Renner checked his diagnostic screen.
Renner hummed concern in the back of his throat before saying, “I really don’t know, Marshall. It’s going to be close. When the bird’s head was shot off, the bullet must have clipped the front end of the rocket tube and angled the exhaust port into Eagles’ tail feathers. Even though those feathers are synthetic and fire resistant, it melted the shit out of a lot of them. I think we are going to have an issue with horizontal control.”
“Check it, Knox,” Hail ordered.
Alex Knox pushed the foot pedals down and then let them back up.
“Very sluggish,” Knox reported. Down is no problem, but up may be an issue.”
“Down is never a problem,” Hail commented. “That’s why God invented gravity.”
Turning his chair thirty degrees toward Tanner Grant, their current mother-drone pilot, Hail asked, “What is the dust-off status of Foghat?”
“Not going to happen in the timeframe we have, Skipper,” Grant responded grimly. He typed on some keys and came back with, “Thirty seconds to blow the ballast and surface and another two minutes to get airborne. At best speed we are ten minutes away, so…”
“So I hate to lose Eagles,” Hail interrupted. His tone was gruff and combative. “A billionteen hours went into that design. If there is any way to save that bird, then…” his words trailed off.
Hail wanted to save the drone, but deep down he knew that it was irretrievable. The bird had to go away. It couldn’t fall into anyone’s hands, no matter whose side they were on.
Finally, giving in to the inevitable, Hail said, “Grant, keep Foghat underwater until nightfall and let’s get these loose ends tied up.”
“Yes, Sir,” the eighteen-year-old responded. Grant was another gaming flight champion, but the boy had also mastered helicopter and car driving skills as well. Hail had hired him by telling him he was going to fly F-35s for the Air Force. It was a lie, but Grant had actually flown the new jet in one of Hail’s simulators, so it wasn’t a complete lie.
If Shana Tran’s opinion meant anything, then Grant was the best looking of the current mission crew. He was clean, blond short trimmed hair, good cheekbones and dressed in nice clothes, khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt that had the Hail company logo stitched into the fabric. Shana thought that Grant could even be considered cute if he ever removed his face from a monitor long enough for someone to notice.
“Twenty seconds until splashdown,” Knox reported.
Except for the sound of the omnipresent wind pouring in from the command center’s speakers, the room was silent. No one spoke. They just waited.
“Ten seconds,” Knox said. He checked his latitude and longitude headings as he eased the drone down toward the river below. He bent the joystick to the left and pressed both pedals down a half-inch.
“You got it, dude,” Grant encouraged his fellow pilot.
“Deploy the antenna float,” Hail ordered.
Shana Tran hesitated for a moment and then touched a red icon on her screen and reported, “Com antenna float has been deployed.”
“Five, four, three, two, one and splashdown,” Renner reported as if they had just returned from space.
A large whooshing sound shot through the room’s speakers and then the command center went deathly quiet. No wind. No water sound. Nothing.
Hail let the room decompress for a few moments. He felt a sickness in his stomach that he got when he let people down; let himself down.
He asked Tran, “Do we still have an uplink with Eagles?”
“Yes, Sir. The float is up and the drone is online.” Tran replied, watching an active data stream on her monitor being exchanged with the sunken drone.
Whereas the mother-drone Foghat, who had dropped Eagles onto station three days ago, was fully submersible, Eagles was not. The bird-drone was designed to contend with heavy rain; where its vital computers, cameras and control motors, would remain in service, but it was not designed to be under water. When Hail had asked for the communications antenna to be deployed, everyone knew why. The mission crew understood that only one signal could be sent to the drone via that communication link.
Hail took some time to think over the situation. He looked around at the eight people in front of their eight consoles who were busy typing and pressing icons, collecting information they anticipated Hail might ask for at any moment.
He loved this place, this room. It had taken over two years to complete, but it was everything he had hoped for. It was his future. It was his new beginning.
Behind the sixteen command stations were two more stations that sat a foot higher on an upper tier. And behind those analyst stations, up one more tier was Hail’s captain’s chair. The stations behind the pilots were reserved for the mission analysts.
Pierce Mercier was sitting in one of them. The other analyst station to his right was empty. Pierce Mercier’s main area of expertise was wet craft. He was their ocean, river, reservoir, pool and basically anything wet expert. He was also an expert in anything plant, animal or insect. Mercier had a funny French accent and the Hail crew constantly made fun of him. He was tall, quiet, refined and polished in a manner that most of Hail’s young crew was not. Marshall had hired Pierce directly from the École Polytechnique (ParisTech) after reading a few of his published papers on Oceanography. Mercier was in his forties and a contemporary that could talk directly to Hail. As a bonus to the mission crew, Mercier acted as a father figure to the young pilots.
“What are the chances of recovering Eagles from the river?” Hail asked Mercier.
Mercier had anticipated the question and instantly responded, “Not good. We are talking about twenty feet down, heavy silt, fast current and the bird will weigh at least twice its flight weight considering how much water it’s taking on.”
Hail didn’t respond.
Mercier felt he should say something more, something positive and added, “I don’t think we can save it remotely. But if we put divers into the water, we could get it back. But that is not going to happen. Is it? That’s not what we do.”
Hail let out a big long breath, an action as close to defeat as Marshall Hail would ever exhibit in front of his crew. He then composed himself, rubbed his chin with a long contemplative stroke and said in a poised tone, “No my friend. That is not going to happen.”
Hail swiveled his massive chair toward Renner.
“How much video did we record?”
Renner glanced at a screen and responded, “About seventy-two hours.”
“That should be enough,” Hail said to himself.
The captain of the Nucleus bunched his lips together and shook his head slightly, recalling how proud his avionic engineers were on the day they had completed the build of the astounding bird-drone. As the tech guys ran Eagles through its paces, everyone involved felt as if they were all little kids with the coolest toy on the block. The drone wasn’t perfect out of the gate, but then most ground-breaking technology is rarely good-to-go on the first go-around. After a few months of tweaking, the half a million-dollar bird was ready to go on its first mission. None of them would have guessed that the demise of the aircraft would come at the hands of a crazy North Korean politician who shot it out of the sky with a hunting rifle.
Hail took in another long breath and let it out slowly. It was his method of dealing with anxiety.
“Blow it up,” he told Knox.
“Are you sure, Skipper?”
Hail didn’t say anything; he just nodded once and tensed his jaw muscles.
Knox typed in a password and pressed an icon on the screen labeled SELF DESTRUCT. He held his finger on the icon as a timer began to count down. If he removed his finger, the countdown would be discontinued. As each digit was displayed, a bright red light pulsed under Knox’s finger. A loud mechanical female voice came through the room’s speakers and read off the numbers.