It had been ten days for the men in the rocks, ten days in the thin atmosphere at twelve thousand feet. That did not bother them, since they had lived at altitude for years. What bothered them was trying to figure out the electronic equipment they had been given, the short-range line of sight radios, the heat detecting binoculars, and the Russian Stingers with their precious batteries. Finally, that day when they turned on the Thuraya satellite phone for the one minute at a time they used it, there was the text message, “Storm front moving generally north.” It meant a drone had taken off and been tracked by the Pakistani radar moving toward their general location. Before they could alert the others, farther up the canyon, they saw it approaching from the south. As they had been told it might be, the drone was below them and its dark gray fuselage stood out. The electronic chameleon skin was only on the bottom of the drone. They were above it.
As the bird passed below them and made its way slowly up the canyon, they could hear the buzzing. They hit the alarm on their special radio. Three men farther up the canyon, sitting on the high edge of the canyon wall, grabbed for the SA-24. They flipped all of the switches to “on” and to “arm.” The long tube started to make noises, beeps and whines. The gunner saw the drone head on through the optical sight and hit the Target Designator button. He threw off the safety. The tones coming from the tube changed into one long, high beep. As the drone passed by them, he pulled the launch trigger. The tube jumped and shook. A flame leaped from the back of the tube as the missile shot out into the sky and after the drone, now ahead and below.
The image on Bruce Dougherty’s screen dissolved into a bright blue rectangle. “Jesus! This is no time for the blue screen of death, man.” He stood up in his cubicle and screamed at the computer support contractor who sat toward the front of the room. “IT, I need connectivity back to my bird, now, or she will just turn around and fly home in a few minutes.”
“Dude,” the civilian contractor yelled back, “chill. There ain’t no signal coming from your bird. The link shut down just as that flash started.”
“What flash? What are you talking about? I didn’t—” Bruce stopped, wondering if he had missed something on the video feed while he was watching the instruments, or rubbing his eyes to stay awake. “Listen, just reboot or whatever you do.”
There was still a smudge of smoke hanging in the high, thin air above the canyon and a dozen small fires in the grass and scrub bushes on the canyon floor below where the fuel and the pieces of the drone had fallen, scattered across a wide area.
The men on the top of the canyon wall packed up. They did not call in. They would tell their story in person. It was safer that way.
Dougherty filed an incident report, unexplained loss of connectivity to UAV, probable crash. The drones crashed far more often than the public was aware. The Predators especially were fairly fragile, underpowered aircraft. At the end of his shift, he went to his boss, Colonel Parsons, to discuss his suspicions that maybe something unusual had happened. Before he could raise his hunch, however, Parsons stood up on a chair and asked the other pilots and support team to gather around.
“What we do is secret, you all know. Therefore, we can’t have the big, public ceremonies that they do in the rest of the Air Force. But that does not mean that the Pentagon leadership or the President is unaware of what we do or who we are. Nor does it mean that they are ungrateful, quite the opposite.” Erik scanned the group, making eye contact with as many as he could.
“In fact, they have created a special honor for UAV pilots and team members, the Distinguished Warfare Award. It can only be given to those of us in the UAV units and to our nation’s new cyber warriors. It recognizes what we do is warfare and it is the new way of war.
“I am pleased today, on behalf of the Secretary of the Air Force, to present the Distinguished Warfare Award to Major Bruce Dougherty for his essential role in a recent classified mission.” Erik jumped off the chair and handed a folder to Sergeant Miller, who read the citation aloud to the group.
“Attention to Orders,” Miller began and then read a brief, uninformative script while Erik placed a medal on Bruce Dougherty’s flight suit. There was a brief round of applause and handshaking.
“All right, everyone back to work. We got birds to fly,” Erik ordered. He then walked Bruce Dougherty out of the building and to his car in the parking lot. Bruce sat up on the hood of his Mustang.
