Surrender Aurora

  It’s going to be the end of the Democratic party for the next 15 years. I guess that means it’s time to get into Lord Trump’s breadline at the soup kitchen. You guys worry me. The F-35 has cost us, so far, $3.8 billion per copy and it does not work. We have 135 of them for a bill of $400 billion. This is terrible. If Trump gets in, the world will end and it’s all your fault for not feeding enough Muslims to the lions.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tanner was trying to catch up. He started with weapons briefings. Missiles and the equipment that supported them. F-4 Phantom Two’s were coming up in the analysis as too heavy and clumsy to operate in Vietnam. Tanner was surprised to find out just how good the Soviet jets really were. According to Boyd’s book, the Russian jets had the raw power and agility to get the job of dogfighting done. The only benefit to the Americans was that in Korea the Russian MiGs had no hydraulic controls. This meant the Russians were physically exhausted after evasive or predatory maneuvers.

  Boyd’s book chronologically told the story of how John Richard Boyd created and sold to the Pentagon a new breed of fighter jet. The two products of his passion were the F-16 Falcon and the F-18 Hornet. Both were produced by the fusion of Boyd designing in secret and in cooperation with General Dynamics and Northrop Aviation.

  General Dynamics changed its name to General Atomics and now made drones for the Air Force.

  Tanner went to his computer, an older Hewlett Packard laptop, and set it up with power supply and mouse. He typed in the names of the first three missiles for air-to-air combat that he had heard of. He looked up the Phoenix, the Sparrow, and the Sidewinder. Boyd’s book noted that in Vietnam the performance for the Sidewinder was so poor the pilots called it the “Sandwinder.” It hit the dirt commonly. The Sparrow and the Phoenix were long-range radar-guided missiles while the Sidewinder was targeted by an infrared heat-sensing lens at the nose of the missile. The Sparrow and Phoenix were pointed like rifle bullets while the Sidewinder seemed to have a dome for a front end. All three failed to work reliably in Vietnam.

  There was an Air Force lieutenant who mentioned a “Kaiten.” He looked for a Kaiten torpedo and was amazed to see a Kamikaze airplane’s ethic applied to the task of submarines trying to sink ships. The Japanese had invented a torpedo with a human pilot. As usual, the pilot would die when the torpedo struck the ship it was trying to sink. A one-way trip.

  Tanner looked at his right hand. Occasionally he felt an itch or throb of pain come from the hand that was not there. He had been warned about it. They had called it “phantom pain.” He had been told the pain would go away if he ignored it. He flexed the muscles of what remained of the wrist.

  He swallowed another oxycodone and went back to the computer. He found the Triton. Named after a son of the Greek god Poseidon, pictured as a man from the waist up and a porpoise from the waist down, this god Triton was at home while at sea. The device named a Triton was a wide-winged, ungainly contraption. Bulbous-nosed and housing a full rotating-dish radar system, the Triton aircraft was pilotless with an unusual V-tail. Pilots called it a “butterfly tail” and its similarity to the Beechcraft Bonanza was obvious. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper had died in an Iowa winter in a Beechcraft Bonanza. On the Triton the tail seemed to work.

  The suggestions were devious. The Air Force intended to use him as a biologically controlled weapon. His arm would somehow be used to guide a weapon.

  His left hand stroked the new cochlear implant behind his left ear. He had needed the money. One hundred thirty-five thousand dollars for the implant and now he was finally finding out what it all meant. He was a Kaiten. A human torpedo. The big difference was he was at the other end of a very long wire separating him from the target.

  He would live. The target would die. To a military man that was largely the only reason to keep on keeping on. As long as he had a purpose and a role to play, he would soldier on.

  From the Boyd book he began to have suspicions. But it was the Air Force that gave Boyd to Tanner. Boyd kept seeing bad weapons get created to fulfill the nuclear missions. Boyd’s creation, the F-16, was a prime example. It started out as a pure fighter and became a nuclear bomber. It did great as a fighter but some performance had to be sacrificed for the A-bomb mission. The plane got heavier and poorer as a fighter. That was the problem in Vietnam with the Phantom. Boyd did not like repeating the errors of that Asian war.

