Erik Parsons looked at the younger pilot and wished Jennifer were there to help. She would know what to say. “Tell you what, Carrot Top. Take my car. No, seriously, take it. Jen can swing by and pick me up later. She has a base tag on the Edge.”
“Boss, I can’t just take—”
“Major, it’s an order. Go home. Better yet, go to Caesar’s, over by the roulette. Take one of the ladies who hang out there upstairs. Get drunk. Get laid. You’re off the next two days anyway, right? Do it. You need it. When was the last time you got laid? Don’t answer that. Just go do it. Then we can talk on Friday. Here, take the fucking keys, I have to get back into the Ops Room.” With that, Erik walked out of the Break Room.
Bruce looked at the two sets of keys on the table, picked up both, and walked out into the parking lot. He got into the black Camaro.
Forty minutes later he pulled up to the valet stand at Caesar’s Palace. A Cadillac XTS pulled up behind him. Bruce headed for the casino floor, but not to roulette, to the blackjack tables. No sooner had he bought his chips and sat down at a table than the waitress asked him what he was drinking. “Scotch, but not the rail one, not the free one. A single malt, Glenfiddich neat. And make it a double.” He handed her his AAFI MasterCard. “Run a tab.”
At the valet stand outside, the Cadillac driver had returned. “Hey, I left my iPhone in the Caddy you guys just parked. I don’t want you to pull it up here again. Can I just go down to the garage and get the phone out.”
“We’re not supposed to let anyone down there, sir,” the valet replied.
“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Ghazi said, as he slipped the valet a twenty.
“No, sir, of course not. The cars are on level P4, in the back, spaces 400 to 600. The Caddy is probably like 480.”
As he approached the Camaro, Ghazi reached under the back bumper and removed the small tracking device he had left there a week earlier. He had tracked Colonel Parsons’s car, but the redheaded man who had walked out of it matched the description of Major Dougherty. Strange, he thought. Then he removed a modified iPhone from his pocket and activated a custom app that the Ukrainians had created. It simulated an OnStar signal. The device interrogated the Camaro through the satellite antenna and then, pop, and the driver’s side door unlocked. Inside, Ghazi found the USB connector and inserted a thumb drive. The OnStar signal had turned on one of the onboard computers, one of five. Now that computer had additional code running on it from the thumb drive. Ghazi removed the thumb drive and relocked the car.
Nine minutes later, back in the casino, still using his modified iPhone, Ghazi tracked Bruce’s mobile to the blackjack table. Ghazi sat at the next table and watched. The Major drank for two hours and seldom won. Then, finally, he scored. To Ghazi’s surprise, Dougherty then got up from the table and headed toward the teller window with his chips. Ghazi walked quickly to the valet stand and ordered up the Cadillac. As he was getting in, he noticed Dougherty giving his ticket to the valet. The Camaro would be pulled up soon.
Six minutes later, Bruce turned left on to Flamingo and then up the ramp on to I-15 North. He knew he was drunk, but he could still drive perfectly well. After all, he was a pilot, or used to be. The trick was not doing anything that would cause him to be pulled over by the Sheriff. There was no way he could blow the breathalyzer without getting arrested.
He took the left exit on to the Gragson Freeway west. He checked the side mirror as he merged into the flow of traffic. An 18-wheeler was coming fast in the right lane. No problem, Bruce thought, go to afterburners. The Camaro SS, he knew, had great pick up, not great rear visibility, but a lot of power under the hood. He punched the accelerator.
Instead, the brakes came on. Bruce knew he had hit the correct pedal, but the Camaro shuddered to a stop. He heard the doors click, as they locked. He looked up into the mirror and saw the grille of the Mack truck.
The Mack rode up over the Camaro and dragged it for 150 feet, scraping and sparking, before the entire mass of metal slowed to a halt. The truck’s driver was unhurt, the Sheriff’s Deputy later noted in the highway fatality report. The body in the Camaro was badly mangled. Death had been instant when the neck had snapped from the spinal column.
