Air Battle Force (18 page)

“Anything I can help you with, sir?”

“I hope so. That's why I got you assigned here from the Pentagon,” Patrick said. He ran his hands wearily over his face and his short-cropped hair. “This is not an official wing project, Daren. I've got no budget—not one dime. I'm stealing fuel and flight hours from the wing already as it is. But I promised the chief that I'd have something to show him.”

“I don't get it, sir,” Daren commented. “Aren't you the commanding officer here?”

“Officially, Daren, I don't exist here,” McLanahan admitted. “The First Air Battle Force was stood up here, but we don't have a mission. It's my job to build one. The One-eleventh Wing is the only official unit here. My funding runs out September thirtieth of this year. I talked the chief and SECDEF into bringing them here to see if we can integrate them into a deployable force, but I don't have a staff or a budget. When the money runs out, it closes down.”

“Excuse me, sir, but what exactly are you working on?” Daren asked.

McLanahan finished typing notes, got up, checked on Bradley to make sure he was warm enough, then motioned to Daren. “Come with me, Colonel.”

Daren followed McLanahan out of the tent. He immediately saw the tall, android-looking figure standing nearby, now carrying a huge futuristic-looking weapon. “Excuse me, sir, but what in hell is that?”

“You mean ‘who,' “ Patrick corrected him. “Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Wilde, Air Battle Force ground operations,” Patrick replied.

“Ground operations? You mean,
combat
ground operations?”

“That's the idea.”

“What's he wearing? What's he carrying?”

“He's wearing electronic battle armor; he's carrying an electromagnetic rail gun.”

“A
what
. . . ?”

“I'll explain later.” They stepped quickly over to the steel trailer. McLanahan unlocked the door by pressing his thumb on a pad; the door opened with a hiss of pressurized air. Inside the tightly packed trailer were two seats facing simple consoles with two hand controllers; on either side of the seats were computer terminals; on the leftmost side, facing the front of the trailer, was a fifth console with three computer monitors, manned by a technician furiously entering commands into a computer keyboard. The inside of the trailer was so loud from the sound of the air-conditioning that the tech had to wear hearing protectors. But all this occupied only about a third of the trailer. The rest was jam-packed with electronics, circuit-board racks, power supplies, communications equipment, and air-conditioning units.

Daren recognized it all instantly: “It's a virtual-cockpit trailer,” he said, surprise in his voice. “It's a lot bigger than I thought.”

“How much bigger?” Patrick McLanahan asked.

“Global Hawk's entire control suite could fit in the back of a Humvee,” Daren said.

“This is definitely first generation,” McLanahan said. “We developed this trailer at Dreamland five years ago, and it was amazing that we fitted it all in here. I just flew the trailer out here today, but there's some snafu in the satellite link.”

“The satellite link was the simplest part of the Global Hawk system,” Daren said. “It's normally bulletproof. We had a simple satellite-phone hookup relaying instructions back and forth from the aircraft and control station.” He went over to the middle left seat. It was obviously the pilot's seat, with a left-hand throttle control and a right-hand flight-control stick, but there were no other instruments visible—not even a computer screen. “What are you trying to control anyway?”

“Sit down and take a look,” Patrick said. After Daren was seated, Patrick handed him a headset; it looked like standard aviation issue except for some strange protuberances on the crossband. When Daren tried to adjust the small, sharp probes that dug into his scalp from those arms, Patrick said, “No, don't touch those. You'll get used to them.”

Daren sat with the strange-looking headset on his head and waited—and suddenly he was standing outside the tent, in the desert, in broad daylight, looking out across the runway! Superimposed on the image were all sorts of electronic data and symbology floating in space: magnetic heading, range readouts, a set of crosshairs, and flashing pointers. He whipped off the headset in complete shock, and the image instantly disappeared. “
What in hell . . . ?
That was no projected image or hologram—I
saw
those images, just as clearly as I'm looking at you right now! How did you do that?”

