Sting of the Drone

by Clarke, Richard A

  He placed his hand in the hand of the younger man as they sat together. “Ghazi, I know about these Ukrainians. Your father told me about them, what you have done with them. I don’t understand it all, but I understand that with the computers, you have become a rich man. Tell the Ukrainians if they help you stop the American bees from buzzing us and if they help with the operation in America, they can take over the distribution of the poppy paste in Europe.”

  “That is a high price to pay for vengeance, Janab,” Ghazi replied.

  “Ghazi, with your father gone, you are now my son and I can tell you things that I cannot share with the others,” Qazzani said, no longer sounding like the old man in the meeting. His voice was different. No longer the sage who talked in riddles, he began to sound like the CEO he was. “Your father ran Europe for us, but the men killed with him, his deputies, were the ones who were trained to take over if something happened to him. The men I have there now are not up to the job. In time, the Russians will move in and take over our markets. So what we offer the Ukrainians is a wasting asset. They don’t know that yet.”

  The truck began to pick up speed as they left the city. “By attacking their drones, you will distract the Americans and make us safer. Then when the bombs go off in their cities, Qaeda and the Taliban will tell them that the bombs will continue until the foreigners all leave Afghanistan completely. The American people will agree, they are weary of war. After they bomb Qaeda and the Taliban some more for revenge, they will go. This time, they will all actually leave.”

  Rashid Qazzani smiled for the first time since Ghazi had been with him that night. “And when the Americans finally leave, it will not really be the Taliban who take over, it will not be Qaeda. Ghazi, it will be us. We will have all the money we need to do it. We have all the growers. They do not want the Taliban in charge. When they were, last time, they stopped the farmers from making the paste from the poppies. But when the Americans finally leave, the drones must stop, too. We cannot have these pilots from their Sin City hitting our people here and in Afghanistan. So while Bahadur’s operation will convince the Americans that the price of keeping their soldiers in our part of the world is too high, you will convince them that using the drones must also stop.”

  “I understand, Janab, and I will stop the drones. And I will help Bahadur. But, Janab, why did the Americans kill my father and his men in Europe? Not because of the drugs. They must have known what they were planning to do for al Qaeda.”

  Qazzani looked into Ghazi’s eyes, probing them. “You are a wise man, Ghazi. Your father was very proud of all the money you made stealing with the computers. He wished you had brought him grandchildren, but he was very proud of his Canadian son.”

  * * *

  The van stopped abruptly and one rear door opened. “Ghazi, this time there must be no connection to us. Make it look like the ISI is going after the drones. Some of the ISI will help you. And Bahadur will leave a trail from the bombings to Qaeda. Not to us. Not this time.”

  Ghazi stared back at the old man. “I will do this, Janab, but not for the extra money, for my father.”

  “I feel like the falconer who launches two birds to attack the target. You, Ghazi, and Bahadur are my two attack falcons. I trust you both and you may trust each other, but Ghazi, trust no one else. The Americans would not have killed your father in Vienna, of all places, unless they knew what he was planning. Somewhere, my son, there is a traitor. I will find him and he will die a slow death, but until then, be very careful.”

  “Shab bakhair,” Qazzani said in parting. Ghazi stepped out of the van onto an empty road. The van pulled away. In the dark, under the tree, Ghazi could see his Kawasaki. It had been moved from the alley while they were meeting. Qazzani was always thinking several steps ahead, moving pieces on the board while eyes were elsewhere.

  Qazzani’s bodyguard moved next to the old man on the floor of the van. “Tell them I will be there shortly and tonight I want a younger one, no hair,” he admonished the guard. The bodyguard removed a mobile from his pocket and inserted a battery. In less than three minutes, he had placed the request, and then removed the battery again and slipped the mobile back into its leather case in his pocket. That was time enough.

  Eight kilometers west and five kilometers up, the mobile’s signal triggered a response in an unarmed black object flying quietly in the night. The caller’s number was known. He was a man associated directly with Rashid Qazzani. The small drone dove, sped up, and activated its night vision camera. The onboard computer calculated that the mobile was moving at eighty kilometers an hour off to the east. Just before the mobile shut down, the computer targeted the camera to look at all vehicles heading north within a hundred-meter strip on the highway. There was only one. Its image was recorded. Its license plate imaged. Its route tracked.

