The Archangel Drones

by Joe Nobody

  Gabe sat for what seemed like hours, trying to filter the multitude of police voices discussing the scene, waiting for something to change. He’d actually nodded off in the control station’s chair when the tone of the scanner’s broadcasts changed. “I think he’s coming out,” an excited voice reported.

  “Does he still have the weapon?” a different voice asked.

  “Unclear.”

  Bolting upright, Gabe’s eyes zeroed in on the G-1’s battery indicator, his foggy brain having no idea how long he’d been sleeping. A few quick mental calculations indicated the unit contained about 20 minutes of on-scene time before having to start for home.

  It took a bit longer to reprogram the drone’s flight path, this being the first time he’d had to override an existing set of instructions remotely. Finally, the Gripen was airborne and moving the short distance toward the apartment complex.

  The infrared cameras made the scene below crystal clear. A ring of man-shapes surrounded a three-story building, their outlines bulging with helmets, body armor, and chests swollen by pouches. It was easy for Gabe to pick out the SWAT team, their AR15-style battle rifles glowing with a unique heat signature.

  With a delicate touch on the controls, he managed an angle on the apartment’s door. Again, it was easy to zoom in on the right threshold, two heavily equipped officers bracketing the opening and clearly on high alert. The image was crisp enough to see the exit splinters of two bullet holes on the door’s surface.

  Using the Gripen’s parabolic microphones, Gabe could hear their negotiations with the holdout. “Come on, Benny,” one of the SWAT cops was saying through the door. “For the hundredth time, there’s no way out of that apartment but through this door. It’s getting late, dude. Everybody’s tired and getting itchy. Come on out, and let’s just call it a night.”

  “Fuck you!” a muffled voice from inside yelled. “I ain’t tired, and I know the minute I come through that door one of you fuckers is going to plug my ass.”

  “Nobody is going to shoot you, Benny. That shit only happens on TV. Put down the pistol; put your hands on your head, and come out. There are 15 damn television stations out here filming away. Ain’t nobody getting shot unless you get stupid.”

  There was a pause, Benny obviously weighing his options. Again, his voice rang thick with defiance, “Bullshit! I know damn well what happens when you shoot at a cop.”

  “Are we going to go through this again? You already told me you didn’t know they were cops. I heard you loud and clear. It’s okay…. Shit happens…. Accidents are a part of life. I give you my word, Benny. Come out the right way, and nobody’s going to get hurt. If the cops serving the warrant didn’t identify themselves like you say, then no harm, no foul. Convince the judge of that, and you’ll not be charged for the shooting.”

  “I don’t believe you,” the voice from inside the apartment shouted. “I’m as good as dead anyway, so you’re going to have to bust through that door, and I’m taking as many of you bitches out as I can. I ain’t going to spend any more time behind bars…. No way, no how. So come on in, Gents, and let’s dance.”

  Gabe watched as the SWAT negotiator bent his head to a shoulder-mounted radio. The video stream was like watching a badly translated movie, a slight delay between the officer’s movements and his lowered voice rumbling over the scanner. “He’s not going for it. Let’s take this up a notch. Bring up the breaching team.”

  There was movement in the foreground, the rapid hustle and flash of more man-shapes. Before Gabe could zoom the camera back, the two officers bookending the apartment door were joined by several others, all of them hugging the outer wall of the structure.

  “Stun grenade through the window?” whispered one of the new arrivals.

  “No, he’s got a mattress blocking the glass on the inside. The door is the only way,” the tense responder advised.

  Keeping low, two of the officers cut out of line, one of them wielding what appeared to be a heavy, round pipe with handles fused on the exterior. His partner was brandishing a shield. Gabe could see the team exchanging hand signals, and then the pipe was banging into the door, propelled with significant force by the burly cop.

  The battering ram drew back for a second strike, but then the door flew inward, immediately followed by a man appearing in the doorway, his hand firing a pistol at the opening.

