The Drone

by Adrian Magson

  ‘Sounds like it crashed, huh?’

  ‘It sure did. One second it was in the air, the next it hit the ground and all I heard was a crunch, and somebody yelling. He sounded real mad so I kept my head down.’

  Vaslik nodded. ‘Sounds like it might have been a model plane of some kind, wouldn’t you say, Clay?’

  ‘I guess.’ The boy looked at his mother but got a stony look in return. ‘Except…’

  ‘Except?’

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  ‘How do you know that? Did you see it?’

  Clay nodded. ‘Some of it. I waited a real long time, ’til I was sure the men had gone away. Then I took a closer look at the place where it had come down.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Bits and pieces. Plastic mostly, and some metal… and some glass bits like a camera lens.’

  There was a short silence. ‘So this man took whatever it was away with him?’

  Clay shook his head. ‘No, sir. They left it where it was.’

  ‘They? There was more than one man?’

  ‘There were three. Well, actually four, only I don’t think the fourth guy wanted to be seen.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Because he was lying on the ground about fifty yards away and watching them. I saw him because he didn’t know squat about moving at night. I don’t know what he looked like, though – he was just a shadow in the dark. But as soon as the plane hit the ground, he checked out of there without the others seeing him and went off towards the old airfield.’

  Another silence. Then Dave said softly, ‘Which old airfield’s that, son?’

  34

  ‘It’s an old place built in the fifties,’ Janice put in. ‘Something to do with the Cold War that never came to anything, thank the Lord. They built it along with a hangar and runway and stuff, but it was never listed and never went – what do you call it – operational. My father said it was a big secret that got forgotten. Nobody uses it for anything now. Leastways, nothing good, anyway, if my sense of smell tells me anything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, last night the wind was coming from over there and I swear I could smell smoke. You get kids or young people finding a place like that and they like to think it doesn’t belong to anybody so they start fooling around. Could be nothing, of course, but something was burning.’

  ‘Do you know if the fire department came out?’

  ‘I doubt that, frankly. Our local department’s had some serious budget cutbacks and they don’t go anywhere they don’t have to unless there’s a threat to life or livestock. And I doubt an abandoned airfield meets either of those, if you know what I mean. All told, the place was a huge waste of money and it’s better if they let it burn down if you ask me.’ She gave Clay a fierce look that made him shrink in his seat. ‘I told my kids to stay right away from there – the place is already falling-down dangerous. You don’t know what else they built down there; there could be underground chambers and shafts or silos and the Good Lord knows what. It didn’t need a fire to make it any less dangerous.’

  ‘Mom, I never went inside—’ Clay protested, but her look silenced him.

  ‘I think we should take a look at this place,’ said Ruth, and looked at Janice. ‘Would you mind Clay showing us where he saw the men?’

  Clay’s eyes went big at the prospect, but Janice’s went bigger. ‘Will it be safe over there?’

  ‘Safe as houses,’ Dave assured her. ‘We’ll take a look overhead first, just to make sure. Then we’ll go in on the ground.’ He looked at Clay. ‘You OK with flying, son?’

  He might as well have handed Clay the keys to Disney; Clay nodded with enthusiasm and jumped to his feet.

  ‘I’ve got stuff to show you first,’ he said. ‘I brought back some pieces of the machine. They’re in the barn.’

  Ruth caught the surprised look from Janice and forestalled another lecture. ‘That was clever thinking, Clay. Let’s have a look, shall we?’

  They all trooped outside and into the barn, which smelled of warm hay and horses. A few chickens were pecking at the ground and shafts of sunlight coming through gaps in the wooden planking lent the interior of the building a comfortable atmosphere.

  Clay went over to one corner and pulled aside a tarpaulin, then stood aside so they could see what he’d found. It looked like so much junk plastic that had been hit with a large hammer, but Dave Proust squatted down and immediately plucked one object out from the pile and held it in the air.

