“Wonderful. Hand them over,” she said.
“They’re by your feet, Nathan,” said Quinn.
He handed the NVGs to Keira, who tried to make sense of the gear.
“You can tighten the head strap once you have it in place on your son’s head,” said Quinn.
Less than a minute later, she had the NVGs firmly attached to Owen’s head.
“Button on the left side toggles between modes,” said Quinn.
Nathan knew his son had figured it out when he heard, “Whoa! This is so cool! Just like the game.”
“Just like the game,” muttered Keira, shooting Nathan a steely glare.
Keira had every right to be infuriated. He’d almost gotten them killed by keeping a secret, though he had to wonder what might have happened if they’d tried to leave this morning, or a day earlier. If Cerberus had been watching them all along, he suspected the three of them would have met with an unfortunate end in the desert. He would never say this to Keira, but the chain of events leading to Quinn’s arrival tonight might’ve been the only scenario in which they survived.
Might’ve being the operative term. They still had a long journey ahead of them.
CHAPTER 37
Leeds felt a persistent tightening in his chest as he studied the two maps projected side by side on the windshield. The California Resource tracking data overlays almost perfectly matched the thermal imagery transmitted from the drones, allowing his techs to match registered car movements with real-time thermal signatures. More precisely, they were looking for thermal signatures without corresponding CALRES tracking icons, indicating vehicles exempt from CALRES tracking requirements. So far, they had eliminated five San Diego County Police Department vehicles and two unknown vehicles that didn’t fit the right description. Leeds was starting to wonder if Quinn had decided to double back and head south. A clever move like that would complicate matters.
The Ravens could stay airborne for two hours, but every minute represented a wider search area, and longer distances. While the Ravens were controlled by satellite-relayed signals transmitted from the van, the data-intensive feeds generated by the drones’ sensors were sent directly to the van by line-of-sight links. Those links were notorious for experiencing “data burps” at longer ranges, which would play havoc with the overlay process. They needed to find Quinn’s jeep within the next few minutes, or risk a complete mission failure.
“What are we missing?” asked Leeds. “Did he park somewhere? Is he hiding in a car wash? Does he have a buddy with a garage in the area?”
“If he parked in a garage, we’re fucked,” said Vega. “Seriously. We need to cross our fingers and hope they’re running like frightened mice.”
“They’re not behaving like frightened mice,” said Leeds. “We have several casualties to confirm that.”
“Even a cornered rat will stand and fight, before it runs like hell. We’ll find them,” said Vega. “I suggest we expand the search. Start scouring the roads north of Penasquitos Creek.”
“Do it.”
“We’re almost to the 805,” said the driver.
“Head north,” Leeds said, wondering if it might be a better idea to stay put, in case Quinn doubled back.
The van turned right on Vista Sorrento Parkway, headed for the Carmel Mountain Road on-ramp a little more than a mile away. He was putting all of his eggs—all of Flagg’s eggs—in one basket by focusing his surveillance efforts north. Once the van started driving toward Camp Pendleton, there was no going back, and if he lost the jeep, he wouldn’t be surprised if Flagg used the drone to put Leeds out of his misery.
“Sir?” announced Vega. “I found him. Red icon on the left screen. He’s approaching Interstate 5 from Del Mar Heights Road. He must have split the middle up Black Mountain Road.”
Leeds watched the icon turn north and merge into traffic on the interstate. The screen next to the overlay map disappeared, reappearing as a thermal image.
“Hold on,” said Vega. “Zooming in and adjusting to regular imagery.”
The image changed to a synthetic daylight view, and magnified until the vehicle filled half of the display area. The black Jeep Wrangler’s left rear signal flashed as the vehicle moved to the leftmost lane and accelerated.
“That’s a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue for you,” said Leeds, relieved beyond comprehension.
He dialed Flagg, who picked up instantly.
“Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” stated Flagg.
