by Diane Capri
No answer. Of course.
Smithers’ growling ceased but his territorial stance held strong. “It’s okay, big guy. I’m gonna come in and we’re gonna be good friends. Okay? Partners.” It was a risk. But what other option did she have? She sure as hell wasn’t going to let a mangy mutt derail her scoop.
Jordan put her fingers through the fence and Smithers’ wet nose sniffed her knuckles. When he licked her hand without chomping, Jordan took it as a good sign.
She unlatched the gate slowly. Smithers stood still. Too still. Watching. Prepared to pounce in any possible direction.
The stairs to Keith’s door were directly in front of her. Ten feet away or so. If she could just get past the woman-eater….
Jordan stepped in and made her mistake. She turned her back on Smithers to close the fence.
When she looked again, Smithers’ razor-sharp teeth glistened in the moonlight and a string of drool fell from his slack mouth.
Maybe if she moved slowly it’d be okay. She liked dogs, but had never owned one. Was his body language a serious threat or merely a warning?
She took a slow step forward, toward the stairs. Smithers rushed her. Drool slung from his mouth. Pointy teeth and hardened body lurched forward.
Jordan leapt right and grabbed a tree. She scrabbled up the trunk without stopping until she was a good six feet above the rotting leaves at its base. Safely above chomping range, she chuckled nervously. “Didn’t know I could still climb trees, did you?”
Smithers growled.
“Damn, you’re nasty. What did I ever do to you, anyway?” She couldn’t jump down into Smithers’ sharp teeth, and she couldn’t stay up there all night, either.
Her sweaty hands gripped a flimsy tree branch. Fear-charged adrenaline and the mental image of her body dropping straight into Smithers’ open mouth pushed Jordan higher up the tree to a sturdier, window-height branch.
A stiff breeze blew across her exposed skin and raised gooseflesh everywhere.
Trembling, but secure enough to try calling Keith again, she reached into her sling bag’s inside zipper pocket. Fingers felt around.
No phone.
“Don’t tell me it’s not here. If I lose my work phone again I’m done. Fired forever. Toast.”
The muscles she used to hold onto the tree quivered. The tree bark roughed up her skin.
“Keith Simpson!” She was seriously annoyed and feeling more than a little stupid. She ripped a twig from the tree and hurled it at Keith’s window. No response. She didn’t have all night, and it was cold.
She stretched farther to snap another twig. Steadying herself with one hand and firmly grasping the coarse branch she straddled, she reached just a little farther.
Rippp.
“You have got to be kidding me.” Jordan glanced at the crotch of her pants, illuminated by a light within Keith’s apartment. Yep. Ripped. “Oh, come on.”
Jordan grabbed twig after twig, breaking them off and hurling them at Keith’s window. Tap! Tap! Tap!
No response from inside.
Then, she heard a loud, distinct buzzing from the far side of the house.
CHAPTER 3
Jordan’s entire body tensed. One of her worst childhood memories coursed through her body, which began to shake hard enough to knock her off her perch. She grabbed onto the branch and whipped her head around seeking the swarm of bees, prepared to drop into the smelly oak leaves and fend off Smithers, if she had to.
The buzz was coming from the back of the apartment, not from elsewhere in her tree. Was that better or worse?
Her mind ran through the obvious possible triggers. Had the hive become alarmed from afar? Had Smithers stirred them up? Perfume attracts bees.
What was her perfume called? Orange flower and lychee.
The buzzing hovered nearby, then moved closer. Hovered again, then moved closer still. As if led by a fickle queen changing her mind about which way to attack.
Forget the neighbors. “KEITH SIMPSON!”
She ducked her head into her arms and prepared for an all-out assault of stingers.
After a moment of feeling nothing of the kind, she peeked out, expecting to see the swarm. But she didn’t.
It was a drone. Not much larger than a Frisbee. Coming straight at her.
Again?? How had she become a drone magnet?
The machine maintained a steady altitude, on or about her eye level. She didn’t even need to duck.
