Drone (A Troy Pearce Novel)

by Mike Maden

“So long as we can do that without alerting the Mexican government. I want to keep this as limited as possible. One kill, one message. End this thing, or at least contain it,” Myers said.

  “Suits me fine. One kill, one job, and we’re done. I doubt you’ll be able to stop at one and I don’t have any intention of standing under the tree after we swat the hornets’ nest.”

  “Understood, Mr. Pearce. One job and you’re done,” Myers agreed.

  “If you can spare him, I’d like Mike to liaison for us.”

  “He’s all yours, Mr. Pearce.” Myers stood up, extended Pearce her hand. He took it. She had a firm grip.

  “I’m just glad we never met,” she smiled.

  17

  Pearce Systems Research Facility, Dearborn, Michigan

  Pearce stood with Udi Stern next to an oversize treadmill. The former Israeli paratrooper was three inches shorter than Pearce, but broader in the chest.

  “Go ahead, Udi. Try.” Dr. Rao smiled.

  Udi smiled nervously at her. “I don’t want to break it,” he said, in heavily accented English.

  “You won’t,” she said.

  Udi stepped closer to the Petman 3, a third-generation Boston Dynamics humanoid robot that was on loan to Pearce Systems. It was jogging at exactly five miles per hour on the treadmill. Its legs pumped effortlessly, and the combat boots it wore pounded on the oversize treadmill’s rubber pad in a faultless heel-and-toe strike.

  Dr. Rao’s team had recently perfected the software that enabled it to run for the first time, and she had renamed the robot “Usain Bolts” after the famous Jamaican runner. But the experimental drone was still a headless mechanical monster with a skinless aluminum-titanium frame, the stuff of science-fiction nightmares. On its chest it wore a black case that housed the video sensor package.

  Udi lifted his own steel-toed boot and lightly kicked the Petman 3, but the robot barely budged. It was still connected to a thick power cable hanging down from overhead, but the cable was providing no physical support.

  “She said to try and knock it over, not ask it for a date,” Pearce said.

  Udi’s dark eyes narrowed. He threw a hard side kick into the robot’s hip. Usain Bolts was shoved hard to the left, but it never broke stride, and quickly returned to center.

  “Try using your hands,” Dr. Rao suggested. “Give it a good shove.”

  Udi spit in both hands, lowered himself, then lunged at the upper torso, careful to not catch himself in the rapidly pumping arms. He whacked it good. The robot’s upper torso twisted violently away from Udi. Its right arm windmilled high while its left arm swung low to help it keep balance. The twisting torso also twisted the hips, and the legs followed the hips. Just as it looked like it was about to crash, the robot did a quick shuffling step, turned on the balls of its feet without losing stride, and righted itself again. Within moments, it was jogging once again in the center of the broad treadmill.

  Pearce laughed. “I knew I should’ve brought your wife instead.”

  “Can you imagine a platoon of these parachuting out of the sky, then racing through the enemy’s streets? The psychological impact alone would be devastating.” Dr. Rao’s eyes gleamed with awe at the future soldier she was helping to create.

  “This place always makes me depressed,” Udi lamented.

  “Not to worry. It will be at least five more years before you’re obsolete.” She giggled, patting Udi on his thick shoulder.

  Pearce shook his head, incredulous. “Thanks for the demo. We’d better push on to the main event.”

  —

  Inside the brightly lit conference room at the lab, Dr. Rao engaged a large video monitor on the center table with a tablet device in her hand. Pearce and Udi stood next to her. The other operators Pearce had selected for the Castillo mission were already doing advance work in Mexico or prepping the computer and communications networks.

  Rao opened the hinged lid of a small aluminum case that was also on the table.

  She reached into the case and lifted something out with a pair of tweezers and set it on the pad. “Watch the monitor, please.”

  She tapped the tablet in her hand and a live image of Udi’s clasped, hairy hands popped onto the screen. When Udi realized those were his hands, he moved them, suddenly self-conscious.

  “Hey! A mini spy camera. Nice,” Udi said.

