by Mike Maden
The general cut a piece of bloody red steak and forked it into his mouth. “We’re going to lose air supremacy to the goddamn Chinese within ten years, maybe five, if we don’t keep pushing on the new ATF systems.” Winchell was referring to the Pentagon’s enduring pursuit of the world’s most advanced tactical fighters. “The F-22 was killed in 2011 under Obama, now this administration is threatening the slowdown of the F-35s.”
“Can’t be helped, Winston. Myers is a grocery clerk masquerading as a commander in chief. It’s the times we live in.” Diele took a sip of his Seagram’s 7 and 7. “It’s all about the pennies with this woman. She fails to see the big picture. That’s what you get when you elect a businesswoman to the White House instead of a strategic thinker. And I can’t muster enough senators on either side of the aisle to filibuster her sweet ass. It’s the damn Tea Party tyranny. Do you know, we’ve lost six thousand defense-related jobs in just the last month because of her? It’s insane. Defense work is the best kind of manufacturing job there is these days. It’s good, solid, middle-class work, whether you’re blue collar or white collar.” Diele cut another slice of beef.
The two men chewed in silence. There was no doubt that the defense budget was being ground down, though technically it was only frozen to last year’s record level. But rising health care costs, automatic salary increases, and mandatory retirement payouts were consuming a larger share of the Pentagon budget every year. A defense budget freeze actually cut deeply into new weapons acquisition.
What neither man acknowledged was that the Pentagon’s weapons acquisition programs were badly flawed and ill suited for the challenges of the twenty-first century. The F-22 Raptor fighter jets cost over $140 million apiece and still suffered a mysterious malfunction in the oxygen system. The problem was so bad that some air force pilots reportedly refused to fly the plane.
The F-35 series was the next fighter behind the F-22 that was designed to give America air combat superiority. Ironically, the F-35 was going to be sold to several nations, including Japan and Turkey, thus technically eliminating “American” air superiority. But the partnerships were considered necessary to help offset the astronomical expense of development and production, and yet it still cost American taxpayers over $300 million per plane. But the F-35 program continued to experience significant setbacks in production problems, cost overruns, and testing, including losing one computer-simulated combat scenario against fourth-generation Russian fighters.
The ultimate irony, of course, was that the United States hadn’t fought a single air-to-air combat engagement since the first Gulf War twenty years ago. Seemingly, the U.S. was building fighters for future air battles it wasn’t going to fight anytime soon. Defense analysts outside of the Pentagon had reached similar conclusions for other weapons systems in other service areas. Not only do generals and admirals prepare to fight the last war, they procure the weapons systems needed to fight them.
Of course, Americans weren’t the only ones guilty of this. In the period between the world wars, few generals or admirals anywhere realized the potential for tanks, airplanes, submarines, or aircraft carriers as revolutionary weapons technologies. European and American defense budgets were squandered on outmoded technologies like giant battleships, the Maginot Line, and other weapons systems perfectly designed to fight and win World War I. Unfortunately, the Germans and Japanese had prepared for World War II and nearly won it.
But these history lessons were lost on much of the current Pentagon establishment. That was partly due to the culture. The very highest air force and navy ranks were only achieved by the men and women who wore pilots’ wings or who had captained warships or submarines. Naturally, they favored the most advanced weapons systems and promoted the warriors who mastered them.
Unfortunately, history taught still another lesson the Pentagon hadn’t learned.
The only wars America had lost since World War II were those fought against technologically inferior opponents. America’s famous B-2 stealth bombers cost over $2 billion each, counting the entire cost of development and production, but the Afghanistan countryside was dominated by illiterate Muslim peasants carrying $200 AK-47s a decade after the invasion.
