The Rule of Nine

THIRTY-EIGHT

The taxi driver finds the dirt road and a few hundred feet in I see Herman’s rental car parked halfway into the brush off to the side.

We pull up. I pay the driver, grab Herman’s coffee and the doughnut box, and Joselyn and I get out.

“Over here!” I hear Herman’s voice beyond the brush.

We make our way between some bushes where Herman’s big feet have beaten the grass down to make a narrow path.

He rolls over off his stomach and sits up as soon as he sees us. “Thought you guys were never gonna get here,” he says. “I’m dyin’.”

“Not to worry. Your friend brought you a box of poison,” says Joselyn.

He reaches up and takes the coffee in one hand and hands me the field glasses with the other. I give him the doughnuts. He sets them on the ground and plucks the lid off the coffee. “Ah, good, cream,” he says. “You remembered. Any sugar?”

“In the box with the doughnuts,” I tell him.

He opens the lid and finds six packets. Herman holds them together in his big fingers and rips the tops off all of them in one move. Then he pours the contents into the hot coffee, stirring it like syrup with a plastic fork.

“We could just get a long needle and inject twenty pounds of sugar into your heart,” says Joselyn. She stands there motionless looking at the steaming cup in Herman’s hand as if it were a viper.

“What did I tell you when I first saw her?” says Herman. He talks without looking at us, picking through the box of doughnuts for his first victim. “All shapely and sexy like that. She’s gotta be a health nut. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Course there are advantages…”

“Yes, one tends to live longer,” says Joselyn.

“That wasn’t the advantage I had in mind,” says Herman. “But I suppose it’ll do. Watch the glasses.” He looks at me as I scan the open field down below through the binoculars. “You’re not careful, Thorn’s gonna pick up glare off the front lens. Morning sun,” he says.

I lower them. “So what do I do?”

“Baseball cap on the ground there,” says Herman. “Use it to shield the front end a little bit. Keep the sunlight off them.”

I settle onto the ground on my stomach, lay the baseball cap over the top of the fifty-power glasses with the bill sticking out over the two lenses. Then I focus them.

“Look to the left there, in the trees up at the end of the field,” says Herman. “See the camouflage?”

“Oh, yeah. I see the plane but he’s got it covered pretty well. Unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t see it.”

“Wouldn’t see it at all from the air,” says Herman, “not with the naked eye anyway. My guess is that’s what he’s worried about. Drug interdiction flights. Last few years that’s become a heavy part of the action down here. If the cartels can bring their product in here, they’re already inside the U.S. Customs zone.”

“So what do you think Thorn’s up to?” I ask.

“Haven’t seen enough to know yet,” he says. He grabs another doughnut and gulps some coffee.

“I don’t know, but I doubt that it’s drugs,” says Joselyn. “Not unless he’s changed. It’s true it’s been a long time. But I don’t think so.” Joselyn sees a small rock outcropping a few feet away. She steps over and dusts it off with her hand, very feminine, then turns and sits on it. “Do you see him down there? Thorn, I mean?” She looks at me.

“I don’t know. I see three men working around the plane. One of them is up on a ladder, big extension thing, against the tail section,” I tell her. “Another one’s got a shorter ladder working against the side of the plane up forward, just in front of the wing.”

“Yeah, he’s been taping down paper,” says Herman, “some big pieces. Looks like they painted the fuselage white, then did the whole tail section that dark blue. Sort of a cone shape on an angle all the way down underneath the tail.”

“I see it,” I tell him.

“Now they’re gettin’ ready to put up a logo or some letters. I’m not sure,” says Herman.

“Yeah, I hear the compressor, but I don’t see it,” I tell him.

“They must have it in the plane to keep the noise down. You can hear that thing all the way out here every time they fire it up,” he says. “They had it going a few minutes ago, just before you got here. They were clearing two spray guns. Shot a lot of red and blue paint all over the grass.”

“Looks like we got company.”

An old beat-up Ford F-250 pickup truck is coming down the runway, moving fast, coming this way. For a moment I wonder if the driver has seen us.

“That’s Thorn’s truck. I followed it on the way out here,” says Herman. “We better get out of here.”

