Mike Maden - Drone Threat

The Reaper’s direction suddenly turned away from the coast and headed inland. No alarms sounded. The captain was too preoccupied to notice the change until it was too late.

But it wouldn’t have mattered if he had.

A doe-eyed Qatari girl from the royal house of Al-Thani swam naked in the vast blue pool inside the expansive stone courtyard.

Al-Saud leered at his newest and youngest wife from the shade beneath the portico and sipped on a minty mojito, his favorite cocktail. She was already pregnant, another sign of favor from Allah, whose blessings were as heavy and real as the thick rope of golden chain around his neck. His villa near the coast was a pleasure palace he had purchased just for the two of them with the dowry he had received from the girl’s father.

Life was good, and al-Saud was filled with the gloating satisfaction of all patriots on the winning side of a war. A war he had helped orchestrate. Thanks to him, the Americans were providing the drones his country required for fighting Daesh and keeping the filthy Persians at bay. Victory was certain.

But al-Saud’s thoughts turned inward. He sighed. House arrest was, literally, a gilded cage. But it was still a burden. His desperate desire was to be back in the good graces of the king. He would be now if it weren’t for Pearce. Pike’s new contract to assassinate the American was paid in full, a wedding gift to himself. He prayed it would be completed soon.

His mood began to sour until he remembered the comforting admonition of his uncle. “The Americans have long arms but short memories.” The old sheikh was right, of course. He would be back in service to his family and his nation eventually. He only needed patience, and a good word from Chandler at just the right time. Until then, he would be forced to endure the sensate life of a pampered Saudi royal. He laughed.

C’est la vie.

Al-Saud drained the last of his glass and slipped off his swimsuit. It was time to pleasure himself again with his young wife in the pool’s cool salt water. He padded over to the gold-tiled edge in his bare feet and called out to the girl. She laughed and waved him in. He felt his manhood swelling as he gazed upon her bright and eager face.

A glint of sunlight caught his eye. He glanced up into the pale blue vault. He sensed more than saw the blinding fury of two erupting Hellfire missiles, cutting off his scream in the scalding fire that burned away his world and everything he loved.

Sitting in his own GCS in San Diego, Ian turned the Saudi Reaper toward Iranian airspace. With any luck the Saudis would think it was Tehran that had managed to pull off the hijacking instead of him. Thanks to the Reaper’s navigational software and avionics package — designed and built by a subsidiary of Pearce Systems — Ian had taken effortless control of the drone and piloted it toward al-Saud’s private residence just five miles off its preprogrammed route.

The Reaper’s onboard facial-recognition software confirmed al-Saud’s identity before Ian launched the Hellfires and the high-powered optical camera captured the astonished look on the prince’s face just moments before he and his compound were vaporized.

Too bad about the girl , he thought to himself. But as his nana told him years ago, You sleep with the Devil in a bed of your own ashes .

Monitoring the communications channels of the Royal Saudi Air Force, Ian knew that two fourth-generation Boeing F-15SA strike fighters had been dispatched, just as he assumed they would be once the Reaper was discovered off course. Equipped with the AN/AAS-42 infrared search-and-track system wedded to the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System, the Saudi pilots would easily find and destroy the slow-moving turboprop Reaper with or without help from Saudi ground-control radar. No doubt they would completely destroy the aircraft along with its black box. But Ian was a cautious man and put a worm in the drone’s CPU that already destroyed any evidence of his activity just in case the black box was recovered.

Ian tapped an encrypted message on his console.

“14Gipper.”

Pike stared at the barrel of a pistol. His hands were raised. She stood well outside of his arm’s reach. The weapon was rock steady in her two-handed grip. The Korean was a pro, for sure.

“Irony is a bitch,” Stella said.

“I’m not following you.”

“Tamar was my friend. We ran an op together with Pearce, right here, in these waters.”

Pike wanted to bargain but the cold rage in her pitiless eyes told him it was pointless.

Stella motioned with her pistol. “Turn around.”

Pike hesitated. Her fingertip slid gently from the trigger guard to the trigger. Not good.

He turned around.

So this was it, he told himself. He faced the wide blue Pacific and its vast pale horizon. Tiny whitecaps shimmered in the morning light. He could imagine worse ways to go than a bullet to the back of the head, staring at the sea.

“She was an honorable woman and you’re a piece of shit,” Stella said. “I want those to be the last words you ever hear.”

“Technically, my dear, the last words—”

Stella clocked him on the back of his skull with the butt of her pistol. Hard. He moaned as he fell, hitting the deck with a sickening thud. He wasn’t dead. She was sure of that.

Couldn’t be dead.

That would ruin it.

Pike woke, eyes fluttering, surprised he was still alive.

His head throbbed, an excruciating headache. His shoulders were killing him, too, and pain shot down the length of his back. His wrists were cuffed to the broad wheel of his brand-new yacht, hands purpling. The weight of his body was suspended from his wrists as if he were crucified in reverse on a silver, circular cross.

He stood up on wobbly legs, the locked wheel supporting him. He shook his head to clear it.

He remembered.

That crazy Korean bitch. Something about irony.

He looked around. Miles offshore. Nobody around.

He called out. She was gone.

Thank God for that.

The cuffs dug into his wrists. He twisted them. The plastic bands dug in deeper. He cursed. Tugged again, hard. Tendons popped. He screamed at the top of his lungs, panicked, raging.

A muffled explosion forward shook the deck beneath his feet.

That caught his attention. He listened.

Utter silence.

Except for the gurgling noise.

What the hell?

He twisted all the way around, his stiff neck barely able to rotate enough to look directly behind him.

A boat. About a half mile away.

He squinted. He saw the Korean standing on the bow of another boat with a pair of binoculars.

The deck began tilting forward beneath his feet.

He whipped back around and the deck angled further.

It was going down.

Fast.

Stella watched Pike scream and flail, his wrists still pinned to the big silver wheel. She could hear his anguished cries even from here. Probably from the pain in his two wrists, now broken, but maybe from sheer terror.

She hoped it was both.

The bow submerged, filling with tons of dead ocean weight. The stern stood high out of the water like a shark fin.

She zoomed in on Pike’s manic, jerking dance as the helm filled with surging sea. A moment later the rest of the ship followed the bow, plunging beneath the surface of the cold Pacific, Pike at the wheel, his screams cut off, steering a course for a deep blue hell.

She lowered her binoculars. Tossed the remote-control detonator over the side.

Her phone vibrated. She checked the message. It was Ian.