Desert Ghosts (2) +20
The tank that had lapped the desert training ground returned to the MRO base, panting as if it had just run a race.
When the tracks stopped and the pale dust settled, someone came rushing out of the maintenance bay.
A bushy, bandit-like beard and grease-stained coveralls.
At a glance, he looked like a Saudi Army maintenance chief who had spent at least thirty years in the field: Chief Warrant Officer Khalid.
The moment the tank halted, he ran straight to the commander’s hatch where Lieutenant Fahad was seated and opened it himself.
Then he folded both hands respectfully and bowed.
"The dust storm was severe. Are you all right, Lieutenant?"
For military hierarchy, his manner was far too deferential.
He looked more like a hotel manager handling VIP protocol.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Lieutenant Fahad tossed off his gloves and replied, "Oh, Khalid. Prepare some ice water for me. I'm thirsty."
"Yes. I will bring it at once."
A chief warrant officer running errands for a lieutenant to fetch ice water.
Watching that absurd scene, I let out a snort of laughter.
So it was true after all.
The Patek Philippe on his wrist had cost tens of millions of won.
His English carried a fluent, unmistakable British accent.
And even a seasoned chief warrant officer was bending over backward in front of him.
What had seemed like a possibility was now laid bare as fact.
I’d heard that children of the Saudi royal family often entered the military and rose to general rank, and Lieutenant Fahad looked exactly like that sort of case.
While I was trying to pin down Fahad’s identity, Chief Khalid’s gaze turned to me.
The deference he’d shown Fahad was gone, replaced by eyes full of suspicion and wariness.
"So, what was the cause? If you tell me you don't know again, you'll be packing your bags tomorrow, Korean."
"I found it."
I answered briefly.
"It was resonance. The engine’s vibration frequency at maximum torque overlapped with the sensor frame’s natural frequency."
"...Resonance?"
Khalid’s brow furrowed.
He was clearly technical enough to understand it immediately.
"Bloody hell. That's the worst kind of problem. A design defect."
"Strictly speaking, yes."
"Then there’s no answer. If we report back to headquarters, redesign the frame, and go through a recall process, it'll take at least a month. Are you telling us to sit around sucking our thumbs until then?"
"No. It won't take that long."
I shook my head.
"I'll fix it here. Right now."
"...What?"
Khalid looked dumbfounded.
Instead of answering, I walked over to the pile of scrap material stacked in one corner of the maintenance bay.
Discarded truck tires and the lead weights used to balance tank road wheels caught my eye.
"I'll borrow these."
When I picked up a handful of tire shreds and lead weights, Khalid snorted in disbelief.
"Hah. Listen, friend. This isn't a U.S. Army shop. You're going to stick garbage onto a machine worth billions? You think that'll work?"
It was the standard reaction.
A conservative engineer who worshipped manuals and valued specifications above all else.
Even Yerin Cho, standing nearby, had her mouth hanging open in disbelief.
Any ordinary engineer would have reacted the same way.
It was absurd enough to make anyone stare: solving the problem by slapping black chunks of discarded rubber onto the K-2 tank, an advanced system worth tens of billions of won apiece.
"Senior... you're really going to use that?"
"If you don't have teeth, you chew with your gums. We're out of time anyway."
I answered casually and picked up a pair of tin snips from the workbench.
It was a brutish little tool with short, blunt blades that could cut even thin steel plate like paper.
With a few hard, forceful snips, the sidewall of the discarded tire was cut into tough little strips.
The tread wouldn’t cut because of the steel cords, but the sidewall was solid, high-quality rubber.
I wedged the cut rubber pieces between the frame members as cushioning, then laid the lead weights on top of the frame.
"Give me a band. Not a plastic tie. A metal one."
"This one?"
"Perfect."
I took the stainless-steel hose clamp Yerin handed me.
Click, click.
As I turned the screw with a screwdriver and tightened the band, the rubber and lead weights were secured to the frame firmly, perfectly.
A plastic tie might fail, but a steel band would only come off if the frame itself broke.
At least for a while, this would hold without any trouble.
But separate from its stability, the visual result was grotesque beyond measure.
The gleam of steel bands and the black chunks of tire rubber together?
It looked like a scrapyard tank from an apocalypse movie.
Chief Khalid stood with his arms folded, watching my work with open cynicism.
But the moment I positioned and fixed the lead weights, his eyes slowly filled with curiosity.
He edged closer and said, "The rubber I can accept as a vibration damper, but why put the lead weights there of all places? Won't that shift the center of gravity?"
"It's supposed to shift."
I flicked the steel band with my screwdriver and answered, "I'm increasing the mass to lower the frame's natural frequency. I want to drag it downward on purpose so it doesn't overlap the vibration band the engine throws out."
Khalid stroked his beard.
"Hmm. So that's f = 1/2pi sqrt(k/m)... Increase the mass, lower the frequency. The theory checks out."
