Turk explained the plan to Danny.
“They’re brave, but that’s no substitute for firepower,” said Freah. “They don’t have enough people to do all this.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think so either,” said Turk. “But they want to get these guys.”
“The Marines are talking about finding the rest of the rebels who attacked them,” said Danny. “Maybe we can figure something out.”
Captain Thomas had asked for a platoon of reinforcements to be sent in from the MEU to go after the rebels who’d attacked. With three rifle sections or squads, the unit totaled forty men, and would be there by nightfall.
“We could send two squads with the Malaysians,” suggested Thomas. “That will be more than enough to deal with these guys, as long as we have air support.”
Greenstreet was in a better mood, or at least one that allowed him to ignore Turk when he saw him. Reviewing the plan with Cowboy, he gave a grudging nod, then said he was handicapped with Rogers still sick.
“I’m down to three pilots,” said Greenstreet. “I can only get three planes up.”
“We can do it with two,” said Thomas.
“You have to worry about the UAV showing up,” said Danny. “Are two planes enough?”
“You’d want two planes to deal with it,” suggested Turk. “So really, two planes handle the attack, and two fly cover.”
Greenstreet bristled, but didn’t contradict him.
“Then one jet on the attack, if we only have three,” said Thomas.
“It’s tight if they’re at both spots,” said Greenstreet. “It’s just a question of how much ordnance we can bring. Maybe we mix the loads, have one flying CAP and the other two attacking but ready to tangle with the UAV.”
CAP was an old acronym for command air patrol, meaning that the single aircraft would fly top cover for the others when they attacked.
“What about Turk flying?” asked Danny. “He did pretty well.”
“These are Marine aircraft,” snapped Greenstreet. “Marine aviators will fly them. I’ll work it out.”
Danny and Thomas exchanged a look, but there was nothing more to be said. Greenstreet stomped off, Cowboy in tow.
“He’ll come around,” predicted Thomas. “He’s just protecting his turf. Some guys are like that. Even Marines.”
“WE’RE MARINES, NOT pussies,” complained Cowboy as soon as they were out of earshot. His anger and language were calculated, though his sentiments were not. “I’ll go up and help them.”
“Relax, Lieutenant,” said Greenstreet. “I fully intend on doing the mission.”
“What?”
“I said I would work it out.”
“You kinda sounded—”
“Pissed off? Yes. We want two planes to deal with a UAV — what was that about?”
“He’s just being careful,” said Cowboy.
“You think he would have said that to an Air Force pilot?”
“Turk’s pretty straight up.”
“And another thing. They’re not sharing everything they know. That UAV is the entire reason we’re here. What do we know about it? Jack shit.”
“They say they’re here to get intel.”
“They’re spoon-feeding us information. That’s what I think.”
Cowboy didn’t think that was fair, but it was really beside the point. They had to fly the mission.
“We had casualties on the ground,” he told his commander. “That means we get out there and get some payback.”
“We’ll get payback.” Greenstreet folded his arms. “But we’ll do it right.”
“That’s why I’m here,” replied Cowboy. “It’s the only way I know how to do things.”
6
The appearance of the advanced UAVs in an obscure third world guerrilla battle had set off alarms within the American intelligence community. The immediate consensus among the tech people was that China had leapt several generations in UAV development and was testing the equipment in a place where few would notice. The fact that China had no ties to the rebels who were benefiting — and in fact had every reason not to support them — gave rise to another theory that Russia was actually the country behind the aircraft. This was backed by a smaller group, who had even less evidence on their side. Outlier theories — that Japan or Israel were involved — had occasionally been floated, only to be quickly shot down.
None of the theories tied the aircraft to either Dreamland, which had originally developed combat UAVs, or Rubeo’s different firms, which had worked on the AI and some of the avionics and body shaping.
But Rubeo knew they would. And for that reason alone, he had to figure out exactly what the aircraft were and who was flying them.
Of course, that wasn’t the only reason. The combat UAVs had revolutionized air combat. And as dangerous as they were in the hands of China, they could be even more dangerous if controlled by someone else. From what Rubeo had seen so far, they were still being tested. Give whoever was handling them a few more months and they would be even more formidable.
Technically, Rubeo was no longer a government employee, but as the head of the firm that had designed most of the Cube’s systems and had an extremely close relationship with the Office of Special Projects, he’d been allotted an office in the deepest basement of the bunker, next to the situation room — convenient, since it allowed him to go back and forth quickly when he wanted. The office was spartan — a wooden desk, a very old, barely padded chair, a single lamp — but that was the way Rubeo liked it.
If he needed to sleep and wanted something more comfortable than the chair, he had a small bedroll tucked next to the desk.
The furniture was spare, but his communications and computing gear was state of the art. The desk sagged under the weight of four different sets of screens and hand-built CPU units, each more powerful than the standard IBM mainframe of only a generation ago.
He’d uploaded data from the UAV to one of his units, where he ran flight and computation simulators, trying to divine what the unidentified UAV was capable of. The parallels to the Flighthawk Gen 4 were striking. But as Rubeo looked at the data they had gathered so far, he went back to the destroyed chip.
He’d called it a processing chip during his briefing, but that wasn’t entirely correct. It seemed to actually function as a gateway between other processing chips, or at least that was his engineer’s theory. And Rubeo’s team had managed to extract a long piece of code from a memory unit embedded in the fuselage remnant.
The code sequence matched sequences used in the early Flighthawks, with an additional “tail” added for the brains used in the Gen 4 version.
There was no way that was a coincidence. While the “tail” solved a number of common problems that might be arrived at independently, appending it to the other sequences had been a matter of expediency — why reinvent the wheel?
The sequence had a command syntax: had it been words rather than numerals, it would have had a specific grammar and punctuation indicating that it was a command. But it was encrypted — though it was clearly a command, it was impossible to tell which command it was. To use the sentence metaphor, it was as if all the letters in the sentence had been exchanged for others.
The exchange wasn’t random, of course. And since Rubeo had a database of all the Gen 4 commands, breaking the encryption, while not trivial, was not impossible.
The computer back at his New Mexico lab had just done that. The command initiated a “flee” sequence, directing the aircraft to leave the battle ten minutes after the start of the encounter. It had been intended as a fail-safe if the controlled UAV lost its connection to the base; here it was probably being used to get the aircraft home.