Sting of the Drone (11 page)

12

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17

MANDALAY HOTEL

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

The Peter Michael “Pointe Rouge” Chardonnay flew through the air. It was carried by the sommelier’s attractive assistant, who had attached herself to a wire, touched a control pad, and had been pulled rapidly fifty feet above the restaurant floor. There she had opened one of the many glass enclosures that held the extensive wine collection in temperature-controlled environments, a series of wine rooms that composed not a wine cellar, but a wine attic soaring above the diners.

Descending to tableside, the acrobatic wine steward announced, “So, we did have the 2009. You’re in luck, because it really is the best available year. Would you like it chilled?”

“No, no that will suppress the taste,” Colonel Erik Parsons replied. “Just leave it on the table, thanks.”

“You knew that wine was in the top case, didn’t you?” Jennifer Parsons said, smiling and simultaneously shaking her head. “Did you pick it just for the show?”

“I don’t know why you say things like that. This is the best California Chardonnay on the list,” Erik replied.

“So what is the occasion? This is not our anniversary and it’s not my birthday, which I think was the last time you took me to a fancy Vegas casino restaurant.”

“Do we need an occasion? It’s my night off. We live ten miles from some of the best restaurants in America. With our combined incomes, we can afford to live better than we do, especially now that we have the last of the tuition payments behind us.”

She looked at him as he tasted the wine. “Honey, we have been together for twenty-five years. I know you. And I am a working psychiatrist, so don’t tell me we have come here just because it’s Monday. Talk to me. What’s on your mind, GI?”

“Well, see, doctor, I have this friend,” Erik began. “And he has been having fantasies of flying through the air above a restaurant and hooking up with his wife, who is also in the air, and they do it somewhere between the Shiraz and the Merlot. But in the dream, they knock over this whole wall of Pinot Noir.”

Jennifer laughed and touched her glass to his. “That is an easy diagnosis. Your friend is probably a former fighter pilot who commanded a squadron of F-16s and is frustrated because now his squadron is a bunch of flying killer robots and neither he nor his pilots ever get to fly themselves through the air … which for them, when they were flying their F-16s, was better than sex.”

“Jeez, Jen, that was such a classical Freudian interpretation, I’m surprised you didn’t go for the F-16s are phalluses thing.”

“Ha!” she laughed. “Goes without saying.”

“Going supersonic, the high G turn, all that stuff was never better than what we’ve done together, really,” Erik said softly.

“Bullshit, now really, what’s bothering you?”

They had ordered the six-course “Degustation” tasting menu and the courses began to appear.

“I think some of the guys are getting ragged. Two days ago one guy clipped the wing of a UN 737 over Mogadishu. He says he never saw the plane. The Reaper spun out and hit a refugee camp, exploded. Amazingly, no one got killed. And the 737 continued on in and landed. Lucky.

“Another guy, Bruce, you know him, says he never saw the civilian walk right into the kill zone, just before he fired. Fried the guy, as well as the four bad guys.

“Then one of Bruce’s birds just seemed to disappear. We later found it on satellite imagery in pieces on the ground. Still trying to figure out whether he clipped the mountain or what happened.

“Out of seventy-five pilots, eleven have asked for early transfer, I dismissed three for DUIs, and eight have filed for divorce since they got here. Those are not normal numbers, Jennie. I am supposed to be a leader, inspire them, keep them happy, act like a team. That ain’t happening. Washington has suggested having chaplains and shrinks just outside the Ops Center, in case the pilots need immediate counseling.”

Jennifer Parsons had followed her husband around the world, moving ten times since they married. There had always been Air Force hospitals or off-base clinics where she could practice. She knew the stresses the military placed on most families and she had always felt blessed that she and Erik had maintained such a real partnership, that they and the two girls had always been such a team together.