She exhaled a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
A quadcopter. Stopped before it slammed into her head. She flashed back to Raine’s Cessna crash and she shivered.
She sat straighter on her branch and watched.
This drone was well-controlled, but far from subtle. Painted a glow-in-the-dark shade of green. Two dark, glowing indigo features like eyes resembled a house fly.
It was the flashiest drone she’d seen yet. Pretty cool, she had to admit.
Jordan chuckled. Keith sent a drone to rescue her rather than lending a human hand. So typical. And kind of adorably geeky.
As it got closer, Jordan saw that the drone’s “eyes” were not paint, but three-dimensional. Convex. Knowing Keith, they were probably cameras.
Which was also pretty cool, even by her non-geeky standards.
Hovering directly in front of her now, the wind from its blades blew her hair back like a miniature helicopter.
The situation was absurd and help with the ferocious Smithers was on the way.
Jordan grinned and lifted her grip from the branch long enough to wave before she gestured wildly toward the ground. “Would you tie up that damn dog and let me in?”
The drone likely wasn’t equipped with a microphone, but hopefully her facial expressions would show up on a monitor Keith was surely eyeing from the apartment.
The drone zipped back around the side of the house, followed a moment later by Keith bumbling out the door at the top of the stairs.
He looked up into the tree and shook his head. “I’m not even gonna ask.”
“That’s one vicious dog you have.”
Keith restrained Smithers, and Jordan slid down the tree while trying simultaneously to cover the hole in her pants. She followed Keith up the stairs, keeping a hand over the rip in her pants. “I didn’t know you had a quadcopter.”
“Why would I not have built my own awesome quadcopter?”
Jordan stepped into his apartment which was nothing less than a technology geek’s dream workshop. “Right.”
Whirrs and purrs and beeps came from every direction. An overhead fan echoed the propellers of the drone.
“Did you turn that fan on just because it’s another gadget? It’s October!”
Keith’s apartment proved he was even geekier than he’d seemed. The place was cluttered with computers plugged in to various electronic devices. Monitors, wires, batteries, and assorted gadgets covered every surface.
A slight ozone residue, probably from soldering, lingered. Jordan could almost taste the metal in the air. Maybe the fans were meant to disperse the smell.
Ping. Pong. Ping. Electronic updates sounded around the room.
Jordan tried to imagine where they’d possibly sit amid the electronics cluttering the musty furniture. Keith tossed her a pair of black sweatpants. She slipped them on over her ripped slacks.
He had already nestled in to a worn yellow armchair, feet propped on a wooden stool. Jordan pushed a hard drive aside and sat on the couch. “So, your quad?”
“Yep. I call him The Fly. It’s the AV1 five-thousand. Practically the best you can get without being in the Air Force.” Keith’s pride seemed justified. “Four antennae, access to two-point-four and five-gigahertz frequencies, GPS for autonomous flight. It’s got two cameras for the eyes, plus a camera with a three-axis stability mount and a fisheye lens with night vision. Records video and everything.”
“Sounds like a freakin’ spy drone.” Jordan understood about half of what he’d s
aid. Keith Simpson knew his stuff. “Impressive.”
“Never underestimate the Keith-Meister.” He flexed his arm where a bicep would be.
She chuckled and nodded. “You definitely know a lot about drones. But did you know Boden High School has a drone club?”
He shrugged. “Bunch of amateurs probably.” He lifted his eyebrows and pointed. “An amateur is exactly what you wanna be if you have an awesome drone. Pros or commercial use, you have to have all kind of licenses.”
She’d learned the advantages of amateur status from her research. “There’s one thing that I find odd about this club. Maybe it’s just me. You can tell me if I’m crazy. But, okay. It sounds dumb when I say it out loud. But one of the guys at the club is…older than the rest. He’s not in high school. For sure. And he’s not a teacher. This guy, he has this multirotor—it’s an octocopter, and the thing is massive. Actually I took a video of it, if you wanna see?”
