A Time for Patriots

“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 waist ?

Joint Air Base Battle Mountain

Four days later

“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 lot

more,” Jon said. “If there’s any meaningful change in the routine, we’ll know about it right away, and we can launch a Sparrowhawk to follow up. Any change in the number of residents, new vehicles, large meetings, new construction, any new fortifications, even changes in temperature of individual buildings — the computer will notify us.”

“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 do it !” Chastain snapped. “I’m tired of you eggheads arguing with me. Change the altitude, and do it now, or I’ll recommend to Washington that we get someone else to do the job.” Jon nodded to Jeff, who put in the commands on the laptop. “When does the first drone return to our airspace?”

“In about twenty minutes.”