The Vulture Read online

  Sam packed up her gear and drove off after assuring Ruth and Ike she would be back for lunch, so if they had plans that required complete privacy, they should act accordingly. Ruth told her to shut up.

  “She has a point, though, Ike.”

  “What. You want to romp? Now?”

  “No…yes, but that’s not what I meant. What the heck was Charlie thinking and how can that flimsy thing possibly solve your problem?”

  “Patience. According to the book this is a technological marvel. Why don’t you unpack the rest of the boxes? I gather we have real estate in town and agents on their way to help us. We will need to get them settled when they arrive and by then I hope we will have something for them to do besides pretend to be looking for fracking sites.”

  Ruth tackled the rest of the boxes and Ike studied the drone manual. After an hour he’d unpacked all of the components and began to assemble it. Completed, it appeared much larger than either thought. Sam returned with her map and an expression that indicated she’d been successful.

  “You were right. The signals are coming from and going to the New Star Ranch. Where did that thing come from?

  “Good. That ‘thing’ came out of the crate. Not much of a toy now, is it?”

  In fact the assembled aircraft did not look like what any of them had imagined. It had a wingspan of nearly five feet and with its propulsion unit mounted high on its dorsal surface, it resembled a flying shark as much as it did a plane.

  “You’re going to launch that over the ranch? They’ll see it in a minute and probably shoot it down.”

  “Wait, wait for it….” Ike opened what appeared to be a briefcase but which revealed a panel that looked like the binnacle of an airplane cockpit. He flipped a few switches and the whole underside of the aircraft changed color. More than color, it seemed to sprout feathers. “Behold the wonders of nanotechnology.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “This stuff is not my long suit but apparently the underside of the unit is covered with an ultrafine network of micro filaments or tubes which can respond to signals sent to them somehow. During the day, the underside of the thing looks for all the world like a large turkey vulture. That’s its name, by the way, the Vulture. The Air Force and the CIA have the Predator, we have the Vulture.”

  “Should I be impressed?”

  “Yes, you should. Not only that, but it is programmed to circle like one of those birds. The problem with the earlier models of this kind of drone was that they looked like a bird, but that’s all. They simply flew in circles. It wasn’t long before the people on the ground caught on. This one banks and sails like a real bird. If you watch it through binoculars, for example, even the feathers seem to flutter in the air current and when it banks, according to the book, they flare as they would with a bird. Now watch.”

  Ike flipped another switch and the feathers disappeared and the underside turned sky blue. “If you were watching it with binoculars, it just disappeared from view.”

  “And at night?”

  Ike flipped another toggle and the drone turned matte black.

  “Holy crap. I want one of those,” said Sam.

  “I’m impressed. Wow, think of the possibilities,” Ruth said. “You could have a dress made with that stuff. Someone comes to your party in the same outfit, you flip a switch and you have completely new dress.”

  “Umm, yeah, I guess that could work.”

  “Or you could change the color of your car to match your shoes. The applications are limitless.”

  “Now you’re being sarcastic.”

  “You noticed. But, you heard it here first, that will be but a few of the civilian applications that some guy with perfect teeth and hair will flog on TV and sell a million dresses, cars, hats, you name it. It is a brave new world we are entering, kiddies.”

  Sam grinned. “Okay. So what kind of payload can it carry and for how long?”

  “It says here it can carry a HiDef TV camera and transmitter and at night, a night vision unit. It can fly around for eight hours before it needs refueling. Charlie says if we need really close-in stuff, they will reposition a satellite for us, but there would be a ginormous hassle to do that so we’re not to ask unless we have something really big.”

  “There is more space in there.”

  “Yeah. The manual says it can carry a small explosive charge. I guess it would be rigged to go if it were to fall into the hands of the wrong people.”

  “Or a small bomb?”

  “That, too, I guess.”

  “So now what?” Ruth asked.

  “Now we fuel this bird up, set it to Vulture mode, enter the geographic coordinates and launch. Later this evening we can bring it back and reconfigure it for a night run.”

  “One problem,” Ruth said. “What about our nosey oafs? Mightn’t they be watching? And won’t seeing this thing buzz off the property give them the heebie-jeebies, not to mention a very bad impression of who we are?”

  “Point taken. We need to secure the perimeter. Charlie sent us some cameras and a monitor in that box over there. Let’s take a walk.”

  ***

  Ike studied the monitor. It had taken him a few minutes to adjust to its relatively small size. The camera in the bird, now circling the New Star Ranch a few miles away, held steady and in focus irrespective of the maneuvers the “bird” made. Ike guessed there were servos that kept the camera pointed and focused as the platform shifted its position in the sky.

  “What did you expect to see?” Ruth had fixed sandwiches and passed one to Ike.

  “Anything from a herd of cattle to a battalion of tanks. I don’t know, really. The place is just too odd not to study. I would love to search one of those barrack-like buildings.”

  “Could the Vulture swoop down for a closer look?”

  “It could, but I don’t want to draw attention to it just now. Up close only an idiot would think it’s a big bird.”

