Net Force--Eye of the Drone

by Jerome Preisler

Carmody shrugged. “I know what I know. What I don’t know, I find out,” he said. “She’s up to something. Something important enough to bring her to Germany. And I’m going to find out what it is. You can bet on that.”

  * * *

  The Airbnb that Kali rented for thirteen hundred euros a month was in a renovated 1980s six-story apartment building with an underground garage on Ruppertstrasse. Turning left off the main strip, she rode for two blocks, swung right onto the garage ramp, and pulled into a spot near the fire stairs. Then she removed her helmet, got her bread out of the saddlebag, and went to the elevator.

  She rode it up to the fifth floor, stepped out, and walked toward the end of the hall, past several apartment doors. Hers was the last in the row and led into a single-bedroom flat with an open kitchenette, a combined living room—dinette, and a bathroom. Straight ahead, the living room had two windows facing north onto the tree-lined street. It was furnished with a large dining table, a desk against one wall, a sofa, some comfortable chairs, and a wall-mounted television. Bright and immaculate, it had modern fixtures and some framed photos of Munich’s historic landmarks on the walls.

  Kali thought the little apartment nicely suited her purposes.

  Shrugging off the backpack, she dropped it onto a chair, took off her jacket and boots, washed her hands in the kitchen sink, and prepared a light breakfast: a pot of coffee and two thick slices of the holzofenbrot with strawberry preserves and butter. Before sitting down at the table, she raised the shades and opened both windows, letting in some sunshine and fresh air. The breeze rustled the treetops outside. She could see the dark pinpoint that had followed her to and from Old Town floating high above the residential street. Were one to draw an imaginary vertical line up from the middle of Ruppertstrasse, it would run straight as a wire to the floating dot.

  Kali ate slowly, sparing occasional glances out the window. The bread and strawberry preserves were delicious, and her coffee strong and black. The dot remained at a stationary hover. She estimated it was between one and two thousand feet in the air.

  She was almost through with breakfast when it shot off eastward over the low, flat-roofed apartment building across the street.

  She did some quick math. She’d noticed it this morning when she left her flat. The ride to Old Town and back was five to seven minutes in each direction. Her errands had easily taken half an hour. And she must have spent another fifteen minutes or so eating breakfast. That put it in the air for roughly an hour.

  She carried her empty dishes over to the sink. A civilian drone could average thirty to forty minutes of flight time before needing to refuel. But the UAV had flown nearly twice as long before it departed, with no sign of decaying speed or altitude. Indicating it was an advanced model capable of in-flight recharge.

  Drones of that type were expensive. So were the ground-to-air laser guns used to generate electricity in their power cells. Kali estimated the combined cost at about a million dollars, and few police forces could fit that into their operating budgets. The German military, yes. An intelligence agency like the BfV or Interpol. The CIA, of course...

  Or possibly a wealthy civilian like Gunther Koenig. The monster she believed responsible for what happened to Eric and Munsey Bergmann, among far too many other crimes to catalog.

  She pushed those thoughts to the back of her mind. There was too much to be done, and she was less concerned with who the drone belonged to than where it came from. The aerial recharge was strictly line of sight, so it would stay within fairly close range of the laser source to ensure it could return there before its batteries drained down. Once she located that source—the where—then the who would likely become clear.

  In the meantime, Kali went over to her backpack, took out her packages, carried them to the table, and went to work. She needed to complete her preparations before the drone reappeared.

  Reaching into her pocket for a Swiss Army knife, she snapped out one of the blades, and slit open the larger of the two boxes on the table.

  The portable Wi-Fi satellite antenna inside was a small, flat, lightweight eight-inch rectangle, its off-white color roughly matching the apartment’s paint job. Kali doubted it would be noticeable from outside and used Velcro adhesive patches to mount it flush against the wall opposite the windows. That took all of five minutes.

