“We ready?” Megan asked Howe.
“You pissed at something?” Howe said instead of answering. Besides flying chase, he was in charge of overseeing the system’s integration for the Air Force, the de facto service boss of what was in theory a private program until it proved itself and was formally taken over by the military. He was the top “blue suit,” or Air Force officer, on the project, though the hybrid nature of the program diluted his authority.
Dominic Gregorio pushed his big jaw between them, saying something about how they’d better hit the flyway before the weather got too tremendously awful. The forecast had the storm continuing for two or three days.
“Pissed?” asked Megan. “Why?”
A phony answer, he thought.
“We ready to hit the
He giggled. For some reason the engineer thought
“Kick butt,” Megan told Howe. She slugged his shoulder and swept toward her plane.
By the time the altimeter ladder on Colonel Howe’s heads-up display notched ten thousand feet an hour later, he had nearly convinced himself he hadn’t seen her frown. Howe pushed the nose of his F/A-22V right, swinging toward the south end of the test range. Megan’s 767 was just settling into its designated firing course about three hundred yards ahead, wings wobbling ever so slightly because of the severe turbulence they were flying through. The synthesized radar image in Howe’s tactical display showed the plane as well as its course; its annotations critiqued Megan’s piloting skills, noting that she was deviating from the flight plan by.001 degree.
Howe’s Velociraptor, with its delta wings and nose canards, had been designed to work with Cyclops as a combination long-distance interceptor and attack plane, able to switch seamlessly from escort to bombing roles. The long weapons bay beneath its belly would include a mix of air-to-air AMRAAM-pluses and air-to-ground small- diameter GPS-guided bombs; the bays at the side would have either a heat-seeking Sidewinder or an AMRAAM- plus, an improved version of the battle-tested AIM-120. Roughly a dozen feet longer than a “stock” Raptor, the Velociraptor’s massive V-shaped wings allowed it to carry nearly twice the fuel its brother held. Its rear stabilizers were more sharply canted and included control surfaces operated with the help of a hydrogen system to radically change airflow in milliseconds, greatly increasing the plane’s maneuverability.
“Birds, this is Cyclops. We’re in the loop,” said Megan, alerting Howe and his wingman that the test sequence was about to begin.
“Bird One,” acknowledged Howe. He looked down at the configurable tactical display screen in the center of his dash, which was synthesizing a view of the battle area ahead. The computer built the image from a variety of sources over the shared input network of the three planes; Howe had what looked like a three-dimensional plot of the mountain below. The large screen showed not just the target — an I-HAWK MIM-23 antiaircraft missile site — but the scope of its radar, a yellowish balloon projecting from the mountain plain. A red box appeared on the missile launcher, indicating that the laser targeting gear aboard Cyclops was scanning for the most vulnerable point of its target; the box began to blink and then went solid red, indicating it was ready to lock. Had this been a real mission, they could have fried it before it presented any danger at all.
Howe pushed his head back against the ejection seat, trying to will his neck and back muscles into something approaching relaxation.
Far below in the rugged Montana hills, the Army I-HAWK battery prepared to fire. The missile launcher was twenty nautical miles due north, a thick dagger in Cyclops’s course. When the 767 drew to within five miles, the battery would fire its weapon. A millisecond after it did, the phased-array radar built into Cyclops One would detect it. The turret at the nose would rotate slightly downward, like the giant eye of the Greek monster the weapon had been named for. Within seconds the laser would lock on the missile and destroy it between three and five hundred feet off the ground.
The only thing difficult about the test was the thick band of storm clouds and torrential rain between the plane and the ground. The rain was so bad the normal monitoring plane, a converted RC-135, which would have had to fly at low altitude through the teeth of the storm, was grounded. Cyclops had handled simultaneous firings from two I-HAWK batteries handily in clear-sky trials three weeks before; it had nailed SAMs, cruise missiles, tanks, and a bunker during its extensive trials. Only the bunker had given it problems; the beam was not strong enough to defeat thick, buried concrete, and the system relied on complicated image analysis to attempt to find a weak point, generally in the ventilation system. The analysis could take as long as sixty seconds — something to work on for the Mark II version.
“Hey, Colonel, what’s your number?” said Williams over the squadron frequency.
“Three-five-zero.”
“Got five even.”
Howe snickered but didn’t acknowledge. The crews had a pool on the altitude where the laser would fry the missile. Three-five-zero was 350 feet, and happened to be the average of the last four trials; five meant five hundred, the theoretical top of the target envelope. Given the results of the past tests, a hit there would be almost as bad as a complete miss. Williams was just a hard-luck guy.
“I can’t see a thing here,” added Williams. “What do you think about me dropping down to five thousand feet?”
“We briefed you at eight,” said Howe. “Hang with it.”
“I’m supposed to see what’s going on, right? My video’s going to get a nice picture of clouds.”
“Okay, get where you have to get. Just don’t get in the way.”
“Oh yeah, roger that. Don’t feel like becoming popcorn today.”
Howe flicked his HUD from standard to synthetic hologram view, in effect closing his eyes to the real world so he could watch a movie of what was happening around him. The grayish image of the sky blurred into the background, replaced by a blue bowl of heaven. Bird Two ducked down through faint puffs of clouds, its speed indicated as functions of Mach numbers in small print below the wing.
The holographic view could not only show the pilot what was happening in bad weather or night; using the radar and other sensor inputs, the Velociraptor’s silicone brain could synthesize an image of what was happening up to roughly 150 miles away. The image viewpoint could be changed; it was possible to essentially “see” what Williams saw through his front screen by pointing at the plane’s icon in the display and saying “first-person” to the computer. (The command was a reference to point-of-view directions in movies and books.) And this was only a start: The real potential of the computing power would be felt when unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs were integrated into the system, which was scheduled to begin after the Air Force formally took over the program; for now, UAV data could only be collected aboard the 767 at a separate station.
Howe found the synthetic view distracting and flipped back to the standard heads-up ghost in front of the real Persipex that surrounded him before scanning his instrument readings. Speed, fuel burn, engine temperature — every reading could have come straight from a spec sheet. The F/A-22Vs had more than a hundred techies assigned as full-time nannies; the regular Air Force maintenance crewmen, or “maintainers,” were augmented by engineers and company reps as well as NADT personnel who were constantly tweaking the various experimental and pre- production systems they were testing.
“Alpha in sixty seconds,” said Megan.
Something in her voice sparked Howe’s anger again. He squeezed the side stick so tightly his forearm muscles popped. For a moment he visualized himself pushing the stick down and at the same time gunning the throttle to the firewall. An easy wink on the trigger would lace the Boeing’s fuselage with shells from the cannon. The plane’s wings, laden with fuel, would burst into flames.
Why was he thinking that?
Why was he so mad? Because she hadn’t smiled when he wanted her to? Because he was in love and she wasn’t?
Screw that. She loved him.
And if not, he’d make her love him. Win her, woo her — whatever it took.
Howe nearly laughed at himself. He was thinking like a teenager, and he was a long way from his teens. At thirty-three, he was very young for his command but very old in nearly every other way.