  The information was bounced to a satellite and then down to a server, for when it might be needed. Then the black bird resumed its patrol.

  5

  TUESDAY, JULY 14

  THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR’S OFFICE

  THE WEST WING, THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  She could no longer pretend. Sandra Vittonelli had to admit to herself that she could no longer wait until after the meeting. She would, after all, do better in the meeting with the National Security Advisor if she weren’t squirming. Moreover, Burrell had not yet shown up.

  His waiting area consisted of two chairs stuffed among three secretaries in his outer office. “We make most people wait in the West Wing lobby, but you can just sit here with us,” one of his secretaries had said. “After all, you’re one of us.” Sandra vaguely remembered the woman, maybe Rhonda, from the seventh floor at CIA Headquarters, but now she was in the West Wing working for Dr. Winston Burrell, the President’s alter ego on foreign policy, defense, and intelligence issues.

  “It’s that first little door on the right, dear,” maybe-Rhonda said. “Just be sure to knock. It’s a one seater. Unisex.” As Sandra was about to knock, the narrow door opened and a man she thought was Vice President Menendez came charging out.

  “Yes, he doesn’t have his own bathroom in his West Wing office. Neither does the Chief of Staff or Dr. Burrell,” maybe-Rhonda laughed when Sandra returned. “It really is a little old building, you know.” Sandra had never thought of the White House West Wing that way before, a sort of Big Brother house with everyone living and working on top of one another. The few times she had been in the West Wing before it had always been downstairs, on the ground level, in the Situation Room meeting space. And she had always been “backbenching” for the CIA Director, or the Director of National Intelligence. Now she was here by herself, wondering if that meant she was being left out to hang by herself.

  “Burrell just wants an informal, kind of off-the-record update,” she had been told at Headquarters. “No PowerPoint, no Happy Snaps, no YouTube hits. Just walk him through it. You do it by yourself. You can do it in your sleep.” She might have to do it in her sleep, she thought, since she had been largely unable to sleep the night before, her mind processing, planning, unable to shut down.

  When she returned from the restroom, a man thrust out a hand. “Hey, Sandra, great to see you again. How’ve you been?” She recognized him immediately.

  “Ray, are you working over here now?” Raymond Bowman, the last time Sandra had worked with him, had been Deputy Director of the Policy Evaluation Group, a small and somewhat vaguely purposed, independent agency that sat above the Potomac on Navy Hill, across the street from the State Department.

  “Same, same. Still at the PEG.” Ray beamed his good mood, in a way that was rare among people in the intel business. “No, Winston asked me to come over to sit in on your meeting. I think it’s just going to be the three of us.”

  “It is,” Winston Burrell announced as he entered the cramped outer office. “Come on in.” The National Security Advisor’s office was spacious and bright, with a conference table on one side and a living
room set on the other, a huge desk set in the back. Two walls had floor-to-ceiling windows, causing Sandra instant reflexive worry about snipers and laser beams linked to audio devices.

  Burrell motioned her to the couch. The two men sat in the armchairs, one on each side of the lower couch. It did not look like a power group, more like a meeting of a prep school faculty. Winston Burrell was in his sixties, broad, balding, beefy. He was known for his rumpled look. He could have been mistaken for the prep school headmaster. Ray Bowman was two decades younger, six inches taller, and looked like he had escaped from a J.Crew catalogue. He might have been the crew team advisor or tennis coach. At five foot five, with short black hair, and businesslike manner, Sandra Vittonelli might have been the Dean of Students or head of the English Department. Rather than having power over a thousand adolescents, however, these three ran a global empire of killing machines.

  Burrell began. “Hell, you’ve been running this operation out in Nevada what, two months now? Figured it all out?”

  “Four months now, sir. It’s familiar in some ways. I was originating some of the Kill Requests when I was at Kabul Station and before that at Baghdad Station.”

