Sting of the Drone (5 page)

A few people heard a bang, when the triangle hit Mach 1, but it was so soon followed by the crash of the glass façade when the triangle hit it, and then by the muffled thump when the triangle exploded in the Cigar Bar. Wilhelm actually saw the triangle as it came through the outer glass façade, less than a second before it went through the Cigar Bar door where he was headed. His eyes registered the flash of light when the triangle exploded in the bar, but his brain did not have enough time to process what his eyes had seen before the steel shards sliced his eyes and his brain and all the rest of him into a bloodied pulp on the burning carpet.

The visual feed from the Myotis triangle, Bird Two, had looked blurred, incomprehensible shapes on the screen as the aircraft had hurtled toward the narrow laser beam projected from Bird One. Then the camera feed from Bird Two, the black triangle, had stopped.

“Target hit. Warhead ignited. No secondary. Fire seems contained,” Bruce reported into his mouthpiece after he turned his attention back to the image from Bird One.

“Fire alarm has gone off in the building, automatically signaling to the Feuer Brigade around the corner,” said a voice from Maryland.

“Zoom Bird One’s camera in on the room, please,” someone in Virginia said, and Bruce adjusted the view. “Thanks. Not much left there.”

Bruce switched the camera back to wide angle and the image on the screen showed the hotel guests filing out of the front door in orderly fashion, guided by hotel staff, as two fire trucks rolled to a stop at the curb.

“Congratulations. This has been a team effort, HUMINT, SIGINT, and the kinetic element, identifying and stopping an advanced plot.” The voice was from Washington. “You are all reminded that this was structured as a Special Op, so it would be completely deniable. No evidence of drone usage. Let’s keep it that way. No bragging. No spiking the football. No leaks.”

More fire trucks and ambulances appeared on the live image of the Palais projected on the screen.

Bruce felt Erik’s hand clamping on his shoulder. “Nice work, Major. Now let’s fly Bird One to the Safe House and call it a day.”

The small black oval stopped its hover, gained altitude quickly to four hundred meters, and headed out toward the Wiener Wald at the edge of the city. There, in a clearing on a wooded estate, a team waited for Bird One to gently set down on the grass. They would then pack it into a truck and drive it to Germany and a U.S. Air Force base.

The bird was on autopilot until it got near the Landing Zone. Then Bruce took control and, using a joystick in his right hand and a sliding throttle in his left, he delicately brought the aircraft down in the clearing for a soft impact touchdown. He had stopped listening in on the Kill Call conference bridge.

The voice from Maryland came over the speakers, “Wien Feuer Brigade Zwei commander reporting to his headquarters five bodies recovered, a few minor injuries from flying glass. Fire is out. He’s thinking someone placed a bomb in the bar.”

Sandra Vittonelli and Erik Parsons left Spook Ops and moved back to her glass-walled office just behind the row of pilots in the GCC Operations Room. Erik was seated on the couch looking out at the Ops Floor, at the images pouring in from above five countries. Sandra was getting two bottles of Pilsner Urquell from her mini fridge in the closet off her office.

“Well, you were right about Bruce,” she called out. “The first time we fly the new stealth, covert birds in a real operation and he did it like a pro. I just wish those new birds had longer loiter, longer range.” She looked at Erik, who did not appear to be listening to her. “Hey, Colonel, wake up. We just got Omar Nawarz, the head of the Qazzani narcoterrorist group’s European operations, plus three of his lieutenants.”

Sandra was looking for the beer bottle opener inside the cooler. “And, while I am not supposed to tell you this, the reason for this as a Special Op was that we had a sensitive HUMINT source inside al Qaeda, one we could not share with the Austrians or anybody else. So we could not tell the Austrians to pick these guys up. The Stapo would want to know why, they’d want to see some evidence.”

She had popped the beers and was walking back into her office. “If we told the truth, that these guys were going to bomb subway systems in Vienna and Germany, that word would leak out fast. And our guy on the inside in AQ would get discovered and killed. So, as far as the Austrians will know, this was a bomb planted by a rival drug gang.

“Hey, you listening, Colonel? We just stopped another 7/7 attack, only bigger. Well done.” She thrust out her right arm toward Erik, with the open bottle of Pilsner.

