Drone Strike: A Dreamland Thriller (Dale Brown's Dreamland)

by Dale Brown

  “Just a little bit,” said Grease every few feet. “Keep coming.”

  “Man, you’re inhuman,” said Turk finally. “You’re a machine.”

  “No, but I ain’t giving up.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Grease had to stop and wait for him every few moments. Finally he scrambled ahead, disappearing into the darkness.

  Hell of a place to die, Turk thought. Somehow, he’d never believed he would collapse from a heart attack; going down in a fireball seemed much more likely.

  And somehow more hospitable. He kept pushing, practically crawling now.

  Why the hell didn’t you eat?

  When was the last time you had water?

  It was Breanna’s voice, upbraiding him. The real problem was sleep—he needed it. His mind was starting to float away from his body, swimming in some sort of disjointed consciousness.

  When this was done, he was sleeping. No matter what. Let the damn Iranians kill him; he didn’t care.

  Sleep.

  Something started to lift him.

  “What the hell?” he said, spinning around to sit up.

  “I’ll take the pack,” said Grease. “It’s only about fifty feet to the ledge.”

  Turk held his arms up, as if in surrender. Grease lifted the pack, slung it on his shoulder, then reached his hand down. Turk took it and heaved himself to his feet.

  “You think we’ll make it after all this?” Turk asked.

  “Damn straight,” said Grease. “We’ve put too much into this now to fail.”

  “Yeah. Absolutely.”

  21

  Over Iran

  PARSA VAHID POINTED THE NOSE OF HIS MIG UPWARD as he left the runway, feeling the press of gravity against his chest. No matter how many times he flew, what he flew, or why he flew, the initial boost off the runway still gave him a thrill.

  When his wingman Lieutenant Kayvan checked in—he’d taken off right behind him—Vahid told the control tower they were heading north. He banked slightly, coming to the proper course, then checked in with the controller. He needed special permission to fly in the Exclusion Zone; this had already been granted, and he was handed off to the special zone’s controller, who used a reserved and scrambled frequency for even the most routine communications. The officer informed him there was one other flight already working the area, a small plane that Vahid knew would be practically useless in a night search. The controller gave him the flight’s contact information; Vahid dialed in and hailed the pilot, who was currently near Qom.

  “We’ll go north of that,” said Vahid. “We’re available for support.”

  The other pilot thanked him. He sounded like an amicable sort; Vahid guessed from his voice that he was an older man, probably pressed into service for the Guard.

  “God is great,” said the man.

  Vahid echoed him and signed off.

  A few minutes later the controller told him to stand by for a communication from Colonel Khorasani. The colonel came on the radio within seconds of Vahid’s acknowledgment.

  “One of our units has had an incident,” said Khorasani without any preliminaries. “A truck has been stolen. The unit is approximately nine kilometers south of the cave where the truck was discovered. It is headquartered at Kushke Nosrat Airport.”

  “Manzariyeh,” said Vahid, almost in wonder—that was the military name for the airport. Once an air force base, it was now directly controlled by the Pasdaran. It was an open secret that it played a critical role as a transport hub for the nuclear program in the area. No planes were kept there, a calculated tactic to keep it from being targeted by the West. But there were healthy antiair missile defenses in the vicinity, and even though it was in the zone he’d been cleared to patrol, Vahid decided he could take no chances.

  “Colonel, you’ll have to alert the forces there that I’m in the vicinity,” he said. “Or they will shoot me down.”

  “That’s being taken care of. The unit whose vehicle was stolen is conducting a thorough search, as are other units. The controller will be in constant communication with you.”

  “Understood.”

  “Captain, there is one other matter that you should be aware of. Five minutes ago we received word from one of our sources that an American bomber was taking off from Incirlik, Turkey. We do not have it on radar, and we may not have them on radar until a critical point.”

  “How many planes?”

  “One is reported.”

  “They’ve done that before,” said Vahid. One would be far less than the number needed for an attack.

  “Yes, the other night, before the incident occurred. Be prepared for anything.”

  22

  Iran

  TURK LAY ON HIS BACK, DRIFTING. IF THEY’D CLIMBED Mount Everest, he wouldn’t have felt as if he’d accomplished more.

  But they were hours from their mission, and then days from getting out.

  Maybe two days, he thought. Even less. They’d take the truck, go north, hopefully hook up with a new reaction force.

  “Aren’t you supposed to check in?” asked Grease.

  “Oh shit. Yeah.” Turk’s chest muscles groaned as he got up. These pains were new; at least his body was trying to be original.

  He took the satcom from his pocket. They were on a ledge facing south; the ridge rose several hundred feet above the road they’d left, but it was far from the highest point in the area; even in the dark he saw higher peaks to his left and right. The ledge itself was about the width of three bowling alleys, and maybe twice as long. The back end, which faced west, formed an irregular wall from three to five feet high as it ran north. There was a path down the east side that they hadn’t seen in the satellite image, or at least not recognized; Grease had scoured the area for signs of someone else but found none.

