The turn caused the aircraft to disappear temporarily from the F-35s’ radars, a variation on the old trick of beaming a Doppler radar. The American system was too smart to stay blind for very long; the F-35s’ redundant systems were able to find it again quickly. But the second or two of confusion, along with the course change, gave the little SUV just enough of an advantage to duck into the ground clutter near the coast, camouflaging itself in the irregular radar returns caused by the ground. It was a command performance, and the fact that Turk had dealt with exactly that sort of maneuver from attacking Flighthawks in simulated combat didn’t make it any less impressive.
“Basher, your bandit is two sixty off your nose,” said Turk, telling the Marine pilot that the UAV had tucked down to his left. “Ten miles. He’s going to try popping up behind you.”
“Uh—”
“Trust me. Put your plane on your right wing and look for the bogie to cross your nose in twenty seconds. It’s going to be low — he’s in the weeds and trying to get behind you. Break now!”
With his F-35 bleeding off speed, Cowboy knew he was a sitting duck for any aircraft that came up behind him. But what Turk was suggesting was very counterintuitive. It seemed almost impossible that the drone could spin around quickly enough to get behind him, let alone get underneath him.
Instinctually, it seemed a dumb move, and not least of all because it would leave him vulnerable to a plunging attack from above, the direction he expected the drone to come from.
Did he trust the Air Force pilot?
Cowboy leaned on his stick, driving the F-35B hard and sharp, exactly as Turk had suggested. The g’s hit him hard, pushing him back into the fighter’s seat.
A black bar appeared at the right side of his windscreen. The targeting radar was going wild.
Mother!
“Can I fire?” asked the Marine, pushing to stay with the UAV. But before anyone answered, the black aircraft turned its nose abruptly in his direction and sliced downward, moving and turning at a speed Cowboy didn’t think possible. He made his own abrupt turn, losing so much altitude that the Bitchin’ Betty warning system blared that he was too low. He scanned his radar and then the sky, but the slippery little UAV and its tiny radar cross section had once more disappeared in the weeds.
Damn.
Turk realized what was happening as soon as Cowboy got the altitude warning. There was no way the Marine was going to catch the other plane now.
Still, they needed as much data as they could get. And they were going to get it by going home.
“Your bandit’s heading west,” he told the Marine.
“Yeah, we’re following.”
“You have it on radar?”
“Negative.”
“Did he turn on weapons radar?” Turk asked.
“No.”
“All right.”
“We’re going to search this area. Once he’s over the water he should be easy to find.”
“Easier, maybe.”
“Yeah. You see where he launched from?”
“I didn’t. I’ll check back with my people,” added Turk, though he could already guess that the answer would be no: they would be giving the F-35s a vector to the site if they had.
Turk signed off with Cowboy and continued down the slope to the mining area. His boots sank into the soft ground. The place smelled like dirt, and death.
While considered “small,” two-hundred-pound GBU-53s still made an absolute mess of anything they hit; the three guerrillas who’d been holding this part of the perimeter had been obliterated. Twenty yards away, half of one of the trucks lay on its side, blown over by an explosion.
A severed leg lay on the ground. Turk stared at it for a moment, frowned, then kept walking.
Three months ago, that would have turned my stomach, he thought. Now it’s just one more ugly part of the landscape.
9
Finally, they’d come.
Lloyd Braxton stared at the console, even though the displays were blank. He had been waiting for this moment for many months. In a sense, he’d been preparing for it for years.
It was intoxicating. Kallipolis was becoming a reality, precisely as he had envisioned. The days of nation states were passing before his eyes; the elite was ready to take over.
He clenched his fists, controlling his excitement.
There was a great deal to be done. This was just one small step in the evolution.
The next step was to defeat the Dreamland people — Special Projects, Whiplash, whatever the hell bs code name they were using. Defeat them and take their technology, the last piece of the puzzle.
Defeating Dreamland would be sweet. Rubeo and his web of sellout scientists, technodrones for the governments of the world, would finally be put in their places.
Braxton scolded himself. If this became a quest for revenge it would fail. He had argued this many times with Michaels, Thresh, and Fortine — especially the ship captain Fortine — who while still being true believers, bore personal grudges against their governments and a host of officials who had wronged them. Braxton didn’t blame them, exactly, but he knew that Kallipolis was a movement of history, a phenomenon like the Renaissance or the Reformation, not something to be sullied by personal grudges.
Kallipolis was both a goal and a philosophy. The philosophy was perfect, unfettered freedom: true dependence on the self, and a true unshackling of the governmental binds that kept men and women from reaching their potential, both personally and as a race. Kallipolis would do away with national borders and provide those who were worthy of it complete freedom and the unrestricted ability to achieve.
The people who made up the Kallipolis movement — aside from the very small group of people he employed, there were over a hundred in close communications with Braxton, and a few thousand more beyond — were members of the intelligentsia, scientists and engineers, and those who had done something with their lives, people who were the builders, not the takers; what they had in common was the ability to see things without emotion and act on them. They acted as he must act: entirely on the scientific principles that had gotten him this far.
So… it was on to the next move. Provoke the Americans into showing themselves, and get Whiplash to expose the tech he needed.
He needed to talk to the rebel leader on Malaysia immediately. The sooner the Americans were provoked, the better.
10
Breanna rolled over in the bed, aware that she had to wake up but unsure why. She was in the middle of a dream, caught in an incomprehensible tangle of odd thoughts and a snatch of memory. The setting was her childhood, a home near the railroad tracks. She was running to catch the train. Her father, dressed in his Class A uniform, was yelling at her to stop. The train was a steam locomotive, a huge nineteenth century bruiser stolen from a Christmas display and multiplied a hundred times…
Up, she told herself, and she slipped off the covers, grabbing the vibrating phone on her bed stand.
Zen snored as she grabbed a robe from the end of the bed and walked to the hallway.
“Breanna,” she said into the phone.
“Need to talk,” said Danny Freah.
“Give me two minutes. I’ll call.”
Pulling on the robe, Breanna went down to the kitchen and glanced at the clock. It was two-thirty in the morning. Indonesia was a day and an hour ahead, making it three-thirty there.
She hesitated for a moment, then hit the button on the coffeemaker. As the water started to heat, she went to the kitchen table and pulled her daughter’s laptop open. The Web browser came up; she checked the news headlines on her home page quickly, making sure nothing important had happened in the roughly two hours since she’d gone to bed.