Team Red

by David DeBatto

  “That’s a Global Hawk,” Scott said. “Fifteen million dollars each, so try not to break it. Stays in the air for over forty hours and covers up to three thousand square miles with a sixty-five-thousand-foot ceiling. Fourteen-thousand-mile range. Color nose camera, variable aperture video, variable infrared for low light and night shots, SAR cameras—synthetic aperture radar—for looking through smoke or clouds, like your NVGs but a million times more sophisticated. No offense.”

  “Dust storms?”

  “Less effectively, but yeah,” Scott said. “All real time via satellite. You’ve already watched the images at your ops center. They don’t fly these low enough for anybody to hit them because they’re so expensive. Did great work over Kosovo. We fly two and the CIA flies two from Langley. The Predators you were asking about are over here. Surveillance or UCAV capable. Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle. Old-time Air Force guys think an uninhabited system is cheating.”

  “Maybe someday we can have uninhabited offensive systems fighting uninhabited defensive systems and then we could fight whole wars where no actual living people die,” DeLuca said.

  “Yeah, but that would take all the fun out of it,” Scott said.

  DeLuca and his son walked down a line of eight smaller vehicles, each about twenty-five feet long with a wingspan only a third of the Global Hawk’s. The plane looked like a very large white plastic spoon, turned upside down, giving it a bulbous nose with its fins in an inverted vee configuration and a pusher prop mounted at the tail.

  “Rotax 912 piston engine,” Scott explained. “Top speed is about how fast you drive on the Mass pike. Forward-looking Lynx SAR cameras for all-weather night or day surveillance, Versatron Skyball turret camera with electro-optic and infrared sensors. These are only about $4 million each, so they don’t mind losing them. Let me rephrase that—they mind a great deal, but they fly them lower than the Global Hawks. Also flown remote. The cameras on this thing could read a postcard from ten thousand feet. Though if it was from you, I don’t think anybody’s developed a computer big enough to read your handwriting.”

  “Your grandmother wanted me to be a doctor,” DeLuca said. “She was so disappointed.”

  “We can also load these up with a mission package,” Scott said. “Lasers, targeting systems, Hellfires. Remember Qaed Salin Sinan al-Harethi? The Al Qaeda guy who blew up the USS Cole?”

  “Sure.”

  “Got him in his car in Yemen with one of these,” Scott said. “Mohammed Atef in Afghanistan, too. Those eleven-foot guys over there are AA1 Shadows, sort of mini-Predators. We’ve been using them a bit more lately.”

  “What’s this?” DeLuca asked, pointing to a row of small doughnut-shaped devices, about four feet across and three feet tall, with a tripod rising from the doughnut, holding a camera. “Are these the robo-vacuum cleaners you use to keep the hangar clean?”

  “You haven’t seen these? They’re pretty new. This is your basic MPSSMP,” he said, pronouncing it “Mis-map.” “Also known as AMGASS, for either ‘Multi-Purpose Security and Surveillance Mission Platform’ or ‘Air Mobile Ground Security Surveillance System.’ Sikorsky calls them ‘Cyphers.’ We call ’em ‘Saucers.’ It’s a helicopter. Vertical takeoff, lands on up to a fifteen-degree slope, runs from a laptop off Ethernet wireless, visible light video, infrared, laser range finders, sensor packages to go into an environment and check for chemical or biological weapons, with long-endurance hover capabilities, and it’s virtually silent. They made these to look around corners and to hover outside windows in urban terrain. They’ve got a much smaller version, no bigger than a dinner plate, that they made to fly into caves, I heard. I haven’t seen that one yet.”

  “And I take it those little jobs over there aren’t model airplanes you guys fly as a hobby in your off hours?” DeLuca asked.

  “These,” Scott said, leading his father over to a large table, “are Hawks. ‘Desert Hawk’ or ‘FPASS’ for ‘Force Protection Airborne Surveillance System.’ Here.” He picked one up and handed it to his father. “Five pounds, one-thousand-foot ceiling, ninety minutes of flight time. All the same imaging as the others. They developed these back home at Hanscom. Also programmed with a laptop. You can’t fly them remote but you can send a new flight program.”

