Erik looked down at Miller’s hands as the sergeant flipped switches and moved the joystick, causing weapons to release thousands of miles away a fraction of a second later. He noticed the pack of Marlboros next to Miller’s wallet in the cubicle. Then his eyes moved to the HD explosion on the Big Board and then the same view from a Predator higher up. There were secondary explosions, bombs or ordnance cooking off inside the building.
“You can’t smoke in here, Sergeant,” Erik said as he took the Marlboros and the lighter. “Major Hernandez, you’re in Control. I’ll be back in ten.”
The last of the night sky was disappearing and the sun beginning to brighten the day as he stood in the parking lot and lit up. He had stopped smoking eight years ago, but the smoke felt so good just now as he leaned against Jen’s white Ford Edge. It was a nice crossover, but he missed his Camaro. He missed Bruce Dougherty, who had died in that Camaro. And he was still trying to come to grips with losing Sandra Vittonelli. So many good friends, fellow war fighters. The fun had gone out of this job a long time ago, he thought. Too much killing, maybe time for him and Jen to find that place on the islands in the Juan de Fuca.
As he was thinking of Jen, his mobile vibrated. The caller ID said it was Ray Bowman phoning him.
That’s when he saw the C-17 diving for the Edge. He had no time to react. It hit the Edge in the middle of its large moon roof, bursting into an orange sunburstlike flash flame. Colonel Erik Parsons’s last thought was half formed when his brain was shattered by the blast. He had seen scores of attacks from the perspective of the attacking aircraft. For a second, he thought he was seeing one from the other side, and then he thought no more. The explosion was big enough to blow in the front doors of the GCC and channel a blast down the corridor, cracking interior glass walls, but the center survived the aircraft attack.
A few miles away, a B-17, an A-380 and a B-29, laden with explosives, destined for the GCC, were now in little pieces on the ground near Ghazi’s dead body. Ray Bowman, still dazzled by the concussive effect of their explosion, dusted off the dirt on his clothes. He had tried Erik on his landline in the GCC, then on his mobile. Nothing. Now he tried Dugout at the North Vegas ranch scene and got through. “How’s the exploitation coming?” he asked Dug.
“I think I stopped the preprogrammed cyber attacks on the subways in DC, San Fran, and Atlanta. Got good leads on guys in Boston, Chicago, and Philly. The Fibbies think they can set those guys up for meets and then bag them before any attacks,” Dugout explained. “How’s things at your end?”
“Guy had huge model planes with some high explosive in them. He launched one. Don’t know where it went. I guess we will find out. He tried to kill us by blowing up the three others. The Bureau guys dropped him. They’re going to go through what’s left of him and his car. I’m not going to wait around. Thought I’d go by the ER and get some nicks tended to,” Ray said walking toward a waiting Sheriff’s car. “I guess I’ll advise Burrell to hold off issuing a public warning. Let the Christmas shopping go on.”
“Who was the guy piloting the RC models?” Dugout asked.
Ray used one hand to shield his eyes from the bright morning sun coming up over the mountains, and with the other hand held his mobile. “Dunno. Was yelling something about our not being invulnerable here, something about payback. Vengeance. Sounded American.” Ray sounded tired, his mind seemed focused elsewhere. “We’ll try to figure out who he was. See where in the never-ending circle of retaliations this guy fits in.”
As he walked away from the smoking wreckage of the radio controlled model aircraft, past the dead body of the terrorist, Ray heard a buzz and looked up. The white drone circling above the scene had large block letters in blue that read SHERIFF.
43
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 22
NAVY HILL
WASHINGTON, DC
It was warm for Christmas, he thought. Climate Change was going to be the big issue from now on, not terrorism. It would do what the terrorists never could, bankrupt us and kill millions. So if the entire world was going to hell, why not smoke the Havana? What was there to lose? Sandra was dead, as was Erik. The drone program was in a legal straitjacket and the Ukrainian and Pakistani governments were demanding investigations, arrests, UN meetings, INTERPOL red notices.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to escape town for the week between the holidays. Maybe fly down to Anguilla. Get a room at that high-end resort. Blow some of the small savings he had left.
