Sting of the Drone

by Clarke, Richard A

  “We’re going to fly above the Antonov and then dive into it from about five thousand feet above it,” Sandra said. “It should split in two and then explode. It’s going to be over open desert, empty desert, for at least the next hour, but we should be in position to ram in about ten minutes.”

  The forward-looking camera no longer showed the AN-22, as the Sea Ghost climbed. The screen showed very bright blue, cloudless sky.

  “We will have to tell the Libyans. This transfer of chemical weapons was probably not approved by the government in Tripoli, probably a rogue officer selling the stuff,” the State Department officer commented. No one replied.

  Then the image on the screen shifted, spun, and became a view of the desert below. “What the hell was that?” Ray asked.

  “The Sea Ghost is in a sharp dive,” Sandra said. That much was apparent. The ground was rushing up fast. Then the screen went black. “The Sea Ghost just flew straight into the ground.”

  “Why?” Ray asked. “How?”

  “I don’t know,” Sandra replied softly.

  “Holy shit,” the Admiral said into an open microphone.

  There was a long silence on the network.

  “Admiral?” Ray called.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Contact the Kirya op center directly,” Ray ordered. “Give them an intercept vector.”

  “Roger that,” the Admiral replied.

  “What is the curio, or whatever you called it, if I may ask?” the Justice representative asked.

  Ray stood up and began to walk out of the room. As he got to the door, he heard someone on the call answer the question. “Headquarters of the Israeli Defense Force.”

  24

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24TH

  PARK STREET MBTA STATION

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  The young Somali-American from Portland stepped off the Green Line trolley at Park Street Over, looking like another of the tens of thousands of students who went through that T station every morning. There were over twenty colleges and universities within two miles of that subway stop, in both Boston and Cambridge. There were a quarter of a million college students in the metropolitan area and it seemed like half of them were on the T headed out for Thanksgiving break.

  He wore a backpack over his hoodie, had on a Patriots cap, and kept playing with his iPhone. He moved with the crowd toward Park Street Under and the Red Line trains to Harvard and Braintree. He took the stair that led to the middle platform, where he could get a train in either direction. He started walking behind the staircase to the end of the platform, where there were almost no people waiting. His mission for today was simple. Slip down into the tunnel and check it out for a place where, next time, he could leave his parcel.

  A man from South Boston who had just turned eighty-two said to the young Portland man in the hoodie, “Trains don’t stop that far down the platform. Only four-car trains this time a day.”

  “Fuck off, granddad,” the young man replied and kept walking, disappearing behind the staircase.

  The old man walked in the other direction, to the MBTA police officer who had just stepped out of the train from Ashmont. “The poster says ‘If you see something, say something,’” he said to the officer and then he told him about the student.

  As the officer walked around the staircase, he saw the young man holding a video camera and approaching the gate at the top of the ladder down from the platform to the tunnel. “Hey, hold up there,” the officer called out.

  The young man in the hoodie started to run toward the ladder. The officer bolted toward him. The student was over the gate and on the ladder before the officer could reach him. The old man, who had slowly followed them, saw both the student and then the officer jump over the gate and climb down into the dark subway tunnel.

  In the tunnel, the officer moved quickly on the gravel path by the side of the track, on the opposite side of the railbed from the lethal third rail. As he approached the man in the hoodie, the officer reached out and grabbed the backpack, which came off in his hand. The officer lost his balance, staggering forward. The young man put his hands together and brought them swiftly down on the back of the officer’s neck. The officer fell, hitting his head on the track. He did not get up.

  Minutes later the old man saw the lights coming down the tunnel, the Red Line train from Harvard. As the lights grew close, the student climbed back over the gate onto the platform. His backpack was gone, as was his Patriots cap. His hood was hanging behind him. Once over the gate, he began to run up the platform.

  “Hey, stop, where’s the cop?” the old man yelled, grabbing onto the student.

  The younger man pushed with both hands, knocking the old man down onto the hard concrete platform. “I told you to fuck off,” the young man said as he ran off.