Jordan reached for her phone in her bag where the video was recorded, only to remember she’d, uh, misplaced her phone. Ugh. “I don’t have my phone on me. Can you pull up my Skyspace cloud account?”
A Channel 12 engineer like Keith knew how to do that sort of thing. “’Course.” He grabbed the closest laptop within reach and clicked a rapid series of buttons while Jordan snagged the stool from under Keith’s feet. She perched close enough to watch the video with him.
“That’s the file.” She pointed.
CHAPTER 4
Keith pressed play and they both watched the video of the Boden High School club drones swarming the field, followed by the octo’s solo flight.
“Sweeeeet.” Keith nodded and let out a low whistle.
“That’s the one.” Jordan pointed to Hugo. “The man flying the octo. I don’t know who the rest of these guys are. But they were all out flying this afternoon. On a Saturday.”
“That’s one serious machine.” Keith rewound and replayed the video. “He’s got bucks. That baby cost thousands.”
“Did you even hear my point? You’re just like Drew.” Jordan gasped. “Wait, Keith. Look.” She pointed to the pattern on the octo. “Freeze it. Freeze the video right there. Now back up. There. See that? His octo has a green and purple pattern on it.”
Keith looked at the footage a few more times. “You don’t see that every day. It’s no Fly though. Where’s the triple camera mount, huh?”
“No, no. You’re missing the point. It’s green and purple. The pilot tonight—the one in the crash—before he went down—he said something about green and purple.” Jordan hopped off her stool and grabbed Keith by the shoulders. “Listen to me and answer me with accuracy.” She looked him square in the eyeglasses. “Could an octocopter take down a plane? Could that octo hit a plane and make it crash?”
His eyebrows lifted, puzzled. “Sure, I thought we’d established that already.”
“I need you to tell me again.”
“An octocopter like this?” Keith smirked like Jordan had asked him if a minivan could carry a family of four. “No question.”
She nodded.
He crossed his ankle over his knee and sat back comfortably. “Think about it. Birds can make a plane crash, right? Remember that commercial flight, Miracle on the Hudson? Landed on the river up north? They survived, but that’s why the landing was dubbed a miracle.”
She nodded again, encouraging him.
“So imagine if birds were metal. And, freakin’ huge. A drone?” He snorted. “A drone could be way worse than a bird. If a multirotor got sucked into a jetliner’s engine? That could be a pretty damn messed up catastrophe.”
Her stomach flipped a few times. His answers helped her story, but they were leading to a terrible conclusion.
Keith put the laptop down and pulled his legs to his chest in the chair. “Even if the pilot just saw a drone and freaked out about possibly hitting it, he could’ve maneuvered the plane erratically and that could’ve made it crash.”
“Are you sure? I mean, what if the guy was experienced?” Jordan settled back into her sunken-in spot on the couch. “Or what if there were fireworks nearby? Could that cause the plane to crash?” She didn’t think this had happened, but she wanted to cover all bases.
“Even the best pilot wouldn’t be able to handle anything if he was already dead.” Keith shrugged. “Never heard of fireworks causing a crash, but I guess it’s possible. Why? Were there fireworks?”
“That’s what one witness said. I couldn’t find any fireworks displays listed for tonight though. At least not for the public.” Jordan sighed and rubbed the suddenly tense muscles in her neck. “What about altitude wise? Would the Cessna have crossed paths with a drone at two thousand feet?”
“It was over Tampa Bay, right? A drone would get a clear signal out there. If the plane took off from Franklin Pierce Airport and was flying at two thousand feet? That purple and green drone there could reach that altitude, easy.” He wiggled his eyebrows and his eyes lit up. “Wanna see mine do it?”
Frankly, she’d seen enough drones over the last two days to last a lifetime. Right now she wanted straight answers, and fast. Drew was at the crash scene tonight. He’d be there during the recovery effort. She wasn’t about to let him find a way to pull ahead of her on a story about drones. If that’s what this was. “What about range though? Can a multirotor go a mile offshore?”
