Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📕

‘All my exercises and evolutions are easy,’ Dawood replied, ‘as you know.’

‘Actually, they’re not,’ the lieutenant responded, ‘so give me a clue.’

‘Okay. Full tanks, full weapons load, half surveillance and half weapons delivery for a bit of variety, and most of the flight in daylight. Does that sound easy enough for you?’

There’s a kind of tradition in the armed forces of all countries that most exercises and activities should begin at a time usually described as something like ‘crikey o’clock’, before even the earliest of the early birds are awake and prepping for the dawn chorus, but many drone sorties were flown during daylight hours, to the relief of those involved.

‘Depends on when and where, I guess,’ Lieutenant Nagell said, ‘but at least I won’t get bored looking through my straw.’

Predator and Reaper pilots have often described controlling their drones as like flying a normal aircraft while looking through a straw.

‘Okay. You ready for the briefing?’

Nagell nodded and sat down in the front row of seats in the aircrew briefing room. A slim and wiry man with closely cropped blond hair and an air of relaxed competence about him, Nagell was a former F-16 jockey who’d transferred to the slightly less frenetic world of remotely piloted aircraft a couple of years earlier. As he would explain to anyone prepared to listen to him, he’d had a successful flying career, basing this statement on the somewhat shaky premise that he’d had the same number of take-offs as landings, meaning that he’d never crashed an aircraft. In fact, he had been regarded not simply as a very competent pilot but also as a man who never got flustered. His nickname, and the name printed on his flying helmet, had been a testament to this: No Sweat.

No Sweat Nagell had entirely embraced the idea of remotely controlled air combat on the grounds that it was just as effective as riding a Fighting Falcon in reheat but a hell of a lot quieter and more comfortable because he could sip a cup of coffee, eat a sandwich or even take a trip to the crapper mid-mission. And he could sleep in his own bed every night instead of sharing a two-berth hut in Kandahar or Baghdad or somewhere surrounded by mosquitoes out for blood and alternately listening out for the whine of incoming mortars or the sound of his hut companion farting. For Nagell, it was no contest.

He wasn’t the only man to take a seat as three other officers, two of them responsible for the drone’s sensors and the third the second pilot for the day’s flight, strolled in moments later and also sat down. The controlling team for each Reaper comprised a pilot and a sensor operator, backed up by a Mission Intelligence Coordinator for operational sorties, and it was normal operating procedure to brief the relief team at the same time as those who’d be controlling the Reaper for the first part of the mission.

‘Met, please,’ Dawood ordered, and a slim, bespectacled man stepped forward and used a handheld remote to display a single schematic map of the local area on the projection screen.

‘I’ll give you the real short version: it’s a beautiful day for flying. Winds light and variable, unlimited visibility and sod all in the way of clouds. Eight eighths blue, in a nutshell. No change expected before tomorrow, roughly mid-morning.’

Cloud cover is reported by meteorological officers and air traffic controllers to aircrew in octas, meaning one eighth, so four octas means that half the sky is obscured by cloud. ‘Eight eighths blue’ is a common military shorthand term to indicate a sky devoid of all cloud cover.

There were no questions about that, predictably enough, and Sami Dawood cracked on with the operational part of the briefing. The Reaper was to get airborne and climb to its assigned cruising altitude of 30,500 feet, flight level 305, well below its operational ceiling of 50,000 feet. Flight levels are a kind of verbal shorthand, the altitude of an aircraft in thousands of feet with the last two zeros knocked off, and above about 25,000 feet are based on whole thousands. So, strictly speaking, flight level 305 didn’t exist, which was why it had been chosen.

The allocation of flight levels worldwide is based on a very simple rule. If the aircraft’s track is between 0° and 179° the flight level must be an odd number – 190 or 230, for example – and if it’s between 180° and 359° an even flight level must be chosen, like 180 or 220. This provides the most basic possible separation so that aircraft flying in opposite directions will always be vertically separated by at least one thousand feet. Selecting an intermediate flight level, in this case between flight level 300 and flight level 310, meant that no civilian aircraft would be at that altitude, so that no matter what happened the drone would always be at least five hundred feet clear of all air traffic. Of course, the Reaper would be under control from the ground control station, the GCS, and its on-board radar would alert the remote pilot to any conflicting traffic, but it provided an additional margin of safety because of the drone’s relatively slow speed: even at its maximum velocity it would be travelling less than half as quickly as most civilian airliners.

It was to maintain a cruising speed of 150 knots to conserve fuel – flat-out, the Reaper could reach 240 knots – and proceed north-west to Lake Ontario, where it would descend to 15,500 feet and carry out a series of surveillance runs aimed at identifying ground-based and waterborne targets along the southern shore. That phase completed, the pilot was to turn the Reaper east, climb to high level again and transit the short distance to the Adirondacks air-to-ground range at Fort Drum, near Watertown in Jefferson County at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. The attack headings, altitudes, targets and the weapons to be used there would be