“OK, bring Foghat in for its drop approach.” Hail ordered.
Hail looked at each member of the mission crew and wondered if they would do what they needed to do when they needed to do it. After all, most of these kids were kids. The closest they had come to killing someone was mowing down a gangster while driving Adder in Grand Theft Auto. But then on the other hand, this type of killing was not much different than the simulated version. They flew a remote aircraft and delivered deadly payloads. They were not in danger and his young pilots were physically thousands of miles away from the action. Still, they all understood that this was not a game. It was the real thing. But making their country a safer place had been done by young people for hundreds of years.
“One mile,” Grant reported.
Anticipating Hail’s next question, Shana Tran added, “Communications are good and the uplink is hot.”
Hail swiveled his chair toward Dallas Stone.
“What’s the status of Led Zeppelin?” he asked the pilot.
“We’re good, Marshall,” Dallas responded. He flipped through a few technical screens until he located a page splattered with data that was labeled DRONE DASHBOARD. “We are fully charged and communications are online. Data streams are good. No dropped packets. No collisions.”
“Excellent,” Hail said. So far everything was going like clockwork.
“Dropping Zeppelin in five, four, three, two, one, and Zeppelin is away,” Tanner Grant announced.
Hail pressed some icons on his left monitor. A moment later, the video being streamed from the nose camera of Led Zeppelin appeared on his right monitor. There was nothing much to look at. A green blur was dancing across the screen as the drone descended and accelerated to a hundred and twenty-two miles per hour, or roughly one-hundred and seventy-eight feet per second. Led Zeppelin’s thousand-foot free fall would be over in less than eight seconds.
“X and Y look good,” Dallas said. “Drifting a little north maybe, but not too bad. The parafoil is going to pop in three, two, one…”
Hail watched the green blur stop for a brief second. The shock of the 4G deceleration scrambled the communications and whited-out the screen as the parafoil yanked up on the drone. Then a beat later an image returned. Hail could make out a distant tree line on a hill maybe a half a mile away. Everything was still green, many shades of green, similar to an old fashion black and white TV with shades of grey differentiating the colors.
Hail pressed an icon on his screen labeled BELLYCAM. Led Zeppelin had a total of five video cameras mounted to its black carbon fiber frame. The aircraft was round and thin and if it had flashing lights and was seen from the ground, it would be recognized as a flying saucer. But the drone was black and had no lights and would never be seen from the ground. Since it was round, there was no real front and back to the machine, but for practical purposes the designers had assigned front, back, left side and right side cameras.
The video from the bellycam was much better than the forward camera. The forward camera was having difficulties maintaining focus while the parafoil’s cords untwisted. The bellycam, however, was mounted directly in the center of the drone. This allowed the camera gimbal to rotate on a fine set of German ball bearings, keeping its lens pointed forward no matter how the aircraft twisted and turned.
“We have a visual on the landing zone,” Dallas said. He twisted his right joystick to correct for wind driftage. A small motor on the drone wound in five inches of thin clear line that was tied to the airfoil twenty feet above. The line pulled down the left corner of the plastic material, changing the aerodynamics of the winged shaped parafoil. Led Zeppelin responded accordingly and turned ten degrees to the north. Once the direction had been corrected, Dallas released the joy stick and the same motor unwound exactly five inches of line and the aircraft flew straight and true.
“Where is the landing point?” Hail asked. “I don’t see it.”
Dallas touched an icon labeled MARKER and then touched his finger to his video screen and circled a dark green area. A red circle appeared on Hail’s monitor.
“Right there, that’s the spot you indicated during the briefing,” Dallas said.
“Great,” Hail said.
The parafoil had slowed the drone from a descending speed of 190 miles per hour to 17 miles per hour.
“Systems check,” Hail ordered.
One of the junior mission pilots that Hail knew, but didn’t see often, fielded the request.
“Checking…” said Oliver Fox. The other pilots called the young man Oli, if Hail remembered correctly.
Hail was proud of the job his programmers had done designing the ship’s command and control network. All the communications with the drones was done through the application. Since there was no direct access to a drone except through the ship’s software, that meant that any drone, or even any part of a drone, could be handed off to another pilot. Weapons, flight control, system checks, damage reporting, if one pilot was busy, then another could access the drone’s flight system and help out.
Hail had all sixteen seats filled with pilots and analysts for just that reason. A few of the pilots would not be flying drones on this mission, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t help out with the hundreds of parameters that had to be monitored and adjusted. Currently, no less than six pilots were monitoring Led Zeppelin’s vitals and watching for any indication that the machine was having problems.
“Approaching two-hundred feet,” Dallas announced. “Preparing to cut the chute. Spinning up the propellers.”
Dallas reached over and pushed forward a thick lever that had a small stencil on it that read THRUST.
A gauge on his control panel began to change. Inside the small rectangle were two sections. There was a red section at the bottom and a green section at the top. Each of these sections was overlaid by ruler marks. As Dallas pushed the thrust lever forward, the red section began to move up, and the green section began to retreat. When the red section and the green section were exactly equal, Dallas said, “We are at equilibrium. Cutting the chute.”
He pressed an icon that looked like miniature scissors cutting a kite string.
“Chute is away in we are in free flight,” Dallas announced.
Dallas turned Led Zeppelin to the right, until he could verify the airfoil was loose and drifting off to the east.
“It would be nice if it made it to water,” Hail said, but he knew it really didn’t matter.
It was only the difference between minutes and hours. The parafoil was made from a hydro-degradable plastic that was up to three times stronger than polythene. Once exposed to the atmosphere, the parafoil, its control lines and every part of the chute had already begun to dissolve. If directly exposed to a body of water, such as a lake or a river, the parafoil would be completely dissolved in a matter of minutes. But even if it landed in the middle of a farmer’s field, considering the humidity level in Kangdong, in a matter of hours the chute would look like a heard of snails and left a thin patch of clear slime on the ground. Hours after that, even the slime would have evaporated. Hail was confident the parafoil would leave no tell-tale sign that it ever existed.
“Status report?” Hail requested.
Shana Tran was the first to respond. “Communications are five by five with both Zeppelin and Foghat.”