Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

“You got it, Colonel. Game-boys with blood on their hands, who don’t always see how the sucker they just evaporated, who never saw it coming, in Yemen, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or Mali has anything to do with keeping the Homeland safe. Game-boys who sit up in bed in the middle of the night, let out a scream, and wake their partners, who find them covered in sweat. That’s what’s happening to some of them.”

With a thud, the wine steward landed tableside. She was attached to a wire and holding a bottle. “Is now a good time for the Pinot? Foxen from their Bien Nacido vineyard. Fantastic.”

Seven blocks away, they opened the champagne. “I always pop a bottle of the bubbly when a client finds just the right place for them and gives me their check,” the real estate agent said to Ghazi. “And I just know, Mr. Romano, that this is the right place for you. Completely furnished, ready to move in, thirty-three floors above everything. You can see the Strip out the bedroom windows and the mountains from the living room.”

Ghazi clinked glasses and sipped the celebratory drink. “It’s very nice. And the Internet speeds seem to be very fast. I need that to keep in touch with my business in New York.” He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window. “Is that the airport out there?”

“No, sir, the airport is over here. That’s the Air Force base way out there, but I guess you can see things taking off from there because you are so high up. Just a fabulous view. And because you are paying cash you can move in less than a week from tonight.”

After locking the condominium, Ghazi and his real estate agent walked down the brightly decorated hall to the elevator, passing a woman dragging a wheelie with a large computer bag strapped on top of it. “G’evening,” Sandra Vittonelli muttered as she passed them on the way to her apartment. Even though she was doing it every two weeks now, it had been a long flight from Washington.

As she unlocked the door to her unit, she could hear the landline ringing. Entering the living room, she felt the secure Blackberry on her hip vibrating. She reached the landline in the study while it was still ringing. “Please authenticate,” a man’s voice said.

She placed the four fingers of her right hand onto the phone’s small screen, then removed a card from a pouch that was hanging around her neck and inserted it into the side of the phone. Finally, she spoke into the handset, “Vittonelli, Sandra. I am code blue, repeat code blue.” With that, she had completed three-factor authentication and the phone began receiving encrypted voice traffic from the Global Coordination Center, forty-three kilometers away in the desert, on the airbase.

“Ms. Vittonelli, we have a potential signature strike pending.”

She lifted the computer bag off the wheelie and placed it on the floor next to her desk. The little study was still dark, she hadn’t had time to turn on any lights in the apartment. “Is it on the HPTL?”

“No, ma’am, not yet on the High Payoff Target List, but it sure fits the signature and we think we have two HVIs there.”

“You think you have two High Value Individuals? Do you or don’t you?” she asked.

“We are waiting confirmation from Maryland, but what we appear to have is a meeting of two of the Qazzani group leaders. We’re not sure how long it will continue. We’re afraid that if we don’t take the shot, the meeting will break up and the HVIs will leave.”

She knew what this probably meant. She would have to try to get out to the base as fast as possible. “Have you done a collateral scan?”

“Yes, ma’am, collateral damage potential is currently scored at zero.”

“How long have you had eyes on?” she asked.

“We followed the first possible-HVI there almost six hours ago. HVI two arrived about an hour later,” the voice from the GCC said. “But we have gone back and looked at historical images of this site from satellites and from our own birds passing by. Never seen anything but guys with guns around.”

“Where is Colonel Parsons?” she asked. Maybe he could handle this one, so she could get into a hot shower and then sleep in her own bed.

“Colonel Parsons said to inform you, ma’am, that he is on his way over to pick you up at your location. He was downtown. He should be there in about five mics.” Sandra groaned, there was no way that she could avoid driving out to the base now, but at least she would not have to drive herself.

She quickly changed out of the clothes that she had worn on the flight and into a tracksuit. She put her Yankees hat on to hide the disarray of her hair. When Erik called to say that he was downstairs, she was waiting for the Nespresso machine to finish pumping out an intensity ten demitasse of eye-opening caffeine.

It could be a long night.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

KUNAR PROVINCE

AFGHANISTAN

“How will you kill your cousin’s husband?” the older man asked, as the two men sat beneath an undercut rock, amid the boulders on a hillside three kilometers from their vehicles.

“Just shoot him,” the younger man replied. “I am not one for the torture. It takes time and then there is the cleaning.”

“But he has been placing these little radios on your Toyota for money, money from the Americans. You should use your knives first.”

“Fadl, if he had not been placing the beacons on my Toyota, do you think that we would have that drone circling up there? This is a good plan Ghazi gave us.”

The two men squinted up at the blue sky, looking for the drone that they had heard almost an hour earlier. Both men were reluctant to move out from under the overhanging rock, to look around the boulders, to expose themselves to the all-seeing eye above them. They were also tired from the walking, alone, from the tunnel exit, up the hill.

“It will be a good plan if it works, but we have been here for many hours. The drugs will be wearing off soon.”

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

OUTSIDE LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

Erik drove the black Camaro only slightly above the speed limit. He did not want to be delayed by the Highway Patrol pulling him over, even if they would probably buy his excuse that he was an Air Force officer who had just been called and told to report to base urgently. For the first part of the ride, neither Erik nor Sandra spoke. He was still angry that he had to leave his wife when there were still two courses left to be served, when their “date night” had only just started. He wondered if he would get back to her in time to enjoy the suite they had taken for the night as part of the casino’s “Dinner and Sleepover” package, designed to lure in locals. Sandra, fighting fatigue, was going over the meetings she had the past two days in Washington.

Erik read her mind. “So how was our Nation’s Capital? Inspiring, efficient, focused on the things that matter?”

“None of the above,” she replied. “You know what struck me on this trip? The briefings I got at Headquarters about the extent of the problem. Sure, al Qaeda in AfPak is almost gone, but we still have the various Taliban groups on both sides of the border and now the narcoterrorist criminal cartels like the Qazzanis.

“But in Yemen we have al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula taking over towns, in Nigeria it’s the Boko Haram offshoot burning down Christian churches with people in them, in Mali it’s al Qaeda in the Maghreb that runs half the country, like the Shabab affiliate that has a swath of Somalia. Bin Laden is still dead, but this thing has just metastasized.”

Erik turned the car into the base, flashing his identification to the Air Force policewoman at the gate. “Well, we are flying in all of those places. It’s a target rich environment. And it’s employment for the likes of us well into the future, no matter the other budget cuts.”