“Hold on. He’s stopping,” I say.

Herman turns to look.

Joselyn is on her feet, standing next to him, shading her eyes with one hand and staring down at the field.

The truck is stopped, no more than a quarter of a mile away. The driver is getting out. He goes in the back to the open bed of the truck and lifts out a cardboard box. He carries it over and sets it down on the field. Then he walks back to the pickup.

“I don’t think he’s seen us,” I tell them.

This time he reaches inside the cab. He steps back and closes the door. He has two items, one in each hand. The one in his right hand looks like a laptop. I can’t make out what the other one is. It’s too small.

“What’s he doing?” says Herman.

“I don’t know.” I have the field glasses fixed on his face at the moment. “I think that’s our man.”

“Let me see,” says Joselyn.

I hand her the glasses.

She raises them to her eyes. “How do you adjust them?”

“The toggle on top.” I show her.

She focuses in. Then suddenly takes a deep breath. “Yes. That’s him. I would know that face anywhere,” she says. When she passes the glasses back to me, her hand is trembling.

By the time I refocus and acquire his image once more, Thorn is down on one knee in the field. He is working on something, but I can’t see it. His back is to me, shielding whatever it is that he has on the ground. He reaches into the cardboard box with one hand and takes out two wires. They look like leads connected to something in the box.

A few seconds later he stands and flings something into the air. He does it almost casually, backhanded, with a flick of his wrist. Whatever it is, it doesn’t fall to the ground. Instead it flies off, like a bird, silent and fast into the distance, where I lose it.

“What the hell was that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” says Herman. “I saw it too, then it just disappeared.”

“What’s he doing?” I ask.

“He’s flying it,” says Joselyn. “What you just saw is an MAV.”

“What the hell’s an MAV?” I ask.

“Micro air vehicle,” she says. “It’s military hardware. Latest cutting edge. Like a model airplane, only smaller.”

“I don’t hear any motor,” I tell her.

“It’s electric. High speed. They use them for surveillance, but use your imagination. With the advances in miniaturization, almost anything’s possible.”

“How do you know about this stuff?” I ask.

“Part of the new generation of weapons systems,” she says. “Designers, kids from Stanford, get hung up on it because it’s novel and looks cute and the military tells them it’s harmless. But the range of possible applications is insidious. I think we should be going.”

“Why?” says Herman.

“Because we can’t see that thing,” says Joselyn, “but if it’s what I think it is, it can probably see us.”

“You mean it’s got a camera?” I say.

“A camera, infrared sensors, I don’t know, but look at him.” She gestures toward Thorn out in the field.

I train the glasses back on him. He’s standing up, holding the laptop in one hand while he manipulates what looks like a small joystick with the other.

“He’s not looking up in the air, is he?” she says.

“No. He’s looking down at the computer screen.”

“So?” says Herman.

“So he’s flying whatever it is using the eye that’s on board that little devil,” she says. “Which means he can see everything on the ground as he flies over it.”

It’s hard to know where it is because we can’t follow Thorn’s line of sight to track the small model in the air. Then suddenly Thorn turns and looks across the field.

“I got it.” In the sunlight with the glasses I pick up the glint off one of the wings. The only reason I can see it is because it’s almost stationary in the sky, doing a tight circle, hovering over an area on the other side of the field.

“Where?” says Herman.

“There.” I point. “See the little metal shed over there? Looks like a pump house?”

“Yeah.”

“Look directly above it.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Looks like a little dot.”

Suddenly the little plane darts away. It moves off just a bit and then drops down quickly and starts to fly in a slow, lazy circle at rooftop height around the corrugated-steel pump house. The building is more of a box, perhaps four feet square and eight feet high, with a slanted shed roof that pitches this way. The metal is all rusted, as if it’s been there for a hundred years.

The model turns, heading toward the building. I expect it to fly over the shed roof but it doesn’t. Instead, the model noses up just as it gets there and stalls. Suddenly it falls like a rock, hits the roof, and slides off and hits the ground.

“So much for that,” I say.

