We looked at the screen. I could see the school through the drone’s camera. The drone was heading right for it.
I heard a soft crack. The image on the screen shuddered, then stabilized. “Hit it, but not on the nose,” Dox said. I heard a series of additional cracks. The screen image shuddered violently, but stabilized again.
“The hell’s that thing made of?” Dox said. “I just put sixteen rounds in it. All right, switching magazines.”
“Larison, Treven, get the fuck out of there,” I said. “You’ve done all you can. There’s no more time. Go!”
The school was at the center of the screen and rapidly expanding. I thought the drone couldn’t be more than a few seconds from impact.
“All right, sweetheart,” I heard Dox say. “Come here. Come take what I’ve got for you.”
There was a methodical drumbeat of cracks. The image of the school shuddered. It shook. It stabilized, filling the whole screen-
And then the camera veered and began to spin wildly.
“All right!” Dox said, jubilation creeping into his normally supercalm sniper tone. “Score one for the home team.”
The sky flashed past on the screen, then the ground, then everything was moving so fast I couldn’t make out any features at all. A moment later, the screen went dark.
“Where did it go down?” I said.
“Not the school,” Dox said. “The parking lot, though. Hot damn, that was close. Nobody hurt, I don’t think.”
“Did the warheads detonate?”
“No, sir. Gillmor must have had them set to blow on nose-first impact.”
“Treven, Larison, you all right?”
“Fine,” Larison said. “Walking away southeast.”
I heard sirens in the background. “Same,” Treven said. “Could use a pickup. Feeling a little conspicuous at the moment.”
“Go to the bug-out,” I said. “Dox, you especially. That cop is going to report sniper fire coming from your position. We’ll rendezvous in twenty minutes. Or less, the way Kanezaki drives.”
I expected Treven and Larison would be able to ghost away just fine in the tumult outside the school. But it wouldn’t be long before coherent witnesses came forward and described them to arriving police. And Dox needed to get far from his hide.
Kanezaki pulled out an iPhone and took photographs of Gillmor’s body and the controls on top of it.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“This is our proof.” He started moving the phone in a small circle, talking as he did so. I realized he must have switched to video mode.
“We need to go,” I said.
He held up a finger. “The man on the ground is the new head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Dan Gillmor, who was controlling the drone that attacked a school in Lincoln today. This is Palmyra, Nebraska, about twenty-five miles away.”
He walked over to the guy he’d shot and took his picture, too, then filmed the truck and its license plates, talking the whole time, dates and coordinates and identifying details. Then we ran back to the van, which he proceeded to drive as though the trip out were just a warm-up. We reached the bug-out point, a church a mile from the school, in under fifteen minutes. Kanezaki cut his speed and pulled into the parking lot.
“It’s us,” I said into the commo, and Dox, Larison, and Treven melted out from behind a dumpster. They got in the van and we drove off at a normal speed.
I climbed in back. Everybody shook hands. I said to Dox, “Good shooting.”
“Hell,” Dox said, “if it had been good, I would have dropped it on the first shot.”
“Hey,” Treven said, “you put it down. That’s all that counts.”
“Well,” Dox said, looking at me, “I don’t want to blame anyone else for how long it took me, but I don’t think the avionics in that particular model of drone are in the nose, unless they’re severely hardened. I finally just shot the shit out of the thing, and hoped I’d hit something vital. Which apparently I did.”
We all laughed. “Tom,” Dox said. “Are you all right? Did I hear you say you were hit?”
“In the vest,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“You’re going to be sore later,” I said. “But the hell with that. Nice shooting.”
“You shot Gillmor?” Dox said. “I thought that was Rain.”
“No, his security,” Kanezaki said.
“Who had me pinned down,” I added.
“Oo-rah!” Dox said. “Somebody give me that man a cigar. Was that your first kill?”
“I guess it was,” Kanezaki said.
“You guess,” Dox said. “That’s funny. Well, you know what they say. You never forget your first. Glad he was shooting back at you. That’ll make it a little easier later.”
I looked at Larison. “Thanks for listening to me.”
He paused, then said, “I was having my doubts on the way into that school a minute ahead of a couple of Hellfire missiles. But…yeah.”
He turned to Dox and said, “Don’t ever fuck with me again about being in your sights. Ever. You understand?”
I thought, Christ, here we go again. But Dox just grinned and said, “All right, all right, I was just trying to relieve the tension. Message received and I will not do it again.”
He held out his hand and, after a moment, Larison shook it.
“Where are we heading?” I said. “The airport’s the other way.”
“I want to get the hell out of Nebraska,” Kanezaki said. “Let’s just keep driving and we’ll figure it out as we go.”
“My God, not another road trip,” Dox said. “I’m still recovering from the last one.”
We all laughed at that. I realized I didn’t even care where we were going.
We only made it as far as Des Moines. The parasympathetic backlash against a combat adrenaline surge is ferocious, and we were all exhausted already. As soon as we knew we were safely outside Lincoln, we started to flag. We pulled over at a highway motel, and checked into two adjoining rooms. We watched the news for a while, but it was all extremely confused. Overall, it was being presented as a failed terror attack, which on one level, of course, it was. As things stood, it seemed like it was going to help the plotters’ aims, albeit not as much as a successful attack would have. But people were still panicking about the ostensibly new threat, and how they couldn’t send their children to school anymore, and how the government had to do more to protect them. Maybe with the emergence of evidence of what happened, including Kanezaki’s photographs and video, the narrative might change. And, of course, maybe Horton would do something to steer things in the direction he said he wanted them to go in. But overall, the whole thing was dispiriting. We watched until we couldn’t take it anymore. Then we all passed out.
When we woke, we turned on the television again, and it seemed the narrative had indeed changed. Now there was talk about a group of secret commandos who had killed the jihadists and foiled the plot and evacuated the children. I wondered what was next.
Kanezaki uploaded his material to Wikileaks. Without more, it might get dismissed as fringe conspiracy theory stuff. Some anonymous spokesman would explain how Gillmor had been operating the drone to take out the terrorists; that the terrorists had learned of his position and gunned him down in cold blood, causing the drone to crash; but that his resourceful men had still managed to eliminate the terrorist threat, even as their brave leader lay dying.
I found I didn’t care all that much. We’d done what we could. And we’d done it well. Now all I had to do was find a way to slip out of the country and enjoy my twenty-five million.
