American Traitor (Pike Logan #15) - Brad Taylor Page 0,1

something different?

The helmet of the F-35 was a monstrosity—a four-hundred-thousand-dollar piece of gear that offered the pilot innumerable feeds, showing him everything that was occurring within his airspace. He could read the world in real time, gaining an unrivaled capability to defeat anything that chose to fight. The pilot read all of those feeds and trusted them explicitly. And it was all software driven.

The pilot controlled cameras that could detail everything around the aircraft, allowing him a 360-degree view that would be impossible without the helmet. He had feeds telling him every threat near the aircraft within a hundred miles. He had sensors that detailed when to fire his weapons, only locking on when the computer told him it was correct, giving him an unparalleled ability to prevent collateral damage in modern warfare. He had more control over his destiny than any pilot in history.

But what if what he was seeing was wrong? If his actual experience wasn’t what was happening? What if his helmet told him one thing, and reality was another?

Jake heard the control tower say, “Comet four-two, Comet four-two, go to thirty-one five. Inbound aircraft at thirty-seven.”

He heard, “Yes. Understood.”

He waited with bated breath, conflicted. If this worked, he was murdering a person he’d never met.

He heard, “Comet four-two, you just passed through twenty thousand feet. I instructed thirty-one five. Are you understanding?”

Most of the Japanese airbases used by the United States were manned and operated solely by Americans, a symbiotic relationship that Japan allowed because the country fell under the U.S. umbrella of protection. Misawa was different. It was the only combined airbase in the Pacific theater run jointly by both Japanese and U.S. personnel, and as such, had been chosen as the base for the first Japanese F-35s to showcase the partnership between the two countries. Jake knew that the men inside the control tower were Japanese, as was the man in the aircraft. They spoke English, because that was the air traffic control language the world over, but it was still a little surreal. Especially since he wasn’t Japanese.

The pilot responded, a little miffed, “Yes. Knock it off.”

Jake heard nothing for a pregnant second, and then the voice from the tower showed its first bit of urgency. “You’ve passed through fifteen thousand at five hundred knots. Acknowledge.”

“I understand. I have it.”

Nothing more. Then the voice from the tower became frantic. “You’re at two thousand feet and going six hundred knots. Acknowledge. Acknowledge.”

Jake waited, but heard nothing else. He knew the radar track ended at one thousand feet. He stood up, glanced left and right, and then saw the first indicator of his success—five men rushing out of the tower. He waited a beat, then sat back down, wanting to hear the tower’s calls.

There was nothing else broadcast, the plane lost to radar intercept at one thousand feet. The recovery of the aircraft would take four months, the body of the pilot itself not found until a month after that, with the United States concerned that the Chinese would attempt to find the top-secret information lying on the ocean floor.

The final report was that the pilot had experienced spatial disorientation flying over the Pacific Ocean at night, where the horizon and the ocean joined seamlessly into one. There was a lot of chatter among the pundit class about the Chinese stealing the vaunted technology of the F-35 by submarine or other means, but they failed to realize that the Chinese had no intention of diving into the depths of the Pacific for technology that had been destroyed by a plane flying at six hundred knots straight into the ocean. Why should they?

Since Mao Tse-Tung, they had been the masters of unconventional warfare, and this was just one more moment of their success. Why find an aircraft at the bottom of the ocean to learn its secrets when you can make every single one of them irrelevant?

Jake dialed a number on his cell phone and said, “It’s done. And I think it worked.”

Chapter 2

December 2019

Amena spiked the ball and I dove for it, barely able to get it back into the air. A floater that I knew she was going to smash. She leapt up and hammered it again with a little bit of rage. I didn’t even try, watching it bounce away. I looked at her and said, “Really?”

She gave me a little impish grin and said, “I thought your reflexes were quicker. Sorry.”

We were in our small driveway on a narrow lane in Charleston,