Sting of the Drone (17 page)

Ghazi had been vague about his background, but he seemed to have operated in international businesses. Yuri knew that this operation was not the first time Ghazi had hired the Merezha organization, but the earlier projects were small, safe, profitable, personal. This thing now was huge and hugely dangerous. It was also bold and potentially fun, the sort of thing that Yuri and Mykola had always talked about doing. The thrill of it made them think less about the danger. And then there was the money. The Merezha was being handsomely paid for supporting Ghazi and his people. Yuri and Mykola would see a small portion of that, but even that portion was considerably more than they had ever made before and both men already had over ten million in dollars and gold scattered in banks around the world.

The beeping indicated a car had started down the long driveway. Mykola looked at the video monitor and then hit the control to open the gate that was set back where it could not be seen from the road. Ghazi appeared to be alone in the Cadillac XTS.

After he freshened up and poured himself a coffee, the two young Ukrainians showed Ghazi the Op Room, as they called the bedroom that they had converted into the computer war game playroom for this day’s mission. “The Hawker took off over two hours ago from Karachi, allegedly bound for Almaty,” Yuri explained. “And your guys say the Predator left Bagram almost three hours ago, so the two should be in the same general area by now.”

“Yes, but this will only work if we know exactly what the Predator’s target is so we can circle above it while it is circling below looking at the target for a while,” Mykola added.

Ghazi looked over the two unkempt men, who looked like they had not washed or shaved or even changed clothes in days. He had noted the pizza crusts and Red Bull cans in the living room. He hoped they knew what they were doing. It had been expensive to lease the Hawker executive jet and even more costly to fit it out the way the Ukrainians had wanted. It was one thing for the Iranians to have done this kind of operation to get their hands on the RQ-170 U.S. stealth drone. Iran had a huge military and intelligence apparatus. The Qazzani Group and the Ukrainian Merezha were highly successful at complex criminal enterprises, but capturing a U.S. drone was something few nation states could accomplish. “We are fairly sure we have lured them to the target. We fed them enough information that they should have sent one of their Predators out for a look and our source in the Pakistan Air Force says the flight is today.”

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13

GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER, OPERATIONS ROOM

CREECH AFB, NEVADA

The lone Predator was being flown by a senior noncommissioned officer. Officers flew strike missions and released weapons. Sometimes noncommissioned officers would fly the armed aircraft to the target zone and then hand it off to an officer. On unarmed reconnaissance flights the pilot for the entire mission was often someone like Sergeant Rod Miller, a twenty-six-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force. This flight seemed fairly routine to Miller. Take off out of Bagram in Afghanistan, fly over the Pakistani border into Northern Waziristan, and patrol an area where CIA sources said the Lashkar-e-Taiba had recently set up a training center.

The target was said to be an isolated cluster of about six buildings with a rifle range and an obstacle course. The mission was simply to find it and then circle it for several hours to develop a Pattern of Life, including whether there were women, children, or obvious civilians who could be considered collateral damage casualties. The presence of such potential casualties usually caused the target to be put on hold, even if it otherwise fit the pattern of a terrorist base sufficiently that it qualified for a possible future Signature Strike.

Once in the area, it took Miller only twenty minutes to find a remote cluster of buildings that seemed to fit the source’s description. There were a few vehicles and some men wandering around the yards, but Miller also saw clothing drying on a line near what could be the living quarters. Maybe there were families staying there. Sergeant Miller kept the main electro-optical imaging camera staring at the target as he programmed the Predator autopilot to fly a wide circle ten thousand feet above. At that height, the small prop engine could usually not be heard and the chameleon electrostatic panels on the bottom of the wings and fuselage would appear the same color as the sky above, making visual identification difficult.

Miller asked Lieutenant Bill Wong, sitting next to him running a similar mission, to keep an eye on his screen while Miller went for a quick “bio break.”

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13

COPPER HILL RANCH

KYLE CANYON, NEVADA

“Better come in here, Nawarz,” Yuri called out from the converted bedroom. “The Hawker has visual on the target.”

