Granger knew that an especially sensitive operation was going to take place today, when he watched Director Bullard and his team enter the building and disappear into the hall leading to the ISR Oversight offices. The controllers in the ISRO monitored all of the flights in the Ops Center. Whenever they wanted to, they could assume control of a drone, temporarily blanking out the screens of the technicians in the main room on the gym floor.
It amused him when Bullard visited flight ops and went directly to Oversight, believing that they were operating in complete secrecy and isolation. Obviously, they failed to understand that he had personally configured and installed most of the data link hardware in flight ops. But even after all of his hard work in setting up the Ops Center six months ago, he had not been invited to join the so-called elite team of controllers in Oversight. Twenty years in the Air Force with a Top Secret security clearance apparently wasn’t good enough for them.
Naturally, Granger had provided his own undetectable backdoor access to the computers and monitors located in the ISRO office. Networks, hardware, fiber optics and computer code were Dwight Granger’s passion. So what if he had not been selected for the Oversight team? Of course, he had set up his private channel into the ISRO to work in one direction only, and to be completely undetectable.
The only supervisor on duty this Saturday above Granger in the chain of command was busy reading magazines and drinking ersatz coffee in his own cubicle fifty feet away. The man was clearly appointed based on political connections; he didn’t know a sheep from a RAM. Typically, he would not emerge until the end of his shift at three o’clock, asking just enough off-point questions about the day’s operations to verify his cluelessness.
Granger typed in his own private command, and accessed the monitors in Oversight. There was little risk of being found out while clandestinely checking into ISR Oversight. Because he was in charge of four Predator teams today, it was routine for him to click from UAV to UAV on his own monitors. He could not control the data throughput from the Predators once they passed over to the control of Oversight, but he could watch their video and digitally record it. The team in Oversight didn’t have a clue about his backdoor access. Dwight Granger had designed and practically installed the entire UAV flight control network on Fort Campbell, from the off-site Ground Data Terminal via optical cable to each monitor in flight ops. The guys in Oversight thought that they could operate in secrecy from him? They thought that they could exclude him from their secret business? Morons.
Seen on his monitors, the UAV flights controlled by Oversight didn’t appear to be any different from the standard ISR missions controlled in the gym, the main room of flight ops. But their armed Predators and smaller drones as often as not ended up dropping missiles on insurgents. Granger enjoyed observing them at their work. It gave him a sense of satisfaction to know that they could not keep him out of the ISRO with a heavy steel cover on their door and special keypad code locks. He had even compiled personal “best of” clips of their missile strikes and shootings from the smaller UAV SniperHawks. Like the one that had killed the former commanding officer of the Kazak battalion.
It was a distant and sterile way to conduct a counterinsurgency, but this was nothing new to Granger. He had spent years controlling UAV missions all over the globe from Nellis Air Force Base, outside Las Vegas. Pull a shift out there with the 3rd Special Ops Squadron, and you could drop a Hellfire missile on a terrorist safe house in Afghanistan one hour and be playing blackjack in a casino the next. Surreal is what it was. Of course, in those days they were using satellites to communicate with UAVs spread around the globe.
Typically these days in Tennessee and Kentucky, three or four white blobs would be seen crossing a field or walking along a road. These were the heat signatures of human beings, usually sneaking around at night after curfew. Zooming in would reveal more details of size, dress, and items being carried. If they were out after curfew or were seen to be carrying weapons, they were often targeted by the team in Oversight. The big Hellfire rockets would blow insurgents into tiny bits, leaving a hot crater in the ground to mark the point of impact. The Hellfires could level an entire house and make vehicles disappear.
The new miniature 30mm laser-guided missiles did much less damage. They would leave their human targets in scattered pieces on the ground, gradually lightening in color as they cooled off. Cars hit by them would often continue rolling, usually on fire, until they ran off the road or impacted something to stop them. Nobody ever crawled out of the burning wrecks, even when they were hit by the smaller missiles. From 20,000 feet up, it was difficult to tell one car or truck from another before they were blown to Kingdom Come. Dwight Granger could only suppose that the deadly missile strikes were based on some kind of solid intelligence work, but target selection was outside his area of responsibility.
Today the armed Predator controlled by Oversight was operating in the bottom of West Tennessee, not far from where the Tennessee River touched the corners of Mississippi and Alabama. Granger split his screen and selected a topographical map of the area, zooming it down to the same scale as the video coming from the Predator. The UAV was orbiting 20,000 feet above the small crossroads village of Mannville in Radford County, a town he had never heard of before. Black squares on the computer-generated topo map represented each house and structure.
Granger clicked the Predator video back to full screen and saw columns of horses with mounted troops moving in from the west. These were probably the Kazaks, the first cavalry unit seen in Tennessee since the first Civil War, a century and a half earlier. Against all expectations, horse cavalry had come to fill a unique niche in the pacification of Tennessee. Many roads were still blocked by earthquake damage, and bridges were down across the region. Horses, plentiful in both Tennessee and Kentucky, could move with great stealth where no mechanized units could go. Even better, they operated with almost no logistical tail. The horses fueled up on grass, hay and water from the innumerable streams crisscrossing Tennessee. They could even swim. To Dwight Granger, the reappearance of horse soldiers was one of the more colorful and interesting aspects of the counterinsurgency in the Mid South.
