Chapter 366

Friday morning was going to be a busy morning. Lorrie and I had a meeting over in the agency hangar with Frank and Eric.

Howie arrived at the restaurant while I was sitting with Kevin and Cory Richfield. Cory had enough material on hand to make one frame and one device. The material would be in this morning to make the rest.

Cory had test assembled both pieces at his shop and now wanted us to do the same. He wanted to fly the drone with it on and at it full weight. All the disassembled components were loaded into his van, including the drone.

The three of us carried the boxes into the aircraft shop where the UPS shipping scale was. First thing was weighing and then bolting the device carrier with its extended stands for the clearance needed from the ground and composite propellers.

When all the components for the device came out of the box, Howie knew what we were building. Cory explained all the machining and why he did certain things to Howie.

From Cory’s explanations it was easy to see this was not the first special project he had made of this type. What my intentions were was to give the two camera drones the capabilities of delivering an anti-personnel or a concussion device - a small bomb in other words.

Based on what I was seeing in the Intel from Kampala, the terrorists were getting smarter and more advanced training and planning from somewhere, and the size of the groups were getting larger.

All of those things meant that it was only a matter of time before they achieved their goals. All this improvement in tactics had happened since the prince and his merry men had their personal meeting with Allah.

The training most likely was coming from Iran through Hezbollah, the ISIS or Chechen separatists.

Had Haamid been able to put the full 50 against the Morocco embassy, the outcome would have been tragically different. They succeeded in breaching the security wall and had been able to get a number of terrorists inside where the assault stalled.

From the questions and answer sessions with my 18 people who had been at Morocco, the attack stalled for a couple of reasons. First they had devoted all their manpower to getting inside the wall; they had no one supplying covering fire to keep defenders down.

Second, once they ran into heavy fire from the defenders, they continued to rush headlong at the defenders thinking they could just overwhelm them.

In the past most acts of the terrorists were almost always a bombing of some kind; car, truck or suicide bombing, by only one or a few individuals. All that changed with the ISIS.

The ISIS in its fast campaign that gained so much territory in Iraq and Syria had used multiple car and truck bombs and then before the smoke cleared, followed up with aggressive assaults against rescuers, civilians and troops alike. That combination created panic and hectic retreats.

These were the tactics that were now being taught at the training camps. Terrorism was evolving and security in Africa and the Middle East embassies was going to get a lot tougher. This was what I was seeing in the Intel for Kampala and what JBG would face at all the embassies that we would have starting in October.

I cleared my head of thoughts and reasons and went back to listening to what Cory and Howie were talking about. The empty assembly weighed 25 pounds.

The center section was three and a half feet long and would hold nine packages of C4, three stacks of three formed into a round tube; 12 pounds of explosive. With the battery and caps the unit was well below the 100 pound limit of the drone. In fact, with a different mounting the drone could carry two.