“Copy,” White responded. “Report every two minutes, report any surface activity within ten miles, Lightfoot out.” White raised his head and watched as the retractable mast carrying the ship’s SPS-69 X-band surface search radar began to extend. The range of the SPS-69 was limited to about six miles on a normal mast, but could be extended to almost fifteen miles by hoisting the radar to 100 feet—which was done only at night or in an emergency, because it looked very suspicious to have a search radar up so high on a noncombat vessel. Even more suspicious-looking on a “rescue” craft was the radar that was normally restricted into a housing just forward of the helicopter hangar—an SPS-40E B-band two-dimensional air search radar, which could scan for aircraft from sea level up to a 33,000-foot altitude and out to a 100-mile range. The Valley Mistress would probably not enjoy the same relatively unfettered access to most nations’ territorial waters if those countries knew the ship had enough electronic search and communications equipment to control a surface or air battle at sea.
Over the din of deck activities, White heard another familiar sound, and he turned toward the starboard rail to see a young man wearing a headset leaning over the rail—way over the rail.
“Chumming for sharks,” as the crew called it, was pretty rare on the stabilized Valley Mistress in good weather, but this poor guy had had trouble ever since he’d joined the ship. White smiled and keyed his intercom button: “You okay, Jon?”
The man hurriedly wiped his mouth and face as if surprised someone noticed him, although there were men and women all around him, and he straightened and walked stiffly and unsteadily toward White.
Jonathan Colin Masters was thirty-eight years old, but he looked about fifteen. He had short brown hair that looked as if someone—most likely himself—had cut it with hedge clippers; normally a baseball cap worn backward hid his goofy-looking hair, but Masters had lost that hat days ago in one of his frequent visits to the rail. He had disarming green eyes and long, gangly legs and arms—but he also had one of the world’s most finely tuned brains on the end of his thin pencil neck.
Masters, a Dartmouth graduate at thirteen, an MIT doctor of science at twenty, was the president of Sky Masters, Inc. an Arkansas-based research company that designed, built, and deployed small specialty aircraft and spacecraft. SMI products took the latest aerospace technologies and miniaturized them: he could turn huge Delta space boosters into truck-mounted launch vehicles, or multi-ton communications satellites into bread-basket-sized devices. He was aboard the Valley Mistress to supervise the progress of his latest development. “Feeling okay, Jon?” White asked as the boyish-looking engineer stepped toward him. The question was serious: repeated seasickness was just as debilitating as any other serious illness or disease, bad enough to cause problems even for a healthy, normally hydrated person; Masters was as skinny as a beanpole and the temperature and humidity in this part of the world were often both in the mid- to high nineties. “Why don’t you stay inside where it Is air-conditioned?”
“I need windows, Paul,” Masters said weakly. “This damned ship of yours has no windows. I need a horizon to get my bearings.”
“You must have a few thousand hours’ flying time, Jon,” White said, adding a lighter tone now that he could see that the young man was feeling okay, “but you’ve had trouble every single day since we left Italy. Ever get airsick?”
“Never.”
“Are you using the scopolamine patches like the doc said?”
“I’ve worn enough of those damned patches to make me look like I’ve got a cauliflower growing behind my ears,” Masters said, “and that stuff makes me drowsy and it makes food taste like charcoal.
I’d rather eat, then barf, thank you very much.”
“Maybe if you’d stop eating the burgers and fries like a pig, You Wouldn’t upchuck so easy.” Masters ate junk food and drank soft drinks like a teenager but never gained the weight; it was always the supergeniuses, White thought, who were too busy to worry about unimportant matters such as health and nutrition. All that brain energy he generated must’ve kept him nice and slim.
“You want to know about the mission preparations or critique my eating habits, Colonel?” Masters asked impatiently. White gave up on the lecturing and motioned for the young scientist to show him the final preparations for the maiden launch of his newest invention.
Assembled on the aft helicopter deck was a sixty-five-foot-long track elevated about twenty degrees, and aimed off the fantail.
Sitting on the front end of the track was an aircraft that greatly resembled a B-2A Spirit stealth bomber, its wingspan a large forty-two feet. The High Endurance Autonomous Reconnaissance System (HEARSE), nicknamed Skywalker, was a long-range, high-altitude flying-wing drone, with long, thin swept-back wings and a bulbous center section that was the aircraft’s only fuselage. Like the B-2A stealth bomber, its engine section was on top of the fuselage, with a low, thin single air intake on the front and a very thin exhaust section in back; it used a single minijet engine, which was now running at idle power and had been for several minutes as White’s technicians did its final checkout.
Skywalker wasn’t wasting gas sitting out there idling—it could probably run for three days at idle power. Painted in black radar-absorbent material, the craft looked sinister and unearthly, like a giant air-breathing manta ray. Unlike remotely piloted vehicles steered from the ground, Skywalker was a semi-autonomous drone—it would carry out commands issued to it via satellite up-link by plotting its own best track and speed.
Skywalker carried 1,000 pounds of sophisticated communications and reconnaissance gear in its fuselage section. The primary reconnaissance sensor was a side-looking synthetic-aperture radar, which broadcast high-resolution digital radar images via microwave datalinks back to the Valley Mistress. The SAR radar, similar to the one in the B-2A stealth bomber but optimized for reconnaissance versus attack and terrain avoidance, was powerful enough to create photographic-like images in total darkness that were clear enough to identify objects as small as a dog, and to electronically measure objects down to a foot in size.
It used the same LPI (Low Probability of Intercept) technology as the B-2A as welclass="underline" very short radar “looks,” the radar imagery digitized so that it could be manipulated, enhanced, and viewed off-line, with the radar turned off. “Everything looks like it’s going fine.”
“Skywalker’s engine has been running fine for exactly ten-point-three minutes, all up-link channels confirm connected and secure—she’s ready for a push anytime,” Masters said confidently, almost boastfully.
“Good,” White said. Some people might get irritated about Master’s cockiness, but White enjoyed it. Left free to let his imagination soar, Masters was a true idea machine, a man who could get the job done no matter what the circumstances. “I’ve got about T minus eight. I’m heading to the recon center—I’m sure you’ll want to stay out in the open air until your ship gets on station.” Secretly he prayed that Masters wouldn’t blow lunch in the confines of the reconnaissance control room—most of the air conditioning in that space was reserved for the electronics, and it was stuffy and smelly enough without the “chain reaction” scent of vomit.
Launch time had arrived. After clearing the area on radar, White ordered Skywalker on patrol. Masters throttled the turbofan engine up to full power; it would need full throttle only for a few minutes, then throttle back to a miserly twenty-liter-per-hour fuel-consumption rate, good for twelve hours of cruising. Then he released the hold-back bar, and the bird hurled itself down the launch rail. It sailed into the darkness at deck level for less than a hundred feet until it had built up climb speed, then, buoyed by its long, thin, supercritical wings, Skywalker climbed rapidly into the darkness. In less than five minutes it was at 10,000 feet. It made a few orbits over the Valley Mistress as Masters and his technicians checked out its systems, then headed north, toward the Iranian coast.