“Doc, this is Jake, one of our pilots. We just got this baby last month. It’s a DJI Inspire drone. This is only our third mission with it.”
As I watched, Jake fitted together the drone’s tubular framework—carbon-fiber tubes that snapped together to form an H, each leg about two feet long—and then began attaching rotors at each of the four corners, followed by a chunky central module that appeared to contain an electric battery and a swiveling camera. “It’s powered by a twenty-four-volt lithium ion battery,” Decker explained. “Like a cordless drill or circular saw. Gives us about thirty minutes of flight time. We’ve got a rack with spare batteries always on charge, so if we run low, we land and swap out. The camera’s got high-def video and night-vision capability, so we can get HD imagery day or night. It’s also got infrared—thermal—so we can look for hot spots, like people.”
Decker helped Jake lift the drone out of the truck and set it on the ground. Then Jake removed a control unit from the big case and powered it up, and with a soft whir, the drone rose into the warm sky and floated toward the house, a surreal Star Wars-looking craft flying toward a backwoods Tennessee cabin.
A FLICKER OF MOVEMENT CAUGHT MY EYE, A SPECK drifting across the sky, so subtle that at first I took it for a floater inside my eyeball. But the speck was soon joined by another, and then several more, and they drifted closer, silent and graceful, silhouetted against the brilliant blue November sky.
I nudged Decker to get his attention, then pointed at the aerial congregation that was gathering, now beginning to circle over one edge of the clearing. “Reckon your drone could slip into formation with those buzzards? Follow their noses to whatever they’re smelling?”
Decker grunted, then radioed the pilot. “You see the buzzards? Just above the southeast edge of the woods?” After a pause, he added, “Sure, go on down and take a look. Let us know if you see anything.”
“Too bad that drone’s not carrying a smell-o-vision camera,” I said, and Decker smiled.
A moment later, his head snapped up and he raised a pair of binoculars, sighting toward the distant tree line. “They’ve got a visual of a body on the ground,” he said. “Cold. It’s not showing up on infrared. I’m gonna take two teams over there. One to check it out, the other to cover them, in case there’s any threat from the house. We’ll move the BFT and the Humvee around there, too. Soon as we—”
Decker was interrupted by the warble of a pager. He snatched it off his hip and glanced at the display, then muttered, “Shit.” He looked around for his deputy commander. “Ron,” he called.
Ron jogged over. “What’s up, Captain?”
“We’ve got a hostage situation in Knoxville,” he said. “Domestic disturbance. I’ve got to scoot. I’ll take my truck, the Humvee, and an entry team. You and the other guys follow once you’ve cleared the house here.”
AN HOUR LATER, I FOUND MYSELF STARING DOWN AT the bloated body and blasted face of Jimmy Ray Shiflett, if Waylon’s memory and the driver’s license photo could be trusted. The body lay a few feet from a massive stump. Judging by the bloating and the insect activity—swarming green blowflies, white dabs I recognized as masses of fly eggs, and swarms of small, freshly hatched maggots in the eyes, nose, and gaping crater of a mouth, he’d been dead for somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours.
A hole freshly dug beneath one side of the stump was filled with a slurry that Waylon sniffed and then carefully tasted before pronouncing it a mixture of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane—“rocket fuel, basically,” he said. “The stuff them long, skinny drag-racing cars burn.” He frowned. “That right there’s the same stuff Tim McVeigh used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City, kill all them workers and little kids.”
“But what happened here?” I asked. “This stuff in the ground didn’t go off, but something must’ve gone off, to do this to him.” The “this” I was referring to was massive damage to the dead man’s face. Much of his mandible appeared to have been blown off, along with some of his upper teeth and part of the upper jaw. His right thumb and first two fingers were destroyed as well.
Waylon gave a dismissive grunt. “What a dumb-ass,” he said, peering down at the dead man. “Always thinking the fed’ral gov’mint or the U-nit-ed Nations was gonna come haul him off to some prison camp. But he ends up killing his own self with plain stupidity.”
“Waylon, I’m not quite following you,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Hell, the stupid sumbitch, he bit down on a blasting cap. To crimp the end.” He pointed at two bits of thin, insulated wire, one red and one yellow, lying on the ground nearby. “Them there’s the wires. He set the fuckin’ thing off in his own damn mouth.”
“Ouch, man,” I said. “Seems like pliers might have been a better choice.”