Erik did not take the beer. “NSA said the fire chief reported finding five bodies. Who was number five?”

4

MONDAY, JULY 13

THE CITY OF DERA GHAZI KHAN

THE PUNJAB, PAKISTAN

He gave up and dismounted from the Kawasaki. There were just too many people walking in the street to try to drive. Sunset and Iftar had been four hours ago and now, with the heat breaking, everyone seemed to have left their homes and gone for a walk to the market street. After living for years in Canada, surviving this kind of heat was not something that came easily to him. It had been 42 degrees Celsius during the day as he had driven down from Multan. Someday, they said, there would be the new M5 motorway connecting to Multan. But someday had not come.

And so he had dodged trucks in the heat for hours. He knew that Dera Ghazi Khan was now a city of more than two million people, but it was not exactly Karachi or Islamabad. It was not even Multan. Of course, that is exactly why the old man had chosen it to be his latest base of operation. Karachi had become too violent, even for him, and there were too many spies in Islamabad. But here in the heart of the Punjab, white spies stood out.

He had never been to this city, although his father had joked that he had named his son after the town. Although his father had enjoyed a Canadian and then a European lifestyle for years, this kind of place was where his roots were. It was his father who brought him here now, his late father. The thought of him brought waves of emotion, the joy he knew when they were together, the sadness that he was gone, the anger at those who had killed him in Vienna. And he now knew who had killed his father.

*   *   *

The fast would not resume until sunrise. He pushed the bike past groups of young men walking together in the street, taunting each other and laughing. Some families strolled together, the father in the lead. Merchants were reopening their stalls, filled with what they had sold for centuries: spices, incense, and rugs. The street had been closed to vehicles for the evening hours during Ramadan. Stalls and shops on the crowded street sold the twenty-first century additions, mobile phones, tablets, DVDs, T-shirts. One stand sold both leather-bound Korans and cloned Xbox video games, two reflections of Pakistan’s soul.

To snare the nocturnal Ramadan walkers, vendors were setting up outside of their shops with hookahs, sweets, figs, dates, and chai. Ghazi Faqir Nawarz ignored their beseeching and pushed the bike forward through the crowd. They had sent him convoluted directions, but he also had his handheld GPS. The coordinates read 30
°
3'27.61" N and 70
°
38'22.66" E. He was close.

After he passed the third mobile phone store on the right side of the street, he saw the alley and the boy, as he had been told he would. Just inside the alley, he removed his pack from the bike and let the boy push the Kawasaki into the alley. From a chain hanging under his shirt, the boy produced a key, opened a wooden hatch door in the wall, crouched, and disappeared into the hole in the wall, pushing the bike ahead of him. In seconds, he was back in the alley, relocking the hatch. Then he spoke for the first time to Ghazi, “Up that stair, at the top.” He turned and walked back to resume his place at the head of the alley.

The alley was narrow, all the more so for the bags and barrels. The stair was metal and attached to the outside of a building halfway down the passageway. As he climbed the steps, Ghazi saw that the bolts were showing signs of detaching themselves from the stucco wall some day soon. The door on the second floor landing was locked. At the third floor, the door was already open and two men stood just inside. They exchanged mumbled Salams. The first man patted Ghazi down, then the second grunted out an order to follow him, “
Mere saath aaiyd,
” and then led the way to an interior door off the dimly lit corridor.

“
Salam Alekhem, Khush Aamdeed.
” The old man sitting on the pile of rugs offered warm greetings to Ghazi. Rashid Bakri Qazzani, the leader of his tribal clan, had become so much more. Now men from many tribes worked for him, Punjabis, Baluchis. His international network bought and sold weapons, heroin, vehicles, land, electronics, gold, currencies, and fuel on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and, in the case of heroin, well beyond into Asia and Europe. He did not rise, but did grasp both of Ghazi’s hands and offered his cheeks to be kissed. “My regrets, that your father has gone to Allah before his time,” he whispered in Ghazi’s ear.

“
Ramadan Kareem,
” Ghazi offered as he joined the circle of five others who sat on rugs in a semicircle around Qazzani. Two boys appeared with chai and dates. When they left, Rashid Bakri Qazzani began.