Raymond Bowman sat on what he thought of as his bench above the Potomac, wearing the leather flight jacket that had been Erik Parsons’s. His widow had insisted that he have it. She didn’t blame him for Erik’s death, or Sandra’s, or Bruce’s. But he blamed himself. Failure sat on his shoulders like twenty-pound weights. It ate at his gut like an acid. It kept him awake like that damn Provigil pill. It caused him to think that nothing was worthwhile, especially him.
Sandra had been the first woman whom he had really connected with in years. She was so good at everything she did, and all that she asked for were tougher missions, harder jobs, and a chance to do good for her country. Between him and her, Ray thought, there was mutual understanding and real mutual respect. While he had never admitted it to himself before, he had hoped at some subliminal level that it might go somewhere, might lead to the next several chapters of his life. Now he had no idea what those next chapters would be and, worse yet, at this moment, he did not care.
“You should shave. How long’s it been? You look like a park bench bum, even if the park bench is inside a highly guarded facility.” Dugout sat down next to him, holding a half lit cigar.
“Privacy. I know it’s a concept that’s foreign to you hackers, but,” Ray said to him. “And theft. Even theft of a Havana. It’s theft. Four days and I think I may not shave again for quite a few more.”
“The Bureau thinks they got the last guy this morning,” Dugout said. “He was a Yemeni American student at Temple. He was supposed to set off a bomb in Reading Terminal in Philly.”
“So it’s over?” Raymond Bowman asked.
“For now. Just in case I missed something, Metro, MARTA, BART, the T are all on manual. Their digital control networks are severed from the Internet. From what we found on a trick thumb drive at the ranch in Nevada, the FBI tracked down the facilitators in Philly and Chicago. None of them had ever gotten the go signal. Seems like the guy that got shot in Heathrow was going to send out the go code from Dubai or Karachi.”
“We think the guy in Heathrow was the guy that got on the boat to Canada? Doesn’t make sense,” Ray noted.
“He never got on the boat. He kept leaving false trails, just in case we got to any of the bombers. CIA thinks now that he was one of the two falcons. The guy you got in Vegas was the other,” Dugout explained. “Lived in Canada, but originally Pakistani, one Ghazi Nawarz.”
“Probably some facilitators in the U.S. the Bureau hasn’t identified yet,” Ray thought aloud. “Did you see the BDA on Kiev and DG Khan?”
Dugout shook his head in the affirmative as he sucked on his cigar, trying to keep it lit. “Bomb Damage Assessment, not Big Data Analysis? It’s pretty good. Those drone attacks fried both places. Also HUMINT says that the heads of both the Qazzani and the Merezha bought it, along with lots of underlings. Apparently some friendly country, I think the Brits, had a guy in the Qazzani compound and the Agency signaled him to leave just before we hit it.”
“Ah, the falcon watcher,” Ray said. “But this won’t be the end of the Qazzani enterprise. Too much money on the table. Where there are drugs to be moved, there will be movers.”
“Right, but now there will be a scramble among the deputies and lieutenants to see who gets to take over both groups. Probably end up killing each other in the succession struggle, as number fours become number threes, and number twos go after each other.”
“I’m sure the Kill Committee will update the target list,” Ray replied.
A white drone with a red stripe on
it was headed south above the river. On its side, Ray could make out the words COAST GUARD.
Ray stood and looked down on the river. “Winston Burrell called this morning. Wants me to come up to Camp David. President wants to give me some bullshit award.”
“When?” Dugout asked, standing next to him and looking down at the river.
“Tomorrow. But I think I’m headed to the beach instead. Maybe Anguilla.”
“You do know it’s Christmas in three days?” Dugout said.
“So?”
“So, it’s happening without the attacks. You saved a lot of lives. You should accept the Goddamn medal,” Dugout said.
“I saved a lot of lives, except for the ones I knew, the ones I cared about most. There’s no great feeling of accomplishment when you kill the bad guys, knowing that there will just be more of them and you or someone else will have to do it again, and again. There’s just a feeling of emptiness.”
Ray turned to face Dugout and put his left hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Jennifer said there is a PTSD syndrome that happens when you survive and everyone else in the Humvee buys it. She said the best cure is to change your environment completely and chill out as much as possible, beer, sun, sand, waves.”