Natural frequency.
In simple terms, it was the physics formula saying that the heavier an object became, the more sluggish it was and the lower its vibration frequency dropped.
He wasn't just reciting the principle; the instant I mentioned it, he produced the formula. That meant he understood mechanics completely.
He certainly wasn't just a mechanic...
"Are you, by any chance, from the General Authority for Military Industries?"
GAMI.
Saudi Arabia’s military industries authority.
The government body responsible for regulating, supporting, and licensing the nation’s defense industry.
At the moment, the Saudi government was conducting test operations after receiving the first K-2 batch.
It wouldn’t have been strange at all for engineers from GAMI to be roaming this area, testing the K-2’s performance and reliability.
"Whether I came from GAMI or somewhere else, is that important to you?"
Just as that thought crossed my mind, Chief Khalid shot back.
I shrugged lightly.
"Not important. I was just curious. If you're from GAMI, you'd be a civilian, so I was wondering why you're wearing a chief warrant officer's insignia."
Khalid’s eyes narrowed.
He frowned slightly as if I were being annoying, then said, "Enough nonsense. Explain this instead. If the position isn’t exact, won't the vibration just get amplified? You could even snap the sensor neck off. How do you intend to deal with that?"
"That’s exactly why it goes here. This is the frame’s anti-node. You have to press down on the spot with the greatest amplitude to get the effect right away."
"Oh..."
Anti-node.
In wave terms, it was the point of maximum vibration amplitude, the place sometimes called the belly of the wave.
It was like pressing hard on the middle of a guitar string just as it was vibrating most violently and cutting the sound off dead.
With that point crushed under a heavy lead weight, resonance would be gone for good.
Chief Khalid’s eyes now held the look of a man who fully understood what I was aiming for.
Yerin, on the other hand, stared in wordless disbelief.
"It's done."
A while later, the APS module frame at the rear of the tank had become a patchwork monstrosity.
"Let's test it. Put it in neutral and floor it."
At my signal, the driver slammed the accelerator all the way down.
Vwoooom-!
The 1,500-horsepower engine roared loud enough to shake the maintenance bay apart.
The floor hummed, and the hull shuddered.
It was the same vibration that had made the sensors go mad out in the desert.
But this time...
"...!"
Chief Khalid’s eyes widened.
The frame, which should have been bouncing like crazy before, was now held down by the lead weights and standing its ground.
Not even a faint tremor remained.
It was as still as a stone.
The monitor was the same.
Not a single red dot, not a single ghost appeared.
Khalid approached carefully and laid a hand on the frame.
"The vibration... it's dead. Really dead."
He let out a hollow laugh.
"I admit it. You've got a hell of a touch, Korean."
With the vibration gone, the waveform on the monitor settled like a calm lake.
Once the noise that had been drowning everything disappeared, the signal-to-noise ratio improved dramatically.
A thought suddenly came to me.
If the signal was this clean now... did I really need to hold back?
Until now, the vibration noise had been so severe that headquarters had probably lowered the sensor sensitivity on purpose to prevent false readings.
But now there was no reason to keep it that way.
I connected the maintenance laptop and entered engineer mode.
The sensor sensitivity settings appeared on the screen.
"Executive Director."
"Yes?"
"Now that the vibration noise is gone, it seems like we should remove the restraints we put on it. It's locked at 80 percent because of the safety margin, but it should be able to handle sensitivity up to 120 percent. Is that all right?"
At my question, Yerin stared at the monitor.
She looked worried that if we raised the sensitivity, those ghosts might come back again.
A brief silence passed.
Then she looked back and forth between the settled vibration graph and my face before nodding as if she had made up her mind.
"...Do it. At this point, we might as well go all the way."
"Good judgment. Point the turret toward the open gate and prepare to emit radar."
At my shout, the tank turret hummed and turned toward the wide-open doorway of the hangar, facing the vast desert beyond.
If we turned it on inside, the lot of us would end up like popcorn in a microwave.
"Start emitting."
The tank’s upper radar switched to high-output mode and began to emit a heavy operating hum.
After I confirmed it, I moved the mouse and pushed the setting to its maximum.
A short loading bar passed, and with a deep whirr, the tank’s upper radar switched into high-output mode.
The driving sound was nothing like before, far heavier now.
At the same time, the maintenance laptop resting on my knee began to shake.
The bright red noise graph that had filled the screen sank to the bottom as if by magic.
It was as though a storm-tossed sea had calmed into a lake in an instant.
Once the signal-to-noise ratio graph settled into the green zone, the detection log in the corner started spinning like mad.
DIST: 2,100 m... 2,500 m... 3,200 m
It was a proper signal.
With the vibration nuisance gone, the sensor had begun to unleash detection power that surpassed its original performance and felt downright insane.
3.2 kilometers.
It was a number far beyond the spec limit.
"Allah, this tank has finally opened its eyes! The detection range is over 3 kilometers!"