  There would be a day when the Air Force would want more minds to cut into for the sake of war. What would happen when such people could not be found? Would the war stop or would young kids be getting the surgery in the form of conscription? Would they lop off people’s hands and plug them into drones?

  He poured himself a shot of Bacardi rum and sipped at it.

  Where are we going? he thought.

  The more he read, the more he was amazed. The other star of the movie Top Gun was the jet airplane called the F-14.

  Now Tanner was finding out that the whole of the three swing-wing aircraft—the B-1 Lancer, the F-111 Aardvark, and the Navy’s F-14—were all junk. Billions had been invested into a failing formula. The only saving graces had been Boyd’s two fighter jets. The Falcon F-16 and the Hornet F-18 were the two older stars. The F-22 Raptor was healthy at $250 million per copy. As expensive as it was, it was still cheaper than the F-35 at $4 billion per copy.

  The whole premise of the Top Gun movie was a fraud. Unstable people don’t become fighter pilots, and though Boyd was consistently insubordinate, he was one of the Air Force’s most decorated engineering innovators. In spite of the Air Force turning the F-15 Eagle and the Falcon into bombers, they did so well in the multi-use mode that the Israelis used them to bomb Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor. They destroyed it and Boyd’s pure fighter, the Falcon, personally delivered eight bombs of 2,000 pounds each to the evil dictator’s doorstep.

  The F-14 Tomcat was too heavy and lacked sufficient wing space to truly be a dogfighter. Libya launched and lost two Soviet-built MiG-23 aircraft at Ronald Reagan’s Navy force just offshore in the Mediterranean Sea. And those two fighters were Soviet-built swing-wing fighters. Reagan outnumbered Qadaffi. He had a formation of F-14 jets at high altitude pounce on the Libyan jets as they chased a smaller force held out as bait. The MiGs didn’t have a chance going up against a carrier group, and their insufficient training failed them against the Americans.

  But the F-14 was still a piece of overweight junk.

  Welcome to the human race, with its wars, disease, and brutality.

  Tanner knew. They were going to deploy a missile with him as a Kaiten human-guided munition. The only difference was that he would be snug in an office building in the United States while the drone missile did its work in northern Syria.

  The Pentagon was saying that the pilot was obsolete and an expense that we could not afford. At $40,000 per flying hour per fighter aircraft, the fighter pilot was no longer desirable.

  The pilots said the missiles that were going to replace them were defective and useless against piloted aircraft. The enemy aircraft could outmaneuver the missiles. More often than not the missiles did not even fire, their rocket motors never started. In Vietnam only ten percent of the missiles were even coming off of the rails from the host aircraft.

  Tanner called his wife and said he would be home soon. He was getting leave and warrant officer bars in a few weeks.

  He had tried the helmet without the implant. It had worked well. The Air Force was using a video game handheld console. The device was covered in buttons and had a joystick controller. He had learned how to change weapons quickly. He had learned how to creep up behind an aviation target and get a missile lock onto it with radar.

  He had been briefed on the combat record of the missiles that the NATO powers used. They were ill-suited to real combat and they had a terrible record in Vietnam. Asia was hot and sticky while the Middle East was dry like the desert air bases in Nevada.

  Tanner looked at his orders. He had to report to Nellis Air
Force Base soon. There he would be paired up with a pilot to learn how to work the Aurora missile system.

  It was the Aurora that would make him the weapons officer in a team armed with a two-seater F-15 Eagle. The pilot would get him there and his implant would target the weapon.

  That is, if the system worked.

  * * *

  The gadget looked like a child’s version of a fighter jet. Air intake on top, butterfly tail, short wings but no cockpit. All of the go-fast goodies but nobody along for the ride. It even had miniature landing gear.

  So far this drone fighter had passed all of the tests. It had air brakes, an afterburner, and a turbo fan engine. It could stay aloft for six hours without extra fuel, and with extra fuel tanks it was good for another eight hours.

  It could carry a small nuclear weapon and, using that nuke, he could generate a huge anti-aircraft air burst capable of knocking an entire group of aircraft out of the sky.

