by FX Holden
“OK, honey, I’ll call you when I’ve asked,” Ambre Duchamp said into her cell phone. “No, Soshane, I can’t promise. He might say no. Now I have to go. The bus is coming.”
It wasn’t. But she always had to make an excuse to hang up on her daughter, or the girl would just keep talking. She felt bad about that, so it made her feel better when the bus turned the corner of Phillips Parkway a few minutes later. Almost like she hadn’t been fibbing. The driverless E-bus juddered to a stop at the sidewalk by the parking lot off the public car park. Ambre still felt a bit like cheering whenever she saw it, given the unpredictability of the Italian-made buses which continuously circled the complex. They were meant to arrive every ten to twenty minutes, but with breakdowns and traffic delays (they had to stop for every single idiot who drove or stepped in front of them), it was often thirty or forty minutes between. But she couldn’t walk it because it was nearly three miles to the Security HQ, where she worked as a data scientist.
She lifted her shoulder bag, balancing the weight by leaning a little to the left, waiting for the doors to open, thinking yeah, there’s an empty seat, I’m going for that one. Looking to her right at the young lady in a trim blue skirt and blouse beside her, looked like one of those public educator types, edging forward. No chance, child, that seat got my name on it.
For some reason, the sight of the girl triggered a memory – her job interview. She still remembered the color of the sky that day, that deep blue sky. Thinking to herself, Up there, that’s the future of mankind. The young technical sergeant from 45th Wing Security Force, who looked a lot like the girl standing beside her, asking her, “So, you got this far, you passed security vetting, so let’s start this interview with your questions about the position.”
Ambre had plenty, but she went with the obvious one. “Yeah, so, I understand what the Security Forces Squadron at the Cape does, but what is this project I’ll be working on?”
“Good question,” the woman said, tapping a stylus on the tablet in front of her, thinking about the answer. “How many visitors do you think the Kennedy Space Center and Canaveral Station combined get per month?”
“I don’t know,” Ambre admitted. She’d been to the Kennedy Space Center museum a year earlier, with her daughter Soshane. The visitor center had been packed with school children and space geeks. She did some quick math. “Maybe ten thousand?”
“Not even close,” the woman said. “One hundred and fourteen thousand. Forty percent are tourists, and then there’s commercial visitors, government State, government Federal, political, Air Force, other Space Force, security services and police, media. Knowing that, how many visitor-related security incidents do you think we record in a month?” She was looking at a tablet, so Ambre guessed it was a question they asked all the candidates and she had the numbers there for reference.
“How do you define an incident?” Ambre asked.
The woman checked her tablet. “Any event where a member of the public is reported doing something that is against regulations. Or the law.”
“Include parking violations?”
“Not including parking violations,” the woman said with a slight smile.
“OK. Two thousand eight hundred and twenty-six,” Ambre replied, without hesitation.
“Uh, wow,” the lady said. “That’s quite precise, and … pretty close. It’s about two thousand. Most people guess a couple of hundred a month. How did you land on your number?”
“Population of the US with a criminal record,” Ambre said. “Eight percent. Of course your visitors here are probably from a cohort where that’s lower, but they’re also a lot of kids, where it’s higher coz they don’t know better, so I stuck with the eight percent. Then assume each of those criminals does something stupid on their visit, that’s a possible nine thousand four hundred and twenty incidents. But probability they’ll commit a crime while on a trip to Kennedy or especially on a military base, that’s a roll of the dice, so say it’s one day out of 365 they’re visiting, so call that a zero point three percent chance any given criminal will commit a crime on the day they’re visiting, that’s 2,826 incidents a month or a little under a hundred a day. What kind of stuff do people do?”
The airman looked at her a little dumbstruck, made a note on her tablet and looked up. “Most of it is petty theft, some vandalism like trying to steal signs and nameplates – pretty much anything with NASA, SpaceX or Space Force on it in the public areas has to be welded on – there’s trespassing, of course, but usually just because they got lost, but there’s also the occasional assault or episode of harassment.”
Ambre let her finish and then said, “And of course, there was the terrorist attack at Kennedy last year.”