  “Hand-launched?” DeLuca wondered.

  “Maybe if you had an arm like Roger Clemens,” Scott said. “Launched with a bungee cord. All you need are two trees, or fenceposts. They’re working on a backpack version, but right now this is as portable as it gets. Good for tactical surveillance, over the next hill or into the next valley. That sort of thing.”

  “It’s amazing how small they can make these,” DeLuca said.

  Scott smiled.

  “You think this is small? Come with me.”

  He led his father to a room at the far end of the hangar, through a set of double doors and into a brightly lit workshop where, at a laboratory bench, a technician in a white lab coat was tinkering with a device about the size of a small hair dryer. Scott put out his arm and stopped his father from going any farther.

  “This is as far as we can go,” Scott said. “These are the micros. DARPA is having us field-test them but they haven’t really been deployed yet in any practical way.”

  Suddenly, the “hair dryer” the technician was working on began to buzz softly, and then it lifted two feet straight up into the air, hanging above the workbench while the technician controlled it with a joystick attached to his laptop. It looked like nothing more than a giant bug, six inches tall and three inches across. It flew toward DeLuca and stopped three feet from his face, watching him with a small camera mounted where the head might go. The technician rotated his laptop, where DeLuca saw his own face on the screen.

  “Good closeup, don’t you think?” the technician asked.

  “Better than the picture on my driver’s license,” DeLuca agreed.

  “I heard somebody saying in the future, the average soldier is going to have one of these, connected to a PDA,” Scott said. “One can only imagine the ways the average GI is going to think of to abuse them. Women’s shower rooms would be my first guess. I heard DARPA also has a flying camera no bigger than a raisin. Robofly, they’re calling it.”

  “Maybe they can program them to fight the sandflies,” DeLuca said.

  “Come on,” Scott said, exiting the workshop and leading his father to a connecting hallway. “Let me show you the control room. That’s where we run the big boys.”

  DeLuca understood what his son was referring to. For all the different Unmanned Aerial Vehicles being deployed in the Iraq theater, it was still true that about 90 percent of the intelligence being used by CENTCOM was coming from satellites, and that, as much as anything else, explained how the United States had been able to overwhelm Iraq’s defenses with such relative ease—combined with U.S. night vision capabilities and complete command of the skies, it had been a bit like boxing with a blind man. According to Scott, the United States had been taking the high ground over Iraq since the end of Gulf War I, launching satellite after satellite, both from Vandenberg AFB in California and from Cape Canaveral in Florida, until now over a hundred new satellites were in place, some in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand to twenty-five thousand miles over the Middle East, others in elliptical or polar orbits to pass over the region twice a day in staggered rotations.

  “Everything you’re about to see is redundant,” Scott said in the elevator. “All the systems installed here have twin processors sistered to them elsewhere, both as a backup in case something happens here and to keep things running if we want to pull out or reassign personnel. We also have a facility in Doha.”

  “NSA?” DeLuca asked.

  “NSA, CIA, DIA,” Scott said. “The National Reconnaissance Office runs the show, but the show’s all over the map.”

  “Why put anything here at all?” DeLuca asked. “Why not just run the stuff from beach chairs in Hawaii?”

  Scott smiled.

 
“There’s talk of doing just that, next time,” he told his father. “The idea that command and control needs to be in theater is under review. The old guys think you still have to get your boots on the ground. The younger guys want to put together a 100 percent wireless army where the only boots on the ground collecting intelligence are going to be CI, with complete uplinks. That’s where it’s headed.”

  “I suppose that could be an improvement,” DeLuca said, “considering that right now I’m holding my team together with walkie-talkies I bought at Radio Shack.”

