A pause of white space on the frequency, most likely while he looked up on the radar scope.
“Approved, ROCK 23. Continue to hold as requested. You’re cleared up to DONVO intersection on G-597. Come back to me on this freq when you are complete.”
All aviation intersections, usually the crossing of two invisible roads in the sky, or airways, were labeled with a five letter identifier nickname. MUDAL and DONVO were intersections in the airspace off Korea and China on airways A-326 and G-597.
The specialists in the back, monitoring all sorts of things from a whole host of countries, intercepted some unique transmissions through the years. Sometimes it could be a phone call, or a training mission, or a local radio station broadcasting unique news stories. Using their direction-finding equipment, they could sometimes get an exact location of where someone was transmitting, and listen in, no matter what the device or language.
Sgt Rae Davis, a three-year member of the 82nd Reconnaissance Squadron and a linguist in Mandarin, was monitoring a variety of frequencies, scanning the UHF bands to see what she could detect. Whoa, what’s this? she said to herself, listening in. “Hey, listen to these Chinese pilots on button 3 in Section A5… ahh… correction, A6. A6,” said Davis to another one of the operators flying a console in the rear of the RIVET JOINT.
She turned to her supervisor in the rear of the aircraft, Technical Sergeant Frank Franklin, “His stuff is encrypted. Pretty good technology….new? I filtered it… out twice, ran it through the box, and retuned. Radical avionics gear, but we can hear him,” as Davis ran her fingers through the walled equipment. “Interesting. Huh. If I use the radar scanner to see what he’s flying, I come up with nothing. No returns.”
“You can hear him, but not paint him?” asked Franklin, the supervisor, listening in the back on his headset. “For real?”
They would not be able to see the aircraft visually from this distance, but could send an electronic signal out, usually receive it back, and the computers would tell them if he was flying a crop duster, helicopter, or a modern fighter.
“Yes, Sergeant. Pick him up to monitor on Button 3,” replied Davis.
Franklin did as Davis asked, but couldn’t get anything. “Nothing there. Play it back for me,” he asked.
“All right, here it is: ‘Roger, gear down,’ and then a few minutes later, ‘Roger….landing checklists complete. Landing speed 142 knots. Runway is 3,000 meters or 9,843 feet. Clear.’
“Odd, er, abnormal. No landing clearance from tower? And no radar signature?” asked Franklin.
“No. Just the transmissions,” Davis replied.
“Wait… wait. He’s got a data downlink system for the engine performance. Can’t see the full readout, but he… has… let’s see here. He has four engines. Looks like two of one type, and… two of another? Ah, he’s also using an encrypted GPS for his navigation, off of … ha! Three of our satellites. Shit, the Chinese are using our satellites for navigation! No kidding?” reported Davis.
The engines were able to transmit performance to an on-board smart phone to capture data because the Devil Dragon was not fully operational yet. Most business and commercial jets transmitted their performance via satellite for maintenance reasons, as do test aircraft, but tactical aircraft do not. Especially this one.
“He’s using GPS satellite birds USA-248, USA-258, and USA-260,” said Davis.
“Nice. Got to love it. The Chinese are using our GPS satellites. Well… we got him. Tab it on the tapes so we can bring it home. Good work, gang,” said Franklin.
U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Earl Brooks was essentially out for a joy ride, taking the P-3 Orion aircraft out with his crew to get his monthly flight time boosted up before he applied for a position at United Airlines. He despised the office life back in the Navy squadrons, and was thrilled to do some joint training in Rangoon, Burma when the mission came down from U.S. Pacific Command. “Train and fly with the Myanmar Armed Forces” was how the message traffic read, and he and the crew didn’t skip a beat in volunteering. The only requirement was that the P-3 had to fly “hot,” in that the aircraft had to have all its special mission equipment “on and scanning” when flying. The crew loved the night life, so they eagerly flew so they could enjoy the liberty call. Translation for Earl Brooks and crew in Burma: beer and women.
The Lockheed P-3 Orion, on loan from the joint 455th Air Expeditionary Wing at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, and was not your father’s standard turboprop airplane. This grey airframe offered the U.S. Navy and joint intelligence community military more endurance, allowing greater time in the air. This standard P-3 fuselage looked like it was on steroids, and performed overland surveillance on moving targets, had a synthetic aperture radar, an electro-optical and infra-red system, known as EO and FLIR, as well as a stream video data link. It also had a distinguished magnetic detection boom pointing out the back, used for submarine hunting. It was a high-performance turboprop with a pressured cabin, crew of 11, and was nothing close to a small business jet in both speed and luxury. In fact, Navy P-3’s were being replaced by the Boeing P-8, which was why Earl Brooks was massaging his apps for United Airlines.
Its latest piece of gear was not only eyes in the sky, but also rather ears. The DroneShield detector, bolted to the fuselage of the Orion just under the right wing, could listen, rather than look, for potentially dangerous airborne threats. The usual threat detected by DroneShield was drones, but the system could cross-reference the audio it picks up to determine sonic signatures and find a match. Routinely found on office building roofs, prisons, airports and other sensitive government facilities, the military found a way to use this system wisely. They also had a StingRay system that could scan cell phones and ground towers.
Navy Lieutenant Commander Earl Brooks did as instructed by flying hot, and always landed on time. The Naval Flight Officers (NFO) in the rear retrieved the blue box from the rear of the P-3 by unlocking a compartment door upon landing, pulling the box that made recordings, and locked it back up again with the aircraft keys. As long as Brooks and the crew were flying regularly at Yangon Airport and not chained to the cubicle life, they didn’t care what the antennas were doing. He then had the aircraft towed inside the hangar that the Navy rented for them. Once inside the hangar, the ground crew chocked the wheels, thanked the aircraft tow driver, and they departed for the hotel on Merchant Road in Rangoon.
The 46-minute trip was without traffic, and the P-3 crews in their vans found it to be a nice drive this time of day. Earl’s van had Voice of America on the FM radio, and was closely following the news back in the states. Upon arrival to the hotel, Earl and one of the rear NFO’s hit the Business Center in the lobby, and made a secure, encrypted connection over the hotel Wi-Fi via a laptop. They needed to transmit the secure data from the flight to the Joint Intelligence Center in Hawaii, and this was the safest method to do it while traveling. Blue box to laptop, data to Hawaii, and they’d soon be downing cold brews.
Navy Chief Petty Officer and Intelligence Analyst Stan Michaels was on duty in the Hawaii Joint Intelligence Center, and received the downlink from Burma. Stan Michaels, 44-years old, both smart and as sharp as a tack, was a technical analyst on his third deployment tour to support the U.S. Pacific Command mission. He usually provided advice on foreign and adversarial militaries to the Combatant Command leadership and staff, but today he was just scanning the technical information from Earl’s P-3 flight. Stan was a mechanical engineer from Lehigh University, but started learning the intelligence technical information after obtaining a defense contracting job about 16 years ago. After becoming bored with his engineering bench testing position at Northrup Grumman in Amherst, New York after a few years, he researched the Navy option, and enlisted.