CHAPTER 1
At 92,000 feet, the Vulture suddenly developed a mind of its own. It dove like the hunter it was, screaming down through the stratosphere, looking for something to eat. Fifty miles away, from his chair in the control center at Groom Lake, a white rectangular box about the length of a shipping container, the remote pilot saw the first sign that something was amiss. The attitude indicator, the instrument that provided him the aircraft’s orientation relative to the earth’s horizon, pitched forty degrees to the right, a severe turn northeast. The control station was state of the art, featuring six twenty-four-inch touchscreen displays for each operator. The three topmost screens, arranged side by side, displayed the aircraft’s various camera feeds. As his eyes moved to the top portion of the screen directly in front of him, the pilot saw the altimeter numbers falling rapidly.
“Uh, problem here.”
His sensor operator looked up from her half-completed checklist. “What?”
“We’re diving.”
She shot him a sideways glance. “Stop screwing around, Sam.”
The pilot moved his right hand from the keyboard and placed it on the control stick, pressing the button on the far left and taking the Vulture out of auto-mode. When he moved the stick toward him, nothing happened. “No joke. Vehicle is no longer on flight plan. Bearing is zero-eight-seven, and I have LOS.”
The loss-of-signal indication was all the sensor operator needed to hear. She typed a command into her keyboard. “Sending lost link now.”
The command was a fail-safe, one that instructed the Vulture’s navigation system to begin flying in predetermined loops until they could regain control. It should have worked instantaneously. “No response,” the pilot said. “Still descending, passing sixty thousand and decreasing speed. Better get on the phone.”
The sensor operator punched a button on the hands-free base next to her that connected her to the RPA communications unit and began speaking into her headset. “Uh, guys, are you seeing this? Vulture is not responding.” She listened intently for a few seconds. “Uh-huh,” she finally responded. “Roger that.”
“What?” asked the pilot.
“As usual, they don’t have a clue. Going to call us back.”
“Great.”
“Did you do an instruments check?”
“Not an instrument failure. Everything is in the green.” The pilot pressed several keys on his terminal and tried moving the control stick again. “She just won’t respond. Someone else is flying her.” He was ex-Navy, an aviator with twenty-two years of actual flight experience who had once landed on an aircraft carrier with a broken tail hook. “No response on signal reboot.”
They both watched as the Vulture turned around just before the Utah border, sailing above the mostly barren desert on a flight path that would, in minutes, bring it back over the secret test range, or over Los Angeles in less than an hour. The sensor operator heard a ring in her headset. She listened. “Roger. Initiating patience timer countdown now.” It was the auto self-destruct timer that could be activated in a worst-case scenario.
Twenty seconds later the patience timer expired. What should have happened next was a shutdown of the Vulture’s engine resulting in a quarter rotation of the wings so the aircraft would spiral benignly to the desert floor.
The pilot grimaced. “Patience timer malfunction. Heading is now south-southwest at two-zero-two, altitude approaching twenty-seven thousand and—”
Letters suddenly began appearing on the monitors in front of them. They spelled out: “Apologies. Have this badass bird back to you in a few minutes. Please stand by.”
The sensor operator rose from her chair. “NFW,” she said. It wasn’t a military acronym.
The pilot depressed a button on his console and spoke into his headset. “Flight Term One, Ops.”
From high up on a mountain to the north, the reply was instantaneous. “Go for Flight Term One.”
“Stand by to issue the command destruct signal on my mark. Do you copy?”
“Ops, Flight Term One copies all and is standing by.”
“Terminate, terminate, terminate.”
“Roger. Flight Term One is transmitting on four two eight megahertz at a thousand watts.”
There was a lot of redundancy built into the flight operations of RPAs. If the patience timer wasn’t working, the transmission of this signal should activate it. The pilot watched and waited for it to do just that. “Flight Term One, Ops, are you sure you’re transmitting? No response from the article.”
A different voice, this one female, controlled and unemotional, streamed into the pilot’s ear. “Ops, Flight Term Two, we see Flight Term One’s signal. It’s likely that the flight termination receiver has been disabled.”
Before the pilot could respond, he saw the indicator for weapons system activation flash green. “Mother of God, the weapons system is arming.”
