The controls for the Predator RQ-1A Unmanned Aerial Vehicle were simple enough. They’d been designed for the average 21st Century soldier and were a near replica of the gamepad for the Sony Playstation. You used one thumbstick for the throttle and the other to steer while vehicle systems were mapped to the face and shoulder buttons-raising the landing gear, moving the nose-mounted cameras and so on. Child’s play, I figured. I had studied the weapon system back in the old days, back when I had a life and a career. I felt confident and alert as my little plane leapt into the air off Governors Island and streaked toward Manhattan.
“Watch out for sudden updrafts,” Kreutzer said. “They can be a real bitch.” He had the second seat in the cramped, overheated trailer. As systems specialist he had to keep the aircraft’s avionics and telemetry streams coming in clear and legible. He faced three big monitors where he could display and manipulate his “product.”
The Standard Oil Building came up on my right and I slewed over a little to avoid its spire and then something went wrong. The Predator kept trying to flip itself over, its right wingtip popping up again every time I tried to bring it down. I poured on a little more throttle to try to break free of what I thought was mild turbulence and suddenly a wall of wind slapped the vehicle across the nose, sucking it down into a superfast spiraling descent that could more rightly be called “falling out of the sky”.
The UAV smacked Broadway at an angle and skipped like a stone across the roofs of several parked cars, finally skittering to a halt in the middle of Bowling Green on its back. The camera showed us a shaky view of the Charging Bull statue and a partially cloudy sky.
Kreutzer’s face curled into a look of infinite smugness as he showed me what I’d done wrong. On his product screen he show me the last few seconds of the Predator’s flight as a PowerPoint slideshow. I saw the spire on the Standard Oil Building and the column of air beyond where Morris Street butted up against Broadway. Then he maximized the infrared view of the same scene and showed me a false color vortex spinning madly at the corner of the two streets-wind shear generated by the difference in temperature between the sunny and shaded sides of the buildings.
“Okay. Lesson learned,” I said. My heart was still racing a little from the excitement of piloting the Predator. When Jack came in to find out what was going on I let Kreutzer explain. They both turned and stared at me when I shrieked.
A dead man with no skin on the top of his head had come to investigate the Predator where it lay in Bowling Green. His inverted nose wrinkled as he sniffed the downed plane’s optics. I had become so immersed in flying the UAV that I’d forgotten it was half a mile away and the walking corpse couldn’t get me through the screen.
I switched off the view and rubbed my hands together. “Let’s get another one assembled,” I said. “I’m ready to go again.”