Drone

by Mike Maden

  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.

  It was getting harder and harder to tell the cops from the troops. More and more police brandished assault rifles and flash bangs, wore tactical vests and helmets, and rolled through town in armored vehicles. Civil libertarians wondered if they were local law enforcement or an occupying army.

  For over a hundred years, the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act had strictly forbidden the use of federal military forces to perform police functions on American soil out of fear that future presidents would be tempted to use them to achieve their political objectives, suppress political opposition, or overthrow the government entirely. Two hundred years of Latin American history had proven those fears fully warranted.

  But the twenty-first century posed global threats and challenges to the nation far beyond the scope and resources of the local city cop on the beat who polished his apple and swung a nightstick as a deterrent to local mischief. It was a slippery slope, to be sure, but a necessary one. Police were taking on more and more military-style operations.

  The only alternative to the heightened security measures, as extreme as they appeared to be at the moment, was to do nothing and simply hope the violent chaos spree would just go away. Myers knew it wouldn’t, so the extra precautions and higher alerts were initiated. She’d do whatever it would take to guarantee public safety, even if the public didn’t like it.

  Malibu, California

  Pearce and Johnny Paloma sped along the Pacific Coast Highway in Johnny’s restored ’73 Stingray.

  “So this writer guy is in on this mess?” Johnny asked.

  Pearce pressed the release button on his Glock, checked to see that the .45 magazine was fully loaded.

  “According to Ian, Babak Ghorbani is Ali’s uncle on his mother’s side. That puts him in it up to his neck until I find out otherwise.” Pearce slammed the magazine back into place and racked the slide.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Pearce and Johnny Paloma approached the high-walled beach house under cover of early morning darkness. The distant surf down below hissed softly in the sand as low tide ebbed away.

  A former L.A. cop, Johnny easily disabled the civilian security system, then proceeded to the rear entrance while Pearce picked the front door lock. After Johnny had cleared the back slider lock, Pearce gave the signal and they both made their way in.

  The house was silent. Pearce and Johnny met up in the living room. Minimalist modern furnishings. Hand-scraped hardwoods. Hell of a view of the Pacific through a big picture window.

  They made their way to the master bedroom.

  Two people slept beneath a white silk comforter. Pearce yanked it off, grabbed the middle-aged man by his silk pajama top, pulled him onto the floor, and shoved his Glock in the startled face.

  “Please! Please! Don’t kill me!” Ghorbani screamed in Farsi.

  Johnny snapped the bedroom lights on.

  Pearce saw out of the corner of his eye that Johnny had a gun in the face of Ghorbani’s bed partner, also on the floor.

  “Where’s Ali Abdi?” Pearce roared in Farsi.

  “Who?” Ghorbani asked in English, blinking heavily. “My glasses, I can’t see.”

  Pearce saw a pair of rimless glasses on the nightstand.

  “Try something stupid, please. I’m begging you,” Pearce snapped.

  The middle-aged man’s quavering hand reached up to the nightstand and found the glasses. He pulled them on. He frowned at Pearce in confusion.

  “Is this a robbery? Please, take anything.”

  Pearce jammed the cold muzzle of the gun barrel against the man’s deeply lined forehead. Ghorbani’s partner whimpered from the other side of the bed.

  “I’ll ask one more time. Where’s Ali Abdi? Your nephew?”

  “I don’t know.”

  CRACK! Pearce whipped the steel barrel of the Glock against the side of the man’s head, knocking his glasses off. Ghorbani howled in pain and clutched at the wound, balling up into a fetal position on the floor.

  Pearce kicked the man’s feet apart, then stepped on one of his bare ankles, bearing down with his full weight until the small bones cracked beneath his steel-toed boot.

  Ghorbani shrieked with the new jolt of pain, completely forgetting his bleeding head wound, and clutched at his broken ankle. Pearce unsheathed his razor-sharp KA-BAR knife and stuck the tip of the blade into the left nostril of the bearded man’s face.

  “Last chance. If you don’t want to whistle like a tea kettle every time you sneeze from now on, you’d better start talking.”

  Ghorbani’s mouth opened and closed a few times, trying to form words through his panic and pain. The syllables finally caught in his throat, like a cold engine finally turning over on a winter morning.

  “I… I haven’t seen him since I was last in Iran, twenty years ago. He hates me. So does his mother, my sister.”

  “And why should I believe that?”

  “Because it’s the truth!”

  “Hey, chief, come take a look.” Johnny motioned with his pistol at the figure on the floor. Pearce frowned. Crossed over.

  The simpering voice cowering by the side of the bed turned out to be a twenty-year-old Iranian boy, pretty and fey in a pink UCLA tank top.

  “This your girlfriend, Babak?” Pearce asked.

  Ghorbani nodded. “My sister’s family are religious fanatics. Ali swore he would kill me if they ever saw my face again.”

