Kill Decision

by Daniel Suarez

  Warner glanced over to the ornately uniformed Pakistani army colonel sitting across from him inside the cramped BRDM-2 armored car. Kayani must be expecting a photo op, since he had never dressed like this before. It made Warner feel more at ease.

  He tried to distract his chronically loose bowels by peering through the narrow bulletproof portal in the side of the BRDM. The convoy was rolling along the Lyari Expressway that followed the river of the same name. As he looked out, the river was just a dusty no-man’s-land several hundred yards wide, bisected by a narrow channel of raw sewage and industrial effluent that reeked of ammonia. On the far side lay the Sindh Industrial and Trading Estate—or SITE town—a place every bit as fetching as its name implied.

  Karachi had never been Warner’s choice, but then, he hadn’t distinguished himself in those early years, and accepting a clandestine service post seemed like a way to beef up his résumé—to get some respect. Then, just a few months after he arrived, the Russians started pulling out of Afghanistan. Colleagues sounded surprised he hadn’t known Pakistan was going to be a career dead-end. He pondered a long list of missed opportunities and unproductive, low-profile assignments that followed. It had taken him one divorce and a decade of patience to work his way Stateside once more.

  Then, on September 11—bam. Suddenly Pakistan was important again, and so were Warner’s years of field experience and extensive army connections there. He soon found himself managing crews operating secretly out of remote places like Shamsi, Dalbandin, Jacobabad, and Pasni. Young teams. Technical teams. Experts doing split operations to launch and maintain unmanned surveillance drones that were being flown from inside trailers. Nobody knew then how important those little toys were going to become. If he was honest with himself, Warner knew that was probably why he’d been given the assignment; it was at first just a sideshow. Now, by chance, it was the main event.

  Those days just after 9/11 were heady times, and he’d finally had a chance to shine. But as always, time marched on and new people with new skills followed the path he’d blazed. Drones were high profile now. Before long he found himself politically outmaneuvered by younger, more technologically adept Ivy Leaguers. The Garden Party set. His age-old nemesis.

  When he looked back on his career, that had been the one consistent theme: being outmaneuvered. His ex-wife had called him timid, even though he’d spent half his life in war zones. Now here he was in Karachi again. Right where he’d started—and he’d been a lot more adventurous back in his twenties. Now he just kept worrying about oral-fecal disease transmission and kidnapping.

  The colonel tapped Warner’s knee and laughed, shouting over the diesel engine of their armored car. “You should not be anxious, you know. Everything has been arranged for maximum safety.”

  “Whenever you say things like that, Anil, you make me nervous. It sounds suspiciously like tempting fate.”

  The colonel laughed uproariously. “Fates be damned, my friend. You will be very happy. This will put the whole bin Laden issue behind us. You will see.”

  He’d known the colonel for twenty-five years—way back when he’d been a CIA paper-pusher, and Anil had been an ISI liaison. Back before Warner’s expertise and long-standing connections made him a valuable consultant. Now both in their fifties, they saw the prospect of retirement just over the horizon. A low-end condo on the Texas Riviera was never far from Warner’s thoughts. Now was the time to swing for the fences. One last pay grade boost before going to the consulting side.

  The four-wheeled armored BRDM-2 slowed down, and Warner took a deep breath. They were cutting in on Tannery Road. From here things would only get dicier. This was PPP territory. Crawling through traffic would make them a sitting duck. One RPG at close range, and the passenger compartment would get punctured by a white-hot jet of molten metal that would ricochet around until everyone inside looked like undercooked meat loaf. He’d seen the tiny holes those armor-piercing warheads made in the hull of a tank. Why blast a huge hole when all you want to get at is the juicy center? But then, the convoy still seemed to be making good time. And they weren’t dead yet.

  He peered out the portal again, and judging from the numerous heavily armed police he saw on the streets outside, Warner realized that the roads must have been blocked to civilian traffic. So much for the element of surprise. . . .

  In a few minutes their vehicle slowed again and swerved right, down a tight lane. Warner’s view became a blur of passing masonry through the side portal. The sharp knock of a business sign being struck and bent back as they rolled past a shop front. All he could hear were sirens, car horns, and the rattle of the BRDM’s diesel engine. They were effectively blind. If someone hit them now, they’d never see it coming.

  But no harm came to them, and in a few moments the vehicle rolled to a halt.

  Kayani clapped Warner on the back. “We are here, my friend. I have something very special to show you.”

  A soldier opened the heavy metal door, and what should have been fresh air flowing in was instead the familiar smell of the Third World—smoke, rotting garbage, and raw sewage. It was an odor Warner didn’t wax nostalgic about. If only he’d been young when 9/11 happened. What sort of career would he have had then? All these young guys out here now with their high-tech equipment. The contractors with their expense accounts and liberal rules of engagement. It still paid to work relationships, though. He still had some advantages the tech wizards did not.

  Kayani motioned for Warner to follow as they passed a gauntlet of worried-looking soldiers training G3s at the upper stories of tenements all around them. There nonetheless were hundreds of curious faces peering from ledges and window frames down on them. Faces whispering to each other.

