War of the Invisibles

The Americans are fed up! “Stealth”, “Stealth”... Yes, if you want to know, in our “box” local craftsmen developed this very invisibility a long time ago. A bomber was just standing on the runway - just yesterday! - but today it’s no longer there. That is, in fact, he is here, but no one sees him, either like that or on the screen. Because it's technology.

But that is not all. Ours realized - okay, the bomber itself is invisible, but what about the weapons? If he launches a rocket, they will immediately spot him, my dear! This means that until it reaches the target, no one should see or hear this rocket. They suffered, but they did it - neither the rocket itself is visible, nor the fiery tail, it does not howl in flight, and even the thermal homing head does not pick it up.

In previous years, even before the Afghan Basmachi and Chechen bandits, our potential enemy was one who had a computer behind each boot. If, for example, our invisible missile hits an object - immediately their video monitor will capture the image of the hit, the computer will quickly calculate where our plane went during this time, take a lead and - write to your parents. No, that won't do either. It is necessary that even after hitting the target no one detects anything. Invisible - so invisible!

This, of course, turned out to be more difficult. Marshal Ustinov, may he rest in heaven, came and looked at it twenty times, but he still couldn’t understand how it was that the “target was hit” if there it was standing, intact. Thank you, our subcontractors have made a program for visualizing the results. On the screen, the target was so dashingly shattered into pieces that he chuckled, nodded his head and signed everything.

Then, however, all sorts of people pestered me, especially about acceptance - show me and show me. It was necessary to force a special decision from the military-industrial commission to be allowed to accept it without inspection. Well, that’s what it was then - if it’s necessary for defense, then it’s necessary. But then the factories directly fought over the production of components for our product; the ammunition alone was developed by two different design bureaus. When Gorbachev arrived, we already had four units ready, and we also had time to show him. That is, in the sense of showing the platform where they stood.

Well, then you know - at first everyone tried to get involved in the conversion, then they completely put the defense order under the knife. The general was still trying to do something, to get some money. In 1995, they took one copy to Dubai to sell to Arabs. Only there, too, there was a snag: the Bedouins didn’t even look at the ground control computer. Our software, it’s clear, is all Russian, no one bothered to adapt it to their hooks. Yes, this is not so simple - you need to run the command line in the other direction according to the laws of Arabic literacy. But in reality, of course, nothing is visible; the goal remains the same. The general then pushed hard at the meeting of the commercial director. And we see: he almost shines, he even seems to have become taller - he’s glad that such a thing will not leave the country.

Only a year has passed since we buried the general - he had a heart attack. Here the people completely scattered in all directions. I left then too. I thought: that’s it, amba.

And a month ago I went to the guys at work and saw that on their monitor some bearded men were loading bags into a KamAZ, and ours, of course, were tracking them. What, I ask, did they contract to develop a security system for vegetable warehouses? They laugh: these are Wahhabis. Well, I say, don’t you liquidate them? And we, they say, have already eliminated them. More than a month ago. It was on them that the fourth generation of “invisibility” was tested. Only they don’t know it yet.