Sam Fisher- Quarter Mile ASE

  First, though, he needed to know what lay between the berm and the goat farm. He pulled out the SC-20 and flipped the selector to ASE, or All-Seeing Eye. Of all the tools at his disposal, this was one of Fisher’s favorites. The ASE was a microcamera embedded in a tiny parachute made from a substance called aerogel.

  Consisting of 90 percent air, aerogel could hold four thousand times its own weight and had a mind-bending amount of surface area: Spread flat, each cubic inch of aerogel—roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another—would cover a football field from end zone to end zone. The ASE’s palm-size, self-deploying aerogel chute could, depending on weather conditions, keep it aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird’s-eye view of nearly a square mile.

  This newest generation of ASE had been fitted with a self-destruct mechanism, à la Mission Impossible. The camera’s interior, coated with a magnesium-lithium mixture, would ignite at a touch of a button on Fisher’s OPSAT screen, turning the camera and its aerogel chute into a charred, unrecognizable lump of plastic.

  He took a moment to gauge the wind, then raised the SC-20 and pulled the trigger. With a soft thwump, the ASE arched into the sky over the berm. Fisher tapped the OPSAT, bringing up the ASE’s screen. The view he had was a quarter mile above the berm, looking straight down. The wind was negligible, drifting southeast to northwest at a slow walking pace.

  The ground on the north side of the berm was also mostly featureless, with scattered trees and scrub brush and the empty artillery revetments set in a semicircle, each one a crescent of stacked sandbags. Fifty yards to the east of these, a curving S-shaped road ran northward to the goat farm, where it turned sharply right and ended in what looked like a gravel parking lot.

  Fisher switched to night vision. In the washed-out gray green he could immediately pick out his two berm guards, both of whom were walking along the base of the berm toward each other. North of them, a hundred feet away, two more soldiers sat smoking atop the revetment’s sandbags. He saw no one else. On the OPSAT screen he scrolled through the options until he came to SEQUENTIAL STILLS>ONE SECOND INTERVAL>OVERLAY TO MAP. He hit EXECUTE. High above him the ASE would be taking a sequence of ten photos, which it would transmit to the OPSAT, which in turn would match the ASE’s landmarks with its own map of the area, producing a layered NV/standard satellite image.

  He switched to infrared and repeated the same process, but as he was about to self-destruct the ASE, a gust of wind caught it. In the few seconds it took the camera’s internal gyroscopes to steady the image, Fisher caught a glimpse of color. He panned the ASE around until he spotted it again.

  Hello, friend . . .

  A man-shaped figure outlined in the reds, blues, and greens of the IR lay prone in the scrub brush north of the artillery positions and beside the S-shaped road. This would be an observation post, he knew, probably a sniper equipped with a night-vision scope and a radio link to a command station somewhere. Anything that came up that road or over the berm would immediately fall into his crosshairs.

  Damn. This complicated things. Then he thought about it. Maybe not.

  He tapped the ASE’s self-destruct button.

- Fallout, Chapter 42