Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

“All right, everyone back to work. We got birds to fly,” Erik ordered. He then walked Bruce Dougherty out of the building and to his car in the parking lot. Bruce sat up on the hood of his Mustang.

“You know what they call those medals in the real Air Force? The Desk Warfare Award, for guys who go to war without ever leaving their desks. Cyber geeks and Xbox gamers, us. It says right in the regs that the medal cannot ever be given for valor in combat,” Bruce explained.

“You wanna give it back?” Erik asked.

“No, boss, I want to fly again, like you and I used to do. F-16s. What I’d really like is a crack at an F-22.”

“Bruce, we have had the few F-22s we got for how many years now? And not one has ever flown in combat. You fly in combat every day. How many enemy have you killed so far? Bruce, the era of manned aircraft is over. We are the future of military aircraft. You want to be in something that goes fast? Take your Mustang out on the back road. Never any sheriffs out here.”

Dougherty laughed. “That’s the way I go home every day. Zero to a hundred in nine seconds.”

“Great,” Erik Parsons said, patting his friend on the shoulder. “And, Bruce, keep the Desk Warrior medal. You saved a lot of lives by the mission you flew in Vienna. We just can never tell anyone, about the bad stuff, or even the good.”

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30

PODILSKY DISTRICT

KIEV, UKRAINE

“You look better today,” Dmitri Bayurak said, thrusting his hand forward.

“Yesterday you kidnapped me from a steam bath and threw me in the back of a truck. Today I was picked up at my hotel in a Range Rover,” Ghazi Nawarz replied. “I look better. I also feel better. And you?”

“Your money hit my account overnight,” Bayurak said. “So I feel better, too. Let me introduce you to Yuri and Mykola. They have also been at work overnight. I will leave you three to talk about ones and zeroes. I have bigger numbers to deal with.”

The two Ukrainians led the way downstairs to the computer operations floor where over twenty young men hovered over computer screens. It could have been a control room for a bank, but these men seemed all to be in jeans and T-shirts, and looked like they had not been to a shower or a barber in a long time. Yuri and Mykola led him to a conference room with the same modern, Scandinavian design feel that had been present upstairs in Bayurak’s office. There were large flat screens on each of three walls. The fourth was glass, looking out at the computer operations floor.

Yuri pressed a button next to the door. The floor-to-ceiling glass wall went from clear to opaque, a milky white barrier suddenly appearing inside the glass. “Polymer dispersed liquid crystal,” Mykola said.

“Of course,” Ghazi said and sat down at the conference table. “So what exactly did you do overnight?”

“Hacked AAFI,” Mykola replied.

“Go on,” Ghazi said.

“The American Armed Forces Insurance company in Texas. Almost all the U.S. military, and ex-military, insure their cars, sometimes their houses, with AAFI. They give low rates and give good service,” Mykola continued.

“Why do I care? Am I looking to insure my car?” Ghazi asked.

“No, your Jaguar XS in Vancouver is already insured with Royal Canadian Sun,” Mykola smiled. “As is your condo.”

“You have been investigating me?” Ghazi said. “You are supposed to be investigating the American drones.”

“Enough fun, Mykola,” Yuri said. “We did. The main American drone control facility is at Creech Air Force Base, outside of Las Vegas. It’s a shit hole. People like to live off base. So we look in AAFI to see what Air Force pilots live nearby. Then we see which ones came there from Langley Air Force base in Virginia, where they train the drone pilots. Here’s your list of drone pilots now living near Creech, their street addresses, their height, weight, eye color, hair color, and what cars they drive.”

Ghazi began flipping through the printouts. “The pictures. They look very young,” he said.

“Some are old pictures. From the college yearbooks. And driver’s licenses. Some from Facebook,” Mykola explained. “But none of them are on Facebook now. For security, ha!”

“We also cracked Dominion Federal Credit Union, it’s like a bank. CIA employees use it,” Yuri added. “Here are active duty CIA people living in Las Vegas area. This one just bought an expensive condo, in a nice building downtown.”

“We want to go to Vegas,” Mykola interjected. “Is necessary to help with operation. More secure. You can’t be calling us from there, besides time differences. You’d be waking us up all the time.”

“Too risky. Too hard to get a visa,” Ghazi replied. “No, you can’t go.”

“No visas, we have American passports,” Yuri replied. “Already these passports are on file with the State Department. Such bad network security these people have. It’s a wonder everyone doesn’t have an American passport by now.”

Ghazi did not reply. “What about the drones themselves. Can we get at them?”

“You just did,” Yuri said. “Wasn’t that your people who used the Stinger yesterday?”

“SA-24,” Ghazi replied.

“Same thing. Russians copied the Stingers they got in Afghanistan years ago,” Yuri said.

“The drones are networked. Anything networked is vulnerable,” Mykola added. “We have plans. You’ll see. We have some boxes we need to ship your guys. And we’ll need an Executive Jet.”

“I want to kill these people, the drone people, not just hack them,” Ghazi said.

“Yeah, yeah, we got that. Not a problem,” Yuri replied. “Lots of ways to die.”

“Can we kill them with their own drones?” Ghazi asked.

The two Ukrainians looked at each other and exchanged a few quick words in their language. “Maybe,” Yuri replied in English. “With drones, for sure. Maybe not with their Predators or Reapers, but with drones, maybe. Easier to do if we are both in Vegas.”

“Before I left Kiev your boss told me he had seen a videotape the Austrian security service has, showing the special black drone that killed my father, do you have that?” Ghazi asked.

“Is not good, you watching your father die, but yes we have it, of course,” Mykola answered.

“I don’t want to watch it,” Ghazi replied. “I want you to send it to someone. With a letter. Make it look like you sent it from Vienna, like maybe you work for the Austrian government and stole it from them.”

“Done,” Yuri said. “What else?”

“The metros, subways. Did you start looking at them yet?” Ghazi asked.

“Mykola loves metro. He takes metro every day, rubs up against girls. Never asks them out, just rubs up against them and gets slapped, am I right?” Yuri teased his colleague.

Mykola blushed. He hit his laptop and began showing images on one of the large flat screens. “American metros come in two types: old and very old. The very old ones are harder to hack, no network controls. They use people to drive them, like in Kiev. Primitive. So, Boston, New York, Philadelphia are like that. The newer ones, Atlanta, Washington, San Francisco, we have hacked those. Piece of cake.”

Ghazi watched the maps and photographs as Mykola flipped through them in slideshow mode. “I need to know where we should put the bombs for maximum effect, how we get around security,” Ghazi said.

“Bombs. Always it’s bombs with you people. It’s the digital age man, you can kill with bits and bytes,” Yuri replied, “at least in the newer metros. The older ones you can bomb. We can do some surveillance through their own cameras. New York has a lot of cameras, easy to hack. Maybe have to send some people in to look around, too. Your people, not us.”