“Is it?” The RX-16 is Northrop’s RPV, a remotely piloted vehicle, which in certain quarters of the Electronic Systems Division is all the rage now: a robot jet craft with classified speeds, perhaps up to Mach 7, and capable of turns and rolls that would kill a pilot. Made of kevlar and other lightweight stealth materials, it has the radar signature of a bee. It’s one of Northrop’s most successful recent contracts, and McPherson was in fact aware it is about to go into production, but he didn’t want to say so.

“Yeah. Great plane.” Feldkirk looks wistful. “I bet it would be a real kick to fly one. But the time for manned fighter planes has passed, it looks like. Anyway, we’ve got some ideas for the use of this RX-16 in the European theater.”

Use against the threat of the Warsaw Pact invasion, then, the Big Contingency that has stimulated so much of the conventional weapons upgrade spiral between the superpowers. McPherson nods. “Yeah?”

“Well, here’s what we’re thinking. The RX is ready, and for some time to come we think it’ll be a good deal faster and more maneuverable than anything that the Soviets will have. Now if the tanks ever roll, we’d like to be able to use the RXs against them, because if we can do that, it might turn into a shooting gallery situation. We have in mind flying the RXs straight down at full speed from sixty thousand feet to terrain-following level, having them make covert runs down there, finding a dozen tanks and clotheslining the Harris Stalker Nine missiles to them, then popping out and up. And turning around for other runs, until the missiles and fuel run out.”

“Stuka pilots would recognize the flight pattern,” McPherson remarks, thinking about it. “So you need a navigation system for the terrain following.” Tree-top contouring at a mile a second or more.…

“That’s right.”

“And covert, you say.” Which means they don’t want the plane sending out investigating signals that can be picked up by enemy detection systems. This contradicts the desire for tight navigation and makes things tough.

“That’s right.” The standard device for locating targets, Feldkirk goes on, a YAG laser operating at the 1.06 micron wavelength, won’t do anymore. The new window for targeting lasers is from about eight to fourteen microns, which fits between the upper and lower ends of the Soviets’ latest radar systems. “This means a CO-two laser, probably.”

But CO2 lasers don’t penetrate cloud anywhere near as well as those using yttrium/aluminum/garnet. “You want it all-weather?” McPherson asks.

“No, just under the weather, day and night.”

So they weren’t concerned about fog, for instance. McPherson suddenly imagines the Soviet tanks waiting for fog to start World War Three.…

“How much weight?”