  “Well, I just thought I should get to know you better, rather than just have you be a face on a television screen in the conference room,” Burrell explained.

  To know me better, or to know the program better? Sandra thought. She knew the National Security Advisor by reputation. He was a survivor, having worked in both the Pentagon and at State. He had done his cooling-off time in a think tank, and then come back in with the new President. He had been with the President early in his campaign, before anyone else in the national security business. They were said to be very close, the two meeting for drinks most nights up in the Residence after the President and First Lady put the twins to bed. Burrell must work very long days, she thought.

  “Let me start with an admission that I will deny I ever said, but should explain why I want to know who is on the other end of the Kill Calls. The President has delegated the approvals to me,” Burrell explained. “I only go to him with the rare ones that pose new issues or close calls. As far as the rest of the world knows, he is making every decision.”

  Burrell stared at her, looking for a sign that she understood the trust that he was giving her, the weight that was on his shoulders. “I understand,” was all that she could think of saying.

  “I knew when I took this job that it would involve life and death. I wanted to save the good guys and I was willing somehow to be a part of getting the bad guys,” Burrell continued. “But now, I feel every day that if I mess up, if we mess up, if somebody I never met messes up, innocent people will die, and the bad guys will win. I know this sounds overly simplistic, but that is what it comes down to.

  “But now, I am not just involved somehow. If I say yes when you call me, people die. If I say no, bad guys get away and may later kill innocent people, Americans, allies, people with families who I will have to meet with and console and explain things to.”

  There was an awkward silence. Sandra and Ray were both trying to figure out if the National Security Advisor was done baring his soul. He wasn’t.

  “All of which is to say, Sandra, that I am putting a lot of faith in you and your team to get it right. But I know that erring on the side of indecision, which means doing nothing, is sometimes not better than acting. You just have to maintain very high standards. No more Herr Stroeders.”

  Sandra shook her head and looked puzzled at the name. “Wilhelm Stroeder, age twenty, a premed student at the University of Vienna,” Ray explained. “His mother is a doctor in Philadelphia, where he was born, making him an American citizen. He was the collateral fatality in the Palais attack. Officially, the Austrians have not figured out it was a drone attack. The new self-incinerating drone seems to have worked. A few people in their security service know, but they are looking the other way in return for some augmentations to their savings. The official After Action is that someone placed a bomb in the room, probably a rival drug gang. We have supplied the Austrians with intelligence that suggests that one of the Ukrainian drug cartels was possibly involved.”

  Sandra was seeing layers to her business that she had no idea existed. “Ray here, whom I gather you know, he is your unofficial Guardian Angel, so appointed by me,” Burrell said. “He’s had your back, even when you didn’t know it. He’s also been the biggest advocate of the program in the interagency.”

  Ray picked up where the National Security Advisor had left off, giving every impression to Sandra that they had planned the conversation. “Sandra, I remember before 9/11 when CIA and the Pentagon were fighting against the whole idea of the Predator and especially the armed Predator. But they had nothing that could find terrorists in real time, verify that there was no collateral at the site, and bring in an arrest team or a kill team. We had nothing. We were blindly sending cruise missiles at targets. Predator changed all that. It has almost completely eliminated al Qaeda Central in AfPak, it has been a huge force multiplier against the Taliban, it has kept AQAP in Yemen on the ropes, it has shattered al Shabab in Somalia, it helped to defeat Qadhafi in Libya. It has probably saved thousands of American lives. We need it.”

  The two men continued to finish each other’s sentences. “And if we screw up in how we use it, people will demand we stop,” Burrell continued. “I have the ACLU and half a dozen other groups trying every legal means to stop the program as a violation of international law, or as a criminal conspiracy to conduct extrajudicial murders. ‘The President and Winston Burrell have set themselves up as prosecutors, judges, jury, and executioners.’ That’s what they say and the truth is, they’re right. We are all of those things.”

  They seemed to have played out their script, so Sandra responded. “Dr. Burrell, we all feel personal responsibility for these life-and-death decisions. No one in the program thinks this is just another job; they are all acutely aware of how sensitive and important the work is, how necessary it is that we get it right, every day.”

