Walter Williams - Deep State

Part of the secret of the Scots kilt, she decided, was the long stockings. They limited the amount of unattractive pale flesh visible to the onlooker. They suggested curvy calves even if the calves in question were matchsticks.

Magnus hadn’t quite learned what made a kilt work and what didn’t. But it wasn’t Dagmar’s job to tell him.

Though probably she was going to have to tell him how to ride a bicycle in a skirt, just to keep him out of the hands of the RAF Police.

We are like ourselves, Dagmar thought, and walked into her kingdom.

It turns out that Lloyd, the intern, was in charge of the unit’s air force. He had been a model rocket hobbyist in high school, and apparently that qualified him to wrangle a whole fleet of radio-controlled drones.

Lloyd invited Dagmar and Lincoln to his workstation for a status report. Lloyd’s scarred metal desk was directly beneath one of the ceiling fans; the fan gave a regular mechanical chirp as it drove cold air down on Dagmar’s head.

Dagmar guessed that Lloyd had graduated from college a couple years ago. He was a little shorter than average height and had rimless spectacles. He wore soft gray slacks and a Van Heusen shirt with a faint lilac stripe, long sleeved against the artificial chill.

He was Air Force Brat, Dagmar thought. And Lola was the Guardian Sphinx.

“We’ve got two types of drones,” Lloyd explained. He had loaded videos of the tests in his desktop computer. “One is a model helicopter with an off-the-shelf zoom lens.” The video showed a flying machine so bare and basic that it looked as if it had been assembled out of carbon-fiber fishing rods and leftover circuit boards. There were two rotors, surprisingly silent, with a package slung between them that consisted of three cameras, each equipped with a different lens and capable of independent tracking. On the video the copter bounded into the air like a jumping spider, then zigzagged around the sky with sufficient speed and agility that the video had trouble tracking it. It made a faint whooshing sound, like Superman passing far overhead.

“It’s got GPS,” Lloyd said. “You tell it where to go, and it goes there, and if you’ve got the coordinates of the target, it will point the camera there without a human operator having to manually adjust it. We figure to use these for reconnaissance-keep tabs on nearby police stations or army barracks.”

“How close does the operator have to be?” Dagmar asked.

“Doesn’t even have to be within sight,” Lloyd said. “The operator won’t be anywhere near the action, and the helo can automatically return to the GPS coordinates from which it was launched, or anywhere else within its range.”

There were more videos, these taken by the copters’ onboard cameras, their occasional jerkiness smoothed by computer enhancement. The lenses, generic products of some anonymous Southeast Asian factory, were capable of remarkable performance: Dagmar could make out individual faces as the helos floated unseen, unheard, over Limassol.

The sounds of the operators came over the sound track, all speaking Turkish. Dagmar listened, frowned.

“Is that your voice?” she asked.

Lloyd gave her a guileless look. “Yes.”

“You speak Turkish?”

“I do.”

She waited for a moment in case Lloyd wanted to offer an explanation, but he only offered a tight little smile and then went on with his talk. The rules said they weren’t to tell each other anything of a personal nature, and Lloyd was clearly a rule follower.

“Our second drone,” he said, “is another VTOL-we can fly them both off roofs, or from roads or parks. But the second one also has anti-air capability. It’s a flying wedge, basically.”

“Sorry?” Dagmar asked.

Lloyd looked at her, solemn dark eyes behind spectacles.

“Do you ever watch World War: Robot?”

“No.”

“It’s one of those programs where homebuilt robots fight each other. And the basic rule for robot combat is that wedges rule.”

Dagmar’s mind swam. “Sorry,” she said, “but I’m still four-oh-four.”

Lloyd’s hands swooped descriptively in the air. “A wedge is just a robot with a wedge-shaped cross section,” he said. “They’re used for ramming-they hit the other robot at high speed and just fling it in the air.”

“Okay.”

“So what we did was adapt the wedge to aerial combat. We’ve got a hard plastic wedge kept aloft by arrays of miniturbines. It’s got several cameras, a GPS, and a top speed of about forty knots if we really want to burn through the fuel. Stability is achieved by fly-by-wire computer guidance-you really can’t turn the thing upside down even if you try. The idea is to fly it against police drones and bring them down by ramming. It’s a type of attack the Russians call taran.”

Dagmar looked at him. “The Russians use planes to ram?”

Lloyd nodded. “They train for it. Even now.”

Dagmar blinked.

“That’s hard-core,” she said.

Lloyd nodded. “Glad we never had to fight those guys.”

The video made the tactic clearer. The flying wedge brought down a whole series of target drones. Usually the wedge tumbled for a second or two but righted itself. On a couple occasions the wedge lost control and crashed.

Dagmar had encountered miniturbine-powered drones before-she remembered the thing hovering over her in the humid night, the hydrocarbon smell of its breath. She thought for a moment, then looked at Lloyd.

“This all seems very sophisticated,” she said. “But what we’re supposed to be leading is a grassroots rebellion springing spontaneously from the population. If we start flying machinery this complex against them, it’s going to be clear that someone’s behind it.”

“This was discussed,” Lincoln remarked, from behind Dagmar’s shoulder. Dagmar gave a little jump at the unexpected sound.

“The wedge is made from generic materials,” Lloyd said. “The miniturbine arrays are available by mail-order. Even the fly-by-wire software is available from hobbyists online-I was kind of amazed to discover that it actually works.”

“Hm.” Dagmar looked at the screen, saw flying wedges hit drones time after time.

“Well,” she said. “I guess it all seems fine.”

Lloyd offered a satisfied smile.

“Now,” he said, “we need to coordinate the air force with your teams.”

“Ha,” Dagmar said. “As if my job wasn’t complex enough.”

Lloyd smiled. “I’ll do most of the work, if that’s all right with you.”

Dagmar could think of no objection to this.

“I was thinking,” Lloyd said, “that we might want to give the air unit a name.”

“Free Turkish Air Force?” Lincoln said. “Ataturk Air Force?”

“Royal Chatsworth Air Force?” said Dagmar, with a look at Lincoln. He returned the compliment.

“Briana’s Airmen?”

“My policy is to remain anonymous,” Dagmar said. “How about the Anatolian Skunk Works?”

Lincoln thought about that for a moment.

“I like it,” he said.

“Words,” Dagmar said. “They’re my job.”

Over the next two days Dagmar’s teams gradually improved their performance. The camera teams shot videos of birds, of the model helicopters, of tractors rolling down country roads, of freighters cruising along the blue Mediterranean horizon. Until Team C’s cameras lost their uplink all at once and they failed to reestablish contact.

Dagmar turned to Byron.

“You handled this last time, right?” she said.

He looked up at her.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll try to talk them through the fix.”

This failed, even with Lloyd interpreting. Dagmar turned to Byron again.

“Can you go north and help them?”