Page 134 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest
“Roger that.”
Gomez pulled on his first-person view goggles and flipped a couple of toggles on his desktop. His first-person view was now displayed on one of the op center’s giant bulkhead LCD monitors. He worked a traditional pilot’s joystick affixed to the station.
The drone’s camera displayed black until the launch tube door popped off, revealing a cloudy gray sky above a wine-dark sea spattered with small whitecaps marching off into the distance.
The drone shot out of its pod with a mighty whoosh of air. Its spring-loaded quadcopter limbs deployed and its four motors instantly powered up. Their high-pitched whining rattled the overhead speakers until Hali Kasim nudged the sound level down.
Unlike most drones, the Madyar wasn’t controlled by wireless RF signals. There was no question wireless drones carrying small-explosive payloads had changed the face of modern war. But defensive technologies were beginning to swing the pendulum in the otherdirection. Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, Iranian, British, Turkish, European, and American drone operators were discovering that electronic countermeasures, especially jamming of RF signals, were increasingly successful knocking drones out of the sky. Interrupting the signal between the operator and drone was responsible for seventy-five percent of drone losses in the Ukraine-Russia war.
Worse, jamming tech was becoming ubiquitous. Besides the large and expensive theater-wide systems being deployed, smaller devices like “backpack jammers” and even narrow-beamed radio wave “rifles” were suddenly flooding the field.
But wartime engineers were nothing if not inventive, and it wasn’t long before the drone fighters discovered the virtue of wire-guided drone flights. Drones were now carrying specially wound spools of fiber slung beneath their airframes like fishing reels, providing a direct, high-bandwidth data link between the operator and the drone. That physical connection meant radio interference was impossible. Better still, the drones themselves now emitted no radio waves that could locate either the drone or the operator by electronic detection. The ultimate bonus: the quality of video imagery of the “flyby fiber” technology was exponentially higher than traditional RF systems.
TheOregon’s modified Madyar carried over thirty miles of fine filament, strong enough that the drone could even fly backward or turn in circles without breaking the line or having it tangle in the rotors.
In place of munitions, theOregonteam mounted a 10x camera and gimbal, extending the Madyar’s optical range far beyond its thirty-mile cable limit. Gomez flew the bird at twenty-five feet above the ocean at radar-avoiding “sea-skimming” levels. The slight chop in the water added to the sea clutter, making radar detection and targeting of the Madyar even more unlikely. At that low height, and with the current weather conditions, the drone should be able to spot a ship the size of theBaktunaround thirteen miles away.
The Madyar gave theOregonthe best possible shot at stealthy, long-range optical reconnaissance. With any luck, they’d find theBaktunwithout theOregonever being detected, its electromagnetic systems in a state of complete silence.
What happened after that would be anything but quiet.
Cabrillo glanced at the countdown clock on one of the bulkhead monitors. Only twenty-nine minutes until Project Q launched.
Max was right. Despite charging across the Pacific at full tilt, they had cut it close getting here. Maybe too close. That countdown clock was only an estimate based on Eidolon’s stolen code.
And if that estimate was wrong, they might even be too late.
?
“What’s that?” Max asked, pointing at the big video display. In the far distance, a jagged speck appeared on the choppy water. The Madyar had flown just over six miles since leaving theOregon.
“I’m pretty sure it’s not a duck,” Cabrillo said. He stood near the wall monitor, his thick arms crossed against his wide swimmer’s chest.
“It’s some kind of a ship, but I can’t quite make it out,” Ross said. All eyes in the op center were glued to the image playing on the wall-size LCD screen. Several minutes later, the jagged speck morphed into the unmistakable outline of a large oceangoing vessel.
“She matches theBaktun’s description,” Eric said as he threw a stock photo of the vessel up onto an adjacent screen. Eidolon’s coded message didn’t include either a picture or a description of the mystery ship. But scouring the maritime databases for a vessel of the same name finally turned up theBaktun, a global research vessel registered to a nonprofit environmentalist organization.
One of theOregon’s research team, Russ Kefauver, deployed his forensic accounting skills to uncover a carefully hidden and legally tenuous connection between the nonprofit organization and a sizable Fierro offshore bank account.
With each passing second, theBaktuncame into clearer relief.
“That high foredeck definitely looks like theBaktun’s helipad,” Ross said. “I’d say we have confirmation.”
“No visible weapons,” Gomez said.
“She looks dead in the water to me, and quiet as the grave,” Max said. “I wonder if she’s playing opossum.”
“What do you want me to do, skip?” Gomez asked. “I’ve got plenty of rope left on the saddle. And by the looks of things, we haven’t rattled any cans down there.”
“Push on a bit, and let’s gain some altitude. I want to see if she’s hiding any surprises.”
“You got it.” Gomez eased the stick back and raised the Madyar to over a hundred feet.
Every jaw in the op center dropped when a second vessel appeared a short distance beyond.
“What the heck is that?” Max asked as Eric’s fingers raced across his keyboard. The former weapons designer pulled up a recently posted Pentagon image and threw it on the screen. It was a perfect match.
“That’s theFuzhou,” Stone announced. “China’s latest version of the Type 055 destroyer.”
