The UAV popped onto the screen, closer than he thought: five miles away.
It turned to a heading almost exactly between north and east, and for a few moments he had a profile of it from the rear side quarter. Rather than adjusting his course to follow, Turk adjusted his course to parallel it. He got another fleeting glimpse, then another, then lost it.
There’s a way to make this work, Turk told himself. Go farther north and flip around.
“I’m going to jump ahead,” he told Cowboy. “You stay on the present course.”
“You want me to follow?”
“No, stay on your heading,” said Turk. “You’re going in the general direction. I’m going to slide around a bit and try and get a good radar on him. I have an idea.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
Turk hit his afterburner again, riding it for three seconds before backing off. He started a turn, aiming to push the nose of the plane at the UAV’s rear fuselage. He found it only three miles away — the drone had slowed considerably.
“You better check your fuel, Two,” said Cowboy.
“Yeah, I know. Listen, Bandit is down to two hundred knots. Gotta be looking to land.”
“Where? There’s nothing out here.”
Cowboy was right. The reef tips were so small even a seagull couldn’t call them home.
“He may just be slowing down for fuel conservation,” answered Turk.
Or maybe he was running out of fuel. Turk was suddenly closing on the contact at a good rate; its forward speed was down to 150 knots.
“I’m thinking he’s going to crash,” Turk told Cowboy.
Two seconds later the UAV disappeared from the screen.
6
At some point Ray Rubeo stopped studying the data flowing across the screen and just stared at the simulation of the UAV in flight. It was impressive, all the more so because it had been developed without the help of a massive government program.
True, vast amounts of it had been stolen or inspired by his own work. Still, to have constructed something so smart and capable — the scientist in Rubeo couldn’t help but admire the ingenuity.
But he wasn’t here to admire someone else’s work — especially when that other person seemed bent on destroying everything he had worked for.
Rubeo tapped his screen, changing the window to see an analysis of real-time performance data. He was surprised to find that the screen was no longer updating.
“What happened?” he asked his team back in New Mexico.
“The UAV appears to have crashed or stopped operating,” said Kristen Morgan, one of the operators handling communications with him. “It’s off their radars and nothing they do will bring it back. They’re close enough to pick it up, or they were.”
“Command signals?”
“If there were, the Global Hawk was too far away to pick them up. When you diverted it to protect the base—”
“Yes, I understand. A necessary decision.” Rubeo scowled. It was a chess match, and one had to protect his pieces until an advantage could be had. “Compile the data as soon as you can. We need models, everything we discussed.”
“Will do.”
“And how are we coming with the file on Braxton and his associates?”
“It’s thicker than it was. We have a whole range of his shell companies and some contractors.”
“Keep working on it,” said Rubeo. “Update my files here every hour.”
“Not a problem.”
“Something he’s done will give him away,” Rubeo told her. “As brilliant as he clearly is.”
7
By the time Danny got back to the command bunker, most of the debris had been cleared and the systems restored. Lieutenant JG Cathy Talaria had taken over and replaced the wounded with fresh staff.
Walsh was back, chest bandaged and arm in a sling.
“Are you OK?” Danny asked.
“Broken arm. The rest is nothing.”
“Don’t—”
“They lost the UAV,” said the techie, changing the subject. He was here for his brain but he shared the tough-as-nails will of the rest of the Whiplash team. “I have the Global Hawk running a search pattern in the area. It has to land soon, at least according to our calcs. It slowed way down before we lost final contact, so it may have crashed.”
“Where?”
“Not sure, Colonel. Turk thinks over the water. But it’s just a guess.”
“Hmmm.” Danny leaned down to look at the console. Walsh had a map up on one of the screens showing the approximate search location. There were several small islets in the area, but none were big enough to support a full base. All had been scouted even before Danny first arrived to look for a base; as far as they could tell there were none.
“If it crashes, we need to recover it,” said Danny. “Hopefully before it sinks.”
“Not going to be easy, Colonel. They’re roughly a hundred miles from shore. And that’s at a minimum.”
“Better to try than give up.” Danny went over to Talaria and told her what he wanted to do.
“If Captain Thomas says we can spare the men, I’ll lead a squad myself, sir,” said the young woman.
“That’s your captain’s call,” said Danny. “Where are the Ospreys?”
“They’re both on the ground getting refueled and checked over,” said Talaria.
“I’m going to talk to the pilots. Tell Thomas what I want to do, and ask him to detail a squad to help me, if possible.”
Turk flew over the area where he’d lost the radar contact. There was nothing but dark, empty ocean. He settled into a widening orbit as he searched.
“Basher One, do you have a contact?” he asked his wingman.
“Negative, Two. What are you seeing?”
“Nothing.”
“You think he crashed?”
“Possibly,” answered Turk. Even in daylight it would have been hard to detect the fragments of the small aircraft on the surface of the ocean. Now, without a fire, there wouldn’t be enough for the passive IR sensor to pick up either.
Turk stared out of the cockpit, frustrated. They’d come so far, only to lose the damn thing.
“Basher Two, check your fuel gauges,” said Cowboy. “How good are you at treading water, Air Force?”
Turk glanced at his fuel gauge and did some quick math. He had about forty-one minutes of fuel left… and it would take about eighteen to get home. They had planned to land with about twenty minutes of reserve, a generally prudent mark.
“I’m a lousy swimmer,” Turk told Cowboy. “I’m about three minutes to bingo. I have enough fuel for two more minutes. The Global Hawk is flying this way.”
“Basher Two, do you have contact with your bandit?” asked Walsh, back at the Marine base.
“Negative. Lost it. We’re trying to get a visual or something, anything, on a wreckage.”
“Be advised the Global Hawk just had a fleeting contact about fifteen nautical miles east of where you are. I’m heading the aircraft in that direction. Stand by for a vector.”
“Roger that,” said Turk, altering his course as Walsh read out the heading. It was almost exactly due east of the point where he’d lost the aircraft.
“Hey, Air Force, you don’t have the fuel for this,” said Cowboy.
“I got twenty minutes of reserve.”
“Turk—”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to break your plane,” answered Turk.
“That ain’t it, dude,” responded Cowboy. “If we have to punch out, I can’t swim.”
Danny strapped himself into the copilot’s seat of the Osprey and hung on as the aircraft began its short taxi down the runway. With no way to quickly tie the Osprey pilot directly into the Whiplash communications system, they’d settled for a low-tech solution — he would relay information to the pilot as he spoke through his own gear. It was easier to do that from the second officer’s seat.