Page 71 of No Vow Broken

“Do you have drones in the sky?” I asked him.

“No, why?”

“Because we’re being watched by a drone similar to the ones from the attack against us in DC.” I put my back to the drone facing him. “Look over my shoulder. The drone is hovering just to the right of the big Y-shaped tree on the hill. Can you see it?”

The agent nodded and then turned slightly to hide his movement as he activated his radio and reported the threat to the other agent, who was now patrolling the back side of the church. Then the agent put his arm around my shoulder and turned us so that we could keep the drone in sight as we walked.

“I’ve asked Agent Walker to notify Operations as soon as he’s out of sight on the far side of the church. Unfortunately, it will be some time until extra agents can arrive.”

“I understand. In the event I may need one, do you have a weapon that I might borrow?”

“You can have my Glock. I have a second one in the car.”

We stood in a way that would block our movements from the drone, and he carefully slipped his gun to me. I slid it into my belt, hiding it beneath my sweater. We both knew it would be of limited use against a drone, but it was better than nothing.

“Thanks,” I said. “I hope I won’t need it.”

“I hope so as well. I suggest you get back in the church, sir. Hopefully we’ll get lucky, and they’re just surveilling us.”

When I entered the church, Lexi, Tito, Elvis, and Xavier were waiting for me by the door.

“Elvis and Xavier have something to tell you,” Lexi said.

“We may have a way to stop that drone,” Elvis said.

I looked at Elvis in surprise. “How?”

“Well, after the drone attack, Xavier and I decided we needed something better to protect ourselves against future drone attacks. I found a drone part, an antenna, lying in the street afterward, so I took it and spoke to Xavier about possibly building, or adapting, something portable to counter it. We reached out to a couple of our engineering colleagues at ComQuest who had been looking at portable GPS jamming systems. We sent them detailed photos and measurements of the antenna and asked them how quickly they could build a workable engineering model. Since then, we have determined that the drone was probably a DJI Phantom model from the photos posted online. They threw together a couple of prototypes, and Xavier picked them up today along with some test equipment. We were going to evaluate them today and see if we could make any refinements. The gear is in the back of Basia’s SUV right now.”

“Right now?” That was a surprise and stroke of good luck. “But you’ve actually never operated it?”

“Nope, but if our friends say it works…then it works.”

“But it’s still an untested prototype,” I reminded them.

“True,” Xavier said. “Regardless, we could try it. Do you have any better ideas?”

Unfortunately, I didn’t, and honestly, I was intrigued by the potential of a drone suppression system. “How does it work?”

“It has two parts,” Xavier explained. “The first part is a powerful omni-directional signal jammer targeted specifically to the known frequencies used by these drones. By knowing their frequencies, we can pump more power into those narrow bands, providing more range and effectiveness.”

“How can you determine what the drone frequencies are?”

“From the antenna we recovered.” Elvis said. “Our friends tested it and were able to determine which reception frequencies the antenna was optimized to operate on. One downside to the jammer prototype is that it isn’t man-portable. It needs an AC power source, not a battery. But 110-volt power with at least a fifteen-amp circuit should be sufficient to provide an effective jamming radius of about three thousand feet. We can plug it into any socket in the church and once the shield is up, the drone shouldn’t be able to operate within about half a mile.”

Interesting and surprisingly simple. “What’s the second part?”

“That may be the most helpful in getting back at these guys,” Elvis said. “It has a very selective signal detector. The detector is also tuned to the same drone frequencies. So, you know what that means.”

I understood at once where they were going with this.

“We can get multiple bearings on the drone control signals and then triangulate on the drone operator’s position,” Elvis continued. “Our friends modified an existing RF locator that had an existing map function already integrated. So, once we get the signals, we can place them on a map.”

Now things were getting really interesting.

“One important caveat,” Xavier said. “We can’t operate the shield and the detector at the same time. The strong shield output would overwhelm any other transmissions in those frequencies and blind the detector.”

I looked between the twins. “And both of these devices are in the back of Basia’s new SUV right now.”

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