Episode 29

9th Reconnaissance Wing

Beale Air Force Base, CA

“Command wants to know about ALL emissions?”

“That’s right.”  The small conference room just off the operations center was very quiet.  Inside the secure area, past the dual-door man trap, there were no casual passers-by to hear the conversation.  Cell phones were not allowed inside so there were no distractions, either.

“They know that they are talking about tens of thousands of sources right?”

“I am sure they do.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

The order to quantify all radar emissions in the South China Sea had come down to the 9th early in the morning.  As usual, it was down to Sergeants to decide how to make things happen.  The wing had spent the past few years trying to track single terrorists in Afghanistan and other less well-known places.  Today, they had a new mission.

For an RQ-4 Global Hawk or the newer stealthier RQ-180, tracking a single radar emitter was child’s play.  In many ways, much simpler than tracking a person or a single truck in Afghanistan.  It would simply isolate the correct frequency and then triangulate.  That wasn’t the issue here.  The issue here was tracking thousands of emission sources, categorizing them, eliminating all the “non-military” ones and then isolating all the remaining military targets.

Some of this was automated.  The system could tell the difference between a commercial fishing vessel and a Chinese Frigate just based on radar frequencies and power output.

However, the difference between a commercial air traffic control radar and a military air traffic control radar was largely academic.

Master Sergeant Nicole Williams had worked in operations for the 9th for over two years.  She loved her job and loved the 9th.  Being stationed in California had given her the opportunity to explore California Gold Country and she had even learned to ski last winter.  Not something that the daughter of a baptist minister from Tuskegee Alabama had expected to do when she joined the Air Force at eighteen.

Williams knew this was her chance to contribute to the war.  “This is what we’re going to.  You remember that senior airman that was showing us how he could use machine learning to interpret reconnaissance data?”

“Timmy?  The one who tried to pick you up last week?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy.  Get him on this and pull in a couple of the other tech weenies.  There is no way we are doing this manually.  I want a report of every “suspicious” radar in the AOA every hour on the hour.  We refine the data set, remove the false positives and repeat.  We do this every hour, every day.  Once the report is good enough, we start forwarding to command.”

“Right.  We’re gonna need a bigger space to work.”

“Let the captain know.  I don’t think anyone says no.”

“Roger that.”

Williams called own the hall to the ops center “James!  We are gonna need at least three birds up at all times.”

“OK Sarge.  You gonna tell the captain first?”

“Right.  On it.”