  The driver on the Red Line train hit the horn and the brakes when he saw the body on the tracks in the tunnel, just a few meters outside of Park Street Station. When the alarm went off in the MBTA Operations Center at Arborway, the image from the surveillance camera on the platform showed the front car of the train stopped where the emergency brake had brought it to a halt, just inside the entrance to the station.

  25

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26

  NAVY HILL

  WASHINGTON, DC

  The heavy rains from earlier in the week were still moving down the creeks and into the streams that fed the Potomac, making it high, fast, and almost milk chocolate in color. Raymond Bowman sat on what he thought of as his bench, high above the rest of the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, on Navy Hill. His field of view included the green forest patch of Theodore Roosevelt Island in the middle of the river, with the high-rises in Virginia beyond. To the right was the giant Kleenex box that was the Kennedy Center and beyond it the riverside in Georgetown. To his left was what he thought of as an architectural travesty and an even more dubious use of money, the building housing the U.S. Institute for Peace.

  It was where he came, behind Donovan Hall, a few hundred meters from his office, to think. The gray sky, the aroma from the black Dunkin’s Bold, the breeze off the river all combined to relax him enough that he felt for the first time in months that his mind was clear, that for a moment his brain was not racing, processing, planning. And then Dugout sat down next to him.

  “I think it was because the Navy guys were using the new Thuraya satellite over the Mediterranean,” Dugout began, as he balanced his mug of green tea and his iPad on his lap.

  “I was just sitting here quietly thinking about how George Washington and his friends lost money on the Potomac canal and locks. What the hell are you talking about, Thuraya, and by the way, hello,” Ray replied. “Happy Dead Turkey Day. Shouldn’t you be watching football or stuffing yourself while visiting family members?”

  “Happy Thanksgiving, yourself. What I should be doing is having dinner with my band. Here, have a Cohiba. It’s your Dead Turkey Day present. I know you will never buy these things for yourself. You wait for me to be your Enabler.”

  Ray unwrapped the cigar and smelled its freshness. “You, in a band?” he asked.

  “Yeah, tenor sax in a jazz combo. My undergrad degree is in music, from Berklee. Anyway, you do realize that it’s like drizzling out here? I saw you sitting in the rain on the video cam feed and thought, maybe I should come out and give you a weather report,” Dugout said.

  “You’ve hacked our own video cameras?” Ray asked. “Yes, I know it’s drizzling. It’s nice. You know Wild Bill Donovan created this complex up here in like ’43? First real home of U.S. Intelligence.”

  “Yes, I knew that,” Dugout replied and handed Bowman a box of wooden matches.

  “You know that he had a drone program?” Ray asked. “He put little bombs on this species of really big bats and released them to fly behind Nazi lines.”

  “That work?” Dugout asked.

  Bowman lit the Cohiba and tried to blow a smoke ring. He failed. “Shit no, of course, it didn’t work. Now what
was that you said about the Navy?”

  “So, I’ve been working on how that Navy drone went down in Libya,” Dugout replied. “The Navy uses a commercial satellite for its link from its drones in the Med, using X band frequencies. Sometimes when their bandwidth gets too thin, they drop the encryption. It’s against policy, but the operators do it when they have to.”

  “So, that’s what they did on the Sea Ghost op in Libya and somebody was waiting. The bad guys had probably seen it happen before and just kept a bot on that link looking for it to happen again. When it did, zap, they slipped into the data stream and nose-dived the bird into the sand. Just your luck it happened when you were trying to stop the Hezbollah guys from stealing some sarin.”

  Ray continued gazing out at the river. “The Antonov had engine trouble later. Crashed off Cyprus.”

  Dugout chuckled. “I heard. Engine trouble? Is that what you call it when an Israeli F-15 sends four, count them four, air to air missiles through your fuselage and you and your planeload of sarin plunge into the Med?”

  “Don’t eat the fish next time you are in Cyprus,” Ray replied.