* * *
Twenty-three thousand feet below, Shiloah Roy’s seventeenth birthday party was moving into high gear. The celebration at the Double J Ranch was beautifully decorated, as was Shiloah herself, sparkling in her turquoise and gold gown, the skirt of which billowed in layers from her tiny waist to her knees and ended in a hem that was the same strawberry blonde color as the hair that flowed down her back in big, thick curls. She looked every bit the million bucks her father had intended, despite her pleadings for a normal birthday party with just a small group of friends. This was to be her formal coming-out, he told her, and people, important people, needed to see her. Shiloah wasn’t stupid. She knew this party was more about him than her. It was a business meeting.
It was 8:30 P.M. The molten-colored sun descended through the haze of wildfire smoke, leaving only the thousand bulbs strung over the dance floor to shine on Shiloah and her friends. Jesse Roy watched his daughter from the extravagant barbecue pit adjacent to the ranch house he had already spent a fortune remodeling. She was everything. And though she seemed ebullient tonight, she had become distant, even combative these last several months, seemingly unappreciative of all the things he had provided, including the elite St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire she attended. Yes, their ranch was in the middle of nowhere, and she had only a few friends nearby, but she had the finest horses to ride and every electronic gadget she could possibly want. Was it drugs, he wondered, a boyfriend back east she was missing? Was it her mother? After eight years, was Shiloah resenting him for her death? If only she would talk to him.
The margaritas and beer were flowing, and the smoke from the Cohiba Esplendidos he and the other men were puffing almost equaled what was coming from the caterer’s grill. As the song faded into its last notes, Jesse Roy walked across the grass to the expensive Las Vegas DJ and took the microphone from him.
“My friends, please join me out here on this beautiful lawn,” he said in a voice bursting with pride. Tall and slender, he was bedecked in a summer beige suit that contrasted nicely with his Kemo Sabe lizard skin boots. At forty-six, especially with his full, pomaded black hair, Jesse looked like the poster boy for what hard work and sweat could win you in life.
More than a hundred guests, about half from south of the U.S. border and the rest Shiloah’s St. Paul’s classmates and their super-affluent parents, stepped onto the grass. They formed two lines facing each other, and they watched as Shiloah walked slowly between them toward her father.
Jesse reached out and took his daughter’s hand. “Shiloah, you are as beautiful as your mother.” Choking up, he made the sign of the cross, an act of sanctification he normally reserved for a big bet at Santa Anita or Churchill Downs, and managed, “May God rest her soul.”
Tears welled in Shiloah’s brown eyes, and with his thumb and forefinger, Jesse squeezed the water out of his own. “I love that you were born on the Fourth of July, as you are a child of this great country and everything it stands for. Independence. That’s you in a nutshell, Shiloah. And it means we have two reasons for fireworks every year.” Everyone cheered. Jesse had paid a king’s ransom for the Zambini Brothers’ eight-minute pyrotechnics show, and he would be damned if he was going to let some county prohibition keep him and his guests from seeing it. Besides, the Double J was nestled in the heart of Dry Valley, surrounded by hills and miles off the highway. No one but Jesse Roy’s guests were likely to see the illegal display. Still, he had a full complement of young men and water hoses standing by in case it sparked on the ground.
Jesse raised a hand into the air and spoke loudly into the microphone again. “Maestro, if you please?”
From the large oval horse arena a hundred yards to the west, the music started again, loud and heavy with drums. Suddenly, a thousand brilliantly colored lights shot into the now dark sky. The laser beams danced across the heavens in every direction, and from behind them came long strings of rockets and a cacophony of explosions and color that rivaled anything on the Las Vegas Strip. It was so loud the people on the ground couldn’t hear each other gasp. Minutes later, it ended in a spectacular burst of red, white, and blue streamers arcing over the ranch and the heads of the party attendees. Bodies and eyes turned to follow the fading rockets, only to find another fireball, much higher and much brighter, coming toward them, leaving a white streak behind it for miles.
Shiloah turned to her father. “Daddy?” she asked, pointing. “Is that for me?”
Jesse Roy and his guests watched in awe as the streaking fireball suddenly seemed to divide. It was an explosion of light, the second fireball glowing even brighter and moving at a much greater speed as it pitched toward the ranch, its fiery propellant illuminating everything below it. Other than the Zambini Brothers crew, Jesse was the only one who knew this was not part of the fireworks he had paid to see. At the last second, he dove on top of Shiloah, covering her with his body.