  When the elevator doors opened, what DeLuca saw made the Tactical Operations Center’s “Star Wars Tent” look about as technologically advanced as the operating room in an old Frankenstein movie. It was a large, darkened room, about the size of a school gymnasium but with a much lower ceiling, and it was filled with computers and other equipment, manned by personnel who were mostly facing the far wall, where DeLuca saw three large flat-screen monitors, each the size of a multiplex movie theater screen. The center screen in the triptych was slightly larger than the other two and showed a map of the world, filled with colored blinking lights that were moving along faintly traced lines. The side screens showed video images in picture-in-picture formats, some constant, others changing every few seconds, others streaming in real time. It was something like a cable TV channel surfer’s ultimate fantasy. Above it all was a banner that read “We Own the Night.”

  “The center screen gives us a quick visual on which spysats are coming online or going off,” Scott said, “and each system has a different color. Lacrosse is blue, and Onyx blinks once a second, Indigo blinks twice, and Vega doesn’t blink, so the controller knows what he’s looking at without reading anything. Keyhole is red. DSP birds are green—that’s Defense Support Program. They orbit at twenty-two thousand feet geo with infrared sensors to look for heat plumes to tell us whenever anybody launches a missile anywhere in the world. The DSPs are being replaced by SBIRS, Space-Based Infrared, but that program got set back a bit when the shuttle broke up over Texas. It’s supposed to be up sometime next month but it’s still going to take a while after that to test it. Yellow is SDS relays in high elliptical that let us relay all this data back to Washington, and elsewhere. The white lights are the DSCS birds. Defense Satellite Communications System. They handle all the tactical communications, from infantry right up to the president. And that one there,” Scott said, pointing to a light on the map, “is DSCS 3-B6, which went up on March 10. That’s the newest one. We have sixty-five DSCS total. We also have six Milstars that are jamproof and nuke hardened, not that we’re worried about that right now, UHF follow-on milcoms, gapfillers because we’re already running out of bandwidth, defense meteorological sats to give us the weather reports for Iraq . . .”

  “Let me guess—hot?”

  “Let me check . . . yes, hot,” Scott said. “They also keep track of solar flares and sunspots, which could really screw things up. Plus about three dozen or so NAVSTAR GPS sats that tell the trucks and the Tomahawks and everybody else where to go. And we’re not really keeping track of the half of it—if I wanted to show you everything in the sky, that board would look like the White House Christmas tree.”

  “Who are these guys on the floor?” DeLuca asked. There had to be over a hundred people in the room, most of them with their faces lit by the blue light of their computer screens.

  “Mostly operations or tech support,” Scott said. “Taking orders from the field and trying to fill them. Half these guys aren’t even military. Subcontractors, but good people. Over there is where you get your falcon views. In the far corner where it looks like they’re playing shopping mall video games, those are the UAV pilots. That panel is search and rescue . . . Which reminds me of something. Can you wait here a minute?”

  DeLuca nodded. His son walked over to a desk where a pair of young technicians were working. One left the room for a moment, then reappeared and handed Scott a small box, first noting the numbers on the side and entering them into his computer. Scott took the box and returned to his father’s side.

  “This is for you,” he said, handing his father the box. “I think I missed Father’s Day, so consider this a late present.”

  “What is it?” DeLuca said, opening the box. Inside, pressed into a protective foam mold, he saw a small capsule, an inch long and half an inch wide, rounded at both ends, with a hole at one end, presumably to hang it from a keychain or necklace. Scott took it from the box, gave it a half-twist, and handed it back to his father.

  “Now it’s activated,” the younger DeLuca said. “It’s a transponder. I promised Mom I’d keep an eye on you. The battery’s good for three months. It sends out a coded signal IDing you every ten seconds, and the frequency shifts to prevent the bad guys from getting a lock on it. They make ’em for pilots who get shot down, but I thought you might want to have one. You can also swallow it and it keeps working, but don’t forget to get it on the other end. They’re like a thousand dollars apiece.”

  “You talked to your mother?”

  “She gets worried, not knowing anything,” Scott said.

  “I should call her,” DeLuca said. “Sometimes it just makes things worse.”

  “Well,” Scott said. “I told her you probably wouldn’t want to wear it, but I promised her I’d ask.”

  DeLuca looked at the transponder one more time, then put it in his pocket.

  “So what exactly do you do around here?”

