Sting of the Drone (10 page)

Today, it was a recce mission, unarmed. HUMINT had reported an HVI holed up in a high perch just inside Afghanistan. No one had ever flown a mission to look up there before, but from the maps and the satellite images, it made sense that someone would hide there, at least in the summer. It was pretty inaccessible and you could surely see anyone coming. Anything that looked like a road ended ten miles away, then the goat path went up, and up, and up. The sheer mountain faces on either side of the wide valley formed a box canyon that ran for almost six miles before it ended in another mountain wall, with a little flat space, high up near a small waterfall.

Bruce could not help but think that it must have been really beautiful at the end of the box canyon, on that cliff, just below the top, in the cool shade, with a natural shower and pool, and a view of the mountains and the valley. He would see it up close fairly soon. The challenge was going to be flying through the box canyon without being seen, then maintaining an orbit long enough to start developing the Pattern of Life on the HVI, the data that would be needed to support an attack decision later on. The chameleon software would help, electronically changing the color of the skin on the bottom side of the bird to what the sky above it would look like from the ground below. But first, even though the HUMINT source was supposed to be good, he had to see if there were any signs of human life up there at all.

It had been ten days for the men in the rocks, ten days in the thin atmosphere at twelve thousand feet. That did not bother them, since they had lived at altitude for years. What bothered them was trying to figure out the electronic equipment they had been given, the short-range line of sight radios, the heat detecting binoculars, and the Russian Stingers with their precious batteries. Finally, that day when they turned on the Thuraya satellite phone for the one minute at a time they used it, there was the text message, “Storm front moving generally north.” It meant a drone had taken off and been tracked by the Pakistani radar moving toward their general location. Before they could alert the others, farther up the canyon, they saw it approaching from the south. As they had been told it might be, the drone was below them and its dark gray fuselage stood out. The electronic chameleon skin was only on the bottom of the drone. They were above it.

As the bird passed below them and made its way slowly up the canyon, they could hear the buzzing. They hit the alarm on their special radio. Three men farther up the canyon, sitting on the high edge of the canyon wall, grabbed for the SA-24. They flipped all of the switches to “on” and to “arm.” The long tube started to make noises, beeps and whines. The gunner saw the drone head on through the optical sight and hit the Target Designator button. He threw off the safety. The tones coming from the tube changed into one long, high beep. As the drone passed by them, he pulled the launch trigger. The tube jumped and shook. A flame leaped from the back of the tube as the missile shot out into the sky and after the drone, now ahead and below.

The image on Bruce Dougherty’s screen dissolved into a bright blue rectangle. “Jesus! This is no time for the blue screen of death, man.” He stood up in his cubicle and screamed at the computer support contractor who sat toward the front of the room. “IT, I need connectivity back to my bird, now, or she will just turn around and fly home in a few minutes.”

“Dude,” the civilian contractor yelled back, “chill. There ain’t no signal coming from your bird. The link shut down just as that flash started.”

“What flash? What are you talking about? I didn’t—” Bruce stopped, wondering if he had missed something on the video feed while he was watching the instruments, or rubbing his eyes to stay awake. “Listen, just reboot or whatever you do.”

There was still a smudge of smoke hanging in the high, thin air above the canyon and a dozen small fires in the grass and scrub bushes on the canyon floor below where the fuel and the pieces of the drone had fallen, scattered across a wide area.

The men on the top of the canyon wall packed up. They did not call in. They would tell their story in person. It was safer that way.

Dougherty filed an incident report, unexplained loss of connectivity to UAV, probable crash. The drones crashed far more often than the public was aware. The Predators especially were fairly fragile, underpowered aircraft. At the end of his shift, he went to his boss, Colonel Parsons, to discuss his suspicions that maybe something unusual had happened. Before he could raise his hunch, however, Parsons stood up on a chair and asked the other pilots and support team to gather around.

“What we do is secret, you all know. Therefore, we can’t have the big, public ceremonies that they do in the rest of the Air Force. But that does not mean that the Pentagon leadership or the President is unaware of what we do or who we are. Nor does it mean that they are ungrateful, quite the opposite.” Erik scanned the group, making eye contact with as many as he could.

