they were.
Ingress complete, they began working on phase two of tonight’s operation. They had to keep Hanley away from Ryan Sedgwick, or anyone who worked with Sedgwick who would recognize Hanley, and they had to do it while preparing for the potentiality of a terrorist attack.
Stage three was to eyeball every single person in the building and evaluate them as a threat.
And stage four was to stop a terror attack.
It was going to be a long night.
Zoya had been looking through the faces in the crowd in the living room, and she saw something that caused her to whisper into her mic. “I spy the Russian ambassador. He’s here with a pair of security. They appear unarmed.”
“Kind of like us,” quipped Court.
* * *
• • •
Two unmarked and massive semi-tractor-trailers rolled north up Clayallee shortly after nine p.m., under heavy cloud cover that made the evening dusk near black. They passed the Museum of the Western Allies in Berlin and followed along with the speed of the light evening traffic, staying several lengths apart.
No one on the road paid any attention to the big trucks, not even when they slowed and made a left onto a two-lane, unlit wooded track. The vehicles rumbled at slow speed into the trees of Grunewald, the largest green area in the city of Berlin, leaving the lights of Clayallee and the mansions along the road behind, and continuing on through the trees for a hundred meters.
Both vehicles then slowed and pulled as far as they could to the right, onto the narrow shoulder, just steps from the parking lot of a Swiss restaurant. The pneumatic brakes on both vehicles hissed air as the trucks parked. Two men in the cab of the rear vehicle leapt out and ran to the back. The rear trailer’s tail pointed away from the woods and back towards central Berlin, and when the men opened the heavy doors, they peered inside and saw nothing but darkness.
But only for a moment. Haz Mirza stepped out of the cab of the front truck, and he jogged back to the open doors of the second vehicle. He wore a small laptop computer on a sling so that it was propped against his chest; there was a tiny joystick attached to the USB port on the side, and once he had stopped jogging he focused his attention on the screen in front of him. He tapped some keys and soon dozens of little red lights began glowing inside the trailer.
The lights switched, one by one, from red to green.
Mirza looked back up the wooded road and towards Clayallee in the evening dim. There were a couple of cars heading this way, but nothing that looked threatening to him or his operation.
And if there were threats out here, Mirza knew the two men with him both carried short-barreled, folding-stock AKs under their light jackets.
He reached down to his keyboard, took a deep breath, and said “Allahu akhbar” while pressing a pair of command keys.
The high-pitched sound of one hundred sixty spinning motors echoed out of the large trailer, the buzzing so loud it was almost painful. He checked the road again and found the coast clear enough, so he tapped a few more keys.
At nine fifteen p.m., one at a time, weaponized quadcopters automatically disengaged from metal racks lining the side walls of the trailer and began flying slowly out the back of the truck.
The first meter-wide craft moved past Mirza and the two other men’s heads at walking speed, and then it climbed just as slowly. There was a canopy of trees over the road, but the forest was well kept, and the limbs didn’t cross the road until they were fifteen meters high.
The first drone stopped its climb at a height of just ten meters, and behind it, at a separation of twenty horizontal meters, the second drone flew out of the trailer.
Other than a small green light, visible only on one side of the quadcopter, the devices were all but invisible in the day’s dying light, and they flew straight along the wooded road, passing over cars without anyone taking notice.
Mirza kept checking his computer, watching the camera view of the lead vehicle, which he called “the eye.” This first drone would be Mirza’s reconnaissance craft. Though all Kargu drones had cameras, this one unit would be kept above the flight, helping orient him as he organized the nonautomated portion of the attack to help him send each vehicle to exactly