  “So you got nothing.”

  “Not nothing, but what I do have, I don’t know how to interpret. There are men down there. They move around like they have things to do. You know, working and so on. Then there seem to be some young people there as well. A fair number. It’s like a camp. But boys only.”

  “Any women?”

  “Oh, yeah. No girls, though.”

  “Hey…”

  “I mean there are women, a number of them. Not as many as the men, but they are there. What I meant was, there don’t seem to be any female children.”

  “And?”

  “And…I don’t know. Why boys and no girls? I don’t like asymmetry.”

  “If I had any idea what that meant, I’d be impressed. What does it mean, anyway?”

  “Look, you have men. You have women. Normal arrangement only more of the former than the latter. That would be an acceptable ratio on a ranch. Okay, you have children. One expects a similar ratio of boys and girls. Not true here. I don’t see any young girls at the ranch, just boys. I want to know why.”

  “Okay, here’s a flash, Sheriff. At the distance you are scanning, you couldn’t distinguish boys, young males, from girls. Not if they are in jeans and checked shirts, have short hair, and wear Nikes. I know you think you can but you can’t. Those things that obsess men, the bumps and curves, don’t appear until later. You could have all girls, for all you know.”

  “You might be right and you might not. If I am correct and there’s even a disproportionate number of boys to girls, I bet it’s important.”

  “You have a very suspicious mind. Okay, let’s say you’re right. How about they are running a boys’ camp?”

  Sam looked up from studying the screen. “I thought I read that the militia group there had a young people’s subunit called the pioneers…something…Young Pioneers. That could be them.”

  “There you go, She
rlock, the Mystery of the Too Many Boys solved

  “Okay, that would explain it. And yes, I do—have a suspicious mind, that is. Hand me a beer, will you?”

  “Here you go. Okay, enough with the gender issues, real and imagined. I’ve been thinking about my nano dress.”

  “Your what?”

  “The dress that is made with those micro fiber things that can change color and do stuff like make the Vulture disappear, that nano dress.”

  “Okay, the theoretical dress. What about it?”

  “How would it work if it disappeared, you know, went blank? Is it like Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility? Would I disappear too? That would certainly be convenient at times. Or would I be standing there in my panties? Or just wearing a dull white dress?”

  “And you need to know this why?”

  “It would make a difference if and how much I spend on underwear, that’s why.”

  “Eat your sandwich.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Charlie added the six pages of single-spaced notes the reporter from the New York Times had sent him to the growing pile on his desk. It told him more about Senator Connors than he really wanted to know and added little to his growing corpus of intel relating to Ike’s attempted assassination. Still, you never knew. Things connected in odd ways sometimes. “Everything is connected to everything else.” An eco guru told Charlie that once. He couldn’t remember where or when exactly, only that he thought at the time the guy was a complete phony. The swami had the circle of life or something like that sort of thing in mind, but in Charlie’s experience, connectedness between people and events meant something different and frequently sinister.

  Sam reported that she had pinpointed the receiver at the ranch, so Ike’s instincts were still sharp. In any event, it meant the operation in Maine could be shut down. When the calls ceased, something should happen at the ranch. They would worry. They would want to know what happened. Back in Maine, attorneys would appear out of the woodwork to protect their clients’ right to remain silent. Not that they’d need them. The men they’d picked up had not uttered a word in the days they’d been stashed in a pre-Guantanamo holding facility. So far no one had thought to provide them with their phone call, so no lawyers yet. Assuming everything is connected the way it seemed to be, two of their men in the hands of the authorities had to produce a reaction. Some of the activity should ripple up the chain to whoever was behind this. The whoever, Charlie felt certain, would be the same Martin Pangborn whose bios, news clips, confidential assessments, and intelligence constituted two-thirds of the pile on his desk. Releasing them didn’t necessarily mean turning them loose on the public, however. They might get lost in the system. Charlie loved that phrase. It covered all sorts of incompetence at so many levels.

  The problem with men like Pangborn stemmed from their ability to surround themselves with multiple layers of deniability. Charlie knew that no matter how deep they probed, they would never find any direct or admissible evidence implicating Pangborn to Ike’s attempted assassination, to Ruth’s, or to the cop in Virginia. At most, he would be an anonymous voice on the phone or, if he were to be in direct contact with someone, that person would be fiercely loyal like the goons they’d picked up in Maine or, like the bomber the FBI lost, be eliminated before they could talk. He made a call and the Maine operation ceased. He would wait and see what popped.

  ***

  Sam noted a flurry of activity on the ranch communication channel. She had not heard back from the cryptographers yet, so she could not know what was being said, but clearly, something happened to stir up the troops.

  Ike,” she yelled down the hall, “are you seeing anything? The phone lines to the ranch just lit up like a Christmas tree.”

  “Some people hot-footing to one of the buildings. I can’t tell if what you have and this are related.”

  “Charlie just sent this,” Ruth said and slipped beside Ike on his bench.

  “What’s it say?”

