He saw the exit sign, and looked at the offside rearview mirror for following headlights. The only pair in sight were a half mile back; judging by the running lights, a semi. Elena moved onto the off-ramp. She was part of the disguise, not only female, but Hispanic-looking and speaking—a Mexican Jew whose Hebrew was limited. Her English was quite good though, with an accent she could thicken as needed.
Lights on dim, they drove a narrow blacktopped road that wound upward through chapparal foothills. It steepened, the winding became a series of switchbacks, and soon they entered forest—pine, eventually with a mixture of fir. With its heavy burden, the van’s engine labored on the grades. When they arrived at the crest, Elena pulled off on a short side road leading to an overlook. By day there might have been scenery, but now, all Rafi saw was the sodden sky. At this elevation, he told himself, they were lucky the rain wasn’t snow.
Wearing a slicker, he got out to guide Elena with hand signals. She parked with the rear doors facing east, with plenty of room between them and the overlook’s waist-high stone safety wall. Then she set the parking brake, leaving the motor running to keep the battery charged. Even though they wouldn’t actually launch the bird, the test program required unloading it and “going through the motions.” It was a nuisance, but the hardware for monitoring was built into the bird, and only functioned in operating mode.
Elena stayed in the cab, out of the rain, which was better than all right with Rafi. That way she wouldn’t see and wonder about some of the things he planned to do.
After opening the rear doors, he took out a pair of chocks and blocked the rear wheels. Inside, he could see the nameless technician at his keyboard, doing what, Rafi had no idea. They were to test the bird’s guidance program, that was all he knew. He himself stayed outside in the weather, watching the heavy-duty telescoping ramp extrude from the cargo section, driven by a powerful electric motor. It extruded straight for two meters, supported by folding legs with wheels, till the first hinged joint was clear. Then legs and ramp began to fold, while the extrusion continued.
It seemed to Rafi that the ramp, with its tracks, must have cost $30,000 or more, built and installed, even at current prices. And it had to be compatible with the bird’s launch computer. The vehicle’s original struts, or whatever it had had, and its brakes, must have been replaced with something stronger. The motor probably had, too, and the van’s electrical system must have been augmented. While the cost of the missile itself had surely been several times that of all the rest. A lot of money for the times. Obviously Ben David had very major resources.
When Baran had first mentioned having the bird, Rafi had researched the available, non-confidential information on it, including testing procedures. In military situations, the purpose of monitoring a Ninja Junior was to support ESAK installations—electronic seek and kill—reporting any hostile discovery events and interception attempts detected by the bird’s sensors, and finally reporting its arrival on target. The reason for this test, however, could hardly be ESAK.
And from something Baran himself had said, Rafi had guessed that the bird, as delivered, lacked the military guidance software. So someone had had to write a program for one. Thus it seemed to Rafi that this would be a virtual flight—what the military termed a planetary matrix exploration—to test that program.
It was dangerous information for Rafi to have. His function was simply to see certain actions carried out, without knowing what they meant.
After a minute, extrusion was complete, the ramp in three segments, one within the truck, one slanting down to the ground, and the outermost forming a launch base. But the electric motor still hummed loudly, and the bird itself began to emerge, its sleek nose followed by an uptilted body with stubby wings. It rode a meter-and-a-half carriage, that on the ramp’s sloping mid-section, adjusted itself to the bird’s center of gravity.
When the carriage reached the end, the motor shut off. Now Rafi could hear a much smaller, whisperlike hum from inside the Ninja Junior. The sound, he supposed, of its onboard computer booting up.