The guard took a deep breath before slowly pulling the heavy glass door in towards him.
“Good choice, Bob. Now step aside and let us leave.”
Williams took a wide step to his right and the caravan began to roll toward the door. Yet when the lead car drew parallel to the guard, he lunged forward, reaching down to grab a handful of the wires connecting the dynamite with the cellphone. He pulled hard and the wires came loose. Then he kicked the model dune buggy to his right, sending it skidding ten feet over the smooth marble tile floor.
“I knew it!” Williams declared. “It’s all a fake.”
The dune buggy spun around on narrow black wheels, the electric motor whining until it was face-on with the guard. The miniature camera mounted on the hovering drone focused on the smiling face of Robert Williams.
“Do you think I’d be that stupid to build a bomb with only one way to detonate? Not likely. Now, say a prayer, Mr. Williams. You just cost all these people their lives.”
The explosion blew out the entire fifty-foot glass front of the bank and shattered windows along the entire block. Roiling clouds of white smoke billowed from the gaping hole on the ground floor of the twenty-seven story building. Shards of glass and splintered marble blanketed the street.
Eight people died in the bank that day — including Anastasia Beaumont — along with two on the street outside. Both security guards were counted in the fatalities. Bank manager Francine Howell wasn’t one of them, although she lost her left arm from the elbow down and suffered third-degree burns along the entire left side of her body. Three other people in the bank were permanently disabled, while every customer and employee in the bank that day experienced some level of injury or psychological trauma.
A week later in Chicago, another remote control car entered a bank. This time all instructions were followed without question, and after the robbery the two-car caravan left the bank and scooted along the sidewalk to an alley between the bank building and its neighbor. A large, eight-bladed drone called an octocopter was waiting. Expertly, the unknown pilot snared the dual straps on the trash container and lifted it from the bed of the yellow dump truck. The UAV — unmanned aerial vehicle — was rated for this heavy of a load, and soon the drone and the money disappeared over the crest of the building next to the bank.
A crowd of people, both from the street and the bank, had followed the RC cars to the alley. Now they stood at the entrance, gawking and uncertain what to do next.
The tiny dune buggy then turned to face the crowd. The tinny voice spoke for the last time. “All of you should take cover. I’m about to destroy the evidence.”
Thirty seconds later, an explosion erupted from the alleyway and echoed through the downtown area, yet unlike New York, no one was killed in this event, just some rather extensive property damage in its aftermath.
The drone and the money were never seen again.
Chapter 1
Xander Moore had just pressed down the top of the Keurig coffeemaker, puncturing the small container of Donut Shop brew, when the bug in his ear sounded: “M-9 Alert! Repeat: M-9 Alert. All prime responders return to station.”
With the coffee machine located on a counter directly behind the pilot console, all he had to do was turn toward the screens to comply with the order.
“Which one?” he asked the other two men in the room. He already knew from the alert code that this was an attack on a shopping mall and that it was occurring somewhere within Zone Nine, which was the state of Florida.
“The Dolphin Mall, Miami,” replied Charlie Fox, his wingman. “Six seconds and counting, and we’re first in line.”
A whole array of basic information concerning the attack was already scrolling on the screens at each of the three stations, requiring only a couple of seconds to digest. Two UAVs, carrying bomb packs, had struck the main entrance to the mall and detonated just to the left of the security maze. The breach was significant enough to allow twelve trailing combat drones to enter the mall.
“All autos?” Xander asked his scanner-operator, David Lane.
“These are,” the young man answered, “although an RPA just entered — and a huge muther, too!”
Xander paused for a moment as he received confirmation through his earpiece that his team was now the lead in the event. “Red-One confirmed, taking command.” He glanced to each side of his station at the other two members of his team. “Okay, boys, we’re it. This is a huge, so we should have backup on-site in seconds. Dave, post them to the exterior of the mall to take out any predators near the service exits. What about our assets?”
“Up and in route,” Lane replied. In the early seconds of an alert, David Lane was the eyes and ears of the operation, feeding crucial data to the other two from a variety of sensors under his control. “Units were offsite, but ten seconds out. Damn, we have eight rapid-response bunkers along the Dolphin Expressway, with a lot of targets within a few miles, including Miami International.”
“Any simo’s being reported?”
“Not yet, it looks like this is the only target being hit at this time.”
“I have the Viper — assuming control.” With practiced and confident skill, Xander gained control of the main defensive drone — an LSC Industries Viper III. Charlie Fox took command of the smaller JEN-Tech Panther, while Lane locked on to the tiny, yet extremely fast and agile, observation drone.
All three team members donned compact virtual reality goggles, placing them in FPV — First Person View — of their respective drones. Even after all the years of doing this, it still took Xander a split second to adjust to the sudden shift in perspective, where one moment he was seated in a dimly-lit team room at a bank of sophisticated monitors and controllers, and the next suddenly zipping forty feet above a crowded parking lot in the brilliant sunshine of south Florida, twenty-three hundred miles away.
With the defensive drones launching on autopilot from their hidden bunkers only a few blocks from the mall, they were already quickly approaching the main entrance to Miami’s largest shopping center by the time Team Red-One took control. Up ahead, they could see where the iconic and massive banner sign displaying the words “Dolphin Mall” in large block letters had once spanned the outer concourse. At night the panel would be illuminated in brilliant colors of Art Deco neon, in traditional south Florida fashion. Now the sign was split in two, each half still swinging precariously from broken and twisted supports. Sparks popped from severed electrical wires and fire was burning off the remnants of bunting that had once proclaimed the arrival of the joyous Christmas shopping season. All the joy and promise of the holiday season had come to a sudden and tragic halt less than twenty seconds ago.
Smoke billowed beyond the shattered sign, where the main breach had occurred. Most malls — as well as other large public venues in America — were now fitted with ingress and egress security mazes. These imposing, S-shaped tunnels were designed to slow any attacking drones attempting to gain entry to the mall. They were equipped with heavy blast doors that could be closed at a moment’s notice, trapping the attackers within the solid metal walls. At that point, even if the drones exploded, the damage would be contained within the maze.
Yet, in this particular case, the terrorists had avoided the security maze altogether. The two designated breach drones had simply detonated their substantial payloads of high-grade explosive against the supposedly bullet-proof plate glass window to the left of the security maze. The resulting breach wasn’t large — only about ten feet in diameter — but it was big enough to allow the other drones entry into the mall.