He finally allowed himself a second to wipe a thick sheen of sweat from his brow before it dripped into his eyes. Everything — their entire mission, their biggest chance to obtain actionable intelligence on General Riaz Rehan — depended on his fingertips and his decision-making in the next few minutes.
“I’m going in,” he said softly, and he gently touched the Y-axis joystick on the controller, bringing his buzzing craft down to 150 feet, then 100 feet, then 50 feet. “Set waypoint Charlie,” he whispered.
“Charlie set.”
Quickly he panned the camera back to the front guardhouse, then back to the helipad. He saw the three perimeter guards; they were right where they needed to be for him to continue on with his mission. He scanned the roof again, and it was clear.
A breeze from the ocean sent his craft rocking to the left. He combated the motion with a countermotion on the X-axis joystick of the controller. Jack did not feel the breeze on his body by the pool house, but at fifty feet it had come very close to sending his helo tumbling off course. He had a backup microhelo in one of the watertight cases, but setting it up for use would waste precious time. They had decided that if they lost a helo on the insertion, they would use the second craft to attempt to recover the first, as they did not want to leave a radio- controlled helicopter with a high-tech camera and a transmitter on the grounds of their target, lest the security force there be tipped off to the surveillance mission against them.
Caruso leaned in to his cousin’s ear. “It’s okay, Jack. Just try again. Take your time.”
More sweat dripped into Ryan’s eyes now. This wasn’t lin the nke back on the roof or in the parking lot of Hendley Associates. This was the field, the real world, and it bore no resemblance to his training.
Jack let the sweat drip freely now as he concentrated on landing his remote aircraft.
He touched down gently next to an air-conditioning vent on the roof. Immediately he shut down the helo, then put down the controller, and lifted a second controller from the grass, finding it only by feeling around for a moment with his hands. This device was a one-handed module, not one-third the size of the remote control for the microhelo. On this second handheld unit he pushed a single button, and now his video glasses projected a new image over his eyes. It was a low-light camera image that showed one of the struts over the microhelo’s landing skids, and behind it, the narrow slats of the ventilation shaft.
This second camera was fixed to a four-inch-long, two-inch-wide, one-inch-tall robot that had been attached to the bottom of the helo by a magnet. On command from Ryan’s controller it released its magnetic hold, and when Ryan powered it up, two rows of tiny legs extended like a centipede, and it lifted off the roof.
The legs were the propulsion system of this ground-traveling bug-bot, and Ryan tested the device by ordering it forward and backward, then panning the 1080p video camera in all directions. Once satisfied that the robot was working nominally, he powered it down, then switched back to the helo controller. He ordered the microhelo to hit its three waypoints and return to its helipad.
Five minutes later he was flying a second bug-bot to Rehan’s roof, landing it near the first. The wind had picked up a little between flights, so the second sortie took almost twice as long as the first.
“Ready for number three,” Jack whispered when the helicopter was back on its pad.
Chavez loaded the bug-bot on the aircraft. “Microhelo is ready to launch payload three.”
“How are we on time, Ding?” Ryan asked.
After a moment’s hesitation, Chavez said, “Fair. Don’t rush, but don’t fuck around, either.”
“Roger that,” Jack said, and he switched his video glasses back over to the camera in the swivel turret under the microhelo’s nose.
After the third and fourth bug-bots were delivered to the air vent over the attic of the target building, Jack brought the helo back to waypoint alpha, two hundred feet above his head, in preparation for a landing. Chavez was ready with the fifth payload and fresh battery for the chopper, as they had determined it could not fly for more than an hour on a single charge.
“Okay,” Jack said. “I’m bringing it down.”
Just then a breeze caught the helicopter, pushing it inland. Jack had dealt with a half-dozen such incidents in the past forty-five minutes, so he did not panic. Instead he brought the chopper back out over the water, it took a second for it to right itself, and he thought he had control. But it drifted again, and then a third time as he started his descent.
“Damn it,” he whispered. “I think I’m losing her.”
Caruso was watching the feed in his monitor. “Just bring her down a little faster.”
“Okay,” Jack said. At one hundred fifty feet the craft jolted forward, and Ryan had to pull it back. “I’m losing the GPS hold. Could be losing battery.”
Carusfifo said, “Ding, can you see it?”
Chavez looked into the night sky above. “Negative.”
“Keep looking, you may have to catch it.”
But it was too late. Jack saw his video feed turn away from the water and the lights of the Kempinski Hotel as the microhelo began to spin slowly, and its descent speed increased sharply.
“Shit!” he said, a little too loudly considering their covert position. “It’s dead. It’s dropping.”
“I don’t see shit,” Chavez said. He was walking around with his eyes in the sky. How fast is it coming down?”
Just then the helicopter slammed into the grass ten feet from its launch pad. It exploded into a dozen fragments.
Jack took off his goggles. “Son of a bitch. Set up the reserve helo.”
But Chavez was already moving toward the wreckage. “Negative. We’ll go with the four bots we have in place. That’s going to have to do it. We don’t have time to send another bird up.”
“Roger that,” said Jack, secretly relieved. He was exhausted with the stress of flying the tiny aircraft into the target location, and he looked forward to getting back across the water, where Caruso would be in charge of operating the bug-bots in the air vents.
50
It was approaching five a.m. when the three men got back to their bungalow. Jack was beyond exhausted. While Domingo and Dominic set up the remote equipment for the bug-bots, Ryan dropped onto the couch, still wet from his swim. Dom laughed; he’d been through every bit of the physical exertion that his cousin had endured, but the mental strain of launching, flying, and landing had all been on Jack Junior.
Now it was Caruso’s turn to drive.
Dominic had studied the architectural plans from the developers of several of the Palm Jumeirah properties in order to find the best entry points for their bug-bots. The attic vents were deemed the best bet, and as the former FBI agent drove his first little bug-shaped robot into the vent, he was happy to find no post-construction metal grating or wire mesh in his way.
The tiny legs on the robot could be magnetized for moving up and down metal surfaces, just like in the ductwork of the air-conditioning system, so he had no problem moving on both the X and Y axes as he progressed deeper into Rehan’s safe house.
The video quality was amazingly good, though the fluctuating transmission speeds at times caused a degradation in the quality. Dom and the other operators at The Campus had also tested a thermal infrared camera, similar to but superior to the one in the nose turret of the microhelo’s thermal cam, but ultimately they decided that that feature would not be necessary for the indoor work they had planned here in Dubai, plus the infrared cams drew more battery power and this would be detrimental to their mission, so they were not attached to the ground drones.
After twenty minutes of operation, he had his first bot in position at the ground a/c return duct in the master bedroom. Dom adjusted the tilt of the camera and checked to make certain that nothing was obstructing the pan. Then he set the white balance and focused.
The laptop in the bungalow displayed a near-perfect color image of the room, and even though there was