“And then what? When are you coming back? After New Year’s?” Dugout asked. “There are a lot more bad guys out there we haven’t gotten yet.”
“There will always be bad guys out there.” Ray pulled his right arm back behind him to gain leverage and then threw his cigar out as far as he could, toward the Potomac.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Readers of two of my earlier books may recall that I have some personal responsibility for the use of drones against terrorists. In full disclosure, here is that story. I served in the White House for over a decade beginning in 1992, for three successive Presidents. My job for many of those years was National Coordinator for Security and Counter-terrorism. In that capacity, I came to believe that we needed to capture or kill the leadership of a group that few people in the United States had ever heard of, al Qaeda.
The CIA was instructed to get bin Ladin, but proved incapable of doing so. They were then asked to locate him reliably in a place where he would be staying for at least four hours, so that we could launch cruise missiles at the site. That did not work either. Frustrated, I asked for an independent review by Charlie Allen, a legendary intelligence officer and iconoclast. Charlie suggested we deploy Predators to the region and fly them over Afghanistan. Predators were only available as unarmed aircraft in those days, but we thought that they might be better than past efforts to find bin Ladin. CIA and the Pentagon, however, opposed the use of Predators for this purpose.
Eventually, the White House had to order the CIA to do a test deployment of the unarmed Predators. I still recall my amazement, sitting in a darkened room well after midnight Washington time, watching the video feed live from Afghanistan, following a truck, zooming in on a camp. On the fourth flight, bin Ladin was located. Then the winter set in and the winds were such that we could not fly the Predator over the mountains into Afghanistan from its base in Central Asia. We would not be able to fly again until spring. It was the fall of 2000 and the Clinton administration was coming to a close.
During the winter, I tried to get the Air Force to arm the Predator with missiles. They had thought about it, but had no plans to try it for several years. With the help of USAF General John Jumper, we compressed that timeline into a few months. Predator, armed with Hellfire missiles, worked well in the experimental flights. We then sought approval from the new Bush administration to deploy this armed Predator to get bin Ladin. Once again, the CIA and the Pentagon opposed the mission. I pressed for a decision to override them again, but National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice delayed a decision for months.
Finally, on September 4, 2001, the Principals’ Committee met in the White House Situation Room. CIA Director George Tenet and the DOD leadership both spoke out against the use of armed Predators to get bin Ladin and the al Qaeda leadership. They were not overruled.
A week later we were attacked.
On September 12, 2001, CIA proposed deploying armed Predators to attack al Qaeda in Afghanistan. On November 14, 2001, in Afghanistan, Mohammed Atef, the head of al Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person to be killed by a Predator. Since then the United States has killed at least two thousand people in five countries using armed drones. And the killing continues.
ALSO BY RICHARD A. CLARKE
NONFICTION
Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror
Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters
Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It
FICTION
The Scorpion’s Gate
Breakpoint
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RICHARD A. CLARKE served for thirty years in the United States government, including an unprecedented ten continuous years as a White House official, assisting three consecutive presidents. In the White House he was Special Assistant to the President for Global Affairs, Special Advisor to the President for Cyberspace, and National Coordinator for Security and Counter-terrorism. Prior to his White House years, he served as a diplomat, including as Assistant Secretary of State, and held other positions in the State Department and the Pentagon.
Since leaving government in 2003, Mr. Clarke has served as an on-air consultant for ABC News for ten years, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for five years, managed a consulting firm, chaired the Board of Governors of the Middle East Institute, and written six books, both fiction and nonfiction, including the national number one bestseller Against All Enemies and Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.
Learn more at www.RichardAClarke.net.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
STING OF THE DRONE. Copyright © 2014 by RAC Enterprises. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Cover design by James Iacobelli
Cover photograph © U.S. Air Force; Edited version by Science Faction / Getty Images
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Clarke, Richard A. (Richard Alan), 1951–
Sting of the drone / Richard A. Clarke.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-250-04797-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-4827-6 (e-book)
1. Drone aircraft—Fiction. 2. Suspense fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.L377S75 2014
813'.6—dc23
2014008828
e-ISBN 9781466848276
First Edition: May 2014
Sting of the Drone Page 27
