Breakpoint

by Richard A. Clarke

  “That’s the whole point!” Rathstein chuckled. “All of their limbs are server motor–assisted. They can run faster than a sprinter, throw a ball farther than the best quarterback, jump higher than a track-and-field star. The exoskeleton suit lets them carry over a hundred and twenty pounds of additional equipment on outside hooks with little or no effect on speed or motion. A few battalions of them could beat any army in the world.”

  Foley put down his beer mug and stared at the doctor. “Shit. We’re talking Imperial storm troopers, like in Star Wars, with the helmets and all?”

  “Sort of. The suits come in green or desert camouflage, not bright white like in the movies. Yes, they have helmets, with air filtration and built-in radios, intranet connectivity that you can see using a visor that also does night vision and telescopic. The listening system has ‘dog ear’ parabolics. And you literally have eyes in the back of your head, because there’s a camera in the rear of the helmet that allows you to see what’s behind you.” This time Rathstein took a gulp of beer. “Don’t you want to ask if you can take a leak?”

  Jimmy laughed. “I assumed you could do that. You probably recycle it into Gatorade so the gyrenes don’t short circuit your spacesuits. What I was puzzling out was how you could take a dump.”

  “That is still a problem, I admit,” the doctor said in a more subdued manner. “But with liquid nutrition and certain medications, the intervals when that becomes necessary can be extended to seventy-two hours or so, for now.”

  Jimmy almost choked on his mouthful of beer. “That’s great, Doc, now the Army guys will be right when they say us jarheads are all full of shit.”

  “No, no. The Army has a similar suit under test at Fort Irwin over by Barstow. Ours is better,” Rathstein said, his finger jabbing at the air. “And we have two companies here wearing them in field conditions. They have only one company. We’ve been in full suit for weeklong operations, with several changes of batteries, of course. They’ve only gone three days at a time in the suit. Tonight we’re going to prove ours is better in a head on test. We’re playing them in baseball. And you have a seat on the first-base line.”

  1750 PST

  U.S. Marine Desert Training Facility

  Twentynine Palms, California

  They drove onto the base in Dr. Rathstein’s hydrogen-cell Chevy Suburban. He had a visitor’s pass ready for Foley. A few minutes inside the sprawling base, they came to a halt before a sand dune and got out. The sun had just set and there was still pale orange light in the west, reflecting off the few clouds on the horizon. In the east the sky was already black and the stars were brightening. Jimmy remembered now how cold it could get in the desert on a winter’s night. And how quiet it could be.

  “What’s here?” Jimmy asked as they walked toward the dune.

  “The baseball game,” Rathstein said, as though it were obvious. “The Marine Superskels against the Army Spacetroopers.” He continued to walk up the dune.

  At the top of the dune, Foley looked down into the shadows. He made out a few tables on the left with people sitting at them, and a single bench with four people on the right. They appeared to be watching something, but there was nothing to see. He blinked and stared out as far as possible. In the dusk, in the distance, he made out what might be a man standing in the sand. Then he heard a sharp ping, the sound of a ball hitting a metal baseball bat.

  “Let’s go get helmets so we can see the game,” Rathstein said as he jogged down the slope.

  Fitted with a sand-colored, oversized football helmet, Foley was given a quick tutorial in its use. The visor had a night-vision device. A projection that appeared to float in front of him showed statistics on the game, like a Fox Box. It also showed real-time statistics, how far the ball had been hit and where, how far the fielder had thrown it and how fast. The Army was up by three in the bottom of the fourth. The Marines’ left fielder had just caught a ball and then thrown straight to the plate to get the third out by stopping the runner from first. He had thrown 2,408 feet, from somewhere out in the darkening desert. There were no lights on the field, but with the visor Jimmy could see players scattered over a great distance bounding across the sand the way Neil Armstrong had jump-walked on the moon. Each of their jumping strides took them almost eight feet into the air and landed them in sand almost twenty feet ahead.

