Net Force--Eye of the Drone

by Jerome Preisler

  Within seconds, it identified the camera as a 32K Fumi Oculus. A high-performance piece of surveillance equipment with real-time VR streaming and thermal and facial recognition sensors. Expensive, highly advanced...and with a back door she knew she could walk through.

  But first she needed to put things logically in place. The drone was probably a Raptor III hexacopter. They exclusively used the Oculus cameras, and the BfV’s local fleet deployed from a launch-and-recharge station at Moosach, whose cover she had broken months ago. Both factors made it likely German investigators were involved in the surveillance. But Kali was convinced they were not acting alone.

  The Americans had been hunting her around the world for months. They were persistent and aggressively determined to capture her. And they did not take a back seat to other governments in conducting their operations. If they were involved, they would take the lead...but international cooperation was rarely driven by unselfish motives. If agencies from different countries were pooling their resources, it was not without having struck a bargain. One would claim the prize. The other, or others, would expect information in return.

  Ultimately, of course, it didn’t matter who sent up the drone. The Americans, the Germans, or some other nation. They would not have their way with her.

  She had other plans.

  Kali tapped out a series of commands on her device’s touchscreen. She would use the drone to find out what her watchers knew about her, what they did not, and what they wanted to know. Once she had that information, she would send them a direct and unmistakable message.

  Then she would wait for them to react.

  * * *

  “What do you make of this?” Carmody asked.

  Dixon shook his head, wearing the VR glasses again. He had returned to the van and was reviewing the image captured from the bald guy’s screen: Outlier in the Sendingler Tor plaza, walking to her parked motorbike.

  “Aren’t we the only ones authorized to operate a drone in this airspace?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Carmody said. “But someone else could be doing it anyway.”

  “Except I don’t think it looks like drone imagery.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Herren, I’m very sure it isn’t.”

  The voice belonged to the BfV technician Krauss, who was in the truck up at Moosach with Wheeler, Long, and the Interpol man Chaput. Carmody heard her in his earpiece, Dixon through the bone conduction transducer in the right stem of his glasses.

  “Okay,” Carmody said. “We’re listening.”

  “The image source is an observational satellite.”

  “A spysat?”

  “I purposely didn’t use that term,” Krauss said. “We can’t make assumptions about why it was deployed. Its purpose could as easily be geomapping as intelligence and reconnaissance. But the source of the image is a satellite. I’m certain of it.”

  “How can you tell the image isn’t from another drone? Or a manned aircraft—say a plane or helicopter?”

  “There are distinctive characteristics,” Krauss said. “Imagine taking a snapshot with a camera. If it tilts or wobbles in our hand, its photos will be blurry and distorted. Atmospheric turbulence does the same to a satellite image. Cloud conditions also cause distortions. Computers automatically adjust for these factors, but I can recognize when it’s been done at a glance. It’s the color, the grain, the angle of view. Trust me.”

  Carmody did. Which meant he suddenly had a serious complication on his hands. Maybe more than one. The sat wasn’t American, or Morse would have told him about it. But it also didn’t belong to the Germans. And it was watching Outlier. Sending down pictures that someone in the apartment directly opposite hers was streaming on his computer.

  “Anything else?”

  “At a glance, its resolution appears to be three to five centimeters per pixel. Or to use the scale set by your National Reconnaissance Office—with zero being the worst res, and nine the best—I would give it a nine.” She paused. “That’s an unofficial guess.”

  Carmody thought a moment. “It can’t get much better than a nine. Only military and intelligence sats are that precise.”

  “These are high-quality images, yes,” Krauss said. “But many newer geomapping satellites have the same capabilities as those sent up by governments. And while the UN accords of 2021 prohibit the public sale of images at lower than twenty centimeters, the limits of satellite resolution are a matter of international law, not technology.”

  Carmody mulled that for a long second. Things had suddenly gotten messy. There were plenty of countries that might want to get hold of Outlier, and some would have interests that did not dovetail with his own. And what if it wasn’t another government, but an unknown person or group? Outlier could have made powerful enemies in all kinds of places.

  Messy.

  “The guy with the laptop,” he said. “We need to find out who he is.”

  “That falls outside your operational parameters.” It was Chaput, the Interpol man. “We would have to obtain permission to use the drone for any other surveillance.”

  “I’m not talking about using it,” Carmody said.

  “Then what, sir?”

  “Sit tight,” Carmody said, and pulled off his earpiece.

  * * *

  Carmody’s awkward typing slowed the works, or his search would have been virtually instantaneous. As it was, it took the AI-powered facial recognition app just seconds to run through a billion images in the Echelon intelligence database shared by the United States, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—and draw a hit.

  Dixon pumped his fist. “I fucking love technology!”

  Carmody scanned the floating data field over the drone’s video-capture image.

  “Aurelion Braithwaite,” he read aloud. “Thirty-seven years old...a former operator for Sharp End International.”

  “Aurelion?” Dixon said.

  “Beats me,” Carmody said. “Before Sharp End, he was a corporal with the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, Special Operations Command.”