  Next, she pulled off the mailing tube’s end cap and slid out a roll of electrochromatic smart film purchased from an online retailer in Singapore. Having already measured the windowpanes, she only had to cut the self-adhesive film into sheets. She worked quickly but unhurriedly with the Swiss Army knife’s scissor attachment, producing two sheets for each window. Then she wiped the windows clean and applied the film to their upper and lower panes.

  She was smoothing down the last sheet with the edge of her hand when something caught her eye.

  Someone, actually.

  The apartment building across the street was among the newer ones on Ruppertstrasse. Ten floors, wide picture windows, glass sliding doors that gave onto modern, narrow balconies. The translucent white curtains behind a fifth-floor balcony door were halfway parted, and a man stood a foot or two behind them, facing the street.

  She caught only a brief glimpse of him before he turned away. His head was bald or shaved, and he wore dark pants and a light shirt. She got the impression he was fairly young, in his mid to late thirties.

  The man did nothing unusual or suspicious and must have stood there less than a minute. He might have simply been pausing to look out his balcony doors in the morning sunshine. Nothing Kali saw told her otherwise, but she took note of him.

  Lowering her guard would be a dangerous mistake.

  She returned to smoothing the window film over the glass. It still needed to be wired, and she had very little time left.

  * * *

  Braithwaite was at his laptop with a fresh cup of coffee, taking a quick look at the images from the NORN-3’s and NORN-4’s overlapping passes before saving them to a new folder. All those years in the service, plus these last three working for Mr. Koenig, and it still amazed him that satellites orbiting three hundred miles up in space could capture clear, crisp pictures of someone or something on the ground to a resolution of three or four inches. Close enough to photograph a person’s handheld device so you could make out its screen icons.

  Or in the case of the pictures in front of him, show him the purple streak in his target’s hair.

  He scanned this morning’s video tracking her from her apartment building to Old Town and back. What had she picked up at the mail drop office? He could see the packages perfectly, but it appeared as if she’d removed their labels before leaving the place...and that made him suspicious. He still had no idea what she knew. But he was certain her latest visit was connected to Bergmann and the girl. And that was more than enough to send up warning flares.

  Braithwaite quietly sipped his coffee. For a moment there, he’d thought she might have noticed him at the balcony doors. That was the last thing he wanted, and it would have been no one’s fault but his own. Truth be known, it was possible she had noticed him, and his slip left him more than a bit disgusted.

  He had fucked up, no sugarcoating it, no telling himself otherwise. That would just compound the mistake. He’d been to some of the most dangerous environments on earth, stinking hellholes where you could have plenty of skill and the best of weapons, but where the key to staying alive was still listening to your instincts. Where some fanatical maniac might slip out of a cave or hole in the ground and slice you to ribbons if you got careless for the smallest fraction of a second. He would have been killed a hundred times over if not for his instincts, and he trusted them as much as any tangible, quantifiable source of information.

  He could almost feel sorry for the Bergmann girl. She was collateral damage. But his neighbor across Ruppertstrasse...she gave him a fair nasty feeling indeed.

  B
raithwaite frowned, the coffee steaming in his hand. Once upon a time, his work had been defined by his training, his unit, and the missions handed down by brass-buttoned commanding officers and politicians. God and country, what bullshit. And low-paying bullshit, too. But that was a long time ago. As an operator for Sharp End years later, he had been well compensated for doing whatever was bloody needed to make problems go away in four of the world’s seven continents. And when you boiled everything down, he supposed that shoe still fit.

  He was a problem solver. And if Koenig was right about the woman, if Braithwaite’s own sixth sense was right, she was potentially a very serious problem.

  He was taking no chances, at any rate. One of the lessons he took from Kunduz was that you had to be proactive or things could blow up in your face. The coalition let its guard down there, got comfortable after cleaning out the Taliban, and look what happened three years later. It was left to teams like the RatHawks to clean up the mess and show the scum the meaning of true fear.