  As the flying teams changed sides for the top of the fifth inning, a man wearing a tan tracksuit came over to the bench. He was not wearing a helmet, sporting instead a set of dark, wraparound sunglasses. “Mark, I assume this is our guest, Detective Foley? I’m Bill Chin, DARPA project director at the Palms. We thought you’d like to see our project in action before you meet with the security guys in the morning. Enjoying the game?”

  “I’m not sure Major League Baseball has anything to worry about yet. No city could build a park big enough for these guys,” Jimmy joked. “There’s definitely not enough open room in the Bronx.”

  “I don’t think what our troops are wearing will be the style for the New York Yankees anytime soon. The game is just a way to let the guys get used to their combat suits. And a little PR for the Pentagon brass to show at the next appropriations hearing,” Chin said, sitting down next to Foley on the bench. Chin held his right arm out and felt his own tracksuit with a gloved left hand. “This tracksuit will be all the rage in Manhattan in two years. The civilian suit. Doesn’t stop bullets, but it does everything else the combat suit does. And it comes with a fly and back flap. Wall Street will love it. The glasses could give you a full Bloomberg board projected out front. You can wear a flexible keyboard or tabloid on your arm or just speak the computer instructions into your mouthpiece, or as I like to call it, your Chin piece.”

  He demonstrated unfolding a flexible tabloid computer screen from the tracksuit’s right arm. “And when you’re getting too excited about your day trading, your onboard cardiologist program calls to tell you that your vitals are elevated.”

  Jimmy played with the flexitab computer for a few seconds. “Why not just have the suit give you CPR?”

  “Oh, it could. It could also give you a sedative and call for an ambulance, since it knows exactly where you are on the enhanced GPS grid,” Dr. Rathstein added.

  “The reality is, Mr. Foley, that everyone who will have one of these suits will be as close to Superman as we are going to become until we build some sort of comic-book antigravity device someday,” Chin replied. “The standard medicine kit can keep you awake for seventy-two hours with no side effects. You could lift a small car with one arm. You don’t have X-ray vision, but you do have telescopic and night vision. You’re directly wired to the internet, so all the knowledge in the world is instantly available to you and you can talk, chat, text, or e-mail anyone anywhere. You are part of the connected consciousness.”

  Foley, who had taken off his helmet, looked at Chin in the dark. “So how much will it be at Macy’s menswear?”

  “I bet we could get it down to a little more than one hundred K a suit in two years,” Chin said and smiled.

  “If you’re taking orders, I’m a forty-four long,” Jimmy shot back, “but I think I’ll need a pay raise. At that price, not many folks will be including that in their 2014 fall wardrobes.”

  “No, not many,” Rathstein chimed in, “but then, in the comic books there was only one Superman and we’re talking about there being tens of thousands of supermen.”

  “Sounds great.” Jimmy got up to watch the game better. “Unless you’re one of the other ten billion people on Earth.”

  “Why did the SCAIF attack fail?” The man they called “the General” sat in the chair by the fireplace. The lights in the room were off.

  “They made it through the main gate at Moffet as planned. The two in the lead car took out the gatehouse and the police car with grenades, and then the truck pulled through. The truck got halfway down the road toward the computer lab, but then it blew up,” the Asian man answered. “The guys in the lead car didn’t stay a
round to find out why.” He heard logs collapsing in the hearth as the fire burned through them. He heard the General exhale, a long breath, through his nose.

  “It failed because we have to use these amateurs, because we recruit under false flags,” the General said as he stood to tend to the fire, “because we seek to do this all with few casualties. Minimize collateral damage. Nonsense.” He tamped down the crumbling logs with a poker. “Specifically, it failed because that black woman drove a car into the side of the trailer and that set off the bomb prematurely. I had an observer there.” He placed another log on the embers.

  The Asian man was disturbed that the General knew more than he did about why the attack had failed. There was something, however, that he was sure the general did not know yet. “The two in the lead car are safe. They changed cars and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to Carmel. They’re holed up in a cabin at a small hotel there. Waiting until things calm down. Waiting for their next assignment.”