  “SASR. I worked with some of them in Afghanistan.”

  “‘Who Dares, Wins,’” Carmody said. “Tough boys.”

  “A guy better be tough with a name like that,” Dixon said, studying the image on-screen. He whistled suddenly. “Wait...take a look at his neck. Right side.”

  Carmody saw part of a small tattoo—the tips of upraised wings just poking up above his shirt collar.

  “They’re red,” he said. “I thought SASR wings are gold.”

  Dixon nodded. “Mostly. Except for the RatHawks.”

  Carmody looked over at him. “Talk to me,” he said.

  “Most breeds of hawk feed on fish or mice,” Dixon said. “RatHawks go after meaner, nastier prey. They were a special missions unit.”

  Carmody nodded.

  “The RatHawks were in Kunduz around the same time I was. Must have been 2019, right after the Taliban push to reclaim the city.” He shook his head. “They were crazy sons of bitches.”

  “Crazy’s a requirement for special missions units.”

  “I mean the kind of crazy that took trophies.”

  Carmody let that sink in a minute. He knew Dixon wasn’t talking about rifles and helmets.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “The guys I met were helping us break up a cell of bomb makers. One would carry four, five severed hands in his pack at a time. And not only hands.”

  Carmody nodded.

  “I followed the trial in the Australian newspapers,” Dixon said. “Don’t know if the guys I knew were involved or not. The coverage was strictly no names or photos. And we never exchanged names anyway.” He paused. “The Aussies were required to take fingerprints of enemy casualties for identification, so they used that as their defense. Claimed the speed of their extracti
ons put them under pressure. That they couldn’t stop to use scanners before heading back to their choppers. They were cleared of all accusations and given honorable discharges.”

  “Whatever works.”

  Dixon was silent a beat. “Taliban raped and killed women and young girls. Burned innocent people out of their homes and slaughtered them,” he said. “It isn’t for me to make excuses. But I saw enough to know anybody can get pushed too far.”

  “There but for the grace of God? That what you mean?”

  “I guess.”

  Carmody didn’t say anything. He’d been to some savage places where the lines were so blurred it was hard to recognize when you were crossing them. But when you went that far across, stepped into that dark territory, you usually didn’t come back. At least not with whatever made you human intact.

  He turned toward the screen again. “Sharp End International was everywhere for a while. Hired its operators from Australia and New Zealand,” he said. “Besides fighting outsourced wars, they did a lot of diplomatic protection. And corporate security for the multinationals.”

  Dixon was also reading the data field on the display now. “Braithwaite left the SASR in 2020.”

  “They wanted him to go away after the court-martial,” Carmody said. “That’s when Sharp End picked him up. No moral qualms there.”

  “He worked for them a couple of years till they folded. Then nothing.”

  Carmody nodded. “I guarantee he isn’t unemployed,” he said. “His skill set and pedigree’s too unique.”

  “But he’s a blank on Echelon afterward.”

  “That’s my point,” Carmody said. “Not all corporations and governments use the agencies. Some of them hire freelancers. Guys who’ll take on the dirty jobs and stay quiet.”

  Dixon’s face screwed up in thought. “You think he has the reach to scrub himself out of the databases?”

  “Maybe not on his own. But with a client powerful enough to send him spysat downlinks...”

  He let the sentence hang unfinished between them.

  After a long minute, Dixon said, “We need to find out who he’s working for.”

  “And what he wants with Outlier,” Carmody said.

  * * *

  The Chinese internet and human rights activist’s name was Hao Ren. A graduate of the Xi’an Institute of High Technology, he was thirty-four, married, with two young daughters. Prior to his 2022 arrest for conspiracy to subvert state power, Hao was a project engineer with the Beijing government’s 610 Office, and a developer of its Sharp Eyes nationwide surveillance platform linking facial recognition video security cameras and internet-connected devices. Designed to enable real-time monitoring of every citizen of the country—one and a half billion people—the Sharp Eyes platform was in the process of transforming China into a digital police state.

  For many years Kali had known Hao only by his Dark Web handle—Fēngkuáng de túfū, or Mad Dragon Butcher. Long before the implementation of Sharp Eyes, he had fought authoritarian repression in his country while imbedded deep within the 610 Office, designing and disseminating software capable of breaching the government’s so-called Great Firewall—the name given to its repressive ban on international news websites, Google search terms, and Wikipedia pages.

  Hao Ren had known he would be jailed if his true identity were ever leaked—and he was correct. Rousted from his home in the middle of the night, he was brought to a covert interrogation facility, severely beaten, and held without formal charges for months. His eventual sentencing was one of the harshest ever for a dissident: twenty-five years in a maximum-security prison, limited contact with his wife and children, and no access to online communications.

  Kali ached deep in her heart for his family and missed his presence in the Space. Hao was a brave warrior and trusted ally, a champion of internet freedom. Along with her dear friend Lucien Navarro, Eric Bergmann, and a handful of others, he was an architect of the equalitarian cybernation that was even now preparing to declare its existence. His jailing was a tragic loss to the cause...but she refused to consider it a defeat.