“I’m afraid for this country, Winston. I thank God every day for men and women like you who are standing guard over us. I just want to put the right tools in your hands so that you can do your job,” Diele said. What Diele didn’t say was that he wanted to hand him the weapons systems the big lobbyists wanted purchased, sometimes even over the protests of the generals and admirals. Congress was famous for buying unrequested weapons because they brought a direct material benefit to their home districts and states, and virtually every congressional district had at least one DoD contract of one sort or another in any given ten-year period.
Nearly all of the current pilots of the venerable B-52, first introduced in 1955, were younger than the airplanes they flew. B-52s were scheduled to remain in service until 2040. That meant, theoretically, a B-52 pilot in 2040 could be flying a plane his grandfather flew in.
“Gary, I’m just an old soldier. You tell me what I need to do, and I’ll do it,” the general said.
Diele laughed to himself. The general was about as political as they come. When Winchell was appointed the superintendent of the Air Force Academy, he stated that the primary purpose of the school was to promote racial and sexual diversity in the service, and its secondary purpose was to promote military preparedness. He did that knowing full well that one day he’d need that kind of politically correct gold star in his record if he wanted the Senate to confirm his appointment as a major general, which it recently did, thanks to Diele.
“Well, I’m no soldier, Winston, but I’ve read a little history, and it seems to me that patience is a virtue in both politics and war. We’ll wait and see for now. I have a feeling that Myers will hand us the nylons we need to strangle her with.”
8
Isla Paraíso, Mexico
The .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle roared. Another massive brass casing tumbled onto the stony ground.
Water sprayed up a half meter to the left of an orange target buoy bobbing in the bright blue Pacific water five hundred meters away.
“¡Hijo de puta!” César barked. He lay prone on the ground as he fired the tripod-mounted weapon, Ali next to him. A pair of oversize earmuffs made the crime lord look more like a DJ than a sniper. Ali wore a similar pair. The Barrett’s big-caliber rounds were designed to pierce armor and the blast was deafening, literally.
César stood up and pulled the muffs down around his neck. So did Ali.
“No, jefe. It was an excellent shot. The wind has risen.”
The gusting wind on top of the island’s mountain peak buffeted them, fluttering their hair and shirts.
“I’m worried, Ali.”
“About Hater?”
“I have tried to reach out to him, but nobody can find the bastard.”
“If he has gone to the Americans, they would already have been here and your sons killed—or worse. Trust me, there is no evidence linking your sons to the massacre. The fact that they are still breathing proves this.”
“You seem certain,” César said.
“I am, jefe. I trained your sons myself. I am certain they left no clues behind.”
César stared hard into Ali’s eyes, probing him for lies. He found none.
That was because Ali was supremely confident about Hater. He had ordered the Mara gangbanger crushed to death in a thirty-ton hydraulic press the day after the massacre. Hater’s tattooed remains were scooped into a sealed barrel and sunk to the gulf floor where the drum settled in the middle of an abandoned dumping ground for American military ordnance. The Mara had to be killed. Hater was the only link anyone had to the massacre—and Ali.
But the inability of either the Mexican or American government to find other hard evidence against the Castillos and launch an attack had come as a complete surprise to the Iranian. The boys really had co
vered their tracks.
Now Ali wondered if the feckless Americans would ever seek their revenge against the Mexicans. If evidence was the problem, he’d have to provide it. Fortunately, he’d planned for this contingency, too.
César laughed. “Yes, you trained them well, didn’t you?” He clapped Ali on the back, then turned the Iranian back toward the big sniper rifle. “So tell me, maestro, why can’t I hit the fucking target with that thing?”
“It takes patience, jefe. You just need to practice. Trust me,” Ali said, smiling.
* * *
Three hours later, the three Castillos and five premium escort girls were barricaded behind the gilded doors of the mansion’s Fiesta Room, a sordid collection of vibrating beds, leather sex swings, exotic animal skins, glittering disco balls, thundering audio, and a bank of digital projectors looping porn on every wall.