“You know what they call those medals in the real Air Force? The Desk Warfare Award, for guys who go to war without ever leaving their desks. Cyber geeks and Xbox gamers, us. It says right in the regs that the medal cannot ever be given for valor in combat,” Bruce explained.
“You wanna give it back?” Erik asked.
“No, boss, I want to fly again, like you and I used to do. F-16s. What I’d really like is a crack at an F-22.”
“Bruce, we have had the few F-22s we got for how many years now? And not one has ever flown in combat. You fly in combat every day. How many enemy have you killed so far? Bruce, the era of manned aircraft is over. We are the future of military aircraft. You want to be in something that goes fast? Take your Mustang out on the back road. Never any sheriffs out here.”
Dougherty laughed. “That’s the way I go home every day. Zero to a hundred in nine seconds.”
“Great,” Erik Parsons said, patting his friend on the shoulder. “And, Bruce, keep the Desk Warrior medal. You saved a lot of lives by the mission you flew in Vienna. We just can never tell anyone, about the bad stuff, or even the good.”
11
SUNDAY, AUGUST 30
PODILSKY DISTRICT
KIEV, UKRAINE
“You look better today,” Dmitri Bayurak said, thrusting his hand forward.
“Yesterday you kidnapped me from a steam bath and threw me in the back of a truck. Today I was picked up at my hotel in a Range Rover,” Ghazi Nawarz replied. “I look better. I also feel better. And you?”
“Your money hit my account overnight,” Bayurak said. “So I feel better, too. Let me introduce you to Yuri and Mykola. They have also been at work overnight. I will leave you three to talk about ones and zeroes. I have bigger numbers to deal with.”
The two Ukrainians led the way downstairs to the computer operations floor where over twenty young men hovered over computer screens. It could have been a control room for a bank, but these men seemed all to be in jeans and T-shirts, and looked like they had not been to a shower or a barber in a long time. Yuri and Mykola led him to a conference room with the same modern, Scandinavian design feel that had been present upstairs in Bayurak’s office. There were large flat screens on each of three walls. The fourth was glass, looking out at the computer operations floor.
Yuri pressed a button next to the door. The floor-to-ceiling glass wall went from clear to opaque, a milky white barrier suddenly appearing inside the glass. “Polymer dispersed liquid crystal,” Mykola said.
“Of course,” Ghazi said and sat down at the conference table. “So what exactly did you do overnight?”
“Hacked AAFI,” Mykola replied.
“Go on,” Ghazi said.
“The American Armed Forces Insurance company in Texas. Almost all the U.S. military, and ex-military, insure their cars, sometimes their houses, with AAFI. They give low rates and give good service,” Mykola continued.
“Why do I care? Am I looking to insure my car?” Ghazi asked.
“No, your Jaguar XS in Vancouver is already insured with Royal Canadian Sun,” Mykola smiled. “As is your condo.”
“You have been investigating me?” Ghazi said. “You are supposed to be investigating the American drones.”
“Enough fun, Mykola,” Yuri said. “We did. The main American drone control facility is at Creech Air Force Base, outside of Las Vegas. It’s a shit hole. People like to live off base. So we look in AAFI to see what Air Force pilots live nearby. Then we see which ones came there from Langley Air Force base in Virginia, where they train the drone pilots. Here’s y
our list of drone pilots now living near Creech, their street addresses, their height, weight, eye color, hair color, and what cars they drive.”
Ghazi began flipping through the printouts. “The pictures. They look very young,” he said.
“Some are old pictures. From the college yearbooks. And driver’s licenses. Some from Facebook,” Mykola explained. “But none of them are on Facebook now. For security, ha!”
“We also cracked Dominion Federal Credit Union, it’s like a bank. CIA employees use it,” Yuri added. “Here are active duty CIA people living in Las Vegas area. This one just bought an expensive condo, in a nice building downtown.”
“We want to go to Vegas,” Mykola interjected. “Is necessary to help with operation. More secure. You can’t be calling us from there, besides time differences. You’d be waking us up all the time.”
“Too risky. Too hard to get a visa,” Ghazi replied. “No, you can’t go.”