  ‘Far as I know,’ he said, ‘UFOs don’t have propellers.’

  Ruth and Vaslik inspected it. It was small, no more than a few inches, but made of a durable plastic.

  ‘I’d say this was a quad-copter,’ Dave continued. ‘I’ve seen them before. Most are small – like the kind kids would play with, even indoors. But I’d say this model was quite a bit bigger.’ He sorted through the pile and picked up a section of gleaming white plastic with stylised letters emblazoned across it. Euro. A jagged edge had cut off any further lettering but Ruth and Vaslik could see what it was immediately.

  ‘EuroVol,’ Ruth murmured. ‘It’s one of their stolen drones.’

  With Janice’s agreement, they went back to the helicopter and climbed aboard. It was a squeeze, but they were only going a short distance. Following an ecstatic Clay’s directions, they took off and flew for about two miles until they saw an unnaturally straight line in the ground below. It was a runway.

  Then they saw the smoke.

  It was hanging in the atmosphere over the field and barely moving, a long pall of dark smoke spread out in a long tail where the turgid movement of air had gathered it up and pushed it slowly away from its source, which was a large square of blackened and crumpled steelwork that had once been a hangar. Beyond it was another shape, this one much smaller, but also smoking, although still standing.

  Dave took them in on a curving course around the area and away from the smoke. There were no signs of vehicles or life, nothing to indicate what might have happened here. The airfield appeared to have been substantial in size, but if there had been any real intent about its development during the Cold War era, it would have possibly been for remote operations to be sited here in the event that known military fields were put out of action.

  ‘Let’s go see the place where you found the crashed drone first,’ said Dave, and followed the boy’s directions to the edge of a gulley nearby, where there was a safe spot of flat ground to land.

  Once the engine stopped turning, they climbed out and Clay led them to a jumble of rocks and bushes, and pointed to a collection of plastic, electronics and wiring scattered on the ground.

  ‘See? Right here.’

  Closer inspection of the remains and the rest of some lettering on the side confirmed that the drone – or quad-copter – was a EuroVol machine. The casing had shattered on impact, revealing the interior with its wiring and circuits, and underneath, between broken skids, was a battered camera with a broken lens. There was also a tubular section of clear plastic with wiring soldered to one end, and mounts which had clearly been ripped away from the body of the drone on impact.

  ‘We’d better take this in,’ Ruth suggested quietly, so that Clay wouldn’t hear. ‘This was obviously a practice run that didn’t end well. But if they stole six machines in all, they’ve got spares enough to play with.’

  ‘But will it be enough to convince Kraski that it’s serious?’ said Vaslik.

  ‘Kraski?’ Dave looked up from a section of motherboard. ‘John Kraski?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ His expression could have curdled milk. ‘I thought he’d have been retired by now. We crossed swords a couple of times before he moved into the Internal Investigations Section, which would’ve suited him like a second skin. Sounds like he’s found himself another new home, though.’

  ‘Can he really block any reports made through Tom Brasher?’

  ‘I doubt tha
t. He probably thinks he can because he’s a self-important asshole. But if Tom Brasher’s as convinced about this stuff as you two, he’ll make sure it doesn’t get stamped on. The one thing nobody’s going to take a chance on is the president’s life.’

  Using a bag from the helicopter’s stowage rack, they collected as many of the pieces of the drone that they could find, then scouted the rest of the area in a widening circle to make sure they had missed nothing.

  It was Clay who found something, but without realising what until Ruth saw his fingers and the soles of his trainers. They carried traces of something bright red, and she thought he’d cut himself scrabbling about in the rocks.

  ‘It won’t come off,’ he said after trying to wipe the colour away. ‘Jeez – Mom’s going to ground me forever!’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ Ruth told him. ‘Show us where you’ve just been.’

  Clay led them over to the edge of the runway about eighty yards away, and a large rock. Both the rock and the ground around it were stained red.

