Captain Steve Austin saw the line of cars outside the gate entrance and cursed. He was still out on Highway 95, and the line snaked from the road leading to the entrance gate and spilled back onto the four-lane blacktop. Right where the gate road met the highway he could see a crowd of people, maybe a hundred in all, dressed as if it were Halloween and carrying signs.
Then he remembered: The protest was today. He should have left his house an hour earlier to get to work on time, and now he’d have hell to pay from his commander.
Not that this job wasn’t hell already.
A former F-16 pilot who’d flown combat missions in Afghanistan, he had a new job piloting an MQ-1 Predator for the 17th Reconnaissance Squadron. He’d joined the Air Force to fly—really fly—but with the explosion of requests for unmanned aerial vehicle support, the Air Force had quit relying on volunteers and had begun forcing pilots to run a tour with the UAVs. There was just too much demand and not enough pilots.
Some of his peers had volunteered and seemed to enjoy the shift work without the need to deploy, but he certainly didn’t. He despised being a drone pilot.
The missions weren’t the issue, per se. In truth, the 17th was a little bit special, in that its mission set was dictated by the National Command Authority. They didn’t get any drudgery like a route reconnaissance tasking from a deployed battalion. They received target packages for terrorists out to harm the United States, and he preferred it that way. If he had to fly a drone, he’d much rather work with armed UAVs over straight intelligence collection. At least with the 17th, he was making a contribution. He’d dropped plenty of munitions in support of national interests while deployed in a fighter squadron, and the strike missions with the 17th didn’t bother him at all.
It just wasn’t flying, and he couldn’t wait to get back into a real cockpit. Especially when he had to deal with idiots like the ones in front of the gate today. Ignorant of the massive intelligence picture he had, they were completely unaware that there were literally thousands of bad men out in the wild, all actively pursuing a goal of taking the naïve protesters’ lives.
He inched forward on the highway and finally turned onto the gate road, the protesters held at bay by the base security, content to chant their slogans at him as he passed. He flipped them the bird and continued on, ignoring when two of them raised their hands attempting to return the favor. He saw a third raise her hand and realized they weren’t making an obscene gesture. They were pointing.
He leaned forward into his windshield and looked up, seeing a speck about forty feet above him and rising. The car in front of him moved, and he followed another ten feet, then leaned forward again. The speck hovered right above his windshield about seventy feet in the air. Then it began to fall.
It took the rest of Steve Austin’s life to realize that the object was growing in size. By the time he recognized it as an out-of-control commercial drone, it had smashed into his windshield, spikes on the skids shattering the glass and the weight of the drone punching a jagged hole.
He felt liquid splash all over his upper body and snapped his head back in confusion. Then the confusion turned to infinite pain as his face and neck burst into white-hot flame. He threw open the door, giving the protestors an event that finally stopped their chanting. Screaming in agony, he ran right at them, his hair now alight and his face melting as the white phosphorus burrowed into his flesh as if it were alive.
As he staggered through the protestors, looking like a grisly rendition of Johnny Blaze, the chemical cauterized his esophagus, burning to his spine. The protestors fell away in horror, the ghastly smell of burning flesh following Austin in a putrid wake. Mercifully, a second later, his arms dropped, and he collapsed on the side of the road, dead.
The white phosphorus continued to burn, tendrils of thick smoke rising from his melted face like steam from miniature volcanoes.