Ghazi hurried down the hall from the kitchen, where he had been making coffee. “Yeah, they have also acquired the encrypted satellite links that the Pred is broadcasting, both the data streams and the video,” Yuri said as Ghazi joined them. “We can’t break the crypt though.”

“Don’t need to,” Mykola said as he sat hunched over three screens. “Just have to jam the encrypted military grade Global Positioning System’s signal from the satellite. And that we start to do now,” he said as he hit the Enter/Return key on the Dell. “In two minutes, when the Pred still can’t get the Military GPS signal, it will switch over to the public GPS channel. That’s how they programmed it. And now we jam the data feed so that the pilot can’t control the bird anymore. Zap!”

Yuri was standing behind Mykola, watching him and the screens. “The Hawker is circling at five thousand meters, so its radio signals are much more powerful than the commands on the same frequency coming down from the satellite is space. When the Pred can’t communicate with its pilot, it will just circle. But after fifteen minutes, if it still can’t phone home, it will break off the mission and fly home.”

Ghazi looked at the computer screens, but could not understand the data that they were showing. “But we don’t want it to go home. Home is the U.S. airbase at Bagram,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” Mykola replied. “Fifteen minutes from now we will start beaming what looks like GPS data down from the Hawker, on the public GPS frequency, but much louder, much more power. We will drown out the real GPS signal and we will give the little Pred our own GPS data, which will be wrong, of course.”

Ghazi sat down in an empty, ergonomic chair, webbed and black. He was finally understanding the beauty of what the Ukrainians were doing, how it was that they guaranteed that they would capture a U.S. drone. “So, as of now that drone is not being controlled by its pilot? It’s out of communications with him? And it’s circling, trying to phone home? It can’t get the military satellite signal to know where it is, so it is using the civilian GPS signal like my car gets from the satellites, right?”

“Exactly,” Mykola. “Now we wait for when it decides to go home and then we make the west into the east.”

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13

GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER, OPERATIONS ROOM

CREECH AFB, NEVADA

“Miller, your bird’s sick,” Lieutenant Wong said to the sergeant as he returned from the bathroom. “Can’t get through to it, but she’s still circling and we’re still getting the vid.”

“What the fuck’d you do to it, sir?” Miller asked as he put his earphones back on. The sergeant was twenty-two years older than the officer and, despite the rank difference, tended to treat the younger man as he would his college-age son.

“I didn’t touch it, Rod. Jeez man, this happens. The satellite radio for the control frequency died and the backup must have, too. So the bird will fly home. Without you doing shit. Just watch the camera feed, which you’re still getting,” Lieutenant Wong responded. “Chill, dude.”

Sergeant Miller punched in an extension number on his keyboard and spoke into his headset. “Major Dougherty, I have a problem with my Pred. Data link is down and she will probably fly herself back to base here in a few minutes.”

Bruce Dougherty was three rows above and behind him in the warren of cubicles. “Got it, Rod. Just keep an eye on her and alert Bagram. I got another problem on my hands right now. So, you handle it. It’s unarmed.”

“Roger that, sir,” Sergeant Miller replied and leaned back in his chair to watch the Predator fly itself home. Exactly fifteen minutes after the command-control data link to the aircraft had been broken, the video images changed. The aircraft was no longer circling, staring at the camp below. The camera switched to a forward view of mountains lit by the last rays of the sun and the dark sky behind them.

“Wait a second,” Miller said aloud. “The camera should be looking at the sunset, not mountains lit by it. This motherfucker is going the wrong direction.”

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14

MASHHAD AIRPORT

MASHHAD, PAKISTAN

The runway at Mashhad was only used a few times a day for the flights to Karachi. To get to Islamabad you had to go by bus. Occasionally a Pakistani Army helicopter or a Pak Air Force C-130 would land, but there was no military base at the airport. The local police and militia maintained security at the field, with a light hand. The air traffic control tower was staffed twelve hours a day, but the workload was light.

By the time the on duty controller saw the Predator, it had already landed and was taxiing down the runway. He could not quite believe what he was seeing.

