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Two days after this, the pilot and loadmaster picked up the cargo from a freight forwarder in Houston, with no idea of either the origin of the crates or their contents.
Contreras knew none of this, of course; like the pilot and loadmaster, he didn’t even know his mission.
But he was starting to get some idea.
Next to Contreras in the cabin sat several pallets under a black cargo net. He’d been through the majority of the equipment stowed on board, and he understood enough to know what was in store today, even if he hadn’t been read in on the specific target or even the area of operations.
On one pallet sat stacks of black Pelican cases of different sizes, and each one housed a drone, along with spare batteries and technical manuals.
Some of the drones were no larger than the ones he’d been using in Guatemala, and they just had cameras, marking them as simple ISR devices, with one unusual feature. Small packages on top of the folded-up devices seemed to be tiny parachutes, meaning these drones could be launched directly out of the cargo ramp of the aircraft.
In addition to the ISR models, a half-dozen more units sat encased on the pallet, and they were significantly larger that the drones Contreras normally used. The case on the outside said “Hornet V-12,” and Contreras looked inside them. These were hexacopters, not quadcopters, and double the size of his reconnaissance models at twenty-eight inches in diameter.
This, of course, was so the flying machines could heft a larger payload, and when Contreras inspected the payloads, at first he couldn’t believe his eyes.
The six hexacopters each carried 250 grams of explosive charges mounted just aft of the camera on the belly.
These Hornets were hunter/killer models, and from what Contreras could tell, he was now in command of them.
Madre de dios, he’d muttered at the time.
Three more six-propeller units had folded-in boom arms, on the end of which Contreras recognized laser microphones, something else Contreras had never seen on a drone. Drones make noise while in flight, and this meant they wouldn’t be able to pick up speech through a laser while in the air, so he knew the aircraft would have to land and stop spinning the props in order to conduct audio surveillance.
Behind the pallet with the drones, three larger black cases, over four feet square each, rode on three smaller wooden pallets.
The three bigger cases all had specialized parachute rigs attached to them by the loadmaster, and Contreras had not been able to look inside them. Still, he could tell they were some sort of large device that would fall all the way to Earth when deployed, so he couldn’t help but wonder if the cases might each house some sort of ground robot.
The name on the side, “Greyhound V120,” made him wonder if the machine had legs like a dog.
There was no paperwork with the cases, so Contreras wasn’t sure how he was to control the devices when the time came, but he just told himself Cyrus wasn’t going to order him to deploy drones he didn’t know how to operate, so he assumed he’d get some instruction.
A quick glance outside into the night revealed to the Mexican that they were now flying over the sandy white beaches of Tulum.
Soon the SkyCourier banked over the dense jungle of the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve at six thousand feet, leveling out and then turning again on an easterly heading that took it back out over the water.
Contreras knew his position only by looking at the GPS on his laptop, and quickly he realized the pilot was flying a racetrack pattern over a few dozen square miles of land and water below, with the coast being the centerpoint of the racetrack.
He could only assume Cyrus was interested in someone or something in one of the massive homes on the rocky and sandy shoreline just south of the Zona Hotelera, or hotel zone, their bright lights piercing the darkness and visible through the portals around him.
Minutes later he received a direct message on his screen from Cyrus, ordering him to launch the three audio drones and two of the video drones above a particular location towards the southern end of their coverage area.
He asked the obvious question: how was he supposed to command the devices once launched, because he had no idea how to do so.
Cyrus’s response came quickly. Deploy as instructed and stand by.
The pilot directed the aircraft to coordinates fed him by Contreras, the loadmaster dropped the rear cargo hatch, and then Contreras powered up all five collapsed devices, following start instructions he’d found in their cases.
Contreras attached his safety harness to a slide bar on the side of the cabin, then stood, carrying all five units stacked one on top of the next like a stack of pizza boxes.
At the top of the ramp he waited until the pilot came over his headset telling him they were over the drop point, and then Contreras simply Frisbeed the units out into the night, one at a time, in quick succession.
Then he made the sign of the cross as they disappeared.
The two smaller and three larger devices fell through the air, tumbling and tumbling, but at just eight hundred feet the parachutes deployed, slowing them, and then all the arms on each device extended. The propellers began to spin, slowing the descending drones even more, but before the chutes sagged and fell, the attached parachute packs jettisoned with a boost from a small CO2 canister on board each unit.
The two quadcopters remained at altitude, but the larger models continued their steady descent under nearly silent intermittent propeller power.
The three larger units containing laser microphones landed to the south, north, and west of a massive hacienda on the water’s edge, the southernmost property Contreras could see through the portal before he looked away and back to his monitors, where he watched the images broadcast from the two ISR units hovering over the ocean.
