by Tom DeLonge
That week, Alan saw Hatcher only once and Morat not at all. When he asked about him, he was told only that agent Morat was “not on base at this time,” though whether he’d gone via Gulfstream to Andrews Air Force Base, or by Locust to the Congo basin, or to the International Space Station, no one was saying. He saw Riordan, the red-haired man, twice, but still did not know his precise rank or function. His orders were sent by encrypted e-mail to his tablet, which he then inserted into a dock in the cockpit of the Locust.
He spent what free time he had with Barry Regis, reminiscing, playing cards, low stress, non-classified stuff, and he relished it all the more because he knew that friendship was virtually unknown on the base. There were other pilots, he knew, but he had never been introduced to them. People came in to work and were bussed out. Those who stayed on kept to themselves, as they were told to, life going on in intentional isolation. Twice as he sat with Regis, Alan had seen Hatcher, and twice he’d read in Hatcher’s face a kind of deliberate permission. Alan’s mental health was being looked after.
He was okay with that.
His missions were generally just getting familiar with the craft. They also had a reconnaissance component, though it was not always clear what he was looking for. He was given coordinates, and sometimes a fight plan, told to engage his sensors and recording devices at key moments. All of the flights were in darkness, the sensors gathering far more information than Alan could actually get with his own senses. The missions were as dull as could be in such a futuristic ship with quirks and capabilities that were still new to him.
Even so, a pattern emerged.
Every location patrolled—cautiously and at altitude, lights out and counter measures engaged—took place over a single icy swatch of the globe: Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Russia. Each mission avoided population centers—not hard, where the territory was vast and the population small and nomadic—and focused on remote facilities accessed by long, lonely roads, characterized by windowless concrete structures, security walls and minor airfields. Some of them showed circular structures that might have been the tops of missile silos, but the places might just as easily have been training camps or nuclear power stations. There was no way of knowing, from what he could see, and the viewers—even with night vision mode enabled—gave him little to go on. The Locust, often sitting motionless in the sky for minutes or even hours, shot ultra-high resolution footage that an onboard computer processed, using a complex algorithm that analyzed minute vibrations in ordinary objects: plants, glass windows, cans of soda. These could, Professor Beaker had told him, be decoded into speech, recreating any conversations that took place in proximity to those objects. Much of it would be unusable, some of it would be coherent but useless, “but a tiny fraction,” said Beaker, “would be gold.”
After each mission, as Alan slouched off to debriefing, and another day of classes and simulations, the same nameless tech in a blue flight suit boarded the ship, downloaded the data to a hand-held computer, and deleted and wrote over all records from the Locust’s hard drive. Alan had gone, he thought bleakly, from being a god, to being a drone.
He said as much to Hatcher when they met to debrief at the end of the week.
“The work is not sufficiently interesting for you, Major?” asked Hatcher, dry as the desert air.
“It’s not that, sir,” said Alan. “It just feels like I’m doing a job you could do just as well with a Reaper controlled from one of those Vegas trailers the media loves to talk about, rather than risk exposing of the Locust.”
“What makes you think it’s the bases we’re surveilling?”
“As opposed to what?” Alan replied.
For a moment, Hatcher said nothing, watching Alan, smiling slightly as realization dawned in the pilot’s face.
“Me,” Alan said. “It’s not about the ground locations at all. You’re monitoring me.”
Hatcher’s fractional shrug conceded the point. “Partly,” he said. “We have to be sure you can follow orders and operate safely in foreign airspace. And the data you have been collecting has been very useful. No one is wasting your time, Major.”
This was in response to Alan’s frown and the way he looked into the corner of the room.
“So I passed?” he said, at last.
“It wasn’t a test,” said Hatcher, though he chuckled at Alan’s raised eyebrow. “Okay. It was kind of a test. And yes, you passed. And before you can ask what you won for doing so, I’d like to give you your new assignment.”
He handed over his tablet and Alan scrolled through the details. Half way through he looked up, shocked.
“This is a daylight op,’” he said.
“Yes.”
“Over Moscow.”
“Yes. We have an agent waiting to upload some data.”
“I’ll get shot down.”
“You know the craft’s evasive capacity and speed,” said Hatcher. “And there are countermeasures we have not yet revealed to you which will help.”
“Such as?”
Hatcher thought for a moment, then decided.
“Come with me,” he said.
THEY RODE THE EMPTY, BLACKED-OUT SCHOOL BUS TO the Papoose facility but walked further, to a different door in the cliff, and another hangar. Hatcher led the way, typing his codes and going through weight and retinal checks at each door. The crew inside still looked up with surprise when he entered, Alan a half step behind. They were working on a pair of Locusts, though whether they were the ones he and Morat had flown, Alan couldn’t tell. The craft bore no insignia or identifying marks. One was partially disassembled, the skin of its great angular wing peeled back in panels to reveal the workings within.
