“Ebb and flow, Richter, that’s how this is going to go,” said Simmons. “You get a glimpse, then you use what little you have. Don’t forget: they’re just as confused as we are.”
The girl nodded, running chewed fingernails over her shaved head.
“Richter, you’ve been in three years now, right?” said Simmons.
“It will be four years in two months, sir,” she said.
“That’s a lot of Navy in your blood,” said Simmons. “Makes you one of the sailors I’m counting on today. There’s nothing here you can’t handle. What we know is all we know. Got me?”
“Aye, sir.”
He was walking back up the stairs to the observation floor when the radar operator called him.
“Sir, we’ve bogeys coming in from the northwest. They’re strung out in a long line,” Richter said. Then, in a lower pitch: “ATHENA counts sixty-two in total.
“Shit,” the radar operator continued. “It’s worse than that. ATHENA is now showing something coming in from the east. It’s patchy, but at least a hundred bogeys… we’re right square in the middle.”
As the information from her screen began to populate the central tactical hologram where all could see it, the room seemed to grow more quiet. A brief groan from the ship’s engines welled up through the hull, as if the Zumwalt had just accepted its fate.
Then a voice rang out over the speakers arrayed around the room. It had a gravelly, Southern twang: “Longboard, this is Boneyard Six Four. You seem to have some party crashers on the way. Can we be of assistance? Over.”
Boneyard Flight, Pacific Ocean
U.S. Air Force colonel Roscoe Coltan ended the transmission and rechecked his position. The twelve-by-nineteen-inch glass-panel Garmin AeroScreen was bolted on shock mounts over the F-15C jet’s original flight instruments. He had rimmed the screen with duct tape for good measure, which showed the level of confidence he had in the technology. It was effective, but it still didn’t seem right, which basically captured just about everything so far in this mission.
Roscoe’s jet had been among the 256 F-15s and F-16s the U.S. Air Force had early-retired in 2014. The argument was that the fourth generation of fighter planes couldn’t keep up with twenty-first-century threats, but the real reason was that retiring the planes created an artificial fighter gap, which helped make the case for keeping the spending up on the F-35, the fifth-generation plane, whose cost had spiraled. The old but still flyable planes had spent the past years stored out in the dry Arizona air of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, aka the Boneyard, the aircraft equivalent of the Ghost Fleet. Alongside some four thousand other retired planes dating back to World War II, Roscoe’s jet had been waiting its turn to be harvested for scrap metal and spare parts.
But now, the age of the planes in Boneyard Flight worked to their advantage. They were crude, but they could be trusted. First flown in the 1970s, the F-15s needed only rudimentary electronics to operate; they had less computing power than his grandson’s talking toy bear and were steered by about twenty million fewer lines of code than the F-35. Most important, the chips in their flight systems had been produced long before hardware hacking or even the Directorate itself had been conceived.
His fuel gauge showed he had about two hours of flight time left if he just nursed the plane along. Unfortunately, the dogfight he expected would shave his time aloft down to a fraction of that.
Boneyard Flight had taken off with two dozen desert-worn KC-135s that had also been pulled out of retirement. Those things were tougher than cockroaches. First flown back in the Eisenhower days, the 707 passenger-jet derivatives did not have a modern chip anywhere, unlike the new KC-46s, which had turned out to be missile magnets like all the other Chinese-chipped gear.
The plan was that another flight of old Stratotankers would be waiting to refuel them on the return leg. He looked down at the rippled sea surface. It was a profoundly deep azure dusted with white lines that reminded him of a light snow on tree branches back home in North Carolina. The tankers would be there, the intelligence briefer had promised, and if not, he said, the sea would contain only friendly ships they could ditch near.
After two wives and twenty-four years in the Air Force, Roscoe knew when he was being bullshitted. He also knew when not to care.
“Oscar, Roscoe. You picking up the same fleet data I am? Over,” said Roscoe.
“Roger that, Roscoe,” said Oscar, an F-16 pilot flying the other element of the escort. The pilot had gotten his call sign back when he was a new lieutenant, a way to put him in his place after he’d been hot-dogging it in flight school. “Sky is clear over Oahu, but the squids look like they are in for some major rain, over.”
“I’m thinking we need to give them an umbrella. I’ll take Eagle and Wall-E elements of the escort to mix it up. You take Viper element on with the big boys to keep ’em safe and give the ground pounders some support, over.”
“Understood, Roscoe. Just like an Eagle driver to steal all the glory,” Oscar responded. “We’ll get them through. Good hunting, over.”
“Eagle Flight, I know you heard that conversation. Form up on me.” Then he paused, and when he spoke again, he made sure to enunciate his words. They said the voice-recognition software would work anyway, but he wanted to be certain.
“Wall-E Flight. Authorization Roscoe. Voice authenticate eagle, two, eight, alpha, delta. New mission order. Autonomous hunt. Air-to-air weapons authority release. Execute.”
He turned his head to see if they would follow the order or just start shooting down all the American jets close to them, like some bad movie. But the twelve F-40A Shrikes in the escort all took a smooth, literally perfect turn with a precision that would make a flight instructor orgasm and then formed up on the flanks of Eagle Flight’s F-15 fighters.
To Roscoe, it was one of the war’s many ironies that the jets they most needed to come through today were the very ones his service’s leadership had done its best to fight for years. Unmanned planes had proved their worth in the Afghan war and then in the various counterterrorism campaigns from Pakistan to Nigeria. But the early models had been remotely operated by pilots on the ground, and they were propeller-powered by four-cylinder engines taken from snowmobiles, meaning they had performance capabilities that even a World War I pilot would laugh at. The generals had always made sure to tell the public that while they were fine for killing terrorists, the early drones wouldn’t be able to survive in any kind of denied airspace. That was true enough, but oddly, behind the scenes, the critics did everything possible to make sure future models would have those very same flaws. The Pentagon, which had begrudgingly started using armed unmanned aerial systems after the CIA got into the business, consistently slow-rolled any attempts to make the next generation of drones faster, stealthier, and more lethal.
In the lean years after the Afghan war, the research budget for unmanned systems was slashed four times as much as any other program. The rationales for opposition included everything from worries about pilots losing jobs to defense contractors’ concerns that the better the new technology became, the more it would threaten their already signed multitrillion-dollar weapons contracts. It got to the point that, in 2013, when a test drone successfully took off and landed on an aircraft carrier by itself, the Naval Air Systems Command tried to send the cutting-edge technology not out to the fleet, but to the Smithsonian. There, in a museum, one of the most advanced planes on the planet could be “celebrated,” and, more important, it wouldn’t be carrying out any further tests that might make people rethink the existing order of things.