Rogue Forces

“But this is a bomber?”

“Was a bomber.”

Thompson noticed technicians working under the aircraft’s belly and saw a large opening. “Is that a bomb bay? This thing still has a bomb bay?”

“That’s a module access hatch,” Jon Masters said. “We don’t drop anything from it—we load and unload modules through them.”

“The Loser had two bomb bays, similar to the B-2 stealth bomber except much bigger,” Patrick explained. “We combined the two bays into one big bay but retained both lower doors. We then split the bay into two decks. We’re able to move mission modules around and between decks and maneuver each module either up or down through the module hatches, all by remote control.”

“A flying-wing reconnaissance plane?”

“The flying-wing design works well as a long-range multimission plane,” Jon Masters said. “Airliners in the future will be flying wings.”

“Scion’s planes are designed to be multifunction platforms; we plug in different mission modules to perform different tasks,” Patrick said. “This plane can be a tanker, cargo plane, do electronic warfare, photoreconnaissance, communications relay, command-and-control—even several of these functions at the same time.

“Right now we’re configured for ground moving-target indication, ground target identification and tracking, air surveillance, datalink, and command-and-control,” Patrick went on. “But if we brought different modules, we can load them up and perform different missions. Tomorrow we’ll have the air surveillance emitters up top.”

He then stepped underneath the plane and showed Thompson a large opening in the belly. “Through here, we’ll suspend the ground target emitter module for ground target identification and tracking. All of the modules are ‘plug-and-play’ through the ship’s digital communications suite, which uploads the data via satellite to the end users. Other modules we’ve installed are for the very-wide-area networking, threat detection and response, and self-protection.”

“‘Threat response’? You mean, attack?”

“I can’t really get into that system because it’s not part of the contract and it’s still experimental,” Patrick said, “but we’d like to do a little more to the bad guys than just decoy or jam their weapons.”

Patrick took Kris up the ladder and into the Loser. The cockpit looked roomy and comfortable. The instrument panel was composed of five wide monitors with a few normal “steam” gauges tucked away almost out of sight. “Pretty nice flight deck.”

“Aircraft commander and mission commander up front as usual,” Patrick said. He put a hand on the side-facing seat behind the copilot’s seat. “We have a flight engineer here who monitors all of the ship’s systems and the mission modules.”

Kris motioned to a counter behind the boarding ladder. “You even have a galley in here!”

“Flushing head, too; that comes in handy on these long flights,” Jon said.

They ducked through a small hatch in the rear of the cockpit, walked down a short narrow passageway, and emerged into an area fairly stuffed with cargo containers of all sizes, leaving only narrow aisles to walk around. “I thought you contractors rode around in planes with bedrooms and gold-plated faucets,” Kris quipped.

“I’ve never even seen a gold faucet, let alone ride in a plane with them,” Patrick said. “No, every square foot and every pound has to count.” He pointed to a half cargo module, the thinnest of all the ones installed in the plane that Kris could see. “That’s our baggage and personal items container. Each of the twenty-five persons we brought on this flight was limited to twenty pounds of luggage, and that included their laptops. Needless to say we’ll be visiting your commissary a lot on this deployment.”

They had to maneuver around a large gray-colored torpedo-shaped object that took up a great deal of the middle of the plane. “This must be the antenna that’ll stick out the top, I presume?” Kris asked.

“That’s it,” Patrick said. “It’s a laser radar module. Range is classified, but we can see well into space and it’s powerful enough to even look underwater. The electronically scanned laser emitters ‘draw’ pictures of everything they see millions of times a second with resolution three times better than Global Hawk. There’s another one down below that’s set up to scan for ground targets.”

“Kind of looks like a missile,” Kris observed. “And that opening down below still looks to me like a bomb bay.” He looked at Patrick with a curious expression. “‘Threat response,’ eh? Maybe you’re not out of the strategic bomber business after all, General?”

“Our contract calls for observing and reporting. Like the colonel said: no more, no less.”

“Yeah, right, General—and when I open a potato chip bag, I can eat only one,” Kris quipped. He looked around. “I don’t see any passenger seats on this thing. Did you take them out already?”

“If you’re going to report us to the FAA for not having approved seats and seat belts for each occupant—yes, Kris, we already took them out,” Patrick said.