After taxiing to the end of the runway, the Predator just sat there, with its propeller spinning very slowly at the rear of the fuselage. Then the man in the tower noticed the cars and trucks driving across the grass toward the Predator and picked up his drop line to the police station. “We have a problem. There are vehicles on the runway that should not be there. And one of them is a drone.”

He picked up his binoculars and focused in on the unmanned aircraft as its rotor slowed to a stop. Then he saw the bright light from the television cameraman standing near the little terminal building.

The young man in front of the camera was talking. “Behind me is what appears to be a U.S. drone. It has just landed at this civilian airport in Mashhad, Pakistan, apparently surprising local authorities. There were no Pakistani military or police here to greet it. In fact, at the moment, only WWN and some local people are at the scene. As you can see, the local men are hitting the drone with their shoes and look like they are getting ready to do some more serious damage.

“WWN was contacted by an anonymous source who suggested that we be here at Mashad airport today. When we got here we were given a piece of paper by a man who then drove away on a motorcycle. The paper said the Pakistani and Afghan people were fighting back against the drones that, they say, kill innocent people. It did not say how they were fighting the drones, but then this one landed and, well, it seems pretty clearly to have been taken out of service somehow, at least for now. Americans may not be the only ones who understand this new killing technology. Bryce Duggan, WWN, Mashhad, Pakistan.”

19

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14

828 NEW HAMPSHIRE AVENUE

FOGGY BOTTOM

WASHINGTON, DC

When Ray got up quietly from his bed, he saw on his Blackberry that it was almost four o’clock in the morning. It was about the only time of day when the neighborhood around his townhouse was quiet. When he came back to bed a few minutes later with two bottles of water, Sandra was awake. She had thrown off the sheet and the street lamp cast a soft orange light across her naked body. “You know we’re crazy on all sorts of levels for doing this,” Sandra whispered as he sat on the edge of the bed.

“No, I don’t know that,” Ray replied, as he slowly moved his hand along her leg. He spoke softly, slowly. “We’re both single again. We work in different organizations. No rules broken, no harm, no foul. Just good conversation and great sex. Don’t overthink it.”

She sat up in the middle of the bed and leaned over to kiss him, then moved behind him and put her head on his left shoulder and her legs around his waist. They sat there quietly for a moment looking together out of the second-story window at the quiet street below. She spoke into his ear, “It is great. And you’re the only one who understands me, my job, where I am in life. It’s all good, I just don’t want…”

“Complications, I know. Look, I meant what I said that night at the Ritz. I like being single, too. I get that right now your career is central, mine is for me, too. Marriage didn’t work for either of us and we don’t need any more obligations than we’ve got. I’m fine with being in the moment, it’s just that I’ve never been very good at it.”

“You did a pretty good job of being in the moment a few hours ago,” she laughed. “I like what we’ve got. We’re so much alike, I mean aside from the fact that I’m short and Italian and you’re tall and WASPy.” She rolled over and sat on his stomach, straddling his wide frame, looking into his eyes. She slipped her fingers slowly through the hair on his chest. “It’s good. We’re a good pair. Neither one of us would ever have been happy breeding, raising kids in some dreadful suburban wasteland, punching clocks, sitting in commuter traffic. I’d have gone mad and become an axe murderer.”

“Some people think we are murderers,” Ray replied.

“Does that bother you still?” she sighed.

“No, never did,” he said. “I know who the murderers are. The guys we go after.” He took both of her breasts in his hands and buried his head in between them.

She felt behind her with her right hand until she found it. “Seems like you’re ready for me to show you something this time. In this one, I play the cowgirl and you play the horsey.” He let out a loud neighing noise. The secure Blackberry on the bedside table replied with a shrill chirping. Sandra let go of him and reached for the Blackberry, handing him the mobile.

“Why did we land it at a civilian airport?” he asked whoever it was on the other end. “Then who did land it there?” He looked at Sandra as her eyes widened. “Goddamn it. I’ll be right in. Give me fifteen minutes.”