  “I’ll try to remember that for when I finally get my leave approved and I get to have last year’s vacation,” Dugout said.

  “Suddenly everybody is messing with our drones. Hezbollah, Pakistanis,” Ray said, turning to look at the man sitting next to him on the bench.

  “Well, first off, I doubt it was Hezbollah who messed up the Sea Ghost. They just happened to have been the unplanned beneficiary,” Dugout replied. “I think whoever put the bot out to look for when the Navy dropped sync on its encryption on the link to its drones is likely the same guy who stole the Pred in Pakistan,” Dugout smiled.

  “I would normally say you have gotten way too paranoid and are also making the analytical mistake of thinking all the jigsaw pieces are from the same puzzle, but I know that smile. You got something, don’t you?” Ray asked.

  “So, the digital master control system on the satellite over the Med and the one being used by the satellite over the Indian Ocean when they stole our Predator, turn out to be using the same operating system. And in both cases the hackers who took control used the same Oh-Day to exploit a vulnerability in the code. No one else, as far as I can tell, has ever used that Oh-Day. So, I would conclude that it’s the same guy in both cases,” Dugout said.

  “I have no idea what you just said,” Ray replied. “The only O’Day I know of is Anita O’Day, jazz singer. You should know her if you’re a jazz guy.”

  Dugout frowned. “Oh-Day as in Zero-Day. You drop the Zeer part and you get Oh-Day and besides lots of people call zero ‘oh.’ It’s cyber speak for a new trick, a virgin hack, something that no one has known about until that first day when one guy uses it. Point is that the same guy hacked both satellites using a nifty exploit he developed. No one else seems to have used it yet, anywhere.”

  “Let’s say I believe that for a minute about the satellites,” Ray said. “It fits into your theory that the drone targets are fighting back. But explain to me how my getting sued fits in. Somehow the family of a victim from the Vienna operation got a video from the security camera across the street from the hotel. It shows the drone going in. As far as I knew, the only people who had that tape were the Austrian Security Service.”

  “I checked,” Dugout said. “The Austrians didn’t give it up intentionally. The reason that tape got into the hands of the family of the victim is that someone hacked the Austrian Security Service. Not all that easy. Maybe something Pak ISI could do, maybe. Then they mailed the video to the family’s attorney.”

  “Okay, so it might be Pak ISI hacking into networks. But a lot of what is happening to us is on the ground out there, not in cyberspace.” Ray said. “Somebody lures us to a house where they have stashed kids. No hacking there. Some of the targets are shooting back with Stingers; we’ve lost four Preds to that. No hacking there. The improvement in their defensive tactics with the use of cars in crowded areas for meets, the tunnels. Those are not technical solutions.”

  “Right,” Dugout reacted. “So, I’d say one explanation is that you’ve got two groups maybe working together, the al Qaeda or maybe Taliban guys on the ground in AfPak and then some hacker unit, like maybe in the Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, or maybe in the Iranian Rev Guards.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re half right,” Ray said. “I think it is two groups, but I’m not sure it’s the Paks or Iranians. Could be the Russians just to mess with us. See if you can run with those theories, but add another. Look for a nonstate actor, a Wikileaks Collective on steroids, maybe a group of college kids in Boston or Palo Alto.”

  “Okay, I’ll look at all those possibilities, but I am telling you now that it’s no hacker collective or group in Boston or San Fran,” Dugout said as he stood up from the bench and brushed raindrops from his windbreaker.

  “Why not?” Ray asked.

  “‘Cuz I know all those guys, what they’re capable of, how they’d do it if they could. They’re wicked smart, but the guys we’re up against? They’re a lot better than anyone I know.”

  26

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30

  GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER, OPERATIONS ROOM

  CREECH AFB, NEVADA

  “The compound that the Pakistani ISI source reported is in that valley up ahead,” Bruce Dougherty said as he flew the Predator on a reconnaissance mission over Afghanistan. “If I fly in there, it would be a perfect place for them to shoot Manpads up at me from the hilltops.”

