Barracuda: Final Bearing

“Please remain seated,” the man in the business suit said, his voice quiet but full of authority. The officers in the command center remained at their consoles, glancing briefly, respectfully up at Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita as he walked slowly among the rows of equipment with his escort, Gen. Masao Gotoh, the chairman of the Joint Staff Council. Gotoh led Kurita to an isolated area of the dark room, the command corner, where an enlarged screen four meters wide and two meters tall flashed views fed by the defense computer network. The screen was split, one-half of it showing a helmet and oxygen mask, the only signs that a person was present the eyes, the other screen half showing a terrain model with superimposed computer graphics. It was gibberish to Prime Minister Kurita. Gotoh explained, his own eyes on the display.

“These are the transmissions from Colonel Namuru in the Shadowstar aircraft. We are seeing them at a five minute delay from real time since the data is recorded, compressed and relayed at a burst to a satellite — that way it is unlikely he would be detected even against an advanced adversary. Against the Greater Manchurians, he is invisible. In a few minutes Namuru’s aircraft will put him down near the Tamga weapons depot. We will be monitoring him as he executes his mission.” Kurita took a peek at his watch and settled into a leather command chair, his eyes unblinking as he took in the screen. “What if something happens to him? What if he’s caught?” Gotoh smiled to himself, knowing Kurita had been fully briefed, but also knowing the older man liked richness of detail. Briefings alone were not enough for him.

“Colonel Namuru and the other Divine Wind Warriors have an implanted chip with a small chemical canister surgically placed in their abdominal cavities. On a signal from the satellite, the chip will release a small dose of poison into Namuru’s body. Thirty seconds later he will be dead.

There is no antidote.” The Prime Minister nodded. The two men watched the data display in silence. “You can see him here preparing for the aircraft to destruct,” General Gotoh said, the pilot’s image busy in the cockpit. Suddenly the screen image bounced violently, then winked out.

The Shadowstar glider sailed at 150 kilometers per hour, 3000 meters over the scrubby hills, four kilometers outside of Tamga. The cockpit’s computer display numerals reached the single digits, rolled too quickly to one, then zero. The aircraft self-destruct sequence began.

The polymer of the airframe was as strong as aluminum when in solid form. Running through the skeletal structure of the framing were hundreds of small polymer tubes and capillaries, all of them connected to a foillined polymer tank filled with a mixture of sulfuric acid and several advanced solvents. A small cylinder of highpressure nitrogen inside the top of the tank, on a computer signal, opened to the tank, the whooshing gas pressuring the fluid inside while a valve at the tank bottom snapped open, allowing the acid and solvent mixture to flow into the pipes and tubes and capillaries leading to the plane’s airframe structural components. The walls of the tubes were machined precisely so that they would carry the acid to the remotest tubes just before dissolving themselves. The dissolving tubes then spilled the acid into the hollow regions of the airframe structures and along their outsides. The polymeric composition of the airframe was chemically synthesized so that it reacted exothermically with the acid while dissolving in the solvents. Areas of the structure not directly in the wash of acid and solvents reacted from the heat of the adjacent melting structures, the acid molecules diffusing throughout the liquefying mass. Over the next twenty seconds, what before had been a network of solid curving beams and struts making up the shape of an airplane became a melting waxy semisolid, then a liquid, then finally as the reaction rate increased, a vapor. The airplane’s lifting body shape melted into a large teardrop, the liquid flying off into the slipstream behind it, the liquid turning to a plume of gray smoke, until all that was left of the aircraft was the egg-shaped carbon composite cockpit module, now tumbling end-over-end to the rocky slopes below.