* * *
The screen on the small laptop was gray, and the few glowing heat signatures that dotted it slowly moved out of view, only to be replaced by more. The hand guiding the Vulture was steady now, its new pilot learning quickly the micro-adjustments that turned the aircraft, made it climb or dive, or altered its speed. The hacker had studied, prepared. Practiced. Approaching the GPS coordinates that were now keyed into the RPA’s navigation, the screen began filling with multiple heat sources. Dozens of them. Then hundreds. The operator slowed the Vulture even more, found the target that had been provided, and fired. The R9X, the missile known in the armed forces as the flying Ginsu, dove toward the ground.
In the command trailer eighty miles to the west, the RPA’s pilot shot to his feet. “Jesus, what the hell did we just blow up?”
Much closer to the Double J, the Vulture’s hijacker typed out an email. It was addressed to [email protected], and read, “Hey babe, amazing sunset tonight. Did you happen to catch it?”
The reply came thirty-four minutes later. “I did. So amazing. Happy Independence Day.”
CHAPTER 2
Why Porter Beck was behind the wheel would be the topic of some heated discussions later, with lots of angry participants, but it was an overdose call, and it was a friend. Had the rest of his dozen officers not been assisting with wildfires or patrolling the county for illegal fireworks, he could have sent one of them, but being shorthanded was a fact of life in Lincoln County, and despite being a daylight man, he was still sheriff.
The EMS team was still fifteen minutes away treating a drunken cowboy who had tried celebrating the Fourth by shooting a dozen roman candles out of his butt crack. So it was down to Beck and Bo to respond to the 9-1-1 call.
The Sheriff’s Department sat literally across the highway from the Pioneer Hotel, probably no more than a half mile as the crow flew, but it seemed an order of magnitude farther to Beck as he steered his F-150 Police Interceptor like a student driver out for his first lesson. It wasn’t mechanical issues that caused him to weave all over the road. It was because he was impaired, his vision narrowed to a tiny tunnel. The disease had come on quickly, though it had been hiding in his DNA for the first forty years of his life. While he could see almost normally when the sun was up or internal lighting was strong, his eyesight after sundown retreated faster than the British at Dunkirk.
He had come to dread the night.
Right now, it was almost 8:30 P.M., the sun already behind Highland Peak to the west and the sky a fading pinkish hue from all the wildfire smoke. Inside the cab of the truck, Beck’s newest officer, Frank Columbo, was holding on for dear life.
“You might want to buckle up, pard,” said Beck as the truck shot over the 93, siren blaring. He sensed his deputy’s unease, could hear it in his voice. “Doing the best I can. Your patience is appreciated.” Columbo was growing on Beck, partly because he had a cool name for a cop, was quiet, paid attention most of the time, and loved a good cup of coffee. Mostly though, Beck liked him because he was a dog.
The night vision goggles were helping some. No doctor had prescribed them, and Beck was unaware of any studies that had tested their value for people with retinitis pigmentosa. All he knew was that they allowed him to see better than if he didn’t have them on, sensing the smallest amounts of infrared light reflected off objects and then electrically amplifying that light into some kind of glowing green image. It wasn’t nearly as clear as it would be for a person with normal vision, but the goggles allowed him to see most obstacles.
Heading up Main Street, the truck swerving, Beck jumped the curb and took out a stand of shrubs that lined the southern border of the LDS church parking lot. Bo yelped.
“A few bushes,” he assured him, silently hoping that was true. “Pretty sure, anyway. God won’t mind.” An agonizingly long minute later, they careened to a stop in front of the Pioneer, and Beck could make out a glowing green form in front of the old building, arms waving. He knew it must be Josie Conrad. She was a wisp of a woman, in her seventies now, and after sliding to a stop, Beck had trouble keeping up with her as he ran, med kit under his arm, up the steep staircase to the second floor.
The Conrads had owned the hotel for more than thirty years. It had about ten rooms, all with their own western theme, and had originally been a saloon as well. Now it was only the hotel and a small restaurant.
As he and Columbo made the brightly lit second-floor landing, Beck tore off the night vision goggles. Down the long hallway, he could see Byron Conrad, Cash’s dad, straddled over his son’s thighs and performing chest compressions too slow to be effective.
“Sheriff’s here,” Josie yelled as she reached the room.
Beck came through the door a second behind her. Byron rolled off his son, gasping for air and crying. “He’s not waking up, Beck. I can’t get him to wake up!”
Beck gazed down at his oldest friend, on his back, shirtless, his face and lips blue. Not breathing. But it was the lifeless body of the family dog, an ancient golden retriever named Lillibelle, lying next to Cash that told Beck everything he needed to know.
