Chapter 47

47

As the others drifted toward the other side of the bar, I faded back toward my booth where my kit bag was.

From it, as quietly as I could, I removed a gray cloth travel bag about the size of a shaving kit. I tucked it into my jacket and then grabbed Colleen and stepped away with her into the smaller part of the restaurant to the left of the front door.

"What's up?" she said.

I led her to the door of the banquet room and stopped.

"Just stay by this door," I said as I cracked it. "And if someone comes over, knock."

"Okay. But why? What's up, Mike?"

"I'll tell you in a sec," I said as I closed the door behind me.

Inside the banquet room, there were four square restaurant tables backed up against the rear wall. One of them was stacked with folded table linens that I placed the gray bag on top of.

The window to the left of it looked out the side of the restaurant into the dark of the gravel parking lot. It stuck fast in its ancient casing about an inch up when I cracked it open, so I had to smack its top rail hard a few times with the heel of my hand to get it open half a foot.

The thin plastic rectangle I took out of the bag was about the size of a paperback book. It had four short segmented arms on its top side and on its bottom there was a little gripper device along with three fish-eye camera lenses in a pyramid array.

As I hit its power button, the little arms of the drone all clicked into the up position and a sound like a tiny Weedwhacker filled the small room.

It was a fishing drone that I had brought along on my road trip. It had a line gripper on the bottom where you clipped in your hooks and bait. With it, you could cast your line basically anywhere, out to unimaginable lengths—five hundred yards or more—and then release everything. It made fishing off the beach especially incredible.

But for my purposes right there and then, I wasn't interested in the fishing accessories.

I quickly slipped my phone into its Nintendo-like thumb controller frame.

The drone had a 4K camera on it with thermal night vision so it was about high time I sent it up to take a look around.

The buzzing thing tickled my palm as I brought it to the open window and I reached out and slowly let it go and watched it hover there like a freed hummingbird. Then I thumbed the controller forward and up, and its blades made a slightly higher pitched sound as it rose out of sight into the night air up above the restaurant and parking lot.

The firmware for it was already downloaded onto my phone as an app. On it I toggled the camera choice to FLIR thermal and then looked down at the screen as an overhead shot of the roof of the restaurant and the parking lot appeared in glowing purple and pink and orange and yellow.

I made the drone ascend higher and saw the Main Street stores appear and then the block where my Airbnb was. As I halted the drone high above the village a moment later, I saw that to the east, the roadblock in the little canyon on Route 4 on the other side of the river was still going strong. To the west, I didn't see the BearCat, but I did see a bunch of vehicles and police officers over by the post office on the other side of my rental building.

I sent the drone a little higher as I zoomed closer to the post office staging area. I saw that they had another roadblock several hundred feet north of the post office on Route 4 by the canoe place.

Then I hovered up high over the post office and thumbed the 32X zoom down at the cops in its parking lot. There had to be over a dozen of them milling around. They must have some kind of war room in the post office itself.

I smiled as I remembered all the drone intel we had gotten in Iraq and Afghanistan. How much had that cost? Hundreds of millions of dollars? Now here I was with my own personal eye in the sky. For what? Five hundred bucks?

"God bless America," I said.