  The General reseated himself. “At least the dog attacks worked. Maybe they’ll realize now that those dogs had ears all this time. Such good stock tips. Well, the internet and cyberspace has been hit. Now we have gone after their robotics. Even this crowd in the White House will be able to figure out that their technology is under attack.”

  The Asian man stood silently, thinking about the failed truck bomb. Finally, he spoke: “If I may ask, who was the observer you had at SCAIF?”

  “The observer? The observer is a man who eliminated two people in a cabin at a small hotel in Carmel a short while ago.”

  5 Thursday, March 12

  0700 Local Time

  Lung Tan Air Force Base

  Taiwan

  Chen Fei sat in the cockpit, listening to the briefing in his headset as his aircraft idled on the taxiway in the early-morning light. He would lead the three-ship mission today, a great honor. Today the targets would be aircraft, remotely piloted. This would be the first day that they would test the airborne laser gun system, one aircraft against another. If it worked, and he knew it would, it would give Taiwan the technological edge over China. One aircraft equipped with a laser could engage a dozen or more enemy fighters. The laser could fire at distances greater than the longest Chinese air-to-air missile. It could switch from one target to another in nanoseconds. The Chinese on the mainland had nothing like it in development. Once they knew Taiwan had it, the mainland air force would be deterred.

  Chen Fei knew the state of the Mainland’s People’s Liberation Army’s air defense capabilities because he held the highest clearances of any of Taiwan’s test pilots. He alone among the pilots was also in the special security clearance compartment that allowed him to read the progress of the American laser program. Every day, the computer warfare unit at the Lung Tan Air Force Base summarized what had happened in the development and testing of the American system by the Boltheed corporation at the secret facility in the Nevada desert. It had been that way for five years. Everything the Americans had done, the Taiwan engineers had copied, every mistake and failure, every technological breakthrough and engineering design. Only three times in those five years had the Boltheed computer network changed in ways that kept the Taiwan warriors out, and then only for a matter of days. The firmware implants in the firewall and intrusion-detection system that the Taiwan intelligence agents had inserted in the network were never detected.

  Now Boltheed was ready to test the Advanced Tactical Laser Cannon with a squadron of the new F-35 Block 20 fighters over the Nevada and California deserts, and unknown to Boltheed and the Americans, Taiwan would also be testing a squadron of its aircraft over the Taiwan Straits.

  “Gentlemen, this is a very big day for Taiwan.” Chen Fei recognized the voice of the program commander, Colonel Zhang. “To review one final time, following takeoff to the north, you will proceed down the west coast over the Straits at altitudes between forty and forty-five thousand feet, depending on cloud formations. Somewhere after passing Penghu Islands on your left, you will detect two formations of drones made up to look like PLA fighters. They will be armed with air-to-air missiles and cannon. You will take out the lead fighter at maximum lethal range, before he can engage you with missiles. Then close and eliminate the remaining aircraft in dogfight maneuvers. Make sure you drop all the targets over water. If you see real PLA aircraft in the vicinity, abort the mission. We do not want them to know what we have yet. Not yet. Good flying.”

  With that, Chen Fei called the tower for permission to take off, received it, powered back on the single jet engine, and the aircraft bolted forward down the runway. He saw the runway markers pass by quickly, 1,000 feet, 2,000 feet, 3,000, and soon the aircraft was in flight. After two minutes, he called to his wingmen. Their aircraft were right behind him. “Jin dui, this is Jin tou zi. Let’s get to altitude fast to save fuel.”

  Fifteen minutes into the flight, the three ship went feet wet over the East China Sea and banked left to begin the run south, parallel to the coast. By choosing this route, Colonel Zhang, commander of the laser program, was simulating real-world conditions. He insisted on real missiles on the target aircraft. These were the skies where Taiwan’s air force might one day have to defend the island against the far more numerous PLA air force. When the laser cannon shot down the target drones, they would fall in the water, not on Taiwanese villages. The Chinese would see the exercise on their radar and be impressed with the state of the Taiwan Air Force’s training, but they would not know that the drones were downed with lasers. Not yet.