He seized Byron under both arms, hauling him out of the room and into the hallway. “Stay out here, both of you,” he told Josie.
He pointed down at Columbo. “Stay, Bo.” The dog sat on command. Overdoses are not good places for canine officers, especially if there is fentanyl in the room. One wrong sniff of the stuff and that’s it for the dog. No doubt Lillibelle had entered the room with Byron, had inhaled some of the ultrafine powder floating invisibly in the air, and had died almost instantly.
A young couple with worried faces came out of their room a few doors down. “Get back!” Beck yelled. “Everyone, back. Go to the end of the hallway.” There wasn’t much risk of fentanyl exposure to human first responders, he knew, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He reentered the room and dropped to the carpeted floor, confirming Cash’s condition in three quick measurements: pulse, pupils, and body temperature. He had no pulse. His pupils were the size of pinpoints, and his body, a shadow of its former self, was cold.
“Damn it, Cash!” Beck yelled. “Don’t go on me like this!” He pulled the naloxone nasal spray out of his bag, popped the two yellow caps off the injector, attached the atomizer on one end, and screwed the vial into the injector. Then he shot the mist into Cash’s nose. If it would work at all at this point, the drug might take a couple of minutes. But for that to happen, he had to get him breathing again. He rose to his knees and brought his hands, one over the other, firmly down over his friend’s breastbone. He started compressions, aiming for two inches in depth, counting each one out loud. “Five, six, seven…”
From behind him in the hallway, Bo barked, helping with crowd control. “Twelve, thirteen…” Beck heard the awful crack, knowing he had broken one of Cash’s ribs, but continued without a pause. “Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Come on, Cash! Not like this. Twenty-two, twenty-three…”
As he continued the chest compressions for several minutes, Beck slowly accepted the futility of his efforts. The naloxone wasn’t working, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of Cash’s heart restarting. Finally, Beck yanked a blanket off a nearby sofa and covered his friend’s face and chest with it. Watching from the hallway, Josie screamed. Beck got up and staggered to the door, looking down at Cash’s parents. “I’m so sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “He’s gone.”
With that, he closed the door, leaving him alone in the hotel room. On a small end table next to the couch above Cash’s body, Beck saw a bottle of whiskey and a plastic dinner plate with some pills crushed mostly into powder. One pill was still whole, and Beck recognized it as a counterfeit M30 immediately. He had seen enough of them over the last few years to know the difference. Made to look like prescription oxycodone, these were Mexican Blues, smuggled up from Mexico like heroin and everything else. He moved the plate to the kitchenette’s sink and scraped its contents into a Ziploc bag, sealing it. Then he ran some water over the plate, rinsed his hands in the warm water, and splashed some on his face.
The memories came flooding back. Beck had known Cash Conrad pretty much his entire life, had been to elementary, middle, and high school with him, had played Little League with him. Along with Jesse Roy, the three of them had been almost inseparable.
The nightmare had begun in their junior year at Lincoln County High. So much like his dad in physical appearance and athleticism, Cash had already received scholarship offers to play football at Southern Utah as well as a small school in Washington state. He had his ticket out, and the sky was the limit. He was an Eagle Scout and a good Mormon boy, a great kid all around. And then in the Homecoming game in October, he took a hard shot from a helmet to his lower back.
The vertebral fracture wasn’t that severe. It didn’t paralyze him. It healed without surgery. In a month, he was doing physical therapy and recovering nicely. But the lingering pain was unlike anything he had ever experienced.
It lasted for almost thirty years.
The back surgeries seemed to make everything worse. When the prescriptions dried up, heroin and morphine were readily available. It was a brutal cycle of rehab and relapse. Nothing was strong enough, not even the helping hand Beck extended when he returned home from the Army. By that point, Cash had made other friends. Their names were Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker.
As he dried his face, Beck realized that Cash’s death made six already this year. In a population of 6,000. Last time he checked, they were close to leading the nation in overdoses per 1,000 residents.
The EMS guys eventually arrived, checked Byron and Josie for any potential fentanyl exposure, and told them they would be fine. Beck knew that would never be the case. They would forever feel as if they had failed their son. Once Cash and Lillibelle were sealed in tombs of thick plastic with a zipper down the front, they were transported to the medical center. Beck watched as they were driven away, then climbed back into the cab with Bo. He waited for the bar crowd that had gathered out front to dissolve before he let the tears come. Bo stepped over the console between them and nuzzled his way onto Beck’s lap with an empathetic whine. He stroked the dog’s big red ears and asked God to take care of his friend.