  Vaslik inspected the colour without touching it. ‘It looks to me like a powdered dye,’ he said quietly. ‘But we should get Brasher’s people to test it, just in case. Isn’t that what Paget said the drones had been ordered and modified to carry?’

  Ruth nodded. ‘He did. Maybe they were using powdered dye to make their test runs.’

  ‘Could be. Let’s just hope that’s all it was.’

  Dave flew them all back to Clay’s home. On the way, he gave the boy a stern warning.

  ‘Now we know you’ve been telling your pals at school that you’ve got a UFO tucked away, and that you hope to sell the idea to a newspaper. Am I right?’

  Clay looked horrified. ‘Shit – how do you know that?’

  Dave put his finger alongside his nose. ‘Trust me, son. We know a lot of shit. And don’t swear – it ain’t nice.’

  Clay didn’t say anything, but stared out of the window. As they dropped towards the house they could see a pickup in the yard and a man talking to Janice. ‘That’s my dad,’ Clay murmured. ‘Am I in trouble?’

  Dave shook his head. ‘No, son. We’ll square everything away with him and tell him how helpful you’ve been. But hear me out: no kidding anybody about UFOs, understand? Tell them what you saw was part of a weather balloon. We don’t want good decent folks like your mom getting scared about aliens, do we?’

  Clay nodded. ‘OK. Do I get a reward?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure we can give you any money, but how about a note of thanks from the FBI? Of course, we’ll have to run it past your parents first.’

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later they took off again and headed back to the airfield, leaving a proud boy with his parents and a promise that Special Agent Tom Brasher would be sending him a letter of thanks.

  As the rotors came to a stop and they sat looking at the remains of what had once been an enormous hangar, Ruth’s phone buzzed. It was Tom Brasher. She turned on the loudspeaker so they could all hear what he had to say.

  ‘We just got a call from the Oklahoma State Police,’ he announced. ‘They picked up a kid not far from Alva, Oklahoma. He got stupid drunk in a bar and started mouthing off about – and I quote loosely – “kuffars and insects delivering the sting of death from the sky… your own toys of death spraying our message of destruction on the head of your leader and ending his tyranny. Allah be praised.” And more stuff like that. He was lucky that two of the guys he was screaming at were state troopers. They hauled him out of there before he got himself lynched. It took a while for us to hear about it until his name got through the system and they checked into his background. Then they called it in.’

  ‘Is he for real?’ said Vaslik.

  ‘Sounds like it to me, even without looking at his personal details. That stuff about spraying destruction and toys of death… that sounds like he was talking drones to me. When we ran his name it lit up a few lights. It turns out he’s called Donny Bashir, and he’s a known associate of Bilal Ammar, the bodybuilder who was seen talking to Chadwick’s mystery man in Newark. They even attended the same mosque.’

  ‘That figures.’

  ‘Yeah. We also have him listed as being present during the Boston marathon bombing. A cop saw him laughing with a bunch of others and pulled him in for questioning. There was no proof he was involved, although he couldn’t come up with a half-valid reason for being there, so they had to let him go. He was posted as a name to watch but then he dropped out of sight.’

  ‘So what makes him a likely extremist?’

  ‘Because of knowing Ammar – and being a tech graduate from NYU where he studied engineering, IT and – get this – chemistry.’

  ‘Ouch. Was Ammar with him at the bar?’

  ‘No. The local cops checked out a nearby motel and found the room they’d been using, but Ammar had gone. The owner gave a good description of him, muscles and all, but he couldn’t recall the vehicle they’d used and they don’t have CCTV.’

  ‘Well, at least that’s one person off the board,’ Vaslik muttered.

  ‘We’re not close enough yet to get this put on the front burner, but we’ll be working on him. In the meantime there are other threats coming in from New York, San Francisco, Washington and Chicago, all concerning imminent and convincing bombing campaigns. They’re currently being investigated. We figure some if not most are simply phone and internet chatter tied in in some way to cause maximum disruption, but they’re taking a lot of time and effort to check out thoroughly.’

