Sting of the Drone

by Clarke, Richard A

  Erik stood up and turned to Major Walker. “Bud, blow up my aircraft, or what’s left of it.”

  On the Big Board, there was now only one image, from Bird Two. What it showed on close up was that Bird One had had a rough landing, with both wings breaking off, but remarkably, the fuel tank had not yet exploded. Then the image zoomed out. A Hellfire zoomed off the left wing of Bird Two, soaring ahead of the Predator, the smoke briefly clouding the image from the camera. In seconds, the wreck of Bird One exploded, leaving nothing large enough to salvage, nothing of value to anyone trying to learn about the aircraft.

  “Well done, Colonel,” Sandra’s voice from Washington boomed over the speakers in the GCC. A cheer rose up from the twenty pilots on the floor.

  Erik had walked back to his desk and placed the conference call headset back on. He spoke into it. “Kill Call Closed.”

  18

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13

  CAMINO AL NORTE BUSINESS CENTER

  NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  “I’m afraid the doctor does not take walk-ins,” the receptionist said. “You will have to have a referral and then request an appointment.”

  “Tell her Mustang is here,” he said. “Go ahead. Ask her if she wants to ride a Mustang.”

  The receptionist was a temp and clearly uncomfortable. She thought that taking a job in a psychiatrist’s office at night was going to be strange and it had been ever since she sat down.

  “Doctor,” she said into the telephone, “a man named Mustang is here and wants to see you and he won’t go away.”

  “Oh, dear,” Jennifer Parsons replied on the telephone, from inside her office. “Well, then ask him if I can ride him.”

  Hearing that, the receptionist hung up the telephone, picked up her bag, and walked quickly out of the office. “You people are just not good Christians,” she said as she slammed the door to the suite.

  “You know, she’s right,” Jennifer said, standing in the doorframe of her office. “We’re not. And I do need to find a new temp agency.”

  “Or a more devout husband,” Erik Parsons replied.

  “Never,” Jennifer replied, putting her arms around his waist. “I like my Mustang, my horse.” She gave him one of her long, slow kisses. “How was your day at the office, dear? Did you push lots of pieces of paper?”

  “It was good. I think we saved some lives today,” he said as he lifted her up and then sat her on the receptionist’s desk. “But I crashed and burned, destroyed my airplane.”

  Jennifer folded her legs behind him. “That’s okay, Mustang, they’ll give you a new toy tomorrow.”

  The door flew open. “I forgot my cell phone,” the ex-receptionist said. Jennifer and Erik leaped off the desk. “You people don’t need a shrink, you need a preacher. And a cold shower,” she said as she stormed out a second time.

  “Buzzkill,” Erik said to her on her way out.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” Jen replied. “Le Croupier is still open. They make great mojitos.”

  “If that’s what the doctor is prescribing for my condition,” he replied.

  “It’s part one of a two-part therapy,” she said. “The second part requires you to get in a hot tub. Later.”

  They took a booth in the back of the bar and grille on the first floor of the office building. Despite the half-off prices, the crowd was thin. Most people still preferred to go to the casinos for their drinking, free drinking if they were gambling.

  “Did you really crash and burn?” Jennifer asked.

  “Yeah, but these things only run around four million. It’s not like I crashed a B-2, or even an F-16,” he said, sipping his mojito. “You’re right. They will give me a new one tomorrow. Several.”

  “So what’s the problem? What brings you to the shrink’s office today?” she asked. “Or were you just feeling horny because you were a hero?” She knew not to ask how he had saved people’s lives, but she did not doubt it.

  Erik laughed. “No, I’m okay. It’s just that after the orphanage, things are a little different. More tense. We actually got turned down by the White House for the first time today.”

  “But you went ahead anyway?” she asked.

  “Well, kinda. Let’s just say I found a way of proceeding that was consistent with the Commander’s Intent,” he said. “But I am a little worried about Bruce. He thinks it’s his fault those kids got killed. I think he’s drinking too much, but I don’t want to put him on report. That would tank his shot at promotion to O-5.”

