Drone

Prologue-2

Unable to fully catch his breath despite the pressure suit that compressed his legs and lower torso to force blood to reach his brain, he stopped his audio narration and left the instrumentation to record his actions. Uncle Ru had been a great pilot in his day. He would understand.

Fan raced into the Daxue Range, the highest part of the Hengduan. How easy would it be to climb over that last snowy crest onto the Tibetan Plateau and at long last fully subjugate those rebellious primitives with a fleet of jets like this one?

Not on today’s planned mission, but someday he’d take them down just as he had taken—

Close by the icy edifice of mighty Gongga Shan, so proud in her glacier-shrouded glory, a shadow fell over his cockpit. One moment the sun had been shining strong from the southeast, then it had blinked out.

He twisted to look aloft. A needle-shaped plane with a broad delta wing blocked the sun. The heat of anger flashed through him. No one was supposed to be using the test range other than himself. Who dared presume?

Mottled gray, it had an unusually long nose spike that must help crack the supersonic air apart. Smooth lines sleeker than even the finest woman.

The fuselage was too slender to hold a pilot.

It must be a drone!

It certainly wasn’t AVIC. The Aviation Industry Corporation of China might be one of the largest companies in the world—one tiny division manufactured the magnificent J-31 Gyrfalcon—but he knew their drones. Unless it was some other division of AVIC trying to show him up? No. China’s first supersonic drone, Dark Sword, was still in the early stages of development.

And the mockup didn’t look like this one at all.

The same fifteen-meter length as his jet but it was no configuration he’d ever seen before.

He held his heading until he was close enough to the glaciers of Gongga Shan to see down into individual crevasses. He slammed aside at the last moment, hoping that the drone would overfly its course into the mountainside. No such luck. It eased in closer until it flew directly above his head. Less than twenty meters away, it seemed to fill the sky.

Flipping his KLJ-7A radar from beyond-visual-range to close-in mode revealed…nothing. Impossibly, though he was close enough to read the markings—if there had been any—it barely registered as more than a patch of turbulent air. Its stealth was already a generation or more ahead of the J-31’s.

Nothing he tried could move it from its position directly above his cockpit. He slammed through maneuvers that he didn’t know he had in him: twists, rolls, and aborted dives.

The J-31 behaved magnificently.

But the drone mirrored his moves with unreal perfection.

At first he thought it was simply locked on to his aircraft for guidance. Except there were moments when it made small, unpredictable adjustments that meant somewhere there was a pilot in active control—a pilot with reaction times like none he’d ever seen in an entire career of dogfights. Fan had made test pilot because of his own exceptional reaction speed, but he couldn’t match the drone’s pilot.

And for the first time since Mei-Li had heated his blood until he’d thought it might turn to steam, he felt a cold chill.

Uncle Ru must be told of this, but the radio returned nothing except static when he ignored orders and tried it. The drone was blocking his transmissions, which wasn’t supposed to be possible.

The drone wasn’t Chinese.

And it wasn’t Russian. Especially not a thousand kilometers into China.

It must be American—and it was hunting him.

There was no weapon he could bring to bear on something flying closer than his own shadow.

As if reading his thoughts, the drone pulled ahead of him. He heard no sonic boom as it passed, though he should have. Stealth and boomless? Formidable indeed.

At Mach 1.79—two thousand one hundred and forty kilometers per hour at this altitude—it descended abruptly to ten meters in front of him. Less than a hundredth of a second ahead.

The precision of the move astonished him for a moment too long.

Wang Fan tried to turn aside, but it was too late—too late the moment the drone started its move. He knew that he’d never make lieutenant colonel and that he’d never again bury himself in the glory of Chen Mei-Li.

The turbulent air of the drone’s supersonic wake shattered his plane as surely as flying into the ground.

Wang Fan reached for the emergency handle but didn’t pull it, knowing that even ejecting couldn’t save him now. Today his name—the Mortal Prince—would come true.

The last thing he ever saw was the drone twisting aside to reveal a final look at the icy crevasses of Gongga Shan straight ahead.

He would leave no more impression on its mighty edifice than a pork baozi splattered on a blue-and-white tile floor.

CIA, Langley, Virginia

Clarissa Reese sat alone in a secure observer’s room three stories beneath the New Headquarters Building. She watched the massive avalanche as it continued to bury any sign of the Shenyang J-31 and its pilot deeper and deeper. The Chinese would never find it there.

Her pilot, deep in a Nevada control bunker, had flown his drone into formation with the J-31 when the high peaks were blocking all of the Chinese surveillance satellites. From that moment on, only the closest inspection would reveal the drone as anything other than an oddly dull reflection off the J-31—because nothing else could be that close to a supersonic craft performing high-g maneuvers. The Chinese would believe that right down to their boots.

Her source had alerted her to, and a CIA analyst had confirmed, the escalating series of J-31 tests over the last few days, giving Clarissa enough time to have the drone flown deep into China the night before. That had allowed her to pick the place and time of the meet up. Those three minutes of the close-in flight had offered alarming information regarding the J-31’s true capabilities.

