Black List
Page 39
Central Intelligence Agency Field Ops Centre, Baghdad, Iraq
‘This had better be good,’ operations chief Steven Kaminsky grumbled as he strode from his office, doing his best to ignore the painful twinge in the small of his back. A compressed disc from a high-school football injury, the pain came and went, though in recent years it seemed to be coming more frequently and with greater intensity.
All things considered, today was a bad day, and judging by the urgent summons that had just come through to his desk, it wasn’t likely to get better.
With computer terminals crammed into virtually every available one of its 5,000 square feet of floor space, the Pit, as it was known, was reminiscent of NASA’s mission control centre. The comparison was an appropriate one, because in many ways it served a similar function. The computers in this room allowed their operators to control a fleet of twenty unmanned Predator drones deployed throughout the country.
The place was bustling with activity, and judging by the concerned looks and urgent tones, the news was not good.
‘Somebody talk to me!’
He was joined within moments by Pete Faulkner, the floor officer, and the man responsible for the day-to-day running of the twenty control suites in the Pit. Faulkner was only in his forties, but with his overhanging beer gut, perpetually furrowed brow and thinning grey hair, he looked at least ten years older. He was always tired, always out of breath, always sweating.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said, wasting no time on preliminaries.
Kaminsky made a face. ‘So I heard. What’s going on?’
Faulkner gestured over to terminal 6, where most of the anxious-looking technicians were gathered. The flatscreen monitors that should have been transmitting feeds from the Predator’s on-board cameras and instrumentation were blank, as though there was nothing going on.
‘Three minutes ago we lost contact with one of our drones over Mosul,’ he explained as they strode over. ‘Data feeds, telemetry, the works.’
Kaminsky frowned. ‘Has it been shot down?’
Faulkner shook his head. ‘It was orbiting at ten thousand feet. The only thing that could shoot it down from that altitude is a surface-to-air missile, and we had no threat warnings before we lost contact.’
‘Equipment failure?’
‘It’s possible,’ Faulkner admitted. ‘But unlikely. Unless it was a catastrophic engine failure, we’d have seen some sign before we lost the feeds. Make a hole here, gentlemen!’
The junior technicians clustered around the terminal parted like the Red Sea, giving them a clear path to a young man working over one of the few remaining monitors still up and running.
Terminal 6 and its associated drone were his responsibility. He knew he had done nothing wrong, but if something happened to the multi-million-dollar aircraft, the blame would fall on his head first.
‘Anything, Hastings?’ Kaminsky asked.
Hastings shook his head without looking up from the screen. ‘I can’t find anything wrong, sir. Engines, instrumentation, on board computers… everything was good right up until we lost contact. It’s like it just… vanished.’
‘So if it’s still in the air, it’s flying without direct control.’ Kaminsky glanced at Faulkner. ‘Contact air traffic control. Find out if it’s still airborne.’
Shit, I hope it’s not over a populated area, he thought. The drone might have been an unmanned aircraft, but it was still an aircraft with engines and on-board reserves of fuel, not to mention any munitions it might have been carrying. Plenty of things to go boom if it crashed in the middle of a town.
‘If it loses incoming control, it’ll revert to its automated flight programme,’ Faulkner assured him.
That wasn’t much comfort.
‘Maybe it’s a problem at our end?’ Kaminsky suggested. ‘The other drones are fine. If it was a problem with our uplink, we’d have lost control of everything.’
Kaminsky opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything, the monitors around him suddenly flickered back into life as the data feeds resumed, telemetry readings once again reporting the status of an aircraft hundreds of miles away.
Faulkner glanced at the technician. ‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing, sir. It just came back all of a sudden.’
Cursing under his breath, Kaminsky reached into his pocket and put on a pair of reading glasses, leaning closer to the screens to take a look for himself. Now in his early fifties, he needed glasses more than he cared to admit.
‘Get me a full system diagnostic, now,’ he ordered, his eyes darting across the various screens. Altitude, heading, airspeed, engine temperature, fuel pressure … All of it looked fine.
Such was his concern for the technical status of the aircraft, he almost didn’t notice the feed coming in from the downward-looking nose cameras. Designed for battlefield observation and intelligence gathering, the high-resolution digital cameras could zoom in close enough to pick out individual facial features from 10,000 feet.
Now, however, they were focused on an urban area of some kind. Characteristic of the ancient cities that dotted Iraq, it was a maze of narrow streets, walled courtyards and old sandstone buildings.
It was a scene of utter chaos.
One of the buildings had taken a direct hit, blasting out an entire wall and collapsing part of the roof. Smoke and flames billowed from the ruined structure, rescue crews and fire fighters trying to fight their way through the destruction and search for survivors. And everywhere, scattered on the streets around the building, lay the motionless forms of the dead.
‘Sir.’
Tearing his eyes away, Kaminsky looked at Hastings. The young man was pale, a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. He looked as if he was about to be sick.
‘What is it?’
Hastings swallowed hard. ‘All three Hellfire missiles have been deployed.’
Shock and disbelief were reflected in the eyes of every person in the room. Nobody uttered a word.
With slow, deliberate care, Kaminsky removed his reading glasses and turned to his subordinate. ‘Pete, better call Langley right now.’
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Awesome Books Inc
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Copyright © 2015 by Will Jordan
The moral right of Will Jordan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781910859094
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Extract from Redemption copyright © 2012 by Will Jordan, published by Century. Printed here with permission.
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