  Warner ducked down and hoped his tan from years of deep-sea fishing would conceal his nationality long enough for him to get to cover. But by now it had to be apparent he was some sort of VIP on a tour. A glance ahead showed that Kayani was leading him through the corrugated tin gate of a warehouse/garage. It was a ramshackle place, with garbage strewn in the alleyways and near the entrance. As he entered, Warner had to slide between rusted Bedford trucks, covered in dust. They still retained some of their outrageously ornate decorations, but parts had been cannibalized. Here the smell of oil and rotting wood overcame the reek of sewage.

  Just beyond these trucks lay another doorway, a subdoor within another larger gate. This is where Kayani stood beaming next to half a dozen soldiers. Warner could see bright work lights inside.

  “This way . . .” Kayani entered, and Warner stepped through behind him. Inside he saw a surprisingly large workshop—easily fifty feet long and nearly as wide, with a tall ceiling hung with chains and winches. What rooted him in place was that the entire workshop was littered with the wreckage and components of what appeared to be American drone aircraft. Disembodied wings with American markings leaned against the far wall. There were entire drone sections, fuselage components, and electrical and optical assemblies, stretching along heavy wooden tables covered in clear plastic tarps.

  “Holy mother of . . .”

  Warner walked along the tables past oscilloscopes, soldering irons, and assorted tools littered across half a dozen workstations. Wrecked fuselage sections were in various states of disassembly, their components arrayed like the results of an electrical autopsy. Legal pads with scrawled notes in Arabic—not Urdu or Pashto, but Arabic—along with hasty diagrams were visible on the workbenches. He flipped aside a plastic tarpaulin and saw the rear section of an MQ-1 Predator, the downward-angled fins and propeller twisted from crash impact. He ran his hands along the ground power panel in the side of the fuselage, wiping away dirt and dust. Given the political waves this discovery would make, Warner had to be certain this was the real thing—absolutely certain.

  He examined the panel. There was the release consent switch, still set to armed. The battery-off button, manual engine start switch, ground power. He pulled the tarp farther back to reveal the front section of the same
or perhaps another MQ-1, the fuselage smashed, with dirt and pieces of branches confusing things even more. He tried to get his bearings, tapping each subassembly as he found it: the synthetic aperture radar antenna, a damaged Ku-band satellite dish. The APX-100 IFF transponder was missing and so was the video recording unit, but he found the primary control module, partially disassembled. Glancing up at the rest of the shop he saw at least four more MQ-1s.

  Colonel Kayani smiled broadly. “Did I not promise it would be worth the trip, my friend? Of course, the Pakistani government has no reason to hide this from you. We have no use for American drones because we have our own Mukhbar and Burraq drones—of more advanced design.”

  Warner stared at the walls in open wonder. And there, in front of him, hung what looked to be a large wiring schematic indicating the individual subsystems of an MQ-9 Reaper drone. The diagram was roughly quarter scale, and printed on professional blueprint paper. Warner could see the computer workstations and color plotters close at hand. They had the plans for an MQ-9. A Reaper.

  This was a full-scale reverse engineering operation. He was nearly speechless.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  Warner, still wide-eyed, spoke without looking at Kayani. “I think I just got promoted.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Influence Operations

  Henry Clarke undid the buttons on his Balmain jacket as he cast an arm over the back of a leather sofa in Marta’s K Street corner office. The tall windows had an expansive view over the broad intersections of Vermont and K Street, just off McPherson Square. It was a beautiful, sunny winter day, and he wondered where he should eat later—and with whom.

  Marta, as usual, stood behind her desk, no chair in sight, pacing as she listened to someone on the phone, interjecting with the occasional “No. Yes. Yes.” She glanced up at the far wall in measured intervals.

  Clarke’s gaze wandered to a dozen flat-panel television screens occupying the wall across from Marta’s desk, in between bookshelves and framed vanity photos of her standing alongside senators, presidents, and celebrity CEOs. Every one of those television screens was tuned to a cable news channel with the sound turned down and closed captioning turned on. It was a collage with variations on the same story—the drone “discovery” in Karachi, and a rehash of the drone attack in Iraq.

  Clarke wondered about that.

  Marta edged closer to her phone’s base station. “Get back to me when the hearing ends. Yes.” Marta hung up the phone and stood staring at him.

  Clarke spread his hands toward the footage from Pakistan. “Well, what a coincidence.”

  “There are no coincidences.”

  “I don’t think the Arab street’s going to buy it.”

  “It’s not meant for the goddamned Arab street. It’s intended for Main Street.”

  Clarke shrugged. “Personally, I would have leaked bootleg video onto the Web first—give it illicit appeal. Coming from mainstream media makes it look suspect to a younger demo.”

  “Suspect? You forget that the only voting your generation does is of the up-and-down variety. It might seem like an ancient Kabuki dance to you, but traditional media is where actual registered voters get their information. In response to the discovery, we’ve got talking heads pushing for greater homeland security and funds for autonomous UAVs. And meanwhile I see this. . . .” She curled a finger at him and walked over to the windows.

