The lemony voice of the strange general was like acid in the brain of the commander of the White Sands Missile Range. “General Tainey, I know the Air Force is terminating the UHR-LADARs. I know they are in the process of being redesignated Objects of Plausible Denial. I also have photographic and thermographic records of the crash sites of the two failed UHR-LADAR drones In my possession are complete financial records of the UHR-LADAR project. I am fully aware that the project is being scrapped and denied because of minor cost overruns and major financial bungling.”
“I don’t know any General Brown with the Joint Chiefs!” Tainey blurted, because it was the only response he could come up with.
“You decide how to deal with this, General Tainey. You can get those UHR-LADAR in the air right now and defend your missile range against this intruder, or face a court-martial for embezzlement and fraud.”
“But I didn’t!”
“You did, General.”
“It’s SOP!”
“Your choice, General Tainey.”
General Brown hung up on him. General Tainey had a long moment of indecision. The phone bleeped in his hand and dragged him back to the here-and-now, which was the command center at White Sands Missile Range, which was where a bunch of folks were standing there waiting for him to give them some kind of orders.
“Well?” he thundered.
“No sign of any intruder yet, sir,” a security officer reported.
The phone bleeped again.
“That’s the President for you, General,” an aide hissed.
Dammit! ‘Yes, Mr. President?”
“General Tainey, I understand you’re deploying a sort of robotic aircraft that senses motion.”
Dammit all to hell! “Yes, sir, doing it now.”
“Keep the Joint Chiefs posted.”
“Of course, Mr. President.”
General Tainey hung up the phone and started shouting, and he didn’t stop shouting for four solid hours. All the while he was thinking that this General Brown, whoever he was, sure had some connections.
The UHR-LADAR took motion detection images so sharp and clean they were like high-contrast, three-dimensional photographs. This required a high degree of interface with the drone control systems, and some penny-pinching in that department had resulted in an aircraft that was almost guaranteed to crash itself once in every one hundred hours of flying time.
The drones were airborne in minutes, and Dr. Smith tapped into their command data feeds, praying they would stay aloft at least a little while.
Jack Fast got a beep from his laptop.
“Oops. Time to go,” he informed the hand of Jesus.
He tapped out a command and checked the coordinates of the airship. It was miles away, but at top speed it would be back in time to make an escape. Besides, the intercept aircraft were moving slow, like prop planes. Some sort of special surveillance craft. Yawn.
The aircraft’s surface was practically sparking with voltage as it sailed across the desert, a black shadow growing bigger. It came to a stop over the long row of devices that had been collected from all over the missile range. Each one of them was a lost secret—an officially forgotten piece of technological history. Sure, some of them were old and probably useless, but every one of them was a technological mystery for Jack to explore.
Now all he had to do was get them home without blowing them to smithereens.
The airship sank to the ground atop the row of ordnance relics, and Jack cut its power. He walked up and down the framework, snapping the titanium crossbars with a pair of specialty metal snips, then folded the framework into a much narrower profile.
Six minutes gone. He had three minutes until the surveillance craft arrived.
“Could you give me a hand?” he asked the hand. “Ha! I kill me. You, too, I guess. Ha!”
Getting giddy, Jack, he told himself, and without any more screwing around he unleashed a spray of chlorine solution on the airship. The synthetic materials shriveled when it contacted the chlorine, while the ceramic-metallic threads were unaffected. The material shriveled and hardened and shriveled again, until it formed a smelly plastic mass that cocooned the ancient ordnance inside.
One minute left. Jack Fast snapped a high-tensile cable to the nose of the titanium-ribbed glob of plastic. The other end was hooked to the earth drill.
Jack jogged to the drill, tossed in the laptop and waved to the hand. “Bye, dude.”
The hatch slammed and the drill became a small lightning storm that was swallowed quickly by the earth, dragging behind it the plastic-shrouded remnants of the U.S. military’s greatest technological gaffes.
Whatever was on the screen, General Tainey couldn’t figure it out. Neither could the operator. Neither could the Joint Chiefs.
The fallout over the drones and their highly illegal but unextraordinary obfuscation began even as the drones started falling into the desert. By daybreak, they were all as completely wrecked as the career of General Lawrence Tainey.