Then Lieutenant Fahad’s cheer rang out through the open hatch.
The laptop data matched the reaction on the ground.
Yerin looked from the monitor to me and back again, unable to believe it.
"This is insane... It's performing better than spec!"
"Machines are meant to be tuned by running them."
I shrugged and rolled my stiff neck when Chief Khalid, after confirming the vibration had vanished by touching the frame, slowly walked toward me.
Was it just my imagination?
Something about the feeling he gave off had changed.
Then Khalid spoke.
"Korean. You were right."
"Yes?"
"The chief warrant officer insignia was a disguise. If you want to observe the voice of the field and the situation without embellishment, nothing works better than this kind of clothing."
He spoke in a calm voice.
"Khalid Al-Omar, Chief Technical Auditor of GAMI."
"...!"
Yerin gasped beside me.
Chief Technical Auditor.
A being like the grim reaper, the one who oversaw the verification of every weapons system entering Saudi Arabia and decided whether it passed or failed.
One shake of his head could turn a contract worth hundreds of billions of won into scrap paper.
"A-auditor, sir, why are you out here..."
As Yerin stammered in confusion, Khalid chuckled.
"There had been a great deal of talk within our country about adopting the Korean tank. So I wanted to see it for myself. I needed to look at the real phenomenon, not data prettied up according to each side's interests."
Khalid kept his eyes on me as he continued.
"This looks good enough. Importing the Korean tank, seriously evaluating its capabilities, and expanding cooperation between our two countries all seem like worthwhile things."
"I'm glad you see it that way."
"You solved the fatal problem. I see it that way because you did well."
Khalid gave my shoulder a couple of light taps and went on.
"Ah, of course, our military can't accept this apocalypse-style patchwork tank as it is. We can't be running around with tire scraps stuck on it."
"Don't worry about that. This is only a proof-of-concept emergency patch."
I replied evenly.
"Now that we've found the cause, I'll send the design data to headquarters in Korea. In a week, properly machined factory dampers and weight balancers will arrive by plane. I'll replace them officially then."
"Good. If that's the plan, then there’s no problem."
Khalid answered with obvious satisfaction.
"Until the genuine parts arrive and are swapped in, I'll hold this claim in abeyance. Data you’ve proven yourself will satisfy my superiors too."
Then he added the decisive line.
"No returns. The main contract will proceed as scheduled, so put your mind at ease."
The words had barely left his mouth when...
Thud.
A heavy sound came from beside me.
Turning around, I saw Yerin slumping into a maintenance chair, her strength gone from her legs.
"Haah... we’re alive..."
She wiped her dry face with trembling hands.
The pressure that had been bleeding her dry for the past two weeks, the fear that the contract would collapse, had washed away in an instant.
I smirked and offered Khalid a handshake.
"A wise judgment, Auditor."
Khalid clasped my hand and smiled with a look full of meaning.
"That aside... after seeing your skill, I’d like to ask you for a favor."
"...A favor? What sort of favor?"
With a slight tilt of his chin, Chief Khalid pointed toward the deep interior of the maintenance bay and the huge hangar door sealed shut there.
"Our problem child is over there. A Chinese-imported composite anti-aircraft gun, something called the CS/AA-7 Heavenly Dragon."
"That's fairly recent. An export model, though."
"You could say that. In my view, it's a terribly problematic piece of equipment, but the people pushing the import keep massaging the data and insisting there’s no issue."
"...Excuse me?"
What exactly had I just heard?
Massaging the data?
Noticing my confusion, Khalid gave a wry smile.
"The internal situation is a bit complicated. There are people who think we should move closer to China, and others who want to maintain our relationship with the United States."
"The ones pushing Chinese weapons imports are the pro-China faction?"
"Something like that. Ah, but don't worry too much. I'm not trying to drag you into politics."
Khalid continued in a relaxed tone, as if to reassure me.
"I just need technical advice. Is this thing actually defective, or was I the one who misunderstood it? That's all."
"...Hmm."
As I hesitated, Yerin stepped closer.
She leaned in and whispered in Korean, "Department Head, you have to do this."
"...Executive Director?"
"We're already competing with the Chinese in Southeast Asia. If we can land one blow here, there’s no downside. I’ll handle making sure we don’t get tangled up politically, so you just give the technical advice."
Yerin looked at me with an expression that said to trust her.
Did she already have a way?
I thought for a moment, then turned to Khalid.
"So, have we reached a decision?"
"If it's technical advice, I believe we can proceed."
"Then that's settled. Let's meet tomorrow morning. Around ten o'clock. I'd like your advice then."
"Should I come here?"
Khalid nodded.
"This will do. Still, just in case, I'll have the exact time passed along to Executive Director Cho. Then I'll see you tomorrow."
With a light wave, Khalid began moving off somewhere with Lieutenant Fahad.
I watched them go and let out a small sigh.
This... should be fine, right?