  “I run a Keyhole team,” Scott said. “One of three. The one we’re on overflies Baghdad at 0200 and 1500 hours. NRO has three Keyholes and three Lacrosses passing twice a day and we get about two hours’ coverage per pass, so that’s basically 24/7. Back in the sixties the KH-1s used to actually drop film canisters from space and the Air Force had to send PJs out of Hawaii to jump into the Pacific Ocean and retrieve them. Our bird’s a KH-12 that sees one hundred miles either side of track and reads down to four inches. We knew Castro was going to need minoxodil before he did. Data stored, accessed, and analyzed in supercomputers at the Pentagon.”

  “You’re doing good stuff, Scottie,” DeLuca said. “I sort of had a favor to ask. I could run it through Uncle Phil’s office if you need it to be official, but I think they’d just send you back to talk to me.”

  “I gathered you didn’t come to see me because I forgot to bring my raincoat to school.”

  “I’m looking for somebody,” DeLuca said. “Is there someplace we could talk?”

  Scott took him to a lounge adjacent to the ops room. There was a microwave, a toaster oven with a basket of bagels next to it, jelly, peanut butter, soda machines, even a pair of treadmills and two stationary bicycles. A television in the corner played a DVD of Singing in the Rain, but no one was watching it. Scott got his father a cup of coffee and led him to a conference table in the corner.

  “What’s up?” Scott said. “Who you looking for?”

  DeLuca told him his story. Al-Tariq could still be alive, and if so, it meant trouble. So far, small things, none of them conclusive, seemed to indicate that it was true. DeLuca needed to talk to the family. Scott listened closely, chewing on his pen as he did.

  “So the guy in hospital,” he asked, “you think it was the son . . .”

  “Ibrahim.”

  “But you couldn’t positive ID him? His picture’s on file, right?”

  “It is,” DeLuca said. “I didn’t get that good a look at him. I think it’s more important right now to look for the wives. We’re having pretty good luck, in general, getting wives to flip once they know they’re going to be safe. Walter should teach a course—‘How to Infiltrate a Chauvinist Society 101.’”

  “And your source said she thought they were somewhere between Sanandaj and the border?”

  “That’s what she said. Is that a problem?”

  “We’ve been watching all the roads, but the eastern border is pretty hilly. We can see wherever we want, don’t get me wrong, but the birds over Baghdad are going to b
e looking a bit sideways if we want to see into Iran. We could go geo but those are so high you lose resolution. I’m guessing we’re looking for license plates on a Mercedes caravan or something like that. We might have some unmanned stuff on file, too. You have any idea when they would have gone?”

  “None,” DeLuca said. “He might have gotten them out before the war or after. I thought everybody was going to Syria.”

  “Nine out of ten did. Maybe that’s why he went the other way. Iran’s been Iraq’s mortal enemy since snakes walked, but if this guy had as much cash as you said he had, I’m sure he could have bought himself a few friends.”

  “What would it take to put together the reconnaissance?”

  “Not that long to search what we’ve got on file,” Scott said. “Longer if we have to start from zero. I might want to send a G-Hawk if I can’t find anything. Depending on availability. Have you got Al-Tariq’s file?”

  “Not on me, but it’s on SIPERNET.”

  “I’ll call you when I find something out. I have your number.”

  Back in Tent City, DeLuca found Dan lying on his bunk, reading one of his Arabic books. When Dan didn’t say hello when DeLuca walked in, he made little of it. It took a moment for DeLuca to realize something was wrong.

  “Something eating you?” he asked.

  Dan looked up from his book.

  “Why did I go with Doc to talk to the mayor instead of going with you to talk to Hadid?” he asked.

  “What?” DeLuca said.

  Dan repeated the question.

  “I don’t know,” DeLuca said. “You’d have to ask Doc that. It was his decision.”

  “He’s not here,” Dan said.

  “So I guess we can’t ask him,” DeLuca said. “What’s the problem? Talk to me.”

  “The problem is this,” Dan said. He handed DeLuca a piece of paper, folded into thirds. DeLuca opened it. It was the note Doc had left him, and the words: “If Reicken hasn’t told you yet, remember to take special care of Dan.”