“And … yes. Five dead, not including the two perpetrators, sixteen wounded.”
“I thought that might be what this project is about,” Ambre said. “Something you’ve started up since that event.”
“You’re right, of course.” The woman leaned forward. “I can only share limited information with you at this interview, and you have signed a secrecy agreement, so you are bound by the Espionage Act to keep everything we discuss confidential. Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ambre said.
“Good. So, every incident we log, we capture data. About the incident, about the people involved. Every visitor who comes in here, even before the attack, we get ID when they register…”
“Which could be faked…”
“And biometrics, like facial scans, which can’t,” the woman continued. “Visitors get a name tag, which is GPS chipped, so we know where they are and where they’ve been, at all times…”
“Where the name tag has been…” Ambre pointed out, “not necessarily the person.”
“True. But we have CCTV over the whole station, thermal and optic, keyed to the personnel and visitor tags, cross-referencing the biometrics in real time and linked to Federal offender databases…”
“Which is only useful if the terrorist is in a database,” Ambre said.
“Which those two weren’t,” the lady said and tapped her stylus again nervously. Ambre learned later she had been there the day of the attack. “We lost two KSC officers and three guests and there were some things we could tighten up, but the inquiry found no glaring holes in their response. They reacted quickly, they isolated the attackers and they dealt with them. All the casualties occurred before they could respond.” She took a breath and frowned. “But we want to find a way to predict the next attack, not respond to it. Whether it’s at Kennedy or here at the Cape.”
“That’s a big ask,” Ambre said.
“How would you go about it?” the woman asked her, back in interview mode.
“Well, you’re drowning in data,” Ambre observed, thinking out loud. “How accessible is it? What quality is it? What’s relevant, what’s not? First, I’d need to create a central hub with everything in it, so I can query the data. That means potentially getting systems that don’t talk to each other to all play nice. There are off the shelf AI support systems that can structure the queries and reporting, but they are only as good as the raw data you give them to play with – so there’s going to be a lot of cleaning, I’m guessing…”
The woman looked at her patiently.
“Three months to complete an audit,” Ambre said. “But if I work around the clock, call it two. Two months to make the plan and socialize it so it gets signed off – shorter if you give me the decision power I need, longer if you don’t. Three months to run a tender and find a supplier who can pull the data hub together, but I already know a few, so call that two months. Three months with the vendor, running queries and debugging the AI, which I wouldn’t want to compromise since the output is predictive and there is a high risk that if we screw up we’ll predict too many incidents or miss one, which could be catastrophic. So … give me this job and in nine months, I’ll give you a system that can flag your high-risk visitors for special attention and you can do whatev
er you want to do with them.”
“You’ve done this sort of thing before,” the woman smiled. “Sounds like your CV doesn’t lie.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I was project lead on a similar project for JP Morgan Chase.”
“Well, it’s a first for a Space Force station. And the good news is, the system is already up and running. You don’t have to build it. But the project was managed out of Kennedy and we just piggybacked on it. It isn’t tailored to the needs of this station, and that’s where you will come in. It’s a flexible term contract, up to two years, with delivery and end of contract bonuses…”
“You want me to adapt the system NASA built for Kennedy so that it works for the Cape,” Ambre summarized. “I can do that.”
She got the job.
That was a year ago. It had turned out that, as she feared, NASA was a behemoth of an organization that had a belt and braces approach to safety issues, but luckily a ‘just do it’ approach to everything else. Kennedy’s identification and prediction algorithms were pretty good already, but they needed tweaking for the Cape, so nine months ended up being ten before she hit her first milestone and popped the champagne (Sprite actually, since she didn’t drink). But after a year of working like a maniac and barely seeing Soshane except to kiss her goodnight and then deliver her to her grandmother in the mornings, she was into a nice routine. The AI was turning out risk assessments on every visitor that came through the gates and turnstiles, and she’d had a few wins where people who had been flagged had been monitored more closely and got tagged doing something stupid, so 45th Wing Security Force was happy. Of course, she knew the offenders might have been picked up anyway, but she’d set up the AI to err on the side of caution, and flag even medium-risk candidates, so when they’d reviewed the incident reports after three months of field testing, the AI had flagged 84 percent of the visitors who had gone on to be ‘offenders,’ including five who had turned out to be carrying concealed weapons. Whether terrorist or criminal or just someone concerned with their personal safety, it didn’t matter. Space Force Security didn’t want weapons inside its perimeter and Ambre’s AI had helped with that. They called themselves ‘Defenders’ for a reason.
