Sting of the Drone

by Clarke, Richard A

  “It’s not supposed to be a fair fight,” Erik shot back. “That’s the whole point. We have found a way of eliminating our enemies that does not put our people at risk. Military leaders have wanted that forever. That’s why they put men inside big metal tanks or had them fly overhead in bombers, but then those things got vulnerable, too. I don’t want it to be fair and to have one out of ten of my guys killed. I want none out of ten killed. And that’s what I got with the drones.”

  They stopped talking as the waiter explained the next course. They were used to editing their remarks when others were within hearing distance, when civilians were around. Erik hoped that, to the waiters, they looked like a couple in from Columbus for the medical equipment show that was filling up the casino’s giant convention hall.

  “Trouble is, you got a bunch of your young pilots who spent their high school years killing pretend people on their computer games,” Jennifer said when the waiter had left. “They have to constantly remind themselves that this is not a game. And they’re not supposed to go home and talk about it with their husbands and wives. It’s an abnormal environment.”

  “Truth is they know that we don’t really need highly trained pilots who can drive an F-16 to do this stuff,” Erik admitted. “And they know they may never get to fly a real fighter, one that they get to sit in. We’re buying fewer and fewer fighter planes and more and more drones. The days of the fighter pilot are dwindling fast. They’ve gone from being highly select, well-trained jocks to being, what’d you call them, game-boys?”

  “You got it, Colonel. Game-boys with blood on their hands, who don’t always see how the sucker they just evaporated, who never saw it coming, in Yemen, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or Mali has anything to do with keeping the Homeland safe. Game-boys who sit up in bed in the middle of the night, let out a scream, and wake their partners, who find them covered in sweat. That’s what’s happening to some of them.”

  With a thud, the wine steward landed tableside. She was attached to a wire and holding a bottle. “Is now a good time for the Pinot? Foxen from their Bien Nacido vineyard. Fantastic.”

  Seven blocks away, they opened the champagne. “I always pop a bottle of the bubbly when a client finds just the right place for them and gives me their check,” the real estate agent said to Ghazi. “And I just know, Mr. Romano, that this is the right place for you. Completely furnished, ready to move in, thirty-three floors above everything. You can see the Strip out the bedroom windows and the mountains from the living room.”

  Ghazi clinked glasses and sipped the celebratory drink. “It’s very nice. And the Internet speeds seem to be very fast. I need that to keep in touch with my business in New York.” He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window. “Is that the airport out there?”

  “No, sir, the airport is over here. That’s the Air Force base way out there, but I guess you can see things taking off from there because you are so high up. Just a fabulous view. And because you are paying cash you can move in less than a week from tonight.”

  After locking the condominium, Ghazi and his real estate agent walked down the brightly decorated hall to the elevator, passing a woman dragging a wheelie with a large computer bag strapped on top of it. “G’evening,” Sandra Vittonelli muttered as she passed them on the way to her apartment. Even though she was doing it every two weeks now, it had been a long flight from Washington.

  As she unlocked the door to her unit, she could hear the landline ringing. Entering the living room, she felt the secure Blackberry on her hip vibrating. She reached the landline in the study while it was still ringing. “Please authenticate,” a man’s voice said.

  She placed the four fingers of her right hand onto the phone’s small screen, then removed a card from a pouch that was hanging around her neck and inserted it into the side of the phone. Finally, she spoke into the handset, “Vittonelli, Sandra. I am code blue, repeat code blue.” With that, she had completed three-factor authentication and the phone began receiving encrypted voice traffic from the Global Coordination Center, forty-three kilometers away in the desert, on the airbase.

  “Ms. Vittonelli, we have a potential signature strike pending.”

  She lifted the computer bag off the wheelie and placed it on the floor next to her desk. The little study was still dark, she hadn’t had time to turn on any lights in the apartment. “Is it on the HPTL?”

  “No, ma’am, not yet on the High Payoff Target List, but it sure fits the signature and we think we have two HVIs there.”

