incognito.
“What
“Things are heating up over in Hong Kong,” his uncle said. “Early this morning our time, an American Air Force jet used for NOAA research was shot down outside Hong Kong.
“Who?” Tombstone asked.
“Chris Hanson, Randall Carpenter, Benjamin Rogers.”
Tombstone had steeled himself, and was surprised — and guiltily relieved — that only one name was familiar. Still, that one name rocked him. “God, not Lobo.”
“She’s MIA. Carpenter is KIA; Rogers is presumed KIA. One Tomcat down, and one Hornet. That’s all I have right now.”
Tombstone was faintly aware of Tomboy sliding her arm through his. “What’s our response? From Washington?”
His uncle hesitated. “As you know, dealing with the PRC requires exceptional delicacy. Nobody wants to start a world war.”
Tombstone snorted.
“Nobody
Tombstone shook his head. “Batman must be livid.”
“Of course. But he’ll do what’s right, just as you would if you were in his place. And right now, that means waiting. When the North Koreans shot down a civilian airliner, it didn’t lead to war, and this shouldn’t either.”
“What’s the Air Force’s position on it?”
“What else? They wish they’d had the chance to tangle with the Flankers, instead of us. But their wings are tied in that part of the world.” His uncle paused. “Speaking of the Air Force, what else have they found out about your little UAV?”
Tombstone’s eyebrows rose. He looked from his uncle to Tomboy, then back. “You know?”
“I was fully briefed on the background before I came up here. Just finished briefing your wife. We’re all on the same page now.”
“Not exactly,” Tombstone said, and described what the DARPA kid had discovered about the bogey’s nation of origin. Then he took a deep breath and added, “But here’s the trick: It was loaded with electronics from one of Uncle Phil’s companies.”
His uncle blinked, then shook his head. “Don’t be thinking ‘treason,’ Tombstone. The PRC has been buying up technology for years. American, Japanese, you name it; if they want it, they simply buy it. It’s perfectly legitimate.”
“Good for business,” his uncle said expressionlessly. “Good for international relations. It’s not like anyone’s letting them buy
“Just the means to make them.”
Thomas Magruder sighed. “As far as Phil’s concerned, the odds are he didn’t even know who the end buyer was, far less what the components were going to be used for. No man in the world was more committed to democracy and free enterprise than he was.”
“Maybe that’s why he was killed,” Tombstone said, suddenly both relieved and excited. “Maybe he figured out where the technology was going, and what for, so they murdered him.”
“That occurred to us,” his uncle said somberly. “We’re checking out the possibility.”
Tombstone suddenly sobered, too. “But… from what the DARPA kid told me, this bogey was years ahead of what we thought anyone else was capable of, never mind China. So even with the right parts, how could they…” He noticed that his uncle’s face looked grimmer than ever. “What?”
Tomboy spoke up. “Your bogey isn’t the only surprise the Chinese had for us. The aircraft that downed the Air Force jet was a completely unknown design, from all descriptions a flying wing with stealth characteristics. It’s got JCS worried.”
“A
As he listened to Tomboy describe what little was currently known about the mystery bogey in Hong Kong, Tombstone felt himself tensing. Although stealth technology was largely an Air Force game, Tombstone had a good understanding of it. Most people, including some in the military and most in politics, had the right idea about stealth. To them, it seemed like a clever but otherwise innocuous idea, and prohibitively expensive. But that wasn’t the case at all. From a military standpoint, stealth was at once the most important and most extraordinarily successful technological development in decades.
The original goal of stealth was simple and realistic. It wasn’t to make an invisible airplane, or even one completely transparent to radar; no one expected that. The problem was that radar installations were relatively cheap to build, upgrade and maintain, while bombers were expensive to make, more expensive to improve upon, and most of all, expensive to lose. Imagine a bomber with the radar cross-section of a goose or an eagle. Imagine how deeply such an aircraft could infiltrate before AA noticed it.
This was the Pentagon’s dream when, in 1975, they funded Project Harvey — named after the invisible rabbit — to fund research into the problem. In the end, Northrop and Lockheed each presented DARPA with a wooden mock-up of its design, to be tested head-to-head at the Gray Butte radar cross-section test site. The Northrup model created quite a stir: To radar, it was no bigger than a pigeon, DARPA’s dreams exceeded. Then came the Lockheed entry, nicknamed “Hopeless Diamond,” which didn’t even look like it could fly. It was bathed in radar waves… and nothing happened. Nothing at all. In fact, according to legend, the model produced its first return only when a crow landed on it.
The battle for technological advantage in military applications is usually measured in tiny evolutionary steps. Relatively speaking, with the creation of what would become known as the F/A-117 Stealth Fighter, the United States had just stepped from the Stone Age directly into the Space Age. A stealth plane could fly over your headquarters and release a precision-guided bomb before you even knew you were in trouble. No other country was close to finding a way to combat this menace, far less produce a counter-menace of their own.
At least, that had been the belief. Until now.
Tombstone was so busy contemplating the ramifications of this information that he almost missed Tomboy’s next words: “That’s why I’m going to China. They want to see if I can get more information on this plane, maybe even get a glimpse of it. We’ve got to know more about it.”
Tombstone scowled. “This doesn’t make any sense. Okay, the Chinese could have stolen stealth technology; everybody knows it’s bound to leak out sooner or later. But UAVs? I got the impression from DARPA that the best the U.S. has come up with so far are nice little recon drones.”
His uncle was shaking his head. Tombstone had never seen the man look so grim. “That’s what I thought, too, until my briefing today. The truth is, the UAV program in this country has been struggling uphill for all the wrong reasons. It’s not because the technology’s really that hard to develop, especially if you’re satisfied with only partial stealth capability. The guidance system used to be tough, but hell, one of today’s ordinary laptop computers has more processing power than the computer that runs the guidance system of the entire space shuttle. The UAV program lags for one reason only: money.”
“Well, I understand new technology is expensive to develop, but — ”
“Virtually all of China’s GNP gets squeezed through a single pipeline,” his uncle went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “That’s the Communist way, of course. No matter where the money comes from or who generates it, it gets divvied up by the government, no arguments allowed.
“In the U.S., it’s obviously a different matter. Here,