On the day she hit 1,000 offenders successfully tagged by her system, she ordered a big cake and sipped on her Sprite among a bunch of Defenders and base IT personnel she’d invited to celebrate with her.
“We can’t keep calling it Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System 1.4,” Master Sergeant Ted Usaka, 45th Wing’s Chief of Cyber Surety, had told her. “BRFSS? We need something catchy the guys on patrol can relate to.”
She’d thought about it. “What do the guys on patrol call it now?”
Sergeant Usaka was a pretty introverted guy, and he looked down at his feet. “Ah, you … it’s probably not appropriate.”
“Tell me. What do they call it?” she’d asked.
“Well, you know, Defenders, they have a pretty warped sense of humor,” he said. “So, uh … they call it the Big Rat-F’ing Surveillance System. BRFSS, see?” He saw her frowning and hurried on. “Like, you know, apparently, rat-‘effing’ is picking the good stuff out of a pile of other stuff which, that’s kind of what BRFSS does, right?” He shrugged. “So when your AI flags a visitor and sends an alert, they call it a ‘Rat-F Report.’ Sorry, I shouldn’t have…” He trailed off.
“So we shorten it to Risk Factor Surveillance or RFS and they can keep calling it Rat-F Surveillance and everyone is happy,” she told him. She wasn’t the creative type. Or easily offended.
Why aren’t the damn bus doors opening? She looked through the windows of the bus, at that one empty seat, saw the other woman sidling down toward the back, hoping she might get in the back doors and beat Ambre to it. Finally, with a hydraulic hiss, the doors to the bus swung open and Ambre jumped inside, seeing the rear doors had stuck halfway open. Oh yeah, love that Italian technology, she thought as she took the empty seat.
Captain Amir Alakeel, Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) 92 Squadron, was also still settling into his seat as he flew his RSAF F-35 Lightning II on an urgent intercept mission over the Persian Gulf between Saudi Arabia and Iran. He tapped the multifunction screen display in front of him and called up air-sea sensor mode, then scanned the sky around him with his Mark 1 eyeballs.
“Haya Two, Haya One. Watch your spacing, Lieutenant.”
“Roger, Haya One,” his wingman, Lieutenant Hatem Zedan, replied. The starboard wing of the F-35 dipped almost imperceptibly and it slid another hundred feet further out and back from Alakeel’s tail. He looked reflexively around the sky and then back at his ground radar display. Despite current tensions with Iran, attacks from above were not his main concern. The Iranians had no real Air Force to speak of.
What it did have, however, were ten Chinese-made, Australian-designed catamaran-hulled Houbei-class missile boats, and a newfound willingness to use them. The data-linked Houbei boats had low-profile, angular stealth conform hulls, waterjet propulsors that pushed them through the water at up to 36 knots, and they were armed with both a 30mm cannon and Chinese-made Saccade anti-ship missiles.
Alakeel was responding to an urgent mayday from the Saudi-flagged very large crude carrier Bahri Tafik, currently sailing through the Straits of Hormuz between Iran and the Emirates. The Tafik had reported it had been stopped ‘by Iranian missile boats and ordered to proceed to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas for immediate inspection.’
It would not be the first time Iran had used the tactic to harass shipping in the Straits, usually citing some sort of specious violation of maritime rules such as a faulty GPS locator, colliding with a non-existent fishing vessel, or failing to respond to navigational directions. But just lately, Iran had stepped the harassment up a notch and was specifically targeting Saudi-flagged crude oil carriers, of which the Bahri Tafik was the largest. At 1,000 feet long, with a draft of 115 feet, it was carrying 2 million barrels of oil. Alakeel had asked him what was behind the sudden increase in harassment of Saudi shipping by the Iranians, but they had no answers.
