Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  “Master arm is on,” reported Captain Pratt now.

  And then he began reading off information as it appeared on his displays. There was nothing else he could do but provide narration for the disaster. “Midstore pylons, selected.”

  “Pilot copies.”

  “Sensor, pilot,” Pratt said, his voice quavering slightly now. “Hellfire is spinning up. Weapon power is on. Laser is armed. Weapon is hot. Where are those goddamned F-16s?”

  “MC, sensor. Thirty minutes out.”

  “Damn it! Warn the fucking FOB!”

  “Laser fired!” This would give the exact range-to-target information to the UAV. It was the last step before launching a Hellfire.

  Seconds later the Reaper let loose a missile. Its five-hundred-pound warhead raced away at the lower edge of the monitor, the flame behind it whiting out the camera for a moment before the screen cleared up and only a bright, fast-moving speck was visible.

  “Rifle!” Reynolds shouted. Rifle was the term used to indicate the pilot had fired a missile, but there was no term to use for a phantom launch, so he said it anyway. He then read aloud the targeting data on his PCC. “Time of flight, thirteen seconds.”

  His stomach tightened.

  “Five, four, three, two, one.”

  The impact of the Hellfire whited out the center of the monitor. It was a massive detonation, with several secondary explosions, indicating that munitions or fuel had been hit by the missile.

  “Son of a bitch, Bryce,” muttered Pratt from his seat on Major Bryce Reynolds’s right.

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit!” Pratt said. “Another Hellfire is spinning up.”

  Thirty seconds later Reynolds called “Rifle!” again. “Looks like the same target.”

  A pause. “Roger that.”

  Together they sat, watching the feed through the eyes of their aircraft as it attacked friendly forces.

  All four Hellfires launched from the Air Force Reaper, striking three different prefabricated buildings in the FOB.

  The two bombs then dropped, detonating on an unoccupied rocky hillside.

  —

  After the launching of all its weapons, Cyclops 04 made an abrupt turn, increased speed to two hundred knots, virtually the UAV’s top speed, and shot south toward the Pakistan border.

  MC gave updates on the location of the F-16s; they were twenty minutes out, they were ten minutes out, they were just five minutes from having the drone in range of their AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles.

  At this point it was not about saving lives. At this point it was about destroying the Reaper before it “escaped” into Pakistan, where it could end up in enemy hands.

  The drone made it over the border before they could bring it down, however. The F-16s hopped the border themselves in a desperate attempt to destroy the sensitive equipment, but the drone dropped to five thousand feet and arrived over the outskirts of heavily populated Quetta, and the flight of F-16s were ordered to return to base.

  Finally the men and women at Creech, along with the men and women in Afghanistan and at CIA and at the Pentagon who were now watching real-time feeds from the runaway Reaper, watched in dismay as Cyclops 04 circled a wheat field just a few hundred meters from the Quetta suburb of Samungli.

  The pilots could tell that even the crash was a controlled setup. The descent had been nearly perfectly executed, the airspeed had decreased as the phantom pilot backed off on the throttle, and the Reaper had made a forward scan of the landing site with its cameras. Only at the last instant, as the UAV floated sixty feet above the ground alongside a well-trafficked four-lane road on final approach, did the phantom pull hard on the control stick, pitching the drone into a left down attitude and removing all lift. Then the aircraft dropped from the sky, hit the field, cartwheeled in the hard dirt a few times, and came to rest.

  The men and women at Creech, at Langley, and in Arlington who possessed a front-row seat to this nightmare lurched back in unison at the violence of the surprise intentional crash at the end of a smooth flight.

  At the GCS at Creech Air Force Base, Major Reynolds and Captain Pratt, both men stunned and furious, pulled off their headsets, walked outside into a warm, breezy afternoon, and waited to hear casualty reports from FOB Everett.

  Both men were covered in sweat, and their hands shook.

  In the end, eight American soldiers and forty-one Afghanis were killed in the attack.

  —

  An Air Force colonel at the Pentagon stood in front of the seventy-two-inch monitor that had, up until the screen went black two minutes earlier, displayed the entire event.

  “Suggest we demo in place,” he said.

  He was asking his higher-ups for permission to send a second UAV into the area to launch enough munitions onto the downed UAV to demolish it where it lay, destroying every shred of evidence that it was an American drone. With a little luck—and with a lot of Hellfire missiles—the UAV might just cease to exist completely.

  There were expressions of agreement throughout the room, though many in attendance remained silent. There were protocols in place for destroying a UAV that crashed over the border in Al-Qaeda country so that they could keep its secrets hidden and remove the enemy’s propaganda value.

  Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess sat at the end of the long table. He tapped his pen on a legal pad in front of him while he thought. When the beating of the pen stopped, he asked, “Colonel, what assurances can you give me that the follow-up UAV will not be hijacked and put down right alongside Cyclops 04 or, worse, fly over the border and attack blue forces.”

  The colonel looked at SecDef, and then he shook his head. “Frankly, sir, until we know more about what just happened, I can’t give you any assurances whatsoever.”