“An outgrowth of the ANTARES technology we developed about seven years ago,” Patrick replied. “ANTARES stands for—”

“I know: Advanced Neural Transfer and Response System,” Daren interjected. “Zen Stockard is a good friend of mine. I know he was spearheading the resurrected program a few years back. I applied for it myself.” Jeff “Zen” Stockard was a flight test pilot at the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center; along with the man standing before him, Patrick McLanahan, Stockard was one of the few people alive who had fully mastered the ANTARES thought-control system. Daren had applied for the ANTARES research program at Dreamland several times, thinking that surely the Pentagon would relish the idea of squirreling him away at that supersecret desert facility—but, like most of his requests for choice assignments, it was denied.

“Zen was big on any program at Dreamland that could help skilled pilots become better aviators,” Patrick said. That was most evident in Zen's own case—he'd lost the use of his legs in a training exercise at Dreamland. “The system sends neural images to the wearer's brain, so he ‘sees' all sorts of images transmitted to him—TV cameras, sensor images, text messages, computer data, any number of things—just as if the optic nerve were sending electrical signals from the eye to the brain.

“The problem we always had with ANTARES was we were trying to design a system that could control an entire aircraft by thought,” Patrick went on. “Piping visual, sensory, or data images to the brain is a relatively simple task—it doesn't require any specialized theta-alpha training. So instead of using heads-up displays or fancy holograms to replicate an airplane cockpit, we just pipe datalinked images directly to the brain. The user can control which images he sees with ease—as quickly and easily as thinking about what you want to see. And everything stays simple if we eliminated the need to control the aircraft with ANTARES.”

Daren donned the special headset again, and a few moments later the images returned. He could swivel his head and look all around the airfield. When he centered the crosshairs on a target such as the hangars on the other side of the runway, he got an exact range and bearing readout. When he turned his head to follow the flashing pointers, he found himself looking at a wooden box about ten feet square, exactly 425 meters away. “What am I looking at?” Daren asked.

“Some targets we set up south of the field.”

“Where is the camera?”

“You're looking at what Sergeant Wilde was looking at.”

“The big guy with the electronic armor and rail gun?”

McLanahan nodded. “The computer stores what he's already looked at in image files; when you tap in to his visual system, you can look at the latest stored image files that he's sent, as if you're looking at them yourself. You can look at what he's looking at in real time, too, but he can control that.”

“Cool. How do I stop it?” But as soon as he thought about not looking at the image, it stopped, and he was again looking at the interior of the virtual-cockpit trailer. “Hey, I switched it! Very cool!” Daren switched the image back and forth with ease. “That works great. But what's the purpose?”

“Switch back to the virtual image.” Daren did it in an instant. “Look at the target box. Got it?”

“Yep.”

“Designate it as a target.”

“How do I . . . ?” But again, as soon as he thought about doing it, the crosshairs blinked three times, and then a red triangle appeared superimposed on the box. “Aha! Got it.”

“You've got a FlightHawk airborne with mini-Mavericks on board,” Patrick told him. “Attack that target.” This time it was simple: He thought about attacking the target, and a voice in his head announced,
“Attack ground target, stop attack.”

“Why did it say ‘stop attack'?”

“That's the command you'd issue to stop the attack,” McLanahan explained. He turned to a computer terminal beside him and verified that the original problem still existed—and sure enough, it did. “But here's where the problem comes in: The satellite datalink is messed up. The FlightHawk is either not receiving the command or receiving it but not executing it. We had the same problem with an operational test a few weeks ago. We couldn't get it to respond until we established a direct UCAV-to-aircraft link.”

“Very cool—commanding a FlightHawk from guys on the ground using this virtual mind-link thing,” Daren commented. “It's a pretty sophisticated routine—lots of data shooting back and forth over very long distances.”

“But you did it with Global Hawk all the time, right?”

