“What the hell just happened?”
Ciaran Burris asks the young man from Holloman who is next to him, Jose Martinez. They flew in together and now sit at the rear of the Gdansk area’s Regional Mobile Emergency Command Center. Their table is covered by monitors and laptops, all showing different parts of the City. From where he sits, Ciaran cranes his neck to watch orders being given to a cluster of uniformed men and women in the main room of the Command Center. Neither he nor Jose can understand a word of the Polish being used, but this hardly matters. It is clear from the tone of voice being used that the Commander is making his displeasure known to the others.
Jose leans in to Ciaran and lowers his voice.
“Apparently, they enabled the master arm and when they did one of the units fired.”
“Accidentally?” asks Burris.
Burris blows on his hands. He has been nothing but cold since landing in Gdansk and encountering this new kind of hyper chill, one that has wasted little time burrowing itself deep into his bones.
“Yes,” replies Joseph, “They think it was an accident but they are not sure. They aren’t sure what happened.”
Ciaran may be just as exasperated. But there is not a lot he can do about it here in an oversized command trailer parked in the middle of an abandoned warehouse not far from the historic central business district of Gdansk. At least the warehouse got them out of the heavy snow and harsh wind. They occupy the ground floor of an old single-level concrete structure, its interior walls, many of them, are covered with an assortment of graffiti, all wild colors and strange symbols and letters of no discernable meaning to Ciaran. On this side of the building are dozens of open docks, their doors gone long ago, and a side yard now used to park trailer trucks. Also in the side yard is a small cleared area for launching remotely piloted vehicles. The pad and short runway are off the main drive, past a locked gate which only police and fire had keys for.
The warehouse is steel framed with cross bracing supporting a metal roof. The roof has a skylight down the center covered over by snow. Banks of factory windows, the kind that can be opened, are largely intact on both sides of the building, but the windows have enough broken panes to give wind and snow full reign throughout the interior. The whole place is drifted high with piles of snow swirled like icing on a cake.
The trailer, more like a German tour bus, is not unlike a spaceship control center. Its rows of personnel are lined up along each side monitoring arrays of screens, officers pacing back and forth, speaking rapid fire orders to their subordinates. The orders are inscrutable to Ciaran, but they give him a sense of how things are going. The people in this center in turn coordinate another group, one of actual drone operators, who are located not far away in portable steel trailers. The trailers look like shipping containers, except that they sprout a forest of aerial antennae and are spread out somewhat haphazardly throughout the warehouse. Each nondescript trailer holds two operators sitting side by side. Trained to operate unmanned aerial vehicles, one is the drone pilot and the other is the sensor operator. Control stick kind of personnel, they operate intuitive, artificial intelligence drones by simple screen command and mouse click.
Martinez has a single headphone on and is listening to the police band while watching the laptop on the table in front of him. He is from Alamagordo and White Sands, where he helped test new forms of unmanned air-to-air combat vehicles while stationed at Holloman. He has experience from northern Pakistan and eastern Afganistan operations and is part of the overwhelming majority of pilots now trained for UVA over conventional aircraft.
Not even Martinez, with all his expertise, is able to operate all of the tens of thousands of military drones on surveillance or combat missions around the world, not just for the U.S. military but also for dozens of other countries. Jose helped the others unbox drones and missiles, fascinated to see the Polish equipment, all the while trying to understand what their equipment choices reveal about the Poles. He pulled up lids at the end of missile cases and watched as crews lifted missiles out, carried them over to big drones, and held them in place to be attached. Martinez knew the gunmetal grey drones operate silently from twenty thousand feet. Their strikes would seem to come from nowhere.
“What are you watching?” asks Burris. By this he means to ask about what is being shown on Espedido’s laptop screen. It’s some kind of aerial geometry unknown to Burris.
Jose hears this with his free ear, the one not listening to the police band, where everything is being reported in a language he doesn’t understand.
“The country’s Sentinel drone,” Jose replies. He taps a key to bring a small image up in the corner of the screen. It shows a batwing style stealth aircraft designed for high level reconnaissance. “It’s their eyes on the prize. With billions of pixels per camera, it maintains a wide angle persistent stare that can take in a whole country at once. It can stay up permanently over a country to watch whatever’s important at the moment. It’s the highest level in any hierarchy of drones. When the Commander uses that big screen in the central control room he can start with real time images coming from this drone showing the entire city. He then drills down, to the street level if necessary. He can pull up an unlimited number of windows and time frames to analyze what he is seeing.”
“Like the birds taking off from the square?” Ciaran says.
“Exactly. And the CAA and NSB have the same capability. They’re seeing everything we’re seeing.”
By these Ciaran knew he was referring to the Polish Civil Aviation Authority and the Polish National Security Bureau, both in Warsaw. The NSB would be reporting directly to the President and to the National Security Council, the two of whom share jurisdiction over matters of national security.
Ciaran watches the Commander’s reactions with admiration. The Commander has taken control of the emergency center from the police and now signals his men to begin the attack. Ciaran wishes he had men with whom he could join the military and local tactical units. While the military is in charge of considerable resources, the three college students are lightly armed at best. They have given the Polish Commander the one thing he needed more than anything else, time to reorganize his forces from the airport debacle, and now he is indeed ready for them. He has an impressive drone force, many of them armed. He has tactical snipers on rooftops, and he has mobile units spread throughout the downtown. He has a warehouse full of all the necessary personnel to operate a fleet of drones.
Somehow, Martinez knows what’s happening.
“The Commander has issued orders not to fire because he doesn’t want any damage to the historical area and its residents,” Joseph informs him. “And with multiple drones, they will follow the lead drone in a formation. The lead is directed, the others just follow.”
Ciaran is convinced this will indeed be the end of the road. He hopes to convince Polish authorities to share the wealth with whatever they recover from these so-out-of-their-depth college kids and give him an impressive intelligence coup to take back with him to the States.
Chapter 80
On Fire Page 79