Dragonflies: Shadow of Drones (4 page)

6

That night, Raina dreamed of flying again. Back in the left seat of her helicopter over the kill zone, watching the thermal imaging focus on some steep, nondescript moonscape. Into the picture strode the dark silhouettes of a pair of Afghan mountain horses, navigating the harsh terrain.

They were small but powerful Lokai, beautiful creatures staged for battle and put to good use by Afghan Northern Alliance fighters and the first covert U.S. troops dropped into the mountains in response to 9/11. They reminded her of the horse her father had bought for her on their small ranch in New Mexico, a beautiful Appaloosa, the year before he came down with cancer and they ended up having to sell the pony to help pay for his treatments.

Raina watched the horses for what seemed like a long time through her scope, until it happened as it always did in the dream. The sudden loss of control. Like falling off a cliff. The fall into darkness and the horror of impact. The feeling that she couldn’t get out of her seat, that she could never get out.

She awoke in a cold sweat. She was alone in her bed in the temporary apartment. Tye had similar digs in another building in the same complex. He’d fallen asleep on her couch while she continued to work away at her keyboard, so she’d thrown a blanket over him and retreated to the bedroom sometime after one a.m.

The bedside clock read a little after four. She knew she had to be sharp for the new day about to break. She had to be sharp for Tye and for Williamson, whoever they all were working for now, because their mission was good and was on target. But she also knew sleep wouldn’t be coming again, at least not for tonight, not for her.

She crawled out from beneath the covers, fumbling in the dark for the crutch she needed to make it to the bathroom without her prosthetic foot. Sometimes the frustration of it all brought tears to her eyes, but she felt as if she were all cried out.

She finished in the bathroom, pulling her bathrobe around her, and stumbled to her desk to check on her computers. Everything seemed normal and quiet–all systems go.

One of the tiny hover angel MAVs lay on the table next to the computer. She picked up the drone and gently turned it over in her hands.

What a marvel of engineering, she thought. Its translucent wings acted as miniscule rotors, not unlike those on her helicopter; except these were made of some ultra-thin but strong membrane-like material she’d never seen before. The tiny control hinges were even more elegant; she’d marveled at them when she first examined them under the microscope.

The brains of the unit were housed behind its miniature camera. She fought against the temptation to try to disassemble the board to examine the circuitry for fear she might damage it. The thing must have cost a fortune to develop. Had to be government. The CIA, NSA, or some other spook agency must be behind it. Or could it have come from overseas? Nothing on the units themselves or their components gave them away, unlike any other drone she’d ever seen. Hell, any Tom, Dick, or Harry could buy a little drone these days and fly them around their backyard using their smartphone as a controller. The off-the-shelf components were manufactured all over the world–China, Russia, Israel. But these little babies were way beyond that.

Her experience as a pilot had given her a healthy respect for flying in combat, so she felt like she understood both the positives and pitfalls of weaponizing unmanned aircraft. She knew many foreign governments, not all of them friendly to U.S. interests, were continuing to develop and deploy their own military drones. In the armaments world it was nothing short of a drone frenzy.

Even so, the camera system on this little baby was more advanced and of far smaller form than any she’d ever seen. When functioning properly, it could almost reconnoiter an entire space, looking at it from multiple different angles. She’d read articles about autonomous drone systems, employing advanced pattern recognition computer algorithms to fly independently, and she shuddered to think of the possibilities. Eye-in-the-sky, all-encompassing surveillance systems like the Army’s Constant Hawk or the Air Force’s Gorgon Stare were already changing the way military strategists looked at warfare.

But the miniaturized MAV she held in her hands took things to an entirely different level. She could provide intimate surveillance of anyone, almost anywhere. She could infiltrate a corporate boardroom or someone’s bedroom. The possibilities were almost as endless as they were sobering.

On the other hand, maneuvering undetected through suburban neighborhoods and even inside buildings was far from easy, as she was learning. It required a special set of talents she was being forced to develop as she went, beyond anything she’d ever had to worry about flying for the military.

