Dave inserted then connected the battery packs and we took the drone out to the open area in front of the house. I sat it down and the four of us stood together near the backside of the garage. I held Sam as Dave started the engines. The drone whined loudly. Dave let the engines idle for a couple of minutes and then brought the little craft up into a hover. It seemed to fly adequately with the load. Dave flew it around the front yard for a bit then increased his altitude and flew out over the valley. The little craft operated perfectly with the load.
Dave flew the craft back to the house and landed in the open area. We took the thing back into the garage, unhooked the batteries and put them in to recharge. I told Julia, Ruth, and Dave to leave the garage while I inserted the blasting cap detonators into the C-4. After they had vacated the garage, I slowly inserted the four detonators. After the last one went in, I let out a long breath and realized I had not been breathing the whole time. I gulped several large breaths of air and took the drone back outside, carefully.
It took about fifteen minutes to recharge the battery packs and Dave reinserted them in the craft. “Okay, show time everyone. I think we should go inside and hook this controller up to the big screen so we can all see the result when it hits.”
Dave and I hooked the controller up to the big TV in the living room and he looked at me and asked, “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be, I suppose,” I answered. I had charged a second drone and would fly it alongside Dave’s and would record the event.
We started the engines and let them warm for a moment. We were happy his didn’t detonate when he started it. Next would be the lift off. Dave gave more juice to the craft and it rose into a hover about twenty feet up, and held it there for a moment, then increased altitude and flew out over the valley, with me on his tail filming. All of us breathed a sigh of relief as now Dave’s bomb was out of range. If it detonated now, we wouldn’t suffer any damage or injury.
Dave flew the drone to the north and a little east, flying up to Centennial, me filming his flight all the way. The truck was in a pasture on the east side of Centennial and Dave flew to the east of the road up to town. Once he flew over the museum, he slowed and I passed him, getting into position to film the hit on the truck with the sun behind my drone. The battery packs read a little over half charge as we slowed so we knew we had more than enough power left for the test. Dave flew directly north until the truck came into view.
The owner’s manual was spot on as Dave increased the altitude to just over fifteen-hundred feet and hovering just a moment to get the camera on the truck, dove the little drone at the target. I kept my drone’s camera on the truck and told Dave I was ready and filming.
He steered the craft in the dive with the truck centered in his camera and kept flying a steady course at full speed right into the front of the truck, striking the unfortunate thing in the grill. The result was spectacular to say the least. The explosion was dazzling sending the cab doors flying to the sides, the hood spinning straight up for about fifty feet. For the most part, the truck disintegrated. The test was a success. I kept my drone on station for another five minutes to make sure the fire didn’t spread then flew it back to the house as fast as the little craft could fly.
Once home, I took the camera card out and placing it in the computer, we watched the truck blow up about a hundred times it seemed. We couldn’t get enough of the sight. The camera angle was from the rear of the truck and we could clearly see the hood fly up, the doors separate and fly to the sides as the explosion took place. It was an amazing video.
Dave and I looked at each other and he said, “You and I need to sit together and strategize about these things. I think that was too much explosive.”
“I agree,” I said. “We need to think about our objectives and how to attack.”
“Tomorrow, boys, tomorrow,” Julia interrupted. “We need to quit for the day and think some. I want to go home and do a few things over there and clean up some, both the house and me.”
“Okay”, Dave said, “I guess we need some time to digest our new weapon system and have time to think about how best to use them. The drones are going to be a deceptive attack. The bad guys won’t know about them at all, so we’ll have the advantage for a few minutes at least – a complete surprise. We need to think about what the enemy will assume and how they may react once we spring the attack. We need to think about methods of assault, and how best to execute the strikes of each drone. We’ll need to exploit the surprise as much as possible. So, think about all that tonight and tomorrow we’ll draw up a contingency plan.”
Chapter 10: Updated Plans and Waiting
I woke to the smell of coffee. Dave had talked Julia into staying the night and must’ve already been up. He was wound up last night when the four of us went to bed. I could tell he wanted to stay up and work on the drone ideas, but the rest of us were bushed and needed some rest. Julia had jumped into the jet tub up in the Underground.
After I got up, I cleaned up, dressed, went down to the library, and got paper and pencils for our powwow this morning. I dropped the supplies on the table in the kitchen, startling Dave. He glared at me but poured me a mug of coffee anyway.
“Ready to hash this out?” I asked him.
“As I’ll ever be,” he replied. “I want to read one of the owner’s manuals for those drones we found at our place. We need to know the capabilities even more than we already do. That’ll be my first thing.”
“May as well get to it then,” I told him. “The girls will probably sleep ‘till noon after the night we put in last night. You’ll be able to read the book while we’re waiting for them.”
“Keep the coffee going, please.”
“I guess.”
Dave went out to the garage where the drones were and opening one got the owner’s manual and began reading. I’d stepped out and sat in one of the deck chairs on the front porch, looking out over the valley. I’d go take care of the animals after my mug of coffee.