“No visas, we have American passports,” Yuri replied. “Already these passports are on file with the State Department. Such bad network security these people have. It’s a wonder everyone doesn’t have an American passport by now.”
Ghazi did not reply. “What about the drones themselves. Can we get at them?”
“You just did,” Yuri said. “Wasn’t that your people who used the Stinger yesterday?”
“SA-24,” Ghazi replied.
“Same thing. Russians copied the Stingers they got in Afghanistan years ago,” Yuri said.
“The drones are networked. Anything networked is vulnerable,” Mykola added. “We have plans. You’ll see. We have some boxes we need to ship your guys. And we’ll need an Executive Jet.”
“I want to kill these people, the drone people, not just hack them,” Ghazi said.
“Yeah, yeah, we got that. Not a problem,” Yuri replied. “Lots of ways to die.”
“Can we kill them with their own drones?” Ghazi asked.
The two Ukrainians looked at each other and exchanged a few quick words in their language. “Maybe,” Yuri replied in English. “With drones, for sure. Maybe not with their Predators or Reapers, but with drones, maybe. Easier to do if we are both in Vegas.”
“Before I left Kiev your boss told me he had seen a videotape the Austrian security service has, showing the special black drone that killed my father, do you have that?” Ghazi asked.
“Is not good, you watching your father die, but yes we have it, of course,” Mykola answered.
“I don’t want to watch it,” Ghazi replied. “I want you to send it to someone. With a letter. Make it look like you sent it from Vienna, like maybe you work for the Austrian government and stole it from them.”
“Done,” Yuri said. “What else?”
“The metros, subways. Did you start looking at them yet?” Ghazi asked.
“Mykola loves metro. He takes metro every day, rubs up against girls. Never asks them out, just rubs up against them and gets slapped, am I right?” Yuri teased his colleague.
Mykola blushed. He hit his laptop and began showing images on one of the large flat screens. “American metros come in two types: old and very old. The very old ones are harder to hack, no network controls. They use people to drive them, like in Kiev. Primitive. So, Boston, New York, Philadelphia are like that. The newer ones, Atlanta, Washington, San Francisco, we have hacked those. Piece of cake.”
Ghazi watched the maps and photographs as Mykola flipped through them in slideshow mode. “I need to know where we should put the bombs for maximum effect, how we get around security,” Ghazi said.
“Bombs. Always it’s bombs with you people. It’s the digital age man, you can kill with bits and bytes,” Yuri replied, “at least in the newer metros. The older ones you can bomb. We can do some surveillance through their own cameras. New York has a lot of cameras, easy to hack. Maybe have to send some people in to look around, too. Your people, not us.”
“We will have people ready, soon,” Ghazi said, wondering how Bahadur was doing with that part of the plan.
“Bayurak doesn’t want what we do traceable back to Kiev, back to him,” Mykola announced.
“Well, you know how to anonymize, bounce through servers in Saudi, make it look like it’s al Qaeda in Yemen,” Ghazi said.
“The Americans can figure that shit out now. Fort Meade, NSA, Cyber Command, those guys,” Yuri said.
“So?” Ghazi asked.
“So, we got to be in Vegas,” the two Ukrainians replied in unison.
“Fucking Christ, all right, you can go to Vegas,” Ghazi exclaimed.
Mykola high-fived Yuri. Then Yuri turned back to Ghazi. “Fucking Christ? I thought you were Muslim.”
“I was, as a child,” Ghazi replied. “Now I am a global citizen. I believe in what works.”
12
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17
MANDALAY HOTEL
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
The Peter Michael “Pointe Rouge” Chardonnay flew through the air. It was carried by the sommelier’s attractive assistant, who had attached herself to a wire, touched a control pad, and had been pulled rapidly fifty feet above the restaurant floor. There she had opened one of the many glass enclosures that held the extensive wine collection in temperature-controlled environments, a series of wine rooms that composed not a wine cellar, but a wine attic soaring above the diners.
