Predator by Richard Whittle

for over the past four and a half years he had been moving rapidly to capitalize on the success of the Albatross technology demonstrator he had built in his garage for DARPA. Within weeks of the November 1983 flight that proved the Albatross’s phenomenal endurance, Karem’s DARPA ally Bob Williams told him to put together a detailed proposal to develop a larger “endurance RPV” that would be able to carry enough weight to perform military missions. Williams said they would call the new drone Amber, and their aim would be to give the military a revolutionary, days-long aerial reconnaissance capability. DARPA’s leaders would never invest much money in such a project, Williams knew, for the agency’s mission was to advance military science, not procure defense equipment. But he was confident his bosses would put at least a few million dollars into the project as seed money, if he could get the armed services to invest as well.
    Persuading the services to adopt the cutting-edge technologies DARPA fostered was never a requirement, but it was always a goal, and Williams knew he had a good argument to take to them. After all, Karem had practically defied the laws of physics by designing a plane that weighed 105 pounds empty, 200 pounds fully fueled, and could stay aloft two days on 15.2 gallons of gas. Rather than having to fly dull and sometimes dangerous reconnaissance missions with manned aircraft whose crews had to land after a few hours and risked being shot down over hostile territory, what if the military could just hang an RPV over a target area for days at a time and have it send back imagery of what was happening on the ground below? Williams thought that would be great.
    Getting the armed services to change their ways was a Herculean task, but Williams knew the timing for selling such a project to the military was the best in years. In 1984, for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War, senior leaders of the Department of the Navy and the Army were taking a serious interest in reconnaissance drones. So was the Central Intelligence Agency. Each had its own reasons.
    Early that year, the Navy Department’s aggressive young secretary, John F. Lehman Jr., had become interested enough in drones to instruct subordinates to buy the Marine Corps an Israeli “mini-RPV” called the Mastiff, and to get U.S. industry involved in developing something like it for both the Marines and the Navy. Lehman had seen the Mastiff fly in Israel in January, during a trip whose purpose was to look for equipment and weapons for the Navy and Marine Corps, which operates under the Navy Department. Lehman scheduled his visit after the most traumatic event in recent Marine Corps history: a terrorist bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 23, 1983, that killed 241 U.S. servicemen, mostly marines. The marines were in Lebanon as part of an international peacekeeping force sent to help tamp down a long-running sectarian civil war. A Muslim terrorist had driven an explosives-laden truck into their barracks, and by the time Lehman landed in Israel, Marine Corps leaders were determined to find better ways to conduct “tactical reconnaissance,” such as detecting enemies before they attack fixed positions.
    Lehman saw the Mastiff fly at an Israeli air base in the Negev Desert. At first glance, the drone looked like little more than a big model airplane, but its boxy fuselage had a television camera inside, and Lehman was impressed when his hosts took him into a control van to see live images that the Mastiff was beaming back to a monitor. As a pilot in the van flew the Mastiff by remote control over a practice bombing range a few miles distant, Lehman could see defunct tanks and other vehicles used for target practice by Israeli fighter plane pilots. When the drone circled back to the base, Lehman could look at the monitor and identify the types of aircraft parked on the tarmac. The Mastiff could stay