Minutes later, they were airborne — and the moment they lifted off, Charlie heard a loud CH — CHUNK! on the other side of the helicopter. “Randolph? You okay?”
“I might have grabbed the pylon a little too hard,” he admitted.
“You copy that, pilot?” Charlie radioed. “You might lose the left fuel tank.”
“They’re both empty,” the pilot radioed back.
“Roger,” Charlie said. “If you feel it coming loose, Randolph, just let it bounce off your back.” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “And if you fall… well, have a nice ride down. You should be okay when you hit.”
“ ‘Should be’?”
It was a short flight to the Knight compound. From a hundred feet aboveground and two miles away, Charlie could easily see the Sparrowhawk’s crash site through her telescopic imaging infrared sensors. The residents had several pickup trucks surrounding the crash, with headlights helping workers pull pieces of wreckage free and throw them into the trucks. “Base, looks like they’ve just about got the whole thing — we’re too late,” Charlie said. “There’s four pickups around the crash site full of debris, and it looks like they’re loaded up and getting ready to head back. I recommend we—”
At that instant Charlie saw a long, thin flash of yellow fire winking from a few dozen yards west, followed by another several yards north. “Ground fire!” she shouted. “We’re taking heavy machine-gun fire! Pilot, break right !” The Black Hawk swung hard to the right at sixty degrees of bank…
… and as it did, the entire left pylon snapped from the sudden g-loads and broke free, disappearing into the darkness.
“We lost Savoy!” Charlie shouted, and she let go of the right pylon and fell to earth.
Her landing on the desert surface wasn’t her best, because the helicopter had been in such a violent turn when she released, and she rolled and skidded across the hard-packed sand and dirt for about twenty yards before regaining her armored feet. She crouched low and scanned the area. The machine guns were still firing into the night sky. Seconds later, her electronic sensors located Savoy, just fifty yards away, and she dashed toward him. He was facedown, motionless, his arms and legs splayed in unnatural directions.
“I’ve located Savoy,” Charlie radioed. “Randolph, can you hear me? Damn, he looks hurt.” No response. She checked his physiological readouts. “He’s alive but unconscious.” She picked him up in a fireman’s carry, then scanned the area. Several pickup trucks were heading from the west toward them, headlights bouncing wildly as they raced across the desert. “They’re after me. I’ll move east away from these jokers.”
Just as she started to run, her sensors picked up a burst of heavy machine-gun fire on her armor. “Those bastards have a heavy machine gun mounted on one of those pickups!” she radioed. “Might be a fifty-cal!” The fire was pretty sustained considering she was running and the trucks were bouncing all over the place — those pricks were pretty good gunners, she thought. Savoy, on top of Charlie’s shoulders, was taking most of the hits. “They’re catching up to me,” she radioed. “These guys are driving like maniacs.”
“We’ve got you in sight,” the Black Hawk pilot radioed. “Keep on coming.” Charlie spotted the Black Hawk in front of her, not more than thirty feet aboveground, heading straight for the pickups.
“They’ve got a big machine gun,” Charlie radioed. “Break off!”
“Just keep coming,” the pilot said, as calm and cool as if he were sipping a beer. Moments later, the Black Hawk zoomed overhead, flying better than eighty miles an hour.
Charlie could hear the machine gun open fire, but no rounds were hitting her. Were they firing at the helicopter? They must have night vision to be able to see it! Just then she saw a flare of light similar to the machine-gun muzzle flashes, but this one was directed down at the ground. Moments later in the sky she saw a burst of fire, followed by a brief trail of fire and loud pops of metal. The roar of the Black Hawk’s engines seemed to surge, then hesitate, then surge again. “Are you guys okay?” she radioed. “Are you hit?”
“We took some hits — that last one felt like a missile or RPG,” the pilot radioed, still as calmly as before, “but I got it, I got it, I—” And at that second there was a brilliant flash of light, an earsplitting explosion, and a sharp vibration that rolled through the earth under Charlie’s armored feet. She turned and saw a massive fireball blossom across the sky.
“Oh God …” She ran in the direction of the crash, less than half a mile away, even though she began receiving “POWER 50 PERCENT” warning messages. But as she got closer, she could see the Black Hawk fully engulfed in flames. Soon several pickup trucks surrounded the wreckage, and men began shouting and shooting automatic weapons in the air in celebration.
“One cannon backpack — that’s all I need,” Charlie said. Angrily, reluctantly, she turned away from the wreckage and the extremists and headed across the desert to safety.
“This is without a doubt one of the most flagrant and outrageous misuses of power since Japanese internment camps during World War Two,” former president Joseph Gardner said. Gardner, a tall and impossibly handsome character bred for politics, was a longtime Washington power player — secretary of the Navy and ardent sea-power advocate, who parlayed his steep buildup of naval forces after the American Holocaust into a successful campaign for president of the United States on a strong national defense platform.
“Who would have believed,” Gardner went on, “that Ken Phoenix would order the FBI to use military hardware to secretly spy on American citizens, over American soil?” Gardner went on, deliberately not using Phoenix’s title when talking about him. “And then, in an even greater assault on personal freedom, they send two of those manned robots in to attack that community. It’s unthinkable .”
“Why do you say it’s military hardware, Mr. President?” the morning talk-show interviewer asked. “Unmanned aircraft are used by police and Border Patrol agencies, not just the military.”
“Both drones were built by a company called Sky Masters, Inc., which is a small but well-known developer of military hardware of all kinds, including weapons, satellites, and aircraft,” Gardner said. “The drones that crashed were called MQ-15 Sparrowhawks. They are capable of carrying up to a thousand pounds of sensors or weapons, including laser-guided missiles, and they’ve been used in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. That Ken Phoenix actually ordered the FBI to fly potentially armed aircraft over the United States to target innocent American citizens is criminal. And those robots belong to the U.S. Army and are armed with cannons and missile launchers — clearly, military technology, designed to kill. Someone has to be held accountable for this outrage, and the buck stops right on Mr. Phoenix’s desk.”
“A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said that suspects residing in the compound where the drone crashed were linked to the recent attacks in Reno and southern Nevada,” the interviewer said. “Shouldn’t we be using all the resources we have to investigate such extreme terrorist activity, Mr. President?”