  A nearby SWAT officer tossed something into the apartment.

  The officer manning the battering ram ducked low behind the shield as twinkles of light continued to flash from inside the doorway. And then the entire interior of the apartment blinked bright white, as if a bolt of lightning had suddenly struck from the heavens. “A flash-bang grenade,” Gabe whispered. “Damn.”

  The thunderous explosion was still echoing through the control room when the first cop entered the breach, his rifle high and sweeping. Gabe heard another shot, obviously the suspect’s pistol, and then the officer’s rifle ignited with a roar that sounded more like a buzz saw than a discharging weapon.

  A few heartbeats later, it was over. The cops poured into the small dwelling, weapons on shoulders, sweeping right and left. Soon the interior was full of light, and the scene suddenly transformed to a cluster of armored-up men standing around, completely relaxed.

  A blinking light on the monitor drew Gabe’s attention back to his equipment. The G-1’s battery was getting low. It was time to bring her home.

  Gabe retired to his apartment after his flying-baby had returned to her crib. His mind was busy with engineering problems, mulling around such puzzles as extending the Gripen’s air time and expanding its coverage of the city.

  After making a BLT on sourdough bread, he plopped on the new-smelling couch and flipped on the television. The evening news, as expected, was filled with the SWAT team’s deployment and eventual shootout with the police. Gabe found it ironic that both the police and the reporter got it right.

  The camera then switched to the grieving widow, her sobbing pleads difficult to make out. “He didn’t even own a gun,” she claimed. “The police haven’t shown me any gun. My husband was executed, just like all those videos we keep seeing on TV.”

  There were a bunch of neighbors and family surrounding the woman, all of them nodding their support, a few shouted out slogans of distrust and discontent toward the cops.

  “You’re right not to trust them,” Gabe whispered to the boob tube. “But not this time. They called it straight.”

  The picture then turned to the HPD spokesman, who ran with the tried and true line that he couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation.

  Gabe smirked, “There’s not anything ongoing about it – the man shot at the cops, and they shot back. He’s dead. End of story.”

  After finishing his sandwich, Gabe realized the irony of his defending the police. After what they’d done to his son… after all the pain they had caused his family, why did he feel compelled to stick up for the cops?

  That line of thinking directed him down another mental corridor, and its substance was troubling to the core of Gabe’s beliefs. This new logic dictated a new, perhaps unwelcome, philosophical epiphany. Maybe the fault lies elsewhere, the tormented father considered. Maybe people like the man in the shootout were to blame for Jacob’s death. Gabe had only been monitoring the police for a few days, but already a vine of sympathy was sprouting in the forest of hatred that he felt towards the men in blue.

  It wasn’t that abuse was ever justified. Gabe could never go there. No, what he was beginning to sense was an understanding of what prompted the cops to perform such acts of brutality. They were dealing with everything from the mentally ill to the species’ most vicious criminals. He wondered how the officers who were involved in today’s shooting would cope when they ventured home to their own families. How would they interact with the wife and kids? Were they somehow able to just shake off the adrenaline rush of a combative citizen at will? Was that even possible? Did their jobs engender undue stress on their pe
rsonal relationships?

  Two days after the SWAT incident, Gabe was again taking a break and watching the local news. He was surprised to see the shooting was again dominating the headlines.

  The victim’s family had contacted a nationally known civil rights activist and requested his assistance in the effort to prove HPD’s trigger finger had erred against an innocent man. One of the anguished family members was filmed, distraught and proclaiming, “Those cops just gunned Benny down in cold blood. The people have to take back this city.”

  The newscast displayed said activist, surrounded by several citizens, barking harsh accusations into the microphone. Gabe had to admit, the gentleman had all of his duck-facts in a row, spouting the same statistics and numbers he’d uncovered shortly after Jacob’s death. Wasn’t the internet a wonderful thing, he mused.