“I can’t see any of the guys in your unit or their spouses because of the conflict of interest rules, but I do consults with my colleagues, so I hear things, always without names, but nonetheless …

“There is a lot of stress in the program. Let’s face it, they kill people fairly often and then they walk out of their dark game-boy room and they’re in the blazing Las Vegas sun, where it’s perfectly safe, fun is all around. It’s hard to live in those two worlds simultaneously,” Dr. Parsons observed. “You don’t want them to think of their job as just a computer game. You want them to know there are real people at the other end. But then when you achieve that they also know that those real people are killed like fish in a barrel, they can’t fight back. It’s not really a fair fight, so your guys get guilty.”

“It’s not supposed to be a fair fight,” Erik shot back. “That’s the whole point. We have found a way of eliminating our enemies that does not put our people at risk. Military leaders have wanted that forever. That’s why they put men inside big metal tanks or had them fly overhead in bombers, but then those things got vulnerable, too. I don’t want it to be fair and to have one out of ten of my guys killed. I want none out of ten killed. And that’s what I got with the drones.”

They stopped talking as the waiter explained the next course. They were used to editing their remarks when others were within hearing distance, when civilians were around. Erik hoped that, to the waiters, they looked like a couple in from Columbus for the medical equipment show that was filling up the casino’s giant convention hall.

“Trouble is, you got a bunch of your young pilots who spent their high school years killing pretend people on their computer games,” Jennifer said when the waiter had left. “They have to constantly remind themselves that this is not a game. And they’re not supposed to go home and talk about it with their husbands and wives. It’s an abnormal environment.”

“Truth is they know that we don’t really need highly trained pilots who can drive an F-16 to do this stuff,” Erik admitted. “And they know they may never get to fly a real fighter, one that they get to sit in. We’re buying fewer and fewer fighter planes and more and more drones. The days of the fighter pilot are dwindling fast. They’ve gone from being highly select, well-trained jocks to being, what’d you call them, game-boys?”

“You got it, Colonel. Game-boys with blood on their hands, who don’t always see how the sucker they just evaporated, who never saw it coming, in Yemen, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or Mali has anything to do with keeping the Homeland safe. Game-boys who sit up in bed in the middle of the night, let out a scream, and wake their partners, who find them covered in sweat. That’s what’s happening to some of them.”

With a thud, the wine steward landed tableside. She was attached to a wire and holding a bottle. “Is now a good time for the Pinot? Foxen from their Bien Nacido vineyard. Fantastic.”

Seven blocks away, they opened the champagne. “I always pop a bottle of the bubbly when a client finds just the right place for them and gives me their check,” the real estate agent said to Ghazi. “And I just know, Mr. Romano, that this is the right place for you. Completely furnished, ready to move in, thirty-three floors above everything. You can see the Strip out the bedroom windows and the mountains from the living room.”

Ghazi clinked glasses and sipped the celebratory drink. “It’s very nice. And the Internet speeds seem to be very fast. I need that to keep in touch with my business in New York.” He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window. “Is that the airport out there?”

“No, sir, the airport is over here. That’s the Air Force base way out there, but I guess you can see things taking off from there because you are so high up. Just a fabulous view. And because you are paying cash you can move in less than a week from tonight.”

After locking the condominium, Ghazi and his real estate agent walked down the brightly decorated hall to the elevator, passing a woman dragging a wheelie with a large computer bag strapped on top of it. “G’evening,” Sandra Vittonelli muttered as she passed them on the way to her apartment. Even though she was doing it every two weeks now, it had been a long flight from Washington.

As she unlocked the door to her unit, she could hear the landline ringing. Entering the living room, she felt the secure Blackberry on her hip vibrating. She reached the landline in the study while it was still ringing. “Please authenticate,” a man’s voice said.

She placed the four fingers of her right hand onto the phone’s small screen, then removed a card from a pouch that was hanging around her neck and inserted it into the side of the phone. Finally, she spoke into the handset, “Vittonelli, Sandra. I am code blue, repeat code blue.” With that, she had completed three-factor authentication and the phone began receiving encrypted voice traffic from the Global Coordination Center, forty-three kilometers away in the desert, on the airbase.

“Ms. Vittonelli, we have a potential signature strike pending.”