  Following the success of the independence-minded Taiwan National Party in the December elections, Chen Fei knew that the prospects of a military confrontation were not just theoretical. Despite their mutual economic dependence, Beijing and Taipei had been hurling invective at each other for the last four months to a degree unseen in twenty years. Mainland officials talked publicly about invading the island if it formally declared its independence from China.

  “Jin Two, drop to angles thirty-eight. Jin Three, go up to angles forty-five. When at altitude, flip on scanning radar at low power. Scan from two hundred eighty degrees to eighty degrees. Copy?” Chen Fei’s two wingmen moved their aircraft above and below his and then both turned on the smaller of the aircrafts’ two lasers. Together the two aircraft would scan over twenty five thousand cubic kilometers of airspace, using their lasers to look for the targets. These lasers acted as radar, but unlike radar they gave off no electronic signature, no radio frequency emission, that would allow other fighters to detect their presence. Some advanced American aircraft carried laser-detection systems, but the laser beam had to strike them at exactly the correct angle and stay there for two to three nanoseconds for the detector to register.

  The Penghu Islands navy base was coming up on the left, the east, and the sun was high enough now to light the base against the coastal mountains behind it. There were scattered light clouds at about twenty thousand feet. They looked yellow in the morning light. Before his aircraft had even passed Penghu Islands, the lower wing man, Jin Two, called in: “Target identified. Two ship formation at angles thirty, sixty degrees off my nose, ninety klicks out. Tracking west to east-northeast.”

  Chen Fei acknowledged, “Roger, Jin two. Continue track.” He quickly switched to his long range electro-optical system and visually acquired the target. They were made to look like PLA J-12s. Chen Fei called in to Control. “Jin touzi, acquired two target drones simulating J-12s at angles thirty, climbing and heading toward the coast at Penghu Islands. Moving in for long-range attack.”

  In his headset, Chen Fei heard the familiar voice of the one of his fellow pilots who today was guiding the exercise. “Jin touzi, this is Control. Acknowledge target acquired. Do not, repeat not, drop target over land, and remember, when you go to engage in dogfight mode, there will be more drones.”

  Chen Fei turned up the power on his idling laser and dove from forty thousand feet to thirty-five. The ocean below was moving by fast. He touched the toggle switch t
hat locked the laser’s pointing mechanism onto the target that he was tracking with the electro-optical system. Then he powered the laser up to tracking mode. The green numbers flashing on the bottom right of his screen indicated how close the target was: 65, 60, 55 kilometers out. Chen Fei hit the power level again, moving the laser into combat mode and setting the range. He had chosen the drone on the right from his perspective. At fifty kilometers, he flipped up the protective cover on his joystick and hit the attack button with his thumb. He paused and hit it again. Then he called out into his headset: “Fox Four, two bursts.”

  The laser gun on the underbelly of the aircraft, where the cannon had been originally, had emitted a 300 kW burst for almost a second. The beam had traveled at the speed of light and then, four seconds later, another had leaped from the aircraft. The heat from the beam had caused the target aircraft’s missiles to heat to the point of exploding on the aircraft’s own launch rail. Now the solid-state laser had to cool for up to thirty seconds before it was ready to fire again.

  “Roger that. Jin Two here. I can see the target. It split in half. Splash one.”

  “Jin Three: I count four more targets at angles three eight. Eighty klicks out. Heading one seven five degrees and coming fast.”

  Chen Fei had felt the adrenaline building, but now it was a rush. Even though it was only an exercise, this would be the first dogfight in which one side used lasers instead of missiles. How quickly could they drop the remaining five drones as they maneuvered against them? He barked into his headset, “Jin Two engage the wingman. Jin Three, with me, let’s get the four ship. Tally-ho!” He pulled back on the joystick to return to forty thousand feet, keeping Jin Three above him and to his right. “Let’s swing around to heading two seven zero so we can come at them out of the sun. Then we fire our own little suns.” He checked the laser control. It had returned quickly to full power after the two long-distance bursts. Now he dialed it down to close in combat mode.