Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Reacher smiled.

“Good try,” he said. “But we don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“We were never going to believe your first answer. Obviously you were going to try to blow us off. Plus, most of those sixty years we mentioned were spent listening to liars, so we know one when we see one. Plus, some of those sixty years were spent reading all kinds of Pentagon bullshit, so we know how they use words. A new torpedo would more likely be called ‘Little Fish.’ Plus, New Age was a clean-sheet start-up with a free choice of where to build, and if they were working for the Navy they’d have chosen San Diego or Connecticut or Newport News, Virginia. But they didn’t. They chose East LA instead. And the closest places to East LA are Air Force places, including Edwards, where you just came from, and the name is Little Wing, so it’s an airborne device.”

Diana Bond shrugged.

“I had to try,” she said.

Reacher said, “Try again.”

Another pause.

“It’s an infantry weapon,” she said. “Army, not Air Force. New Age is in East LA to be near Fort Irwin, not Edwards. But you’re right, it’s airborne.”

“Specifically?”

“It’s a man-portable shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. The next generation.”

“What does it do?”

Diana Bond shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

“You’ll have to. Or your boss goes down.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Compared to what?”

“All I’ll say is that it’s a revolutionary advance.”

“We’ve heard that kind of thing before. It means it’ll be out-of-date a year from now, rather than the usual six months.”

“We think two years, actually.”

“What does it do?”

“You’re not going to call the newspapers. You’d be selling out your country.”

“Try us.”

“Are you serious?”

“As lung cancer.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Suck it up. Or your boss needs a new job tomorrow. As far as that goes, we’d be doing our country a favor.”

“You don’t like him.”

“Does anyone?”

“The newspapers wouldn’t publish.”

“Dream on.”

Bond was quiet for a minute more.

“Promise it will go no further,” she said.

“I already have,” Reacher said.

“It’s complicated.”

“Like rocket science?”

“You know the Stinger?” Bond asked. “The current generation?”

Reacher nodded. “I’ve seen them in action. We all have.”

“What do they do?”

“They chase the heat signature of jet exhaust.”

“But from below,” Bond said. “Which is a key weakness. They have to climb and maneuver at the same time. Which makes them relatively slow and relatively cumbersome. They show up on downward-looking radar. It’s possible for a pilot to outmaneuver them. And they’re vulnerable to countermeasures, like decoy flares.”

“But?”

“Little Wing is revolutionary. Like most great ideas, it starts with a very simple premise. It completely ignores its target on the way up. It does all its work on the way down.”

“I see,” Reacher said.

Bond nodded. “Going up, it’s just a dumb rocket. Very, very fast. It reaches about eighty thousand feet and then it slows and stops and topples. Starts to fall back down again. Then the electronics switch on and it starts hunting its target. It has boosters to maneuver with, and control surfaces, and because gravity is doing most of the work, the maneuvering can be incredibly precise.”

“It falls on its prey from above,” Reacher said. “Like a hawk.”

Bond nodded again.

“At unbelievable speed,” she said. “Way supersonic. It can’t miss. And it can’t be stopped. Airborne missile defense radar always looks downward. Decoy flares always launch downward. The way things have been until now, planes are very vulnerable from above. They could afford to be. Because very little came at them from above. But it’s different now. That’s why this is so sensitive. We’ve got about a two-year window in which our surface-to-air capability will be completely unbeatable. For about two years anyone using Little Wing will be able to shoot down anything that flies. Maybe longer. It depends how fast people are with new countermeasures.”

Reacher said, “The speed will make countermeasures difficult.”

“Almost impossible,” Bond said. “Human reaction times will be too slow. So defenses will have to be automated. Which means we’ll have to trust computers to tell the difference between a bird a hundred yards up and Little Wing a mile up and a satellite fifty miles up. Potentially it will be chaos. Civilian airlines will want protection, obviously, because of terrorism worries. But the skies above civilian airports are thick with stacked planes. False deployment would be the norm, not the exception. So they’d have to turn off their protection for takeoff and landing, which makes them totally vulnerable just when they can’t afford to be.”

“A can of worms,” Dixon said.

“But a theoretical can of worms,” O’Donnell said. “We understand Little Wing isn’t working very well.”

“This can go no further,” Bond said.

“We already agreed.”

“Because these are commercial secrets now.”

“Much more important than defense secrets.”

“The prototypes were fine,” Bond said. “The beta testing was excellent. But they ran into problems with production.”

“Rockets or electronics or both?”

“Electronics,” Bond said. “The rocket technology is more than forty years old. They can do the rocket production in their sleep. That happens up in Denver, Colorado. It’s the electronics packs that are giving them the problems. Down here in LA. They haven’t even started mass production yet. They’re still doing bench assembly. Now even that is screwed up.”

Reacher nodded and said nothing. He stared out the window for a moment and then took a stack of napkins out of the dispenser and fanned them out and then butted them back together into a neat pile. Weighted them down with the sugar container. The restaurant had pretty much emptied out. There were two guys alone in separate booths at the far end of the room. Landscape workers, tired and hunched. Apart from them, no business. Outside on the street the afternoon light was fading. The red and yellow neon from the restaurant’s huge sign was becoming comparatively brighter and brighter. Some passing cars on the boulevard already had their headlights on.

“So Little Wing is the same old same old, really,” O’Donnell said, in the silence. “A Pentagon pipe dream that does nothing but burn dollars.”

Diana Bond said, “It wasn’t supposed to be like that.”

“It never is.”

“It’s not a total failure. Some of the units work.”

“They said the same thing about the M16 rifle. Which was a real comfort when you were out on patrol with one.”

“But the M16 was perfected eventually. Little Wing will be, too. And it will be worth waiting for. You know which is the world’s best-protected airplane?”

Dixon said, “Air Force One, probably. Politicians’ asses always come first.”

Bond said, “Little Wing could take it out without breaking a sweat.”

“Bring it on,” O’Donnell said. “Easier than voting.”

“You should read the Patriot Act. You could be arrested for even thinking that.”

“Jails aren’t big enough,” O’Donnell said.

Their waitress came back and hovered. Clearly she was hoping for something more lucrative from such a big table than five bottomless cups of coffee. Dixon and Neagley took the hint and ordered ice cream sundaes. Diana Bond passed. O’Donnell ordered a hamburger. The waitress stood and looked pointedly at Reacher. He wasn’t seeing her. He was still playing with his pile of napkins. Weighting it down with the sugar canister, lifting the sugar off, putting it back.