Feel the plane
.

She could still hear Major Williamson’s voice from only a few weeks before admonishing her through her headset to get control of her tiny drone, as if she were actually aboard the flight. She was finding she liked the challenge of piloting the tiny devices. The larger dragonflies were sometimes more fun to fly, zooming nap-of-the-earth or darting in and out among buildings. They were designed for use outdoors and could track far greater distances. But they also made more noise, a faint but persistent flutter. The hover angels, like the one she held in her hand, were especially effective indoors, but were more easily thrown off track by extremes in temperatures, a stiff wind, or even hot or cold air blowing from an air conditioner or room vent.

“Best little private eye in the world.”

“Oh,” she said, setting the drone back on the desk.

“That thing in your hands, I mean…it’s a pretty good investigator.” Tye, all six-feet-four of him, leaned against the doorframe of her bedroom. His shirttail hung out. His jeans looked like he’d slept in them, which of course he had, and his short hair was pasted to one side of his head.

“You startled me.”

“Sorry. I heard you rummaging around in here and wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“You look like hell.”

“Good morning to you, too. Don’t you ever sleep?”

“I slept…some,” she said, sounding a little more defensive than she’d intended.

“You’re really obsessed with those things, aren’t you?” He looked at the little drone.

“I am,” she admitted. “You have to admit they’re pretty amazing.”

She picked up the MAV again. She was coming to consider the little drones as extensions of herself. MAVs were something she could control, unlike people. If the public knew the kind of things they could do with these little gems, would they be fascinated? Or horrified?

“Well, you know what they say,” Tye said.

“What’s that?”

“A pilot’s first love always has to be their ship.”

“What do
you
know about being a pilot?”

“My dad was one. For a little while at least. Before he left me and my mom. But that’s a long story.”

She set the drone down again and turned away for a moment, embarrassed. She felt disarmed sometimes by his candor.

“Me, I’d rather be being face-to-face with someone, looking them in the eyes.” He smiled at her from across the room.

This was the man she owed her life to, but there was a part of her, she had to admit, that sometimes wished he hadn’t been so heroic, that wished she’d died in the crash along with Skyles.

Her long recuperation and the counseling that went along with it had been painful and slow. She’d been left to pick up the pieces of what was left of her life and the inevitable self-questioning about what she might have done differently. Now here Tye was, suddenly, improbably, back in her life. Come to rescue her again? Rescue her from what?

“I guess robots will never truly think and act like humans,” she mumbled, half to herself.

For now, Williamson had assured them, their MAVs were strictly surveillance platforms. But it didn’t take much of an imagination to realize that these little flyers were bound to be weaponized, sooner or later. And when it happened, there would be few places an assassin, or counter-terrorism team for that matter, couldn’t penetrate. Counter-measures, along with the drones themselves, would become huge business. For all she knew, maybe they already were.

“Let’s hope not.” Tye laughed. “Otherwise, we’re all doomed.”

Staff Sergeant Tye Palmer had seen two tours in Iraq and another two in Afghanistan. His special technical expertise, he jokingly claimed, was functioning as a homing device for trouble.

“You had breakfast?” he asked, stretching and yawning.

“No, I–”

“You got any eggs and bacon around this place? I fry a mean over-easy.”

“Sorry, I haven’t had time to shop.”

“Okay. We both need some fuel in the tank. Why don’t I slip back over to my apartment and jump in the shower. I’ll be back in a jiff and we can head out and find something to eat.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

He lingered in the doorway for a moment.

“Oh, and thanks,” she said.

“For what?”

“For checking on me.”

“Somebody’s got to do it, Chief.”

For an instant, she was sure she was looking at the ghost of Captain Skyles. She glanced down at the drone on the desk in front of her again, wondering if, with all of the technological wonders happening these days, someone somewhere in the world was actually developing a workable time machine. But when she looked back at the doorway, Tye was gone.

7

A couple of hours after daybreak, Raina stepped back into the apartment, closing the door behind her. She tossed the van keys onto the desk next to her computer, laying her cell phone next to them, and sighed.

