The pilot maneuvered Foo Fighters in closer to the wreckage of the Suburban. But the man with the gun was already standing next to the SUV’s driver window with his gun pointed inside.
Wilson flew up behind the Diambu lookalike. The drone’s thin tripod legs had already been extended, and Wilson set it down quickly with Foo Fighter’s minigun pointed at the back of the man’s head.
The sole survivor of the Land Rovers was talking to someone inside the SUV at gunpoint. When he heard the noise behind him, he turned away from the vehicle toward the noise. The crews of both the Hail Proton and the Hail Nucleus saw a closeup of the man’s face being shot with Foo Fighter’s camera. The man’s expression was so infused with disbelief and awe that he looked like he might be watching an amazing circus act.
“Turn on the communications,” Hail told the pilot. “I want to talk to this guy before I kill him.”
Wilson reached for the communications icon which would allow Hail’s voice to be patched into the drone’s onboard speaker.
But as Wilson pressed the icon, his control set vanished from his screen. Wilson looked confused for a moment. He said grimly, “The drone is dead. It’s out of power and it did an auto shutdown.”
Snake Island, Nigeria
Kara was still groggy from the SUV’s barrel roll. Her head had been whipped around, and she felt mildly concussed. Even before she had fully come around, she saw Baako standing at her broken window. He was pointing a .45 caliber handgun in her face. He wasn’t smiling. He looked every bit as deadly as his recently departed twin brother.
“Why did you kill my brother?” he asked.
Kara heard the words, but they were distant and murky like he was talking to her while she was deep underwater.
She answered him honestly without considering Baako may not be prepared to hear the truth.
“You said that your brother was a Christian, but he was a bad Christian,” she heard herself say. “He was a bad person,” Kara said groggily.
Baako’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Kara thought he looked prepared to put a hole through her forehead. But deep down, she sensed Baako knew she was right. He had known all along that his brother was damned. He fully understood his twin brother was a bad person. Therefore, Kara telling him what he already knew didn’t necessarily enrage him. Kara was counting on Baako’s sense of morality.
“He was going to die one way or another,” she told Baako calmly, now looking past the barrel pointed in her face and into his bloodshot eyes. She noticed that the left side of his face had been burned. Blood was seeping from a wound on his shoulder.
Behind Baako, she saw one of Hail’s drones approaching. Its thin legs were poking out from under the machine. It was flying at a slow and controlled hover. Baako must have heard the sound. He turned and looked behind him. Seeing the aircraft, he swung the pistol around and pointed it at the new threat. Baako thought the machine looked like a small flying saucer with propellers. If it had been on its side, it would have resembled stick rings he and his siblings had played with so long ago. They would find any old ring, and using a stick, they would hit it to make it roll along the ground. The winner was the one who could keep their ring rolling the furthest. The difference between those rings and the ring that was flying sideways toward him was immediately evident. The flying ring had a large gun with a short barrel hanging beneath it. It landed next to him on its thin legs. The flying saucer’s propellers spun down. Its thin legs reminded Baako of some water birds that could stand on their thin legs and sleep in the middle of a pond.
Baako considered shooting the machine for a moment, but the odd contraption did the strangest thing. All three of its long legs began to go up inside its body. As the legs withdrew, the machine sunk lower and lower toward the ground. Once its legs were completely gone, the gun hit the runway with a clank, and the machine tilted onto its side and died. Satisfied the aircraft was no longer a threat, Baako turned back towards the SUV, and he pointed his gun at Kara.
“Now, where were we?” he asked. His face was expressionless.
Kara looked at Baako and wondered how much longer she had to live. Motion caught her eye, and she looked past Baako up into the sky behind him. Two of Hail’s drones were closing in on her position.
Without looking down, she reached over and pressed the button to unlock her door. She had no way to know if it had become jammed in the wreck. Kara heard the mechanism click and hoped her door had indeed unlocked. All she had to do was wait for a distraction. Considering how fast Hail’s drones were closing in on her SUV, she knew that whatever happened would take place in the next ten seconds.
Hail looked on helplessly through the eyes of Seagulls as Foo Fighters died in front of Baako. “I can’t believe this,” Hail moaned. He spoke into the room’s speakers to Alex Knox, who was flying Foreigner.
“What’s your assessment, Knox?”
“Not good,” was the young man’s response. “The target is standing right in front of the driver’s door of the SUV. If I go with guns blazing, I will not only kill Diambu, or whoever the hell he is, but I will also probably kill Kara. If I use the missiles, nothing within fifty yards of the impact zone will make it out alive.”
Hail felt as helpless as he ever had. He had a large drone on-site, but it didn’t have the finesse to get the job done.
On the video screen, he saw the jihadi point his gun at Kara again.
Just as he was giving up hope, Sarah Starling, who was flying Seagulls said, “I’m going in.”
“In what?” Captain Nichols shot back.
“Just going in,” Starling said.
The pilot pulled back on her right joystick which swept Seagulls’ wings back in against its body. It was a position as close to a dive as the drone could manage. The airspeed indicator on the pilot’s screen began to climb. In three seconds, the birdlike drone accelerated from 140 to 180 knots.
The video was crisp and clean, and the crew watched as the drone closed the distance on the SUV. At one point, the bird was going so fast it was falling from the sky. Starling used the tips of its wings to keep the drone on course.
At almost 185 knots, the hard beak of Seagulls slammed into the back of Baako’s head.
Kara watched Hail’s big drone fly over the top of her position. She didn’t immediately understand why the drone hadn’t unloaded, and then realized that anything it shot would have probably killed her as well. In the periphery of her vision, she saw Seagulls retract it wings and begin to dive toward her vehicle.
Even though Baako was telling her, “I won’t kill you because I am not like my brother,” Kara didn’t get a warm and fuzzy feeling being on the business end of the gun. Seagulls was now moving fast, coming in hot, as they would say in the profession.
She smiled pleasantly at Baako, making him feel as if she didn’t pose a threat. Just as Seagulls smacked into the back of Baako’s head, Kara pulled on the door handle and slammed her shoulder into the door, banging it open. Kara had timed it perfectly. Just as Baako’s head had been jerked forward by the impact of the drone, the frame of the SUV’s heavy door caught Baako in the middle of his forehead. His head made the sound of a cantaloupe dropped on a sidewalk. His eyes rolled back into his skull, and he slumped to the ground. He landed next to Seagulls which was now a dead drone who had served its purpose.