I’d been sitting there for a few sips when I heard a very loud whoop coming from the garage. Dave came blasting out the door a moment later with a booklet in his hand, running for the house. He saw me on the porch and without using the steps, jumped up and screeched to a halt.
“They have remote release mechanisms,” he said with a flourish.
“What?” I asked, not comprehending what he was saying.
“The drones we got from Sam’s. They have remote controlled release mechanisms on them. We can bomb with them instead of doing the Kamikaze thing!”
The light came on and I understood what he was saying. The implication hit like a bolt of lighting. I sat up staring at Dave, and he staring at me said, “Don’t you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, “I get it…I got it. We can bomb them and not loose the drones. Fly them back to the house, reload and bomb them again. With five of them, all four of us can fly one and bomb the crap outta them.”
“They can hold four bombs each and we can drop them one at a time according to the directions! Can you believe it?”
“Four…that means sixteen bombs at two point five pounds of explosive each, flying around a convoy of their vehicles at one time. They won’t have a chance.”
“Come on,” Dave said, turning for the front door.
I jumped up and followed him inside. Ruth was up and said morning and asked what the hubbub was all about.
“Those drones Dave and I found in his underground…they hold four bombs each and we can drop them instead of flying the drones into something,” I told her, pouring myself another mug of coffee.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means the four of us can fly around their convoy and drop bombs on them until we’ve dropped sixteen of the things down their throats, that’s what,” Dave told her.
She looked down at the table and I could tell she was visualizing bombing one of their vehicles. I smiled because I was probably imagining the same scene. “You know,” she
said, “I wish we had more people. That way we could bomb them and use some guns on them at the same time. That would really keep them busy.”
“I’m glad she’s on our side,” Dave said.
“You and me both, honey,” Julia said as she snuck up on us. “Morning everyone,” she said, and we said the same. “I’ve been up on the stairs listening in and heard everything about the drones. That’s good news. Maybe we could fly two over the convoy and have two of us using machineguns on them. Something to think about.”
“First thing is we need to test these things out,” Dave said. “We need to figure out how to attach the bombs to the drones safely and how to drop them without blowing ourselves up. We need to practice with them…a lot.”
“What are we waiting for then?” I said standing up. “Come on Dave, help me with the animals then we can get those drones in here and charge the battery packs and start some training.”
“We’ll fix breakfast,” Ruth yelled as we left the house.
It didn’t take long for the two of us to care for the animals. Afterwards, we ran to the garage and got all the drones, placing them in the tote wagon and hauling them to the house. Inside, we stacked the drones in a pile in the library and I asked Dave to follow me to the armory where we retrieved the other three large drones I had in there. We now had eight large drones, five of which were very large, and six smaller ones in the pile.
“I didn’t think we had this many of the things,” Dave said.
Julia said, “I don’t remember getting them all. These five are huge,” she said pointing to the stack from Sam’s underground supply.
“Those were in one of Sam’s storerooms,” Dave told her. “I remembered seeing them somewhere over there and Doug and I went over to the house and got them.”
We plugged in several battery packs for charging and decided to charge all the batteries and at least have the packs ready to go if needed.
Dave was looking at one of the largest drones trying to figure out how to connect things to it. “There must be some trick to this,” he said, perplexed. “We need to read the manual.” He got up, went back to the kitchen table, and began reading the book again. I followed and poured both of us another mug of coffee. Before I sat down with him, I went back to the library and got one manual from each of the different types of drones we had. I’d read them all and figured out the capabilities of each.
The ladies sat breakfast in front of us and after praying we ate and read. The four of us sat there, munching absent-mindedly, reading the instruction manuals. It probably would have been a funny site to someone, who may have been watching us, seeing the four adults in deep concentration while eating.
Dave looked up and said to no one in particular, “Altitude ceiling is twelve-thousand feet. More than two miles! With these, we can see the airport from here I bet.” He bent back to his reading.
I felt a chill so got up and put three logs on the fire, which was down to embers. That should do it for a while. I turned back for the table and stopped, looking at the trio reading. Ruth had reached for her coffee mug and frozen bringing it to her lips. She was clearly reading something very interesting.
Dave looked up to where I had been sitting and seeing I was gone, looked confused for just a moment, then looked around the room and spying me near the fireplace said, “Hey, remember that big storehouse facility north of I-80 over near Cheyenne? Where you first met Ruth?” I nodded. “We need to make a run over there and see if there are more of these things stored somewhere.” He was dead serious.
“You think we have time for that, or can it wait until we know what these guys are planning next?” I asked him.
We looked at each other for a moment and he said, “That’s gotta go on the list for the next run east for anything. We need to look in all the stores in Laramie also. You think you and I should make a special trip over to Cheyenne for more C-4?”
“Uh, that’s a thought, but at this stage, we’re probably good enough,” I answered.
