The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (30 page)

A pale red beam shot from the device’s mouth, reflecting on the quadrocopter, which was within twenty yards of them.

“The laser has a lock on the target system,” Poplowski said. “Now compiling data on the target-system sensors.”

“How long does that take?” asked Dubin, pacing frenetically.

“Done.” The kid glanced at the readout on his phone, then tapped in a response. “Now adjusting the collimating lenses to generate sufficient infrared.”

He again checked the readout and then input instructions accordingly. And again.

Dubin chewed a nail. “When will you shoot the thing?”

“It doesn’t exactly work that way,” Poplowski started to explain. “It’s more like an arm wrestle is taking place between the UAV’s system and the—”

He stopped himself short as the drone seemed to brake in midair, then dropped like a stone. It cracked the surface of the river and disappeared.

Poplowski jumped into a victory dance and whooped. As did Dubin, almost causing Fisk to miss the ring of his phone.

He eyed the readout:
PLUMMER, ROY
. He hit answer, and before he could say anything, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency man said, “I’m tracking three more quadrocopters launching from Union City.”

Fisk iced up. “Heading?”

“Manhattan based on current trajectory, one is going toward Thirty-Fifth Street, give or take a block. One is angled toward the low Forties, one to around Fiftieth Street.”

Fisk looked up. Dusk veiled any drones he might have been able to see before. “Empire State Building, Times Square, Rockefeller Center?”

“It’s very probable that . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Roy?”

“Now there’s more quadrocopters.”

“How many?”

“Another fifteen, maybe twenty. Like vampire bats.”

Fisk started to do the math in his head. Twenty TATP-bearing drones landing in crowded areas, where New Yorkers were currently massed to watch the fireworks, could mean casualties in the hundreds, maybe even thousands—

“And there are other aircraft trailing them,” Plummer said with a gasp that quashed Fisk’s hope that the new aircraft were a positive development.

“Not F-16s, I take it.”

“No, UAVs, three of them. Octocopters.”

“Drones with eight rotors?”

“
Huge
drones—fourteen, fifteen feet in diameter—with eight rotors.”

This explained the big rotor blade at Bantam Chemical, Fisk thought. Bigger drones to deliver bigger bombs. “But what good would bigger drones do?”

“Good question,” said Plummer. “They’re more susceptible to conventional defenses—they’ll be low-hanging fruit to the F-16—” He stopped abruptly.

Fisk saw the quadrocopters launch rockets of some sort. Incandescent orange baseballs, they looked like, hundreds of them, at least two dozen from each quadrocopter. On both sides of the Hudson, spectators let out cheers, no doubt believing the fireworks show was under way.

“The quads have released a hot-burning magnesium-based composition,” Plummer said.

Fisk braced. “Meaning?”

“Decoy flares, evidently.”

The flares didn’t rise much higher than the quadrocopters, then began drifting back to the Hudson River. As the flares’ luminescent trails gave each drone the appearance of having sprouted a pair of angel’s wings, Boyden’s plan became clear to Fisk: decoy flares were used by aircraft as a countermeasure against infrared homing missiles. The missiles sought out the heat signature from the flare, leaving the aircraft unscathed. Boyden meant these flares to neutralize the F-16s and helicopters protecting New York, clearing the way for the octocopters big enough to deliver payloads of TATP, in turn big enough to dwarf the casualty total of 9/11.

Plummer said, “Pray that the octocopters aren’t packing bombs or anything like that.”

A
total of twenty-four quadrocopters, according to Plummer, had flown out of an apartment window in an empty three-story building in Union City that was scheduled for demolition. The quads preceded four octocopters that rose from the building’s water tower, in which they’d been stacked. One of them quickly fell behind, Plummer reported, evidently experiencing technical difficulties. This offered Fisk no solace—the octocopter’s TATP payload might still detonate in Union City, which had nearly seventy thousand citizens packed into just over a square mile.

The swarm of drones then began its way to the Hudson River, which now resembled a mosaic, flickering from black to white in reflection of the building lights on either side. Under ordinary circumstances, at their speed of between ten and fifteen miles per hour, the drones would cover the mile and a fifth to Manhattan in five minutes. The westerly wind now accelerated that, leaving Fisk with closer to four minutes to stop them.

First he needed to defeat the veritable obstacle course between the Seventy-Second Street on-ramp and the shore—an eight-foot chicken-wire fence, two medians, three sets of guardrails so far, and the speeding cars and trucks he had to dodge. He couldn’t tell whether the moisture he felt was blood spurting from the wound in his hip, now reopened, or just perspiration. The pain said the former.
But he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except getting to the NYPD Harbor Patrol boat Dubin had ordered. Getting to the edge of the water where the boat would meet them, that is. Meanwhile he dragged Poplowski along.