“In fact, they have created a special honor for UAV pilots and team members, the Distinguished Warfare Award. It can only be given to those of us in the UAV units and to our nation’s new cyber warriors. It recognizes what we do is warfare and it is the new way of war.

“I am pleased today, on behalf of the Secretary of the Air Force, to present the Distinguished Warfare Award to Major Bruce Dougherty for his essential role in a recent classified mission.” Erik jumped off the chair and handed a folder to Sergeant Miller, who read the citation aloud to the group.

“Attention to Orders,” Miller began and then read a brief, uninformative script while Erik placed a medal on Bruce Dougherty’s flight suit. There was a brief round of applause and handshaking.

“All right, everyone back to work. We got birds to fly,” Erik ordered. He then walked Bruce Dougherty out of the building and to his car in the parking lot. Bruce sat up on the hood of his Mustang.

“You know what they call those medals in the real Air Force? The Desk Warfare Award, for guys who go to war without ever leaving their desks. Cyber geeks and Xbox gamers, us. It says right in the regs that the medal cannot ever be given for valor in combat,” Bruce explained.

“You wanna give it back?” Erik asked.

“No, boss, I want to fly again, like you and I used to do. F-16s. What I’d really like is a crack at an F-22.”

“Bruce, we have had the few F-22s we got for how many years now? And not one has ever flown in combat. You fly in combat every day. How many enemy have you killed so far? Bruce, the era of manned aircraft is over. We are the future of military aircraft. You want to be in something that goes fast? Take your Mustang out on the back road. Never any sheriffs out here.”

Dougherty laughed. “That’s the way I go home every day. Zero to a hundred in nine seconds.”

“Great,” Erik Parsons said, patting his friend on the shoulder. “And, Bruce, keep the Desk Warrior medal. You saved a lot of lives by the mission you flew in Vienna. We just can never tell anyone, about the bad stuff, or even the good.”

11

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30

PODILSKY DISTRICT

KIEV, UKRAINE

“You look better today,” Dmitri Bayurak said, thrusting his hand forward.

“Yesterday you kidnapped me from a steam bath and threw me in the back of a truck. Today I was picked up at my hotel in a Range Rover,” Ghazi Nawarz replied. “I look better. I also feel better. And you?”

“Your money hit my account overnight,” Bayurak said. “So I feel better, too. Let me introduce you to Yuri and Mykola. They have also been at work overnight. I will leave you three to talk about ones and zeroes. I have bigger numbers to deal with.”

The two Ukrainians led the way downstairs to the computer operations floor where over twenty young men hovered over computer screens. It could have been a control room for a bank, but these men seemed all to be in jeans and T-shirts, and looked like they had not been to a shower or a barber in a long time. Yuri and Mykola led him to a conference room with the same modern, Scandinavian design feel that had been present upstairs in Bayurak’s office. There were large flat screens on each of three walls. The fourth was glass, looking out at the computer operations floor.

Yuri pressed a button next to the door. The floor-to-ceiling glass wall went from clear to opaque, a milky white barrier suddenly appearing inside the glass. “Polymer dispersed liquid crystal,” Mykola said.

“Of course,” Ghazi said and sat down at the conference table. “So what exactly did you do overnight?”

“Hacked AAFI,” Mykola replied.

“Go on,” Ghazi said.

“The American Armed Forces Insurance company in Texas. Almost all the U.S. military, and ex-military, insure their cars, sometimes their houses, with AAFI. They give low rates and give good service,” Mykola continued.

“Why do I care? Am I looking to insure my car?” Ghazi asked.

“No, your Jaguar XS in Vancouver is already insured with Royal Canadian Sun,” Mykola smiled. “As is your condo.”

“You have been investigating me?” Ghazi said. “You are supposed to be investigating the American drones.”

“Enough fun, Mykola,” Yuri said. “We did. The main American drone control facility is at Creech Air Force Base, outside of Las Vegas. It’s a shit hole. People like to live off base. So we look in AAFI to see what Air Force pilots live nearby. Then we see which ones came there from Langley Air Force base in Virginia, where they train the drone pilots. Here’s your list of drone pilots now living near Creech, their street addresses, their height, weight, eye color, hair color, and what cars they drive.”

