a semicircle close to the ground.

Eight feet off the surface.

That wasn’t all that high.

Boston watched as the Osprey flew toward the hangar area, still skimming low over the terrain.

That was the solution. It had to be.

As soon as the tilt-rotor craft had gone, he began grabbing the disks.

Captain Danny Freah watched in amazement as the Osprey whirled around, hoodwinked by the flashing reflectors. It fired, then settled back down into a hover just at the edge of the minefield.