  Pearce believed him. Homosexuals had a short life expectancy in the Islamic Republic of Iran these days.

  “Does Ali know you’re here?”

  “If he did, I’d be dead. Why?”

  Pearce holstered his weapon, frustrated. “He might be in the neighborhood. If you do hear anything from him, better call the FBI.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Pearce nodded at Johnny. “Let’s go.”

  Turlock, California

  Brian Heppner was sound asleep on his pricey adjustable air mattress. His alarm was set to go off in twenty more minutes at 4 a.m. for the first milking of the day, but he hadn’t gotten into bed until after midnight. Worse, he’d loaded up on NyQuil because he had a summer cold that he couldn’t shake and the coughing wouldn’t let him fall asleep.

  A third-generation dairy farmer, Brian had grown up with the remarkable work ethic—and commensurate sleep deprivation—that went along with owning your own herd. Dairy sales had tanked in the last few years. That meant even more hours and less sleep just to stay out of bankruptcy.

  Brian kept a twelve-gauge Mossberg 590 pump shotgun loaded with double-aught buckshot next to his bed because thieves had been breaking into isolated farm homes all over the valley for the last few year
s and budget cutbacks had kept county sheriff patrols to a minimum. He’d practiced grabbing it out of his sleep a hundred times so he wouldn’t have to think about it when the time came to use it. His wife hated the gun and joked that he slept so deeply that the thieves could steal the bed out from under him and he’d never even know it.

  BAM! The bedroom door busted off of its hinges.

  A squad of black-clad men stormed in, UMP9s ready, hollering in Spanish. Brian’s wife screamed.

  Half awake, Brian lunged for the shotgun.

  A machine pistol fired.

  Three jacketed rounds ripped into Brian’s rib cage.

  Two minutes later, the SWAT lieutenant called for an ambulance with Brian’s blood-spattered wife still screaming in the background.

  Washington, D.C.

  Donovan took the call. Another fatal shooting, this time in Turlock, California.

  Damn it.

  Some poor dairy farmer had been killed because somebody called in and said that they heard screaming and what sounded like machine-gun fire.

  Brian Heppner had just been SWATed—a dangerous trick used by extremist crazies to harass political opponents back in 2012. The tactic was ugly and effective. Just call in a gun-related emergency to 911 and the dispatcher would automatically send in the SWAT team. That way you let the cops do your intimidation for you, and your opponents lived in sleepless fear of another break-in for the next six weeks.

  The LEO community was on high alert. Every call was taken as seriously as possible. What else could they do but respond?

  According to the reports he’d received, Donovan knew it was the Bravos behind all of it. There had been at least fifty-three SWATings across the country in the last hour, all of the emergency calls reporting the same thing. Thank God there had been only two fatalities so far.

  So now the bastards were letting us do the terrorizing for them, Donovan thought. It was only 7:18 in the morning, but Donovan uncorked his bottle of Bushmills and took a sip anyway. It was going to be another long damn day and he dreaded calling Myers with this new round of bad news.

  When was it going to end?

  SEPTEMBER

  51

  Dearborn, Michigan

  Pearce’s tablet flashed. Skype was ringing in.

  “Anything?” Pearce asked, knowing the answer.

  “Nothing. The poor bastard hasn’t even left the house since your visit. Even has his groceries delivered now.”

  “No calls? No contacts?”

  “Zip, zilch, nada,” Stella said.

  Pearce believed her. She was his best drone pilot, and he’d put her on drone surveillance over Babak Ghorbani’s house since the day he and Johnny had paid the writer a visit. Stella had cut her teeth on surveillance missions. After getting arrested for shoplifting in her junior year at USC, Stella was hauled before a judge. Noting she was a major in video-game design, he gave her the old “army or jail” offer. She took the army offer and six months later was flying Israeli-built RQ-7 Shadows over Afghanistan, eventually logging over two hundred combat missions before her hitch was up.

  “You want me to stay on him?” she asked.

  “Go ahead and shut it down. It’s a bust,” Pearce said, logging off of Skype.

  Washington, D.C.

  Jeffers scratched his head, frustrated. “You’ve got to give them something, Margaret. The midterm elections are just three months away and your congressional supporters are really feeling the heat.”

  “Give them something? How about a backbone? I can lend them mine, I suppose.” Myers was frustrated, to say the least.

  The “Day Without a Mexican” strike had stretched into an entire week, and it was just one more hurricane in the storm of chaos that had enveloped the nation. Myers thought it would be helpful if someone in her own party would stand beside her during the current debacle, but she was out of luck. Many had privately assured her that they were in complete support of her policies, even though publicly they were being forced to say something different, or nothing at all. That kind of self-serving duplicity was almost more painful than the outright betrayal that Diele and others had openly displayed. At least Diele was completely honest in his contempt for her and her ideas.