The Chinese had started from stolen plans for the F-35 Lightning II and they’d done a fine job of copying it. By theft and massive effort, they had closed a technological advance that should have taken them another decade to achieve. Like the Japanese of the ’70s and ’80s reverse engineering electronics and personal computers, the Chinese were now the masters of copying American ingenuity.

There’d been no detectable transmission by the pilot for the forty-seven minutes they’d been tracking the jet since its departure from Fenghuangshan Airport in Chengdu. Once in formation, the drone had blocked the J-31’s radio frequencies but left the instrumentation reporting systems active.

She imagined the horror of the Chinese as they watched their precious jet run wildly out of control—the pilot’s attempt to save his life—then disappear.

The force of the jet’s impact with the mountainside had guaranteed that nothing bigger than a rivet would survive. The final crash had again been timed to be wholly out of view from any satellites other than the CIA’s own USA-224 KH-11 keyhole sat—an Earth-facing copy of the Hubble Space Telescope and one of the four active real-time capable craft. Actually, the Hubble was a space-facing version of the earlier KH-11.

The drone certainly detected no emergency locator signal on a close flyby.

She spoke into the secure link to the Nevada control bunker that had remained silent throughout the flight.

“General Harrington, bring it home.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She closed the link.

Freezing the best image of the avalanche from the drone’s final pass on her screen, she tried to see any sign of the Chinese plane. There wasn’t even a hint of its ultimate resting place. No blemish of a fuel explosion on the face of the pristine fall of ice. It was simply gone.

The Shenyang J-31 hadn’t had enough fuel to reach a border, so their military would be forced to cross off a possible defection. It had simply behaved chaotically, as if the pilot was fighting for his life against a failing aircraft that then disappeared forever up the narrow mountain valley. No search would find any evidence until it fell out the bottom of the glacier decades or even centuries from now.

Clarissa would make sure her operative at Chengdu convinced Lieutenant General Zhang Ru that it was a fault with the plane. The next time Ru was in the operative’s arms, she’d drop a hint of trouble that the pilot had “happened to mention to her” during their night together. It would lay the seeds of doubt. Perhaps of something he had discovered—though been vague about—not wanting to shame his commander by pointing out the jet’s flaw.

Yes. That should work nicely. And the highly detailed volume of classified information the pilot had divulged into the former gymnast’s recording equipment would be for Clarissa’s people alone.

Should the operative cry for the lost pilot on Ru’s shoulder or shouldn’t she?

The girl would know; she was perfect.

Chen Mei-Li’s coach had made it easy to recruit the lovely gymnast at the last Olympics. He’d struck her to the ground (just out of sight of international television) for placing a single tenth-point off the gold to a meticulously drugged Russian wind-up doll.

That the bastard also had made himself her personal-and-private coach—in a way wholly unrelated to gymnastics—had only made Clarissa’s job all the easier. Mei-Li had proven an unslakable hunger for revenge on the institutions of her native country.

She claimed she was more than willing to offer her body to that end and had twice refused Clarissa’s half-hearted offer of an extraction—not that she’d have actually done it. Mei-Li was an exceptional resource who would be impossible to replace.

Clarissa had cemented the Chinese waif’s undying gratitude by arranging for the coach’s car to crash horribly before the games had ended.

For strictly personal reasons, she’d used a well-place Agency med-tech to ensure his death was slow and exceedingly painful. Too sad for him that he’d lost the ability to scream.

Clarissa purged all records of the drone and satellite session from the observation room’s secure server’s memory—one of the many advantages of holding a director-level clearance—then checked that there were no stray strands from her trademark white-blonde ponytail. The slick look combined with her five-ten height before donning heels said, “Mess with me at your own peril.” She hadn’t had to prove it more than two or three times before her reputation preceded her.

Men were always thrown off balance when she turned and they saw the rest of her hair. It wasn’t some neat, short, athletic ponytail. Instead her hair went thickly wavy where it passed her shoulders on its way to the middle of her back. In 2001, a Journal of Experimental Psychology article—read between sessions of teenage slavery on her father’s office couch—concluded that men perceived long hair as a sign of s****l health.

The day of her father’s death—that she wished in retrospect had been ten times more painful than the coach’s—she’d begun growing it out in earnest. No longer was her hair bobbed short to avoid it being a handhold, but neither would any of the imprudent minions who dared cross her path ever get to touch it. She only let it down for very special occasions.

With a sharp clack on the marble floors, her high heels heralded her approach as she strode toward her top-floor office. In the world of low-profile women, it announced that the CIA’s Director of Special Research was on her way and everyone should fear her. As well they should; she’d just set the Chinese fifth-generation jet program back by years.

Enemies were all to be erased with maximum prejudice. Her country was all that mattered. Lovers? Occasionally. Friends? Who had the time?