  Burgess said, “Then let’s save our drones while we still have some left.”

  The colonel nodded. He didn’t like SecDef’s sarcasm, but the man’s logic was solid.

  “Yes, sir.”

  SecDef had been spending the past half-hour conferring with admirals, generals, colonels, CIA execs, and the White House. But of all his communications since this rapid crisis had begun, his most informative conversation had been with a General Atomics technician who happened to be in the Pentagon at the time and had been rushed into a five-minute meeting with SecDef before being put in a holding area, awaiting further consultations. When the scope of the crisis was explained to him he declared, in terms forceful enough to get his point across, that however the hacking of the UAV had been accomplished, it would be dangerous to presume that there were any technological limitations to the geographical reach of the perpetrator. No one in the military or at General Atomics could say, at this early stage, that an operator who takes control of a drone in Pakistan could not also take control of a U.S. drone flying over the Mexican/American border or a drone flying in Southeast Asia or in Africa.

  Secretary of Defense Burgess used this information when he announced to the room, “We don’t know where the attacker is, or what his access points are into our network. Therefore I am ordering, at this moment, a full ground stop of all Reaper drones.”

  A colonel involved with UAV operations raised his hand. “Sir. We do not know if the access point is limited to the Reaper system and fleet. It may well be that someone with the capability we just witnessed might have the ability to hack into the other UAV frames.”

  SecDef had thought about this. He stood, grabbed his suit coat from the back of his chair, and slipped it on. “For now, just the Reaper. Between us and CIA and Homeland Security we have, what? A hundred drone ops running at any one time?” He looked to a subordinate. “I need that number for POTUS.”

  The woman nodded and rushed out of the room.

  Burgess continued, “There are a hell of a lot of soldiers, border patrol, and other
s who owe their safety to the situational awareness those UAVs provide. I’m heading over to the White House and will talk it over with the President. I will give him both sides of the argument on this, and he’ll make the call as to whether or not we shut down all UAVs worldwide until we figure out what this . . . until we figure out what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, I need information. I need to know who, how, and why. This incident is going to be an ugly mess for all of us, but if we can’t answer those three questions asap then it’s only going to get uglier and last longer. If you and your people are not working on getting me answers to those three questions, then I don’t want you bothering me or my people.”

  There was a crisp round of Yes, sirs from the room, and Bob Burgess left, an entourage of suits and uniforms moving out behind him.

  —

  In the end, President of the United States Jack Ryan did not have time to decide whether or not it was necessary to shut down all of the UAVs in the U.S. military and intelligence. As the secretary of defense’s black Suburban pulled through the White House gates one hour after the crash of the Reaper in Pakistan, a massive Global Hawk drone, the largest unmanned vehicle in the U.S. inventory, lost contact with its flight crew while flying at sixty thousand feet off the coast of Ethiopia.

  It was another hijacking—this became clear as the phantom pilot disengaged the autopilot and began making gentle adjustments to the pitch and roll of the aircraft, as if testing out his control of the big machine.

  The men and women watching the feed recognized quickly that either the phantom pilot of this incident was not as experienced as the one who expertly operated the Reaper over eastern Afghanistan, or else it was the same pilot, but his familiarity with this larger and more complex airframe was not as good. For whichever reason, within moments of the hijacking the Global Hawk began to lose control. Systems were shut off incorrectly and restarted out of sequence, and any chance to right the aircraft was lost while it was still several miles in the air.

  It crashed in the Gulf of Aden like a piano falling from the sky.

  This was seen, by virtually everyone cleared to know about it at all, as a message from the hackers. Your entire unmanned fleet is compromised. Continue to operate your drones at your peril.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  CIA officer Adam Yao was dressed in a black baseball cap, a white T-shirt, and dirty blue jeans. He looked like most every other male his age in Mong Kok, and he moved through the street crowds like a man who lived here in the lower-income neighborhood, not like he lived in Soho Central, one of the ritziest parts of Hong Kong. He was playing the role of a local merchant coming to get the mail for his shop, like any one of hundreds of other men in and out of the Kwong Wa Street post office.

  Of course he had no shop, and he had no address in Mong Kok, which also meant he had no mail at Kwong Wa. In truth he was there to pick the lock of Zha Shu Hai’s P.O. box and to get a look at the young man’s mail.

  The post office was crowded; it was shoulder to shoulder coming through the door. Adam elected to arrive just before noon, during the busiest part of the day here in always congested Mong Kok, hoping to use the chaos to his advantage.

  Adam had always operated in the field with a simple credo: “Sell it.” Whatever he was doing, whether he was playing the part of a homeless person or a high-flying young trader on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Adam embraced his role totally. It allowed him to get into and out of buildings without proper credentials, to walk right past Triad gunmen without them giving him a second glance, and it meant secretaries in line for noodles and tea on their lunch break might well chat about work within earshot of Adam without knowing, allowing him to learn more about a company and its secrets during lunch hour than he would by breaking into the company over the weekend and rummaging through file cabinets.

