Halifax looked at her, “You have ten minutes. I want a drone headed out the chute in ten minutes tops and a second Fantom loading as soon as it is away, is that clear?”
“Mission profile from the Operations Order sir?” she asked.
“OPORD says unarmed reconnaissance,” he replied tersely.
She grabbed a tablet from the rack over her desk and powered it on, bringing up her inventory screen. Unarmed recon meant no weapons other than guns, and a recon pod in the ordnance bay. Immediately she saw a problem — recon pods were not part of the auto-load system, they had to be fitted manually and that would take additional time.
“Sir, is this another exercise?” Bunny asked, pulling her virtual-reality helmet over her platinum stubble.
“No, Lieutenant,” Halifax said. “A Russian nuclear sub has declared a reactor emergency off the coast of Saint Lawrence Island. Alaska NORAD indicates the sky over the island is swarming with Russian aircraft, and the Russians are actively jamming. The situation with that sub is clearly worse than Ivan is letting on. With all the jamming we can’t get through to our radar station base at Savoonga, so we need eyes over Saint Lawrence an hour ago. NORAD is repositioning satellites and scrambling a drone out of Eielson, but we can get over Saint Lawrence before anyone else can.” He looked at Rodriguez. “So we need to launch stat.”
“Then we can either go with the birds I have on the rack, which can be launched with a multi-role loadout, or take an extra thirty minutes to fit dedicated recon payloads.”
Halifax considered briefly, “Go with what you have ready.”
“Rules of Engagement sir?” Bunny asked. “Standing Rules?”
“No,” Halifax said clearly. Standing Rules of Engagement allowed a pilot to fire back if they were fired upon first. “You will not engage Russian aircraft, even if fired upon. That’s why ANR has tasked us — they don’t want to risk piloted aircraft, or create an international incident. And we do not want to give away the existence of this base. Set your waypoints so it looks like your origin is Nome.”
Rodriguez didn’t need more encouragement. She called up two fighters and authorized them to be delivered on the conveyor belt from the magazine to the catapult bay.
“Permission to go down to the flight deck Sir?” Rodriguez asked, clear that she would need to be close to the action if they were to shave precious seconds off every step of the regimented launch process.
“Granted,” Halifax said.
Her crews were milling around down by the flight deck; aircraft handlers, catapult crew, ground equipment trouble-shooters… half of them looking like she felt (tumble dried and freaked out) and the other half just standing around ready to be told what to do. She headed out of the trailer and before she even finished running she was barking orders.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is not an exercise, this facility is now officially open for business!” she said, and couldn’t help grinning. “I’ve dialed up two Fantoms — we’ll launch immediately. You have eight minutes to get the first machine onto that Cat, systems online and ready to fire. Five minutes for the machine after that. Questions?”
“Bring two reserve machines into the bays, just in case we get a dead boot ma’am?” one of the crew quickly asked. He was a young, pimply plane captain she’d seen at work on the Trump under one of her aircraft handling officers but in the flat structure they’d adopted under the Rock he had no qualms about speaking up.
“Good idea Collins, I’ll pull two machines into the reserve bays, you get them prepped with recon pods. Now, lock and load people!” She stayed as long as it took for the conveyor belt to deliver the first Fantom and watched as a robot arm lifted it out of its cartridge and dropped it onto the guide rails of the catapult. Two crewmen got to work dropping the wings, locking it to front and rear bars and tensioning the launch wire. While they were doing that, two electronics technicians booted up the drone’s A.I. system and began speeding through the pre-flight checklist. There was a ‘fast boot’ mode made for combat environments that gave the A.I. enough resources to get itself in the air, and left it to run its own ‘pre-mission’ checks during the first few minutes of flight. They didn’t have to check with Rodriguez, it was obvious this was the mode they should load given the urgency in her voice.
After five minutes the two Cat crew members backed away and each raised an arm in the air. Almost simultaneously, the two electronics techs closed and locked the drone’s system access panel and stepped away from the machine, raising an arm in the air.
“Outstanding!” Rodriguez said into her mike. “Launch stations. Prepare to retrieve cartridge and load Fantom two!”
Crew members a good distance from the deck crouched and turned their backs, while those who had just been working on the drone jumped over blast barriers and put their helmeted heads down.
“Flaps, slats, panels, pins!” she called.
“Green.”
“Man out?”
“Man out aye.”
“Visual?”
“Thumbs up.”
“Cat scan.”
“Cat clear.”
“Cat to 520 psi.”
“520 aye.”
Rodriguez reached for her throat mike, “Light her tail O’Hare,” she said.
She looked at her watch. Eleven minutes. Damn, they had to get faster. A hand tugged at her trousers, “You’re not in the trailer now ma’am, get down please,” Collins said with a grin, pointing to a spot beside him behind one of the blast barriers. The engines of the Fantom began to spool up and blue-white fire burst from the rear exhaust.
“Launch launch launch!” she said, giving ‘Lucky’ Severin, the launch officer, the order to punch the drone out of the rock.
She had just ducked down behind the concrete blast barrier when the Scimitar engines of the Fantom fired in earnest and the delta-winged drone rocketed down the catapult, riding the rails to the end of the flight deck and flying straight and true down the chute and out of the cavern. There was no cheering this time. Rodriguez was glad to see two crew members already pulling the used cartridge off the line and putting it into the reloading bay, while the loaders got to work again fitting and configuring the second Fantom for launch.
“Bunny, I’m loading your second Fantom, with two more in the queue,” Rodriguez said as she crouched. “We’ll get them in the air, you can decide how to use them.”
“Good thinking ma’am, I’ll add two more machines to the mission package.”
She imagined Bunny in the trailer, playing her keyboards like a concert pianist, punching in coordinates for the drones to follow once they were outside the chute. In a situation like this, she would send the drones away in pairs, not wait for all four to form up.
Rodriguez nodded to Severin, and pointed at herself, then back to the command trailer, indicating he should take over down on the deck while she went back to her real job. Ordinarily she would only come down to the deck if there was an issue, but what the hell… her first operational launch under the Rock?
She wasn’t going to stand up on the island and just hope it went right!
“Five minutes to feet dry,” Bunny said calmly a short while later. “Wedge is data-linked and all birds are singing.”
A six-plane formation of Fantoms was a ‘hex’ but a four-plane flight was called a ‘wedge’. Rodriguez marveled at how the pilot could control four combat aircraft at once, even if onboard AI was doing the real-time flying. It was a completely new type of combat pilot the Navy needed for drone combat. Bunny had been headhunted for drone testing because she had exactly what it took; a solid diagnosis of ADHD and excellent Continuous Partial Focus skills. She had the heads-up display for each of the drones on a separate virtual screen, and flicked between them at will. She didn’t try to control them in real-time at such distances due to the satellite induced communication lag; she could only do that when they were in direct ‘line of sight’ of the undersea comms array buried in the sea floor outside Little Diomede or hot linked via an Airborne Control aircraft. But she had memorized all of the literally hundreds of offensive, patrol and defensive sub-routines programmed into her keyboard. Combined with the mission waypoints and orders laid out on the tactical screen, which she could also change on the fly, it gave her tactical control of her drones, without having to worry about little things like trying to not fly them into the dirt.