  Before his imprisonment, Hao Ren and his hacktivist underground had carried out their greatest act of resistance directly under the noses of their government watchdogs. Nearly all of China’s three hundred million surveillance cameras utilized a single type of image-and-video processing board. The boards were produced by Fumi China, a subsidiary of the Japanese-owned Fumi Corporation, based in Beijing’s Chaoyang industrial district.

  Inside the Fumi manufacturing facility, workers belonging to Hao Ren’s network had seeded the boards with tiny microchips about the size of a grain of coarse salt. Accessed by someone with the proper software codes, the chips rendered Fumi cameras wide open to remote attack and manipulation. Armed with the knowledge of their presence, a skilled writer of computational code could inject them with malware that allowed them to hijack not only the cameras, but all hardware and software interfacing with them.

  Including the drones on which some were mounted.

  Kali Alcazar—called Outlier in the Space—was known on the Dark Web as the most prolific and talented code writer on the planet. Code was her medium of expression, her tool of exploration and investigation, her musical notation or sculptor’s clay. She often thought in code as others would in words or found herself doodling in code with a pencil and paper. She had written code every day since she was seven, navigating the imaginary worlds of text adventure games with a keyboard and mouse, seeking exotic lands, hidden treasures, and the solutions to puzzles on which magical kingdoms might rise or fall.

  In the Airbnb apartment on Ruppertstrasse, Kali sat very still at the dining table, a look of concentration in her onyx-black eyes. The app on her tablet was locked onto the drone’s radio receiving channel.

  Her output flowing from her mind to her fingers to the tiny microchip planted in the drone overhead, she was in her truest element.

  * * *

  A hack is never accomplished in a single step. It typically progresses in five phases, or stages, described as reconnaissance, scanning, gaining access, maintaining access, and the wiping of tracks to avoid discovery. Kali’s attack followed this logical sequence—but it was, in reality, a double hack. The first was directed at gaining and maintaining access to the Fumi camera. From that beachhead she would launch her second hack, a takeover of the drone hosting it.

  The camera was hers within a minute, allowing her to see the same real-time feed her watchers saw. See herself through her own window, sitting at the dining room table, her head lowered over the tablet hidden from sight by the table’s edge. It was like being in two places at once, almost an out-of-body experience.

  But she could not let that distract her. There was more to learn.

  Kali ran a quick hardware diagnostic and saw that the Fumi was fitted with a two-terabyte micro SD memory card. Digital imaging gobbled up huge reserves of memory, but this was enough to capture and store many hours of video. The camera’s recording log showed multiple surveillances of her—seven over the last three days—automatically indexed by time, date, and other identifiers.

  She would download all the footage to her tablet.

  * * *

  It was minutes later.

  Kali studied the tablet on her lap, its display showing a freeze-framed video image from that morning’s earlier drone surveillance.

  The image’s time stamp was 9:50:21 a.m.

  As the drone had broken from its hover over Ruppertstrasse, heading west over the rooftops, its aerial camera had briefly skimmed over the balcony doors across from her, the lens accidentally peering inside the bald man’s apartment to fall on his notebook computer.

  Kali had zoomed in on its screen, wanting to be sure she was not mistaken about what she saw there.

  She was not.

  She saw herself.

  Herself, in the
Sendlinger Tor plaza, returning to her motorcycle after she picked up her packages.

  Incredibly, the drone had caught the bald man reviewing video of her.

  But this did not look like drone imagery to her. There was something subtly different about it. The colors, the angle.

  No, she thought. Not a drone, but Koenig’s NORN surveillance sats.

  It was not unexpected.

  From what she knew of satellites, they orbited in double or triple formation—and in some cases even larger groups. Staggering their paths through space allowed extended periods of surveillance, so as one satellite completed its pass, another in the group took over for it. The more satellites in the group, the fewer the gaps in surveillance.

  Koenig’s full NORN constellation was said to number in the hundreds. Their collective surveillance could cover the entire earth at the same time.

  Unease coiled through Kali’s stomach. She felt exposed and violated. A drone could be spotted and therefore avoided. But trying to dodge an array of cold, hidden eyes in the sky was another prospect. And it didn’t end there.

  If Koenig was behind the surveillance, then it followed that the bald man was in his employ. Hired security, probably. Not rank and file, but someone he trusted to do his dirty work. Kali needed to assume he’d been tracking her through Munich for a week. And that he had the ability to see all her further movements in the city. There was nowhere she could feel safe.

  She took several deep, rhythmic breaths. Gathering herself, quieting her mind. Fear would not help. That was the deadliest enemy of all. She needed to think calmly. To logically assess her situation. What did she know? What didn’t she know?

  For one thing, she knew far more about who was watching her than she had known just an hour ago. She knew she was being watched by both a drone and a satellite. That meant her watchers knew she was here. And one of them—likely the most dangerous—was installed in an apartment across the street.