Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Poor Richard’s Almanac
Poppy Benedict, General McCandless, and Tom Hughes from CIA Science & Technology were gathered around two men seated in large chairs that resembled pilot’s seats from a fighter jet. In a sense, this is precisely what it was.
The men were in a Ground Control Station trailer parked in a backwater of Selfridge Air National Guard Base watching the pilot take his MQ-9L SuperReaper UCAV—Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle—through its paces. Though the UCAV station had very high-resolution screens in front, the pilot and his sensor operator wore the new experimental flight helmets with virtual reality displays built into them.
The system was designed such that the pilot and sensor operator felt they were sitting in the drone as it conducted its mission. Poppy, McCandless, and Hughes followed along watching the high-definition display screens.
“If Americans ever knew how well we spent their tax dollars,” McCandless whispered, “they would beg us to take more. I mean, just look at this. Hollywood doesn’t have it this good.”
The SuperReaper flew in lazy figure-eights over Dearborn and downtown Detroit, centering on the big mosque in Dearborn and Comerica Park downtown. The pilot monitored his flight instruments and the sensor operator tracked various electronic receptions to get a visual and digital familiarity with the topography and its activity.
The drone was relatively lightweight without its customary Hellfire missiles or JDAM bombs and metal ordnance racks, and it handled well, almost with the swift control responses of a jet fighter. The addition of the long centerline pod for a 300-kilowatt experimental combat laser hugging the bottom of the fuselage added no practical performance penalty at all.
“How’s it going for you, pilot?” McCandless said. “Because it’s looking pretty good out here to us.”
“Very well, sir. The SuperReaper is a great airframe to fly. The new software updates added and refined control feedback, so it’s more like being in a flying cockpit than ever. They’ve shaved a few more hundredths off the command-to-satellite-to-airframe time, but it’s still nearly a second round-trip, and we fly for that. This bird is the test bed we flew over from Dreamland-D, so the big fiber laser is still the one 300-kilowatt prototype. We flew it up to Grayling and did some calibration yesterday”—the big national guard training center in mid-Michigan—“so we think we have the laser zeroed. We identified a small cooling issue, but we think that was solved.”
The panorama of metro Detroit the aircraft’s vision displayed on the monitors was breathtaking.
“This particular Reaper still has an Increment-2 GORGON STARE wide-area surveillance system on board, so our look-down covers about thirty-nine square miles. The air distance between the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn and Comerica Park in downtown Detroit is only ten-point-four miles, so we’re watching both objectives, and many miles around them, in a single look.”
“Not too shabby,” Poppy said.
“No, sir. Not too shabby at all,” the pilot said. “Anything happens we need to respond to, we are rockin’ on ready, sittin’ on go. We’ve even left the other drones on standby, because the SuperReaper can cover both primary objectives at the same time.”
The pilot smiled, and banked left over the Detroit Opera House to wheel around the ball park and head back to Dearborn.
“This downtown is spectacular all lit up at night,” the pilot said.
General McCandless, Poppy, and Tom Hughes looked up at the trailer’s displays to see what the pilot saw. They each nodded in cynical agreement.
It was their job to keep it that way.