She and Tye had gone out to breakfast at a local diner where they’d eaten bacon and eggs and good hot coffee and alternately shared pages of a daily newspaper. This was their day to get all of their planning and preparations together before Derek Kurn’s frat party tomorrow night, but Tye had said little while they ate. Maybe he was just hungry; at times he didn’t seem to be much of a conversationalist.

She’d dropped him off at a Wal-Mart a half-mile down the highway from the apartment complex where he said he needed to pick up a few things. He said he would walk back to the apartment and they would meet up again in an hour to finalize their plans.

Moving awkwardly across the room on her prosthetic, she turned and flopped down on the couch to think. Lucky for her it was her left foot, her Army rehabilitation therapist had cheerily assured her. At least she could drive a car without special equipment. Maybe not a helicopter again, but….

Oh, who was she kidding? She’d become a freak of nature; that was all there was to it. The pretty–at least she still hoped–young woman seated in the corner at the bar all the guy’s would try to come on to…that is, until they got a look at the foot. Then their eyes would skip away. Even if they stayed to listen to her story, they’d treat her more as an object worthy of a respectful distance, like some kind of monument–unless they were soldiers themselves–to the men they maybe thought they should be. The juxtaposition didn’t exactly spark an avalanche of potential romance.

But enough of the pity party. She started to push up from the couch when she heard, almost sensed, the slightest creak of the floor from within the darkened kitchen, and felt an iciness slice through her like a knife.

She wasn’t alone. She didn’t know exactly how she knew, but she knew. She tried to fling herself across the room to where her old Army sidearm hung in its holster on the coat rack, but she was too slow.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

She froze, down on one knee. A pair of men, dressed in blue jeans and collared shirts with their heads covered by ski masks, appeared, rising up from their crouch around the corner into a shooter’s stance. In their hands were Colt semiautomatics, pointed at her head.

Her heart leapt into her throat.

“Who are you?” She instantly figured by their bearing and demeanor they were either military or ex-military.

“You don’t need to know that, ma’am. Please return to the couch.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“It’s not a request.”

She looked into the eyes of the one doing the talking, the taller of the two, and could see he meant business. She worked her jaw in a circular motion. How could she have been so stupid as to let these two get the jump on her?

“Okay, a polite command then,” she said. “I guess I’ll take the couch option.”

She stood upright and with a slight hitch in her stride returned to the couch.

The man spoke to his accomplice. “Cuff her and hood her.”

“What?” She didn’t like the sound of this.

But before she could react the other man moved behind her and pulled her hands together behind her back, securing them with a pair of handcuffs. Then a black hood came down over her head, throwing her into the dark. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Why are you doing this?”

“The less you talk and the more you listen the easier this is going to go. Turn around and sit down on the couch,” the first man said.

She could hear him moving toward her. She felt the briefest touch of something hard against her head and realized to her horror it was the barrel of his Colt. At least she could still breath.

“Okay. Okay. Let’s not get trigger happy.”

She did as he instructed. It was a little difficult without the use of her arms or her sight, but she managed to drop down heavily onto the couch again. The two men were silent for a moment, but she could hear them moving around her. She wondered what they were doing.

The answer came a moment later when she felt the sting of a needle in her hip.

“Hey!” She instinctively tried to shake away, which made it hurt worse.

“Don’t move.”

“What are you doing? What did you just give to me?” Visions of the video she’d just recorded from Nathan Kurn’s office flashed through her mind.

“You won’t be harmed as long as you cooperate.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“This is for your own protection.”

The drug was already taking effect. Like a gray curtain, sleep pressed down through her shoulders, arms, and legs; noting the effects as if examining them from a great distance, she could no longer feel her appendages, nor the rest of her body; not ever her mouth, her lips, or her tongue.

“But you’re treating me like a terrorist,” she managed to mumble, the voice not like hers at all.

The last words she heard one of the men speak sounded something like a dream.

“Maybe you are.”