Through the windshield, he thought he saw a light streak across the sky, a fuzzy fireball moving at tremendous speed. He wondered if it might be his friend’s soul speeding like a missile to heaven.
“Goodbye, Cash,” he said.
CHAPTER 3
Beck slept about as well as a deer during hunting season. Images of Cash’s lifeless body floated behind his eyes, and Columbo’s restless legs syndrome didn’t help. It also didn’t help that he was sharing the small sofa in the break room with the new deputy. Around two in the morning, he gave up and walked back into his office. He sat down behind his desk in the old leather chair the last sheriff had ceded him, the springs screaming like a piglet stuck under a fence, and pulled up his email to check for any recent wildfire updates. There was nothing new from Esther Ellingboe, the Bureau of Land Management’s district manager up in Ely, and no news was good news as far as Beck was concerned. He turned to the large map of the county on the wall to his right, the one with thirty-five colored pushpins clumped in various locations. Each pin constituted a wildfire, each color-coded to indicate a particular status. Green pins were for fires already extinguished. There were fourteen of those, spread throughout the mountains mostly to the east and south close to the Utah border. Eight yellow pins indicated fires under control but which were still active. Most of that was up north. Then there were twelve red pins designating more than 32,000 acres of woodland and high desert vegetation that were currently burning out of control.
He rose from the chair and placed a new red pin at the top of Highland Peak. He doubted there had ever been thirteen red pins in the map this early in fire season, certainly not in the few years since he returned home. This year, there had been little snow in the higher elevations, and by the end of April it was pretty much gone, and with it any hope of holding the devil at bay.
As a result, Beck’s tiny force was spread out over the county’s 11,000 square miles, assisting the Forest Service and BLM in evacuating residents and blocking roads into fire areas.
“That’s a lot of fire, my friend,” he told Bo.
Columbo rose from his position on the floor and began moving in circles before settling into a ball on the floor. The dog scratched one ear furiously, then clamped his big black eyes shut.
“Am I boring you?”
His cell phone pinged. Beck sat back down and noticed the new email at the top of his continually expanding inbox on his oversized computer screen. He thought it was some kind of spam and dangled the cursor over the delete button. But then the subject line caught his eye: RE: Hello, Lisa1957.
He leaned closer to the screen, hoping he had misread it, wondering for half a second if the retinitis pigmentosa was starting to screw with his inside-the-office vision, a progression of the disease he knew was coming someday. But he was reading it clearly. Can’t be a coincidence. To the best of his knowledge, there were only three people in the world who had knowledge of and might possibly understand the meaning of the name Lisa and 1957 when they were combined. He was one of them.
He looked at the sender address, [email protected]. The name meant nothing to Beck except that Mei was a common Chinese name for girls. He could ignore the message, delete it even, but he knew it would be at his own peril. His fingers moved to his face and his perpetual two-day stubble, an absent-minded habit he engaged in when pondering a problem. He felt the creases at the corners of his light blue eyes, burrowing trails of time, like the gray popping up in his otherwise brown hair, still thick but beginning its grudging retreat at the top. He was officially middle-aged now, approaching forty-six and feeling it, and mysterious emails in the middle of the night weren’t likely to help with his chronic lack of quality sleep.
Beck gazed at the screen once again. Hello, Lisa1957. He clicked on the message. It was brief: And so it begins, Sheriff. I hope this note finds you well. I have done a lot of homework on you, and I hope my instincts about you prove true because I have a feeling I am going to need your help very soon.
Beck cradled his chin in his folded hands. Done a lot of homework on you? Going to need your help? And so what begins?
There was no valediction, no name beneath the message. Was Mei O’Day the sender’s name? That would be an odd combination but possible. He decided to let Google decide, but when he got no hits, he examined the name again, this time more carefully. It wasn’t O’Day with an O. It was a zero. Zero Day Mei. He Googled that. It returned a number of hits on two Chinese pandas named Mei at the Atlanta Zoo as well as a story about a computer hack of some kind. Nothing immediately useful.
He hit reply and typed out Who is this? Then he waited twenty-five long minutes before summoning the courage to click send. Immediately, another email arrived in his inbox. Delivery Status Notification (Failure).
The communication was meant to be one-way.
Copyright © 2024 by Bruce Borgos
