Target Utopia

by Dale Brown

  “I got this,” he said. “Sorry, I gotta go. If you get that coding, tell me right away.”

  He killed the video.

  FLYING THE F-35 was pretty much a pilot’s dream—it was the newest aircraft in the fleet, arguably one of the best ever made. Getting a chance to sit in the pilot’s seat was without a doubt one of the highlights not just of Cowboy’s Marine Corps career, but of his life.

  So why was he feeling huge pangs of jealousy just staring at the back end of the sleek aircraft Turk was piloting a few hundred yards ahead?

  The Sabres weren’t visible on his radar yet, but he assumed Turk could see them. He certainly acted like he knew precisely where they were.

  Were they going to shoot them down? Or was Turk going to simply “capture” them once they got close?

  Cowboy assumed the latter, but he was ready to do combat with them. He assumed it would be even more intense than the furball with the combat UAVs he’d just finished.

  Bring it on, he thought. Bring it on!

  “Basher Two, do you have the Sabres on your radar?” asked Turk.

  “Negative.”

  “Do you have AMRAAMs?”

  “One,” answered Cowboy. “I have two Sidewinders and my cannon. I’m good to go.”

  “We’re not going to catch them this way,” said Turk. “I need to get the Sabres to turn back and come for us.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “I want you to fire your AMRAAM,” said Turk. “It may lure them back.”

  “I don’t have them on my radar,” said Cowboy.

  “If I give you a general heading, can you fire them in bore-sight mode?”

  He was asking Cowboy to fire the missile without a lock. While not often done, the missile did have the capability to fly into the general direction of any enemy aircraft and then use its own radar to lock on to the target.

  “If that’s going to work,” said Cowboy.

  “I don’t know,” admitted Turk. “Assuming the Sabres react, they’re going to come after you. They’re going to make you their primary target.”

  “Yeah, that’s not a problem.”

  “They’re tough little fighters to deal with,” said Turk. “I’ll issue commands to take them over, but we may end up shooting them down. We can’t let them fall into enemy hands.”

  “Roger that.”

  “They haven’t responded to the general control signal already, which is . . . bad.”

  “Then we’ll shoot the bastards down if we have to, right? Isn’t that why we’re here?”

  “That’s why we’re here. But you’re going to be the target once you fire.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ll nail them if I don’t.”

  “Stand by for a bearing.”

  30

  The Cube

  RUBEO PROPPED UP his head on his fists, staring at the computer screen as the DNA coding was read into the encryption formula, trying to unlock it. They had plenty of transmission to work with—the two Sabres were “talking” to each other, using their distributive computing power to decide what to do about the planes pursuing them. But Rubeo’s team hadn’t been able to get past the changed encryption, let alone get deep enough into the systems to figure out how to take them back over.

  With all the computing power at his disposal, it was still taking minutes to grind through the damn thing.

  Had Braxton done this? There were so many damn possibilities.

  The screen blinked, then flashed with a new message: WORKING.

  They’d found the encryption key. Now all they had to do was get into the Sabre programming, examine it, then rewrite it.

  Like climbing Mount Everest in shorts and sneakers in the middle of the winter, and setting a world’s record for the hundred yard dash along the way.

  Rubeo thought back to the earliest days of the Flighthawk program. There was always a fear that the planes would take off on their own.

  It seemed silly now, as if they’d all watched I, Robot or 2001 a few too many times.

  But they’d put in a knockoff code that reset everything. Jennifer had come up with it, joking it was an S&M “safe phrase.”

  He’d been so sheltered he’d had to ask what the hell that was.

  What the hell was it?

  “Ray, we have some sequences ready,” said Kristen Morgan, back in New Mexico.

  “Stand by,” he told her. “Captain Mako, I will have a transmission for you to try,” he said, punching in the connection. “We will start with the basics, a simple recall. I don’t expect that to work,” added Rubeo. “We will then have it initiate a response and a data dump. You will receive a great deal of telemetry. You’ll be best off flying by hand as it transmits, to avoid any error induced by processing delays.”