33
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13
PRADO PARK
CHINO, CALIFORNIA
The B-52 circled the field and then lined up with the runway for final approach. There was a slight crosswind, which caused the aircraft’s nose to point a little to the left, but soon the pilot had righted the bomber as it descended and then touched down. It taxied down the runway and then pulled off to a parking apron. Then three men picked it up and carried it off to the grassy area where the other aircraft were on display.
“How long is that wingspan?” he asked the man who appeared to be the owner.
“Six feet on each side,” the bomber’s owner beamed. “You like it?”
“She’s a beauty,” Ghazi replied. “I’ve never seen a radio controlled plane this big. Is it the biggest?”
“One of the biggest. Was the biggest for a while, but newcomers, you know. Tom Harris over there, his C-17 is now the biggest, but Linda Cahill and her boy made that DC-3, or C-47 I should say. It’s pretty huge.”
“May I?” Ghazi asked, as he went to kneel down by the fuselage for a closer look. “So she has four engines that all work?”
“JetCat P120s. Course, the real B-52 have eight engines, four pairs, but they’re little compared to what you would see on a real 777. You know, for ETOPS, those mothers are huge. A man can stand upright in one and still be dwarfed. Amazing.”
“And this is all battery powered?” Ghazi asked.
“No, real Jet A-1 fuel. Plus a bunch of lithium batteries in sequence. The C-17 has four kerosene-fueled engines. That’s why we have this new requirement that we all have to carry fire extinguishers. Just another expense.”
Ghazi nodded, knowingly. He wandered down the flight line, amazed at the number and diversity of the model aircraft, and at their size. The owners were mostly middle-aged men, or older. They wore baseball hats with patches and buttons. Some wore old military-style jackets, but there were also teenagers in jeans and hoodies. The children, or maybe grandchildren, of the owners seemed just as enthusiastic as their elders. He stopped by one young man who was showing off to friends.
“Yeah, so I hacked the app for this Chinese RC model helicopter and made a few adjustments and, ta-da, now I can fly the Sukhoi from my iPad,” the teenager was explaining. The Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker was one of the bigger fighters on the strip. Painted up in Russian Air Force livery, it looked so real that Ghazi caught himself thinking about Gulliver’s Travels. Had he become a giant or had all the world’s aircraft been shrunk?
“Mind if I ask you a question?” Ghazi said to the three teenagers with the Sukhoi. They nodded and mumbled agreement. “What is this airplane made out of? Is it aluminum?”
The boys shook their heads, no. “That would be way too heavy, dude. It’s fiberglass mainly, some carbon fiber. And balsa wood. Got some metal parts, sure, but we try to keep the weight down so it can get off the ground and stay up for a while.”
While these people all looked like the quintessential American patriots, Ghazi thought, their allegiance to the United States did not seem to extend to all of their aircraft. There were several British Spitfires, at least one Japanese Zero, the French Concorde, and a Chinese flagged MiG-21. Ghazi had been to the Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington. This field in Chino, California, looked like someone had stolen the museum’s content and put it all in a miniaturizing machine.
As he walked down the line, aircraft continued to take off, perform aerobatics, and land. Speakers mounted on posts announced which aircraft was performing and who owned it. The crowd applauded often, although it was not all together clear to him what prompted some of the clapping. From what he could gather from the announcer, there were to be prizes given out later in the day.
“Are you Tom Ha
rris?” he asked the man standing by the C-17.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“I heard that yours is the biggest aircraft here. Is that right?” Ghazi asked.
“For now. Jimmy Yang is working on an Airbus-380, you know, the one with the double deck. It’ll be a monster, like the real one,” Harris said.
“I was wondering, how long did it take you to build the C-17?” Ghazi asked.
“I call her the Globemaster II, that’s the Air Force designator. Took me about ten months, start to finish. Why, you thinking of trying to build something?”