“Well . . . we don't actually
fly
a Global Hawk unmanned recon plane from the ground, sir,” Daren pointed out. “It has to have a flight plan loaded in memory first. We can make lots of changes to that flight plan, but it has to have the flight plan first.”

“I
want
to be able to fly the UCAV, Daren,” Patrick said. “I understand what you're saying about Global Hawk, but the ability to keep the man in the loop is important to any attack mission. Besides, we still have to be able to manually control the plane for certain phases of flight.”

“Which phases, sir? Certainly not flying straight and level?”

“How about a rendezvous with another aircraft?”

“As in refuel a FlightHawk from a tanker?”

“How about fly one right up inside the bomb bay of a B-1 bomber?”

“A B-1 bomber!” Daren exclaimed. His eyes widened in surprise, but then he shrugged. “Why not? I think you have the technology to do that right now. A computer the size of my wristwatch can fly a B-1 better than any pilot I've ever known.” He paused for a moment, then said, “We can do it one better, sir.”

“How?”

“Why don't you fly both the FlightHawk
and the B-1 bomber
—right from the VC.”

“Make the carrier aircraft
and
the attack aircraft
unmanned?
”

“Why not?” Daren Mace asked. “I know you can already monitor and control most every system aboard the B-1 from the virtual cockpit. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to make the Vampire fly
itself.
”

“But why are we interested in making the carrier aircraft unmanned?” Patrick asked. He already had some answers himself, but he wanted to hear Daren's reasoning.

“I have a feeling I'm preaching to the choir, sir, but here goes,” Daren said. “First: cost savings. Conventional wisdom holds that the cost to train and keep crew members in an aircraft like the B-1 bomber exceeds the cost of the aircraft by a factor of ten over its service life. Make the planes unmanned, run by computers, and now you don't need rated officers to fly them anymore—technicians can monitor the computer systems, and technicians and intelligence experts can pick targets to attack.

“Second: Removing the human-necessary systems in the plane would really create huge savings in weight, system complexity, performance, electrical load, and dozens of other areas,” Mace went on. “The weight of an ejection seat with all its associated systems and plumbing is five times the weight of the guy that sits in the seat. We wouldn't need to sap bleed air from the engines for pressurizing the cockpit—that would boost available engine power by at least twenty percent, maybe more. We'd have enough surplus electrical power on board to install newer, faster computers just by not having to illuminate the crew compartment.

“Third: Missions wouldn't be restricted by the humans,” Daren concluded. “Even with backup crews on board, you can't simply keep refueling a plane and keep it aloft for days and days—eventually the crew has to land the plane and get out. You can keep a robot plane on station for days, even weeks. You do away with crew rest requirements, you don't waste flight time by doing crew-proficiency tasks, and you don't need to provide for flight crews on mobility or deployment. And obviously we're not risking any human crew members in high-risk missions.”

“We just have to make it work, then sell the gear and those arguments to the Pentagon.”

“I worked at SECDEF's office for over a year, sir,” Daren said with exasperation in his voice. “I saw perfectly outstanding projects killed on nothing more than a whim: The contractor was from the wrong state and wouldn't relocate or open up an office in a certain congressional district. A three-hundred-page proposal was missing a few pages. Or some staffer didn't get a luxury suite when he or she visited a base or plant. You can bust your butt and develop a great program, and they may still cancel it for reasons as stupid as they don't like the color you painted it.

“Defense procurement is bullshit, sir. The best programs get killed all the time while the crummy ones get funded. Then, years later, the good program gets the green light, even though it costs twice as much as it did the first time.” Daren nodded toward McLanahan's son sleeping on the ground just a few feet away. “If you pardon me for saying so, sir, there is no project I've seen in all my years in the Air Force that's worth putting a child in a sleeping bag on the ground in the middle of winter so you can keep on working on it. Do you think anyone outside this base cares if you're successful or not? I can tell you honestly, sir—no one does. It wouldn't be worth a young boy getting even one sniffle.”