Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

from really high up. Those drones had terrorized the Syrians we worked with.

In places like Mosul, the front lines were close. ISIS fighters were dug into the ruins of destroyed cities. Bombed out neighborhoods where progress was measured in buildings taken, tunnels destroyed. The problem for them was that the drones didn’t have any kind of long range. The flying part wasn’t a problem, the video part was. Those ISIS drones were not flown from a hundred miles away, not even five. The video signal stopped working after less than a mile.

I watched the incoming drone. I was thinking about the people operating it. The drone would arrive in a few seconds. If the range was a mile or less, the corollary was that those people were less than a mile way. Trouble was already here. Faster than expected.

Hank came into the room. He said, “Keeler, you see the drone?”

I said, “Not a neighbor?”

“We don’t have neighbors.”

I had already moved off the sofa, in a crab like scuttle. I was crouched against the wall under the window. I said, “Don’t talk to me, do something normal.”

Hank was standing there in the middle of the room looking confused. He had a glass of milk in his hand. His upper lip was coated with the white liquid, caught in the fuzzy hairs of a hopeful attempt at a mustache. “Normal like what?”

“Like standing normally at the window looking at it.”

I swung the window inward a tad, so that I could see the reflection. I only saw a brief blur, but I heard it well enough. The drone came in close, buzzing past in a loud high-pitched whine. It veered off above the trees, then came in again, slower. Hank stood at the window looking at it. The drone hovered over the driveway, oriented at him, the rotors screaming. I could see the reflection well. The thing was silhouette against the sky. Quad rotors, a wedge-shaped brain, and something hanging pendulously below the main brain. Maybe it was armed somehow. After half a minute, the thing veered away and went over the house. We heard it on the other side, scanning laterally across the pitch of the structure, looking in windows. It was doing reconnaissance. The pilot was unconcerned about being obvious.

In the back of my mind I was thinking about weapons and sensors. Maybe it had infrared. Maybe not. Maybe it was wired to explode, like a kamikaze. Maybe not. I was leaning on the side of not.

Hank was still standing there, looking highly uncertain.

I said, “Now’s the time to tell me about any weapons you might have in the house, Hank.”

“Oh.” He said, “I’ve got the bear gun and the squirrel gun. Mom’s got the Glock.”

I said, “Bear gun and the Glock, Hank. With whatever ammo you’ve got.”

Hank left the room wordlessly. The drone on the other side of the house suddenly whizzed up over the roof again, careened into the front yard and spun around to look into the living room once more. I stayed down, glancing hopefully in the window reflection, but unable to see the drone. Then it was closer, buzzing madly, right in front of the open window.

I realized that the drone was coming inside.

I stayed very still. The noise of the quad rotors was intense and getting louder. The drone was inching in through the window, directly over my head. I could feel the rotor wash. Like standing under four madly rotating fans. I slowly tilted my head up. The thing was right over me, moving forward in jerky increments. One tiny twitch at a time, as the controller flicked the joystick. The thing hanging from the main brain was a high end camera unit. The camera had its own motor, and probably its own controller. It was swiveling on a gimbal, tiny servo motors wheezing. A modular system of interchangeable lenses, like what they use for movies. I revised my estimate up to fifteen or twenty grand, maybe more.

What I also revised was my image of the operators, the people behind it. There were two of them. One for the drone, the other for the camera. They’d be sitting somewhere relatively safe and secluded. Maybe a car, parked off road. It would be somewhere close, that was for damn sure. They would be discussing what they saw, calculating their approach, figuring out what they’d need to get the job done.

The drone drifted further in. Soon it was going to be too far for me to reach. All the controller would need to do was swivel the camera around and see me, crouched under the window. So I did the only thing that there was to do, reached up to take hold of it.

But the drone suddenly buzzed back the way it had come, a straight path out of the window. I managed to remove my hand in time, hoping that the roving camera unit hadn’t caught it. The drone was buzzing away from the house and up into the sky. Ten seconds later it was out of sight. A minute later, the sounds of the forest returned.

Hank was not back yet. I counted two minutes. Nothing happened. I stood up and went toward the back of the house, where I figured Hank was looking for his weapons. I ran into him coming the other way. He said, “Sorry, I forgot the combination and had to ask Mom.”

I said, “No problem. Did you get her Glock?”

“Shit.” He started to backtrack toward Helen’s office.

I stopped him. “Just focus on the bear gun, Hank. I’ll go see your mom. Show me where her office is.”

Hank pointed down the corridor. “It’s there. She went to the bathroom. Maybe she’s back at her desk now.”

I went to Helen’s door and knocked. No response. I opened the door. Nobody in there. An empty office chair facing a large computer screen filled with information. The other side of the room looked like an art studio. Paint brushes and paints, charcoal sticks and