  It could move at Mach 2.7. With no pilot its payload was purely warhead and fuel.

  Tanner would be the missile’s pilot while a more experienced pilot would handle the Aurora aircraft after the mothership aircraft brought the Aurora to its combat area.

  The gadget passed most of its tests with great ease. The E-Systems computer was called a “Boyd in the box.” It programmed the missile in just how to overcome a dogfighter from an aggressor-squadron-trained pilot.

  The aggressor squadrons were a group of pilots flying aircraft similar to their opponent’s. Americans flew F-5 jets originally built for the South Vietnamese Air Force. When the nation collapsed, the planes became available.

  Air Force planners had Groom Lake on their side. Long talked about as the home of captured flying saucers from alien races, the reality was that it housed and tested enemy aircraft captured over years of careful deception.

  MiGs and Sukhois filled out the ranks at Groom Lake. Korean, Vietnamese, Syrian planes filled the hangars at the dry lakebed test facility often called by the outsiders label of ‘Area 51.’

  The Aurora was two weapons in one. A carrier which looked like a small one-eighth-sized fighter jet with cameras and sensors instead of a pilot and a smaller rocket-fired missile with its own 70-pound warhead. Clearly it could also carry a small nuclear warhead.

  The carrier was reusable while the warhead was a single-use option. Nineteen hours of fuel gave it lots of “loiter time.” It was prohibitively expensive to use as a “one shot” device but if used properly, it could return to an airfield under its own power and be reloaded.

  The pilot’s position would be manned by an experienced fighter pilot while the warhead missile would be guided by a gunner with a bio-neural implant. That was where Tanner and a gang of “gimps” traded a $135,000 implant for the privilege of snuffing out a war or a stout terror flight out of the sky like the mythic pheasant hunters from America’s Midwest. Tanner missed hunting but this was an opportunity few could even be jealous of. Hunting MiGs with a robotic-guided miniature fighter jet dazzled the realities of the gunnery sergeant. In two weeks’ time he would be a warrant officer and start the grooming process of linking his mind directly to a weapons system. It was a bit of a stretch but it looked like it could work.

  He kept up the daily dose of Syntheris and the daily pain pill. The phantom pain persisted but the oxycodone killed it quite adequately. Just a little alcohol in the evening was enough of a boost to give it all of the potency it needed to get him to sleep.

  The Aurora project now had a name. It would be called the RQ-99. Reconnaissance drone, number 99.

  * * *

  James got back into the swing of things quickly. He got back to his apartment and made coffee, laundered clothing, and stroked his left ear. He couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get the implant but knew he could never be choosing the option of actively serving his country.

  Just getting the implant would be enough. They could take it out again with no ill effects. He would stay a civilian with government service status as a GS-4. He would get retirement and a pension. He could afford nursing school.

  It was a strange privilege to be part of the program. Trump and Hillary were at war and James thought to himself just what an odd President Trump would make. Billionaires tended to just make themselves richer and everyone else poorer while Obama was moving slowly and that could be the undoing of the whole Democratic Party. Sad but true.

  Trump would make an adequate President while Hillary was not James’ top pick either. It was a choice of two evils and the American television audience seemed to love the camera-mugging from Trump. They would be the final judges and the world’s fate would be decided by the poll margins of reruns of Seinfeld and The Cosby Show. We would be getting a President bound by the ratings from the Trump TV show called The Apprentice.

  James secretly hoped Trump would allow for liberal programs like medical marijuana and a review of military junk like the F-35. Boyd would have wanted it that way, but Trump was a billionaire and all those contracts could go to his friends rather than the best interests of America’s fighting troops hunkered down in Syrian foxholes.

  Presidents could be forgiving to each other. Carter, Bush one, Bush two, Clinton, and Obama made up a strange club. The way Trump was calling for a vilifying look at all Muslims made enemies of people like the Saudis and Turks. Where was he going to launch jets from if not from Arabic airfields? He was burning bridges fast and it could be the undoing for the American warriors who would be tasked with doing the battle for all that Saudi and Iraqi oil. It wasn’t an easy problem to solve.