  Braithwaite finished his coffee, shut the laptop, stood up, and carried his empty cup to the sink. Afghanistan, Sudan, the Ukraine...he’d been to a long list of permanent war zones, enough for a lifetime. Munich suited him. He felt settled here. For a big city, it offered a polite, civilized atmosphere. He liked the food, nightclubs and blondes, the clean, quiet streets in Old Town. He enjoyed calling Munich home, and if he paid attention to detail, and was prepared to do what needed to be done, he would be here a long time.

  Which meant finding out what the woman wanted, and identifying the problem she presented. So he could make it—and her—go away like all the rest.

  * * *

  The Germans were known for being organized, structured, and efficient planners, and nowhere was this cultural attribute more evident than in Munich’s constellation of industrial and manufacturing parks.

  A joint government and commercial project initiated midway through the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Münchner Gewerbehof-und Technologiezentrumsgesellschaft, or GMBH centers, were built to attract technological entrepreneurs by bundling their corporate research and development facilities within a short, easy commute of the city’s residential neighborhoods.

  Situated north of the Maxvorstadt’s famed scientific universities, NORN Aerospace was one of the program’s greatest success stories. An innovator in the field of private orbital communications and earth observation satellites, it had grown from a small, single-building R & D facility to occupy the entire Maxforsadt GMBH, its complex of buildings sprawling over one hundred thousand square feet—the equivalent of a full city block.

  Not all the GMBH parks shared Maxvorstadt’s high-profile status, however. Some forty miles west of the NORN compound, the Moosach MBH was largely unoccupied and undeveloped. Its single moderately sized company, Helikopter Helfer, occupied two bland concrete structures on one side of the park and was listed in Munich’s business directories as a niche components refitter for the modernization and upgrade of manned rotary aircraft fleets.

  But it was nothing more than a shell. One with a legitimate product, but still a shell. Primarily serving as a clandestine technical station for the BfV, Helikopter-Helfer’s core purpose was to launch and keep the agency’s new fleet of air-rechargeable rotary surveillance drones flying for indefinite periods.

  It was 9:15 a.m. when the hexacopter monitoring Outlier’s activities flew to Moosach to recharge its batteries. This afforded Carmody, Dixon, and Schultz some downtime over at the Nussbaumpark. Meanwhile, in a fenced lot behind Helikopter Helfer’s nominal distribution warehouse, the occupants of a large panel truck with the corporate logo on its side were about to get busy.

  Their group consisted of the remaining two-fifths of Carmody’s CIA stalker team, Long and Wheeler, along with two Germans and a Frenchman. The Germans were BfV technical personnel specializing in drone operations. One was a tall, bony man of about thirty named Stefan Metzler. The other was a short, chubby woman of forty or so named Hanna Krauss. Seated at a workstation similar to the one in Carmody’s vehicle, they stared at their flat-screens and pattered away at their keyboards, both very well liked and appreciated by their CIA colleagues.

  The Frenchman was another story. A fiftyish, thick-mustached Interpol agent named Chaput—pronounced sha-poo—his irritating presence served no useful purpose in their eyes. While the CIA contingent was well aware Interpol had played matchmaker between their team and the BfV, Chaput seemed to believe he was in charge of the operation, showing a propensity for barking orders when his role was, in fact, to facilitate and offer intelligence and technical support.

  “The drone is nearly at its proper bearings!” he barked, and pointed to the screen showing its position. “We must stand ready!”

  Wheeler ground his teeth. He could see that as well as anyone else in the truck with him. It had trimmed altitude to five hundred feet; a hundred fifty more or so and it would be within range. As Metzler and Krauss, who were experts at flying drones, surely knew without being told.

  “We’re all on it, Kaput,” he said.

  “Chaput!” the Frenchman corrected with a glare. He looked over at the German techies. “Prepare to commence recharge!”

  Metzler and Krauss exchanged glances of mutual misery and quietly went about their work. Watching the screens, Wheeler and Long saw the hexacopter’s on-screen icon settle into a stationary hover overhead. It was now at a height of three hundred feet. Well within the laser beam’s optimum range.