Beyond it was another door. It was open, showing another hangar and, sitting alone in the middle, a silvery disk, a classic “flying saucer,” sleek and round, with a central bulge that seemed to have windows, the rest clad in steel or aluminum, bright as chrome. It seemed to sit in mid-air, though at this distance, it was impossible to be sure it wasn’t suspended or otherwise held up by something Alan couldn’t see. He angled his head to get a better look, and one of the ground crew was suddenly in his face and shouting, his hands up.
It took a second for Alan to realize he wasn’t the one being yelled at. A soldier, standing behind the first Locust, came around its long, knife-like wing with his M4 at the ready. Alan hastily turned back to face the door they’d come in through, raising his hands. When he turned back, the door into the hangar beyond had been rolled shut and the saucer—whatever it was—had vanished.
Hatcher gave him a thoughtful look, then snapped a smile into place.
“Sorry about that,” he said, as the place went back to work as if nothing had happened. “Prototype. Best to put it out of your mind.”
“I can try,” said Alan.
“So,” said Hatcher, walking purposefully to the tech who’d raised the alarm. “I’m here to show Major Young the cloak. He’ll be using it this afternoon. My clearance,” he added, showing his tablet. “And his.”
The tech scanned the computer documents and then double-checked them on a device of his own, while a single word bounced around in Alan’s head.
Cloak.
He watched the technician climb the stairs into the cockpit, blinking as one of the craft’s power systems engaged and a light ran around the triangular wing. Alan shot Hatcher a dubious look, a half-smile that said this was all a kind of joke that he was already in on. Cloaking? They couldn’t be serious. It must be some kind of radar counter measure, something that confused ground arrays, bouncing the signal to make it shift, or cause it to be mistaken for a flock of birds, or …
The closest Locust vanished.
One moment it had been there. The next, without a sound, the air seemed to ripple, and it was gone.
Or very nearly. Alan could see through the space where the ship had been to the partially disassembled craft behind it, and the wall of the hangar with its now carefully closed door. But there was somet
hing very slightly off about the image. It wasn’t just that his brain rebelled against the idea of seeing through something so obviously solid. The ripple effect that had marked the ship’s disappearance hadn’t gone completely, and when he looked to the other Locust, it seemed like things were not exactly in the right place. Close. Very close, in fact, but not quite.
He followed a seam in the concrete floor and watched the way it seemed to break and continue an inch or two out of place before reconnecting with its proper line on the other side. The ship was clearly still there, but somehow, something was bending his sight around it.
My eyes are made the fools of the other senses, he thought, a line from Shakespeare that some part of his brain had retained since high school. It had never made sense to him until now. He shifted from foot to foot, watching the way his vision changed so that it was just possible to imagine the shape that was so bizarrely lost to sight. Without turning away, he asked the question he always seemed to be asking these days.
“How is this possible?”
He got the usual answer.
“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” said Hatcher. “If it helps, it’s all about bending light. Light normally travels in straight lines, and you see along those lines. If they can be distorted around an object, the eye—following the curved lines—can be fooled into thinking it’s seeing normally, when in fact the system has created a visual dead space in the center. And just so you know, it will disengage if you go above Mach 1. It’s not flawless, but it is, as they say, close enough for government work.”
Alan gaped at him, then—as the cloak was disengaged—back at the ship that seemed somehow even more magical, now that he could see it again.
“This gentleman will show you how to engage the system and when to use it,” said Hatcher. “And don’t get overconfident. The cloak generates an ion signature of its own that could actually make it easier for certain sophisticated tracking systems to lock onto it, so don’t assume you’re truly invisible. We’ll activate the onboard computer’s vocal interface so that you can simply speak commands: the voice recognition software is state of the art, but then you’d expect that.”
“Yes.”
“You won’t be able to talk to us, however. Not with the cloak engaged.”
“Understood.”
“If you see evidence that you’ve been detected,” Hatcher said, “you hit the home button. I don’t care how much of the mission has been completed. You return to base immediately by the fastest safe route. You got that, Major? Immediately. This is your primary directive. Hesitate, dodge, decide to go exploring, discharge your weapons or otherwise disobey that fundamental principle, and you will never fly in this or any similar craft again. Are we clear?”
“Crystal,” said Alan.
“Okay,” said Hatcher. “Bring us back some nice pictures of the Kremlin.”
THE FIRST PART OF THE MISSION WENT FINE. ALAN ENGAGED the cloak twenty minutes before sunrise, crossing into Russian airspace at ten minutes after nine a.m. local. An hour later, he was over Moscow, his multi-source, situational awareness display swarming with aircraft—most of them civilian—but he saw no evidence that any of them knew he was there. His orders required him to drop to a thousand feet over Red Square, where he would have to hold position for exactly six minutes while his systems uploaded the data being transmitted to him from an operative below.
It was utterly surreal. The Locust hung there in the bright morning sun, and below him, Alan could see the colorful onion bulb minarets of Saint Basil’s Cathedral and the long, angular brick wall and towers surrounding the Kremlin complex. Alan was old enough to recall those tedious, terrifying Soviet armored parades from the Reagan era, all those olive green tanks and missile carriers driving slowly past the balcony while politburo officials stood ramrod straight. And now he was here, in a different age but still, in a sense, an invader.