  “That’s how I always fly,” responded Turk.

  “Good for you,” responded Rubeo dryly, though for once he wasn’t being sarcastic.

  BREANNA GOT UP from her station, ostensibly to refill her coffee cup, but actually just to walk off some of her excess energy. At times like this she really missed flying. The effect of all the übertechnology in the room ultimately reminded her how far from the action she was.

  She wanted to be the one in the danger seat, not Turk. She hoped she was not sending him to his grave.

  She’d done that already. It wasn’t really fair to him that he had to go through it again.

  And there was her father, standing like a statue near Rubeo at the back, arms folded, looking not awed, not even old, but exactly as he’d once looked in the Dreamland situation room, waiting and watching as his people were on a mission. He’d sent them into danger countless times—often, he was right there with them.

  At the time, she’d questioned whether he should be out there. Even a colonel—his rank when he first arrived and for a considerable time afterward, though he was surely doing the work of a general, and one with more than one star—was expected to command from a distance, not duck fire at the front. Leading from the front didn’t mean making yourself the spearhead, which her father often was.

  But now she understood why he’d done it. Ordering someone to risk their life was a hell of a lot harder if you were sitting in a bunker yourself.

  Her father glanced over and saw her.

  “Nice place you got here,” he said.

  Then he smiled. She hadn’t seen that smile in a long, long time. It felt enormously good.

  “Thanks,” she told him. “We had a good model.”

  31

  Over the South China Sea

  THE SABRES IGNORED the AMRAAM until the missiles began searching for them.

  Then they got pissed off.

  “We got their attention,” Turk told Cowboy. “They’re coming back for us and they’re getting the lead out.”

  “I’m seeing them up on radar now,” said Cowboy.

  “Do a one eighty. Head back from where you came. Don’t be slow. I’ll pick them up.”

  “You don’t really think a Marine’s gonna run away from battle, do you?”

  “It’s what I need you to do. I have to fly with them long enough to give commands. Or shoot them down.”

  “Roger,” said Cowboy, clearly reluctant.

  The Sabres had a standard maneuver to change direction quickly, climbing and flipping their wings as they topped into a loop. The variable control surfaces and wing-in-body design—not to mention the lack of a pilot—allowed them to withstand g forces that would shatter a normal aircraft, and so they could change direction in far less space. They couldn’t defy physical laws, however—it was impossible to transfer all their energy and momentum to the new direction. That gave Turk a little bit of a breather. He flew at them, transmitting his “takeover” code, the command which would normally retrieve Sabres into escort mode.

  The planes ignored it.

  He tried a verbal command and then decided he would have to treat them like hostiles: he told his weapons radar to target them.

  The Sabres didn’t react.<
br />
  “I need your attention,” he said, pressing the trigger of the gun.

  Three rounds shot out in the Sabres’ direction. He was way too far to get a hit, but the Sabres’ control computer realized he was trying to kill them. They talked it over between themselves and decided there was only one reason that could be—surely this enemy had found a way to spoof their mother plane’s silhouette. That decision overrode the safety protocol that kept them from targeting him, and they promptly began tracking him as an enemy.

  In a traditional dogfight, a two-on-one advantage is not insurmountable, especially if the single aircraft is flown by a superior pilot who understands the limitations and advantages not just of his plane, but of his opponents’. Still, a numerical advantage in the air is just as potent as one on the ground. The enemy must be approached with skill and savvy. All things being equal, a head-on attack is usually not advised.

  Which was one of the reasons Turk undertook it. The other was that he needed to play for time to let Cowboy get away.

  The Sabres were flying a so-called “loose deuce,” a time-honored side-by-side formation that allowed either (or both) planes to go on the attack as well as support each other. The distance between them was roughly the same as their average turning radius; whichever plane Turk focused on, the other aircraft could get on his tail with an easy maneuver.