Ghazi lowered his chin, looking dejected. “Well, I was, but I assume that as a first timer it would take me at least twice as long, but I don’t think we have two years.”
“Why not? It’s a great hobby. You can spend the nights out in the garage by yourself, with a little TV and a beer chiller. It’s probably saved my marriage, I’ll tell yah.”
“I’m sure, but it’s just that it’s for my nephew, Sanjay. He loves these planes. But the doctors aren’t sure how long he has. They told us one to three years, unless of course there is a breakthrough. Of course, we are all praying very hard to Jesus for a breakthrough. It would be a miracle of sorts,” Ghazi said.
The C-17 owner looked at Ghazi for a long time, thinking, nodding his head. “You know, Jesus acts in all kind of ways, through all kinds of people. Maybe it’s not always all that we pray for, but he knows best.”
“Yes, it’s true,” Ghazi replied. He stared down at the C-17.
“Tell you what,” the man said, “I’ve been thinking I need a new project. Thinking of building something bigger than Jimmy Yang’s 380. Otherwise my wife has her Honey Do list, you know? You think you could scrape together ten thousand? That’s about what it cost me, without the labor.”
“You would sell me your Globemaster II?” Ghazi seemed incredulous. “Then, yes, I could pay cash. I had a very good year. I am in venture capital. In Palo Alto. I would give you twelve thousand for her. She is a beauty and Sanjay will love it. It will give him a new burst of energy.”
The Globemaster pilot smiled broadly. “Have you got a pickup by any chance? May need that to pull the custom trailer.”
“I have a Ford 150 here. And, I can go back into town to the Bank of America and get the money in cash,” Ghazi offered.
“Now that’s just icing on the cake. No need to involve the IRS. You know, sometimes it’s little white lies that keep a marriage together. I may just tell Cynthia that the Globemaster crashed, otherwise she’ll be wanting some of the proceeds for her damn landscaping. She wants an underground irrigation system. That woman never leaves her garden.”
The men shook hands as red tri-winged aircraft flew low overhead. Now my squadron is complete, Ghazi thought, six beautiful, radio-controlled model planes, one of the best collections in the United States of America. “That’s Joel Rubin, he calls himself the Red Baron. We call him Snoopy.”
34
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13
SOUTHWEST GATE, THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, DC
Three large, green helicopters took off in sequence, headed south. It happened every Sunday afternoon. The First Family returning from Camp David, where the President and his wife liked to take the twins for the weekend. Ray Bowman was not allowed to enter until the “movement” was complete. As the three ships moved off, he inserted his badge into the card reader and punched in his PIN, nodded to the Uniformed Secret Service officer and walked up the snow-lined West Executive Avenue.
It was what one National Security Advisor had called the broadest narrow street in the world. On one side was more power than any one person had anywhere else, but also unrealistic expectation of what could be done with it. On the other side were the staff in the massive Eisenhower Executive Office Building, who knew the limits of power because they could never get everything done that the people across the alley wanted accomplished.
As he walked under the awning and into the ground floor of the West Wing, Ray thought about the job of the National Security Advisor. It had incredible scope and enormous influence, without all of the glare of media attention and the harassment of Congressional hearings. He wondered if, one day, he might be able to convince a President to let him have the job. To get there, he had to avoid disasters on his watch at the PEG. He knew that was not going to be easy.
Winston Burrell met him in a small conference room in the Situation Room. It seemed more like a private dining room for four, maybe six, except that in addition to all the dark wood there were lots of digital clocks and a very large flat screen. Burrell looked like an old city political boss, a rotund man in his early sixties, sitting in his little back room on a Sunday afternoon, receiving his ward leaders one at a time. In a way, Ray thought, that is what Winston Burrell was, more political than strategic, more boss than CEO. He saw his job as dealing with constituencies, here and abroad. For Burrell, Ray was an enforcer, someone he could trust to deal with difficult problems, discreetly, not someone he ever had to put on a State Dinner guest list.
“Some guardian angel you are,” Burrell began.