  Clarke sighed and followed her. They stood side by side looking down onto the green expanse of McPherson Square below. There, a few hundred protestors had gathered with signs and banners, the largest of which Clarke could just make out: America—The Biggest Terrorist.

  “Comic Sans. Never a good choice.”

  “It’s not their choice of font that concerns me. It’s that this attitude might spread.”

  “Frankly, I’m surprised anyone still bothers to protest in the street. It requires so many people.”

  Marta glared at him.

  He held up a finger and walked over to his Dior Homme leather satchel and withdrew his iPad. With a few clicks he flipped it to show her a map of the D.C. metro area with clusters of thousands of red dots on it. “Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.” He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. “Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule—meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.” Clarke gazed down at the protestors in McPherson Square. “Meaning everything’s normal. I wouldn’t worry about them—they’re not the reality. Just a statistical outlier.”

  She stared down at the protestors, unconvinced. “You’re the social media director. It’s your job to contain this shit, and here I am looking at a counter-messaging campaign in my own backyard.”

  “If it makes you feel better, do it the old-fashioned way—have your guy hire a dozen drug addicts down at the train station to join the protest. A few dirty, scary people ranting and raving on television. It’ll reverse the message to a boomer demographic. Or just ignore it. What happens on the streets doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Marta stood glowering. “Don’t these people have jobs?”

  “Probably not. Some of your clients might have had something to do with that.”

  She looked up at him and grunted, then returned to her expansive desk. “Don’t get too smug, Henry. You and your sock puppet army are just another tool. The basic principles of public relations never change.”

  He slipped his iPad back in its case. “Perhaps, but you never had metrics like this before me. I can tell you moment by moment how your message is playing with not just a national but an international audience.”

  “Part of the audience, Henry. Only part.”

  “The part that matters, Marta.”

  “I can’t remember if I was as self-important as you when I was your age, but I do know I never learned anything by talking.”

  “Well, that’s one of the benefits of social media. We can automate the talking.” He zipped his satchel shut and tossed it back onto the sofa. “How are your votes lining up on the Hill?”

  “The bill is moving fast through the Appropriation subcommittees, but it’s been tied up in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Some congresswoman from Ohio, or wherever the fuck, with qualms about automating war—as if the Chinese or the Iranians had any qualms about it.”

  “If she’s come out publicly against it, our opposition team will already have a file on her. Do you need us to move on her?”

  “Not yet. We’ll work back channels for now. But if I can’t sell it to the intel committees, I’ll appeal directly to the public. So get your people ready. If I can convince the working class that taxing corporations is destroying the country, I can sell autonomous weapons. Even if we have to spread the manufacturing over something like thirty-five, forty states.”

  “A few thousand jobs won’t help you sell it to the public. They need to know what’s in it for them.”

  “That stopping the bombings here in the U.S. will be difficult without autonomous systems. The Defense Department is already drowning in surveillance video. And then there’s the limitations on satellite bandwidth. That’s what’s preventing us from deploying ten thousand drones over Central Asia and the Middle East—JSOC alone is blowing through a hundred million dollars a month in commercial satellite bandwidth. They’ve maxed out available capacity, and it needs to escalate fast. That means drone autonomy is preordained. And then there’s always saving American lives.”

  Clarke shrugged. “It all sounds complicated. And in some ways, Marta, the fact that people think these are regular, old-fashioned terror
bombings works against you. There’s a significant demo that believes our drone attacks overseas are causing these attacks, and the sooner we reveal these bombings as drone attacks, the sooner that demo can be flipped.”

  “Patience, Henry. This gives us leverage against politicians who think they’ll get punished by the electorate for letting drones successfully attack us. For some reason, it’s a popular notion that American voters won’t react adversely to acts of medieval barbarism, but that somehow high-tech attacks will freak them out. Undermines feelings of American exceptionalism.”

  Clarke shrugged. “They might be right. What if the public panics?”

  “Oh, please, why does everyone always worry about the public panicking? No politician is ever safer than when bombs are falling.”

  Suddenly a window-rattling BOOM echoed across the city. It silenced them both. The sound faded away.

  Clarke looked up. “Another bombing.” He grabbed his satchel again and liberated his iPad as he headed back toward the window.

  Marta was close on his heels as several lines on Marta’s phone lit up. She ignored the phone as she studied the horizon. The clear winter day helped her see a column of black smoke rising from several miles away. “Other side of the river. This could move things along.”

  “It was damned close. Don’t you ever worry that one of these things is going to come flying through your window? It scares the hell out of me.”

  “There’s no point worrying about dying, Henry. We’re all going to die eventually.”

  “Well, at least you got a chance to live first.” Clarke was tapping furiously at his iPad. “Twitter should have something in a second. I follow every media analyst in the Beltway, and they’ve always got their ears to the ground. Here. Crystal City, down by Reagan International.” He read out loud. “Flames visible upper floor office tower. Broken windows. Bodies.” He looked up. “Everyone races to have the first Tweet in a disaster.”