  “We’re several months away from building an efficient technical solution for border crossing. Why not ease up a little until the technology falls into place? Take a little pressure off, build up a little goodwill?” Jeffers asked.

  “That’s a great suggestion. Tell me, how many more Bravos do we need to let cross before you think La Raza will invite me to their annual gala?”

  “That’s not fair, Margaret. Consensus is how democratic governments work.” Jeffers was frustrated, too. Myers had no idea of what he had to put up with to keep her shielded from the long knives slashing all around her. The only good news lately was that there hadn’t been any more airport attacks.

  “Consensus? How about the national interest? Just once, let Congress rally around what’s best for the country instead of what’s most likely to get them reelected. That’s the only kind of ‘consensus’ I can actually support.”

  Jeffers took a deep breath to calm down. “Everything’s a damn mess right now. Like a slow-motion car wreck.”

  “The ‘mess’ we’re in is proof we’re doing the right thing. The ‘mess’ we’re in is exactly why my predecessors haven’t tried to tackle these issues before—too difficult, too complicated, too costly, too hard. But doing the right thing is always harder and more complicated than doing nothing.”

  “You know, they’re calling you La Bruja Mala in the Hispanic media because you make good people disappear.”

  “I’ve been called worse than a witch before. If they’re reduced to calling me names, it means they’re out of political arguments.”

  “Or they’ve moved beyond them.” Jeffers sighed. He knew he couldn’t win this battle with her.

  “We’re only a few weeks into this. Tell our ‘supporters’ to man up a little. Casualties have been relatively light, and our law enforcement resources are just now fully deployed and focused. With any luck, the worst is over.”

  Jeffers knew she was right. She’d made a gutsy call, and it took even more guts to stick with it. That’s why he threw in his lot with her to begin with—she had a bigger nut sack than any man he knew in politics, himself included. “If luck is what you’re counting on, Madame President, you better get on your pointy hat and broom, and conjure some up for yourself. This thing isn’t over yet.”

  Myers chuckled. “I’ll do my best. Just make sure you keep your ruby slippers in the closet. I can’t afford to have you disappearing on me right now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Diele’s out there just waiting for the first chance to drop a great big old farmhouse on your head and I want to be there to pick up the pieces when it hits.”

  They wouldn’t have long to wait.

  52

  Baku, Azerbaijan

  The Azeri Spring the previous year had been mostly a nonviolent revolution that drove out a relatively benign but utterly corrupt government and replaced it with a coalition of parties committed to complete secularization, Western modernization, and integration into both the EU and NATO. The government itself put up virtually no fight at all and dissolved within days without firing a shot. All of the battle casualties had been between forces within the Azeri Spring uprising and the radical Shia elements demanding the implementation of sharia law. Poorly organized and equipped, the Shia radicals were quickly suppressed.

  The new president of the Republic of Azerbaijan, a Harvard-educated MBA and former oil industry executive, was the first Azeri woman to serve in that office. Her government had recently signed Memoranda of Understanding with the appropriate European agencies to begin the long process of full economic and military integration with the EU and NATO. The Azerbaijanis needed both if they hoped to escape absorption by either Russia to the north or Iran to the south. New discoveries of vast offshore gas and oil reserve
s promised Azerbaijan a new century of untold prosperity for the entire nation if the new reserves were managed carefully and honestly. Azerbaijan was the world’s oldest known oil producer, transporting oil to neighboring countries 2,500 years before the first American oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859.

  Azerbaijan’s future looked as bright as the dawn until the morning that waves of Russian fighter bombers and radar-controlled naval guns unleashed their fury, destroying Azerbaijan’s air force jets on the ground, army tanks in their storage sheds, and navy ships in their piers within minutes. Cruise missiles blasted communications facilities, including the nation’s only broadcast television station, and decimated several government buildings, including the Ministry of National Security, Parliament, the Government House, and the presidential residence.

  Russian paratroopers dropped into the nation’s capital seven minutes after the final air assault and Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers streamed across the border moments after the first jets had taken off.

  Russian forces also deployed a half dozen unarmed Searcher II surveillance drones, recently purchased from Israel Aerospace Industries. Their own drone program was in a shambles.

  By noon, oil-rich Azerbaijan had once again become a Russian possession.

  Washington, D.C.

  As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Diele was entitled to the most up-to-date global security information available. He was duly summoned to the White House just before 11:30 a.m. for an emergency briefing, the subject of which had not been disclosed on his unsecured line.

  When he arrived at the Cabinet Room, the secretaries of state, commerce, energy, and defense were already present, along with the DNI and select congressional leaders. Diele found his customary seat just as Myers and Early entered the room.

  “It’s a briefing, General, so please, cut to the chase,” Myers said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” General Winchell, the air force chief of staff and Diele’s close ally, was presenting the facts.