“So can this work?” Fisk asked. For the third time.

“I just don’t know, man.” The spindly kid, probably not much of an athlete on his best days, struggled to haul himself over the final West Side Highway guard wall before the water. “Theoretically, yeah, I guess so. The thing is, I’ve seen fireworks videos recorded by drones flying through the fireworks, so obviously those fireworks didn’t do much to the sensors.”

Fisk helped him down, onto the mucky roadside between the highway and the water. “Could it work if we sent up hundreds of fireworks?”

“Could, maybe, yeah.”

Fisk was hoping for a stronger endorsement of his plan.

When the patrol boat was within ten feet, he ran and jumped the watery gap. Dubin, lagging behind, still on the highway median, waved Fisk ahead. Probably better he stay behind anyway, Fisk thought, so that he could oversee the other desperation measures, including distributing night-vision goggles to cops on the street so that they could take their best shots at the drones. Although unable to shoot down the octocopters, the F-16s could still aid in the defense of the city, ironically by use of their onboard pyrophoric flares, which ignited on contact with the air as soon as they were dropped, and, like the fireworks, might overwhelm the drones’ sensors. One more line of defense for New York was Poplowski, who remained behind in hopes of recharging the LightningRod using the Tahoe battery. And perhaps the Emergency Services Unit would deploy the LightningRods they’d purchased from his company.

Such were the countermeasures that the city had been able to muster one minute into an attack that Boyden Verlyn, Fisk suspected, had had several days to plan.

“We’ve been briefed, Detective,” the harbor cop in the boat’s small wheelhouse said as Fisk came aboard. “Except which barge do you want to go to?”

“Good question.” Fisk had counted five of the behemoths in a row along the center of the river, distributed evenly over the seventy or eighty blocks between Chelsea and Morningside Heights. “How about the one closest to Union City?”

The harbor cop spun the wheel, meanwhile flattening the throttle. The boat lurched out onto the river, the shore seeming to fly away. Fisk had to grab hold of a rail to remain standing. Noting the streetlights flickering like stars on the ink-black water, he might have believed the boat was in outer space if not for the repeated thumps of the bow.

In thirty seconds, the boat slowed alongside the barge, which was surprisingly large close up, bigger than a basketball court, yet rising and falling with the slightest wave. Fisk guessed three minutes had elapsed in total since the drones took off, meaning they were more than halfway to Manhattan.

Looking up, he discerned flashes from the gray clouds overhead: whirling rotors. As the boat engines quieted, he heard the drones’ whine.

He wasted no time, jumping from the bow and onto the deck of the barge, which was almost entirely covered with wooden crates, each the size of a child’s desk, their open tops providing a view of the sand filling them. The sand held in place cylindrical metal mortar tubes that launched the fireworks shells. Thousands of wires led from the crates to a single control panel, where a chubby twenty-something technician with a neck beard was sitting. He was snacking on a bag of cheese curls, until, seeing Fisk, he got up and brushed some of the orange crumbs off his T-shirt. He asked, as people always do when the police pull up, “Everything okay?”

Fisk met him in the middle of the deck. “Can you launch all the fireworks at the same time?”

The technician screwed up his face. “All the fireworks?”

“Yes.”

“Why would I ever want to do that?” Clearly it was the first he’d heard of this effort.

“To stop drones from killing people.”

“Drones?”

Fisk pointed up.

The technician looked up at the solar system’s worth of flares, then quickly down again, now with a wispy grin. “Dude, those are just flares.”

Pointing up again, Fisk barked, “Listen!”

The technician cocked an ear. It sounded like there was a swarm of giant bees overhead. Intermittently, the flares illuminated fuselages and rotors. If that weren’t enough to convince the technician, the wobbly octocopter bringing up the rear abruptly descended off the coast of Jersey City, tumbling end over end before splashing into the river beside the bow of a moored tugboat. The tug, rising and falling with the current, leaped into the air before disappearing in a ball of flame, a sun in miniature, accompanied by an earsplitting blast and a pillar of water like something out of a Bible story. A hot blast current buffeted the barge, nearly costing Fisk his balance again. The water and flames quickly shrank to nothing, having reduced the tugboat to smoking flotsam. Through the blaring whine in Fisk’s ears came delirious roars from the spectators on shore.