Leeds wanted to say something irreverent, but decided against it. The drone Flagg was about to launch was equipped with two AGM-120 Strikefire missiles, and he didn’t want to push his luck.
“We’re 2.4 miles behind them,” said Leeds. “I’m confident we can take them out.”
“It’s too risky. I don’t doubt that you could disable the vehicle, but killing everyone inside isn’t guaranteed.”
“I can guarantee it.”
“I can’t have you pull the van over and fire bullets point-blank through their heads while dozens of cars drive by and traffic drones watch from above. Not to mention the cameras mounted everywhere on the highway,” said Flagg. “The drone will be airborne in a few minutes. Follow the jeep and be ready to mark it with a laser. Once our Raptor identifies the marked target, I’ll have you break off pursuit. It’s out of our hands at that point.”
“Copy that,” said Leeds, swallowing his misgivings about using the drone.
“Cheer up, Nick. You’re still my favorite tac-ops boss,” said Flagg. “Speaking of which, I think it’s time your team in Idaho paid Nathan Fisher’s parents a visit. Capture and interrogate, if possible. I need to know how far this has spread, and where David Quinn fits into the picture.”
“I’ll issue the order. They’re in Ketchum, less than forty miles from the parents’ house.”
“Tell them to be careful,” said Flagg, ending the call.
A minute later, Leeds’s van merged onto Interstate 5, accelerating to catch up with Quinn’s jeep. Under normal circumstances, a two-mile highway separation would take forever to close without drawing law-enforcement attention. Fortunately for Leeds, his van was invisible to the highway’s automated speed monitoring and ticketing system. He could expect to have eyes on the jeep in a few minutes.
CHAPTER 38
Lisa Fesko, former US Army captain, focused the night-vision spotting scope on the eastern edge of the airstrip and triggered the digital recording function. Three nights ago, a convoy of military-style vehicles had delivered a small garrison of armed guards and a shipment of heavy equipment to the previously abandoned hangar.
Armed men patrolled the hills and placed surveillance sensors in a wide, oval-shaped perimeter around the airstrip, while a pack of technicians off-loaded the contents of the heavy transport trucks. From her position nestled into the front of a hill overlooking the airstrip, just under a mile away, Fesko had a sweeping view of the facility, without the corresponding risk of detection.
Patrols out of the field remained confined to the first ring of lower hills forming a shallow bowl around the runway, reinforcing the tight string of motion sensors and thermal-detection cameras placed just beyond the hills. The security strategy served well to keep hikers or curious locals from getting too close, but did little to dissuade serious surveillance, especially when an interested party had ample warning.
Fesko had been sent into the hills with Landon King, a former recon Marine, eight days earlier, when her organization learned about an imminent two-day construction project to level and repack the neglected dirt runway. A contact at the Ramona-based construction outfit hired to do the work passed the information up the chain of command as soon as it had been announced. It had been a lucky break, considering the vast scope of recent and unusual shell-company-sponsored land purchases in Southern California—far too many to watch at any given time.
The construction tip-off turned out to be one of the California Liberation Movement’s most important disc
overies in months. They watched the men dolly sections of an SQ-17 Raptor drone into the hangar, along with enough communications and electrical equipment to run a small airport. Even more ominous, they off-loaded air-to-ground missiles from one of the trucks. Fesko couldn’t positively identify the exact missile type from this distance, but she recognized the unmistakable quad-carrier dolly used to transport helicopter or drone armaments on military runways or aircraft-carrier decks.
She and King had cut their daily ration intake in half to extend their time at the observation post. An armed stealth drone represented a serious escalation in the One Nation Coalition’s war against the secession movement, its significance underscored by the past two days’ events. While they couldn’t directly prove ONC was behind the reactor failure in Del Mar, the timing suggested their suspicions were well founded. The assassinations were undoubtedly the work of the industrialist-funded group, likely perpetrated to turn the tide of public opinion permanently against the CLM.
