1503935582 by Steven Konkoly

Author:Steven Konkoly [Konkoly, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503935587
Published: 2016-05-17T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 38

Lisa Fesko, former US Army captain, focused the night-vision spotting scope on the eastern edge of the airstrip and triggered the digital recording function. Three nights ago, a convoy of military-style vehicles had delivered a small garrison of armed guards and a shipment of heavy equipment to the previously abandoned hangar.

Armed men patrolled the hills and placed surveillance sensors in a wide, oval-shaped perimeter around the airstrip, while a pack of technicians off-loaded the contents of the heavy transport trucks. From her position nestled into the front of a hill overlooking the airstrip, just under a mile away, Fesko had a sweeping view of the facility, without the corresponding risk of detection.

Patrols out of the field remained confined to the first ring of lower hills forming a shallow bowl around the runway, reinforcing the tight string of motion sensors and thermal-detection cameras placed just beyond the hills. The security strategy served well to keep hikers or curious locals from getting too close, but did little to dissuade serious surveillance, especially when an interested party had ample warning.

Fesko had been sent into the hills with Landon King, a former recon Marine, eight days earlier, when her organization learned about an imminent two-day construction project to level and repack the neglected dirt runway. A contact at the Ramona-based construction outfit hired to do the work passed the information up the chain of command as soon as it had been announced. It had been a lucky break, considering the vast scope of recent and unusual shell-company-sponsored land purchases in Southern California—far too many to watch at any given time.

The construction tip-off turned out to be one of the California Liberation Movement’s most important discoveries in months. They watched the men dolly sections of an SQ-17 Raptor drone into the hangar, along with enough communications and electrical equipment to run a small airport. Even more ominous, they off-loaded air-to-ground missiles from one of the trucks. Fesko couldn’t positively identify the exact missile type from this distance, but she recognized the unmistakable quad-carrier dolly used to transport helicopter or drone armaments on military runways or aircraft-carrier decks.

She and King had cut their daily ration intake in half to extend their time at the observation post. An armed stealth drone represented a serious escalation in the One Nation Coalition’s war against the secession movement, its significance underscored by the past two days’ events. While they couldn’t directly prove ONC was behind the reactor failure in Del Mar, the timing suggested their suspicions were well founded. The assassinations were undoubtedly the work of the industrialist-funded group, likely perpetrated to turn the tide of public opinion permanently against the CLM.

Personnel at the end of the runway scrambled in the darkness to ready the drone, which had appeared several minutes ago, when the supposedly decrepit hangar’s bay door slid open way too smoothly to reveal a dark-red, dimly glowing interior. The Raptor carried a stubby missile on each side of the fuselage, attached to a pylon under its swept-back wings.

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