Chapter 14

The weekend dutifully rolled by. The beginning of the week following Christmas was the same as it had been, the previous week. Our test of the drone wasn’t until Tuesday, and I didn’t want to get in Marcus’s way as he worked on the final touches for the demonstration.

I did talk to Ted, briefly. He had been out to the range just before they shut down on Friday, and had watched some of the action. He said everything was looking right on track. Marcus had made a few more modifications, but they were mostly just fine-tuning some of the control systems, to ensure the drone did what it was supposed to do.

He had rolled out the best radar and detection equipment he could get his hands on (some of it, courtesy of Ron), and so far the drone was performing beautifully. We knew that the Air Force would try and put it through its paces, once they got hold of it. It was best to try and match what they would do, beforehand, to ensure there were no surprises.

I was also briefly consulted on the name, since we couldn’t just keep calling it “the drone.” With Ron’s input we decided on “SWEEP Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Mark III.” “Mark III” because the first version never really made it off the drawing board, and the second was essentially scrapped and majorly overhauled during the practical design phase. Apparently the arrangement of plating on the Mk. II was not ideal, as it let some signal leakage through. Because the military does love their acronyms, we gave them one. SWEEP stood for “Stealth Warfare Electronic Espionage Platform;” because, even though it was capable of carrying an internal munitions payload, the amount of armament it could carry was a lot smaller than other drones currently in service.

Marcus’s original idea had always focused on something geared for intelligence gathering, more than for direct interdiction. We didn’t come up with the surveillance and interception hardware ourselves, but we did make modular connections that would allow the Air Force, with the assistance of our engineers, able to attach some of the latest in hardware available to the military. Our goal was to build a truly silent, stealth platform for these devices to be installed on. The weapons connections found on most drones were missing on the SWEEP, due to the fact that attaching external weapons systems caused the stealth features of the drone to become moot. Instead we had installed extremely sophisticated cameras and detection equipment that allowed the drone to collect a wide range of intelligence data.

I took the opportunity to get together with Emily once more, before work took over all my free time. We managed to change it up. Her mother and father had to go to some auction for the day, and Emily managed to get me a ride to her family farm. She terrified me with the wild way she rode her four wheeler, with me clinging to the back! The horseback riding was fun, though. I wasn’t particularly good at it, since this was the first time I had ever been up close to a horse, but I soon got the hang of it and it was pretty pleasant.

Unfortunately the day ended all too soon, since she hustled me out of there well before it was time for her parents to come home, just in case. Still, it was a great way to spend the day. I was really relaxed when I got home, even if I did smell like a horse!

The next morning I was up bright and early, pacing waiting for Mary Ann to pick me up. To say I was anxious would be a huge understatement. If this didn’t go well, we basically had an extremely expensive paperweight, and most of the money I got from the settlement would be down the tubes. I had a lot of plans for the future, but they all required money. Not that I thought we were going to fall flat on our faces, but the possibility was there, and it had me nervous.

I got to Ellington field several hours before the test, and people were bustling everywhere. There were grandstands being set up, along with a lot of machinery on the ground in front of them. Some of it I recognized as ours, including the control desk the pilot we hired would use to fly the drone. The rest, I guessed, belonged to the Air Force ... or, at least, the Texas Air National Guard.

We met up with Ron and he got me through security. He walked me over to a hanger where Marcus and Ted were huddled with the engineers.

“How we looking, guys?” I said as I strolled up.

Marcus turned, smiled at me and said, “We are all set, Cas. The trials yesterday went beautifully. Totally fooled Ron and his test monkeys.”

Ron just shook his head, “I told you not to call them that.”

Marcus just gave him a dismissive wave, “I think we are truly ready. We did a once-over again this morning, and everything looks perfect.”

“Great, so what should we be doing while we wait?”

Ron looked a bit sheepish, “Well, Ted needs to go and start schmoozing. I know there are a few Generals he is acquainted with, and it would be good for him to ‘press some flesh,’ before everything kicked off. I hate to say it, Cas, but I think it’s best if you stayed out of the limelight. It’s very hard getting over your age, and these guys don’t bend to the unusual well. I would say stick with the other engineers, and join them on the side benches. I know this is partly your baby, too, and I hate to cut you out of the festivities; but...”

He let that last part go with a shrug.

“No, I get it, and it makes total sense. If everything is looking good here, then maybe Marcus should go with Ted and talk up the project.”

“Good thinking,” Marcus said, scooping up some stuff he had been working on and handing it over to one of the guys.

