“Ah, General Shateri,” the Russian general said excitedly, “we have finally developed a drone capable of carrying a twenty-five kilo package thirty-two kilometers in under thirty minutes.”
“And fully automated, General Geiman?”
“Fully.”
General Geiman turned to the Russian officer in charge of Drone Technology, “please, Captain Jennings, explain to General Shateri the drone’s technical specs, but not too technical the General doesn’t understand.”
They all laughed.
Captain Jennings explained, in one long breath, “the aerial robot is fully automated and controlled via this master controller,” as he displayed the controller to the generals, “the master controller is synched to our RTK transmitter on the roof…”
“I must ask, Captain, what does that mean?” asked General Shateri.
“Real time kinematics. GPS, if you will.”
“Ah.”
May looked up, but couldn’t see beyond the house’s second-story windows, and noticed that the Russian officer, Captain Jennings, spoke fluent English without a trace of accent (he was a sleeper-cell Russian agent, born in America to cold war-era Russian spies and employed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs in California).
Captain Jennings continued, “…this RTK transmitter is linked to four American Global Navigation Satellite Systems for its waypoint information and it enjoys an optimal targeting area of one meter. The master controller features a ten-inch, ten-eighty-pixel display that the operator, me, can use to verify the target, and has a thirty-two kilometer range, or twenty miles, enough to reach downtown Atlanta or the airport from a safe distance.”
Captain Jennings placed the master controller down, trained an index finger at each part of the drone as he spoke, and continued, “these particular drones have been adapted from an agricultural management platform with a gimbal that holds its high-def camera and radar subsystem. Its eight props span two meters and the one point four-kiloamp hour battery will carry a payload of over fifty pounds, twenty-five kilos, for up to four hours stationary, and can fly at speeds of up to thirty-nine knots, and as I mentioned earlier, has a range of twenty miles.”
Captain Jennings clacked his heels when he completed his explanation.
“Exceptional!” clamored General Shateri.
“A demonstration, Captain Jennings?” asked General Geiman.
“Of course.”
General Geiman turned to General Shateri. “It’s just like General Kim to miss this demonstration over a meaningless soccer game.”
“Football. These generals have been rivals since they were children in North Korea. Rivalry is good.”
“Competition is a preoccupation that threatens the outcome of this war.”
“It is just a game with an old friend.”
Captain Jennings instructed one of his two subordinates to retrieve a backpack from the crate inside the barn. May tensed as she heard the soldier come in, open and close the box, and pace back to the captain, who took the backpack from him. He displayed it to the generals, “this, of course, is the Tabari Low Yield Thermonuclear Pack, like the three we field-tested in McDonough. Each pack contains a one-kiloton-yield nuclear warhead, and when detonated at an altitude of one thousand feet, each warhead produces a thermonuclear blast of three hundred thousand degrees Celsius, resulting in complete and total obliteration within a one-kilometer radius. And as you observed, when these packs are used in a daisy-chain application, like in McDonough, no infrastructure remained, and human fatalities were estimated at nearly one hundred percent.”
“What I am most impressed with, Captain Jennings,” General Shateri remarked, “is that your team has overcome, what is the term when multiple bombs cancel out one another?”
“Fratricide, General. That, along with its high-yield battery and lifting capability, is what has taken us this long to achieve — coordinating the networking structure so the Tabaris will detonate at precisely the same time, regardless of location relative to one another. Two Tabaris detonating closely together a fraction of a second apart might cancel each other out. We have overcome that problem.”
“Bravo,” replied General Shateri.
General Geiman took the pack from the captain, eagerly adding, “imagine, General Shateri, once we have control over the American people, a single Tabari flown high above one of their sold-out American football stadiums. There’s enough power in just one Tabari to erase one hundred thousand lives from existence in an instant. Now imagine ten thousand of these drones strategically placed all around the United States and fully autonomous with minds of their own, recharging themselves and relieving each other when necessary, all the while monitoring the Americans’ every move. Then the American people will comply with us and they will submit to the power that the PLA possesses.”
“How many of these weapons have we manufactured to date?”
“We are in possession of the remaining twenty of the initial twenty-four our laboratory has produced.”
“One remains in Moscow,” Captain Jennings added, “undergoing tests to increase thermonuclear capacity. We don’t want them too large as to cause unnecessary radioactive fallout. It would be unsafe for our comrades. We want them just the right size to take control of the American people.”
General Geiman said, “Russia maintains the world’s largest reserve of nuclear weapons. Had we simply desired to wipe the United States from existence, we would have utilized our one hundred-megaton Csar Bombas and lived our lives in peace without the American plague and its pestilence.”
“Indeed.”
“Sir, may I?” Captain Jennings asked, took the Tabari from him, and continued, “permit me to demonstrate and further explain.”
“Please.”
“There’s a hole located here at the bottom of the pack,” he pointed out, “and this firing pin.” He pulled a six-inch long, one-inch diameter metal shaft from a pocket sewn into the backpack and connected it to the Tabari via a short length of flexible wire.
Captain Jennings’ assistants held the drone at chest level while he slipped the pack onto the drone’s platform just behind the camera, and then pressed the pack’s single strap through a simple locking mechanism. He plunged the firing pin into the hole at the bottom of the pack.
“There. It’s fully readied,” Captain Jennings said whimsically.
“Is that dangerous?” General Shateri asked nervously.
“Yes, very,” the captain replied, “however, the firing pin isn’t just a symbolic failsafe. Once inserted, all networked Tabaris come online, readied and awaiting the commanding officer’s instruction. If I were to depress this arming button,” the captain displayed a switch under a clear, protective shield on the master controller, “after a two-minute countdown… boom, regardless of the automation script we’ll run for tomorrow’s display in Atlanta,” he thumbed back at the house, “I should mention, to disarm the weapon, you must enter the proper nine-digit code here,” Captain Jennings demonstrated, pointing to a keypad on the master controller, “if you simply pull out the pin… boom.”
“It’s elegant in its simplicity,” General Geiman remarked.