When he was certain they were all passed out from copious amounts of Cristal, meth, dope, and perversion, Ali slipped into his own private quarters and locked the door behind him. He opened up his encrypted cell phone and dialed an untraceable number that bounced off of a series of satellites and cell towers, sending the signal halfway around the world and back again until someone on the other end of the line picked up.
“Yes, Commander?” a man asked in Farsi. The Western-trained computer specialist was speaking from Quds Force headquarters in Ramazan, Iran.
“The dog needs her bone,” Ali said.
“It will be done within the hour.”
Ali clicked off his phone. The technician he had spoken with was first-rate. By this time tomorrow, Myers should be howling with rage, and by the grace of Allah, tearing at Castillo’s throat with her sharpest teeth.
9
Arlington, Virginia
Within the last fifteen minutes, there had been an explosion in tweets and retweets on a string of highly related, red-flagged search topics: #elpaso, #cincodemayo, #massacre, #myers, #killers, #aztlan, and others.
What was going on?
Sergio Navarro was at his computer workstation inside the Intelligence Division of the DEA headquarters building. It was 4 a.m., he was the shift supervisor, and he was bone-tired.
The twenty-six-year-old intelligence analyst had helped form the new Social Media Task Force organized around RIOT, Raytheon’s new social-media data-mining software. Rapid Information Overlay Technology not only hoovered data on suspects using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, it also predicted their future behavior. Drug dealers were as attracted to social media as the rest of the world was, and their desire for more human interaction through inhuman computers enabled the DEA to harvest terabytes’ worth of vital intelligence information that they might not have otherwise acquired.
Navarro had been slumped behind his computer working on his master’s thesis project, designing hardware and software for an open-sourced, Arduino-based crowdmapping device to locate and track drug dealers. Because it was all open-sourced, he could distribute the devices for free to poor communities victimized by drug violence all over the world. But with the budget freeze, the DEA couldn’t pay for it, so Navarro had turned to Kickstarter and crowdfunded six figures for the project. When the RIOT software alarms rang, Navarro quickly pulled up the search window.
Tonight’s automated search had focused on El Paso and the terrible massacre that had occurred just over a week ago. RIOT had just found the string of tweets, and they were all being generated by a single event: an uploaded video file. RIOT had found the video link as well, so Navarro opened it.
It was a cell-phone video of the Cinco de Mayo massacre.
Holy crap!
This was the smoking gun his division had been looking for.
The video was dark, shaky, and suffering the pangs of autofocus—the attack had been at night and the scene was lit primarily by a distant street lamp. Nevertheless, the video was generating quite a stir in the blogosphere. The video showed the two killers blasting away with their machine guns, death-metal music screaming in the background. Unfortunately, audio quality was poor because of the cheap microphone in the cell phone that shot the video.
Navarro located the video on the original Facebook post in question and dubbed a clean copy for the DEA’s use. Navarro then reflagged the El Paso automated-search packages in order to catch the rising tidal wave of interest in the video, now surging to several hundred hits and climbing by the minute. It was about to go viral.
At the same time, the search bots were also sifting through the comments on the video posted on various web, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook pages. Just like old-school serial killers needed to keep physical trophies of their gruesome work, psychopaths in the social-media age often uploaded video of their crimes—a kind of digital trophy.
Navarro now had the time to fiddle around with the video clip he’d just copied to his own hard drive. He majored in computer science as an undergrad, but he had taken a couple of filmmaking courses as electives, including a class on nonlinear editing where he had learned to use Final Cut Pro.
Navarro opened his copy of FCP and dropped the video clip into the timeline. He played around with the filters to improve the quality of the image, slowing the shaking and enhancing the sound. He then experimented with the zoom feature. He played the newly edited clip a half dozen times, alternately slowing or speeding the clip. Something began to strike him as odd about the two shooters.
Navarro had avidly followed the El Paso massacre story. He had an aunt and uncle who lived in that city, and two cousins who had recently graduated from the Frida Kahlo Arts Academy. Navarro stopped the video clip loop. Rewound it. He put the two killers right in front of the open doors of the Hummer and paused it again. He studied the shooters. Examined the Hummer again.