We three headed out. They went to go talk up the project, while I did my best to stay out of the way of the guys doing the final check. They hadn’t spent a lot of time around me. I knew they were still uncertain about me, and for the same reasons that Ron didn’t want me to go with Ted and Marcus. Eventually I would be old enough to move my own plans forward, but while I had the limitations I was currently under, it was still a giant pain in the ass to have to sit on the sidelines. Not that I thought I could do a better job negotiating than Ted could. I might have some kind of genetically souped-up brain, but Ted had decades of business experience on his side, and that was worth its weight in gold. I knew if everything worked out, Ted would get us as good of a deal as possible.

I hadn’t spent much time with Marcus’s band of Engineers. While we chatted off and on; for the most part, they left me alone, even though I was mixed in with them off to one side of the viewing stand. After what seemed an eternity, the festivities got under way.

The tests weren’t spectacular from where I was sitting, but I knew it would be an eye opener for the group crowded around the radar control set up. It was being manned by one of their people, and I knew they would have the best person they could get. After a few minutes the drone came silently whisking overhead, and you could see a commotion among the group at the radar station. From their excited body language, my guess was that no one knew the drone was there, ‘till it got within visual range.

It was eerie how silent it was. I hadn’t really considered it before, but with any machine flying through the sky, you just expected some kind of sound. Yet, this thing was dead silent. I am sure close up there were sounds, but at the distance it was from us, nothing at all was heard.

Next came a series of higher altitude passes, which was supposed to make it easier on the radar guys, followed by several more low altitude passes were made. The low altitude passes would naturally be the hardest to detect, since the drone would be obscured by the natural signals given off by ‘ground clutter,’ but it also showed off one of the features we had touted: the lack of “buzz” commonly associated with the drones currently in service.

There were a few of the low passes where I thought maybe I could hear something, but I wasn’t sure. Again, from my seat, it seemed like the audience was suitably impressed. This whole time the drone had also been snapping pictures and running a video feed from the installed surveillance array. After one more low pass, there was a thirty minute wait as the drone was landed and the brass examined its take. Their technicians had worked hard to hide pieces of intelligence in the testing area for the drone to find. This may not have been as sexy as a test where stuff was blown up for the spectators, but the true professionals in attendance would know the value of an intelligence gathering tool such as this.

While we were waiting for the test to resume, that did get me to thinking. There was a strange dichotomy between my stated goal of trying to make the world a better place, and building military ordnance. On one hand, this seemed like one of those ‘necessary evils.’ We needed money to do anything I really wanted to do, and this seemed like the best shot at getting the funding we needed to move forward. On the other hand, the US military didn’t always have the best track record on what they wanted to do with that ordnance. If I were being dishonest with myself, I could qualify our building a drone by saying that it had no offensive capabilities, but the realist in me understood that the military could use the intelligence our drone could gather to kill just as many people as if it had a missile attached. If it were up to me, I would find a way to offload the drone project in its entirety, and focus on things like the desalinization project. But that was easier said than done. It all came back to the need for funding. This wasn’t something I was going to find a way out of, sitting here in these bleachers, but it would be something to ponder in the future.

Ted, Ron, Marcus and a bunch of guys in uniforms tromped off into a conference room set up especially for their meeting. I went back to the hanger we had been assigned, and puttered around for what seemed like hours before Ted, Ron and Marcus entered the hanger. I took it as a very good sign that the three of them seemed to be in an extremely good mood.

Ted walked up and exuberantly said, “We did it!”

“You’re going to have to elaborate on that,” I said, smiling back at him.

Marcus couldn’t hold it in anymore, and jumped in saying, “They were blown away by the test. They had both the test installation, and the Ellington control tower looking for SWEEP-1, and they never picked it up.”

SWEEP-1 was the ID of the test drone that flew today. I was happy to hear the stealth features worked as well as Marcus had hoped they would.

“They were also impressed by how silently it ran,” Marcus continued. “Their only real concern was the lack of offensive capacity, but I reiterated that this was one of those situations where you had to decide which was more important, stealth or payload. I told them they already had platforms capable of carrying out direct interdiction. What they didn’t have, was a solid stealth platform.”

Ron’s head was bobbing in agreement, “They want to investigate further. They ordered five for testing purposes, and authorized an ‘intent to order’ for twenty more, if the testing proves out. A representative of the DIA also expressed an interest.” That was good news, the DIA, which stands for the Defence Intelligence Agency, is the intelligence gathering arm of the military.

“They agreed on a price of four million apiece for them,” Ted added.

I did the math quickly in my head. While we had let Ron inside the processes a lot, we never discussed the cost structure of the drone with him, since ultimately, his allegiance was still to the Air Force. Not that I felt that we were screwing the Air Force, but it’s best not to talk about profit with the customer.

Marcus felt that these would not be selling in huge quantities, since they were more of a specialty item for the military. I figured, at best, we would be selling fifty of these a year; so I agreed we wouldn’t need a large production facility. Unfortunately, even a small production line would cost a fair amount.