Rodriguez bit her lip and watched as the flight systems aboard the Fantom stabilized it and it transitioned from kinetic to onboard hydrogen fuel power from its Scimitar engines. This was the moment most prone to disaster. The drones had to kick in full afterburner at the moment of launch or they would simply drop into the sea outside the chute.
Bunny had her hand on the stick and her eye on her simulated cockpit flight screen, but Rodriguez knew for all her bravado about flying her drone out of the chute, she was pretty much a passenger at this point. The drone’s onboard AI could react to its environment and adjust its flight envelope a hundred times faster than Bunny and her redundant flight stick could. By the time she could twitch her stick a millimeter, the drone had already decided it had enough power for a successful launch, and aimed itself at the open air above Little Diomede. But AI could glitch, which was why she had her hand on the stick in case she needed to take back manual control while it was still in range of their undersea transmission array.
Bunny was controlling her Fantom through a virtual-reality helmet, with Rodriguez relegated to watching it in 2D on a bank of screens that simulated cockpit views, tactical overviews and a heads-up display of instrument readouts. Flicking her eyes to the forward view screen, Rodriguez saw the hulks of the old fishing fleet flash past underneath the drone and then it began to climb into the night sky. Before she had even exhaled the breath she didn’t realize she was holding, the roar of the drone had died away and the cavern was suddenly quiet, and empty of all motion but the swirling water vapor from the drones Scimitar engines. Until a huge cheer went up from the personnel ringing the dock. Rodriguez couldn’t help but smile, and heard the relief in Bunny’s voice as she calmly announced, “Fantom 4–1 successful egress. AI has control. Turning to 150, altitude 200.” She leaned back from her stick, letting it go and flexing her fingers. She pulled up her virtual-reality visor, turned to Rodriguez briefly, flashing her a quick thumbs up, before turning and pulling the visor back down.
“Cat return to launch readiness. Recovery team to standby,” Rodriguez said into her comms, and watched with satisfaction as the members of the red-shirted crash and salvage crew returned to their rest stations and changed their shirts to green in anticipation of recovering the aircraft after its mission.
The only other person in the trailer was the CO, Halifax. He patted her shoulder. “Nice launch Boss. Almost be a shame when it becomes routine.”
“If shooting 80 million dollars’ worth of warplane through a hole the size of a barn door underneath a billion tons of rock ever becomes routine sir, you can hand me my discharge slip.”
“Now you’ve got that Cat working again, you’ll be firing three next time, then six, then twelve Lieutenant Commander. And you’ll be doing it at a pace you never thought possible. Your people ready for that?”
She watched as Lieutenant Severin, her catapult officer, went around high fiving everyone on the flight deck. “They were born for it sir,” Rodriguez said, sounding as confident as she felt.
The trailer was quiet for a moment, as they watched Bunny at work, pulling data from the drone and tweaking its flight path as it settled in for its flight down the Alaska coast, skimming the sea at not much more than wave top height. It would be an hour before it went feet dry over Alaska’s southern coast near Anchorage. Rodriguez had plenty to do outside, giving props to her people for a picture-perfect launch.
“Permission to hit the flight deck sir?” she asked Halifax.
“Granted. Lieutenant Commander, before you go?” Halifax asked. “A question?”
“Sir?”
“How you and your pilot run this mission is entirely your call, but the coast facing Russia is probably the most watched piece of sky outside of Atlanta International Airport. I know the Fantom is 5th generation stealth, but what radar can’t see, thermal and magnetic imaging satellites can. No disrespect to Lieutenant O’Hare, but I’d like to know you have a plan so that Air Force won’t be laughing their asses off at us for the next five years.”
Bunny was listening; lifted up her visor and gave Rodriguez a wink, then went back to work.
“Well sir, firstly, you have to remember Air Force has been staring at that piece of sky for seventy years, without seeing anything but the occasional lone flight of Russian bombers acting like they accidentally got lost. Stare at nothing long enough, you start seeing nothing.” She held up two fingers, “Plus, I checked and it’s two years since the Pentagon put Eielson through an unannounced exercise like this. Whoever is on duty at this time of night is sitting over there right now, sucking back lukewarm coffee and probably sneak-watching porn on a tablet. They have no idea what kind of shitstorm is about to hit them. Plus, Lieutenant O’Hare there has a cunning plan for not getting my very expensive warplane shot down. Tell the Commander, O’Hare.”
O’Hare turned around and took off her helmet. Her bleached white cropped hair topped a brown freckled nose and piercing green eyes that were never at rest. She opened her mouth to answer, but Halifax tried to prick her balloon, “Let me guess. You’re going to circle south and blast up some river valley or mountain range at Mach 1.5 and treetop height, then pop up within cruise missile launch range, get a GPS lock on the target and call it mission accomplished before you high-tail it south again on afterburner.”
Bunny grinned, “It’s called the Tanana River Valley sir, and maybe that’s the way you’d do it. That’s the way most folks would do it and the radar operators at Eielson would have wargamed that a hundred times. So yeah, I’m going to come at Eielson from the south… or south-southwest actually. But on the commercial flight path that goes between Anchorage and Fairbanks. And I’m going to be flying at ten thousand feet, with my landing lights on, wheels and flaps down, at a stately 200 miles an hour. Every long and short-range radar and every infrared satellite in the northern hemisphere should be able to see me.”
Halifax looked at Bunny like she had completely lost her marbles, and then at Rodriguez, who couldn’t hide how much she was loving it. And he could see clearly neither of them was going to tell him any more right now.
“With your permission sir,” Rodriguez said to Halifax. “We have work to do.”
“Permission granted Boss,” Halifax said, his frown turning to a slight smile.
Airman E4 Dale Racine first saw the blip on his screen and heard the chime of the audio alarm as it came into the air traffic control zone for Fairbanks, 120 miles south of Eielson airbase. His eyes flicked to his screen as his system analyzed the flight profile of the unidentified object and compared it to civil and military flight plans. By its size, speed and altitude the system identified it as a probable light passenger aircraft but it didn’t match any logged civilian flight plan. Plus it was on a direct heading for Eielson. Had he missed it earlier? He quickly checked the data logs for that sector, but came up empty. Air traffic control at Anchorage should have called it in then handed it off, but there was no record of them having pinged it. He sighed.
“Sir, I have an unidentified aircraft 100 miles out approaching from 185 degrees, altitude ten thousand, speed 226 miles an hour,” Racine called out to the officer of the watch, Staff Sergeant Elmore Bruning. Bruning and the other Airman in the tower at Eielson were busy planning how they were going to land both a C130 transport flight and a flight of drone-modded F-22s twenty minutes from now with only one functioning runway and one man short up in the tower because Airman E3 Scarlatti had just reported sick again the lazy bastard.