Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

Peter Cobb was chief executive officer and major shareholder in Zodiac AFV, Inc., a company specializing in armored fighting vehicles-hence the initials in its name. For him personally, and for his company, which had developed Despot at their own expense over seven years, everything hung on the weapon’s being accepted and bought by the Pentagon. He had little doubt; Despot was years ahead of Boeing’s Pave Tiger system and the newer Tacit Rainbow. He knew it responded completely to an abiding concern of NATO planners-isolating the first wave of any Soviet tank attack across the central German plain from the second wave.

His colleagues were Lionel Moir of Pasadena Avionics in California, who had built the Kestrel and Goshawk components, and Ben Salkind of ECK Industries, Inc., in the Silicon Valley near Palo Alto, California. These men also had crucial personal as well as corporate stakes in the adoption of Despot by the Pentagon. ECK Industries had a slice of the prototype-stage B2 Stealth bomber for the Air Force, but this was an assured project.

The Pentagon team arrived two hours later, when everything was set up. There were twelve of them, including two generals, and they comprised the technical group whose recommendation would be vital to the Pentagon decision. When they were all seated under the awning in front of the battery of TV screens, the test began.

Moir started with a surprise. He invited the audience to swivel in their seats and survey the nearby desert. It was flat, empty. They were puzzled. Moir pressed a button on his console. Barely yards away the desert began to erupt. A great metal claw emerged, reached forward, and pulled. Out of the sand where it had buried itself, immune to hunting fighter planes and downward-looking radar, came the Despot. A great block of gray steel on wheels and tracks, windowless, independent, self-contained, proof against direct hit by all but a heavy artillery shell or large bomb, proof against nuclear, gas, and germ attack, it hauled itself out of its self-dug grave and went to work.

The four men inside started the engines that powered the systems, drew back the steel screens that covered the reinforced glass portholes, and pushed out their radar dish to warn them of incoming attack, and their sensor antennae to help them guide their missiles. The Pentagon team was impressed.

“We will assume,” said Cobb, “that the first wave of Soviet tanks has crossed the Elbe River into West Germany by several existing bridges and a variety of military bridges thrown up during the night. NATO forces are engaging the first wave. We have enough to cope. But the much bigger second wave of Russian tanks is emerging from their cover in the East German forests and heading for the Elbe. These will make the breakthrough and head for the French border. The Despots, deployed and buried in a north-south line through Germany, have their orders. Find, identify, and destroy.”

He pressed another button and a hatch opened at the top of the AFV. From it, on a ramp, emerged a pencil-slim rocket. Twenty inches in diameter, an eight-foot tube. It ignited its tiny rocket motor and soared away into the pale-blue sky where, being pale blue itself, it disappeared from view. The men returned to their screens, where a high-definition TV camera was tracking the Kestrel. At 150 feet its high-bypass turbofan jet engine ignited, the rocket died and dropped away, short stubby wings sprouted from its sides, and tail fins gave it guidance. The miniature rocket began to fly like an airplane, and still it climbed away down the range. Moir pointed to a large radar screen. The sweep arm circled the disk but no responding image glowed into light.

“The Kestrel is made entirely of Fiberglas,”intoned Moir proudly. “Its engine is made of ceramic derivatives, heat-resistant but nonreflective to radar. With a little ‘stealth’ technology thrown in, you will see it is totally invisible-to eye or machine. It has the radar signature of a strawberry finch. Less. A bird can be radar-detected by the flapping of its wings. Kestrel doesn’t flap, and this radar is far more sophisticated than anything the Soviets have got.”

In war the Kestrel, a deep-penetration vehicle, would penetrate two hundred to five hundred miles behind enemy lines. In this test it reached operating altitude at fifteen thousand feet, hauled in at one hundred miles downrange, and began to circle slowly, giving it ten hours of endurance at one hundred knots. It also began to look down electronically. Its range of sensors came into play. Like a hunting bird it scanned the terrain beneath, covering a circle of land seventy miles in diameter.

Its infrared scanners did the hunting; then it interrogated with millimeter-band radar.

“It is programmed to strike only if the target is emitting heat, is made of steel, and is moving,” said Moir. “Target must emit enough heat to be a tank, not a car, a truck, or a train. It won’t hit a bonfire, a heated house, or a parked vehicle, because they aren’t moving. It won’t hit angle-reflectors for the same reason, or brick, timber, or rubber, because they are not steel. Now look at the target area on this screen, gentlemen.”

They turned to the giant screen whose image was being piped to them from the TV camera a hundred miles away. A large area had been fitted out like a Hollywood set. There were artificial trees, wooden shacks, parked vans, trucks, and cars. There were rubber tanks, which now began to crawl, pulled by unseen wires. There were bonfires, gasoline-ignited, which blazed into flame. Then a single real tank began to move, radio-controlled. At fifteen thousand feet the Kestrel spotted it at once and reacted.

“Gentlemen, here is the new revolution, of which we are justly proud. In former systems the hunter threw itself downward on the target, destroying itself and all that expensive technology. Very cost-inefficient. Kestrel doesn’t do that; it calls up a Goshawk. Watch the Despot.”

The audience swiveled again, in time to catch the flicker of the rocket of the yard-long Goshawk missile that now obeyed the Kestrel’s call and headed for the target on command. Salkind took up the commentary.

“The Goshawk will scream up to one hundred thousand feet, keel over, and head back down. As it passes the Kestrel, the remotely piloted vehicle will pass on final target information to the Goshawk. Kestrel’s onboard computer will give the target’s position when the Goshawk hits zero feet, to the nearest eighteen inches. Goshawk will hit within that circle. It’s coming down now.”

Amid all the houses, shacks, trucks, vans, cars, bonfires, angle-reflectors dug into the sand of the target area; amid the decoy rubber tanks, the steel tank (an old Abrams Mark One) rumbled forward as to war. There was a sudden flicker and the Abrams seemed to have been punched by a massive fist. Almost in slow motion it flattened out, its sides burst outward, its gun jerked upward to point accusingly at the sky, and it burst into a fireball. Under the awning there was a collective letting-out of breath.

“How much ordnance do you have in the nose of that Goshawk?” asked one of the generals.

“None, General,” said Salkind. “Goshawk is like a smart rock. It’s coming down at close to ten thousand miles per hour. Apart from its receiver for getting information from Kestrel and its tiny radar for following instructions to the target for the last fifteen thousand feet, it has no technology. That’s why it’s so cheap. But the effect often kilograms of tungsten-tipped steel at that speed hitting a tank is like… well, like firing an air-gun pellet onto the back of a cockroach at point-blank range. That tank just stopped the equivalent of two Amtrak locomotives at a hundred miles per hour. It was just flattened.”

The test continued for another two hours. The manufacturers proved they could reprogram the Kestrel in flight; if they told it to go for steel structures with water on each side and land at each end, it would take out bridges. If they changed the hunting profile, it would strike at trains, barges, or moving columns of trucks. So long as they were moving. Stationary, except for bridges Kestrel did not know if an object was a steel truck or a small steel shed. But its sensors could penetrate rain, cloud, snow, hail, sleet, fog, and darkness.