  “Umm…They shut down the transmissions in Maine. That’s one thing. He also says the two of you need to talk. Just you two? I’m hurt. And finally the Fifty-first Star is the key to the whole puzzle. Goody. Now, just what or who is Martin Pangborn?”

  Ike stared at the screen as the Vulture made another east-west pass across the center of the ranch and then banked north to start a north-south sweep.

  “Ruth, do you remember Maine?”

  “The slogan that started the Spanish-American War? Before my time. Or do you mean our vacation gone sour last year when you accidently blew up a helicopter?”

  “A fortuitous accident, as you recall. Those people had murder and mayhem in their hearts. Yes, that Maine memory. The incinerated chopper and its occupants belonged to Martin Pangborn. I gather he is still upset about it.”

  “I thought it was covered up by the Agency’s clean-up crew.”

  “As did I.”

  “I guess you and the ubiquitous Charlie will have to have your chat. That can’t bode well.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Every time you and your spook buddy have a sit-down, all hell breaks loose and people get hurt, as in dead.”

  “Not always.”

  “Often enough. Listen, Ike, I know we have to see this through and if it means things might be bloody, well okay. I get all that. But I have to tell you that I am not happy going through life in some nut’s crosshairs and it has to end. This is not normal living. I came to Picketsville to take a job at the college. That’s all I wanted to do. College presidents are supposed to face down sit-ins, angry parents, thick-headed board members, and insolent faculty, not be shot at, blown up, and maimed. You need to find a new line of work or I need body armor.”

  “Maybe made with nano technology so you could change its color? Or disappear?”

  “I’m serious, Ike.”

  “I know you are. The problem is, most of the really bad things that come my way have to do with who, or more precisely, what I was, not what I am now. The sheriff of a small town has his moments, but nothing like this.”

  “You’re right. Maybe you need a nano tech past that we can make disappear.”

  “I know you are being facetious, but the truth is, that is more of a possibility than you might think.”

  “What?”

  “I need to talk to Charlie. Let’s get this mess settled and then I will find a way to throw a switch and my past, like our Vulture, will disappear from view.”

  ***

  Martin Pangborn expected a phone call. He would wait. Meanwhile, he watched the rush hour traffic stop-start its way eastward toward Whacker Drive. Worker bees on their way home from dead-end jobs and wasted lives, he thought and smirked. If they only knew what he knew, but then, if they did, where would he be? Success, he believed required a ratio of something like a thousand to one, losers to winners and he was definitely one of the winners.

  Pangborn stood just under five feet ten inches. His height did not make him a short person as it is generally understood. But he didn’t qualify as a tall one either and that was a constant source of annoyance. As a teenager he’d longed to be at least six feet tall. All the popular boys were. Through no fault of his own he’d failed at that, but it might have been the last thing he would fail at. Well, except for the hair. Most of his hair deserted him in his early thirties, though the beginning of male pattern baldness could be seen in his high school yearbook. Like many men, he was in denial about it and sported a comb-over that began just above his left ear and streaked to his right. By now, precious little remained to comb, but he stayed with the practice even after the meager strands on his pate looked as if they had been drawn there with an eye liner. “More comb than over,” one of his employees had said. Unfortunately he didn’t know Pangborn had come up behind him and he had joined the ranks of the unemployed the next day.

  He gla
nced at the phone willing it to ring. Martin Pangborn did not panic. He had assets he had not yet deployed. That’s how he put it to Jack Bratton, Colonel Jack Bratton. Jack had risen to an E-7 rating in the Navy, no mean achievement, but Colonel was a reach. He’d achieved a small bit of notoriety as bodyguard to a series of bratty rock stars and wannabees. Currently, that is when he wasn’t cleaning up after Pangborn, he spent his time providing security, muscle, for concerts and off-the-grid sporting events. The latter had caught the eye of several local police departments but nothing had ever been laid at his doorstep. Nevertheless, in the inverted world of the Fifty-first Star, Colonel had been his landing place. Pangborn had taken to him and had seen to his advancement primarily because Bratton did not seem to have any sensibilities. He was the sort of man who matures from the boy who tortured the cat, pulled the wings off butterflies, or bullied those weaker and more vulnerable than he. There were half a hundred men and an equal number of women who would happily stand idly by and watch Brattan drown, fall over a cliff, or die of thirst while they sat on a case of Perrier. None had yet screwed up the courage or had the opportunity to do anything like that and probably never would. The Brattans of this world appear immune to the limits imposed on the rest of us.

  The phone chirped. Pangborn let it continue through five cycles and then picked up. “Go.”

  “Yes, sir. You want me to have a face-to-face with the guys so that they get their stories straight before they meet the lawyers, right?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I am only concerned about the welfare of some acquaintances. You know that. We have people in the federal prison system and the local Maine constabulary. Find them and see if you can determine what, if anything they need.”

  “Yes, sir. Message received.”

  Pangborn frowned and tapped off. He liked Jack in many ways and in others he didn’t. People had their uses and then they didn’t. Among other things, Bratton lacked discretion. His time in the useful category might be reaching its limit, he thought.