I went over to the board on the wall we write things we needed on and wrote drones and C-4. I added bailing wire as I could use some for the fencing project I’d be working on in the spring. We would probably need more of it for the underground green houses we were planning to construct anyway. I shook my head and knew I was getting off topic so concentrated on the upcoming battle we knew we faced.
Dinner that evening was more talk than eating. Nothing new came from the discussions and most of that dwelt with the drones and their capabilities. We decided the ladies would fly the Kamikaze drones and we men would fly the bombers. We planned to use the Kamikazes to hit the first and last vehicles then blast the middle with the bombers. Sort of like another nosebleed ambush, but from the air.
We were about to break, and I said, “I hope we’re the ones with air superiority and not them.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Dave said looking at me. “We really don’t know what their capabilities are, do we?”
“No, and if that drone you shot down carried missiles, what’s next?” I queried. “I remember a documentary show saying drones were used to drop two-thousand-pound laser guided bombs in Afghanistan so maybe they have one of those. I hope not, but we need to consider that possibility. At least they may be carrying missiles again.”
“What do you suggest?” Julia asked.
“Getting away from the homes at least,” I answered quickly. “We should fly the drones from another location, maybe from a truck or ATV if necessary. That way if they do fire missiles at the houses, we won’t be in them.”
“All of us need to be thinking out of the box for this one,” Dave said. “Write down ideas and we’ll consider everything. At least our underground construction was to withstand a nuclear blast. If they drop a bomb on it, we’ll be rocked, but that’ll be about it.”
“But the house will be gone, won’t it?” Julia said. No one answered her as we all knew that would be the case. We broke from dinner and Dave and I took one of the big drones out onto the front porch and went back inside.
I threw a couple of logs on the fire and together, Dave and I sat on the couch. He flew and I watched. First thing he did was flying over Sheep Mountain. What a gorgeous site it was from the air. Before the plague, I should have taken flight lessons and gotten my private pilot’s license. Then I could have bought a plane and built a small runway down in the valley…hindsight again.
Dave flew out to Highway 11 and followed it out to the end of Sheep Mountain. He took a few dives down towards the roadway, simulating the dive we would make on bombing runs. It was exhilarating. He passed the controls to me and I did a few, too. We were making the diving passes at the juncture of eleven and State Road 416 as that seemed a good spot to hit if they attacked from that direction.
Dave said, “We should make some bags with sand or flour and use them as practice bombs. Add rocks to make them weigh the same as the bombs we make for realism. I bet we would have bombing down to a science in no time.”
“Another thing to add to the list,” I said. “I don’t want to use flour, but maybe we could use unmixed concrete or something. That would mark well and be weighty enough to use.”
“Good thinkin’,” Dave said.
“I’m going to bed,” Ruth said.
“Me, too,” Julia added.
“We’ll be up in a bit,” I said. “We need to bring the drone back. Night,” and gave Ruth a kiss.
Dave kissed Julia and went back to flying the drone. We’d only used a quarter of the battery power on this flight. The book said they could stay aloft without a load for around ninety minutes. That meant loitering time. We’d have to test that and see how long they could stay aloft with a load of four bombs.
Dave landed on the front porch and I got up to retrieve the drone. Inside, I pulled the batteries and plugged them in, threw two more logs on the fire, said goodnight to Dave and headed upstairs.
Mid-morning the next day, Dave and I were in the garage with the body of
one of the bigger drones, the bombers we were now calling them. We’d connected a single battery and were playing with the release mechanism and had learned how to operate it. We made some small packs of concrete and used small sticks to simulate the blasting detonators we would use in the bomb construction.
Each pack weighed in at two point five pounds, so right at the ten-pound limit if we used four packs. The packs could be dropped individually or as a group. We’d already decided dropping all four at once would be an exciting event. We’d save that for the real episode if needed.
First thing we did was take four of the simulated bombs to the house and connect them to the drone we’d flown the night before. We attached the fully charged battery pack then went back in the house, refilled our coffee mugs, and sat on the couch with the controller.
“You first,” I said, “after all, it was your idea.”
The grin on his face said it all - he was ready to try it. He took a sip of coffee, flexed his hands and fingers, and hit the start button. We could hear the engines on the porch and Dave said, “You better go watch. We don’t want one of the real ones falling off and blowing up the porch.”
I agreed and got up and opened the door to watch the liftoff. Dave gave the drone power and it slowly rose and flew out into the middle of the yard. I gave him a thumb up and he began to gain altitude. I shut the door and quickly sat beside him on the couch. We’d previously agreed on a flight plan to lift to three thousand feet, turn directly east and fly to the summit of Sheep Mountain. We would keep a close eye on the battery level throughout the mission.
Once he reached the altitude, Dave turned the bomber east and headed towards the mountain. “How does it handle with the additional weight?” I asked.
“Sluggish,” he said with a face. “It actually feels heavy on the controls so keep that in mind when you fly it. Almost to the mountain.”
I'm Tired of Zombies | Book 2 | Full Scale War Page 26