Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [85]
“You fellas are more optimistic than I am,” Callahan said with a sigh. “His own bunch won’t ever turn on him. And you’ll have a damn hard time get-tin’ the word out, anyway, what with all the TV folks kissin’ up to him all the time.”
“There are still some honest people on the radio,” Ford said.
“And don’t forget the bloggers,” Parker added. “They’ve shown that they can spread news the mainstream media doesn’t want heard. All it’ll take are a few brave men and women at first who are willing to tell the truth. It’ll mushroom from there.”
“I hope you’re right,” Callahan said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
The guests began to arrive while the sun was still up. Callahan already had meat smoking in a barbecue pit, and delicious aromas filled the air. Ford, Parker, and Earl were dressed in their cowboy clothes. Callahan introduced them as his cousins from Houston, as they had planned. None of the guests seemed to doubt the story.
As they stood near the barbecue pit, Earl complained under his breath, “I look like an idiot in this getup. You two can pass for cowboys, but me …” He shook his head.
“You’re right, Earl,” Ford said. “You look like a little kid in a Hallowe’en costume. Or you would if kids still dressed like cowboys for Hallowe’en.” Ford grinned. “You just need a cap pistol.”
“Oh, thanks,” Earl said dryly. “That makes me feel a lot better.”
Parker took a pull on the beer he held. Callahan had filled a big washtub with ice and shoved a few dozen bottles of beer down into it.
“We’ll leave when everybody else does, right?” he asked.
“Yep,” Ford said. “I doubt if anybody’s watching close enough to notice there’s one more pickup leaving than drove up earlier.”
Earl said, “Uh … guys? What’s that thing?”
The agents turned to him. He nodded toward a range of hills about half a mile north of the ranch house.
Ford’s eyes narrowed as he spotted the aircraft flying slowly over the hills. It had an odd, streamlined look about it, and Ford recognized it instantly.
“Drone,” he said as the craft swung toward the ranch. “Damn it! Somebody’s decided to take a closer look.”
“You mean it’s a remote-controlled plane?”
“Yeah, with high-powered cameras mounted in the nose,” Parker said. “We’d better get in the house, otherwise it can look right into our faces from that altitude.”
Moving unhurriedly so as not to attract attention, the three men turned and walked across the patio into the house. Outside, Callahan’s guests noticed the drone plane as well and started pointing and talking about it.
“You think the guys flying that thing saw us?” Earl asked nervously once they were inside.
“I hope not,” Ford said. “Maybe we made it inside before it got close enough.”
He had a bad feeling, though. The cameras on a surveillance drone like that were powerful enough to zoom in from a long distance and pick up quite a few details. Even before the drone finished its pass, it could have captured digital images of everybody at the gathering, and right now somebody could be running those images through government computers at mind-boggling speeds, searching for matches.
The drone circled back over the hills. Ford thought for a second that it was leaving, but then it swung around again so that its nose pointed toward the ranch house. He grabbed a pair of binoculars Callahan kept on the mantel over the fireplace and lifted them to his eyes, peering through them and locating the drone in time to see the hatch in its belly slide open so something could poke out.
“Damn!” he exclaimed as he threw the binoculars aside. “It’s armed with a missile.”
“Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no!” Earl babbled. “Not again!”
Ford slammed the sliding glass doors aside and ran out onto the patio. “Everybody out!” he bellowed. “Get out of here! We’re under attack!” It made him sick to think the lives of all these innocent people were in danger because of the plan he and Parker had come up with. They had known the government—or at least, certain people inside the government—wanted them dead at all