Mike Maden: Blue Warrior

Mostly.

The locals told him bloody chicken livers were the next best thing to live bait if he wanted to catch one of the razor-toothed tiger fish lurking in the deep water, a hundred silvery pounds of thrashing mouth full of vicious teeth as long as sixteen-penny nails. They told him to keep the hooks small unless he wanted to catch one of the really big monsters, but then he’d have the fight of his life on his hands—literally.

He went with the big hooks.

The choppy water chucked against the hull of the small wooden boat. His fishing line hadn’t budged in hours in the gray water. Sunset wasn’t too far off. If something didn’t strike the bait soon, he’d start rowing back. He flexed his blistered hands. In this wind, he was in for a long haul back to shore.

He’d rejoin Johnny tomorrow, back in the park after Johnny finished up his training consultation with Sandra.

Troy took a sip of beer.

He thought about his old man a lot lately, a Vietnam vet killed by the war years after it ended. Wondered if the same fate awaited him.

Growing up, he and his dad had fought their own private little war, scratching out a living in the mountains of Wyoming. The old man would laugh at him now, for sure. Wasn’t he becoming all the things he said he hated about him?

Probably for the same reasons, too.

His dad didn’t talk much about the war. Didn’t have to. Wore it in his brooding face, the scars in his flesh. If he had regrets, he didn’t say. He just drank.

Pearce had no regrets. Was proud of his CIA combat service. In SAD/SOG, he engaged the enemy wherever he found them. Righteous kills, each one. But the War on Terror had taken too many of the people he cared about, sacrificed on the altar of political ambition. So he quit. He missed them all.

Especially Annie.

Pearce still loved his country but hated politics. He formed Pearce Systems because he could pick and choose his operations with a certain moral clarity. And it paid well. More important, deploying remotely piloted vehicles kept his friends out of harm’s way even when the bullets were flying.

So what was his problem?

He was an angry man. Always had been, bar brawling all the way back in high school. Stanford took some of the edge off. Practically civilized him. Then he joined the CIA. They honed his angry edge into a fine killing blade, but under control.

Maybe he was losing control.

His anger deepened the last few months, for sure. So had the depression. Didn’t make sense. His company had never been more prosperous, or done better work.

After last year, he focused Pearce Systems on the commercial uses of drone technologies. More opportunities, more money. And little chance of his people getting killed. The South African delivery was a favor for an old friend, and probably the last military system he would ever deliver.

But bitter disappointment still ate at him. The United States had cut and run out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now both were sliding back into chaos and radicalism. Tens of thousands of brave Americans bled and died to free those nations, but the jihadi shits they fought remained, which meant they won.

His government had broken faith; now Pearce felt like he had lost his.

Serving President Myers last year rekindled it briefly. She was the one politician he could believe in, because she put the national interest ahead of her own. He trusted Myers completely. But she resigned, falling on her sword to keep the nation safe.

He and his team proudly fought the Mexican cartels and the Iranian terrorists. He was grateful Myers secured blanket immunity for them all after it was over. But he didn’t need a law degree to know that only criminals need immunity.

Heroes got medals, not pardons.

President Greyhill and Vice President Diele were in charge now. Exactly the kind of politicians he loathed.

He was done with it.

Pearce took a long pull on his beer. His line still didn’t budge. He hoped Johnny was having more luck than he was in trying to land his own pretty fish.

Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

Mozambique

Johnny Paloma pretended to stare at the solar-powered drone in Sandra Gallez’s hands, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of her face, confident and curious.

“Like this?” she asked. The Belgian beauty held the Silent Falcon’s carbon-fiber fuselage forward with one hand while the other supported the tail structure. The six-bladed prop spun almost silently, but the electric motor threw enough torque into the blades even at this low speed to blow her dark, curly hair away from her cheeks. Working undercover in L.A., Johnny encountered plenty of hot women in the clubs and on the beaches. He even worked a few side jobs as a bodyguard for some of the best-looking women in film. But Sandra’s natural, unadorned beauty enthralled him.

“Yes, about forty-five degrees. Just like a Raven,” Johnny said. He held the Nintendo-style controller in his hands. The auto launch toggle was selected. This would automatically take the Silent Falcon to an altitude of five hundred feet and circle it until it received further commands. Onboard sensors and software avoided obstructions in its flight path or possible collisions with other aircraft.

“Now?”

“Now!” He laughed.

She threw it. Despite its seven-foot wingspan, the lightweight sUAS lifted effortlessly into the bright morning sky.

This portion of the park was mostly flat grassland, populated by a smattering of acacia trees. Perfect for small drone operations, especially landings by rookies. It was elephant country. Rhinos, too.

Sandra jogged back over to Johnny, standing behind the brand-new green Land Rover Defender utility wagon. The famous World Wildlife Alliance white rhino logo was painted on the hood and the rear door. Pearce Systems fitted out the wagon with all of the necessary drone operations gear. The talented young conservationist was in charge of the WWA’s most advanced research project.

“Now put the goggles on,” Johnny said.

Sandra picked up the wireless Fat Shark Dominator HD video goggles and slipped them over her eyes. They were lightweight but huge, like a telephone handset attached to her face. Of course, she couldn’t “see” out of them—they didn’t have any lenses. The Fat Shark was a video projection system—a wearable digital theater.

“Now take this.” Johnny handed her the flight controller.

“Fantastique!”

“Quite the view, eh?”

“Like a bird. I can see everything.”

Sandra’s entire field of view was filled with a perfect HD first-person video (FPV) image on the screen, which was also simultaneously recorded on a hard drive in the Rover. The forward-looking bird’s-eye POV through the spinning propeller was mesmerizing. She tapped another toggle and a real-time map of Limpopo Park appeared on her video screen. A blue dot indicated the GPS location of the Silent Falcon, and a red dot indicated the position of a recently GPS-tagged rhino, part of the last herd in Mozambique, about five kilometers away.

“Now rotate the camera,” he said. “The god’s-eye view is even cooler.” The Silent Falcon was equipped with a rotating gimbal that housed the optical and infrared cameras, along with a laser pointer.

“This is perfection, Johnny!” Sandra rotated the camera through its entire range of motion, like she’d done on simulated practice sessions before, but this was her first real-time flight with the Silent Falcon.

The WWA recently made arrangements with Mozambique’s Wildlife Department to take over rhino observation-and-research duties. The cash-strapped, ill-equipped bureaucracy had become rather lax in its conservation responsibilities in the last few years, particularly in regard to the endangered rhino population, now perilously small and reduced to just a dozen adults. The sad truth was that some of the poorly paid Mozambican park rangers were known in the past to have colluded with poachers to gather up the rhino horns so prized by wealthy Chinese for their supposed powers as aphrodisiacs and medicinals. But even the honest park police were increasingly tasked with counterterror duties, and wildlife considerations took a backseat to the new security priorities set in Maputo.