  “Oh, no. Much more than that,” Rao said. “Watch.”

  Rao engaged the tablet again, and the image on the monitor turned toward the ceiling tiles, then rocketed for one of them. The camera looked like it was going to crash into the ceiling, but instead, it stopped abruptly. The image on the monitor turned upside down, and now Rao, Pearce, and Udi were on the monitor far below. Within a second, however, the image righted itself and enlarged to full frame on the monitor.

  “Now let’s have some fun.” Rao punched another button, and the lights shut off. The room was pitch-black, but a new infrared image appeared on the video monitor. Blue wire-mesh overlays—facial recognition software—instantly engaged, scanning all three faces. In less than a second, the blue lines flashed red.

  “Apparently none of us is Aquiles Castillo,” Dr. Rao said. “If one of us had been, the appropriate facial image would have flashed green.”

  “Impressive,” Pearce said.

  Rao pressed another virtual button on her tablet. The lights snapped back on and the monitor displayed a swift, uneven flight back toward the black box. The onboard camera hovered just an inch above it for a moment. Five more miniature mosquito drones were parked in the box. Rao tapped one last button and the camera eye landed on the black foam padding inside the box, the last image displayed before the monitor shut off.

  Udi and Pearce exchanged a glance.

  “Amazing. But they look very fragile,” Udi said.

  “Open your hand, please,” Rao said. She picked up one of the mosquito drones between her elegant fingers and dropped it into Udi’s broad open palm.

  “I can hardly feel it,” Udi said. He raised and lowered his open hand like a measuring scale. “In fact, I really can’t feel it at all.” Udi brought his hand close to his face.

  “It looks exactly like a little mosquito. Incredible.”

  Rao picked up another one and handed it to Pearce. He examined it closely as well.

  “They’re surprisingly durable. And they’re so light, our targets won’t notice they’re on them until it’s too late,” Rao said.

  “What’s the battery life?” Udi asked.

  “Two hours maximum. But they can tap into a light fixture, a lightbulb, even the static electricity on human skin, and recharge.”

  “How does facial recognition work with identical twins? They share the same DNA,” Pearce asked.

  “Identical twins aren’t truly identical. That’s a misnomer. Even their fingerprints aren’t the same. It’s like your own face. The left side of your face is always slightly different from the right side, even though it’s all the same DNA,” Rao said.

  “How many are we deploying?” Pearce asked.

  “Six mosquito drones. Three lethals for Aquiles. They have a blue mark on the belly. The other three carry nonlethal identity chips for tracking Ulises. All six are already charged and preprogrammed with the correct facial target recognition.”

  “Why six bugs? Why not just two?” Udi asked as he examined his bug more closely. It really did look like a tiny aluminum mosquito with tissue-thin wings.

  “Redundancy. Maybe the bad guys own a fly swatter. Who knows what you may encounter. Besides, we’re not paying for them.” Rao smiled. “Any other questions?”

  “Range? Limitations?” Pearce asked.

  “In a windless environment, a two-hour charge will get you a half mile maximum, flying straight. Any kind of wind resistance drops that considerably, as does maneuvering around objects. Windspeed ab
ove five miles per hour will be extremely problematic, even prohibitive. These drones are really designed for close indoor operations. They operate independently, day or night.” She held up the tablet. “Use this to activate them or make programming changes, but otherwise, you don’t need it for flight controls unless you want to. Their Achilles’ heel, obviously, is that you have to have some sort of a delivery system that can deposit them safely within the operating environment.”

  “I’ve got a delivery system in mind.” Pearce pointed at Udi. “Him.”

  Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

  Two days later, two gorgeous women in bikinis rocketed across the deep blue water of the Gulf of California in a sparkling white ski boat. It was a perfect day in paradise beneath a brilliant, cloudless sky. The occasional gull swooped overhead.

  Stella Kang drove the boat, towing Tamar Stern on a single high-performance water ski. The inboard engine whined like a jet turbine. The boat ran so fast that Tamar threw a ten-foot-tall rooster tail behind her.

