Chapter 7
Captain Turk Mako stretched his arms back and rocked his shoulders, loosening his muscles before putting on the flight helmet for the Tigershark II. For all of its advanced electronics and carefully thought-out interface, the helmet had one serious shortcoming:
It was heavy, at least twice the weight of a regular flight helmet. And the high-speed maneuvers the Tigershark II specialized in didn’t make it feel any lighter.
Then again, the brain bucket did keep the gray matter where it belonged.
“Ready, Captain?” asked Martha Albris, flight crew chief for the test mission.
Though standing next to him, Albris was using the Whiplash com system, and her voice was so loud in the helmet that it hurt Turk’s eardrums. Turk put his hand over the ear area of his helmet and rotated his palm, manually adjusting the volume on the external microphone system. The helmet had several interfaces; besides voice, a number of controls were activated by external touch, including the audio volume. It was part of an intuitive control system aimed to make the Tigershark more an extension of the pilot’s body rather than an aircraft.
Turk gave her a thumbs-up.
They walked together to the boarding ladder. The Tigershark II was a squat, sleek aircraft, small by conventional fighter standards. But then she wasn’t a conventional fighter. She was designed to work with a fleet of unmanned aircraft, acting as both team leader and mother hen.
Turk went up the four steps of the ladder to a horizontal bridge, where he climbed off the gridwork and onto the seat of his airplane. He folded his legs down under the control panel and into the narrow tunnel beneath the nose of the plane, slipping into the airplane much like a foot into a loafer.
Albris bent over the platform to help him. As crew chiefs went, she was particularly pleasing to the eye, even in her one-piece coverall. Turk had actually never seen the civilian mechanics supervisor in anything but a coverall. Still, her freckled face and the slight scent of perfume sent his imagination soaring.
Maybe he’d look her up after the postflight debrief.
Turk’s fantasies were interrupted by a black SUV that pulled across the front of the hangar, its blue emergency lights flashing. The passenger-side door opened and his boss, Breanna Stockard, emerged from the cab.
“Turk, I need to talk to you,” she yelled. “There’s been a change in plans.”
Turk pulled himself back upright.
“Flight scrubbed, boss?” he asked. The helmet projected his voice across the hangar.
“The test flight is. But you’re still going to fly.”
“Really? Where to?”
“We’ll discuss it inside,” said Breanna.
Breanna watched Turk climb out of the plane and run over to the truck. That was the great thing about Turk — he was enthusiastic no matter what.
“Another demo flight for visiting congressmen?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said, turning toward the hangar. “We have to go downstairs to discuss it.”
The Office of Special Technology used a small area in the Dreamland complex to house Tigershark and some related projects. Besides a pair of hangars, it “owned” an underground bunker and a support area there.
The Office of Special Technology was an outgrowth of several earlier programs that brought cutting-edge technology to the front lines. Most notable of these was Dreamland itself, which a decade and a half before had been run by Breanna’s father, Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian. But the walk down the concrete ramp to the secure areas below held no special romance for Breanna; she’d long ago learned to steel herself off from any emotion where Dreamland was concerned.
“You’re flying to Sudan,” Breanna told Turk when they reached the secure area below. Once a medical test lab, the room was now used to brief missions. It was functionally the equivalent of a SCIF, or secure communications area, sealed against possible electronic eavesdropping.
Breanna walked to one of the computer terminals.
“Less than twelve hours ago, a UAV called Raven went down in a mountainous area in the southeast corner of Sudan, not far from Ethiopia,” she said. “I have a map here.”
“That’s pretty far to get some pictures,” said Turk, looking at the screen. “Going to be a long flight, even supersonic.”
“It’s not just a reconnaissance mission, Turk. Whiplash has been deployed. Our network satellite in that area is down for maintenance. It’ll be at least forty-eight hours before we get the replacement moved into position.”
“Gotcha.”
Whiplash was the code name of a joint CIA — Defense Department project run by the Office of Special Technology. It combined a number of cutting-edge technologies with a specially trained covert action unit headed by Air Force colonel Danny Freah. Freah had helped pioneer the concept at Dreamland as a captain some fifteen years before. Now he was back as the leader of a new incarnation, working with special operators from a number of different military branches as well as the CIA.
Unlike the Dreamland version, the new Whiplash worked directly with the Central Intelligence Agency and included a number of CIA officers. The head of the Agency contingent was Nuri Abaajmed Lupo, a young covert agent who, by coincidence, had spent considerable time undercover in roughly the same area where the Raven UAV had gone down.
Nuri had been the first field agent to train with a highly integrated computer network developed for Whiplash. Officially known as the Massively Parallel Integrated Decision Complex or MY-PID, the network of interconnected computers and data interfaces, the system allowed him to access a wide range of information, from planted bugs to Agency data mining, instantaneously while he was in the field.
The high volume data streams traveled through a dedicated network of satellites. The amount of data involved and the limitations of the ground broadcasting system required that the satellites be within certain ranges for MY-PID to work. The Tigershark II could substitute as a relay station in an emergency.
“You’re to contact Danny Freah when you arrive on station,” Breanna continued. “We’ll have updates to you while you’re en route.”
“All right, I guess.”
“Problem, Captain?”
“No ma’am. Just figuring it out.”
Turk folded his arms and stared at the screen. The target area in southeastern Sudan was some 13,750 kilometers away — roughly 7,500 nautical miles. Cruising in the vicinity of Mach 3, the Tigershark could cover that distance in the area of four hours. At that speed, though, it would run out of fuel somewhere over the Atlantic. He’d need to set up at least two refuels to be comfortable.
“The first tanker will meet you in the Caribbean,” said Breanna. She tapped a password into the computer and a map appeared. “It’s already being prepped. You fly south with it, then head across to the Med. A second tanker will come on station over Libya.”
“How long do I stay on station?”
“As long as it takes. We’ll find another tanker; you can just stay in transmission range if you have to refuel off the east coast of Africa. Obviously, you won’t be able to provide any surveillance, but we’ll have to make do until we get more gear there. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like it’ll even be necessary. The mission looks very straightforward.”
Breanna double-tapped the screen, expanding the map area of southern Sudan. Next she opened a set of optical satellite images of the area, taken about an hour before the accident.
“This satellite will pass back over that area in three hours,” she said. “It’s possible that they’ll find the wreckage before you arrive. If not, you’re to use your sensors to assist in the search. All right?”