The bird caw ed, and hopped away toward the back of the plane.
McKinney gave him a look like she’d entered a madhouse.
“Your restraints are a precaution. Some people react badly to the drugs. Get hysterical. Never a good thing on an airplane.”
She tried to keep her voice calm, despite her mounting temper. “I’m not hysterical.”
He studied her, then cast a look at someone behind them. “Mooch.”
She heard movement, then the swip of steel being drawn as a handsome, neatly groomed man in his twenties with cocoa brown skin leaned over her. He looked of South Asian/Indian descent, and wore a crisp white galabia and white taqiyah skullcap. A stethoscope hung around his neck. He deftly slipped a razor-sharp killing knife through both her wrist straps. In a moment she was free, rubbing her wrists as “Mooch” disappeared again behind her.
McKinney looked around the whole cabin now that she could turn around. Half the interior was cargo space packed with metal cases and electronics equipment. Another bearded man, with pale skin and wild brown rock-star hair, sat one row back. He looked possibly Albanian or Russian with a soft, slightly rounded face and wide-set eyes. He wore faded jeans and a heavy metal band’s T-shirt covered with Arab script. He also had tattoos of horses and fiery skulls running the length of both forearms. He was unaccountably tuning a kora-a traditional West African stringed instrument. Behind him sat a rather plain, olive-skinned woman in a maroon hijab and sari. She was holding a copy of Small Arms Review but had looked up to meet McKinney’s gaze. The woman nodded and went back to reading.
Beyond her was a twentysomething Eurasian kid with hipster glasses and a soul patch. He wore khakis and a dark green pullover, along with a headset and mouthpiece. He was busy at an electronics console in the cargo area.
“Who are you people? Where is this plane headed?”
Odin extended his hand to the row behind him. “Foxy, pass me the Rover.”
The Albanian man sighed and set aside the kora to dig through a satchel on the floor. “Take it easy on her, boss.”
“The Rover, please. Thank you.” In a moment Odin came back with a ruggedized computer tablet. He tapped the screen a few times, then held it up for McKinney to see. The device was already playing what appeared to be black-and-white aerial footage, a view from a thousand feet up, orbiting a jungle village.
McKinney recognized it. “The Marikitanda Research Station.”
“FLIR imagery taken from an MC-12 about twenty minutes ago.” He pointed with his scarred, calloused hand. “See this?”
“My cabin.”
“Right. Watch.”
McKinney saw a luminous human form run from her cabin. This was apparently infrared imagery, highlighting heat sources. She watched herself sprint into the jungle, where she was soon lost beneath the dense canopy. Moments later an object streaked into the frame and impacted on her cabin-whiting out the screen.
She looked up at Odin. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“You were the target of a drone attack tonight, Professor McKinney.”
“A drone attack-wait, you know my name.”
“We know everything about you. Age thirty-two, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, undergraduate degree in evolutionary biology, UCLA, masters and postdoc work in entomology, Cornell University. Recently acquired a full professorship and a research grant for your work modeling Hymenoptera social systems. You’re a Bills fan. You hate peas. Shall I go on?”
She stared blankly at him.
Foxy was again tuning the kora as he muttered, “Social media’s a bitch…”
McKinney was now fully awake. “You said a drone attack.” She narrowed her eyes at Odin. “How were you… why were you here?”
“Like I said, we’ve been surveilling you for several days.”
“But why?” McKinney then shouted, “And why the hell didn’t you warn me? I could have been killed!”
“Calm down.”
“I’ll calm down when someone explains to me what the hell is going on. Why was I drugged and kidnapped?”
Odin spoke in soothing tones. “The research station has armed security, Professor. What would have happened if you called out for help? Innocent guards could have been hurt trying to defend you.”
“Who are you people? Why would a drone attack me?”
He held up a calming hand. “We’re here to help you.”
“Then you should have warned me instead of-”
Odin shook his head. “This is a secret operation, Professor. I needed to be certain they were targeting you. We had to wait until the last possible moment.”
“That who was targeting me?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” Odin turned the tablet screen back toward him and started tapping at it again. “Until tonight we haven’t been able to predict the target of these drone attacks in advance. But you solved that for us.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Let’s take it one step at a time.”
“Why would someone send a drone after me? I study ants.”
“Here…” He turned the Rover back toward her.
McKinney could now see a close-up infrared view of her own bungalow and its corrugated tin roof. There, hovering around her window, was a dimly visible object. A pizza-pan-sized four-rotor flying… thing. She could barely make it out as it moved from window to window with the thoroughness of a bee at a flowering bush.
She stared at the screen in disbelief. “None of this makes any sense.”
“Looks like a modified Chinese F50 airframe, but that doesn’t really tell us anything about its firmware or who sent it. I could buy a hundred of these off the back of some truck in Dubai or Moscow.”
She was still watching the evil-looking insect float outside her living quarters, her own glowing heat signature visible in bed through the window.
“As near as we can tell, the parent drone sniffs out its victims by their IMEI.”
McKinney still watched the screen. “I don’t know what that is.”
“International mobile equipment identity. Every mobile phone has a unique number burned in at the factory. That ID can be used to pinpoint the location of a specific phone anywhere in the world within fifty meters.”
McKinney had a vivid image of her iPhone charging next to her bed.
“But that’s not accurate enough to deliver ordnance. So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches to confirm the presence of the target. The spotter descends, and we think it searches the vicinity, looking for the victim’s face-probably uses a cheap pocket camera face-detection chip to make a list of human faces that it compares with target photos it already has in memory. We’ll know more if we can catch it.”
“Where would it get my photo?”
“Facebook, LinkedIn, university profile. That’s a trivial problem.”
She watched in horror as the spotter drone suddenly projected a grid of hundreds of infrared dots across the interior of her cabin-across her very body-in a light spectrum she hadn’t seen as she lay in the darkness.
“Registration grid. Once the target is confirmed, it uses an IR laser to send a coded signal back to the parent, clearing it to attack. That’s how we knew when to make our move.”
McKinney saw her own form shining an LED flashlight beam out her screen that didn’t show up in infrared, but the video focused on the quadracopter spotter drone, which floated away. A bright light blinked rapidly on its back in a complex sequence.
“The spotter then moves to a safe distance to film the strike, confirm detonation of ordnance, fatalities, so on. ELINT suggests that it then connects to the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot it can hijack to upload the video to a predetermined Web domain before the spotter also self-destructs.” He looked to the back of the plane. “Did we stop that video upload, Hoov?”
The Eurasian guy at the electronics console answered. “We did. There was a connection to our open Wi-Fi