She lifted the computer bag off the wheelie and placed it on the floor next to her desk. The little study was still dark, she hadn’t had time to turn on any lights in the apartment. “Is it on the HPTL?”

“No, ma’am, not yet on the High Payoff Target List, but it sure fits the signature and we think we have two HVIs there.”

“You think you have two High Value Individuals? Do you or don’t you?” she asked.

“We are waiting confirmation from Maryland, but what we appear to have is a meeting of two of the Qazzani group leaders. We’re not sure how long it will continue. We’re afraid that if we don’t take the shot, the meeting will break up and the HVIs will leave.”

She knew what this probably meant. She would have to try to get out to the base as fast as possible. “Have you done a collateral scan?”

“Yes, ma’am, collateral damage potential is currently scored at zero.”

“How long have you had eyes on?” she asked.

“We followed the first possible-HVI there almost six hours ago. HVI two arrived about an hour later,” the voice from the GCC said. “But we have gone back and looked at historical images of this site from satellites and from our own birds passing by. Never seen anything but guys with guns around.”

“Where is Colonel Parsons?” she asked. Maybe he could handle this one, so she could get into a hot shower and then sleep in her own bed.

“Colonel Parsons said to inform you, ma’am, that he is on his way over to pick you up at your location. He was downtown. He should be there in about five mics.” Sandra groaned, there was no way that she could avoid driving out to the base now, but at least she would not have to drive herself.

She quickly changed out of the clothes that she had worn on the flight and into a tracksuit. She put her Yankees hat on to hide the disarray of her hair. When Erik called to say that he was downstairs, she was waiting for the Nespresso machine to finish pumping out an intensity ten demitasse of eye-opening caffeine.

It could be a long night.

13

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

KUNAR PROVINCE

AFGHANISTAN

“How will you kill your cousin’s husband?” the older man asked, as the two men sat beneath an undercut rock, amid the boulders on a hillside three kilometers from their vehicles.

“Just shoot him,” the younger man replied. “I am not one for the torture. It takes time and then there is the cleaning.”

“But he has been placing these little radios on your Toyota for money, money from the Americans. You should use your knives first.”

“Fadl, if he had not been placing the beacons on my Toyota, do you think that we would have that drone circling up there? This is a good plan Ghazi gave us.”

The two men squinted up at the blue sky, looking for the drone that they had heard almost an hour earlier. Both men were reluctant to move out from under the overhanging rock, to look around the boulders, to expose themselves to the all-seeing eye above them. They were also tired from the walking, alone, from the tunnel exit, up the hill.

“It will be a good plan if it works, but we have been here for many hours. The drugs will be wearing off soon.”

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

OUTSIDE LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

Erik drove the black Camaro only slightly above the speed limit. He did not want to be delayed by the Highway Patrol pulling him over, even if they would probably buy his excuse that he was an Air Force officer who had just been called and told to report to base urgently. For the first part of the ride, neither Erik nor Sandra spoke. He was still angry that he had to leave his wife when there were still two courses left to be served, when their “date night” had only just started. He wondered if he would get back to her in time to enjoy the suite they had taken for the night as part of the casino’s “Dinner and Sleepover” package, designed to lure in locals. Sandra, fighting fatigue, was going over the meetings she had the past two days in Washington.

Erik read her mind. “So how was our Nation’s Capital? Inspiring, efficient, focused on the things that matter?”

“None of the above,” she replied. “You know what struck me on this trip? The briefings I got at Headquarters about the extent of the problem. Sure, al Qaeda in AfPak is almost gone, but we still have the various Taliban groups on both sides of the border and now the narcoterrorist criminal cartels like the Qazzanis.

“But in Yemen we have al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula taking over towns, in Nigeria it’s the Boko Haram offshoot burning down Christian churches with people in them, in Mali it’s al Qaeda in the Maghreb that runs half the country, like the Shabab affiliate that has a swath of Somalia. Bin Laden is still dead, but this thing has just metastasized.”