  “But you can counsel him, can’t you, without it going in his jacket?” she asked.

  “Sure, and I have,” he replied. “It’s just, it’s more than Bruce. It’s like something’s shifted. Like the bad guys are figuring us out, like we’re not quite invulnerable anymore.”

  “Look, honey, you always said you had to fight against this whole idea that you all are the Avenging Angels who can throw lightning bolts down from your home in the sky,” Jennifer said. “You’re not invulnerable and you do fly real weapons that can hurt real people. You may have to remind your guys of that every once in a while, but I am still much happier having you fly your drones than when you were flying the F-16. If you crashed and burned one of those, you might have been a crispy critter.”

  “Yeah, well, I miss the real cockpit,” he replied.

  A young man in a blue blazer, sitting at the bar by himself, finished his 7 and 7, put down a ten, and walked out. Jen watched him through the bar’s window as he got into a Cadillac XTS. “I’m thinking about looking at the new Caddy to replace my Ford,” Jennifer said to her husband. “Have you seen it?”

  “No, I love my Camaro and I’m gonna take you back to my place in it, with the top down. Let’s go check out the hot tub.”

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13

  COPPER HILLS RANCH

  KYLE CANYON, NEVADA

  Yuri Poderev did not like the sun. He was happier now that it had set. Bright sunlight made it hard for him to think clearly. It distracted him. He liked the night, when it was as if a noise went away. To deal with the Nevada sun, he had bought black-out shades and curtains for the rooms where he and Mykola Zatonsky had set up their equipment. The rest of the house they had left largely untouched. It was isolated, well off the Kyle Canyon Road, slightly more than an hour’s drive north from the Las Vegas Strip. There was a large pool in the backyard inside the fence, and beyond that a horse barn twenty meters away. There were no horses.

  There were satellite dishes, a T3 high capacity Internet connection from the phone company, and a separate fiber line from the cable company. Running the lines from the road had been costly, but there did not appear to be any budget constraints on this operation. The Pakistanis had money, apparently from some Arab supporters. The only Pakistani Yuri had met so far in the operation, the one who had just moved into a high-rise condominium in Las Vegas, was Ghazi Narwaz. And Ghazi appeared to be a very Westernized, global operator who seemed to be somewhat computer literate. He could not follow all that Yuri and Mykola had explained to him, but he seemed to have a far better understanding than most “tourists,” as the two computer experts referred to the millions of Internet users who had no idea how either their computer or the networks worked.

  Ghazi had been vague about his background, but he seemed to have operated in international businesses. Yuri knew that this operation was not the first time Ghazi had hired the Merezha organization, but the earlier projects were small, safe, profitable, personal. This thing now was huge and hugely dangerous. It was also bold and potentially fun, the sort of thing that Yuri and Mykola had always talked about doing. The thrill of it made them think less about the danger. And then there was the money. The Merezha was being handsomely paid for supporting Ghazi and his people. Yuri and Mykola would see a small portion of that, but even that portion was considerably more than they had ever made before and both men already had over ten million in dollars and gold scattered in banks around the world.

  The beeping indicated a
car had started down the long driveway. Mykola looked at the video monitor and then hit the control to open the gate that was set back where it could not be seen from the road. Ghazi appeared to be alone in the Cadillac XTS.

  After he freshened up and poured himself a coffee, the two young Ukrainians showed Ghazi the Op Room, as they called the bedroom that they had converted into the computer war game playroom for this day’s mission. “The Hawker took off over two hours ago from Karachi, allegedly bound for Almaty,” Yuri explained. “And your guys say the Predator left Bagram almost three hours ago, so the two should be in the same general area by now.”

  “Yes, but this will only work if we know exactly what the Predator’s target is so we can circle above it while it is circling below looking at the target for a while,” Mykola added.

