Mike Maden - Drone

Able-bodied survivors finally screwed up the courage to look around. Some tended the injured. Most crossed to the big picture windows—or to what was left of them—shattered glass crunching beneath their feet.

The tarmac was littered with burning aircraft, smashed trucks, and scattered baggage carts, along with shoes, underwear, soda cans, styrofoam cups, golf clubs, and a thousand other artifacts.

And then there was the carnage. Corpses broken, twisted, burning. Limbs scattered like leaves. A few bodies still strapped in their seats, smashed into the tarmac.

It was hard to believe that so much damage could be inflicted in just one minute and eleven seconds.

Washington, D.C.

“Yes, I’m watching it now, on Fox,” Myers sighed into her phone. Donovan was on the other end. “It looks like Dante’s Inferno.”

The camera trucks were blockaded from the airport entrances so they could only manage long-distance shots. Black columns of smoke mushroomed into the bright blue Texas sky.

“We’re shutting down all outbound flights around the country until we’re sure this thing is over with,” Donovan said. “We’re also putting every surveillance helicopter we can lay our hands on—metro police departments, military units, executive shuttles, even news copters—on a five-mile radius sweep of every major airport in the nation. There haven’t been any other reports of similar attacks, but there’s no point in taking any chances.”

“Damn it. We’re still playing catch-up with these bastards. We’ve got to get ahead of them, right now.”

“I’m initiating Plan Orange,” Donovan replied. “Unless you’re ready to announce a national emergency.”

“Not yet. But I’m calling in all of the other National Guard units not already activated, just in case.”

“Understood,” Donovan said.

“Looks like we’ll be putting boots on the ground after all, Bill. I just never thought it would be in my own country.”

State of Veracruz, Mexico

Mo Mirza sweated like a pig.

He’d grown up in Westwood near UCLA, his alma mater. Beach weather mostly. Not the smothering heat of a Mexican jungle. But here he had privacy. And his own landing strip.

Mo was twenty-four years old, but looked like he was barely out of his teens. His thin beard was patchy and untrimmed, and his dark short-cropped hair was mottled with blue coloring. With his thick black-framed glasses, red high-top Converse basketball shoes, plaid Tony Hawk skater shorts, and a faded Ramones concert T-shirt, he looked every inch the quintessential American slacker.

He was anything but.

The jungle hangar was little more than a thatched roof on polls, but the natural material was perfect for thwarting optical and infrared surveillance. No walls, but plenty of room for the Reaper’s twenty-meter wing span and the big drums of aviation fuel.

The Bravo airfield was primitive by any measure, but sufficient for the task at hand. Four of Ali’s Quds men with automatic rifles were a grim comfort, but the airstrip’s extreme isolation was their best defense. The locals didn’t bother them. This was a Bravo camp and they knew to stay far away, even if Victor was dead.

Mo slapped at another mosquito on his neck and cursed as he ran another diagnostic check on the avionics package. The Chinese unit was a piece of crap, but he couldn’t risk using the American one. Either they’d track it or lock him out remotely. Both were bad news. He’d flown the Reaper with a portable ground-control station from a third-party vendor out of New York that played just like a video game, and the Israeli uplinks connected perfectly with Nasir 1, Iran’s global navigational satellite. But the Chinese unit sucked balls and made the Reaper hard to fly.

Mo’s phone rang.

“Will you be ready?” Ali asked.

“Rechecking everything now. Any luck on the Blue Arrows?”

Ali had a lead on a couple of the Chinese Hellfire knockoffs, designed for use with the CH-4, the Chinese Predator knockoff, also stolen from the U.S. arsenal. When Mo hijacked the Reaper, it only had two missiles left. Now it had none.

“They’ll arrive in three days.”

“Awesome. Then everything will be ready.”

San Diego, California

Pearce’s phone rang. It was his tech guru, Ian.

“Tell me you found him,” Pearce said.

“Not Ali. His uncle.”

“Where?”

Ian chuckled. “You’re not going to believe it.”

Washington, D.C.

Myers stood in the situation room of the DHS, studying the wall-length electronic touch-screen display map of the United States with Bill Donovan.

Previous attacks had been color-coded according to severity. Red markers indicated wounded; black indicated fatalities. Tapping on any of the markers pulled up a text window with all available data, including victim photos, crime scene information, agency in charge at the scene, etc.

The best shot they had to predict the future was to process the fire hose of data that was pouring in from the Utah facility as it daily analyzed petabytes — billions of megabytes—of images and data inputs it was receiving from all of the law enforcement agencies, along with the Domain Awareness Systems, which were linked to the thousands of security cameras guarding most public buildings. The only thing they were sure about so far was that the Bravos had split up their forces and spread their operations over the widest possible area. Soft targets were the norm.

Drone Command had continued to beg, borrow, steal, and lease several more drone systems as well, including the recently decommissioned Blue Devil 2 hybrid airship, which the air force had spent over $200 million to develop but had decided to mothball. The nearly four-hundred-foot-long airship was capable of carrying thousands of pounds of surveillance payloads and keeping them aloft for twelve hours at a time. Ashley had deployed the Blue Devil 2 with a Gorgon Stare wide-area surveillance package over Los Angeles just two days before the Hollywood attack and was eager to find out what evil the Mind’s Eye “visual intelligence” software had uncovered. Until they could discern an attack pattern, DHS had ordered a general mobilization of all LEO resources. State, county, and city law enforcement agencies were on high alert; police reserve units were called up; television and radio stations ran public service ads extolling citizens, “If you see something, say something. Don’t be afraid to call in anything suspicious.”

The unfortunate side effect of the extra security precautions was that the anxiety level of the average citizen shot through the roof; emergency rooms were filling up with as many heart attacks as panic attacks. Valium prescriptions were at an all-time high. Paranoia was increasing, too, and the number of concealed-carry permit applications had overwhelmed the ATF online application system. DHS urged the public to remain both calm and vigilant, but the number of cities declaring martial law rose daily. Racial and ethnic tensions were rising as well. Just like after 9/11, American flags were popping up everywhere, especially on cars. But now, so were Mexican flags, with the same intensity. Ironically, American Hispanics—many of whom had served in the U.S. military or had relatives on active duty—were flying the American flags. Mexican flags were most commonly flown on American university campuses like UC Berkeley by liberal Anglos and foreign-born nationals.

What stung Myers most was the right-wing militia and “prepper” groups harping about impending martial law. She actually shared that concern and had raised it with her attorney general. The 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (signed into law by President Bush) and the 2011 NDAA (signed into law by President Obama) gave Myers ample legal warrant to deploy U.S. armed forces in counterterror work on U.S. soil, in effect, turning them into cops on the beat.