  “This is Tiger, checking in.”

  Breanna answered. “Go ahead, Tiger.”

  “We’re ready for the download.”

  “We missed the 2300 mark,” she said.

  Not by too much, he thought, but she continued before he could protest.

  “It’s all right. We understand all your difficulties. We have a new arrangement. We’re going to connect two hours before the attack. It’ll be a longer download, but it will be fine. You won’t need to do anything, as long as you’re in position and the unit is on.”

  “Good,” Turk told her.

  “The parameters—your instructions for the attack are going to be a little more complicated than originally planned. You’re going to do more flying than we thought.”

  “Hey,” said Turk, suddenly perking to life. “Complication is my middle name.”

  “Good. Whiplash, off.”

  Turk looked over at Grease, standing with his arms crossed over his rifle.

  “Complication’s your middle name, huh?” said the sergeant. “Now what the hell are they throwing at us?”

  “I don’t know. It has to do with flying, though. I can handle it.”

  In fact, it would be welcome.

  THE HOURS PASSED SLOWLY. THE MOON DISAPPEARED. Turk completed the download without a problem. They still had a little over two hours to go before the attack would start. Until then his biggest concern was keeping his fingers from turning numb with the cold.

  Grease continued to scan the ground below with his glasses. Turk secured the control unit, making sure it was ready before it went into standby state.

  “Do your legs cramp?” he asked Grease when he was done.

  “Say what?”

  “Your legs. Don’t they get tired? Cramp?”

  “No. I’m used to using them.”

  “So am I, but climbing and everything.”

  “Yeah, I guess. We train pretty hard.”

  “So I saw.”

  “You don’t know the
half of it.”

  Turk went to Grease’s pack and took out one of the water bottles. “Were you trying to get me to quit?”

  “We were trying to toughen you up.”

  “Quitting wasn’t an option,” said Turk.

  “Good,” said Grease, unmoved. “Don’t drink too much of that water. Hard to say when we’ll get more.”

  There were three more bottles in the pack, but Turk didn’t argue.

  “Lot of traffic out there.” Grease gestured. “They’re moving units around.”

  “They must be looking for us.”

  A stupid thing to say.

  “They didn’t tell me I was blowing up nukes,” Turk added, more to change the subject than to impart information. “They only said we were blowing up equipment.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know.” Grease continued to gaze into the distance.

  “No. They didn’t tell me because, if we were captured, they didn’t want the Iranians to know what they knew. It all makes sense now. I mean, we were expendable, right?”

  “Always are.”

  “Even now, I imagine they won’t say everything.”

  Turk stared south. Qom, the holy city, lay somewhere in the distance; he thought it was the glow of light at about ten o’clock, but he couldn’t be sure. The Iranians had deliberately set their program up near the holy site to make America hesitate before attacking it.

  The city would survive. From what he’d seen of the first attack, only the immediate area aboveground was affected; belowground might be a different story, though he had no way of knowing.

  Still, to risk not only your own population—a million people lived in Qom—but a shrine holy to your religion—what sort of people did that? What religious leader could, in good conscience, approve such an idea?

  The same kind of leader, perhaps, that would dream of wiping out another people because their God was not his God. Turk couldn’t begin to comprehend the hatred, the evil, it involved.

  “Trucks down there,” said Grease, pointing. “See them?”

  Turk went over and looked. The vehicles were driving northward in roughly the area where they had left the road. For a moment they appeared to stop, but it was an optical illusion, or some trick with his mind: the vehicles were still moving.

  “I don’t think they’ll look for us up here,” he said. “We’re pretty far from the labs. Five miles—that’s pretty far.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Once we hit them, they’ll be so confused we’ll have an easy time getting away,” said Turk. “It’ll be like the other day.”

  “You think that was easy?”

  “Wasn’t it?” Turk knew he was just rambling, trying to find something that would reassure himself, not Grease. He felt a need to talk, to do something, but at the moment all he could do was wait for the download to complete.

  “Airplane,” said Grease.

  Turk heard it, too. It was coming from the south. He listened for a moment.

  “Jet,” he told Grease. “They’ll never see us.”

  23

  CIA campus, Virginia

  “AIRCRAFT ARE AWAY. AIRCRAFT ARE TRACKING,” DECLARED Teddy Armaz, the head of the nano-UAV team. “Exactly sixty minutes to ground acquisition at my mark . . . Mark.”

  The screen at the front of the room showed the swarm’s position over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, southeast of the Bay of Bengal. They were gliding bricks at the moment, hurtling toward the earth at about Mach 5. In about twenty minutes the swarm would split into several subgroups. From that point they would fly a set of helixlike paths toward the target area, following the elaborate plan Rubeo’s people had worked out to optimize the attack on the two sites.