  Again, he was plagued with indecision. The G-1 knew the truth, had it documented on both audio and video. The cops had played it fair and square, and his recordings would expose that reality beyond any shadow of a doubt. Should he reveal the facts?

  While it was true that his recent experiences with stalking the police had rounded off a few of the sharper edges of his negative attitude toward law enforcement, Gabe still hated the authorities for what they had done to his son.

  He now believed that the police, in conjunction with the governmental entities empowered to hold them accountable, were playing a statistical game… weighing the odds. As long as there was more “good” being accomplished than “bad,” the scales of justice were balanced. Sure, occasional mistakes were made; people were hurt; lives were lost – but the overall numbers were positive for society. Those who were harmed, falsely imprisoned, or killed, could sue to acquire “monetary justice.”

  Adam Barlow had, in a way, seconded that very notion. The attorney, having functioned in the inner workings of the justice system for many years, couldn’t understand why Gabe was so intent on pursuing a change. More than once, the legal eagle had advised his client, “Just take the money. Move away to some glorious paradise, and forget Houston ever existed. The cash can’t bring Jacob back, but it can help with the healing.”

  Even Sandy, loving mother of a murdered child, had experienced a similar resolution. She had left him, more or less, over that single point of contention. “Let it go,” she had begged him.

  There was no simple explanation for how such a system composed of non-working checks and balances had come into being. Like organic matter creeping through excruciatingly slow, Darwinist changes, he was sure it had developed, morphed, and advanced in its complexity over time. Eventually, it was not only capable of survival; it had been ingrained with the skills necessary to dominate its sometimes weaker, nobler ancestor.

  But the system was still wrong, clearly not the American way.

  A justice system based on majorities wasn’t what the founding fathers had in mind. Statistical means and averages weren’t part of the law.

  The principle was as old as society itself – restated and sanctioned generation upon generation. In the book of Genesis, the Christian Bible recounts the earliest example. Abraham was speaking with God about the destruction of Sodom, “Will you consume the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous within the city? Will you consume and not spare the place for the fifty righteous who are in it? What if ten are found there?"

  God had endorsed the salvation of the innocent in the face of overwhelming wickedness, "I will not destroy it for the ten's sake.”

  Philosophers, lawmakers, and attorneys throughout the centuries have restated the same principle, now a cornerstone of our legal system – the presumption of innocence. The famous British jurist, William Blackstone touted its importance in 18th century England. His oft-quoted standard declared, “It is better that 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.”

  America’s Benjamin Franklin echoed the same basic premise, which was expanded slightly by John Adams, asserting, “It is more important that innocence be protected than guilt be punished.”

  Yet, Jacob hadn’t received any presumption of innocence, nor had some percentage of the citizens who encountered law enforcement. Gabe believed his son had been punished for some reason, known only to the mind of Officer James Marwick. And that violated everything he believed in, everything he had studied and adopted in this process of making Jacob’s death count – from the Peelian Principles to the presumption of innocence.

  The entire thought process drew Gabe back to the same starting point, the question of whether or not to divulge HPD’s innocence in Benny’s shooting. In the end, he cut through the rhetoric and examined the issue in its simplest terms. Certainly, one of Jacob Industry’s goals was to protect the presumption of innocence. Secondly, the presumption of innocence in this case had to do with safeguarding HPD, who had acted professionally in this situation and had upheld the letter of the law. HPD was the blameless one here, and his video could prove that fact.

  “I guess you’d better practice what you preach,” he whispered to the television. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Presumption of innocence and the Peelian Principles are two-way streets.”

  Having made the decision to release his evidence regarding the SWAT team’s breach, Gabe headed to the control room, finally comfortable with taking the high road. Right was right.

  He was sitting down to prepare the files when the scanner software alerted to another HPD radio call. A man was walking through a park, supposedly carrying a gun.

