Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1536266
and "do something." We don't need the details—the less we know, the better. Our agent reports: the duck-feeders are his backup, but the guy on the bench is neither ours nor a random jogger. What now? The switch must happen in a narrow time window. Thor devises a plan: scare him off. We drop to about sixty meters—the grenade-release altitude—and hover over the bench. The guy hears the drone, freaks, and bolts north. We track him until he leaves our AO, hand him off to Raven 1, then return to the empty bench. Our agent slips in, sits five minutes, then tosses a white plastic bag into the trash. Two minutes later the duck-feeders finish, mount their bikes, and ride off. Mission success. All day we repeat this sort of op—tailing people, watching cafés, covering our teams in the cemetery. Field grove a few kilometers out is our rare luxury: flying over town demands total focus—signal, battery, altitude, maps, plus constant comms monitoring. By afternoon we're told to pack up the grove and return to the brewery to continue flights from there. First blood With the flight base moved, the mission priority shifts: sabotage via elimination. We're to drop a fragmentation grenade from the drone onto an enemy soldier disguised as a civilian. Only we have that capability. Operating from the brewery increases risk during launch and recovery, so we must be stealthy, fast, blasting out of the building. We rig the grenade under the drone, pull the pin, then launch—ceiling overhead, two meters of loft, and an open window ahead. But the drone's sensors glitch, it jolts up then plummets. A hard throttle thrust breaks the erratic scramble, and we burst out into the open. Heart pounding, we race to our OP, sweating bullets. Next sorties will go smoother—we tell ourselves. We fly over a larger city park. After a day of agents dancing across town, our people now roughly know enemy operative faces. Thor issues ROE: the grenade blast must be at least 50 m from any civilian, and we must be certain the target is a combatant. We're given three suspects. From 150 m up we observe them under tree cover at two benches facing each other. The park is crowded—dog-walkers, kids, cars, buses. Flying with a live grenade drains battery faster, and from the brewery we're at the edge of range. Time is tight. We have to get to the target—at most five minutes of loiter time before we need to return and TRAINING