by Mike Maden
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
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Copyright © 2013 by Mike Maden
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maden, Mike.
Drone / Mike Maden.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-14109-4
1. Drone aircraft—Fiction. 2. Vigilantes—Fiction. 3. Suspense Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.A284327D76 2013 2013025096
813'.6—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book is dedicated to you, Tom Lavin, my magnificent father-in-law, a combat-wounded, combat-decorated Marine. In 1952 you were just a kid hunting the enemy on night patrols with nothing more than a .45 in your hand and your head on a swivel, the point man on a zeroed-in path between rice paddies forward of the MLR. Overrun on the Yoke, bombarded on X-Ray, ambushed on Irene, you and your friends were outnumbered and outgunned, but you prevailed, unyielding in blood and valor. You did your job well, Pop, and so did your friends, the ones who came home from Korea and the ones who didn’t. You believed, and that made all the difference.
Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CHARACTER LIST
EPIGRAPH
AUTHOR NOTE
MAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
JUNE
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
JULY
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
AUGUST
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
SEPTEMBER
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
OCTOBER
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
FEBRUARY
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ADDENDA
CHARACTER LIST
PEARCE SYSTEMS
Troy Pearce
CEO, Pearce Systems
Udi and Tamar Stern
Husband-and-wife team; field operatives
Stella Kang
Former U.S. Army drone pilot; field operative
Judy Hopper
Pearce’s personal pilot
Johnny Paloma
Former LAPD SWAT; field operative
Ian McTavish
Director of IT operations/research specialist
Dr. Kirin Rao
Head of research and development
Dr. Kenji Yamada
UUV research and operation; oceanographer (whale researcher)
August Mann
UGV specialist; head of nuclear deconstruction division
MYERS ADMINISTRATION
Margaret Myers
President of the United States
Bill Donovan
Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
Jackie West
FBI Director
Dr. Karl Strasburg
Foreign Affairs/Security Advisor
Frank Romero
U.S. Ambassador to Mexico
Faye Lancet
Attorney General
Mike Early
Special Assistant (Security) to the President
Nancy Madrigal
DEA Administrator
Pedro Molina
Director of ICE
Robert Greyhill
Vice President
Roy Jackson
Head of DEA Intelligence
Sandy Jeffers
President’s Chief of Staff
Sergio Navarro
DEA Intelligence Analyst
T. J. Ashley, Ph.D.
Head of Drone Command
Tom Eddleston
U.S. Secretary of State
OTHER NOTABLES
Antonio Barraza
President of Mexico
Hernán Barraza
The president’s brother and chief advisor
César Castillo
Head of the Castillo Syndicate
Ulises, Aquiles Castillo
César’s twin sons
Colonel Israel Cruzalta
Battalion Commander, Infanteria de Marina Mexicana
Victor Bravo
Head of the Bravo Alliance
Dmitry Titov
President of the Russian Federation
Konstantin Britnev
Russian Federation Ambassador to the United States
Ali Abdi
Quds Force Commander
ACRONYMS
AMISOM
African Union Mission in Somalia
AUMF
Authorization to Use Military Force
ARGUS-IS
Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System
ARSS
Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System
BMI
Brain-Machine Interface
DARPA
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DAS
Domain Awareness System
FISA
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
JDAM
Joint Direct Attack Munition
JSOC
Joint Special Operations Command
LATP
Lima Army Tank Plant
RIOT
Rapid Information Overlay Technology
UAV
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
UGV
Unmanned Ground Vehicle
USV
Unmanned Surface Vehicle
UUV
Unmanned Underwater Vehicle
WPR
War Powers Resolution
Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.
— ATTRIBUTED TO JULES VERNE
AUTHOR NOTE
All of the drone systems described in this book are currently deployed or in development. I have taken the liberty of simplifying and, in some cases, amplifying their performance characteristics for the sake of the story. However, I am confident that the “new and improved” versions I have described will soon be widely available.
MAY
1
El Paso, Texas
Cinco de Mayo was cooler than usual in the sprawling border city of El Paso, one of the poorest in America. In one of its grimmest barrios, a pink stucco house thrummed with life on a dark, narrow street. A crowd of teenagers from the nearby arts academy high school danced to throbbing music in the frame of its big picture window, their faces all smiles and laughter. The first graduation party of the year.
Out on the front porch, a knot of young men in hoodies and drooping pants stood guard, drinking beer out of Solo cups and smoking cigarettes, trying to look tough in a brutal part of town. To anybody passing by, they looked like somebody’s crew, but they were just teenagers like the kids inside, their young bodies rocking unconsciously to the beat of the music behind them.
An obsidian-black Hummer on big custom wheels slowed as it passed the house. The windows were blacked out. Death-metal music roared inside. No plates on the bumpers.
The hoodies out front pretended not to notice, playing it cool but keeping careful watch out of the sides of their bloodshot eyes.
Four houses up, the Hummer’s red brake lights flared as it slowed to a stop, then its white back-up lights lit up. The big black box of steel rolled backward. The gear box whined until it stopped in front of the pink stucco house.
