“We’re down,” Fox announced with little fanfare. “Docking Styx now.”
Three thin brown fishing lines lowered three tiny brown tri-barbed fish hooks about an inch down the pole. A second later, the hooks were reeled back in. Each of the hooks dug into the weathered pole and secured Styx to the top.
“That’s the way to do it,” Hail told Fox. “Two in place and one more to go.”
Paige Grayson was up to bat.
Without hesitation, Grayson pushed her feet into the flight pedals and twisted both of her flight controllers to the right. The micro-hub knows as Stones rose into the air and hovered over Led Zeppelin. Grayson oriented the craft so that its main camera was pointed in the direction of Chang’s compound. She then increased the speed of the propellers and ascended quickly to a hundred feet.
Knox patched Stone’s camera into the big monitor above Grayson, providing Hail and the rest of the crew a view of her drone’s streamed video.
Grayson navigated Stones along the same vector that Aerosmith and Styx had taken. First out of the bushes, then up higher and over the fence, and now down lower as Grayson brought the drone within twenty meters of its landing zone.
Above Hail, the image on two of the large monitors being sent from Styx and Aerosmith was standing still and only Stone’s video stream was on the move. The dark green pool came into view. It was surrounded by lighter green bricks. A spillway adorned with cement and rocks was cut into the side of the pool. The opening released water into a small brook that ran down hill. Rocks had been methodically placed in a specific pattern to create a babbling brook that meandered through the backyard. The brook terminated fifty meters downhill, where a hidden pump sent the water back into the pool via a buried pipe.
“Almost there,” Grayson said. She kept glancing down at the bottom of her screen at her altitude. The other micro-hubs had never descended lower than twenty feet. Grayson’s drone, however, was now only two feet off the ground.
Grayson glanced at her navigation screen.
“My X and Y show this is my LZ, but it looks pretty wet to me,” Grayson said. “What do you guys think?”
Hail shook his head. “How can you tell it’s wet?” he asked. “It’s all green.”
Grayson shrugged without taking her hands off the controls.
She said, “It looks like there is some luminescence coming off the rocks, like they are reflecting the moon light.”
Gage Renner, who had designed the drone, spoke up. “The hub can take some water, but it would be best if we set it down somewhere dry. It looks like there may be some water splashing from the stream right there, so why don’t we land to the right a few feet?”
Hail said, “We want to keep Stones surrounded by rocks so it doesn’t look out of place. If we want to set it down on the periphery of the brook, then that would be OK, but it needs to be surround by rocks.”
Renner said, “It’s not like anyone except for the gardener walks this far down the brook and we are only talking about twenty-four hours. I think we have to depend on stealth here and take a chance,” Renner suggested.
“OK,” Hail conceded. “Set it down, Paige.”
“Rodger that,” Grayson said, and tilted one of her flight controllers to the left. “There’s a patch of rocks further down the stream that look dry. I’m going for that.”
Grayson maneuvered Stones to the left a few yards and said, “This area looks good and dry. I’m coming down.”
A foot above the edge of the stream, a drone that looked like a river worn stone, lowered into place, nuzzling itself between four other river stones. The doors on its cylindrical propeller shaft irised closed and the micro-hub turned into a rock.
Unlike the other two drones that had touched down and were still streaming a video, the instant that Stones touched down, its stream went dark. Hail knew that the camera was still sending an image, but the camera was looking directly into a rock sitting next to it. That was no big deal. Stones had a specific purpose and sending back surveillance video was not part of its mission.
Hail stood up and began clapping his hands. The sound was loud in the quiet room.
“That was a fantastic job, everyone,” he told his crew. “Everything worked out the way we planned it. I couldn’t have asked for a better phase of this mission.”
The rest of the crew pushed back from their stations and relaxed.
“Let’s put all the hubs into sleep mode to save power and I’d like all of you to put yourselves into sleep mode as well.”
There was a smattering of laughter. A few of pilots got up and stretched and began with idle mission chatter, burning nervous energy.
Hail yelled out over the noise, “I need everyone to be back on station in five hours, that’s zero seven-hundred hours.”
On his way out of the mission room, Hail shook Renner and Mercier’s hands.
“So far so good,” he said to them.
“Let’s just hope the big show tomorrow morning goes as well,” Mercier said.
“Yep,” Hail agreed.
Hail opened the massive iron door, left the mission center and headed back toward his stateroom for a few hours of sleep.
Sleep, he thought to himself. Yeah right.
Nizhny Novgorod, Russia ― Volna Hotel
The sex was OK.
Nothing she would write home about, as the saying goes. But then Kara didn’t have anyone to write home to. She was an only child and her parents had passed away when she was foreign language major at Middlebury College in Vermont.
The sex was just about what she had expected from the Russian. She hadn’t been man-handled in the same manner as some of her past assignments had treated her. But as she had expected, the moment they had entered his hotel room, Kornev had pressed her up against the wall, kissed her hard and had begun to immediately remove her dress. She would have been surprised if he hadn’t. After all, her dress was drop dead sexy. She was certain that Kornev thought it looked even better on his floor.
He had whispered into her ear that he wanted to make love to her, right there, right then. Wall sex at its finest. She hadn’t protested. Sex on the wall, sex on the couch, sex on the floor, sex in the bed, it was the same to her. The angle of her body, perpendicular, upright, vertical, erect, horizontal, recumbent, prone, prostrate, supine, it was just boys being boys. It was a visual thing with them, but to her it made no difference.
Kornev had used the expression, making love to her. But Kara never referred to sex with her targets as love making. Love had nothing to do with it. Love had nothing to do with most of Kara’s new life in the CIA. She had loved her parents and look what had happened to them. She thought she had loved a man in college, but once her parents were killed, that part of her heart became inert. As far as she could tell, the part of her heart and soul, the gooey intimate part that was responsible for the feeling of love, was buried in the same hole as her parent’s parts and pieces. There hadn’t been much of them left, and deep inside, Kara felt there wasn’t much of her left either. The predominant feeling that Kara woke up with every day was anger, as well as an overwhelming need for revenge.
The hotel bed was soft and the sheets were smooth and cool on her naked body. She was lying on her side facing the Russian who was staring up at the ceiling. He had recovered quickly after the wall sex and had carried her into the bedroom where they had gone for round two.
Victor Kornev turned his head and looked at her. He said, “Tonya, I have to attend a video meeting downstairs.”