The first flight, with Paulson as lead, would take off at 2200. The second group, led by Ginella, would come off the runway three hours later, at 0100.

The two flights would overlap for a brief period, but the general idea was that the first flight would be relieved by the second, which would operate until daylight.

“What happens if they don’t find the guy by then?” asked Grizzly.

“Then he’s not alive,” said Ginella. She glanced at her watch. It was a little past 1900, or 7:00 P.M. “There’s a little time to grab something to eat, but make it quick. Anyone that’s too tired, I want that hand up now.”

She looked at Turk. He wasn’t about to admit fatigue.

Assigned to the second group, he would fly wing to Grizzly; Ginella explained that he had never flown at night with the special gear the Hogs used. Coop was flying as her wingman.

Li was in the first group as Paulson’s wing.

“I’m sorry for you,” Turk told her as they went over to get some dinner.

“For what?”

“Paulson can be a real prick.”

“I think he’s a pretty good pilot.” Turk felt a little stab in his heart, until she added, “A class A jackass and a jerk besides, but he flies well.”

While they ate, Grizzly regaled them with stories about his first nighttime refuel in a Hog—not particularly morale inducing, as he had fallen off the fuel probe not once, not twice, but three times, which the boomer—the crewman manning the refuel probe—had claimed was a new Hog record. Turk gathered that the difficulty of the refuel was the reason he’d been relegated to the back of the line.

“The boomer, though, claimed the worst pilots at night refuel are the F–22 jocks,” said Grizzly.

That got a jealous laugh from the others, even though it was probably not true.

Turk hardly touched his food, spending most of his time watching Li instead. She had long slim fingers. They were expressive, even just holding a fork.

He wanted to ask her why and how she had become a pilot, but Grizzly started another story about how he’d spent “a year one week” flying Hog missions with a SEAL team.

His stories were too involved to be interrupted. The ops weren’t the interesting part; the shenanigans, missteps, complications, and above all the nightly parties with members of the SEAL team, were the real point. According to Grizzly, they had gotten into a total of ten fights in six days, including one all-out brawl with members of a mixed martial-arts troupe.

True or not, it was a good yarn. Li, anxious to get ready for her flight, excused herself before it ended. Unable to find an excuse to accompany her that wouldn’t sound overly corny, Turk watched her leave.

Even her walk was sexy.

He was glad that he didn’t have to fly with Paulson, but the long wait before the sortie weighed heavily. He finally found a couch in a corner of the room next to the ready room and bedded down.

He started to drift off. He saw Li in his mind, starting to slip into unconsciousness. The image was pleasant, but almost immediately it morphed into Ginella. They started having sex.

Turk opened his eyes. Grizzly was shaking him.

God!

Turk practically jumped to the ceiling.

“Rise and shine, bro,” laughed Grizzly, who fortunately had no idea of the dream he’d just woken him from. “We got some flyin’ to do.”

18

Libya

Following Halit’s advice, Rubeo decided to avoid the gate south of Tripoli, riding about twenty miles across open desert to reach a road that connected to the main highway south.

The road was barely discernible from the dirt, grit, and sand that washed over it. They drove up through a succession of hills. From a distance the terrain looked like the rumpled back of a giant sleeping facedown on the earth. Up close they were brown and almost featureless, bland nonentities that only slowed them down.

So much of life was like that, thought Rubeo. From a distance things looked remarkable. And then you got there and they were bland and boring.

Even his own life. For all his work in artificial intelligence systems, in related technologies, in the interface between man and machine—what accomplishments filled him with excitement?

The work that he was doing now on autonomous machines? On computers that really, truly, thought for themselves—not in the areas where they had been programmed to think, but in areas that they knew nothing about.

The Sabres were a small by-product of that work—a distant offshoot, really, because of course war had to be programmed into a machine.

And programmed out. The machine needed to be taught limits so it would not turn on its master, as everyone who had ever picked up a scifi novel surely knew.

Had he not given the Sabres proper limits? Or was it a mechanical flaw?

Some combination, surely.

They had not yet ruled out direct action from the enemy. But that seemed to make little sense. Why do something to cause more casualties? The aim would be to have the plane destroy itself.

“What do you think of this?” asked Jons, handing him one of the team iPads. The device was equipped with a satellite modem in place of the usual cell and wireless connections; the com system used a series of anonymous servers to hide the identity and origins of the Web requests.

The screen showed a news story on the UAV incident. Labeled “Analysis,” it recounted some of the popular theories on what had happened. Most were far off base or so vague that they could be describing a car accident.

But the paragraphs Jons had highlighted speculated that the attack had been made because of software problems. And it cited anonymous e-mails from “developers” indicating that the aircraft were making targeting decisions on their own.

In contrast to the rest of the piece, there was plenty of well-reasoned thought on the subject, enough to convince Rubeo that the source knew a great deal about the problems involved. He scrolled back to the top and reread the story carefully. Much of it was generic, so much so that he couldn’t figure out whether the writer, as opposed to the source, actually knew what he was talking about.

“It’s not very specific,” said Rubeo, handing the iPad back. “This middle part is interesting, but I don’t know that he has any real sources inside our organization. He might know someone at another company that’s working on the problem.”

“That’s what I thought.” Jons opened the browser to a new page. “But I did a couple of searches on some of the phrases just to be sure. Look at this list.”

There were twenty-eight matches from bulletin boards and comment areas. All used similar language to describe the accident and the theory that the aircraft had been under their own autonomous control when the attack was made.

“These drones are being operated without human supervision,” read one. “They decide who to kill and who to spare. The man who invented them, Ray Rubeo, thinks machines are better than people.”

The latter was a rather common criticism, not just of Rubeo, but of practically any scientist who worked in the area. But the fact that it was being directed at one person, rather than a team, bothered Rubeo immensely. Coupled with the alleged e-mail, it looked as if someone either in his company or at least tangentially related was leaking information.

“What do you think?” asked Jons.

“Someone doesn’t like AI,” said Rubeo, handing the computer back.

“Or you. You’re mentioned by name in these. My guess is that a bunch of organizations got the e-mail cited in that article,” added Jons. “It looks like a campaign.”