“What is it, Jala?” Zarazi asked.
“Our communications officer picked up some kind of high-frequency transponder that was just activated,” Turabi said. “It looks like a sort of radio beacon. He must’ve set it off when the convoy was attacked.”
“A trouble signal?” Zarazi asked. “We’ve detected no other forces in this area. And a helicopter patrol would take hours to come from Andkhvoy or Mazar-e-Sharif. What good would it do…?”
“An air attack — with a jet already in the area, covering the convoy,” Turabi said. “That’s why our intelligence was so detailed and why this convoy was so poorly protected — it’s being covered from the air. It might even be one of those American Predators, the unmanned little aircraft that can fire Maverick missiles. They could be starting their attack right now.”
Zarazi looked at the officer in puzzlement — and then his eyes grew wide and his mouth dropped open. “Get the men ready to get out of this area and take cover.” He stepped over to O’Rourke. “Who is watching us? What is happening?”
“I’d advise you to surrender, Captain,” O’Rourke said. “Just lay down your weapons, put your hands in the air, and kneel down. They won’t attack if you surrender.”
“Who are ‘they’? What are they?”
“There’s no time for questions, Captain. Surrender right now.”
“Bastard! Unholy bastard!” Zarazi pulled his sidearm and shot O’Rourke in the forehead, killing him instantly.
Several of his men had started unloading crates and removing tarps from pallets in the back of the supply trucks. “Run for your lives! Get away from those trucks! Run!”
Four hundred miles away, orbiting at twenty-eight thousand feet fifty miles south of the Pakistani coastline over the Arabian Sea, an EB-1C Vampire orbited lazily, watching and listening. The EB-1C was a U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer long-range bomber, built in the mid-eighties, but it had been upgraded and modified so much since then that its builders would probably never recognize it now. But as incredible as the Vampire was, the aircraft it controlled were even more amazing — in fact, they represented Patrick McLanahan’s future of aerial combat.
“Oh, my God, they killed Major O’Rourke,” U.S. Air Force Major General Patrick McLanahan said in disbelief. He studied the high-resolution digital video display on a large, multifunction “supercockpit” monitor before him. “That bastard! He was unarmed! He surrendered….” He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping the image he saw would go away. When it didn’t, his hate bubbled up past the boiling point. “I count about a hundred men, about two dozen Toyota pickups off away from the road. Stand by to attack.”
His aircraft commander, U.S. Air National Guard Brigadier General Rebecca Furness, squirmed restlessly in her seat. “Let’s get busy and nail those suckers, sir,” she spat.
The images Patrick and Rebecca were watching were coming from a StealthHawk Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle, or UCAV. It had been launched several hours earlier from the EB-1C Vampire’s forward bomb bay and had been scanning the area around the United Nations truck convoy with its infrared sensors and high-resolution digital cameras. The StealthHawk resembled a big, wide, fat surfboard, its lifting-body fuselage slightly triangular in profile. There was a large air inlet, mounted atop the fuselage to lower its radar cross-section, for the aircraft’s single turbofan engine. It had no wings — the StealthHawk had a special flight-control system called a “mission-adaptive lifting-body skin” that actually used computers and tiny microhydraulic actuators to change the outer skin on the fuselage to increase or decrease lift as necessary. The EB-1C could carry three StealthHawks in its bomb bays, one in the forward bomb bay and two in the center. Each StealthHawk could carry a payload of five hundred pounds, along with enough fuel for several hours of flight.
Patrick touched a control button and spoke, “StealthHawk, commit attack,” and the fight was under way. Orbiting at ten thousand feet over the truck convoy was a second StealthHawk, launched from the EB-1C’s center bomb bay. Instead of sensors this one carried weapons — six AGM-211 “mini-Mavericks,” hundred-pound, short-range, precision-guided attack missiles.
“Commit StealthHawk attack, stop attack,” the computer responded. When Patrick did not countermand the order, the computer added, “StealthHawk engaging.”
“Excellent,” Patrick said. “StealthHawk reporting code one so far.”
“Then that would be a first for one of Masters’s gadgets,” Furness said dryly. Rebecca Furness was the wing commander of the one and only EB-1 Vampire squadron in the world, the 111th Bombardment Wing of the Nevada Air National Guard based at Battle Mountain Air National Guard Base. Although the Vampire bomber had been used in several conflicts and skirmishes around the world in recent years, from Korea to Russia to Libya, it was still considered experimental, and therefore the aircraft’s designer, Dr. Jon Masters, worked closely with Furness’s unit to make improvements and fixes to the state-of-the-art weapon system to get it ready for initial operational capability.
But Jon Masters, a Ph.D. since the age of thirteen and a world-class aeronautical and space engineer, was also a world-class pain in the ass — not exactly a people-friendly person. Rebecca’s job was hard enough — standing up a new unit with an experimental high-tech bomber at a newly constructed air base in the middle of nowhere in north-central Nevada — without the nerdy and conceited Dr. Masters disrupting her life.
Although Patrick received the sensor data from the StealthHawk on the supercockpit display in the Vampire bomber, the StealthHawk had already identified most of the vehicles in the target area and had presented its target priority list to Patrick continuously during its surveillance. “The StealthHawk detected a twenty-three-millimeter antiaircraft gun on one of the Toyota pickups,” Patrick said. “That’s the first target.”
Even Rebecca had to be impressed with the StealthHawk system’s target-detection and classification capabilities — she was accustomed to dropping bombs on a group of vehicles or an entire area, not selecting just one vehicle out of many similar vehicles for attack.
“I count ten vehicles total in the target area — no, make that twelve. Two have already bugged out.”
“What’s it waiting for? Get it in there, and let’s make some scrap metal.”
“It’s already on the job,” Patrick said. At that moment the StealthHawk released a single mini-Mav missile from its internal bomb bay. The missile fell away from the StealthHawk, gliding toward its target while it adjusted its track with lead-computing cues and wind-drift-correction information datalinked from the Vampire’s attack computer. When about a mile from its quarry, the missile’s small rocket motor fired, and the missile covered the last seven thousand feet of its attack run in less than two seconds. The mini-Mav’s warhead was twenty-eight pounds of thermium-nitrate-energized high explosive, which had the power of ten times its weight in TNT. The truck and its six occupants disappeared in a cloud of dust, smoke, and yellow-red explosions.
The StealthHawk’s laser radar remained locked on to the target for postattack analysis, but from the large secondary explosions and size of the smoke and fire clouds surrounding the target, it became clear only seconds later that the truck was toast. “Target appears to be destroyed,” Patrick said.