86

The secret service agent—Snelling—gave me a pin to place on my shirt that said I was one of the good guys, then used his authority to get me to the top of the carrier. I immediately saw what Kurt had told me. Every stairwell was a narrow, one-person-only affair, and there weren’t that many of them. It might not have been a problem when the ship was operational, but it would definitely hamper getting five hundred civilians off quickly.

We went through the bridge, complete with mannequins acting as if they were fighting World War II, and entered the flight deck, which was absolutely jam-packed with people, all the way to the back of the deck, behind the historical aircraft where they couldn’t even see the president talking.

On the way up, jogging the metal stairs, the echo of his feet bouncing off the steel of the ship, Snelling had said, “We have four DroneDefenders on top. Do you have any idea what direction it’s coming from?”

I said, “I don’t. What’s a DroneDefender?”

“It’s a focused jammer mounted on a rifle stock. Basically, it cuts the drone’s ability to receive GPS or radio signals and causes it to either fall out of the sky or return to base, depending on the type of drone. It defeats the ability of anyone to control it.”

“What’s the range?”

“About four hundred meters.”

“Do you have radar? Something to find the drones to get the weapons on target?”

“Yeah, but we only have one. That’s why I asked the direction. Face it the wrong way, and it’s worthless.”

We reached the deck and he said, “How serious is this threat?”

“It’s serious. If I were going to call it, I’d say that fucking thing is in the air and headed this way. It’ll be an explosive charge, probably kinetic in action and not triggered by remote. They’ll want to fly it straight into where the president is speaking, so aim the radar away from him. Where’s his podium? Does he have a backdrop?”

“Yes. The stage is in the middle of the ship, just in front of the tower for the bridge. He’s speaking toward the bow, although they’ve got video monitors for all the folks behind him.”

“Then it’ll be coming from the bow.”

We pushed through the crowd, and I saw President Hannister take the podium, showing not a whit of concern that he was being hunted. He cracked a few jokes and then went into his campaign speech. I have to admit, it was pretty impressive. He was on four or five giant monitors, and I didn’t see him scanning the sky, looking for his doom.

We reached the edge of the bow and two different agents ran up, holding what looked like AR-15s with a couple of boom mikes for barrels. Snelling said, “Where should we put them?”

“On each corner. Put the other two at the rear in case the drone flies by them. And get a guy up high, on top of the bridge, with binos. Where do we stand with the radar?”

“That’s actually on top of the bridge right now. He’s scanning the bow and has about a forty-five-degree spread, which means he can see anything to the left and right of the bow in a cone that extends about a hundred meters both ways.”

“Good. How long is the president going to talk?”

“Believe it or not, over thirty minutes. Probably closer to forty-five.”

I shook my head, then heard my radio earpiece go off with Jennifer calling Knuckles. I felt my first bit of hope, because I sure as hell didn’t trust all of this technological bullshit.

That hope was drowned five seconds later, when Snelling said, “They have one, they have one.”

He went to his radio, and I heard him say, “Spike leaders, Spike leaders, we have a UAV inbound.” He paused, then read off a grid reference that meant nothing to me, but hopefully meant something to the guys with the DroneDefenders.

I caught my end of the radio traffic with Knuckles, just bits and pieces, but it was enough to tell me they’d found the hornets’ nest. Maybe they’d “cut the control” by killing that sorry son of a bitch.

Snelling was scanning the sky. He pointed and said, “There!” He immediately went to his radio and began giving commands, bringing the aft DroneDefenders forward to the bow.

I looked at where he was pointing and saw a speck in the distance, coming closer. It closed on the deck, and the DroneDefenders all aimed at it, unleashing an overwhelming barrage of electronic interference.

Knuckles called, giving me a quick SITREP and saying they had control, and I didn’t have the sense to tell the secret service to quit what they were doing. Of course, I also didn’t know that the guy who’d built the weapon was a nascent genius and that our actions were playing into the terrorist’s hands.