“Uhh…lemme think in kilometers…,” Keith muttered, tapping the fingers of his right hand in a complex rhythm. “With an extender you get two kilometers…converts to one-point-two miles, yeah.”
He looked up. “An average-to-good drone could do a mile. But if the plane was at two-thousand feet….”
He tapped his right hand fingers faster. “Plane would’ve been five to ten miles offshore.”
He nodded conclusively. “Operator was probably on a boat.”
Keith stood and gestured with his arm. “C’mon. Let’s go outside and I’ll show you how high The Fly can go.”
Jordan followed him outside to the landing at the top of the stairs.
Keith turned The Fly in his hand, examining it from all angles. “It’s illegal to go above four hundred feet. So I’ll send her just that high. Four hundred. But take my word for it.” He smirked. “She can definitely go higher than that.”
Keith clicked the power switch on the drone and pressed a couple buttons on the transmitter. “Okay, check it out.”
Keith threw The Fly in the air. Jordan gasped as the controls caught it and held the exact altitude. The Fly hovered as Keith controlled the joysticks. The Fly glowed green in the darkness, then hovered, buzzed, and zoomed straight upward. In seconds, the quad was so high she could only see the blinking green and red lights required by the FAA.
“Here, take the controls.” Keith thrust the transmitter into her hands.
Jordan tried to thrust the transmitter back to him. “No, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He pressed her finger on a joystick. “That makes it go up. This joystick turns it. Don’t worry about the other joystick. Just go up.”
Jordan pushed the joystick as he instructed and squinted towards the stars. “I can barely see the thing!”
“Throttle back, throttle back! That’s too high!” Keith’s hot hands pried the transmitter back from her.
Jordan blinked. “I told you I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Don’t worry.” Keith pushed up the bridge of his glasses with one hand and manned a joystick with the other. “I’ll take it from here.”
He drifted the drone down to what must have been about four hundred feet and zoomed around the night sky.
“Is it getting louder?” Jordan looked at him.
His eyes widened. He put a finger to his lips, signaling her to be quiet. They stood with heads tilted back like Pez dispensers, scanning the high skies and nearby buildings.
Undeniable now. A helicopter’s blades chopped the distant air. Louder. Louder.
Jordan and Keith turned to look at e
ach other, mouths open.
The helicopter was coming toward them.
“Uh oh.” Keith said it in slow motion, like a sixteen-year-old who’d just crashed his father’s car.
She remembered what the whirr of the quad’s blades above her head felt like, and imagined how that might feel intensified by a thousand. Then, the helicopter came into view behind the neighbor’s trees.
“It’s a freaking police chopper, Keith.” Jordan’s mind switched to breaking news mode. “I wonder what’s going on. Is the drone taking video right now?”
“We have to bring The Fly down!” Keith’s pitch jumped an octave higher. “They could accuse me of interference and fine me. Or worse!”
He shifted his weight back and forth anxiously on his porch landing, pressing the transmitter’s joystick so hard she worried he might break it.
The Fly came into clear view and finally, within Keith’s reach. He snatched it out of the air, grabbed Jordan’s wrist, and ran. He dragged her past Smithers, through the gate, and down the driveway.
A shiny object glimmered amid a pile of leaves near her car. Jordan flicked her wrist away from Keith. “My phone!” She squatted and snatched it up. “It must have fallen out when I got out of the car.” Thank God.
Jordan zipped the phone inside her sling bag, patted it to be sure, and ran across the street to catch up with Keith.
But where was he?
She looked around in the darkness. “Keith?” Jordan’s jog slowed to a walk as she headed toward the empty lot where he’d been headed. “Keith?”
Silence.
And a spotlight from the sky circled the area around her.
Crap.
CHAPTER 5
Jordan’s gaze traced the edges of the empty lot. Keith couldn’t have gone far. He was smart, but he wasn’t fast. She meandered toward the far edge of the lot, calling his name.
He poked his head out from a port-a-potty. Jordan sucked in a breath and her hand hugged her pounding heart. “Oh my god.”