Of the thousand-odd drones that would normally be airborne on a night like this, ranging from tiny hand-launched spy craft like toy helicopters to strategic reconnaissance drones big enough to look like passenger jets, only a handful were allowed up in the air.
Some of the drones had to stay airborne, by order of various agencies. There were those which were part of ongoing criminal investigations, and those tracking the borders for drug smugglers and illegal immigrants. These were allowed to go aloft again, but only with extra supervision in their ground control stations. Then there were the armed drones that circled various high-value resources day and night: crucial airports and satellite uplink sites, the “backbone” facilities that kept the Internet running, Camp David and the White House. Those drones were there to prevent another 9/11 — if someone tried to fly a commercial aircraft into a collision course with the sites, the drones would shoot the terrorists down before they could reach their targets.
Those drones were vital to national security.
They now belonged, every one of them, to Charlotte Holman.
Thanks to the secretary of defense’s getting her inside the air force base, she could take over any or all of the military drones whenever she pleased.
Had she been greedy, had she commandeered all the Creech drones airborne that night, she would have been detected right away. Fighter jets with human pilots would have been scrambled to take the drones down, and within an hour or two the threat would be eliminated.
But she was not greedy or careless or stupid. She and Paul Moulton had worked all this out quite carefully. In the end she chose only two drones, releasing the rest of them from her clutches. All but two of them would perform their scheduled patrols and then return to their bases without doing anything suspicious.
Of the two she did commandeer, one was an MQ-9 Reaper, a slightly larger, slightly heavier descendant of the old Predator class. This Reaper carried a single Hellfire missile slung under its belly, and its single, ever-vigilant eye was tasked with watching the skies around Washington, D.C. Holman sent the machine a program to replace its existing flight plan and it accepted the change without comment. For the moment, its controllers in Nevada would remain unaware that it no longer belonged to them. They would only get a few minutes’ warning once the new program went into effect.
The second drone that Holman chose was something a little more special. An MQ-1C Gray Eagle, one of the newest and most advanced UAVs in the fleet. The Gray Eagle was designed to stay aloft for as long as thirty-six hours without refueling, hiding miles up in the sky where it couldn’t be seen before swooping down at the last minute like its namesake to deliver death from above. This one was outfitted with four GBU-44/B Viper Strike guided bombs that could use GPS to find their targets with a level of precision Hellfire missiles could never beat. It also had an electronics package to combat enemy jamming countermeasures.
This particular Gray Eagle was tasked with keeping station well out at sea east of Washington, cutting long circles over the most commonly used shipping lanes. Its purpose was to intercept any foreign threats that might try to harass American cargo vessels. It would serve this purpose as expected, to the letter, for nearly twenty-four hours to come. At a specified time, however, it would switch off its control transponders and follow a simple program, a few dozen lines of code, that Paul Moulton had written weeks ago.
Holman waited for the Gray Eagle to confirm that it had uploaded her new program and filed it away in its long-term memory. Then she cut the link between her computer and the servers at Creech. Just to be safe, she erased all her own logs and then uninstalled the proprietary software she’d used to contact the drones.
Once that was done, no one could ever prove she’d been in contact with the Reaper or the Gray Eagle. Of course, it also meant she couldn’t change their programs now even if she wanted to. From this point, there was no turning back.
Wilkes came back after an hour’s nap and grabbed a couple of pistols from the supply they’d taken from Contorni. “You’ve got all the details straight?” Chapel asked him.
The marine rolled his eyes. “Still not sure why we don’t just kill Holman. But, yeah, I know what I’m supposed to do. And you’re the boss.”
“I outrank you. And Hollingshead needs us to do it this way,” Chapel insisted.
Wilkes just nodded and headed out. From the window of the room, Chapel watched him grab a taxi and head north on the highway. “Okay, we just have to trust he’ll do his part. Angel — are you ready to go?”
“Sure,” she told him. “There’s an Internet café about two miles north of here. I can do everything from there.”
He nodded. “If you suspect, even for a second, that they’re on to you, that the NSA knows you’re online—”
“I’ve learned my lesson,” she told him. “And I know how to cover my tracks.”
“Okay. Stay in the other room until it gets dark. Then get to work.”
“Got it,” Angel said. But she didn’t leave immediately. Instead she searched his face with her eyes, as if she needed to know something desperately important.
“Something on your mind?” he asked.
She frowned. “I know you’d do a lot to save the director,” she said.
“Sure,” he replied.
“I want you to know — if it was me, I would die for him. If I could, I would take the bullet.”
Chapel thought for a moment before responding to that. “I hope he knows how loyal you are.”
She shook her head. “I need to know if you would do the same.”
Chapel glanced over at Julia. She raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“You mean, am I willing to put myself in danger to protect him?” Chapel asked.
“No,” Angel said. “I mean, if it comes down to trading your life for his, will you do it?” She looked away from his face. “I know it’s a strange question. But I–I’ve got my reasons for asking. For wanting him to be safe.”
“We all want him to be safe,” Julia said. “I only met him once, and I still want that. Are you asking Jim—”
“Chapel knows what I’m asking.”
And Chapel thought maybe he did. He tried to think of the best answer to give her. “He’s my commanding officer,” he told her. “I’ve sworn to obey him and to protect him to the utmost of my abilities. He’s a man I admire, too. Someone I believe in. So… yes. The answer to your question is yes.”
Angel said nothing more. She just nodded and stepped outside, closing the door gently behind her.
Once she was gone, it was just Chapel and Julia in the motel room. “What was that all about?” Julia asked.
“No idea,” Chapel said, which wasn’t strictly true. He had an idea. It just seemed too crazy to credit.
Julia shook her head. “Whatever. We’ve got some time before we move out. When was the last time you ate something?” she asked.
Chapel looked away from the window and frowned. “Not sure.”
She grabbed a plastic bag from the bed and lifted it in the air. “Sandwiches,” she said. “Straight from the local gas station.” She opened her eyes very wide. “Yum.”
“In the army we learned the secret of eating bad food. You just tell yourself it’s fuel for your body. That it’ll make you less tired all the time.”
“And does that work?”
“No. But it gives you something to talk about besides how crappy the food is,” Chapel told her.
She laughed and tossed the bag of sandwiches at him. It wasn’t a great throw, and he had to lunge out of his chair to make the catch. Which turned out to be a lousy idea. Down on the floor on one knee, he had to hold himself perfectly still until the dark spots cleared from his vision and he could breathe easily again.