M1117 Guardian armored security vehicles and heavy Army trucks filled with more troops approached the town from the north, and stopped. The wrecked bridges, which had cut off large areas of West Tennessee from outside help, also provided those insurgent-controlled areas with a sense of security against outside interference. Military bridging equipment was sometimes used to cross a series of small rivers, in order to penetrate an unpacified county with government forces. Sometimes the foreign troops would throw a vehicle-mounted scissors bridge across a creek or stream, allowing them to arrive in force with little or no warning. This was probably the case today. Of course, helicopters were used when they were available. Today a pair of Chinooks was orbiting around the village, looking like a pair of horseflies when seen from four miles up.
The Kazak soldiers were readily identifiable by the blinking infrared Phoenix firefly strobes that squad leaders wore on the shoulders of their uniforms. The rest of the soldiers wore reflective strips on their shoulders. On a clear day, when the Predators were filming in both the visible and IR spectrums, the tiny strobes and reflective tape allowed the UAV crews to distinguish the military forces from the local civilians.
Today appeared to be the day that this part of Radford County was coming back under government control—like it or not. Granger didn’t know how the locals had done it, but they had managed to hang on through an entire year without electric power, heating oil, gas stations, banks, or supermarkets. You had to give them grudging admiration, even if they were resisting the government’s very best efforts to assist them.
The admiration stopped cold when you pondered the horrible acts of racial genocide they had inflicted after the Memphis earthquakes. Dwight Granger had seen the murderous aftermath of their racist hate crimes on many national news programs following the quakes, and he had little pity
for them. These holdouts would now be transferred to a location where they could be properly housed and fed, while heavy equipment crews moved in to repair their roads, rebuild their bridges, and reconnect their county to the power grid. Once the Mannville residents were moved to the relocation center, their post-earthquake crimes against humanity could finally be given a full legal accounting before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
A few hundred local civilians had gathered on a black-paved parking area near some large intact structures. A quick click back to the electronic map told him it was Mannville Senior High School. This was not unusual, especially on a Saturday. These small towns, almost cut off from the outside world, had turned to barter to provide for their needs. What they managed to find to eat, he couldn’t imagine, but then again, it was rich farming country down there. But how did they grow anything last summer without fuel for their tractors and harvesters? Someday, experts would have to conduct a field study of how these rural Tennessee folk had adapted so readily to life without fuel or electricity. They had “gone Amish” and actually survived.
The Predator’s video view slid around, panned, and zoomed. Dwight Granger couldn’t control the camera; he was a passive observer. Columns of mounted troops entered the parking lot, where the people had assembled in a line near a fence. The file of people then separated into two long lines. One line walked toward the east and then disappeared into a large rectangular building and out of sight. It appeared that the horse-mounted troops were guiding them, like sheepdogs moving livestock. Then the remaining line of people walked the other way, out of the parking lot. The horsemen led them to the state road where the Army trucks were parked, and where more foot soldiers stood in groups. Their reflective tabs and IR strobes easily distinguished them from the townspeople.
The video panned in a blur, refocusing to show two school buses emerge from another large building. Their roofs were painted white, with large black numbers clearly visible from above. The buses were numbered R37 and R22. They drove to the area near the high school and parked, one behind the other, in the middle of the road.
The people herded from the parking lot stood waiting in a long line, at least three or four hundred of them. When the buses stopped, the people walked toward the first one, R37. Fifty or sixty people disappeared inside, like little bugs disappearing inside a hive. Another group disappeared inside R22. The buses then departed, leaving the long line of people assembled between columns of horse soldiers. The buses were followed by one of the Army trucks.
The camera slid over to another set of buildings across from the high school. A steeple on top of one building identified it as a church. Next to the church was a larger rectangular structure. The two buildings were surrounded by soldiers both on foot and on horseback. Their IR strobes blinked the Morse code letter K: dash-dot-dash, which identified them as Kazaks. Granger clicked back to the computer map: the troops were around the Hope Baptist Church and its adjoining church hall.
The video then followed the two buses and one truck as they drove east out of Mannville on State Road 158. The townspeople were being involuntarily relocated. Dwight Granger switched screens to observe what his own Predator teams were doing above Middle Tennessee. They were on routine patrol patterns above Nashville, Murfreesboro, Columbia and Shelbyville. Still curious, ten minutes later Granger clicked back to his private channel into Oversight. One of the buses was winding its way along a narrow, twisting road. The trees were bare of leaves, so the bus remained visible almost all of the time. The latitude, longitude and elevation data in a box on the bottom of the screen changed, following the Predator’s cross-shaped aiming curser. The second bus was not in the frame; he assumed it had stopped somewhere else after leaving Mannville.
Bus R37 finally parked in a small clearing. Granger had assumed the people were going to be taken to a relocation center north of Radford County in a pacified area, so this remote location confused him. Most of the FEMA relocation centers were built around former “big box” retail stores. Their parking lots and subsidiary shopping blocks were fenced off, creating instant internment and feeding facilities. There were no such retail shopping centers east of Mannville. The computer map indicated that it was farmland and woods clear over to the Tennessee River, a few miles to the east.