“Mohsin, as you know, was droned by the Americans. My youngest brother, my brother for fifty-five years. My right arm.” The men in the circle looked at the rugs below them and offered brief words of prayer.

“Now, all of our chiefs in Europe, including Omar Nawarz, your father, Ghazi. Four men from the villages here who years ago we sent to schools in Australia, Canada, Turkey. For decades they built our operations in Europe. Now, gone.”

The men in the circle, Ghazi realized, were of his generation. They could all be in their thirties. One looked maybe younger. Were these the people who would take over now? Was that what this was about?

“But do not doubt that our operations continue, even now. They were designed to withstand deaths. We anticipate deaths in this business. Men have moved up, good men, men trained by those who have been killed.

“But before we move on, we must avenge their deaths.” The old man looked down at the carpet and when his head rose, his voice did, too, and the anger within him. “Who bombs luxury hotels now, in Europe? Who did this?”

The room was silent. No one would say what they were all thinking: the leaders of the European branch of the Qazzani crime cartel were killed because the man sitting in front of them had accepted a lucrative subcontract from the remnants of al Qaeda, had agreed to use Qazzani people to put Yemenis and Somalis into large suicide bombs and then have them explode on commuter railways in Berlin, Vienna, and Munich. Now, the Qazzani leaders in Europe were gone, their operations probably could not really be put back together, and the al Qaeda money would never show up.

Finally, Ghazi coughed. He addressed Qazzani with a deferential title. “
Janab,
with respect, it wasn’t a bomb. It was a new kind of drone.”

“The Austrians say it was a bomb,” the man next to Ghazi offered. Like the others, except Rashid Qazzani, this was a man that Ghazi did not know. He had said his name, Bahadur, at the greetings. “They say it was Russians, guys in our business.”

“Yes, but there are videos that Austrian Security Police have. They slowed them down and they see a drone like a big black arrow and another black drone watching nearby.” No one asked how Ghazi knew. He was not really part of the clan, not like his father. His mother was a Canadian. He lived sometimes in Karachi but mainly in Vancouver, did his own business, whatever it was. Sometimes it had been special errands for Qazzani. He must have done them well. The old man trusted him, and now he had sent for him. “The Austrian Security Police work with the Americans. They will not tell their own people what they suspect,” Ghazi concluded. “They will keep the Americans’ secret, not tell the Ministers.”

Qazzani threw his head back and looked at the ceiling. “Drones. American drones. They chased al Qaeda from here, but now, now they kill us, they kill my brother when he goes to Afghanistan, they kill the Taliban all the time.” He returned his gaze to the men around him. “Where do they live, these drones, where is the hive?”

“There are many,
Janab,
around the world.” Again it was Ahmed Bahadur, who ran operations in Asia and Australia. “They fly from bases in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Seychelles, other secret places in Europe and the Arabian peninsula. But their big hive, their television says, is in America, in their city for sin, Vegas.”

“Sin. Yes, these flying robots are very sinful,” Rashid Qazzani agreed. “But how do the robots … who tells them where to fly, and how do they know what to do?”

Bahadur deferred to Ghazi. “They are not really robots,
Janab.
Men fly them. These men are in Las Vegas and other places. They see what the drone sees, they fly it like an airplane, except their controls are in Las Vegas and what they do there is sent to the drone off a satellite in space using something like the Internet.”

Rashid Qazzani stared at Ghazi. Was he trying to understand what Ghazi had just said? No one spoke for several minutes. It became clear that their leader was thinking, assessing his situation, his options. Some of them had seen this before. Soon there would be a pronouncement, a big decision.

*   *   *

“Ghazi, my friend, we must stop the drones, not just to get revenge for our people, but to save ourselves. If we do not do this now, they will breed. They will come for us one day.

“Flies can be swatted. Men can be killed. These drones can be stopped. Ghazi, I want you to do this. You will understand how and I will give you all that you need.”

Ghazi bowed his head in respect. “Thank you for the honor,
Janab.
The men I work with in Kiev, they have some people who I have used before for special help. Computer men. They rent out these computer men for a high price.”