It just sat there, idling.
The death-metal music still thundered behind the Hummer’s blackened glass, muffled by the steel doors.
Now the boys turned in unison, stared at it, starting to freak out. The oldest kid nodded at the tallest.
“Yo. Go check it out.”
“Me? You check it out.”
No need.
The Hummer’s doors burst open, death metal exploding into the night, drowning out the music inside the house.
Two men leaped out, strapped with shoulder-harnessed machine guns. Balaclavas hid their faces. They wore black tactical gear and Kevlar vests stitched with three letters: ICE.
The ICE men advanced in lockstep as they raised their weapons in one swift, synchronous motion, snapping the stocks to their cheeks, picking their targets through their iron sights.
The boys bolted toward the back of the house.
Too late.
Machine-gun barrels flashed like strobe lights in the dark. The air split with the roar of their gunfire.
The first rounds tore into the lead runner, then raked into the backs of the guys right behind him. They tumbled to the pavement in a heap like broken marionettes.
The gunmen advanced toward the porch, firing at the big picture window. The plate glass exploded. Panicked shouts inside.
In sync, the shooters loaded new fifty-round drum mags and fired at the house. Steel-jacketed bullets sliced through the walls, throwing big chunks of soft pink stucco into the air. One of the rounds smashed the party stereo, killing the music inside.
The shooters dropped their empty mags again and loaded two more. They advanced shoulder to shoulder onto the porch, the machine-gun stocks still tight to their faces. Gloved hands tossed flash bangs through the shattered picture window. The concussion grenades cracked like lightning.
Bodies on the floor writhed in blood and glass. The killers jammed their machine guns through the window frame and cut loose until the ammo gave out and the barrels smoked with heat.
Three hundred rounds. Eighteen seconds. Not bad.
Grinning behind their masks, the two shooters high-fived each other, then scrambled back into the Hummer. They slammed the doors shut as the vehicle rocketed away, tires screeching. The roar of the machine guns and the shrieking death-metal music disappeared with it. The night was finally quiet around the little pink house.
Except for the screaming inside.
2
Mogadishu, Somalia
Colonel Joseph Moi took his daily afternoon nap from exactly 3:15 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. It kept him sharp late into the evening when he usually did his whoring. It also gave him a reason to stay out of the withering sunlight boiling his troops in the compound outside.
The colonel’s sleep was abruptly interrupted when his silenced cell phone vibrated on the nightstand like a coping saw on a piece of tin. His conscious mind rose through the thick waves of REM sleep just enough to guide his hand to the phone and shut it off. Gratefully, the practiced maneuver spared him any significant mental effort and he was able to slip back down into the depths of perfect slumber, noting the faint breeze beating gently on his face from an overhead fan.
Then his cell phone rang.
Pain furrowed his angular face. Once again, his mind had been dragged into semiconsciousness, but now it was attended by a splitting headache. He’d been robbed of precious sleep. Rage flooded over him.
Who the hell is calling?
He forced his heavy eyes open.
It suddenly occurred to him that it wasn’t possible for the phone to be ringing like this. He’d put it on silent, as always, just moments before he lay down, and when it vibrated earlier, he’d silenced it again.
Strange.
Moi rolled over and snagged the phone off of the nightstand. The number read UNKNOWN.
That was stranger still. Only two people had the number to this particular phone and they were both well known to him.
The first was General Muwanga, the overbearing Ugandan army officer in charge of the African Uni
on military district to which Moi’s command theoretically reported. That was a phone call he would have to take despite its inevitable unpleasantness.
The other was Sir Reginald Harris, the English lord and bleeding-heart administrator of a charitable family trust, but that would have been a very enjoyable phone call to receive. Harris would have rung him up only if he was ready to pay the additional “security fees” Colonel Moi demanded in order to release the shipment of corn soya blend (CSB) the trust had shipped to Mogadishu two weeks ago. Harris’s CSB shipment was intended for three thousand starving Somali children at a refugee camp one hundred kilometers toward the northwest.
Colonel Moi’s compound was strategically located in one of the least inhabited suburbs of Somalia’s capital city. As the commander of a unit of Kenyan troops assigned to AMISOM (the African Union Mission in Somalia), Colonel Moi’s responsibility was to ensure the safe transport of much-needed foodstuffs from Mogadishu’s revitalized deepwater port to the hinterland where famine had once again displaced over one million starving Somalis.
The Islamist al-Shabaab militia had reinfiltrated Mogadishu recently despite the best efforts of the African Union forces that battled against them in an attempt to give the Somali Transitional Federal Government time to reestablish functioning democratic institutions in the world’s most infamous failed state. At the moment, the Shabaab militia posed the greatest threat to the safe delivery of food.
But not in Moi’s sector. His command had completely cowed the Shabaab, thanks to Moi’s aggressive tactics. Or at least that’s what Colonel Moi reported to the Western aid organizations that coordinated deliveries through him. Moi cultivated the extremely profitable fiction for naive outsiders. The Shabaab left Moi alone because he paid them in hard currency, not because they were afraid of him.