Alan did not pay attention to politics. He had long since decided it was best for someone in his position not to. It muddied the waters. But he was curious as to what was going on, and what he was participating in, however unwittingly.
He checked the onboard chronometer. Three minutes and ten seconds.
He drummed his fingers on his armrest. The silence of his engines unnerved him, as did the flickers of light from his MSSA scanner as yet another plane headed out of the city. He toggled between the political, topographical and multispectral settings that formed the background to the transponder, IFF and other integrated feeds. The Locust avoided the easily detectable pinging of radar by operating passive interferemetrics utilizing the ambient radio frequencies from all other transmissions to discover, ID and track those surface contacts and unknowns that were collectively known as skunks.
There was a long white building with an ornamental gilded roof along one side of the square. People were coming and going, though there was less bustle than he had expected.
Four minutes. The upload bar was filling slowly. Alan had asked Hatcher why their operative couldn’t just upload to Dropbox or something, like everybody else, but Hatcher had only smiled and shook his head.
“Because the Internet is so secure, you mean?” he said.
Three minutes.
Something flashed on his MSSA screen. Two somethings. They were coming towards him, though that was surely coincidence. Alan looked to adjust position without breaking the upload connection, sliding the ship to the side and lowering another hundred feet.
The two craft on the MSSA made the same adjustment. And now a siren shrieked through the cockpit. There was no doubt about it. The two planes—if that was what they were—were on an intercept course.
Someone could see him.
Some kind of bistatic radar designed to spot low observable platforms? Perhaps, though it was surprising.
Cursing, Alan disengaged the upload with 87 seconds still on the clock. The cockpit rang with the cycling siren, and a serene female voice came through his headphones from the onboard computer.
“Two aircraft on attack vector. Configuration matches: Sukhoi SU-30. Engaging avoidance systems.”
Alan grimaced. The SU-30—what he was used to calling a Flanker-C—was a fast and maneuverable fighter. But it was no match for the speed of the Locust. He sent the craft into a near vertical climb and gunned the engine to just below Mach 1 to keep the cloak intact as long as he dared. Moscow fell away beneath him as he pushed the ship as close to the speed of sound as he could. He scanned the MSSA. The fighters were closing fast. In seconds, they would be in combat range.
He waited, shooting out over the suburban sprawl north of Moscow, then pulling east, where there were few towns. There was a lake showing on his map. The Flankers were almost on him.
“Incoming aircraft weapons systems online and searching for target,” said the computer evenly.
One more second …
He breathed.
“Missile away and incoming,” said the computer.
Another half second …
Alan slid his speed gauge to Mach 4 and punched the controls.
He felt it this time, the slide and pop as he shed the cloak and tore across the sky, climbing all the time. The missiles fell behind him and the fighters that released them immediately slowed, banking, as if they thought they’d overshot him.
Alan released a whoop of triumph, suddenly conscious of the sweat on his upper lip.
The lake was already behind him. He’d need to decide whether to keep going east or double back over Europe and the Atlantic. He began some hasty mental calculations, tracking the position of the sun. If we were going home with his tail between his legs and hostile fighters on the sniff, he’d be better doing it in darkness.
“Incoming craft,” said the computer. “Attack vector.”
“I already lost them,” he muttered.
“New contact,” said the computer.
“What?” Alan gasped. “Where? I don’t see it! How can they follow me at this speed?”
“That
is unknown at this time.”
“What kind of aircraft are they?” he said, correcting his course and increasing speed to almost Mach 5.
“Nonconventional,” said the computer.
Alan hesitated, shaking his head as if to clear it.
“What does that mean?”
“Configuration of pursuing aircraft is classified,” said the computer placidly.
He saw it now, a blip on his MSSA, in his slipstream, no more than four nautical miles behind him. It was matching his speed.
Alan stared.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see how you like heights.”
And he pointed the Locust straight up.
“You might be fast,” he snarled, “but I’m pretty sure you can’t handle space …”
“Intercept aircraft closing,” said the computer.
It wasn’t possible. Alan swung his chair around and stared through what was now the Locust’s rear window. There, bursting through the cloud layer into the bright blue stratosphere, hard on his tail, was a ship, chrome bright and shaped like an arrowhead. As Alan gazed, aghast, he saw the unmistakable flash of something in the nose. He was under fire.
He pulled the Locust hard to the left, rolling it and changing direction. There was no point trying to lose his pursuer in space. He had already seen the ship—or one very like it—up there, and knew it could match him turn for turn. As the Locust rolled, he saw a flash of light stab past him.
Lasers.
He dived, reaching for the red homing button, and turned on the auto-flight-planner, thinking furiously about Hatcher’s order that he not engage his weapons.
“Decrease speed before engaging homing device,” said the computer.
“Not really an option,” said Alan, corkscrewing the Locust away from another flash of enemy fire. He came out of the roll and checked his six. The arrowhead was still in pursuit. If its weapons were locked on, he was about to find out.