  “You think you have two High Value Individuals? Do you or don’t you?” she asked.

  “We are waiting confirmation from Maryland, but what we appear to have is a meeting of two of the Qazzani group leaders. We’re not sure how long it will continue. We’re afraid that if we don’t take the shot, the meeting will break up and the HVIs will leave.”

  She knew what this probably meant. She would have to try to get out to the base as fast as possible. “Have you done a collateral scan?”

  “Yes, ma’am, collateral damage potential is currently scored at zero.”

  “How long have you had eyes on?” she asked.

  “We followed the first possible-HVI there almost six hours ago. HVI two arrived about an hour later,” the voice from the GCC said. “But we have gone back and looked at historical images of this site from satellites and from our own birds passing by. Never seen anything but guys with guns around.”

  “Where is Colonel Parsons?” she asked. Maybe he could handle this one, so she could get into a hot shower and then sleep in her own bed.

  “Colonel Parsons said to inform you, ma’am, that he is on his way over to pick you up at your location. He was downtown. He should be there in about five mics.” Sandra groaned, there was no way that she could avoid driving out to the base now, but at least she would not have to drive herself.

  She quickly changed out of the clothes that she had worn on the flight and into a tracksuit. She put her Yankees hat on to hide the disarray of her hair. When Erik called to say that he was downstairs, she was waiting for the Nespresso machine to finish pumping out an intensity ten demitasse of eye-opening caffeine.

  It could be a long night.

  13

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

  KUNAR PROVINCE

  AFGHANISTAN

  “How will you kill your cousin’s husband?” the older man asked, as the two men sat beneath an undercut rock, amid the boulders on a hillside three kilometers from their vehicles.

  “Just shoot him,” the younger man replied. “I am not one for the torture. It takes time and then there is the cleaning.”

  “But he has been placing these little radios on your Toyota for money, money from the Americans. You should use your knives first.”

  “Fadl, if he had not been placing the beacons on my Toyota, do you think that we would have that drone circling up there? This is a good plan Ghazi gave us.”

  The two men squinted up at the blue sky, looking for the drone that they had heard almost an hour earlier. Both men were reluctant to move out from under the overhanging rock, to look around the boulders, to expose themselves to the all-seeing eye above them. They were also tired from the walking, alone, from the tunnel exit, up the hill.

  “It will be a good plan if it works, but we have been here for many hours. The drugs will be wearing off soon.”

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

  OUTSIDE LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  Erik drove the black Camaro only slightly above the speed limit. He did not want to be delayed by the Highway Patrol pulling him over, even if they would probably buy his excuse that he was an Air Force officer who had just been called and told to report to base urgently. For the first part of the ride, neither Erik nor Sandra spoke. He was still angry that he had to leave his wife when there were still two courses left to be served, when their “date night” had only just started. He wondered if he would get back to her in time to enjoy the suite they had taken for the night as part of the casin
o’s “Dinner and Sleepover” package, designed to lure in locals. Sandra, fighting fatigue, was going over the meetings she had the past two days in Washington.

  Erik read her mind. “So how was our Nation’s Capital? Inspiring, efficient, focused on the things that matter?”

  “None of the above,” she replied. “You know what struck me on this trip? The briefings I got at Headquarters about the extent of the problem. Sure, al Qaeda in AfPak is almost gone, but we still have the various Taliban groups on both sides of the border and now the narcoterrorist criminal cartels like the Qazzanis.

  “But in Yemen we have al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula taking over towns, in Nigeria it’s the Boko Haram offshoot burning down Christian churches with people in them, in Mali it’s al Qaeda in the Maghreb that runs half the country, like the Shabab affiliate that has a swath of Somalia. Bin Laden is still dead, but this thing has just metastasized.”

  Erik turned the car into the base, flashing his identification to the Air Force policewoman at the gate. “Well, we are flying in all of those places. It’s a target rich environment. And it’s employment for the likes of us well into the future, no matter the other budget cuts.”

