“None of your business, McLanahan,” Chastain growled as he swept the sky with binoculars. Jon lowered his binoculars, looked at Patrick, and shook his head. “How much longer, Masters?” the FBI special agent asked.
“Any minute now.”
Chastain’s cell phone rang. “Chastain.” He listened for a few moments, his eyes growing wider by the moment. “Oh, shit . I’ll be right there… find a TV.”
“In my office,” Patrick said.
“What happened?” Jon asked.
At first Chastain wasn’t going to say anything with Patrick there, but he decided Patrick was going to find out soon anyway: “There are news crews at the Knights’ compound,” he said. “The drone crashed.”
“What … ?”
“There are pieces of another plane out there too — they’re saying there was a midair collision,” Chastain said. “It’s all over the damned news.”
They raced back to Patrick’s office and turned on the television. They expected to see pictures of the crashed drone, but instead they were looking at what appeared to be a large area of scorched desert just south of a multilane divided highway that appeared to be Interstate 80. “What is this ? They’re reporting on a brush fire?” Chastain asked.
They found out soon enough: the caption on the bottom of the screen read: Scene of the second unmanned aircraft crash near Battle Mountain, Nevada.
“What in hell … !”
“ Both Sparrowhawks crashed?” Jon Masters said in a low, stunned voice, almost a whimper. “My God…”
Chastain’s cell phone was in his hands in a flash. “I want those crash sites cordoned off and all news helicopters kept away,” he said.
“I’ve got to get out there,” Jon said tonelessly, his eyes wide with disbelief and despair. “I’ve got to find out what happened.”
“You’re not going anywhere, Masters,” Chastain said, putting a hand over his cell phone’s microphone. “This is still a classified operation.” He turned back to his cell phone. “Jordan, Chastain here. I want…” He fell silent, listening, then veins started to pop out on his forehead. He jabbed a finger at Patrick, then at the door, silently ordering him to get out. After Patrick departed, Chastain yelled, “Get HRTs Four and Five loaded up and on their way out to that compound now . I’ll get Los Angeles and Seattle to send their teams.”
“What happened?” Jon asked.
“The damned Knights are dragging pieces of the drone inside their compound,” Chastain said. “The news crews are going in with them. They say they’re expecting the government to respond with force, and they say they’re going to defend themselves and repel all attackers.”
“You mean they’re stealing my Sparowhawk ?” Jon cried out.
“Shut up about your damned drones, Masters,” Chastain said. “They’re evidence, and I’m going to get them all back, you can count on that .”
“Send in the Cybernetic Infantry Device robots,” Jon said. “The robots will get them back.”
Chastain thought for a moment, then redialed his cell phone. “Richter, I’m going to brief you and Savoy on a mission. Meet me at the drone control desk. We’ll deploy by helicopter in fifteen minutes.”
They drove back to their hangar, where they met Jason Richter, Charlie Turlock, Wayne Macomber, and FBI agent Randolph Savoy at the Sparrowhawk control center. “Flip back to the last images of the compound,” Chastain ordered. He waited until the right images were displayed. “Okay, here’s where the drone crashed, about two hundred yards outside the main fenced part of the compound, at the edge of one of their crop circles.” He pointed to the machine-gun squads. “Here’s where the terrorists are setting up machine-gun nests, behind cover of these buildings outside the fence. It’s been more than two hours since these pictures were taken, so we’ve got to assume they’ve moved some of these nests closer to the crash site.” He turned to Richter. “Can you pull the wreckage away from the compound?”
“I’m sure we can,” Jason said. “But if the terrorists are armed with machine guns, we’ll be going into a combat zone. Randolph’s not trained for that, and we have no defensive weapons. Charlie and I will do this mission.”
“You’re not supposed to have any weapons, Richter,” Chastain said. “First of all, this is an FBI operation, so Savoy goes. That’s what he’s been training for.”
“Let me go in,” Whack said.
“Get out of here, Macomber — this isn’t for you,” Chastain snapped. Whack backed up a step; Chastain was going to order him out, but one look at Whack’s dark scowl made him decide to just turn and ignore him.
“I’ll go in the second CID,” Charlie said. “Randolph and I have been working together all this time — it’s best to keep us together.” Jason thought about it for a moment, then nodded.
“Second, I don’t want you to engage with them,” Chastain said to Charlie. “What I’m asking is: Can the robots provide you with enough protection from machine-gun fire to allow you to get in there and drag the wreckage away from the compound so those terrorists can’t take all of it?”
Charlie thought for a few moments, studying the frozen Sparrowhawk images. “What kind of guns are those, Whack?” she asked.
“They look like M60 machine guns,” he said after studying the screen for a few moments. “I see a couple others that might be M16s, but bigger. AR-18s on a bipod, maybe.”
“Well, Turlock?” Chastain urged.
Charlie turned to Savoy, a look of concern on her face. “The CIDs can take 5.56- and 7.62-millimeter fire at all ranges, even full auto,” she said directly to Savoy. “They can’t hurt you, but you will feel them. It can get really distracting, even disorientating, like bugs or bats flying around your head. You need to—”
“I can do it, Charlie,” Savoy said. “Let’s go.”
“If it’s a heavier caliber, like a fifty-cal or twenty-millimeter, at close range with sustained automatic fire, it could damage a muscle joint or sensor, especially in the head,” Charlie went on. “If they use heavier weapons — and your sensors will alert you to the weapon size, direction of fire, and range — you’ll have to protect your forward sensor with your forearms. Try not to use just your hands, because the armor’s not as tough. If you feel heavy automatic fire on you, you have to move right away so you don’t get sustained impacts on one section of armor. The robot’s sensors will tell you if you’re taking damaging fire… sheesh, we’ve hardly talked about the sensors and helmet warning and malfunction readouts—”
“I understand them pretty well,” Savoy said. “I’m ready.”
“We haven’t talked at all about a helicopter insertion.” She turned to Chastain. “We can’t do this, Chastain. He’s not ready.”
“I am ready,” Savoy repeated.
“Is he ready or not, Turlock?” Chastain growled.
Charlie looked at Savoy with concern, but nodded. “I’ll be right beside you,” she said. “The best thing to do if you get pinned down by several nests is to run away.”
“Got it, Charlie,” Savoy said. “Let’s go.”
Charlie looked at him carefully once more, then nodded at Chastain. “Let’s go.”
While Charlie and Savoy mounted inside their CIDs, an Army National Guard UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was flown over to the hangar. The UH-60 was a long-range medevac model with an external fuel tank on a short pylon on each side mounted above the entry doors, plus protective skids surrounding the landing-gear tires. With the helicopter hovering, Charlie showed Savoy the exact place to hold on to the pylon. “You can fend yourself away from the landing gear,” she radioed to him, “but don’t squeeze the pylon, because you’ll snap it right off. Grab onto this cross-member on the pylon, circle your fingers around it, and keep your fingers closed. Don’t squeeze.”