  “Good, then that’s just what we will do, fly in there,” Erik Parsons replied. He switched open his circuit to Sandra Vittonelli in her office twenty meters behind him. “Sandy, you may want to come out and watch this. I think you were right about that Pakistani ISI source. I think we are being lured into a Stinger kill box.”

  When Sandra joined them on the floor of the ops center, she could see the unarmed reconnaissance Predator flying toward the valley. That view was being provided by a stealthier drone, a Peregrine, flying in trail and higher up. “Good, this looks like another one of their traps,” she said. “Make sure to turn off the chameleon skin on the Pred so that they can get a good look at it.”

  Time began to move slowly for the team on the Ops Room floor as they waited to see if there would be another Stingerlike missile attack, what could be the fifth shoot down of a UAV in a month. On the Big Board were images from both the Predator and the Peregrine above it.

  On the hillsides on either side of the valley floor, men also waited, spotters and shooters. Their two SA-24 missile launchers were humming in standby mode. Like the U.S. Stinger, the SA-24 had to be drawing current from the battery pack to keep its highly sensitive infrared sensors warmed up and ready to move quickly to full active search. By flicking a switch next to the trigger, the operator could bring the launcher and the missile inside the tube to full readiness in thirty seconds. Then if the operator pointed the tube toward a target, as soon as the infrared seeker on the missile had locked on to the target’s infrared signature, a high-piercing whine would come from the handgrip of the launcher holding the missile tube. Then, when the trigger was pulled and the missile launched from the tube, the SA-24 would seek that infrared source.

  The spotter on the north ridge saw it first. “Hamdullah,” he cried and began hitting the Transmit button on his handheld two-way radio. The clicking sound from his hitting the button sent a warning across the valley to the team on the other ridge. The shooters on both teams moved their thumbs up on their grips, bringing both missile launchers into full active search. The shooters began to scan the sky through the optical tracker, looking for the drone. In less than a minute, both missile launchers were emitting an ear-piercing whine. They had locked on to their target, a Predator.

  Two indicator lights linked to the Predator’s onboard sensors turned red and began blinking on the pilot’s dashboard, indicating that the Predator had detected that it was being lit up by an infrared seeker. “We’ve d
etected missile lock on. Two, one on either side of the valley,” Bruce Dougherty said into his chin microphone. “Tallyho.”

  The slowly moving minutes with little happening were suddenly transformed into lightning quick seconds, with multiple simultaneous actions directed by sensors, not by humans. Two plumes of smoke could be seen on the video from the Peregrine as the SA-24s were launched toward the Predator. Almost simultaneously, red stars began shooting from the Predator, infrared heat sources with the same signature as the Predator itself had just seconds earlier. Near the rear of the Predator, two gray-white boxes began to emit new infrared signature patterns for the Predator, rapidly changing to prevent the upcoming missiles from switching to it and locking on.

  To the sensors on the SA-24s, there were now dozens of objects with the infrared signature of the Predator and then there were other objects with different, new infrared signatures, constantly changing. The missiles were programmed to recognize that the many Predator signatures were probably flares designed to fool it. Therefore, the missiles attempted to lock on the new signature source, but there were too many of them and they were too rapidly switching and transforming to permit target acquisition and lock on. Given that pattern, the missiles were programmed to fly to the general area of infrared activity and then to detonate, in the hope that some of the shrapnel from their explosion would strike the real target.

  As the SA-24s streaked into the sky and the red star flares shot out from the Predator, the sensors aboard the Peregrine triangulated where the shooters were. Within two seconds of the Stingers leaving their launch tubes on the hillsides, four missiles with equal velocity leaped from the launch bay of the Peregrine, which was flying slightly above and behind the Predator. They raced toward the areas where the SA-24s had been fired. Once over the launch areas, the air-launched missiles exploded, spreading thousands of sharp, strong, antipersonnel razors out in a density such that anyone within two hundred meters would have been hit by a minimum of a dozen blades, each of which would be an artery-shredding, lethal attack.