  “Remember that intercept last month about something happening around Christmas?” she asked.

  “Yeah, whatever happened to that?” Erik said.

  “This is why these trips back to DC are essential, even though they take a lot out of me. You’d never know it on the outside, but people on the seventh floor at Headquarters, people downtown, are all trying to figure out how to stop the Christmas Bombings. That’s what they’re calling it, but they don’t want it to leak to the press, especially since there may be nothing to it.”

  “Nothing to it?” Erik replied. “That just means they haven’t been able to develop any leads.”

  “That’s exactly what it means.” She looked out at the variety of drones on the runway and in the hangars as they drove down the flight line. There were some of the older Predator and the larger Reaper drones based there for the pilots to use in training flights, some of the large Global Reach drones that went anywhere in the world from the United States, and some of the newly arrived Homeland Security drones to patrol the Mexican border, on both sides.

  “That’s what struck me, Erik. We are the only thing that they have that works. We shoot at the bad guys and keep them so they can’t really set up shop and start training thousands of terrorists the way they used to do in Afghanistan before 9/11. But we can’t drone every guy who gets radicalized on the Internet in his dorm room. And we can’t shoot Hellfires into houses in the U.S. where they may be planning the next one. All we can do is get some small fraction of the guys overseas.”

  Erik pulled up to the single-story, windowless white building that was the Global Coordination Center. “Maybe, but let’s go kill a few more of them,” he said, thinking about Jennifer alone in the hotel suite.

  * * *

  Walking onto the floor of the GCC gave Sandra all of the adrenaline rush the coffee had failed to deliver. She felt at home here, like she had a purpose. She strapped on her wireless headset and began the drill. “Okay, what have we got here? Let’s start with Virginia. CIA, what’s your story?”

  “We have a HUMINT source with excellent access and substantiated previous reporting on the Qazzanis. He beaconed the vehicle of Musuhan, number three in the group. They’re meeting just over the Pak border inside Afghanistan, so the strike won’t raise concerns in Islamabad.”

  Then the voice from Maryland came over the speakers, “NSA here. We geolocated the beacon at the coordinates of this compound that you are looking at on screen.”

  Bruce Dougherty continued the story from his cockpit cubicle on the floor of the GCC. “We found the compound at those coordinates. Checked the plates on the vehicles parked outside. One is the vehicle we associate with Musuhan and the other is a vehicle of another HVT named Fadl Kaprani.” Bruce zoomed the camera in on vehicles parked outside a high-walled compound of one large and two smaller buildings. “They have been inside for hours. Some sort of cartel board meeting maybe. The usual smattering of guards on the roads in and up in the hills, one-zees and two-zees.”

  “And you said the collateral score was zero?” Sandra asked.

  “Yes, ma’am, we have imaged the area for seven hours now and there is no sign of any civilian activity. We have looked back at historical images from satellite sweeps and never any women or children. They had some guys there recently erecting that outbuilding there at the top. We think it’s a new, private hooch for a senior guy, so he doesn’t have to stay in the big house with the guards and cooks.”

  Erik was flipping through the supporting documents on his iPad. “Legal has signed off on it. Pentagon and Agency have cleared the shot. The White House has been notified to stand by.”

  “Okay, patch me in to Dr. Burrell,” Sandra agreed, looking up at the image of the isolated compound on the Big Board. “That’s a hell of a long meeting they’re having. Let’s get the shot off before it breaks up.”

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

  KUNAR PROVINCE

  AFGHANISTAN

  The children were mainly Tajiks. The man who took them from the orphan school had promised that they would be resettled in a new school for Islamic orphans in Saudi Arabia, a beautiful new campus funded by a Prince. The man had also made a generous gift to the orphan school, so that even those children who could not yet go to Saudi Arabia would live in better conditions. No doubt some of that gift actually made its way to fixing the dilapidated building, buying some food. Most of it probably went into the personal bank account of the headmaster.

