Collateral Damage Read Free

under Turk’s command and he could override at any point, they were every bit as capable a human pilot of fighting on their own.
    The aircraft were targeting a government tank formation near Wadi al-Hayat. Located at the north side of a small cluster of hills, the camp looked out over a wide expanse of desert. There were several towns and villages in the area. These were claimed as loyal to the government, but that status was in doubt. If recent history was a guide, the inhabitants would join the rebels as soon as a sizable force got close. And that would happen once the tanks were destroyed.
    The primary targets were T–72s, venerable Russian-made armor equipped with 125mm main guns. The tanks had not been used in either this war or the 2011 conflict, but were nonetheless operational; they had moved up to their present position only a few days before. The Libyan government had recently obtained a shipment of ammunition on the black market.
    The attack plan was simple. The UAVs carried four antiarmor Hellfire missiles each, had been given four tanks as targets, and would attack much as a group of manned attack planes. The autonomous programming in the UAVs allowed them to do this without human guidance or input, though Turk could intervene and redirect the attack if he wished.
    Turk had run a half-dozen missions along these very same lines, and with the exception of the Mirages, this looked to be as routine as all the others. Using a hand gesture—his flight suit was specially wired to interpret gestures in conjunction with the command context, or the screen displayed on his visor—he pulled up the overall sitrep map. This was a large area plot that superimposed the positions of all four Sabres as well as the Tigershark on a satellite image. The real-time sitrep showed the four UAVs coming in exactly as programmed, flying at about fifty feet over the sand dunes just northwest of the encampment.
    That made it difficult for the mobile SA–6 antiaircraft battery protecting the camp to spot them, let alone target them. A pair of ZSU–23 four-barreled mobile antiaircraft weapons were parked in their path, but the radar-equipped weapons had apparently not found them either; all was quiet as the small UAVs approached.
    Turk had taken the Tigershark some one hundred miles to the southwest as he engaged the Mirages. He now swung back to get a view of the attack. He was still about fifty miles away—well beyond the range even of the high-powered optical cameras the Tigershark carried—as the first aircraft reached its attack point.
    â€œVisual preset two,” he told the computer. “Image screen B Sabre One.”
    The command opened a new window on his virtual cockpit screen, displaying the feed from Sabre One.
    Turk watched the aircraft launch a pair of missiles at the command and control vans for the SA–6 site. Launched from approximately five miles away, the Sabre’s missiles used an optical guidance system to find their targets: the small sensors in their head essentially looked at the terrain, identified their targets based on preprogrammed profiles—photos, in this case—and flew at them. This meant that there was no signal from the missiles or their launch planes to alert the defenses to their presence; the first thing the Libyans knew of the attack were the explosions, which occurred almost simultaneously.
    The destruction of the two vans rendered the missile battery useless, but the enemy’s SA–6 missiles themselves were still relatively high-value targets, and as soon as the destruction was recorded, Sabre One’s combat computer pushed the plane into a second wave attack on the launchers, two tanklike chassis sporting three missiles instead of a turret.
    The first strike created an enormous secondary explosion, shrapnel and powder shooting across the complex. The Sabre’s second missile disappeared into a cloud of smoke; a bright burst of flame