Hail kept the gunsight fixed on the red tip of the soldier’s cigarette. A triple tap from the mini gun and it didn’t matter if it impacted the guard’s forehead or his throat. It would still be instant lights-out for the guy. But the bright red dot in the darkness was a great target.
“Go back,” Hail willed the guard. “Go back and visit your buddies up front.”
But the guard did not go back. Instead he proceeded to walk the remaining distance down the side of the warehouse toward the back corner.
Hail felt his finger tighten on the trigger of his control stick. With his drone positioned in the corner of the property, and the guard just arriving at the corner of the warehouse, this was as close as the soldier would be to Hail and therefore the best time to take a shot. Hail pressed an icon and switched the gun from auto into manual mode. Maybe just one quick round would do the trick and therefore minimize the noise, Hail thought.
The guard stopped at the corner. Instead of walking around to the backside of the warehouse, the soldier simply poked his head around the corner of the warehouse and took a quick look. By now the glowing cutting marks had cooled and were no longer a red flag waving in the darkness. The guard must have been satisfied that no trespassers were on the property, because he turned back toward the front of the warehouse and began the long walk.
Hail took his finger off the gun trigger and told Knox, “Start cutting again. Our friend is gone.”
Renner turned the gas back on and Knox pressed the ignitor and lit the torch. Knox repositioned the torch an inch under the third side of his vertical cut, so if any metal had fused back together, the flame would separate it again.
Hail checked the time: 3:38AM.
Hail told Renner, “Gage, break open Blondie and get your pilots ready to fly. We are running out of time and as soon as the hole is open, they need to be in the air.”
“Understood,” Renner said.
He accessed Blondie’s command and control systems and pressed an icon.
Back in the dark field, both of Blondie’s cargo doors began to open. Tiny electric motors barely made a sound as they lifted the counterbalanced thin sheets of carbon fiber from Blondie’s back. Once the doors had fully opened, the motors stopped and the drone became perfectly silent again.
Renner got up from his station and walked into the middle of the mission room. He stepped up on to the next tier where analysts were stationed. All of the young pilots were already looking at him and waiting for instructions.
“We are going to do this exactly as we performed it in the simulator,” Renner began. “Each of you has a particular drone assigned to you, as well as a specific location where to land that drone. Our time frame has tightened up, so instead of one drone at a time, we are going to fly in pairs with less than a minute between launches. Are there any questions?”
Twelve pilots looked at him and none of them spoke up. Renner felt that was a good omen.
“Starting the last cut,” Knox reported, moving his control stick to the left to complete the box. Sparks, smoke and red hot goo fled from the cutting torch.
“Less than one minute,” Hail said. “I think you can get them in the air, Gage,” Hail told Renner.
“Roger that,” Renner acknowledged. “Pilots one and two, you are good to lift off.”
Pilots one and two happened to be the most experienced junior pilots on the ship.
Oliver Fox and Paige Grayson prepped their stations and ran a full systems check on their drones.
Inside the belly of Blondie, twelve drones sat patiently waiting to get airborne. Each of them was stacked on one another, four stacks, four drones per stack. None of the drones were anything special. They were designed with just enough battery power to get them to their LZ and nothing more. They were provisioned with large motors, wide propellers to carry their payload and nothing other than a light-weight low resolution camera.
“Are we ready to fly?” Renner asked Fox and Grayson.
“Yes, Sir,” they both reported.
“Go Oliver,” Renner said.
Fox pulled the trigger throttle on the drone called Thing 1.
Fox watched his video monitor as his drone cleared Blondie’s cargo bay doors. Once it had risen four feet, Fox swiveled his controller in the direction of the warehouse. The video on the drone spiraled into focus. In front of Fox sat a well-lit warehouse.
“Moving towards the wire,” Fox announced.
“Go Paige,” Renner ordered.
Trying to stay close to her flight partner, Paige Grayson pulled the trigger and began swiveling her drone toward the warehouse before it had even cleared the hatch. As soon as she saw the warehouse lights, she tilted her drone forward and began to make up ground on Thing 1.
“The cut is almost done,” Knox reported. “Only one more inch.”
Hail didn’t know how much noise the metal flap would make when it came loose, so he checked BEP’s camera inside the warehouse to confirm that the room was still unoccupied. The two by two-foot piece of metal could fall inward or outward, and they had to be ready for either contingency. If it fell inward and landed on something flammable, then they had to have all their drones inside and in place before the warehouse became an inferno. If the flap landed on the outside, then Knox had to make sure that it didn’t damage his drone. Either way, Knox understood that once the cut had been made, he still had to move Men at Work out of the way to make room for the dozen drones headed toward the new opening.
Knox didn’t have long to wait. Five seconds later, the torch found its starting point and the metal sheet dropped away and fell inside the warehouse.
Hail brought up Black Eyed Peas’ control panel. He accessed the camera pan-head and rotated it 180 degrees so the lens was pointing toward the back of the warehouse. The steel beam that BEP was resting on blocked some of the floor of the warehouse below, but Hail could clearly see a gaping black hole cut in the wall at the end of one of the wide aisles. He watched the new opening for a moment, waiting to see if there was a flare up of smoke or fire.
“Looks like we’re good,” Hail said. “Good job, Alex,” he told Knox. “Now you need to move your drone out of the way so the Things can get in.”
“Will do,” Alex said, discarding the screens that dealt with all the cutting tools and pulling back up the flight control screens. He pressed a few icons and wrapped his hands around the control sticks and lifted Men at Work off the ground.
“It’s a lot lighter without the gas,” Knox commented.
“Where do you want me to set it down, Marshall?”
“I’d like to get some eyes on the front of the warehouse. Why don’t you go over the top of the wire and set it down in weeds where you can get a good visual of the main gate.”
“OK,” Knox said and pressed the throttle and watched the drone gain altitude. As Men at Work cleared the razor fence, Knox saw THING 1 and THING 2 pass over the fence about five yards away, heading in the opposite direction.
“Wow, it’s getting so busy around here that we’re going to need a flight controller,” Knox joked.
Fox and Grayson flew their drones up to the hole Knox had cut in the warehouse. Very carefully, Fox maneuvered THING 1 through the opening, followed immediately by Grayson’s THING 2.
Hail watched closely, understanding that the first nine drones were the most important. Each one of them carried the two pound shaped charge of RDX or cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine as Terry Garber liked to refer to it.
Fox carefully flew his drone down the aisle, staying low in case of a malfunction or a communications problem. If THING 1 was going to fall to the floor, then Fox wanted to make sure it was a short distance in order to minimize the noise of impact.