There was a knock, the door opened and an enlisted man stuck his head in. “They’re ready for you now, sir. Please follow me.”
Tombstone followed the crisply laundered back out of the building and across a tie-down area toward an enormous, windowless hangar where his pass was carefully examined by another, better armed and altogether meaner-looking weenie. Finally the guard saluted and opened the door.
Tombstone stepped into a vast, echoing hangar. At first it appeared to be empty. Then he saw a small collection of metal objects scattered across a tarp in the center of the concrete floor. Three men were bending over the tarp: the Air Force rep from the meeting; John Palmer the spook; and the young DARPA nerd. The Air Force rep looked up and waved him over.
As Tombstone approached, he stared at the garbage on the tarp. Immediately he recognized pieces of the bogey that had pursued him all over the Maryland sky, laid out in roughly correct configuration. Part of the rear half appeared to be intact, if scorched and bent; one of the forward fins had been laid out in more or less correct position; of the nose section there were only tiny fragments, unrecognizable to Tombstone. Other pieces sat in trays to either side. Tombstone was reminded of an archaeological dig, with a half-exposed fossil.
Still, the general shape of the bogey was recognizable enough to give him a chill. “I’m surprised there’s this much of it left,” he said.
“It wasn’t easy to find,” said the Air Force rep. “Fortunately, the vehicle buried itself in six feet of mud before the warhead went off. A lot of the aft section was simply fired right back out like a cannon shell.”
Tombstone released a breath. “So, what is it, who built it, and why was it following me?”
The DARPA kid looked up, eyes shining with excitement behind his glasses; Tombstone was reminded of a twelve-year-old kid staring at the Milky Way. “It’s a UAV,” he said.
“A UAV? But — that can’t be right. Didn’t you read my report? It was dogfighting me.”
The kid grinned. “No it wasn’t; it was just following you around, like a Sidewinder, and trying to take you out.”
“You mean it was a heat-seeker?”
The kid glanced at Palmer, then back. “Not exactly. You ever hear of Predator?”
“You mean the Air Force drone?”
“Predator’s a lot more than a drone, Admiral,” Palmer said. “It’s a completely automated surveillance aircraft. It takes off, flies to a defined location, performs its mission, then returns to base and lands… all without a bit of human intervention. It’s the future of aerial reconnaissance.”
Tombstone frowned. “That’s all very interesting, but a surveillance aircraft — unmanned or not — does its thing over stationary ground. I’m sure it’s fairly simple to write a mission program for that, but I’m telling you, this thing was dogfighting me. Somebody had to be flying it, like a radio-controlled plane.”
“Wrong-Oh, Admiral,” the kid said. He pointed into one of the bins. “Wrong kind of antennas for radio control. It used GPS — geosynchronous positioning satellite — data to get into position, but after that something else took over, and that’s when things got hairy for you.”
“ ‘Hairy?’ ” Tombstone said. He leaned forward. “You might call it that. I’d say it was a little more serious than ‘hairy’.”
The kid grinned. “Not tweaking you, Admiral. Here’s the deaclass="underline" This thing carried enough fuel to cruise for maybe an hour or so. It could be launched from a meadow or a country road, or even a boat if some kind of catapult was used. Once it reached its assigned territory, it would start to circle around while its video camera — actually, four of them — scanned everything that entered that airspace. Its onboard computer would match each image against images stored on its internal hard drive. When it got a match, boom — it went in for the kill.”
“Wait. You mean this thing was set up to recognize my aircraft?”
“Looks that way. Somebody programmed it to fly around until it spotted a Pitts Special — maybe even a specific Pitts Special — and then go after it. That’s another major difference from Predator. Predator is slow, a prop-plane with long wings, basically a motorized glider. This sucker used a nifty little turbofan a lot like a Tomahawk’s. There are some of the fan blades.”
Tombstone stared at the debris again. “I can’t believe you can tell so much from this.”
“Well, only part of what I know is based on the wreckage itself. See, DARPA has been doing research along these same lines, so — ”
“Mr. Williams,” Palmer said quietly.
The kid glanced over at him with a glint of humor in his eye. “Sorry, 007.” Then, to Tombstone, “Guess this is where your need-to-know stops. Anyway, the main reason I know what kind of guidance system this thing used is because of how you avoided getting shot down. It finally hit me: You said that whenever you snap-rolled the Pitts, the vehicle seemed to lose track of you. Right?”
“So it seemed.”
“That’s because it wasn’t programmed as well as it could have been. I’m betting it was taught what a Pitts Special looks like from all kinds of angles, so it could always recognize your plane in the sky, regardless of your attitude or position. Right? But somebody forgot that when a plane rolls fast enough, it takes on a whole new profile, visually. It could be interpreted as a sort of big cylinder. The vehicle couldn’t recognize that shape, so it went back into search mode until you stopped rolling.”
“That’s it,” Tombstone said. “That’s exactly what happened.”
The kid shrugged. “Elementary.”
“So where did it come from? Who built it?”
The kid started to respond, glanced at Palmer. The spook nodded. Picking up a curved piece of the fuselage, the kid tilted it so Tombstone could see a character painted inside.
“Made in China,” the kid said.
Tombstone glanced from the kid to the spook, then back at the wreckage on the floor. “China built this?” he said.
“That’s what these symbols tell us,” Palmer said. “They say something like ‘Gift of the Eastern Wind.’ There are other indicators, too, like some of the construction methods and materials. China was involved.”
Tombstone shook his head. “I knew the PLA was developing cruise missiles, but this…”
“We thought the United States had a lead time of years, if not decades, in UAV technology,” Palmer said. “As you can imagine, this came as quite a shock to us as well.”
“Especially since this puppy was really well-designed,” the kid said. “I mean, most of China’s aeronautics is based on old Soviet stuff, right? And until real recently, the Russians were still building fighters using rinky-dink 1950s technology. Sheet steel, big clunky aluminum fittings; they even used vacuum tubes in their instruments long after we’d switched to solid-state circuitry.”
Tombstone nodded. He’d heard all that before; he also knew that the tune had changed dramatically with the advent of the Mig-29 and its successors.
“Okay,” the kid said. “So China has been just as bad, or worse. But this thing…” He picked up the piece of fuselage again, put it back. “It’s a masterpiece of minimalism. The fuselage and moving parts are sophisticated stuff — graphite composites, bonded aluminum, titanium alloy… but the electronics, what’s left of them, are pretty much off-the-shelf. In fact…”