Descending to tableside, the acrobatic wine steward announced, “So, we did have the 2009. You’re in luck, because it really is the best available year. Would you like it chilled?”
“No, no that will suppress the taste,” Colonel Erik Parsons replied. “Just leave it on the table, thanks.”
“You knew that wine was in the top case, didn’t you?” Jennifer Parsons said, smiling and simultaneously shaking her head. “Did you pick it just for the show?”
“I don’t know why you say things like that. This is the best California Chardonnay on the list,” Erik replied.
“So what is the occasion? This is not our anniversary and it’s not my birthday, which I think was the last time you took me to a fancy Vegas casino restaurant.”
“Do we need an occasion? It’s my night off. We live ten miles from some of the best restaurants in America. With our combined incomes, we can afford to live better than we do, especially now that we have the last of the tuition payments behind us.”
She looked at him as he tasted the wine. “Honey, we have been together for twenty-five years. I know you. And I am a working psychiatrist, so don’t tell me we have come here just because it’s Monday. Talk to me. What’s on your mind, GI?”
“Well, see, doctor, I have this friend,” Erik began. “And he has been having fantasies of flying through the air above a restaurant and hooking up with his wife, who is also in the air, and they do it somewhere between the Shiraz and the Merlot. But in the dream, they knock over this whole wall of Pinot Noir.”
Jennifer laughed and touched her glass to his. “That is an easy diagnosis. Your friend is probably a former fighter pilot who commanded a squadron of F-16s and is frustrated because now his squadron is a bunch of flying killer robots and neither he nor his pilots ever get to fly themselves through the air … which for them, when they were flying their F-16s, was better than sex.”
“Jeez, Jen, that was such a classical Freudian interpretation, I’m surprised you didn’t go for the F-16s are phalluses thing.”
“Ha!” she laughed. “Goes without saying.”
“Going supersonic, the high G turn, all that stuff was never better than what we’ve done together, really,” Erik said softly.
“Bullshit, now really, what’s bothering you?”
They had ordered the six-course “Degustation” tasting menu and the courses began to appear.
“I think some of the guys are getting ragged. Two days ago one guy clipped the wing of a UN 737 over Mogadishu. He says he never saw the plane. The Reaper spun out and hit a refugee camp, exploded. Amazingly, no one got killed. And the 737 continued on i
n and landed. Lucky.
“Another guy, Bruce, you know him, says he never saw the civilian walk right into the kill zone, just before he fired. Fried the guy, as well as the four bad guys.
“Then one of Bruce’s birds just seemed to disappear. We later found it on satellite imagery in pieces on the ground. Still trying to figure out whether he clipped the mountain or what happened.
“Out of seventy-five pilots, eleven have asked for early transfer, I dismissed three for DUIs, and eight have filed for divorce since they got here. Those are not normal numbers, Jennie. I am supposed to be a leader, inspire them, keep them happy, act like a team. That ain’t happening. Washington has suggested having chaplains and shrinks just outside the Ops Center, in case the pilots need immediate counseling.”
Jennifer Parsons had followed her husband around the world, moving ten times since they married. There had always been Air Force hospitals or off-base clinics where she could practice. She knew the stresses the military placed on most families and she had always felt blessed that she and Erik had maintained such a real partnership, that they and the two girls had always been such a team together.
“I can’t see any of the guys in your unit or their spouses because of the conflict of interest rules, but I do consults with my colleagues, so I hear things, always without names, but nonetheless …
“There is a lot of stress in the program. Let’s face it, they kill people fairly often and then they walk out of their dark game-boy room and they’re in the blazing Las Vegas sun, where it’s perfectly safe, fun is all around. It’s hard to live in those two worlds simultaneously,” Dr. Parsons observed. “You don’t want them to think of their job as just a computer game. You want them to know there are real people at the other end. But then when you achieve that they also know that those real people are killed like fish in a barrel, they can’t fight back. It’s not really a fair fight, so your guys get guilty.”
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