He exchanged a knowing look with the technician, whose eyes bulged. He stammered, “I’m still going to need some, you know, authorization.”

“How about my key to the city?” Fisk drew his Glock.

Raising his hands, the technician slowly backpedaled. Toward the control panel, fortunately.

Fisk followed. “What do you do? Just turn it on and then press the red buttons?”

The guy nodded.

Holstering his Glock, Fisk snapped the oversize toggle switch at the top of the panel into the on position, causing the red light beside it to dim and the green to illuminate. With both hands he swatted the red buttons—four rows of sixteen, the numbers beside each corresponding to crates, he supposed.

He turned to the technician to verify that he’d done it properly. Needlessly. Confirmation came in the form of a cannonlike blast from one of the mortars and a plume of flame that reached twice his height, sending a shell whistling into the darkness.

It appeared to be headed directly into the path of the drones. Two or three hundred feet overhead, Fisk estimated, the shell let out a gut-rattling boom and expanded into a sphere of yellow, red, and orange stars that drifted back down to earth with trails of sparks.

Meanwhile more blasts—hundreds of blasts up and down the barges—blended into a single roar, with the plumes of flame commingling to produce a reverse rain of shells, many bursting into neon comets that formed large tendrils, producing a palm-tree-like effect.

Other shells exploded at their apex into small stars that crisscrossed one another. Some generated a quick flash followed by a very loud report and then nothing but smoke. Each bang rattled Fisk from head to toe. He dug his thumbs into his ears to protect his hearing, and still his eardrums were pummeled.

Quickly it became impossible to distinguish one effect from the next, the airborne stars and candles and comets merging into a single giant multicolored sun. The conflagration gradually descended, engulfing the drones, which, like flies, dropped, one after the next.

They sliced into the Hudson River and sank slowly, their duct-tape-wrapped payloads shimmering in the reflection of what turned out to be the last shell to launch. It erupted into a cluster of stars that whizzed in all directions before forming a swaying American flag.

Amid a rain of sparks and ash and cumulus smoke that tasted of cordite, Fisk heard the cheers on both sides of the river transform to confusion, everyone wondering no doubt why the hell all of
the fireworks for the hour-long show went off in one twenty-second burst. He also heard his phone buzz with a text from Plummer of the NGA.

GOOD WORK! 4 OCTOS DOWN, 5 TO GO.

Swallowing hard, Fisk looked up through the thinning smoke, making out a brand-new set of octocopters preceded by another twenty or thirty quadrocopter escorts, most directly overhead, a few more than halfway to Manhattan. All he could do was draw his Glock and hope for unprecedented range and marksmanship.

At the same time, from the pier, Shane Poplowski managed to take out one of the octocopters with a recharged LightningRod—the drone fell like a twirling baton before knifing through the surface of the Hudson and disappearing unceremoniously. A Koala pilot proved a deadeye shot, taking down another of the octocopters with his Smith & Wesson 5906 service pistol at a hundred yards. Get that guy on the Olympic team, Fisk thought. Unfortunately, no other helicopter crew scored a hit, and on the city streets and rooftops on either side of the river, not a single sharpshooter got into position in time to expend a round.

As Fisk’s own rounds disappeared into the night around them, the three remaining octocopters turned downriver. The smaller quadrocopters turned as well before taking the lead.

Fisk’s mind played a feverish montage of downtown landmarks. Like One World Trade Center. Or how about the Stock Exchange? An explosion there would have the effect of crippling the economy. Or the Statue of Liberty—the TATP could take her head off. And then there was the High Line park, into which hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers—at least—were packed to watch fireworks.

Damnably, he could do nothing now but watch. Right away, however, he received a measure of hope: an F-16 flew over the barge and onto the scene, so fast that it seemed supernatural, the sonic
boom dwarfing that of the explosions of the fireworks shells. The fighter plane released dozens of flares. The balls of yellow-green fire drifted down into the path of the drones.

Whether or not the flares did any good was difficult to say because, on instructions from Dubin, thousands of fireworks shells shot into the night from the four other barges. They rose past the drones and burst into a galaxy of stars before seemingly setting the sky ablaze, lighting New York City like noon.

The drones plummeted.

To a watery grave.

All of them.

And Fisk felt it at once: the mix of exhaustion and delirium and satisfaction. The one-of-a-kind buzz that accompanied a case truly closed.

He might have fallen to his knees and kissed the deck, or maybe embraced the technician. But then he would have missed the end of the fireworks. He enjoyed every last spark.