Personnel at the end of the runway scrambled in the darkness to ready the drone, which had appeared several minutes ago, when the supposedly decrepit hangar’s bay door slid open way too smoothly to reveal a dark-red, dimly glowing interior. The Raptor carried a stubby missile on each side of the fuselage, attached to a pylon under its swept-back wings. Two missiles—each capable of destroying a house, obliterating an entire floor in an office building, or turning an armored vehicle into a twisted heap of melted, smoking scrap metal.
Base had insisted they send the raw flight data captured by night-vision and infrared scopes immediately. The flight profile imagery would be processed and integrated with a sophisticated search program designed to detect the Raptor drone. Fesko wasn’t sure how the CLM planned to stop the Raptor once it took flight, but she suspected they had something ready. Base told her that a critical asset was in danger on the ground, and they suspected that the sudden drone launch was not a coincidence. Their languid mission in the rolling hills outside Ramona had suddenly become the organization’s focus.
“Are we good?” she said.
King kept his face pressed into the thermal scope’s eyepiece, giving her a thumbs-up. “Yep. I’ll track and record until I lose visual contact, though I’m not sure what good it’ll do them. That thing will be virtually invisible over San Diego County.”
“We’re doing our part,” she said. “The rest is up to them.”
“We could be doing more. Another twenty-five pounds of gear would solve this problem. Probably save some lives.”
Fesko agreed. With her organization’s recent acquisition of guided, rifle-fired projectiles, they could have put the drone out of business before it launched, but mission planners hadn’t anticipated the sudden intensification of hostilities—and they certainly hadn’t expected One Nation to field armed drones. Surveillance drones? Sure. Everyone used them. Only specific military units and the Federal Border Patrol operated armed stealth drones—legitimately.
A few highly questionable private military contractor outfits were rumored to use them overseas, but international investigations into the matter had proven fruitless. The launch of an armed Raptor drone from a strip of worthless land purchased by a “watch list” company raised some hard questions.
“You always want to shoot things,” Fesko said.
“I hate shooting video of targets better served by steel,” King said. “That thing is heading into the night to ruin lives.”
She thought about what he’d just said, and found herself wondering about King’s 0.308 chambered assault rifle. “Can you hit it from here with your rifle?”
He took his eyes off the scope and turned on his side in the tight, cocoon-shaped tent. “Are you tempting me?”
“Can you do it?”
“Only if I moved about a thousand feet closer.”
“Yeah, but a hundred feet out from here, you’ll lose your sight lines. You’d have to top one of the hills ringing the airstrip to reacquire, dodging sensors and patrols.”
“What about the first observation post we scoped? It’s closer,” said King.
“That would work,” she said. “But it’s too far away from our current position, and you’d have to be careful on the approach. The Raptor will be long gone by the time you get there.”
King turned his attention back to the airstrip. “It’s a moot point. They’re about to launch.”
Fesko scoped the far end of the runway, watching the guards and personnel step back from the rolling drone. A muted buzzing sound reached the observation post, propagated through the hills by the drone’s sound-dampened, rear-mounted propeller. A few seconds later, the unmanned aerial system rolled forward, picking up speed as it traversed the unlit, hard-packed gravel runway. She kept the scope’s synthetic daylight image centered on the fast-moving drone, following the graceful machine into the sky until it passed the lowlying hills beyond the southern end of the runway, taking its persistent buzzing sound with it.
“I’ll start transferring video,” Fesko said, removing the scope from its tripod mount. “They need this ASAP.”
She took her night-vision scope and backed out of the tent, which opened at the edge of a shallow boulder-strewn gully traveling down the back side of the hill. Behind the closest boulder, a satellite antenna pointed skyward. She plugged the night-vision scope into a military-style data terminal just outside the tent’s rear hatch and followed the onscreen prompts to synchronize the two devices.
A pair of boots struck her in the side, nearly knocking her into the gully.