Ghazi began flipping through the printouts. “The pictures. They look very young,” he said.

“Some are old pictures. From the college yearbooks. And driver’s licenses. Some from Facebook,” Mykola explained. “But none of them are on Facebook now. For security, ha!”

“We also cracked Dominion Federal Credit Union, it’s like a bank. CIA employees use it,” Yuri added. “Here are active duty CIA people living in Las Vegas area. This one just bought an expensive condo, in a nice building downtown.”

“We want to go to Vegas,” Mykola interjected. “Is necessary to help with operation. More secure. You can’t be calling us from there, besides time differences. You’d be waking us up all the time.”

“Too risky. Too hard to get a visa,” Ghazi replied. “No, you can’t go.”

“No visas, we have American passports,” Yuri replied. “Already these passports are on file with the State Department. Such bad network security these people have. It’s a wonder everyone doesn’t have an American passport by now.”

Ghazi did not reply. “What about the drones themselves. Can we get at them?”

“You just did,” Yuri said. “Wasn’t that your people who used the Stinger yesterday?”

“SA-24,” Ghazi replied.

“Same thing. Russians copied the Stingers they got in Afghanistan years ago,” Yuri said.

“The drones are networked. Anything networked is vulnerable,” Mykola added. “We have plans. You’ll see. We have some boxes we need to ship your guys. And we’ll need an Executive Jet.”

“I want to kill these people, the drone people, not just hack them,” Ghazi said.

“Yeah, yeah, we got that. Not a problem,” Yuri replied. “Lots of ways to die.”

“Can we kill them with their own drones?” Ghazi asked.

The two Ukrainians looked at each other and exchanged a few quick words in their language. “Maybe,” Yuri replied in English. “With drones, for sure. Maybe not with their Predators or Reapers, but with drones, maybe. Easier to do if we are both in Vegas.”

“Before I left Kiev your boss told me he had seen a videotape the Austrian security service has, showing the special black drone that killed my father, do you have that?” Ghazi asked.

“Is not good, you watching your father die, but yes we have it, of course,” Mykola answered.

“I don’t want to watch it,” Ghazi replied. “I want you to send it to someone. With a letter. Make it look like you sent it from Vienna, like maybe you work for the Austrian government and stole it from them.”

“Done,” Yuri said. “What else?”

“The metros, subways. Did you start looking at them yet?” Ghazi asked.

“Mykola loves metro. He takes metro every day, rubs up against girls. Never asks them out, just rubs up against them and gets slapped, am I right?” Yuri teased his colleague.

Mykola blushed. He hit his laptop and began showing images on one of the large flat screens. “American metros come in two types: old and very old. The very old ones are harder to hack, no network controls. They use people to drive them, like in Kiev. Primitive. So, Boston, New York, Philadelphia are like that. The newer ones, Atlanta, Washington, San Francisco, we have hacked those. Piece of cake.”

Ghazi watched the maps and photographs as Mykola flipped through them in slideshow mode. “I need to know where we should put the bombs for maximum effect, how we get around security,” Ghazi said.

“Bombs. Always it’s bombs with you people. It’s the digital age man, you can kill with bits and bytes,” Yuri replied, “at least in the newer metros. The older ones you can bomb. We can do some surveillance through their own cameras. New York has a lot of cameras, easy to hack. Maybe have to send some people in to look around, too. Your people, not us.”

“We will have people ready, soon,” Ghazi said, wondering how Bahadur was doing with that part of the plan.

“Bayurak doesn’t want what we do traceable back to Kiev, back to him,” Mykola announced.

“Well, you know how to anonymize, bounce through servers in Saudi, make it look like it’s al Qaeda in Yemen,” Ghazi said.

“The Americans can figure that shit out now. Fort Meade, NSA, Cyber Command, those guys,” Yuri said.

“So?” Ghazi asked.

“So, we got to be in Vegas,” the two Ukrainians replied in unison.

“Fucking Christ, all right, you can go to Vegas,” Ghazi exclaimed.

Mykola high-fived Yuri. Then Yuri turned back to Ghazi. “Fucking Christ? I thought you were Muslim.”

“I was, as a child,” Ghazi replied. “Now I am a global citizen. I believe in what works.”