Black Wolf

Activity. An interesting way to describe murder.

“Everything is tenuous,” said Brea

“Not everything,” said Reid. “As for the identity—”

“The DNA is suggestive, not conclusive,” she said.

Reid didn’t answer. It was his way of reproaching her—worse, she thought, than if he had argued or even called her a name.

Not that Reid would do either.

“At some point we will have to address this with Colonel Freah,” said Reid finally.

“We’ll keep it where it is for now,” said Brea

“Admittedly.”

Brea

“I’ll keep you up to date.”

“Thanks.”

The meeting Brea

Sometimes she did, too.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, rushing in.

“Well, you’re here now,” said General Timothy “Tiger” Wallace. “Let’s get moving.”

Wallace gave her a tight grin, but the expression gave nothing away. He was the Air Force’s chief of staff—the top boss—and a difficult man for her to gauge. He’d served with her father, and claimed to be a great admirer of Dreamland and everything associated with it. He and Zen occasionally had lunch together during his visits to Capitol Hill. On the other hand, he frequently butted heads with Brea

One of which Brea

“Thank you, General,” she said, sliding her laptop onto the table. “Everyone is aware of the Sabre UAV program and its present status.”

She nodded toward Steph Garvey, the two-star Air Force general in charge of the Sabre program. Garvey gave her a smile—genuine and easy to read.

“We have made good progress with the UM/F program in general,” continued Brea

“That’s a matter of opinion,” grumbled Admiral David Chafetz. There was no mistaking Chafetz’s attitude—he didn’t like anything even remotely co

Officially designated UM/F–9s, the unma

Though greatly improved over the years, the Flighthawks had a number of limitations, including range and speed. More importantly, their airframes were now well past their design age. Materials fatigue—both their metal skeleton and carbon-fiber skins—was starting to hamper their effectiveness. Internal fasteners had to be inspected before each flight on some of the high-hour aircraft—an onerous procedure that added several hours to the maintainers’ routine chores. It was time for a new generation of remote fighters to take over.

The Sabres were that fighter.

Nicknamed after the fighter that had dominated the skies over North Korea during the 1950s, the UM/F–9 was the first UAV capable of sustained Mach speeds. (Though technically the Flighthawks could fly faster than the speed of sound, they could not operate reliably in Mach-plus regimes for several reasons unrelated to their airfoil.) Long and sleek, the aircraft used a hybrid ramjet pulse engine to fly; an array of maneuvering nozzles and high-strength carbon-based alloys made twelve g-plus turns routine. Tests showed that it was more than a match for even the improved F–22C Block–150s that had recently joined the Air Force’s top interceptor squadrons.

But high speeds and maneuverability meant nothing if the aircraft could not be controlled. And this control system—called Medusa—represented the real breakthrough.

Like the Flighthawk, the Sabre was capable of “autonomous combat.” In other words, it could figure out on its own how to take down an enemy, then do so. Unlike Flighthawks, Sabres could work together against an enemy, employing section tactics without human intervention. Data from one aircraft was immediately shared with all of the aircraft in the same flight. Spotting a group of four enemy planes, for example, the flight could decide to break into two elements and attack from two different directions.

While the Flighthawks had small onboard flight computers to handle many of the basic tasks of flight, they relied heavily on a centralized computer and a human controlling them, generally from an EB–52 or modified B–1.

Medusa did not exist separately from the Sabres. It was, as the man who invented it liked to say with his droll puns, a true “cloud computer.” The interco

But there had to be a human in the process somewhere. And that was what today’s meeting was about.

Actually, the man who invented Medusa didn’t agree that there should be any human anywhere in the process. It wasn’t that Ray Rubeo had no use for his fellow man or thought that human intelligence was an oxymoron, though charges along those lines had often been leveled at him. Rubeo simply saw no need for a human “to muck things up.”

“You don’t steer a Sidewinder to its target,” he had told Brea

But the military was not ready to think about a squadron of aircraft as “fire and forget” weapons. And though Rubeo worked, as a contractor, for her, Brea

So where did the Medusa “control” unit go?

At a secure base far from harm, like those generally used for the Predator and Global Hawk? Or a plane, like the Flighthawk system?

A satellite control system with a ground base could be used, but there were problems with bandwidth, and the cost was considerable—much more than Medusa, let alone the Sabres.

Medusa’s range was roughly two hundred miles, a considerable improvement over the Flighthawks. Still, that was close enough that a savvy enemy could seek to locate and isolate the control aircraft. Simply making the plane run away would mean a cheap victory, as the Sabres would have to follow or lose their co

The Air Force was pushing for a new version of the F–35 to act as the Sabres’ controller. This would be a stretched, two-seat version of the stealthy lightweight fighter. There were considerable problems with such an approach, starting with the fact that the stretched F–35 couldn’t carry enough fuel to stay in a combat area for more than an hour, far less than the Sabre. There was also a matter of cost, which would be considerable for a plane not even off the drawing board yet.

The Navy had gone along with the plan, grudgingly, because it would allow the Sabres to operate from carriers for the first time. But as Chafetz’s demeanor made clear, their support was less than enthusiastic.

Brea

“I should start by giving you all a bit of good news about the intelligent command system that flies the planes,” she said, flipping open her laptop. “We call it Medusa. It’s—”