“Climbing up,” he told his crew, pulling up on the collective to increase lift and climb higher into the air as they neared the shoreline. The truck’s headlights had been turned off just before they made contact with the park ranger, but he knew precisely where Smuggler’s Cove was located, even without the steering carat on his display.
“Pulling up the FLIR,” AWR1 Rose said.
Brian glanced down at the display on his forward panel that showed the view from the helicopter’s Forward-Looking Infrared. He watched as Rose manipulated the sensor and centered it on the National Park Service truck.
“Tallyho,” Dillon said when the crosshairs settled on a lone figure standing alongside the truck. “Ranger Reid… er… Tiffany, this is Raptor Two Four. We are on station and have eyes on your pos. Over.”
“Copy that, Raptor Two Four. Can you search a mile in either direction along the beach? Over.”
“Affirm,” Dillon said.
Brian responded by banking the Seahawk to the right, angling toward a spot on the beach east of Smuggler’s Cove. He watched as Rose zoomed out on the FLIR, letting the sensor “snowplow” along the terrain as it moved along the beach at roughly the same speed as the helicopter.
“Few hot spots, but they look like animals to me,” Rose said.
Brian glanced at the screen and nodded. “Yeah, I agree.”
The sensor stopped snowplowing, and Petty Officer Rose guided it in arcing sweeps up the hillside, looking for a heat signature that resembled a human shape. After a few minutes of scanning the area, he keyed his intercom and said, “That’s about it for a mile in this direction.”
“Roger that.” Brian banked the helicopter left, sweeping across the beach as he turned to search west of the cove.
“Tiffany, this is Raptor Two Four,” Dillon said from the left seat. “No joy at the east end of the beach. Proceeding west to search the other end.”
“Copy, Raptor.”
Brian glanced down through his window as they passed over Smuggler’s Cove, looking through his night vision goggles at the female park ranger. Her head was tilted up to the sky, and she waved as they flew past.
From their hide site on Montañon Ridge, Chen looked up from the tablet she had been working on when she heard the helicopter approaching. When Wu Tian had returned and informed her that he had eliminated both women and covered their corpses with brush, she knew they would eventually be discovered. She just hoped his hasty concealment of the bodies would keep them hidden long enough to allow them to complete their task.
“Are they here for us?”
She looked over at Wu Tian, who was staring at the dim silhouette of a military helicopter paralleling the shoreline near Smuggler’s Cove. She shook her head. “They’re probably searching for the women you killed.”
“That’s sooner than I would have expected,” he said. “Any targets yet?”
She glanced at her watch, then back to the tablet. “It’s still too early for the missile test, but there is one airborne above us now.”
“How much longer until the patch has been installed?”
Chen slipped the VR goggles onto her head and picked up a controller in each hand. She rotated her head left and right, then up and down, orienting herself within the virtual reality environment. Holding out her hand, she swiped at a screen only she could see and saw the timer in the bottom right corner. “One more minute.”
“Should we take this one?”
Chen shook her head. “Not yet.”
“But if the helicopter finds us…”
“No,” she said, her tone firm and commanding. “We wait.”
While Chen immersed herself in the virtual reality framework she would use to hack into the Joint Strike Fighter, she knew Wu Tian was watching the approaching helicopter with unease. But they were hidden well. Their camouflage would keep them invisible from prying infrared sensors and night vision, and the netting disguised the assortment of nondescript black boxes and cables littering their hide site.
The weapon was unlike any she had ever used before. It was man-portable and contained a processor with immense computing power, but the real secret was in the interface she would manipulate once they initiated the hack. She was tempted to hack into the one above them, just to verify the professor had successfully modified the waveform, but she was worried it might tip her hand.
No, she reminded herself. We wait.
At last, she stopped swiping and tapping on the air in front of her and lifted the goggles from her head. “It is complete,” she said with a tone of satisfaction.
Wu Tian looked back at her with emotionless eyes.
35
Lieutenant William “Jug” McFarland completed his last sweep of the airspace over the missile test range. Normally a P-3 Orion assigned to VX-30 at Point Mugu would have been tasked with performing the pre-mission sanitization, but the test squadron’s only maritime patrol aircraft had been pulled to the Western Pacific for real-world tasking. Not that Jug minded. He was just happy for the excuse to squeeze in another sortie before the test.
The ocean beneath him was devoid of surface contacts, with the exception of the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser, Mobile Bay. He thought it fortunate the Pentagon had considered the test important enough to assign the Mobile Bay for area sanitization, and he looked down on the darkened ship as she steamed north toward Santa Cruz Island.
“Mobile Bay, this is Devil One.”
“Go ahead, Devil One,” the ship’s controller said.
“My sweep of the airspace is complete. Your unit is the only surface contact in the test area. Confirm?”
“Copy that, Devil One,” the man’s voice replied. “We launched Raptor Two Four to aid the Coast Guard in a real-world search and rescue mission on Santa Cruz Island.”
Jug activated his Distributed Aperture System and looked down at the darkened island, letting his jet’s infrared sensors detect the MH-60R’s hot exhaust. Within seconds, his jet’s core processor had identified the helicopter and placed a digitally created box around it on his Helmet Mounted Display. The helicopter was flying low level over the island’s southern coast.
He checked his fuel state and saw that he had enough gas for at least some loiter time over the island. Well, why not? he thought.
“Mobile Bay, is Raptor Two Four up Link Sixteen?”
“Affirm.”
Jug pulled up his communication portal and selected the control page for his Link 16 datalink. Normally, the Joint Strike Fighter disguised itself from others within the network, but if he was going to be of any assistance in the search, he needed to reveal himself to the helicopter crew.
“Frequency?”
“Raptor Two Four is up Cobalt,” the cruiser’s controller replied.
“Devil One,” Jug replied, then dialed in the new frequency. He banked left and set up a relaxed orbit over the island, letting the autopilot keep him in position as he manipulated his EOTS to put his infrared sensor on the ground beneath the helicopter. “Raptor Two Four, this is Devil One.”
“Go ahead, Devil One,” the new voice replied.
“Raptor Two Four, Devil One is a single F-35C overhead at angels twenty with one five minutes of playtime,” Jug said. “How can I help?”