That was it.
Navarro snatched up his phone and speed-dialed his supervisor.
10
The White House, Washington, D.C.
President Myers sighed. It seemed as if each new closed-door meeting was more crowded than the last.
Seated around the table were DEA Administrator Nancy Madrigal and Attorney General Faye Lancet, who was the head of the DOJ, under which the DEA operated. The director of ICE, Pedro Molina, sat next to his boss, DHS Secretary Bill Donovan, one of Myers’s closest advisors. Bleary-eyed Sergio Navarro was also at the table seated next to his boss, Roy Jackson, the head of the DEA Intelligence Division. But the rest of Myers’s trusted inner circle was also in attendance, including Mike Early and, of course, Sandy Jeffers, seated to her immediate right. Dr. Strasburg sat strategically across from her.
Protocol, not preference, put the vice president on Myers’s immediate left. If it were up to her, Greyhill would have been seated in the men’s room.
Everyone had hot coffee or bottles of water and iPads on the table in front of them. They listened intently.
Jackson adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. He was a bookish, middle-aged African American just under six feet tall but well over three hundred pounds. He shifted in his chair, a nervous habit. The chair creaked under the enormous load. He picked up the video controller.
“One of my IAs, Sergio Navarro, brought this video to my attention just three hours ago. Whoever shot this was lucky they weren’t killed in the attack. We estimate they were standing about one hundred yards south of the north-facing vehicle at an oblique angle of approximately forty-five degrees. That meant the camera operator was out of the shooters’ line of sight, otherwise they likely would have been gunned down as well.”
“Any idea who shot the video?” Greyhill asked.
Jackson nodded at Navarro. He knew his IA was not only racked with fatigue but also intimidated by this morning’s briefing. The young analyst had never even met the DEA director before, let alone the president and other cabinet officials. But Navarro had made the discovery and Jackson wanted him to get the credit.
“The video was posted to Facebook under a pseudonym,” Navarro said. “I ran the sensor patte
rn noise profile against SPNs in our database, but we came up short.” SPNs were the unique digital fingerprint that every silicone chip embedded in a digital-camera image. “We’re still working on that.”
“Where was it posted from? Maybe that will give us a clue,” Greyhill suggested.
Navarro leaned forward. “That’s the interesting part. We can’t locate the server. We can’t even identify it. Pretty sophisticated firewall.”
“Isn’t that suspicious?” Myers asked.
“Not necessarily. Whoever posted it was smart enough to know that they would be the only material witness to the killing. They probably wouldn’t have posted it if they weren’t sure they couldn’t keep their identity secret,” Donovan said.
“Which makes them a prime target,” Early added.
Myers referenced her iPad. “What do these comments mean?” She was referring to the viewer posts on the Facebook page.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Spanish. I came up through the Russian desk,” Jackson said.
“You didn’t get them translated? There might be a clue,” Myers asked.
Jackson hesitated. “Actually, yes. Agent Navarro translated them for me. I have it on a separate report.”
“What do they say?” she demanded.
Jackson shook his head. “Just a bunch of crackpot comments. Vile. Not worth the time.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, Mr. Jackson. Read them aloud, please.”
Jackson reluctantly opened another file folder on his iPad and pulled up a sheet of translated comments. “Most of the names are nicknames or posted as ‘anonymous,’ but we’re running them down.” Jackson cleared his throat. “I’ll just start at the top, the most recent posts. The first one reads: ‘The whore’s son deserves it.’ Signed, RicoPico. The next one reads: ‘Man, I wish I had a gun like that. I’d kill me some gringos, too.’ Signed, PanchoVilla247. The third one reads: ‘What was he doing there anyway? Probably hitting the bong and banging his students.’ Signed, AztecaNacion. The next one reads—”