Read Predator for Free Online Page B

the technicians fly it, and hired Hertenstein a few weeks later.
    *   *   *
    A little before noon on November 30, 1983, Jack Hertenstein and two Air Force engineers sent by DARPA were standing on a dry lakebed at El Mirage, near Adelanto, California, under clear skies, watching a new Albatross lazily orbit a two-mile aerial course about a thousand feet overhead. The Albatross would continue to orbit above the three men for an hour, and then another hour, and then another hour.
    Over the past two years, Karem and his two-man team had not only built a better prototype but also improved nearly every piece of equipment needed to operate it, from an analog autopilot Hertenstein designed that measured air pressure at the wingtips and stabilized the plane as it flew, to a data link that beamed to the ground information such as speed, altitude, and climb rate. With Hertenstein standing ready to take over with a radio control box if necessary, Karem and Machin were taking turns piloting the Albatross from inside a nearby camping trailer. They had converted the trailer to a ground control station for the Albatross by removing the air conditioner to make space and installing a small control panel with a couple of TV monitors and joysticks. For this DARPA test flight, which had begun with a rolling takeoff at 11:39 a.m., they had also installed a special device in the Albatross to measure how much fuel the drone was burning each minute it flew.
    At two hundred minutes, Hertenstein told Karem they should land because the sun would soon be setting and it would be unsafe to fly with no lights on the Albatross. Using his radio control box, Hertenstein took over the flying—and had to break off his first attempt to conclude the flight when a dirt biker who appeared from out of nowhere zipped directly across the drone’s landing path. On the next try, Hertenstein brought the Albatross in smoothly, flaring the nose upward to slow its final approach speed from about sixty-three to fifty-five miles per hour as it touched down. The wheels hit the lakebed at 3:14 p.m., bringing the test’s total flight time to three hours, thirty-five minutes. The fuel monitor showed that, at the rate at which its go-kart engine had been consuming gas, the Albatross could have remained airborne an astonishing forty-eight hours or more—five to ten times as long as any RPV ever flown.
    The DARPA official in charge of Karem’s project, Robert M. Williams, was gratified to hear the test results, and not only because the data confirmed his own calculations. When Williams had told some Air Force experts that Karem was developing a drone able to carry close to its own weight in fuel and fly for two days and maybe more, they assured him that no one could design such an aircraft, that physics made it impossible. Abe Karem had proved them wrong. But when he looked upon what he had made, he knew it was just a beginning.

 
    2
    THE BLUES
    They called it the Yale Daily News Asian Expedition, a rather grandiose appellation, perhaps, for four college students on a road trip. But even in his twentieth year, Neal Blue liked to think big, and the concept had been his. The plan was to spend the summer of 1955 driving a car from Paris to Calcutta, skirting the Iron Curtain to learn how people on the edge of the Soviet Bloc lived and how their economies functioned. Even in his second year at Yale University, Blue was keenly interested in such matters.
    Medium in height, modest in weight, chiseled in his features, sophisticated beyond his years, he was the eldest son of hardworking Denver, Colorado, Realtors James E. and Virginia Neal Blue, politically active Republicans whose pro-business, anticommunist views were passed on to their offspring. Having bought and sold used cars during his high school years because he could make a lot more money that way than by mowing lawns, Neal already knew he would be an entrepreneur after he finished Yale. He