  Rather than aiming for one or the other, he beelined toward the area between them. This forced the Sabres to decide on a strategy; Sabre One turned to meet him, while Sabre Two tucked into a dive but stayed on course.

  Besides calculating counters to his move, the artificial intelligence that flew the planes was also evaluating his tactics and, in an effort to predict what he would do—his intelligence or stupidity—though it didn’t use these terms. The fact that he had gone after two planes head-on didn’t win him points in the IQ department, but the AI had to consider whether this might not be a trick—to put it crassly, was the move so dumb that something was going on that the computer didn’t know?

  In the next few moments Turk gave the Sabres every reason to think that was true. Rather than continuing the course to take on Sabre One, or tucking his wing left and going after Sabre Two—or, more prudently, getting the hell out of there while he still could make a clean break—he pulled his nose up and aimed for the sun. This necessarily slowed him down, and made him a dandy target for Sabre One.

  Just as the aircraft locked him up in its weapons radar, Turk dropped the Tigershark toward the earth as hard as he could. Sabre One was temporarily without a shot, but it strove quickly to make up for that, dropping into a dive. Meanwhile, Sabre Two banked south, trying to head toward Turk.

  “How’s that sequence coming?” Turk asked Whiplash. “I got the transmission gateway open. You can transmit directly.”

  “Yes,” said Rubeo, in a tone that suggested Turk’s IQ was perhaps ten points below moron level. “We are doing that now.”

  If anyone thought he was a moron, it was the Sabres; he now had both aircraft behind him, not a very good place to have an enemy in a dogfight. But the aircraft were worried that it was a trick: the Tigershark’s airfoil demonstrated it had high capabilities, and it had already convinced them that it was their mother ship. So rather than attacking with the all-out abandon a human pilot might have used, the planes remained cautious. Sabre Two closed on Turk slowly, while Sabre One stayed above and behind, just in case.

  Turk took his pursuers downward, weaving and bobbing in a ribbonlike pattern that teased Sabre Two but didn’t allow it to get close enough to take more than a single shot. Since its autonomous programming prevented the aircraft from shooting anything less than a ten-shot burst with a ninety-five percent degree of probable accuracy—the programming was there to preserve the limited ammo store, and could be overridden remotely—Turk knew he was in relatively little danger as long as he had sky to maneuver in.

  But then as he turned hard right, he saw that Sabre Two had broken off and was climbing up behind him. The planes had given up targeting him.

  Why did they do that?

  The answer was provided by the flash of a Sidewinder exploding a half mile away: Cowboy had come back to protect him.

  At the worst possible moment, thought Turk, cursing.

  COWBOY KNEW THE missile was going to miss before he fired it—all-aspect or not, the Sidewinder was too far from its target to guarantee a hit. But what he wanted was to break the Sabres’ lock on his wingman. It looked like Turk was about to get nailed, and he needed to do something to get the UAV off his back.

  It worked. The Sabres left Turk. The only problem was, they were coming for him.

  Cowboy jerked the plane into the sharpest turn he could manage without blacking out. As gravity threatened to cave in his chest, he got a warning that the other Sabre was targeting him. This was followed by a run of black BBs across his wing.

  Possibly I bit off more than I could chew here, he thought.

  SEEING THE F-35 and the Sabre locked in a tight turn, Turk scrambled to get close enough to get the plane off the Marine’s back.

  “Take him lower!” he told Cowboy. “Go as low as you can, break out of your turn when I tell you.”

  Turk’s idea was to kick off the Sabre’s safety protocols. Like most moves born of desperation, it didn’t really work—the Sabre slowed to compensate for its better dive qualities, but it remained virtually locked on Cowboy’s tail as he veered lower and lower, passing through 5,000 feet. The F-35’s ECMs were going full blast, which did help, since it meant that the Sabre had to stay close to get a lock. But that was going to be immaterial as soon as Sabre Two got in the mix—which it was aiming to do now, starting downward from above.

