go in fifteen hours. “Anyway”—he flipped a switch and then played a little with his mouse control—“there’s the Chinese lead elements.”
“Son of a bitch,” Tolkunov said, demonstrating his knowledge of American slang.
Tucker grinned. “Pretty good, ain’t it? Once I sent one over a nudist colony in California—that’s like a private park where people walk around naked all the time. You can tell the difference between the flat-chested ones and the ones with nice tits. Tell the natural blondes from the peroxide ones, too. Anyway, you use this mouse to control the camera—well, somebody else is doing it now up at Zhigansk. Anything in particular that you’re interested in?”
“The bridges on the Amur,” Tolkunov said at once. Tucker picked up a radio microphone.
“This is Major Tucker. We have a tasking request. Slew Camera Three onto the big crossing point.”
“Roger,” the speaker next to the monitor said.
The picture changed immediately, seeming to race across the screen like a ribbon from ten o‘clock down to four o’clock. Then it stabilized. The field of view must have been four kilometers across. It showed a total of what appeared to be eight bridges, each of them approached by what looked like a parade of insects.
“Give me control of Camera Three,” Tucker said next.
“You got it, sir,” the speaker acknowledged.
“Okay.” Tucker played with the mouse more than the keyboard, and the picture zoomed in—“isolated”—on the third bridge from the west. There were three tanks on it at once, moving at about ten kilometers per hour south to north. The display showed a compass rose in case you got disoriented, and it was even in color. Tolkunov asked why.
“No more expensive than black-and-white cameras, and we put it on the system because it sometimes shows you things you don’t get from gray. First time for overheads, even the satellites don’t do color yet,” Tucker explained. Then he frowned. “The angle’s wrong, can’t get the divisional markings on the tanks without moving the platform. Wait.” He picked up the microphone again. “Sergeant, who’s crossing the bridges now?”
“Appears to be their Three-Oh-Second armored division, sir, part of the Twenty-Ninth Group-A Army. The Thirty-Fourth Army is fully across now. We estimate one full regiment of the Three-Oh-Second is across and moving north at this time,” the intel weenie reported, as though relating the baseball scores from yesterday.
“Thanks, Sarge.”
“Roger that, Maj.”
“And they can’t see this drone?” Tolkunov asked.
“Well, on radar it’s pretty stealthy, and there’s another little trick we have on it. Goes back to World War II, called Project Yehudi back then, you put lights on the thing.”
“What?” Tolkunov asked.
“Yeah, you spot airplanes because they’re darker’n the sky, but if you put lightbulbs on ’em, they turn invisible. So, there are lights on the airframe, and a photo sensor dials the brightness automatically. They’re damned near impossible to spot—they cruise at sixty thousand feet, way the hell above contrail level, and they got no infrared signature at all, hardly—even if you know where to look, and they tell me you can’t hardly make an air-to-air missile lock onto one. Pretty cool toy, eh?”
“How long have you had this?”
“I’ve been working on it, oh, about four years now.”
“I’ve heard of Dark Star, but this capability is amazing.”
Tucker nodded. “Yeah, it’s pretty slick. Nice to know what the other guy’s doing. First time we deployed it was over Yugoslavia, and once we learned how to use it, and how to coordinate it with the shooters, well, we learned to make their lives pretty miserable. Tough shit, Joe.”
“Joe?”
“Joe Chink.” Tucker pointed at the screen. “That’s what we mainly call him.” The friendly nickname for Koreans had once been Luke the Gook. “Now, Ingrid doesn’t have it yet, but Grace Kelly does, a laser designator, so you can use these things to clobber targets. The fighter just lofts the bomb in from, oh, maybe twenty miles away, and we guide it into the target. I’ve only done that at Red Flag, and we can’t do it from here with this terminal, but they can up at Zhigansk.”
“Guide bombs from six hundred kilometers away?”
“Yeah. Hell, you can do it from Washington if you want. It all goes over the satellite, y’know?”
“Yob tvoyu maht!”
“Soon we’re going to make the fighter jocks obsolete, Colonel. Another year or so and we’ll be doing terminal guidance on missiles launched from a coupla hundred miles away. Won’t need fighter pilots then. Guess I’ll have to buy me a scarf. So, Colonel, what else do you want to see?”
The 11-86 landed