  Ghazi looked over the two unkempt men, who looked like they had not washed or shaved or even changed clothes in days. He had noted the pizza crusts and Red Bull cans in the living room. He hoped they knew what they were doing. It had been expensive to lease the Hawker executive jet and even more costly to fit it out the way the Ukrainians had wanted. It was one thing for the Iranians to have done this kind of operation to get their hands on the RQ-170 U.S. stealth drone. Iran had a huge military and intelligence apparatus. The Qazzani Group and the Ukrainian Merezha were highly successful at complex criminal enterprises, but capturing a U.S. drone was something few nation states could accomplish. “We are fairly sure we have lured them to the target. We fed them enough information that they should have sent one of their Predators out for a look and our source in the Pakistan Air Force says the flight is today.”

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13

  GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER, OPERATIONS ROOM

  CREECH AFB, NEVADA

  The lone Predator was being flown by a senior noncommissioned officer. Officers flew strike missions and released weapons. Sometimes noncommissioned officers would fly the armed aircraft to the target zone and then hand it off to an officer. On unarmed reconnaissance flights the pilot for the entire mission was often someone like Sergeant Rod Miller, a twenty-six-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force. This flight seemed fairly routine to Miller. Take off out of Bagram in Afghanistan, fly over the Pakistani border into Northern Waziristan, and patrol an area where CIA sources said the Lashkar-e-Taiba had recently set up a training center.

  The target was said to be an isolated cluster of about six buildings with a rifle range and an obstacle course. The mission was simply to find it and then circle it for several hours to develop a Pattern of Life, including whether there were women, children, or obvious civilians who could be considered collateral damage casualties. The presence of such potential casualties usually caused the target to be put on hold, even if it otherwise fit the pattern of a terrorist base sufficiently that it qualified for a possible future Signature Strike.

  Once in the area, it took Miller only twenty minutes to find a remote cluster of buildings that seemed to fit the source’s description. There were a few vehicles and some men wandering around the yards, but Miller also saw clothing drying on a line near what could be the living quarters. Maybe there were families staying there. Sergeant Miller kept the main electro-optical imaging camera staring at the target as he programmed the Predator autopilot to fly a wide circle ten thousand feet above. At that height, the small prop engine could usually not be heard and the chameleon electrostatic panels on the bottom of the wings and fuselage would appear the same color as the sky above, making visual identification difficult.

  Miller asked Lieutenant Bill Wong, sitting next to him running a similar mission, to keep an eye on his screen while Miller went for a quick “bio break.”

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13

  COPPER HILL RANCH

  KYLE CANYON, NEVADA

  “Better come in here, Nawarz,” Yuri called out from the converted bedroom. “The Hawker has visual on the target.”

  Ghazi hurried down the hall from the kitchen, where he had been making coffee. “Yeah, they have also acquired the encrypted satellite links that the Pred is broadcasting, both the data streams and the video,” Yuri said as Ghazi joined them. “We can’t break the crypt though.”

  “Don’t need to,” Mykola said as he sat hunched over three screens. “Just have to jam the encrypted military grade Global Positioning System’s signal from the satellite. And that we start to do now,” he said as he hit the Enter/Return key on the Dell. “In two minutes, when the Pred still can’t get the Military GPS signal, it will switch over to the public GPS channel. That’s how they programmed it. And now we jam the data feed so that the pilot can’t control the bird anymore. Zap!”

  Yuri was standing behind Mykola, watching him and the screens. “The Hawker is circling at five thousand meters, so its radio signals are much more powerful than the commands on the same frequency coming down from the satellite is space. When the Pred can’t communicate with its pilot, it will just circle. But after fifteen minutes, if it still can’t phone home, it will break off the mission and fly home.”

  Ghazi looked at the computer screens, but could not understand the data that they were showing. “But we don’t want it to go home. Home is the U.S. airbase at Bagram,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Mykola replied. “Fifteen minutes from now we will start beaming what looks like GPS data down from the Hawker, on the public GPS frequency, but much louder, much more power. We will drown out the real GPS signal and we will give the little Pred our own GPS data, which will be wrong, of course.”