“Watch it!” she whispered, gripping the terminal so King didn’t kick it over the side.
“We have a problem,” he said, pulling his rifle and the thermal scope out of the tent. “The fucking drone returned.”
“Returning to base?” she asked, reaching for the rifle she kept at the foot of the tent.
“I don’t think so,” he said, grabbing for her night-vision scope.
“It’s transmitting,” Fesko said.
“Shit,” he said, shouldering his weapon and flipping open the riflescope’s lens covers. He raised the rifle, aiming slightly above horizon, due east of their position. “Hell. We’re being marked by a laser from the Raptor. How much have you transferred?”
She checked the screen. “Eighty percent.”
“That’s enough,” he said, thrusting his thermal optics device into her chest. “Start sending the thermal data.”
King jumped into the gully and started to move downhill.
“What are you doing?” she yelled.
“Buying you some time,” he called back, pausing next to the satellite antenna. “Drag all of that shit into the tent and transmit the thermal imagery. It’s about to start raining missiles.”
Fesko gripped the briefcase-size terminal and pulled it into the tent with her, yanking the cable from her scope. Working feverishly, she connected King’s thermal-imaging device to the terminal and started the synchronization process. While the gigabytes uploaded, she secured the tent flap, hoping the thermally insulated and chemically treated material would render her invisible long enough to send an adequate amount of data to her organization.
An ear-shattering detonation ripped through the hills, shaking the ground and shredding the tent with rocks and fragments. A sharp burning seized her right leg and the tent collapsed over her. A few moments passed before she realized she’d survived the explosion intact. Her leg responded sluggishly, but other than that, she was still in the fight. The tent hadn’t taken a direct hit.
She dug through the loose tent material to find the communications terminal, pushing a torn layer away to see the display. It was still transmitting, but at a slower rate. Thirty percent complete. She wasn’t sure if that would be enough. They probably wanted to see what the drone looked like under thermal observation while it was flying, which was at the end of the file. King had probably just given his life protecting the transmission source from the first missile; she’d do the same with the second mi
ssile.
As Fesko backed out of the collapsed tent, it occurred to her that they couldn’t fire the second missile without jeopardizing the Raptor’s original mission—the drone only carried two missiles, and refitting it with two more would take time. They’d come after her in vehicles, which gave her all the time she needed to send the data and prepare a defense that would cost them dearly.
She emerged from the tent to the acrid smell of high explosives and gritty taste of settling dust. If King had somehow survived that blast, he was in worse shape than she was. She’d look for him in a minute. A distant flash drew her attention to the airfield, where a small orange light arched skyward. She craned her neck, following the light until it disappeared high in the sky above her.
They didn’t use the Raptor’s missiles.
Fesko rolled into the gully, clutching the data terminal and the thermal scope to her chest as the missile fired from the airfield struck the ground where the tent had been assembled. While the lip of the gully protected her from the fragmentation effect of the twenty-pound warhead, the blast’s devastating pressure wave killed her instantly.
Shielded by her partially jellified corpse, the two electronic devices continued to function, sending data through the intact cable to the still-functioning satellite antenna.
CHAPTER 39
Nathan watched Quinn examine the rearview mirror and both side mirrors, waiting for his verdict.
“I don’t see anyone following us,” said Quinn. “At least nobody obvious. What about you, Owen?”
“No lasers,” said Nathan’s son, craning around in his seat. “But I can’t see straight up.”
“Why would he need to see straight up?” asked Keira.
Quinn and Owen responded at the same time: “Drones.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” mumbled Keira.
“We’re more than halfway there,” said Nathan. “They would have caught up to us or done something by now.”
“Maybe they don’t want to machine-gun us on the highway, in front of the cameras. The entire highway is monitored,” said Keira. “If they know where we’re headed, they could hit us when we exit the highway.”
Fractured State (Fractured State Series Book 1) Page 18