  Their circuit took them directly past a number of luxury yachts anchored in a three-mile-long line of privilege in the waters off of Cabo, including the Castillo boat, which was parked at the farthest end, some distance away from the others.

  The first time around, the girls drew quite a bit of attention to themselves. Stella was a stunning Korean-American woman. Her thick black hair whipped behind her like a battle flag. Tamar was half Ashkenazi and half Ethiopian, with piercing green eyes and short-cropped hair. The two women were attractive enough to draw attention to themselves, but nobody in Cabo had ever seen anyone fly as fast as Tamar did on her ski.

  On the second pass, all hands were on deck on the yachts. The men whooped and hollered, raised their glasses and bottles, whistled and cheered. A few boats even blew their big horns as the two laughing women rocketed past. The two skiers waved and smiled at their admirers. Even the party girls on the big yachts cheered, in awe of the show that Stella and Tamar were putting on.

  A half mile away, Udi and Pearce kept discreet watch from a fishing boat they’d rented. They pretended to be sport fishing mako sharks, which were running hot this time of year, but their eyes were fixed on the surveillance gear they’d rigged to keep tabs on both the Castillos and the two women on their team. A couple of big rods and reels were rammed into their holders in the back of the boat, and thick steel shark lines trailed in the water behind them. Pearce sat strapped in the fighting chair holding another rod, the butt end jammed into the gimbal between his feet. Udi was in the cabin, the boat cruising slowly on autopilot. Pearce chummed the water behind the slow-moving boat every now and then, mostly to keep a half dozen gulls circling overhead.

  “Your wife can really ski, Udi.”

  “Base jumping, parasailing. She does it all. Well, except cook.”

  “Next pass, Udi.”

  “Roger that.”

  Stella brought the ski boat around for another run. The big inboard engine whined even louder as she pushed the needle on the tach into the red zone. Tamar leaned deep into the curves she was cutting in broad swathes through the ocean. They pushed past the Castillo yacht and out into the blue water, getting ready for another turn.

  Suddenly, the ski boat’s inboard motor sputtered, then cut out, and the high-pitched whine disappeared. The silence was startling.

  The ski boat’s bow had ridden high like a haughty stallion when the engine roared; now it sagged into the water, spent. Tamar had tossed the rope aside as soon as the engine died. She glided to a graceful halt until she gently sank into the water near the ski boat. Voices echoed on the water, some cheering, some booing. The Castillo boat was nearest, but it was at least a quarter mile away. A gull wheeled in the sunlight above it.

  Tamar grabbed hold of her ski and paddled to the back of the ski boat where Stella helped her up onto the skier’s platform. Stella took the ski and stowed it as Tamar climbed all the way in. They flashed a lot of skin in the process.

  More cheering erupted from the Castillo yacht.

  The two gorgeous women stood in front of the engine compartment, feigning confusion.

  Udi watched the Castillo boat. Nobody was racing out to rescue the damsels. “What’s taking them so long?”

  “Maybe chivalry is dead. You ready?”

  “Yeah.” Udi had slid into the cabin and was working a joystick. A video display was in front of him.

  “There,” Pearce said, without pointing.

  A small rubber launch with an outdoor motor pushed off from the near side of the Castillo yacht and buzzed toward the two stranded women. Pearce lifted a pair of civilian-grade field glasses.

  “Two of them. Mexicans.”

  “You were expecting Italians?” Udi asked.

  “You’re up, wisenheimer.”

  Pearce watched the motor launch approach the stranded ski boat. They tossed a line over and Stella caught it and secured it to one of the davits. Pearce could hear the men in his earpiece ask in Spanish what was wrong. Stella pretended to not speak any Spanish, though she was more fluent than Pearce was. The two Mexicans were just deckhands from the Castillo boat, not the Castillos themselves, thankfully. No telling what stunt the twins would have tried to pull on two vulnerable women in a boat on open water this far from shore. The Castillos still weren’t scheduled to arrive on their yacht until tomorrow night.

