Criss Cross

Chapter 40

By early afternoon that day, Sampson and I were back in that cut field northwest and across the road from Rivers’s acreage. I got out the drone I’d bought at a hobbyist store in Fairfax, Virginia.

“You know how to use it?” he asked.

“Twenty-minute lesson from the young lady who sold it to me,” I said, thumbing on the power for the remote. The drone was painted in desert camo, the main reason I’d bought this particular model. I followed her directions and then gave the drone the command to fly. To my delight, it lifted off right away, climbed seventy feet, and then came almost straight back down to a soft landing.

“I think I like this thing already,” I said. “You seeing its camera feed on the laptop?”

“Very clear images,” Sampson said, sounding impressed. “But I don’t get it, Alex. What are we going to do, just have it hover over his place until the battery is dead?”

“I did buy extras.” I sent the drone up again. “But I don’t know if we’ll need them.”

“What’s that mean?” Sampson said.

“Hang with me, old buddy,” I said. I had the drone climb to three hundred feet and then head southeast toward Rivers’s property, meadow, and doomsday bunker.

Nothing appeared different from the afternoon before. I flew the drone well past the solar panels, the anthill, and the house before starting to circle.

As the drone approached the bunker on its way back, I dropped it quickly down to one hundred feet. It flew right over the top of the anthill to that scorched pine tree where an eagle had built its nest. I twitched the joystick, brought the drone directly above the nest, and aimed the camera inside. “Definitely abandoned,” I said. “Not even a feather.”

“Alex, you’re in Rivers’s airspace.”

“Something’s off,” I said, and I eased the drone down to four inches above the nest, pivoted it one hundred and eighty degrees left, then cut the power. The screen blurred for a second as the drone sagged into the nest. The lower part of the screen was obscured by a wall of twigs and leaves, but the upper part clearly showed the anthill and the ground surrounding it.

“You’re serious?” Sampson said.

“Malfunction,” I said.

“We’re just going to leave it there?”

“Better than flying it for hours on end. And it saves a ton of battery life.”

“What if Rivers sees it?”

“Why would he? It’s painted camo.”

John stared at the screen for several moments before throwing up his hands in surrender. “Can you turn the camera toward the house?”

After several fumbles, I moved the camera left almost forty-five degrees so it was aimed at the house, up there on the knoll above the pond. “We could have used a zoom function, but it’s not bad,” I said.

“And now what? We sit?”

“Well, I’m going to sit and eat.”