“You’re welcome.” He couldn’t seem to manage to get more than two or three words out at a time.
“So,” Renaldo said, putting her hands together, “are you… going to be done soon?”
“Oh!” Brad said, looking at the scrub brush and the gloves on his hands as if he forgot he had them on. “I’ll just get on out of here and wait… until… you know…”
“Okay.” As he walked toward the door, she put out an arm to stop him. “Brad? Can I call you Brad?”
“S-sure.”
“And you can call me Cassie.” She lowered her eyes. “I have a confession to make.”
“W-what?”
“I didn’t just happen to stop here on my way to Salt Lake City,” Renaldo said, looking deeply into his eyes and taking a deep breath, which only accentuated her breasts even more. “I knew you were going to be here.”
“You did? How?”
“It’s my job to find out things like that,” she said. “But the thing is… I learned that not because of business, but because I wanted to see you.” She lowered her eyes again. “I could lose my job if anyone found out.”
“Found out what?”
“That… that I’m turned on by you,” Renaldo said. “You’re a hardworking, dedicated guy, but”—she put a hand on his chest—“but you’re also great-looking, and you have this hard young body, and I’m just plain turned on by you. I know I could lose my job if anyone ever found out I followed you here, but right now I don’t care. And I saw the way you looked at me back on that first day in the hangar. I was flattered. That makes me even hotter for you.” She stepped closer to him. “Brad, can… can I kiss you?” All he could do was stand there and sweat. “I know you just turned eighteen today, so you’re a man, and that turns me on even more. I love hard, strong young men.” And she lightly touched his lips with hers, with the very tips of her nipples pressing against his chest.
“I knew you would have soft lips,” she murmured. “Hard-body guys always have soft lips.” She backed away, her eyes still closed, and she smiled when she opened them and saw Brad frozen like a statue in front of her. She pressed a card into his hand. “Call me sometime on my cell when we can… be alone,” she said. “And please, Brad, keep this a secret. My career depends on your discretion.” And she turned and walked out.
Brad stood there, still frozen, until he heard Renaldo’s car door slam and the engine start up… and when he was able to move, he found his legs as weak and rubbery as straws.
How in the world, he thought after a long breathless moment, am I going to get anything else done today… with no damned blood above my
“I’d say that was a very successful first deployment,” Jon Masters said. He had just ordered the first Sparrowhawk remotely piloted aircraft back to base, and the second was en route to take up the surveillance orbit. “Almost five straight days on station, and we gathered a ton of useful data on the routine in that compound.”
“But we don’t know anything more than we did five days ago,” Special Agent Chastain grumbled.
“We know a
“I wish we could identify some of those individuals down there,” the agent named Brady said.
“We’re working on face-recognition capabilities for some of our remotely piloted aircraft,” Jon said. “Ten thousand feet and overhead is not a good position to get a good shot of a face, but an unmanned plane at a lower altitude and standing off would have a better angle at a face. After that, it’s just biometric comparison done by computer — we’ve been doing that for years.”
“You’re always with the damned sales pitch, Masters,” Chastain snapped, “but we’ve been sitting here for four damned days and we haven’t seen a thing that helps our investigation.” He studied the laptop monitors. “If we flew the drone lower, we’d get better resolution on these pictures, right?”
“The sensors are optimized for ten thousand feet aboveground,” Jon replied. “The resolution will always be better the lower you go, but usually we go for the best resolution at a higher altitude, not lower. The lower you go, the more likely it is for your target to spot the aircraft. We also have problems with data transmission and interference from local radio and TV broadcasts, not to mention having to think about terrain and obstacle avoidance. We usually—”
“I’m not interested in what you ‘usually’ do, Masters,” Chastain said. “I’m only interested in results. Fly the drone at ten thousand feet.”
“But… that’s less than a mile aboveground,” Jon said. “Most folks can see large aircraft quite easily if they’re less than a mile up.”
“No, they can’t.”
“And ten thousand is the minimum en route altitude for the Victor-113 airway,” Jeff the aircraft control technician chimed in. “Any small aircraft flying the airway heading southwest will pick ten thousand feet.”
“We’ve been flying the drone right on the damned airway for five days and we’ve had to move it… what, twice?” Chastain argued. “And even if we didn’t move the drone, it would’ve missed the other traffic by miles. There’s no traffic up there we need to worry about. Fly the drone at eleven thousand.”
“That puts it right at the altitude that northeast-bound traffic flies,” Jeff said.
“Then add five hundred feet, or six hundred, I don’t care, just
“In about twenty minutes.”
“Make sure the airspace is closed down again, and fly the thing so it stays away from populated areas,” Chastain said. “We’ll have it orbit inside protected airspace until dark, then land it.” Jeff selected North Peak, about fifteen miles west of Battle Mountain and clear of all airways, to orbit the Sparrowhawk, and he was careful to turn on its transponder beacon to help air traffic control steer other aircraft away from it. Jon contacted air traffic control and advised them of the orbiting unmanned aircraft.
Time passed much as it had done the previous four days. With both Sparrowhawks flying, Charlie Turlock was able to use the interior of the hangar during the daytime to help Agent Randolph Savoy train in the Cybernetic Infantry Device robots, and as she expected, he was a very fast learner; at night, they trained outdoors. Wayne Macomber watched, but kept to himself most of the time, using rubber cables to keep up with his rehabilitation exercises. “Any questions, Randolph?” Charlie asked after their last session ended.
“None,” Savoy said. “You were right: it’s pretty intuitive and straightforward to learn how to pilot these things.” The other agents looked over and shook their heads at the sight of the two massive mechanical humanoids conversing in electronic voices, as if they were acquaintances who had just met on the street.
“The whole idea was to issue CID robots to young, qualified soldiers right out of basic training, so it had to be easy to learn,” Charlie said. “Combat training is a whole different story: the basic combat course is two months, and each weapon backpack is another two weeks, plus range time. But if we had the funding, we could field an army of CIDs.” She stepped over to the storage container, climbed out, then initiated the refolding and stowage sequences, and Savoy did likewise. “Now I guess we wait to see what they find at that Knight compound.”
The images from the second Sparrowhawk orbiting at the lower altitude were indeed much better, and now the federal agents crowded around the wide-screen laptop, studying the compound carefully. “Look at the heavy weapons those guys have in there,” the agent named Brady said, pointing at the screen. “There’s at least four machine-gun squads right there.”
“Looks like they’re getting ready for something,” Chastain said. “Looks like we might need the robots after…” Just then, the image went blank. “What happened?”
“I told you that might happen,” Jon Masters said. “The lower altitude means more interference.” They waited, but the image did not reappear.
“Jon, we might have a problem — I’m not getting flight data from Sparrowhawk Two,” Jeff said. “We might have lost satellite contact.”
“What the hell does that mean, Masters?” Chastain asked impatiently.
“It’s no big deal,” Jon said. “It’ll orbit the area until satellite contact is restored. If it’s not restored within two hours, it’s programmed to return to the airport.”