  ‘Could it be part of a wider campaign?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘My opinion? Yes. If they throw up enough noise and get our attention focussed on what seems like genuine threats in other cities, it disguises their real intentions. We’re hoping to break this Bashir guy down to see if he’s got the ability to make a dirty bomb, or if he’s just mouthing off to distract us further, but the Staties aren’t having much luck. They didn’t know what to do with him so I persuaded them to hold him in the Woods County jail in Alva until I get down there. What we need is some hard evidence that makes it a real and genuine danger. Have you guys found anything?’

  Ruth gave him a summary of their findings, but she could tell by his muted reaction that bits of a machine by themselves weren’t sufficient to provide the kind of hard evidence he and his superiors wanted.

  Then Dave Proust stepped in. ‘Tom, we’re about to go look at the airfield buildings to see if we can pick up any useful details. But it looks to me like somebody torched the place on purpose. If you want my gut instinct, this is for real. Nobody would dump a busted-up machine in the remote kind of place we found it in the hopes that somebody might stumble across it and tell the authorities. And the kid saw it flying at night, miles from anywhere. These guys, whoever they were, are for real, too.’

  ‘I hear you, Tom. Give me a call as soon as you get back, OK? Oh, and don’t go in cold.’

  ‘Will do. Speak later.’ He nodded at Ruth to cut the connection.

  35

  ‘Is it me or is this place creepy?’ said Ruth. They were standing outside the helicopter and studying their surroundings. The air smelled thick with smoke, burned rubber and metal, and down here it was like looking through a thin veil that shifted violently with every final turn of the rotors.

  It was clearly an airfield – or had been – but apart from the obvious runway and the two buildings in the distance, it looked long-abandoned, strewn with weeds and coarse grassy clumps sprouting out of the concrete like bristles on an old man’s chin. The only thing to Ruth’s mind that was missing was a ball of tumbleweed rolling across the landscape and some Morricone music in the background.

  ‘It certainly has an atmosphere.’ Vaslik was looking down at the ground alongside the helicopter. Dave had landed on a patch of stubby grass, but a couple of feet away the ground was dusty where a bowl of wind-blown soil had built up over time. ‘But we’re not the first to come here.’

  The other two followed the di
rection of his glance to where a set of twin tyre tracks had cut the corner.

  Vaslik knelt and ran a finger across the tread marks. ‘These look pretty fresh. A commercial vehicle or a pickup.’

  ‘Could be campers or hunters,’ suggested Dave. ‘Or kids fooling around.’

  ‘What, out here?’

  ‘Sure, why not? Clay did. But I’m thinking older kids – the kind who play with matches.’

  ‘Humour me, Cochise,’ Ruth said to Vaslik. ‘How can you tell these are fresh?’

  He grinned. ‘God, you city folk just crease me up.’ He cast around and pointed to where another tyre print further over was full of wind-blown dust. ‘These are several days old. This one hasn’t been dusted in yet.’ He glanced up and nodded towards the two buildings in the distance. ‘Shall we go look?’

  Ruth shielded her eyes and studied the two structures. The hangar was nothing but a blackened skeleton of concrete, with the roof structure partly in place but hanging down on one side like a giant bird with a broken wing. Puffs of dark smoke drifted up in one corner, but most of the fire looked to have burned itself out. Even in this defeated and ruined condition, it wore the sad demeanour of a place long forgotten and left to decay. Like ancient barns and cowsheds back home in England, it was now just a footprint in history.

  She looked up as a flutter of movement caught her eye. A flock of birds swooped by, twisting and turning in formation against the pale sky, changing places in bursts of bewildering speed, yet always tight together as if joined by hidden wires.

  ‘Starlings,’ she said aloud, caught for a moment by their air of total liberation. ‘The hooligans of the bird world.’

  Vaslik looked at her. ‘I never figured on you as a bird watcher. Do you have any other nasty habits you haven’t mentioned?’