A Royal Saudi Navy Badr-class corvette was hurrying to the crude carrier’s assistance, but was still an hour away. Alakeel and Zedan would reach it first.
Alakeel listened as the Saudi Coast Guard hailed the Iranian ships again. “Iranian naval vessels in the proximity of Saudi merchant vessel Bahri Tafik, your actions are unsafe; we request you return to Iranian national waters and allow the Bahri Tafik to proceed unhindered.”
There was no answer. There had been no answer to any of the Saudi Coast Guard hails, only insistent instructions from one of the Iranian ships to the Captain of the Tafik that he change course for Bandar Abbas for ‘immediate inspection.’ He had refused, but according to Saudi Coast Guard radar, the tanker was lying becalmed off the coast of the Iranian island of Qeshm. Due to their low observability profiles, Saudi Coast Guard radar had been unable to confirm the Tafik Captain’s report that at least three Iranian vessels had surrounded his carrier.
“Haya Two, Haya One, approaching waypoint. We will turn to 110 degrees and overfly the target at 10,000 feet. Stay on me.”
“Roger, Haya One,” Zedan replied. It was the kid’s first time going up against the Iranian Navy, and Alakeel knew exactly how he would be feeling. Nervous, excited, scared and, in his 5th-generation fighter, probably way more confident than he should be. Stealth was useless when you had been asked to eyeball your target. If you could see them, they could see you. And if they could see you, they could kill you. Alakeel did not intend to make a stealthy approach and the Iranian missile boats typically carried Chinese-made Vanguard infrared anti-air missiles, which had a ceiling of 13,000 feet, so they would theoretically be within range of the Iranian boat’s anti-air defenses.
Traffic in the Straits was heavy, and as he swung around to point his flight at the expected position of the Tafik, he scanned the sea ahead of him with his APG-81 radar in track and identify mode. Linked to a cloud-based intelligence databa
se, it sorted through the returns of the dozens of ships below, looking for the very specific signature of the Bahri Tafik. Twenty miles out from Qeshm, his system told him it had a probable ID. He locked the target up, seeing already from the size of the return that it was probably the right ship. It was a very solid return, and it wasn’t moving.
“Haya Two, Haya One. Syncing target data, beginning ingress,” Alakeel said.
His radio clicked in acknowledgment.
At ten miles, he saw a large dark shape on the horizon, which quickly expanded to a ship and then the very unmistakable profile of a large crude oil carrier.
A chime sounded in his ears. His aircraft was being bathed in radar energy from ground-based stations in Iran and the Emirates, both military and civilian. They were flying with the aircraft’s Luneberg lens system engaged. It reduced their stealth profile and made them visible to watching radar. The Saudi mission planners who had tasked Alakeel’s flight with this mission had wanted their aircraft to be visible to the Iranians below so that they would not react precipitously at the sight of Saudi fighters suddenly overhead. But the chime and warning on his multifunction display told him one or more military radars were trying to lock onto his aircraft, in this case the type 362S fielded by the Iranian Houbei missile boats – so they’d seen him alright. But they didn’t have a lock.
“Haya One, Haya Two, showing multiple spikes, sir,” Zedan reported.
“Copy. Stay cool, Lieutenant,” Alakeel replied.
Alakeel twitched his side-stick to aim his ship down the starboard side of the Tafik, dropping a wingtip so he could get a good look as they cruised overhead at a leisurely 500 knots.
“Sector Control, this is Haya One,” he said, calling up the ground controllers at 92 Squadron’s home field; King Abdulaziz Air Base, Dhahran. He brought his and Zedan’s aircraft around in a sweeping circle above the stalled crude carrier. “I can confirm the target is stationary at grid position alpha eagle zero two. I see three Iranian Houbei-class missile boats, one at the bow, one at the stern, and a third stationed off the port beam. Do you want us to buzz them, Control?” A low-level flyby at supersonic speed was a common tactic to test the resolve of the Iranian commander below. Often it would be enough to scare them off.
