Jack Mars - Hunting Zero

“Watson, I have to get to New Jersey fast.”

“Working on it,” the agent replied. “Just stay put, it’ll be there any minute.”

“What will be here?”

Watson answered, but his response was drowned out by the sudden, startling chirp of a siren directly behind him. He spun as a police cruiser crunched over the gravel lot toward him.

I don’t have time for this. He snapped the phone shut and slipped it into his pocket. The passenger’s side window was down; he could see that there were two officers inside. The car pulled right up alongside his and the door swung open.

“Sir, put the bag on the ground and your hands on your head.” The officer was young, with a military-style high and tight fade and aviator shades over his eyes. Reid took notice that one hand was on the holster of his service pistol, the button clasp undone.

The driver got out as well, older, around Reid’s age with a shaved head. He stood behind his open door, his hand also hovering near his belt.

Reid hesitated, unsure of what to do. Local police must have heard the APB from the troopers. It couldn’t have been difficult to spot the Trans Am with the fake plates parked so openly next to the baseball field. He scolded himself for being so careless.

“Sir, put the bag down and hands on your head!” the young officer shouted forcefully.

Reid had nothing to threaten them with; his guns were in the bag, and even if he had one he wasn’t about to shoot anyone. As far as these cops were aware, they were just doing their job, detaining a fugitive from a high-speed chase that had incapacitated three cars and, in all likelihood, still had the northbound lanes of I-95 shut down.

“This isn’t what you think.” Even as he said it, he lowered the bag to the gravel slowly. “I’m just trying to find my daughters.” Both arms came up, his fingertips touching just behind his ears.

“Turn around,” the young officer ordered. Reid did so. He heard the familiar clinking of handcuffs as the cop pulled a pair loose from the pouch on his belt. He waited for the cold bite of steel on his wrist.

“You have the right to remain silent…”

As soon as he felt contact, Reid sprang into action. He spun, grabbed the officer’s right wrist with his own, and twisted it upward at an angle. The cop cried out in both surprise and pain, though Reid was careful not to twist far enough to break it. He wasn’t going to injure the officers if he could help it.

In the same motion he grabbed the loose cuff with his left hand and snapped it around the officer’s wrist. The driver had his gun out in an instant, shouting angrily.

“Back away! On the ground, now!”

Reid shoved forward with both arms and sent the young officer stumbling into the open door. It swung shut—or tried to, pushing the older cop backward. Reid tucked into a roll, coming up on his knees right beside the man. He snapped the Glock out of the cop’s grip and tossed it over his shoulder.

The younger cop straightened and tried to yank his pistol loose. Reid grabbed the empty, swinging half of the handcuffs dangling from the officer’s wrist and pulled, throwing the man off balance again. He looped the cuffs through the open window, yanking the cop into the door, and snapped the open loop of steel around the older officer’s wrist.

As the pair struggled against each other and the door of the cruiser, Reid tugged the younger cop’s pistol free and aimed it at them. They fell still immediately.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” he told them as he retrieved his bag. “I just want you to stay quiet and don’t move for a minute or so.” He leveled the gun at the older officer. “Put your hand down, please.”

The cop’s free hand fell away from his shoulder-mounted radio.

“Just put down the gun,” the younger officer said, his uncuffed hand out in a pacifying gesture. “Another unit is on its way. They will shoot you on sight. I don’t think you want that.”

Is he bluffing? No; Reid could hear sirens wailing in the distance. About a minute out. Ninety seconds at best. Whatever Mitch and Watson had planned, it needed to arrive now .

The boys on the baseball field had paused their game, now clustered behind the nearest concrete dugout and peering out in awe at the scene mere yards from them. Reid noticed in his periphery that one of the boys was on a cell phone, likely reporting the incident.

At least they’re not filming it , he thought glumly, keeping the gun trained on the two cops. Come on, Mitch…

Then—the younger cop frowned at his partner. They glanced at each other and then skyward as a new sound joined the distant screaming sirens—a whining hum, like a high-pitched motor.

What is that? Definitely not a car. Not loud enough to be a chopper or a plane…

Reid looked up as well, but he couldn’t tell what direction the sound was coming from. He didn’t have to wonder long. From over left field came a tiny object, soaring quickly through the air like a buzzing bee. Its shape was indistinguishable; it appeared to be white, but it was difficult to look directly at it.

The underbelly is painted in reflective coating , Reid’s mind told him. Keeps the eyes from being able to focus on it.

The object dropped in altitude as if it were falling from the sky. As it crossed over the pitcher’s mound, something else dropped down from it—a steel cable with a narrow crossbar at the bottom, like a single rung of a ladder. A rappelling line .

“That must be my ride,” he murmured. While the cops stared in disbelief at the literal UFO soaring toward them, Reid dropped the gun on the gravel. He made sure he had a tight grip on his bag, and as the crossbar swung toward him, he reached up and grabbed onto it.

He sucked in a breath as he was instantly swept into the sky, up twenty feet in seconds, then thirty, then fifty. The boys on the baseball field shouted and pointed as the flying object above Reid’s head retracted the rappelling line rapidly, gaining altitude again at the same time.

He glanced down and saw two more police cars screeching into the park’s lot, the drivers exiting their vehicles and looking upward. He was a hundred feet in the air before he reached the cockpit and settled into the single seat that waited there.

Reid shook his head in astonishment. The vehicle that had picked him up was little more than a small egg-shaped pod with four parallel arms in an X shape, each of which had a spinning rotor at the end. He knew what this was—a quadcopter, a single-person manned drone, fully automated and highly experimental.

A memory flashed in his mind: A rooftop in Kandahar. Two snipers have you pinned at your location. You have no idea where they are. Make a move and you die. Then, a sound—a high-pitched whine, barely more than a hum. It reminds you of your string trimmer back home. A shape appears in the sky. It’s hard to look at. You can barely see it, but you know help has arrived…

The CIA had experimented with machines like this one to extract agents from hot zones. He had been part of the experiment.

There were no controls before him; just an LED screen that told him their air speed of two hundred sixteen miles an hour and an ETA of fifty-four minutes. Beside the screen was a headset. He plucked it up and fit it over his ears.

“Zero.”

“Watson. Jesus. How did you get this?”

“I didn’t.”

“So Mitch,” Reid said, confirming his suspicions. “He’s not just an ‘asset,’ is he?”

“He’s whatever you need him to be for you to trust that he wants to help.”

The quadcopter’s air speed increased steadily, leveling out at just under three hundred miles per hour. Several minutes fell off the ETA.