  The seventeen boys, the oldest of whom was ten, had been thrilled by the bus ride, at first. The trip, however, had taken eighteen hours and the snacks they were given were not enough to quench their hunger. Thus, when they got to the compound, they gorged themselves on the hot food that had been prepared for them. There were sleeping rolls for twenty and soon, tired from the bus ride and drugged by what was in the food, all of the children were settled quietly in their bedrolls.

  As the first of the boys began to wake, to try through the fog of the remaining sedative coursing through their systems to figure out where they were, they discovered that they could not open the doors to go out. One boy found a hatch door on the floor, the one that led to the tunnel, but that, too, was locked from the other side. The men who had fed them were gone. They were alone. The three boys who woke first learned this and began to be afraid.

  The others never knew that fear. They had gone to sleep with full stomachs for the first time in months. They had settled happily into new, clean bedrolls, thinking of the ride in the airplane that the men had promised would take them to their new home.

  The Reaper was circling at twelve thousand feet in a light ten-knot wind from the north. A Predator was two thousand feet above it to provide a second set of eyes. Occasionally, the Predator’s pilot would use its camera to scan the skies for any other aircraft. There were none in the area. The antennae on board the Predator scanned frequencies for mobile telephones, handheld radios, any electromagnetic signatures emanating from the valley below. There was only silence.

  At Creech, the Reaper pilot’s control panel showed all systems nominal. On the Reaper’s underside, toward the front of the thirty-six-foot fuselage, inside a protective dome, the multispectral camera moved slowly, always pointing at the target below. The camera could zoom in close and provide High Definition images in daylight or zoom back and show the entire valley. At night, the Low Lite camera would flip into place, providing green or gray images as clearly as in midday. Toward the back of the aircraft, inside a four-foot blister, a synthetic aperture radar scanned the ground below, feeding data to an onboard computer that generated photographic quality images from the radar’s return, day or night. Below each of the thirty-six-foot wings, hanging from the weapons racks were two laser-guided 250-pound bombs and two Hellfire missiles.

  The
first Hellfire penetrated the roof of the house where the boys slept, and then it exploded. It had an antipersonnel warhead, one that spread smaller balls of explosives and razor sharp metal. The second Hellfire had a high-explosive warhead, designed to knock over walls from the overpressure created by its blast wave. Hellfires three and four hit each of the two smaller outbuildings inside the compound wall with high-explosive detonations. All four hit in less than a minute. Each impacted within eighteen inches of their designated aim point. The wooden gate in the compound’s wall was blown open from the blast. An alarm on one of the SUVs outside the wall began to wail.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

  GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER

  OPERATIONS ROOM

  CREECH AFB, NEVADA

  “No secondary,” Bruce Dougherty observed. Normally terrorist camps were filled with enough of their own explosives that the Hellfires triggered additional detonations. “And no rescue party from the watchers in the hills.”

  “Yeah, well they’ve all learned by now that we wait around and pop the rescue parties, too,” Erik Parsons observed. “Nothing’s going to happen. Might as well bring the birds home and call it a night.”

  * * *

  As they walked to the door of the GCC, Erik asked Sandra, “So we killed the number three in the Qazzani group. How long ’til they have another number three? And why don’t we like the Qazzanis again, remind me?”

  As they walked to the car, Sandra wearily replied. “The Qazzanis support al Qaeda and the Taliban. They have set up their own little country that spans the two sides of the AfPak border. They sell heroin all over Europe and the Middle East,” she paused. “And they killed three senior Agency people last year in an ambush they set up because they wanted to kill CIA officers.”

  “Ah, so it’s personal?” Erik asked.

  “We don’t do revenge killings, they do,” Sandra replied. “But for me, for the guys at Headquarters that set the priorities, yes, it’s personal. I went to two of those Agency funerals, saw the kids. We may sit back here in CONUS perfectly safe, but what we do here only works because we have some guys out there on the ground, in the shit.”