“I know.”
“Let’s see, we have six hearings scheduled on the Hill on our drone policies. The UN has created a Special Rapporteur, whatever the fuck that is, to keep an eye on our use of drones. She’s in Geneva, must be a cushy job. And the AG tells me there are now twelve distinct lawsuits filed in various courts around the country to stop us killing Americans with drones, to stop us from violating international law and Human Rights agreements we are party to, and to get all sorts of data on our use of flying killer robots under the Freedom of Information Act.”
Ray poured himself a coffee from the decanter in the middle of the conference table. “To say nothing of the media frenzy. Especially WWN. It’s a ratings thing for them. Now 60 Minutes is piling on, planning an entire show on drones next week. And our best pilot just got flattened by a semi on the interstate. It’s all going great, Win. Got anything else you want me to look after while I’m at it?”
“Is there any good news?” Burrell asked.
“Some. We seem to have scared the terrorists—at least, they haven’t used a Stinger against us in a while, since we started firing back at the shooters. We foiled an attempt to hijack another drone and shot down the aircraft involved, linked it to ex-Pakistani intelligence by the way.”
“I’ve been thinking of designating them, ISI, as a terrorist organization,” Burrell observed. “What’d you think? State is bullshit with me for suggesting it.”
Ray decided to let that question pass. “Drones are still the only game in town, Win. Without them Qadhafi would still be running around in the desert in Chad or someplace plotting a comeback. Al Qaeda would still have a Shura Council of experienced managers in Pakistan. The Taliban would be running even more of Afghanistan. Half a dozen Americans would still be hostage in Somalia and the President of Yemen would be toast, literally.”
“You don’t have to sell me, Ray. It’s the only thing CIA can do. And the Pentagon says it’s either drones or it’s huge commando raids with SEALs, or better yet, plastering the countryside with B-2s. But there have been too many mistakes. You know what the President said when I told him drones were the only way we had to deal with al Qaeda in Yemen? He said drones were doing the recruiting for al Qaeda in Yemen. He’d heard it on television. It could be right, you know.”
“I will get an analysis, but I doubt it’s right,” Ray replied.
“You remember that the Agency had a very sensitive human source who tipped them off about the gathering in Vienna? They won’t even tell me anything about who the source is or how they got him. My guess is that the Jords or the Brits, maybe the Indians or the Emiratis developed the source, not CIA.”
“Well, whoever it was, he was right about Vienna. The group we hit were Qazzani’s men in Europe, but they were planning to do some contract work for al Qaeda, bombing German subways,” Ray recalled. “What’s that go
t to do with anything now?”
“The same source, whoever that may be, has reconnected and sent word that as a result of our attack in Vienna, there is a major plot afoot to seek revenge. Two groups are operating independently, but both will strike simultaneously, allegedly in the U.S. Two falcons, whatever that means. The source personally overheard that phrase ‘two falcons.’ That’s all we’ve got, no where, when, how, who,” Burrell said.
“That squares with another report we had last summer about something big happening around Christmas,” Ray replied. “So, maybe, just maybe, something’s going to happen somewhere, possibly someday in the next couple of weeks, but we don’t know what it is or who is going to do it. Sounds like the summer of 2001. Nothing actionable, but be afraid. Be very afraid. Great.” Ray replied.
“Yeah, well I am not telling the President or anybody else to deliver that message to the public, not yet. The FBI is chasing down all their informants, shaking all the trees. Maybe it will turn out to be nothing. Meanwhile, I want you to stay focused on saving the drone program. I assume you know about the latest Inspector General investigation, the Red Sea incident?” Burrell asked.
Ray shook his head. “No, what incident?”
“Seems like there were civilians, including kids, killed when we blew up that yacht with the AQAP and Shabab summit going on it. The Pentagon IG says there was a cover-up, focusing in on the Air Force pilot running the Vegas squadron. Was he the one that just got hit by the truck?”
Sting of the Drone Page 21