Mike Maden - Drone Command

“It’s rare, isn’t it?”

“Very. I’m just lucky, I guess. I was first diagnosed two years ago. Handled it fine with diet and exercise until my pancreas shut down about a year ago.”

“And here you are.”

“Make lemonade, I always say.” She held his gaze for a moment then turned to her tea, slightly embarrassed.

“Excuse me,” Pearce said. He headed for the restroom.

Myers watched him amble away. His gait was powerful and athletic even at this late hour. Though in his forties, Pearce still had a fantastic physique and excellent health. For the first time since they met, she felt like damaged goods. Her body was letting her down, which only reminded her that he was several years younger. Not that she was vain — she didn’t really think about her age all that much. She’d been strong and healthy since working her father’s cattle ranch as a little girl all the way through high school, along with lettering in three sports. She always ate right, exercised. Never looked her age. Not even now.

She grinned. Okay, maybe she was a little vain. It was hard to imagine a man like Pearce wanting to be physically intimate with an android like her with her pumps and needles and monitors. Not exactly Victoria’s Secret stuff. He’d probably think he was making out with one of his drones.

Her smile faded. She remembered sitting in the doctor’s office two years earlier. The LADA diagnosis hit her hard that morning. She had spent the first few minutes staring at the lab results and feeling sorry for herself. A real pity party. Life wasn’t fair. She had already lost her husband and her son, and now she was losing her health.

And then she realized it was true, life really wasn’t fair, and that she’d had a far better run of good fortune than most, even though most of that luck had been earned through hard work and taking big risks. Her dad had taught her a lot. Life was like a temperamental horse. Discipline worked wonders. But even the best horse still crapped in the barn every now and again. By the time the doctor came back, she had decided to pull up her big-girl panties and get on with it.

Pearce returned and sat back down across from her.

“Nice bathroom. Size of a basketball court,” he said.

“There’s two more of them, should the need arise.”

“We’re certain Feng saw the broadcast,” Pearce said. The androgynous Thai had confirmed it verbally an hour earlier, according to Lane. “Now what?”

“We wait.”

“I hate waiting.” Pearce drummed his fingers on the cushions, thinking. “You ever like a guy who wasn’t paying attention to you?”

Myers fought back a grin. You have no idea.

“Yes. In college, there was someone.”

“How did you get him to pay attention to you?”

“Easy. I ran into his car in the parking lot at the student union. I was driving an old Buick at the time. Did a fair amount of damage, as I recall. I left a note with my name and number.”

“How did that work out for you?”

“Asked me to marry him six weeks later.”

“Your husband?”

She nodded. “He was a really good guy.”

“No doubt.” Pearce smiled. The laugh lines deepened around his dark blue eyes. “So now we just have to find ourselves another Buick.”

When Myers and Pearce arrived at the new business-jet terminal at Narita International Airport, everything was waiting for them, including one of the new HA-420 HondaJets. As soon as Pearce dropped his American Express Black Card onto the counter, a small army of uniformed agents suddenly appeared and swiftly expedited all the necessary legal, flight, and insurance documents for today’s scheduled round trip to Taiwan’s Taipei Songshan Airport. A courteous young flight steward served Myers a French press of dark Arabica coffee and a plate of matcha cookies in the executive lounge while Pearce conducted his preflight inspection of the HondaJet with a company official. An hour later, she and Pearce were airborne.

Why’d you pick the HondaJet?” Myers whispered in the headset.

“Because I own one,” Pearce said. “Judy taught me how to fly it.”

“I liked her.”

“Me, too.”

Judy Hopper had been his personal pilot and was the best flier he’d ever met, but she turned out to be a great flight instructor as well. She brought him along on single-engine prop planes before finally promoting him to the HondaJet, a magnificent lightweight aircraft with a state-of-the-art cockpit featuring flat-panel displays with touch-screen flight planning and navigational controls.

Pearce thought about Judy a lot lately. Her piloting skills saved his life back in Algeria. Myers’s, too. He hoped she was happy in her new life as a missionary’s wife in Africa. Wished she was flying the plane today. It would improve their chances of surviving greatly.

Pearce and Myers were flying at nearly five hundred miles an hour, bypassing Nagasaki Airport on their way out over the northern reaches of the East China Sea, heading roughly southwest toward the island nation of Taiwan.

The digital navigational panel displayed their GPS location and registered flight path, circumscribed by narrow red bands that warned against veering off course. The terminal agent explained that the air lanes between Japan and Taiwan weren’t safe beyond the red zone owing to certain recent political developments. She was either too polite or too afraid to say that the Chinese now considered the area their national airspace and that planes entering it were subject to being shot down without warning.

Pearce had previously marked the location of Mao Island on his digital map — a designation still unrecognized by every government in the world save North Korea and Cuba. The HondaJet was locked firmly in the middle of the designated flight path, nearly due south of the disputed new island.

He glanced over at Myers strapped into her padded leather seat. Whispered in the head set. “All set?”

Myers nodded. “You betcha.” She glanced around the high-tech cabin. “Not exactly a Buick.”

“Actually, Honda calls this ride the Civic of the Sky.”

Pearce turned the yoke and pressed the rudder pedal into a sharp, smooth turn heading due north. A moment later, cockpit alarms sounded as the navigation screen flashed a warning signal repeated by a female voice in their headsets. “Entering disputed airspace. Return to designated course.”

Pearce tapped the touch screen, killing the alarm bells and warning signals. His radio buzzed. An incoming call from a traffic controller, no doubt. He ignored it.

“There.” Myers pointed at the windscreen. On the far horizon they both saw the two-hundred-foot-tall oil derrick looming high above the deck of the Chinese drillship. She tapped another screen and a forward camera began feeding a live image of the drillship into a video monitor.

Pearce nodded toward the west. Far below, the wake of the Kunming missile destroyer, keeping a distant watchful eye.

“Looks menacing, even from here,” Myers said.

“Heading down.”

Pearce eased the yoke forward until the digital altimeter read just one thousand feet. From this height, oceangoing container ships looked like toy boats.

“We should have their attention now,” Myers said. Her gut tingled.

“We got it the moment we entered their airspace. That destroyer has already painted us.” Pearce and Myers were informed by Tanaka personally about the Volant drone getting shot down the day before. Didn’t exactly boost Pearce’s confidence in today’s mission. He wished the civilian HondaJet had missile-lock alarms and electronic countermeasures.