  “Okay, Sandra,” Burrell said, “What would you tell a Congressional Committee?”

  “I’d tell them we do not initiate Kill Calls lightly. We track a target and spend days getting a Pattern of Life on him, what does he do every day, where does he go, when does he go there, who else is there. We work very hard to ensure that there are no women and children, no civilians anywhere nearby. We often wait until he is in a car alone or with another terrorist, off on a road by himself.

  “If we are going after an HVI, we make sure it’s him, through facial and voice recognition, through human assets on the ground. Then we act under Title 50, Intelligence Act authority, under the Presidential Finding. If we see a signature of an imminent terrorist threat or an opportunity to do irreparable damage to the terrorist organization, we go Authorized Use of Military Force, under Title 10, Defense authorities, under the Law of War standards. Lawyers pore over every strike before I initiate a Kill Call. We are very careful.” Then she thought about the Viennese student. “We know how we missed the student in Vienna. We have run an After Action to figure out what went wrong. It won’t happen again.”

  Burrell got up and walked over to his desk, picked something up and returned to the sitting area. He handed Sandra a picture of a handsome, young blond boy. “The President gave me this. It’s Wilhelm Stroeder. I have no idea where he got it. He gave it to me. I’m giving it to you. I should be giving you a picture of the thousands you’ve saved, but we don’t know who they are, so I am giving you Wilhelm to remind you and your team that this is about real people, not just HVIs and code names.”

  Burrell rose and offered Sandra a handshake. ‘You’re doing a good job, but you have to keep it that way because there are people gunning for you, for me, for the program. And Ray’s right: it’s all we got.”

  Leaving the suite, Sandra Vittonelli felt that the already heavy weight on her shoulders had just doubled. “Got time for a coffee?” Ray asked as he followed
her out. “Let’s drop downstairs to the Mess.” On the ground level, outside the Situation Room doors, Ray Bowman seemed to know everyone, even the enlisted sailors running the take-out window of the West Wing’s little executive dining room. He talked them into opening a side dining room, where he and Sandra sat alone with big mugs of dark roast.

  “Are you sure you don’t work here?” Sandra asked when they had settled into the chairs in the dark, wood-paneled private dining area.

  “I do have a Mess account,” he admitted. “I am here a lot, doing special projects, off-the-books stuff sometimes, for Winston. He doesn’t trust the Bureau or the Agency.”

  “But I’m Agency,” Sandra noted.

  “Yeah, but your program is closely identified with the President. The program is a hybrid, half Intel, half DOD. And it’s kind of a redheaded stepchild. The boys up the river keep a safe distance. Notice that you were the only Agency person here today. No Director, no Deputy. If it goes splat, they will be nowhere near it, and if it does go wrong, they will let it go splat all over the President and Burrell. If it works, they will take the credit.”

  Sandra laughed.

  “What’s funny about that?” Ray asked.

  “I thought you were a redheaded stepchild once. Weren’t you?”

  It was Ray’s turn to laugh. “Very good memory, Sandy. I was, when my mother got remarried. Now it’s really darkened, kinda auburny brown,” he said patting down his hair.

  Sandra Vittonelli’s secure mobile phone chirped. “I have to take this,” she said to Bowman. After a short, cryptic conversation, she returned to the table.

  “Ray, Erik is acting when I am on the road and he wants to initiate a Kill Call. Is there someplace here? Can you get me into the Sit Room?”

  Three minutes later they were sitting together in a small conference room in the Situation Room suite. On the main screen was an image beamed from a drone in Pakistan, an image that seemed to be mainly clouds. Erik Parsons’s face was on a smaller, side screen. “Ms. Vittonelli, we have been tracking an HVI code-named Packard for six days now. His Pattern of Life was that he kept to the house or the yard, receiving bad guys, but always with his wives and kids around, so No Joy. An hour ago he and two goons got in the SUV and they are driving south toward civilization. Right now they’re still on a back road, pretty empty, but they are about ten minutes away from a main road that will have traffic.”