What Happened to the Light?

What happened to the light?

“Where’s the light?” the deputy in charge cried, as he stumbled over a root and dropped his flashlight. Its beam stabbed an uncoordinated pattern in the air as he struggled to his feet.

“Back in a minute,” Jimmy Neal said, peering into the darkness to discover the orientation of the drone. Was he flying it back toward him, or away? “I have to swap batteries.”

“Hurry,” said the deputy. “It’s black as a ni...—it’s really dark out here. I thought you said that thing could day up for a half-hour.”

“Close to a half-hour,” Jimmy Neal said, distractedly, trying to see the aircraft more clearly. “It depends on . . .” Shit. He definitely was flying it further away. He better fix this before it flew out of range. He’d never be able to find it.

Helicopter over Coaling strip mine, helicopter over Coaling strip mine. This is the Alabama Highway Patrol, the radio barked.

Jeb jumped so abruptly that his right hand skewed the cyclic stick and the helicopter lurched. “Highway Patrol. This is Heli 13,” he said into the mic touching his lips, as he pressed the trigger on the stick.

Heli 13, the radio said. Was that you shining that light?You’re interfering with a public safety investigation. We’re going to file a complaint with your station.

“Sorry, . . . uh . . .” What should he call him? “Sorry, trooper,” Jeb said. His hands were now slippery. He felt a bead of sweat roll down his cheek as well. Shit. What had possessed him to turn on the damn light?

“Is there a problem?” Cameron asked from the back seat.

“Nothing,” Jeb said. “No problem.” Cameron of course, had heard the transmission from the ground—or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he was listening to another frequency.

Yeah, there’s a problem—you. Cameroncould be the most annoying young pup in all of Alabama. Jeb had been glad when he was hired, fresh from journalism school at the University of Alabama. Unlike most of the others for whom it was just a job to be tolerated, Cameron threw himself into everything. His desk was littered with books, magazines, and hard copies of web pages about photojournalism. He hovered over the technicians whenever they worked on the equipment. He volunteered for everything—even cleaning the heads.

But he could be supremely annoying. His enthusiasm unfortunately extended to flying. He was a 15-hour helicopter flight student and pestered Jeb with questions about his piloting. That would have been all right, but he was scared of his shadow. Just now, when Jeb had played with the searchlight, Cameron has said, “Are you sure it’s okay for us to turn that on? I don’t think we’re supposed to use that.”

Shit. Why had he ever fixed the damn searchlight, or why hadn’t he talked to Rebecca about it? He knew why. That bitch. All she cared about was whether the pilots wore their helmets and had freshly laundered flight suits. Nevermind whether they got in the air quickly and covered what the stations wanted. She was going to get all their contracts cancelled and Jeb would have to go back to flying tours over Mobile Bay, or worse, giving flight instruction to self-absorbed rich kids and doddering retirees.

He peered at the altimeter and then struggled to see the ground. Damn, it was dark.

“I don’t know why they even have us out here,” Cameron said. “I could take pictures of the dark back in the hanger—if we turned out all the lights.”

“Right,” Jeb said, wishing Cameron would forget which switch patched his headset into the intercom. Not Cameron; he never forgot anything.

Jimmy Neal had recovered the drone. Exhaling relief, he removed the big battery and shoved another in to replace it. He knew what the problem was: he had to use the searchlight to see the drone when it was more than a few yards away, and that added five- to ten minutes of battery use to each short flight. It would be better if he could save the light for when the vehicle was directly over the search area. But he had to see it to fly it—and he also needed to see the ground. It would be altogether too easy to smack it into a pine tree in the sharp ridges that memorialized the former strip mine, now repopulated with pine, eventually destined for the paper mill.

“Finally,” another deputy said, over his handheld radio. “You’ve got to get it lower. The beam is not bright enough.”

It had seemed like this would be a piece of cake when Jimmy Neal had sat in the conference room with the sheriff, pitching their proposal. “Thirty minutes over the target, then a minute or two to swap batteries, then back over it.”

The sheriff was an anomaly in Alabama law-enforcement. But then, Tuscaloosa County was an anomaly in Alabama. As the home of the University of Alabama, it had long accommodated both rednecks and radicals, cultured intellectuals and the Ku Klux Klan. A graduate of the U.S. Navy’s Aviation Officer Candidate school, the sheriff flew as a marine helicopter pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan and returned to his hometown to run for sheriff at the age of 28. Efforts to belittle his youth and to uncover some kind of embarrassment in his background were unsuccessful in preserving the job of the 65-year-old good ole boy incumbent. The combination of Crimson Tide football player, marine, pilot, and good looks was irresistible. He won in a landslide.

The sheriff loved technology, but so far had made little headway in persuading the county commission to come up with a couple million dollars to buy a helicopter.

He was, thus, quite receptive when Jimmy Neal went to see him. He also was quite knowledgeable and extended the meeting long past its intended one hour as he quizzed Jimmy Neal on drone control systems, powerplants, and batteries.

"What are you doing?! Where you going?!" The diver screamed. "I need the damn light!" The battery had reached the level of depletion at which the microdrone was programmed to return home, no matter what.

“This whole affair has been botched. Completely botched.”

The state trooper walked up to the sheriff. “Some damn news helicopter, probably from Birmingham, was a shining a searchlight all over the place. I told him we were going to shoot him down if he kept doing it.”

“What? What?” the sheriff said. “A searchlight?”

Shit, Jimmy Neal thought. “I think we've got it covered, Sheriff,” he said tentatively

“He don't have it covered, the perpetually hostile chief deputy said. “Every time one of the guys thinks he sees something, he shuts the light off and flies the damn thing back.”