The Army truck stopped behind the school bus. Soldiers exited from the back and went to the front of the bus. The people, more than fifty, emerged from the bus one at a time. They walked toward a prominent stripe cutting across the clearing, where the ground changed from grass or brush to some other kinds of shrubs and dirt. The landform was indistinct, but the straight line across the clearing where the terrain changed was apparent. He clicked the screen back to the topographical map of the area and zoomed down. The gash across the clearing was a ravine. Ravines, creeks and sinkholes crisscrossed and pockmarked this part of the country.
Dwight Granger sat transfixed, unable to move. The small dots that were people walked forward until they were in a line spread along the color shift on the ground. A dozen somewhat larger dots with their distinctive IR reflectors formed another line behind them. These soldiers were widely spaced apart, perhaps twenty feet from the line of civilians. A dozen or so soldiers for fifty or sixty civilians. Then the people suddenly moved forward a few yards, and instead of being small dots as seen from above, it was apparent that they were on the ground, in different orientations, one upon the other. The Predator B was filming both the visual color spectrum and IR, so Granger switched views to try to gain clarification of what he was seeing. From each soldier sprouted a vivid white line. Rifles. Very hot rifles. When seen on infrared, rifles fired on full automatic went from ambient temperature to hundreds of degrees in seconds, turning them bright white. The soldiers moved toward the edge of the ravine; it appeared that they were continuing to fire.
Dwight Granger checked his own computer, to be certain he was capturing all of this action. He had seen individuals and small groups rocketed, but it had always been at least plausible that they were in fact rebel AI’s, armed insurgents. That was one thing. This was another. This was sickening. This was mass murder—there was no other possible explanation.
The school bus departed empty, taking several turns to reverse its direction in the small clearing. Fifteen minutes later, bus R22 arrived. It must have been parked far enough away so that its passengers couldn’t hear the gunshots and become alarmed. A few miles would be sufficient. The horrific process was repeated. The passengers were marched from the bus the short distance to where the clearing broke in a sharp line at the edge of the gully. Clicking to the infrared view, he could see that the hot white shapes that were the people taken from the first bus were already turning a cooler shade of gray. Dead. The new line of victims, that’s what they were, he understood that clearly now, the new victims were again lined up and mowed down, falling forward, down the ravine’s edge and on top of the earlier victims. Again the soldiers moved to the edge of the ravine, and continued to fire down into the warm bodies until there was no more movement. Empty, the second bus departed the scene.
****
A hundred feet away from Dwight Granger’s work station, Bob Bullard and Harry, the senior UAV tech, were also closely watching the events unfolding at the nameless ravine in Radford County. The director’s staff, bodyguards, and the rest of the Oversight team had been sent out for an extended lunch, leaving them alone to follow the events around Mannville. The movement of school bus R22 as it departed the clearing seemed to snap Bullard out of a trance. “Harry, where’s the other bus?”
The tech had put the Predator into a programmed circle pattern, so that he could concentrate on controlling the sensors. He pulled back the zoom lens, widening the field of view until R37 was visible, approaching the departing bus on the rural lane leading to the ravine. “There it is. Like clockwork.”
“Harry…we need to turn this off. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“What?”
“Kill the vide
o, and get that Predator out of there. Then erase everything that was recorded today. This is bad. This could be a problem. We can’t have this saved anywhere. I never authorized this. My new liaison officer to the Kazaks must have gone out of his mind.”
“Okay…you’re the boss,” said Harry, stubbing out a cigarette.
“I’m serious. Erase it all. This could bite us in the ass, big time. Get that Predator out of the area. Erase everything.”
“The weather’s getting shitty anyway. I’ll bring it back to the bird farm.”
“Good,” replied Bullard. “The Kazaks don’t need our help to finish this job. They know what to do. They can take care of business the old-fashioned way, without UAVs or helicopters. I just don’t want any video of it. Got it?”
“Loud and clear, chief. There, it’s done. It’s all deleted and overwritten a thousand times. It can’t be recovered.”
“And there are no backups?”
“Hell no. It’s gone. Trust me—I zapped it good. Just forget you ever saw it.”
“And no more UAVs or helicopters down there until I tell you otherwise,” Bullard instructed.
“I understand. No problem. Nothing flies over Radford County until you say so. Like you said—the Kazaks know how to take care of business the old way.”
****
The five-ton Army truck drove no more than twenty minutes, rumbling along narrow country lanes into a section of the county Jenny had never seen before. At least not as far as she could tell from her limited rearward view out the back of the truck and through the tear in the canvas roof behind her. Since arriving in Mannville, she had only gone on a few short car rides. Gasoline was too precious to use for anything but the most essential trips. Even with unlimited gas, it was impossible to cross the Tennessee River to the east or the Mississippi state line to the south, and nobody in their right mind would go west, back toward the hell that was Memphis. A checkpoint allegedly manned by Nigerians prevented free travel over the one remaining bridge to the north.
Foreign Enemies and Traitors Page 22
