Featured Excerpt: Shades of Mercy by Bruce Borgos

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 nuhaigottome997@gmail.com, 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.”