  Adam was an actor, a con man, a spy.

  And he was selling it now. He had a set of lock picks in his hand, and he pushed into the post office, walked directly up to Zha Shu Hai’s P.O. box, and knelt down. With men and women within inches of him on both sides, no one paid an instant’s attention to him.

  Yao picked the lock in under ten seconds. He slipped his hand inside and found two pieces of mail, one a business envelope and the other a small package containing a Bubble-Wrapped item. He pulled both pieces of mail out, closed the door to the box, and then pulled out the pick holding the tumblers up, which instantly relocked the door.

  He was out in the street a minute later, and he did a quick surveillance detection run to make sure he had not been followed from the post office. Once satisfied he was in the clear, he descended into the MTR underground station and headed back to his office on Hong Kong Island.

  Soon, he was back at his desk dressed in his suit and tie, and had placed the small package and the envelope in the ice tray portion of a small refrigerator/freezer he kept near his desk. After letting them chill for an hour, he reached into the freezer and removed the envelope, and opened it with a sharp knife. The sealant had frozen solid, and this allowed the knife to cut through it without tearing the paper, and it would also make it easy to reseal the envelope once it had thawed out.

  When he had it opened, Adam read the address on the outside. It had been sent from mainland China, from a town in Shanxi Province that Yao did not recognize. The address was handwritten not to Zha Shu Hai, but to the P.O. box. The return address was a woman’s name; Yao wrote it down on a pad on his blotter, and then he reached inside the envelope.

  He was somewhat surprised to find a second envelope inside the first one. This envelope had no writing on it at all. He cut it open in the same manner as the first, and inside found a letter handwritten in Mandarin by a shaky hand. Adam read it quickly, and by the third paragraph he understood what it was.

  The author of the letter was Zha’s grandmother. From her note he could tell she was in the United States, and she had posted this letter to a relative in Shanxi Province so as not to tip off the U.S. Marshals Service, which she knew was hunting her grandson.

  The relative from Shanxi had forwarded this on to the P.O. box without adding any note of his or her own.

  The grandmother talked about life in northern California and a recent surgery and other members of the family and some old neighbors. She closed with an offer to help Zha with money or to put him in contact with other family members who, she said, had not heard from him since he’d arrived in China a year earlier.

  It was a typical letter from a grandmother, Adam saw, and it told him nothing other than a little old Chinese lady in the States was likely involved with aiding and abetting a fugitive.

  He put the envelope and the letter aside, and he reached back into the freezer for the package. It was small, not larger than a paperback book, and he quickly opened it before the sealant began to thaw. Once it was open, he checked the mailing address. Again, it was sent just to the P.O. box without a name, but the return address was an address in Marseille, France.

  Curious, Adam reached inside and pulled out a small Bubble-Wrapped disk roughly the size of a silver dollar. It had pins coming out of the sides as though it attached to a computer motherboard or some other electronic device.

  Along with the item was a several-page data sheet explaining that the device was a low-power superheterodyne receiver. The paper went on to explain that the device was used in keyless entry systems, garage door openers, remote security alarms, medical devices, and many other devices that receive external radio frequency transmissions as commands to perform mechanical functions.

  Adam had no idea what Zha would want with the device. He turned to the last of the pages and saw that it was a chain of correspondence between two e-mail addresses.

  Both parties wrote in English; the man in Marseille was clearly an employee of the technology company that manufactured the device. He was corresponding in the e-mails to someone named FastByte22.


  Adam read it again. “FastByte Twenty-two. Is that Zha?”

  The e-mails were concise. It seemed FastByte22 had made contact with this employee on the Internet and asked him to sell him a sample of the superheterodyne receiver because the company would not export it to Hong Kong. The two then negotiated payment in Bitcoin, an untraceable online currency that Adam knew was used for computer hackers to barter services and for criminals to buy and sell illicit goods on the Internet.

  The e-mails went back a number of weeks, and they gave no indication as to what FastByte22 needed with a little gadget that could be used for anything from a garage door to a medical device.

  Adam took out his camera and began photographing everything, from the letter from Zha’s grandmother to the high-tech receiver. He’d have to spend most of the rest of the day retracing his steps. From repackaging the envelope and the package to returning to Mong Kok to breaking back into the P.O. box to drop the two items back in before Zha had reason to suspect they had been taken.

  It would be a long afternoon, and he did not yet know what he had accomplished today.

  Other than finding a potential alias for Zha Shu Hai.

  FastByte22.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The conference room of the White House Situation Room is smaller than most people imagine. The narrow oval table seats ten, which means for many sensitive meetings the assistants of the principals are lined up standing along the walls.

  The scene in the conference room was chaotic as the Situation Room staff prepared for the meeting. The walls were full of men and women, many in uniform, some arguing with one another and others desperately trying to get last-minute information about the events of the morning.

  Half the seats were empty, but CIA Director Canfield and Secretary of Defense Burgess were in their places. The director of the NSA as well as the director of the FBI were present, but they stood and conferred with underlings, sharing details of anything new learned in the past ten minutes.