Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

“No, no they’re not,” Ghazi pushed back. “Nobody in our organization will know you are supporting us on these two operations, just me and our leader. You can take all the security precautions you want.” Ghazi emptied his vodka. “Or, or, I can fly tonight to Moscow. I have some friends there who are very close to the Czar. The Czar also has people who are very good at getting information. And Czar Vladimir is not so happy with the Americans. He also knows how to keep his fingerprints off dead bodies. But then you have seen proof of that here in Kiev, haven’t you?”

Bayurak walked to his desk and sat behind it. “You people are such bad businessmen. You let your crazy ideology cost you so much money.” He opened a red leather folder and took out a Montblanc pen. “All of Europe, no competition. At the same price we buy it now for the Ukrainian market?”

“Yes,” Ghazi replied. “And let me assure you, this is not about ideology. For us, this is good business. For you, it will be, too. You will make a lot of money.”

Bayurak nodded. “All right, now what were those six questions you wanted answers to?”

SATURDAY, AUGUST 29

GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER

CREECH AFB, NEVADA

Bruce Dougherty hated sleeping during the daytime in Vegas and flying the birds in the daytime in AfPak. It upset his body clock and he didn’t sleep well as a result. He had been using Ambien for so long that it didn’t seem to help much anymore. It just put him into a strange, waking, trance-like state while he tossed and turned, twisting the sheets and blankets. Then when it was time to get up and go to the base, he needed lots of strong coffee. Then Red Bull at work. This had been a bad week. He kept wondering about the boy in the hotel in Vienna, kept thinking of what his life was like, what it would have been like, if he had only seen him earlier, if he had not killed him. He knew it was crazy, after all of the other deaths, but he could not clear it from his mind.

Today, it was a recce mission, unarmed. HUMINT had reported an HVI holed up in a high perch just inside Afghanistan. No one had ever flown a mission to look up there before, but from the maps and the satellite images, it made sense that someone would hide there, at least in the summer. It was pretty inaccessible and you could surely see anyone coming. Anything that looked like a road ended ten miles away, then the goat path went up, and up, and up. The sheer mountain faces on either side of the wide valley formed a box canyon that ran for almost six miles before it ended in another mountain wall, with a little flat space, high up near a small waterfall.

Bruce could not help but think that it must have been really beautiful at the end of the box canyon, on that cliff, just below the top, in the cool shade, with a natural shower and pool, and a view of the mountains and the valley. He would see it up close fairly soon. The challenge was going to be flying through the box canyon without being seen, then maintaining an orbit long enough to start developing the Pattern of Life on the HVI, the data that would be needed to support an attack decision later on. The chameleon software would help, electronically changing the color of the skin on the bottom side of the bird to what the sky above it would look like from the ground below. But first, even though the HUMINT source was supposed to be good, he had to see if there were any signs of human life up there at all.

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.