Darpa Alpha

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“Sure beats binoculars,” the sergeant opined softly, one hand deftly slipping another stick of odorless gum into his mouth, the other holding a four-inch-square monitor. “Clear as crystal.”

Lieutenant Sammy Ramon nodded as he too watched the monitor his sergeant was holding. The live video feed of the lake’s research facility a quarter of a mile below was coming in from the twelve-man team’s tiny eight-inch MAV recon plane. The micro air vehicle, developed by DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research and Projects Agency, was made up of collapsible transparent wings and tail and equipped with a Viccol video camera and laser range finder. To get a closer look at the monitor, the lieutenant, using his left hand to remove his “Fritz” Kevlar helmet, his right to slide his M-16 forward to his side, momentarily wiped the beaded perspiration from his drab olive-green face paint, the latter indistinguishable from the camouflage paint of his collapsible Paratrooper mountain bike nearby. For security reasons, the other eleven men in the lieutenant’s commando squad hadn’t been given the precise in-country coordinates of the enemy naval base below, yet each man, looking down from his hide toward the lake, knew the exact layout of the base, everything from the small data hut on the lake’s sandy shoreline to the bigger and more vital research barge offshore.

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