  If Trump got in, it could mean a roboticization of all of the nation’s military machine. Take away the pilots and soldiers and be left with nothing but television-guided bombs going after ISIS fighters with Russian guns and tanks.

  The new Toyota trucks were an interesting permutation. Obama was blind to the opportunity to bomb Toyotas. He did not deploy the A-10 Warthog tank-killing jet. He destroyed TOW missiles as an environmental threat. There were opportunities he was backing away from.

  The entire mindset of Vietnam was moving in the direction of unbridled use of troops. Live bodies killing thousands in retribution for the 2015 December third attack in San Bernardino that left 14 dead in an ISIS-friendly event of homegrown terrorism.

  The path of the crusade was moving to an eventual tipping point. Lord Trump would rule if times went as they were going.

  Would it be so bad if he won? Would General Motors survive? How would it affect crops growing in Iowa? Where would this Lord Trump stand on the very rural communities that gave America so many of its raw, young soldiers?

  Trump was smarter than he looked. He was selling America on a product like it was a K-Mart blue light special. It promised to keep huge American corporations alive and many soldiers dead. But America felt insulted. America had a grudge to settle. Maybe America would survive but there would be high costs.

  Could Trump do it without creating a bloodbath? America wondered. If just ISIS troops died, it would be written off as the quenching of anger of lost American pride.

  Would that rage transfer into wise decisions? America wondered as the Republicans marched on to victory. Perhaps it wouldn’t be that bad but America wondered.

  * * *

  Tanner had two weeks at home after the warrant officer promotion. Time with the wife and kids. Schoolwork and his wife with three girls making preschool messes and playing with toys. Tanner played and was “Matthew” again

  He paid the mortgage and the credit card bills. He bought the warrant officer bars and collected the ribbons and medals from his time in Afghanistan. A Purple Heart, campaign medals, sea service deployment, good conduct medal, a citation for bravery, and room for the Congressional Medal of Honor if it ever came in. He would still keep his Navy Cross.

  A career in ribbons on his alpha class uniform. He was proud of his record. They would need to invent a new ribbon for bio-neural warfare.

  * * *

  Nellis Air Force B
ase was the neighbor to Las Vegas. Tanner and McGregor were in the base hospital on the same day.

  “Feels like a reunion, doesn’t it, James,” said Tanner as he sized up James in his civilian clothes and Navy flight jacket.

  “Yeah, Matt. We’re gonna wax some ISIS ass if this all works out. We could be doing MiG-cap on all of North Syria.” James referred to the old mission from Korea and Vietnam of covering air superiority from MiG jets of Russian origin for the movement of ground troops and slower, more vulnerable bombers.

  “At best, Matt, I am just going to be a civilian consultant. They have me on ‘pattern recognition.’ That means I learn languages quickly. I also play good video games. I have been on the Syntheris for three months. Now I will get the implant. Time to see if the anti-rejection drugs work.”

  They waited in the pre-op together. James was told to get into the wheelchair and was rolled into a long hallway. They said their “good-byes” and wished each other luck.

  Then James was alone to undress, don a gown, and get rolled into the operating room. They shaved up three inches above the left ear and gave him an intravenous drip of sedative.

  James’ memory stopped there. When he awoke he was in a hospital bed with IV tubes hooked up to his left arm. He looked around. He looked for his watch. It wasn’t there.

  His head was bandaged. He reached up with his left arm and found a mass of gauze padding covering his left ear and temple. With his right hand he probed at the protective covering. He had been given a close haircut all over and had the wound site shaved.

  A nurse in blue scrubs came in. “Mr. McGregor! You’re awake. Everything went according to plan. How do you feel?”

  “A bit groggy. How long was I out?”

  “It’s noon. You went into surgery yesterday. It takes a while to get the drugs out of your system. I’ll let the doctor know you are awake. He will have questions for you. Would you like something to eat?”

  “Yeah. Soon.”

  “After you talk to Dr. Henderson. You have him as a post-op. You got lucky. You had Dr. Brown. He is one of the best neurosurgeons in the whole area. He normally does work in Las Vegas but he does special work for us. That means you’re special.”