“Can you still get that news guy on the radio?” the sheriff asked.

“I'll try,” said the trooper.

The trooper said something into his radio, listened, and said something else. The helicopter, which they all could hear heading away to the south, stopped, its rotors flapping. It switched on the searchlight and began to move in their direction. The trooper turned up the volume on his radio.

Damn! Jimmy Neal thought. If they would just be a little more patient.

The helicopter and its bright circle of light were getting closer. Jimmy Neal sighed and prepared to put the little drone back in its case.

"We’re taking fire we’re taking fire!”Jeb’s voice over the CTAF frequency was pitched an octave higher than usual. This was not good. Usually Jeb said everything in a practiced monotone with no inflection or emotion.They all teased him about it because he was so animated in face-to-face conversation.

“Jesus Christ!” the sheriff said. “Tell the helicopter to get the hell out of there before he gets shotdown.We got to get some guys over there to see what's going on.”

The trooper spoke into his radio, the chief deputy yelled at several of the other deputies, and they jumped into two of the sheriff cars. “Where we goin’?” the chief deputy asked.

“You heard the shots,” the sheriff said. “Just get on over there.”

There were no more shots as Jimmy Neal, the sheriff and his diminished contingent waited impatiently.

“We don’t know where we goin’” the chief deputy’s voice came over the radio. “It’s pitch black out here, and we couldn’t see any path, even if there is one.”

“Fuck!” the sheriff said. Then he looked at Jimmy Neal. “Can you fly that thing over there?” he asked. "Are you willing to risk it? They’ll probably shoot at it. I'll pay for it if it gets destroyed."

“Sure I can,” Jimmy Neal said. “Maybe if I fly through some gaps in the trees, it won't be so easy to hit. Sounded like shotguns, anyway, not rifles.”

Hepulled the little aircraft back out of its case, stuffed another battery in the compartment andlaunched it, now headed to the south. He waited as long as he could before turning on the searchlight. He was able to keep microdrone insight for a while by watching its blue and red LEDs. When he turned on the searchlight, the sheriff and the others clustered just behind him, looking at the image displayed on the iPad.

The tops of the pine trees were vivid, close enough to touch. “Be careful,” the sheriff said.

“I see a gap,” Jimmy Neal said. “Let me reposition . . . there!”

The screen showed four young man, one with shotgun. They were talking excitedly with each other, arguing. They appeared to be drunk.

The one with the shotgun raised it, pointed at them—he appeared to be pointing at them on the screen—and pulled the trigger twice. Jimmy Neal jerked the drone sideways with a flick of the cyclic. The sound of the shots followed the muzzle flashes on the screen by a half-second or so.

Jimmy Neal moved his left thumb and forefinger on the collective and the drone dropped down. “Ten feet off the ground now,” he said.

Without removing his eyes from the screen, he said, “If you look at the lower right, you'll see the coordinates. You might want to give them to the ground units.

"Good idea,” the sheriff said. He grabbed the radio from the trooper.

“That ain’tgoin’ to do much good, the chief deputy’s voice said over the radio after a few minutes. "We know where they are, now, but we can’t see how to get there.”

“Wait a minute," Jimmy Neal said, quickly flipping the switch on his console to trigger autonomous hover. "Is that helicopter still around? Have him go up to two thousand feet. Shotgun pellets won’t do much harm up there. And then he can turn his light on—down to where the cars are.”

The much higher powered searchlight on the helicopter provided enough light that the deputies were able to maneuver their patrol cars along a much neglected logging trail to follow their GPS-enabled maps to the coordinates Jimmy Neil and the sheriff had provided.

Meanwhile, the much lower angle of the much smaller searchlight aboard the microdrone fully illuminated the four jerks whose intoxicated confusion was ballooning. The apparent leader attempted a few more shots with the shotgun, but then had difficulty reloading it for further attempts. Each time he fired, Jimmy Neil jerked the drone sideways.

"Wait a minute," said the sheriff, shifting his attention between the radio and the screen. “That’s Mead Hamm. Son of a bitch! He's the kid we’ve been looking for in the damn lake. He's not in the lake."

"No, he isn’t," Jimmy Neal said, flicking the cyclic to jerk the drone out of the way of another group of pellets as the weapon pointed in its direction again.

"Well, son," the sheriff said "I guess your little machine – our little machine – found him after all, despite all of the bitching."

"Yes sir, I guess it did."

“That shit,” the sheriff said. “Getting all of us out here in the middle of the night to look for him, while they were having a beer and pot party all the time. Well, I’ve never liked the prick, and I expect even the lazy-ass district attorney will take an interest in this one. Fraternity brother of his father or not.Assault on a law enforcement officer.”

“Uh . . .”

“What?”

“He didn’t shoot at us,” Jimmy Neal said. “He shot at the drone.”

“Oh,” the sheriff said. “Right. Well.”

“But he did shoot at the helicopter,” Jimmy Neal said.

“You sure that wasn’t the trooper—or the chief deputy?” the sheriff asked. Then he laughed. "Take care of that thing, buddy,” he said.“We just might want to get some more of them."

"Yes sir."

"How would you like to become a deputy sheriff and be the director of the "Aviation Wing of the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff’s Department?"

“That would be awesome, sir,” Jimmy Neal said, as he flicked the switch for automatic hover. The screen now showed the group preoccupied with the deputy sheriffs who had leaped out of their cars with their weapons drawn.

He better bring it back soon. The battery was getting low.

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