Thorn grabs the box, gets in the pickup, and races across the field. He parks close to the pump house, then retrieves the little plane. He checks it out.

“Maybe he broke it,” says Herman.

“I don’t know. It looks like he’s adjusting something under the wings,” I tell them. “That’s got to be the smallest model plane I’ve ever seen. It’s not much bigger than his hand. It looks like four bent wires coming out underneath. They look like the legs on an insect.”

“Let me see,” says Joselyn.

I hand her the glasses. She focuses and looks. “Climbing, perching, and jumping,” she says. “It’s what they’re working on.”

“What?” I say.

“There’re like feet or something attached to the ends of the wires.”

Within seconds he flings it into the air again, opens the computer, and starts all over.

“What’s he doing, playing?” I ask.

“I don’t think so,” says Joselyn.

Thorn flies the model around the shed twice and then approaches from the same direction, straight in toward the roof. At the last second he noses up and the little plane falls from the air once more. Only this time it doesn’t slide off the roof. It stays there, upright, as if there is something holding it in place.

“Son of a gun. He did it,” she says.

“Did what?” says Herman.

“He perched it on the roof,” she says. “From everything I’ve read, they haven’t been able to do that yet.”

“What?” I ask.

“The military has been putting out RFPs, requests for proposals, to contractors for several years. They’re looking for somebody who can design a micro air vehicle that can perch on the side of a building.”

“Why would they want to do that?” says Herman.

“Because if you can attach enough things to the side of a building and equip them with listening devices, you can pick up everything going on inside. The power to recharge the batteries you get from a photoelectric cell. A fly on the wall could stay there for years,” she says.

“You work with some very insidious people,” I tell her.

“I don’t work with them. I just know about them.”

“You think that’s what he’s doing, trying to pick up surveillance?” says Herman.

“I don’t know,” says Joselyn. “I know they have stuff that can fly and climb. And they’re working on weapons systems, some of them no bigger than the tip of your finger. They say within a few years they’ll have robotic insects the size of a grasshopper armed with lethal toxins and heat sensors to home in on the human body. They could release them by the millions using missiles tipped with cluster bombs. If they can do that, they can do anything.”

“Where do you guys get this stuff?” I ask.

“It’s not science fiction,” says Joselyn. The second she says it I hear a high-speed whirring sound. It comes from behind us, sounds like the wings of a hummingbird, and races over our heads. It’s gone before we can even see it.

“Son of a bitch,” says Herman.

When I look out at the field, Thorn is standing there holding the computer, looking down at the screen. The little model is no longer perched on the roof.

“Let’s get out of here,” says Joselyn.

“It’s too late. He’s seen us,” says Herman, who is already halfway to the car.

I lift the binoculars up to my eyes with one hand. “What the hell is that?” I am looking back at the jet under the camouflage netting. The rear ramp is now down. The man who was doing the welding is testing the motor that lifts the ramp up and down. As I look at it I realize why. The ramp was never designed to carry the kind of weight represented by the bomb. Resting on a steel cradle just above the stairs is the massive casing of a torpedo-shaped device.

“I gotta call Thorpe,” I tell her.

“Later,” she says.

I pull out my cell phone.

“Not now,” she says.

“Just a second.” I fumble with the applications until I find the camera. I look at the screen on the phone and wait for the ramp to come down again. It won’t be a great picture but it’s better than nothing.

“We don’t have enough time,” she says.

Thorn is down on one knee out in the field with the open cardboard box next to him.

The ramp starts to come down.

Thorn is charging up the little bird for another look. He finishes and then slowly stands, turns around, and looks up. Like a flashbulb going off in his head, he suddenly realizes what’s on display under the belly of the big plane. He spins around and looks up toward where Joselyn and I are standing. I don’t think he can see us, but he knows we’re here.

I wait until the end of the ramp reaches the ground, like a yawning mouth, and then I snap the picture.

It’s a footrace for the car, with Joselyn out in front. Herman is already behind the wheel, with the engine running.

We jump in the back and Joselyn yells, “Move!”

“Do you think he saw us?” I ask.

“I don’t, but I think we better find another way out of here,” she says.