  The address was close, less than 20 minutes flight time for the Gripen. The weather was perfect, and in a matter of minutes, the G-1 was again soaring through the sky just as the sun was slipping over the evening’s horizon.

  With his attention divided between the monitor displaying the drone’s flight and preparing the SWAT video for distribution, Gabe found himself again having more work than one man could handle. He wished he could bring someone else into the secret folds of the operation.

  The city park proved to be a challenge for the G-1 and its array of optical cameras. Rather than a cluster of police focusing on a single location, this latest situation was more widespread and fluid.

  The area in question was several blocks long and wide, with most of the cops converging on a wooded tract of land just south of a softball field. Initially, Gabe thought the solution was height, ordering his robot to 350 feet in order to provide a wider field of view and hopefully be able to follow the action.

  But that didn’t work, the heavy canopy of foliage blocking too much of the ground below.

  He then zoomed in on the baseball diamond, finding the field vacant. Taking a huge risk, he ordered the Gripen to hover over the pitcher’s mound at a height of 10 feet. “If any of the cops notice the drone, hopefully they’ll think it is just a hobbyist taking advantage of the open spaces to play with his toy,” he mumbled, trying to justify the bold move.

  Such a low position required other modifications to the G-1’s behavior as well. Gabe had to slowly spin the drone in order to scan the horizon and observe the greatest swath of territory. The tactic worked, but the change in protocol increased the diligence required by the operator to a nerve-racking level. For the first time, the Gripen’s father was sweating as he manipulated his invention.

  The radio helped Gabe coordinate his search as much as it did the swarm of cops moving through the area. When an officer reported, “I’ve got eyes on the suspect, 30 yards down the south hiking trail,” Gabe knew where to position the G-1.

  Before any of the police could approach, the Gripen was overhead. Gabe could clearly observe the suspect, casually strolling along the trail with what appeared to be a rifle case slung over his shoulder.

  The pedestrian pulled up suddenly, no doubt hearing the shouted commands of two HPD officers hurrying up the path behind him. A moment later, the guy’s hands were in the air.

  Gabe turned on the microphone, listening with great interest to see how the exchange was taking p
lace.

  “Please set the case down on the ground, sir,” one of the cops stated.

  The fellow did as he was told without comment.

  “What’s inside?” the other policeman asked.

  “None of your business, officer. Is there a problem?” the overwhelmed and startled hiker replied.

  The cop didn’t like the citizen’s reply. “We had reports of a man walking through the park with a rifle. You’re the only person we’ve seen matching the description. Is there a weapon inside that case?”

  “No,” the man reported confidently. “There is not a rifle inside that case.”

  More officers were arriving on the scene, the sole pedestrian now finding himself surrounded by a ring of pumped-up cops.

  “Do you have identification, sir?” asked another of the recent arrivals.

  “No, I don’t carry my wallet when I walk these trails. I lost it some years ago while on a hike, and the hassle of getting all those cards and my driver’s license replaced was major bullshit.”

  That answer didn’t seem to please the police either. “You mean you don’t have any ID on your person?” barked another officer, his voice dripping with disbelief.

  “No, officer, I do not. I wasn’t going to be driving a car or buying anything, so my billfold is at home on the dresser. Is it illegal to walk through the park without ID?”

  “Yes, you are required to have identification in the state of Texas,” replied the officer.

  Gabe’s attention piqued at that remark, knowing damn well that there was no such law. The cop was deliberately misleading the guy. Why?

  “I don’t believe that’s accurate, officer,” the confident fellow came back. “But if you’re right, and I’m wrong, I guess you’ll just have to arrest me.”

  “Let us verify you don’t have a weapon inside that case, and I’m sure we can let it go,” the mouthy cop countered.

  Gabe shook his head, almost admiring the crafty policeman. They needed probable cause to search the case. Either that or the owner’s permission. The lie about the ID law had been designed to obtain the suspect’s permission, but he didn’t fall for it.