  A dome roughly the size of half a watermelon sat on the truck’s roof. Inside it on a swivel base was a nozzle about the length and thickness of a flashlight. The nozzle belonged to a laser with a small, square, lab-grown diamond in its cavity. In a moment, it would focus the light created by excited electrons into a coherent, high-intensity beam. The beauty of using a diamond, and not a more traditional ruby, was that it possessed perfect transparency and superior thermal conductivity. A diamond laser, therefore, generated less heat than other lasers and could send out the extended-duration beam necessary for a recharge without making the drone burst into flames...along with the truck and everything and everyone inside it.

  In Krauss’s words, it was sweet and potent.

  She sat tapping away at her keyboard. Atop the van, the laser nozzle poked upward through its protective dome. There was an audible hum inside the truck as it began delivering its photonic juice.

  Ten minutes later, the bird was good for another hour of flight. Theoretically, it could stay in the air for months or even years, allowing for maintenance requirements.

  “Recharge complete!” Chaput declared.

  Everyone in the truck ignored him. They watched the monitors as the bird climbed to an altitude of about fifteen hundred feet, jinked in the air as the techs made some course corrections, jinked again, and then went flying back toward Ruppertstrasse.

  After a minute, Metzler stretched his arms, and Krauss rose to pour some coffee.

  “The bird looks full of pep,” Wheeler said, turning to Long.

  “Definitely a peppy bird,” Long said.

  Wheeler kept looking at him. “You know what they say.”

  “No.” Long knew when he was being set up. “What do they say?”

  Wheeler grinned.

  “Diamonds are a drone’s best friend,” he replied.

  * * *

  Moving away from the windows, Kali sat down at the dining table, installed the Singaporean window-film manufacturer’s remote control app onto her tablet, and tried it out. It worked as advertised. She could shift the film from clear to opaque and back in under a second, the sequence continuing until she ended it with a touchscreen or voice command.

  With the tablet on her lap, she ran through the procedure several times to make sure the wiring was perfect. That took her perhaps a minute. Syncing up with the Wi-Fi satellite antenna took another two.

  Next,
she typed the encrypted URL for her cloud vault and then entered in her passcode. High-end surveillance drones employed ultra-secure encrypted protocols to harden their networks. But the cloud vault contained stolen authentication keys for almost every drone network used by global military and intelligence agencies. With the keys downloaded, the air-cracking software she had designed could sniff out even the most secure drone communications network.

  The high-speed download took about fifteen seconds. Kali needed only three and a half minutes to complete her preparations.

  Everything was set; she was ready for the hack.

  * * *

  Carmody disliked being idle. He attributed this to his military background, though it was possibly an ingrained trait. One way or another, his years with AFSOC reinforced it. As a Pathfinder with Twenty-Second Special Tacs, you needed to act quickly and decisively to soften up an LZ, establish an assault zone, or conduct a troop recovery in a hostile environment. The slightest delay could mean the difference between success or failure, life or death.

  He sat at the computer station in the rear of the surveillance van, wanting to optimize his time while the drone recharged. Dixon had gone into the Nussbaumpark to stretch his legs and check out the fair. Schultz was still up front looking like a deliveryman on his coffee break. Admittedly, Carmody was tired. He’d slept very little the past few days and supposed he could have snatched a little rest before the bird’s next pass. But he wanted to review the pictures from its last one. Especially its final half hour or so. Later on, he would pop a Coprox and shut down for a while.

  It was now seventy-two hours since his team’s arrival in Germany, putting them more than a week behind Outlier. But they were fortunate to be on her at all after the Azores. If it wasn’t for a government transportation official with S4—the state-owned airline—she would have shaken them off in Ponta Delgada. Not that the official’s cooperation came cheap. It had cost ten thousand dollars in CIA contingency funds to entice him to open his databases.