  Ghazi sat down in an empty, ergonomic chair, webbed and black. He was finally understanding the beauty of what the Ukrainians were doing, how it was that they guaranteed that they would capture a U.S. drone. “So, as of now that drone is not being controlled by its pilot? It’s out of communications with him? And it’s circling, trying to phone home? It can’t get the military satellite signal to know where it is, so it is using the civilian GPS signal like my car gets from the satellites, right?”

  “Exactly,” Mykola. “Now we wait for when it decides to go home and then we make the west into the east.”

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13

  GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER, OPERATIONS ROOM

  CREECH AFB, NEVADA

  “Miller, your bird’s sick,” Lieutenant Wong said to the sergeant as he returned from the bathroom. “Can’t get through to it, but she’s still circling and we’re still getting the vid.”

  “What the fuck’d you do to it, sir?” Miller asked as he put his earphones back on. The sergeant was twenty-two years older than the officer and, despite the rank difference, tended to treat the younger man as he would his college-age son.

  “I didn’t touch it, Rod. Jeez man, this happens. The satellite radio for the control frequency died and the backup must have, too. So the bird will fly home. Without you doing shit. Just watch the camera feed, which you’re still getting,” Lieutenant Wong responded. “Chill, dude.”

  Sergeant Miller punched in an extension number on his keyboard and spoke into his headset. “Major Dougherty, I have a problem with my Pred. Data link is down and she will probably fly herself back to base here in a few minutes.”

  Bruce Dougherty was three rows above and behind him in the warren of cubicles. “Got it, Rod. Just keep an eye on her and alert Bagram. I got another problem on my hands right now. So, you handle it. It’s unarmed.”

  “Roger that, sir,” Sergeant Miller replied and leaned back in his chair to watch the Predator fly itself home. Exactly fifteen minutes after the command-control data link to the aircraft had been broken, the video images changed. The aircraft was no longer circling, staring at the camp below. The camera switched to a forward view of mountains lit by the last rays of the sun and the dark sky behind them.

  “Wait a second,” Miller said aloud. “The camera should be looking at the sunset, not mountains lit by it. This motherfucker is going the wrong direction.”

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14

  MASHHAD AIRPORT

  MAS
HHAD, PAKISTAN

  The runway at Mashhad was only used a few times a day for the flights to Karachi. To get to Islamabad you had to go by bus. Occasionally a Pakistani Army helicopter or a Pak Air Force C-130 would land, but there was no military base at the airport. The local police and militia maintained security at the field, with a light hand. The air traffic control tower was staffed twelve hours a day, but the workload was light.

  By the time the on duty controller saw the Predator, it had already landed and was taxiing down the runway. He could not quite believe what he was seeing.

  After taxiing to the end of the runway, the Predator just sat there, with its propeller spinning very slowly at the rear of the fuselage. Then the man in the tower noticed the cars and trucks driving across the grass toward the Predator and picked up his drop line to the police station. “We have a problem. There are vehicles on the runway that should not be there. And one of them is a drone.”

  He picked up his binoculars and focused in on the unmanned aircraft as its rotor slowed to a stop. Then he saw the bright light from the television cameraman standing near the little terminal building.

  The young man in front of the camera was talking. “Behind me is what appears to be a U.S. drone. It has just landed at this civilian airport in Mashhad, Pakistan, apparently surprising local authorities. There were no Pakistani military or police here to greet it. In fact, at the moment, only WWN and some local people are at the scene. As you can see, the local men are hitting the drone with their shoes and look like they are getting ready to do some more serious damage.

  “WWN was contacted by an anonymous source who suggested that we be here at Mashad airport today. When we got here we were given a piece of paper by a man who then drove away on a motorcycle. The paper said the Pakistani and Afghan people were fighting back against the drones that, they say, kill innocent people. It did not say how they were fighting the drones, but then this one landed and, well, it seems pretty clearly to have been taken out of service somehow, at least for now. Americans may not be the only ones who understand this new killing technology. Bryce Duggan, WWN, Mashhad, Pakistan.”