  When Breanna first saw the rendering of the flight paths, she had trouble making sense of it. The composite diagram looked like a piece of multicolored steel wool, pulled out at the top and twirled to a point at the bottom. Several of the individual loops looked like the path hailstones took in a storm cloud.

  The complexity worried her greatly. What Rubeo saw as a set of mathematical equations, Breanna viewed as a collection of potential disasters. If just one of the aircraft deviated from its course at the wrong moment, it might collide with two others; the trouble would quickly mushroom. While the systems had been checked and rechecked, there was always some bit of random, unforeseeable chance, some oddity of fate that could interfere and throw everything into a mucked-up tangle in the blink of an eye.

  Rubeo, standing at the back of the room, arms folded, didn’t believe in chance or luck, at least not in that way. Breanna glanced back toward him, watching for a moment as he stared at the progress screen at the front of the room. He didn’t move; he didn’t even seem to breathe. He just stood ramrod straight, observing.

  “Flight indicators are all in the green,” said Armaz.

  “Very good,” Breanna told him.

  “Turk is checking in,” said Paul Smith, the team liaison handling communications. “You want to talk to him?”

  Breanna touched the small earbud hooked into her right ear. It contained a microphone as well as a speaker.

  “Channel B,” she said, and the computer connected her into the line. She listened as Turk finished describing their situation to the controller. They were camped on a ridge almost exactly five miles from each of the targets. The sun had just risen.

  “Turk, how are you doing?” she asked when he finished.

  “We’re good,” he said. His voice sounded faint and tired.

  “You’re doing a good job.”

  “Yup.”

  Shouldn’t she say something more? Shouldn’t there be a pep talk?

  The words didn’t come to her. “Good luck,” was all she could think of as the silence grew.

  “Same to you,” said Turk. Then he was off.

  “NASA asset is airborne and on course,” reported Armaz.

  “We have a heat indication in Aircraft 5,” said Bob Stevenson, monitoring the swarm’s systems. “The system is moving to compensate.”

  “Please isolate the image,” Breanna said.

  The tangle of flight lines on the screen disappeared, leaving one blue line near the center. The line was evenly divided between solid—where the aircraft had gone—and dotted, where the plane would fly. A new line, thicker, but in the same color, appeared on the screen. This showed the actual flight, making it easy to see the variance between what had been originally programmed and what the flight system aboard the nano-UAV was now doing to compensate for the high heat.

  “Can we override that?” asked Rubeo from the back.

  “Still in a plasma blackout,” said Armaz. The aircraft had, in effect, a speed-and-friction-generated shield around it that prevented communication.

  “You should add the general flight-flow vector to your image,” said Rubeo.

  “Go ahead,” said Breanna.

  The line showed the overall pattern of the swarm, ghosting it over the screen. The errant UAV, being tracked by radar aboard the ship that had launched her, moved parallel to the lower line, getting neither closer nor farther.

  “What’s going on?” Breanna asked Rubeo.

  “The indicator malfunctioned, not the aircraft,” said Rubeo. “The computer tried to compensate, but it still got the incorrect signal. It’s still trying to compensate, and still being told it’s not working.”

  “What’s going to happen to it?” Breanna asked.

  “I’d have to work the math,” said the scientist. He touched his ear, a tic Breanna knew meant he was suppressing nervousness—she guessed he had already run the numbers in his head. “But my guess is that it will end up well to the south of the target area by the time the plasma effect dissipates. At that point it will attempt to recorrect. It will be late to the party, if it doesn’t self-destruct.”

  “
Can we still accomplish the mission?”

  “You can lose two more,” said Rubeo. “If they’re the right ones. Of course, nothing is guaranteed.”

  24

  Iran

  TURK RUBBED THE TEMPLES ON BOTH SIDES OF HIS head. The download had finally finished and he was reviewing the plan to strike the sites. It was incredibly complex.

  “I can’t decipher some of these flight patterns,” he told Sara Rheingold, who was going over the procedure with him from Whiplash. “I just can’t.”

  “You don’t have to, not until that very last set.”

  “I have to know that they’re moving correctly.”

  “If there’s a problem, you select the alternatives, based on what you’ve seen.” She paused, then came back on the line. “Stand by for Dr. Rubeo.”

  “Captain Mako, you have reviewed the overall plan?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “The procedure until the final attack is no more difficult than the first attack you rehearsed. When the time comes for manual control, the final speed of the aircraft will be well under one hundred knots. You will have an easy time guiding them.”

  “Well—”

  “The flight control computer aboard the aircraft can slow their speed down to twenty-one knots if necessary. That’s the last command stored. You will have an easy time taking them over. You fly them in stages. The other aircraft have been programmed to orbit or stand by in a way that preserves their flight energy until given an order to proceed. Each XP-38 UAV will be ready for you when you need it.”

  “Unless something goes wrong.”

  “Captain, may I suggest that you spend the next thirty-eight minutes going through whatever points you are confused about with my staff, and review the diagrams of the target sites. You really don’t have much time to waste fretting over things you can’t control.”

  25