  Pearce swung his binoculars over to the Castillo yacht. An M40A5 bolt-action sniper rifle with a Leupold Mark 4 scope was tucked under a piece of canvas by his feet just in case things went south. There was even more powerful ordnance stored in the cabin if things went really south. He watched the gull circling high overhead.

  Inside the cabin of their fishing boat, Udi was working the joystick controlling the SmartBird drone, a perfect example of biomimicry. It was designed and patterned to fly like a gull, including the long, rhythmic beats of its wings that appeared perfectly organic, so much so that it often found itself in the company of other gulls. Pearce had purchased the second-generation drone—smaller, faster, and even more anatomically correct than the original—from the German manufacturer Festo a few months earlier, but this was the first chance he’d had to deploy it in an operation.

  The SmartBird drone featured an onboard camera, of course, and the Castillo yacht was fixed squarely in the center of Udi’s video screen. Udi maneuvered the drone in a leisurely circle, careful to keep the gull between the sun and the yacht. If anyone decided to watch the mechanical bird, the blinding sun would keep the surveillance brief.

  Pearce watched the two Mexican deckhands lift the inboard motor cover and inspect the ski boat’s dead engine. The girls giggled and shrugged, feigning stupidity. “Academy Awards all around, ladies,” Pearce chuckled.

  Stella slipped a hand behind her back and flipped Pearce the bird.

  Udi gently dropped the gull drone down to thirty feet above the yacht and released the pod containing the mosquito drones. They activated upon release. A separate wide-screen monitor flashed all six camera images from the six minuscule machines as they made their way onto the eighty-foot-long roof of the Castillo vessel. They were programmed for evasion and quickly scuttled for cover under vent hoods and rails, spreading out as far as possible to avoid detection. Two cameras went black when two mosquitoes—one lethal, one not—were blown into the water by a random gust of wind.

  “Done,” Udi called out. He pressed another button on a separate remote-control unit. “Boat’s ready to go.”

  Pearce whispered a command to Stella. “We’re done here. Fire it up.”

  Stella heard the command in her earpiece. She immediately stepped over to the starter button and pushed it.

  The ski boat’s engine roared to life, echoing like a gunshot across the water. The two Mexicans nearly jumped out of their skins. Before they could react any further, or worse, become suspicious, the two girls clapped and shouted like cheerleader
s, then playfully shooed the men off of their ski boat and back onto their motor launch. As soon as Stella untied the rope on the davit, the motor launch sped away, the men all smiles and waves as Stella and Tamar smiled and waved back. Pearce finally lowered his glasses when he saw Stella and Tamar rocket away, back toward shore.

  Udi stepped out of the cabin. “So far, so good, eh?”

  The fishing reel in the gimbal screamed with a big strike. The quivering line bent the big rod nearly in half.

  “Look at that! Too bad we’re heading back in,” Udi said.

  Pearce leaped back into his fighting chair and strapped himself in.

  “We’ve got plenty of time,” Pearce grunted as he began reeling up the steel line. “Grab yourself a beer and keep the boat steady.”

  Udi shook his head, laughing. “Sure thing. You’re the boss.”

  “Yup. And rank hath its privileges.”

  Castillo Yacht, Cabo San Lucas

  Thirty-six hours later, the crew heard the girl scream.

  The hot little blonde from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, had been studying Spanish for a year in Mexico on her daddy’s dime.

  Though a gifted language student, she was at a loss for words at the moment, moaning like a porn star with Aquiles on top of her, thrusting like a bull. Her eyes were tightly shut in anticipation of her own ferocious climax when she heard Aquiles howl. She felt something warm and wet splash onto her face, and her eyes snapped open.

  Aquiles’s face was twisted in a silent scream. Blood cascaded from his mouth and nose. She watched the last flicker of light leave his panicked eyes just as he collapsed, trapping her beneath his heavy corpse in a puddle of sticky hot blood.

  And that’s how the crew found her, half crazed and keening.

  JUNE

  18

  Isla Paraíso, Mexico

  César Castillo sat with a glass of Cuban rum in one hand, his third so far. His grieving, red-rimmed eyes stared at nothing in particular.