Bad Luck and Trouble

deal.”
    Diana Bond paused a long moment. Then she nodded.
    “I’ll trade,” she said. “I’ll give you outline details, and in return you swear on those sixty years in uniform that they’ll go no further.”
    “Deal.”
    “And after I talk to you this one time, I never hear from you again.”
    “Deal.”
    Another long pause. Like Bond was wrestling with her conscience.
    “Little Wing is a new type of torpedo,” she said. “For the Navy’s Pacific submarine fleet. It’s fairly conventional apart from an enhanced control capability because of new electronics.”
    Reacher smiled.
    “Good try,” he said. “But we don’t believe you.”
    “Why not?”
    “We were never going to believe your first answer. Obviously you were going to try to blow us off. Plus, most of those sixty years we mentioned were spent listening to liars, so we know one when we see one. Plus, some of those sixty years were spent reading all kinds of Pentagon bullshit, so we know how they use words. A new torpedo would more likely be called ‘Little Fish.’ Plus, New Age was a clean-sheet start-up with a free choice of where to build, and if they were working for the Navy they’d have chosen San Diego or Connecticut or Newport News, Virginia. But they didn’t. They chose East LA instead. And the closest places to East LA are Air Force places, including Edwards, where you just came from, and the name is Little Wing, so it’s an airborne device.”
    Diana Bond shrugged.
    “I had to try,” she said.
    Reacher said, “Try again.”
    Another pause.
    “It’s an infantry weapon,” she said. “Army, not Air Force. New Age is in East LA to be near Fort Irwin, not Edwards. But you’re right, it’s airborne.”
    “Specifically?”
    “It’s a man-portable shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. The next generation.”
    “What does it do?”
    Diana Bond shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”
    “You’ll have to. Or your boss goes down.”
    “That’s not fair.”
    “Compared to what?”
    “All I’ll say is that it’s a revolutionary advance.”
    “We’ve heard that kind of thing before. It means it’ll be out-of-date a year from now, rather than the usual six months.”
    “We think two years, actually.”
    “What does it do?”
    “You’re not going to call the newspapers. You’d be selling out your country.”
    “Try us.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “As lung cancer.”
    “I don’t believe this.”
    “Suck it up. Or your boss needs a new job tomorrow. As far as that goes, we’d be doing our country a favor.”
    “You don’t like him.”
    “Does anyone?”
    “The newspapers wouldn’t publish.”
    “Dream on.”
    Bond was quiet for a minute more.
    “Promise it will go no further,” she said.
    “I already have,” Reacher said.
    “It’s complicated.”
    “Like rocket science?”
    “You know the Stinger?” Bond asked. “The current generation?”
    Reacher nodded. “I’ve seen them in action. We all have.”
    “What do they do?”
    “They chase the heat signature of jet exhaust.”
    “But from below,” Bond said. “Which is a key weakness. They have to climb and maneuver at the same time. Which makes them relatively slow and relatively cumbersome. They show up on downward-looking radar. It’s possible for a pilot to outmaneuver them. And they’re vulnerable to countermeasures, like decoy flares.”
    “But?”
    “Little Wing is revolutionary. Like most great ideas, it starts with a very simple premise. It completely ignores its target on the way up. It does all its work on the way down.”
    “I see,” Reacher said.
    Bond nodded. “Going up, it’s just a dumb rocket. Very, very fast. It reaches about eighty thousand feet and then it slows and stops and topples. Starts to fall back down again. Then the electronics switch on and it starts hunting its target. It has boosters to maneuver with, and control surfaces, and because gravity is doing most of the work, the maneuvering can be incredibly precise.”
    “It falls on its prey from above,” Reacher said. “Like a hawk.”
    Bond nodded again.
    “At unbelievable speed,” she said. “Way supersonic. It can’t miss. And it can’t be stopped. Airborne missile defense radar always looks downward. Decoy flares always launch downward. The way things have been until now, planes are very vulnerable from above. They could afford to be. Because very little came at them from above. But it’s different now. That’s why this is so