  “Come toward me, now!” ordered Turk. “Just flat out toward me!”

  “It’ll lock.”

  “Not long enough to fire. Do it!”

  The F-35 and the Sabre accelerated in Turk’s direction. Turk lit the rail gun. The first slug flew right at the Sabre, missing only because the aircraft dove at the last second.

  Sabre Two changed its target, coming for Turk instead of Cowboy. Turk had used nearly all of his available energy to get into position and fire; he was flat-footed.

  He managed to evade, turning and diving, dropping close to the water—close enough to get his safety protocols annoyed. As the Sabre closed, he hit his last bit of chaff and took a turn, practically losing his wingtip in the water.

  The Sabre sailed past, climbing to get away from the waves.

  “I need you to stay close to the Sabres,” said Rubeo over the Whiplash circuit, “and to turn off your ECMs. I need sixty-five seconds to transmit. You have to be within a mile. Closer is even better.”

  “Turn off the ECMs?”

  “In the F-35 as well,” said Rubeo.

  “If he does that, he’ll get shot down.”

  “If he doesn’t, he’ll get shot down anyway.”

  Rubeo’s logic was undoubtedly correct. But Turk still hesitated—it was one thing to make himself a target, and quite another to tell someone else to sacrifice himself.

  But it was the logical thing to do. And it was the only thing that would get the Sabres back and accomplish his mission.

  “Cowboy,” said Turk, “they’re going to try transmitting a command to retake the Sabres. But they need us to turn off our ECMs.”

  “Roger that.”

  “I don’t think you understand—that Sabre is right on you. It’ll nail you.”

  “We gotta do what we gotta do.”

  “Hit every store you have—everything,” said Turk. “Then punch your gas, turn off the ECMs. And run.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Hold on. Let me get closer to your tail—we’ll do it on my count. Twenty seconds.”

  32

  South China Sea

  DANNY FREAH WATCHED the Osprey pick up the last of the downed Chinese pilots. He wasn’t the only one watching—the J-15s were circling overhead, with the F-35s above th
em.

  It wasn’t going to go down as one of the great moments of international cooperation, but at least no one was firing at one another. The Osprey had been invited to bring the downed Chinese pilots back to the Chinese aircraft carrier; Danny decided to grant permission. It was the sort of bold move that would undoubtedly get him cashiered if the Chinese decided to renege on their ceasefire, but he felt it was the right one.

  The Whiplash team, meanwhile, had assembled to board another Osprey and go west to the island where the UAVs had launched from. Danny was leaving the small Marine contingent aboard the tug; the McCain should be there within an hour.

  The bow of the container carrier had slipped just about to its gunwale in the water, but the rest of the craft showed a surprising reluctance to sink any farther. It was likely that there was just enough buoyancy in the ship to keep it afloat. In any event, it would shortly be someone else’s problem: once the McCain arrived, the Navy would take physical custody of both ships. The destroyer captain was optimistic that his people could put out the fires and salvage the rest of the ship. Two other Navy vessels, both salvage craft, were on their way to help.

  So for now, Danny decided he could devote himself to more pressing matters: the island where the UAVs had launched from.

  “Saddle up, Whiplash!” he shouted as the Osprey lowered itself toward the tugboat. “Last man aboard buys the beer tonight. Last man besides me,” he added, realizing he was bound by duty and custom to be the last man in the aircraft.

  33

  South China Sea

  TURK WAS SWEATING so badly he practically swam in his flight suit as he raced to catch the Sabre on Cowboy’s tail. The other UAV was somewhere behind him, but he couldn’t worry about it now—he had to do what he could to save his friend.

  “Now!” he yelled. “ECMs off!”

  The computer complied, as did Cowboy.

  The Sabre didn’t react. Turk was hopeful that meant it was now under his control, but a half second later he saw something puff on Cowboy’s wing. The Sabre was firing.