The DroneDefenders stopped the UAV in its tracks, so to speak, causing it to hover about seventy-five meters in front of the bow, only thirty feet above the deck. It remained stationary, and Knuckles called saying, “We’re looking at the screen, and we have no control. We can’t fly it away. I don’t know why.”

I exhaled and said, “We got it. We got it. The secret service has an antidrone gun.”

Knuckles said, “The camera is zooming in on the president.”

I ignored the call and said to Snelling, “What now? Just let it hover until it runs out of juice?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. This is the first time we’ve ever dealt with this type of threat.”

I said, “You see that crap hanging below it? That’s a bomb. If it runs out of juice, it’s going to hit the water like concrete, and it’s going to go off.”

I heard the president droning on in the background, the people cheering everything he said. Snelling wiped his upper lip and said, “I don’t know what else we can do.”

Knuckles said, “Pike, that thing is doing something strange. We aren’t touching anything, and it’s zooming in on the president.”

I clicked on and said, “It’s the electromagnetic interference. These guys are torching it.”

He said, “I don’t think so. It’s stable and controlled. It’s not like it’s freaking out and going batshit. It’s looking for something.”

I took that in and said, “Keep me abreast of what you see.”

To Snelling, I said, “Shoot that fucking thing down, right now.”

“What? We can’t start firing during a presidential speech. We have it contained.”

Knuckles came on, “Pike, for some reason, the camera has gone from the president and is now scanning left and right.”

I said, “Snelling, that thing has some program to defeat your weapons. I have a man that’s looking at the feed right now. It’s doing strange shit, and your DroneDefenders aren’t interfering.”

“Pike, I can’t just start blazing away during a presidential speech. I get you operate under different rules—I saw that with the helo—but that drone has lost control from the source.”

I said, “I know it’s lost control from the source, because my men just slaughtered the guys controlling it. They’re now telling me it’s doing stuff on its own.”

Knuckles said, “Pike, it’s found something it’s interested in. It’s zooming in on the seal attached to the president’s podium.”

My mind went into overdrive, assessing everything I knew about the problem, and realized we’d lost control because we were blasting the drone. I had men who owned the hardware, and I was preventing them from executing.

I said, “Turn off the DroneDefenders. Turn them off, right now.”

“No way. That’s the only thing keeping it away.”

“Snelling, turn them off. My men have the control box, but they can’t do anything because you’ve cut the signal. That fucking thing is on some secondary protocol, like you said before, where sometimes it flies back to base. You made it blind, and instead of flying back to base, it’s started searching.”

He looked at me hesitantly, and I understood the pressure he was under. The president’s life hung in the balance, but I knew I was right.

Knuckles said, “The screen is now nothing but the seal. What’s going on?”

I said, “I don’t know,” and the drone began to move. Slowly at first, but then it picked up speed. The men with the DroneDefenders tracked it, hosing it down with electrical jamming, but it did no good.

I shouted, “Turn them off!” And the drone began streaking toward us at an incredible speed. I ripped off my jacket and exposed my weapon. Snelling saw the rifle and immediately reacted as if I was a threat, his nascent suspicions of me causing his secret service instincts to take over. He jumped toward me and I hammered him with the barrel, right on the forehead, splitting the skin. He dropped to the deck, and out of the corner of my eye I saw other secret service agents reacting to my display.

The drone reached the deck going forty miles an hour and began to descend. I snapped my stock in place, thinking, Please, dear God, let me hit it before they hit me.

I raised the weapon and began firing controlled pairs, each one missing. The drone dropped lower, now directly to my front. I saw an agent shouting at me, his weapon drawn, and knew I was going to die. He aimed, and I broke the trigger.

The air above us turned into a fireball, the shock wave driving everyone within thirty yards into the deck. I hammered hard and rolled over, disoriented. I heard screaming, the trampling of feet, and saw a flaming bit of the drone to my left, but I didn’t move.

I just lay there, taking one sweet breath after another.