Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

“Oh, you heard that,” Ray replied. “There must be half a dozen Jefferson Counties around the U.S. Do you have any helicopter drones?”

She gave him a look that suggested she did not quite share his sense of humor. “I don’t,” she said. “Homeland Security might. They’re buying all sorts of stuff like that.”

“We have a much larger model coming out next year that can shoot suppressant foam under high pressure right down into the heart of a fire. Are you from a fire department?” the Canadian saleswoman asked.

“I am the sheriff of Jefferson County.” Sandra replied, “Do we look like firemen?”

“Oh, sorry. No, of course not. No you don’t,” the Canadian reassured. “But the Hovering Fire Truck model also comes in a crowd control and dispersal version, too, with tear gas, slippery solution spray nozzle, even an option for a noise generator that operates at a frequency and power that makes people void.”

“Void?” Sandra asked.

“Shit themselves,” Ray offered.

“Yes, that’s right,” the Canadian woman agreed. “We don’t make that piece of equipment ourselves, but we can add it. The Hovering Fire Truck model is designed for the Crowd Control Sound System to be just plug and play.” She smiled broadly.

“I guess that would make rioting difficult,” Sandra observed as she started to walk away. “Lovely. We’ll think about it.”

“We have a whole range of nonlethal options….” the Canadian called after the short woman and the tall man as they moved on down the aisle of display booths. Sandra spotted a coffee bar and café in the corner of the sprawling exhibit hall and moved to it.

Sitting with her Caramel Macchiato, Sandra looked at the ingredients list on the energy drink bottle that Ray put down on the small round table. “Careful with this stuff,” she said, “there’s enough five-syllable chemicals in it to make you short-circuit.”

“You mean void?” he asked as he sat down.

“That, too. So what are you really doing here? Did you come all the way to Vegas to make the point that the use of drones is getting out of control? Because I still disagree with you.”

“Actually, no. I didn’t even know that there was a drone show until I checked in last night at the hotel,” he said. “I’m here for the hacker convention. My chief hacker, Dugout, has been on my case for a couple of years now to come. He says he always learns new tricks here. And he reconnects with the hacker underworld types he uses sometimes.”

“Dugout?” she asked.

“It’s his hacker handle. His real name is Douglas Carter the third, so in prep school they called him Trip. He hated it. But he’s a big Red Sox fan and he’s helped them with a software program, so they let him sit in the dugout once. Hence, Dugout.”

“I won’t even ask how you gave a hacker a security clearance. You guys at PEG clearly have different standards than we do at the Agency,” she said.

“He’s a national asset, helped us a bundle already. But you’re right, we look for the iconoclasts, the force multiplier geniuses. Want to avoid groupthink. That’s how we can have such great analytical capability with fewer than a hundred staff. We beat the pants off the Agency analysts every time, even though we are way outnumbered,” Ray said. “I’ve had Dugout create some software to look for patterns on the thousands of hours of video you guys collect from your birds.”

A small, round drone with four rotors flew up and hovered above the café. Three others quickly followed. Then the formation of four mini-helicopters formed into a line and began slowly to move down the length of the exhibit hall like a flock of ducks in a line abreast. Sandra and Ray watched and then, without commenting on the flying flock, resumed their conversation.

“Here’s what he has found so far. He’s detected four new patterns. First, the HVIs don’t seem to be meeting in buildings anymore. He thinks they know we look for meetings and then we blow up the buildings. So they are meeting in cars. One car goes to a meeting spot and an HVI gets out, the car keeps going. Then another car with the second HVI comes along and the first guy hops in. The meet occurs in a car in a crowded neighborhood with lots of potential collateral damage if we strike. This way the classical signature of a meeting that you look for never happens.”

“We do have a fixation on blowing up buildings,” she admitted. “But we also pick off HVIs in cars if they are alone on a road. Meetings in cars parked in crowded market streets will give us a problem. What else?”

“The second thing is related. He thinks that now when HVIs do go into huts or houses, they seem to exit from a nearby house. He thinks they are using tunnels. They know we are watching them and we like to blow up the buildings they are in, so they go in one building then walk through a tunnel to a building nearby but beyond the blast range if we detonate the first building,” Ray said.

“Okay, we can look for signs of that, maybe use our multispectral cameras to look for indications of tunnels,” Sandra replied. “Sometimes a tunnel under a dirt field will show up as a different color, a line, on a multispectral image. We don’t have a lot of birds with cameras like that, but…”

Ray continued. “Dugout also thinks that the terrorists aren’t afraid of single Predators anymore. They seem to have figured out that we fly a lot of solo missions that are just recce, just looking for targets. When we are going to strike, there are two or even more birds circling. One to attack and one to film the strike, or a backup to fire missiles at anybody that shows up to rescue people from the rubble.”

“That’s an easy fix,” she said, “we start running a few lethal solo flights so we’re not so predictable.”

“Yeah, well if you kill the targets, how are they going to spread the word that solo drone flights can be lethal, too?” Ray asked.

“Not a problem,” she replied. “There are always squirters.”

“Squirters?” he asked.

“That’s what we call the guys who survive the detonation and run out of the rubble. That happens a lot. We usually pick them off on the run, but we can let a few go,” Sandra suggested. “Dugout sounds like he’s good. What’s his fourth idea?”

Ray casually looked around to confirm that they were still the only ones at the little round tables in the café. “He thinks that the bird that you lost recently was lured into an ambush, shot down by a Stingerlike missile fired from a mountaintop above the Predator.”

Sandra drained her cup. “Yeah, Colonel Parsons came to that conclusion, too, about the Stinger. Actually, probably a Russian knockoff like the SA-24. But Erik didn’t suggest it was a setup, a lure. That would indicate a level of sophistication, of premeditation.”

“That’s the point. My analysts think it could be indicative of a terrorist response to the drones that is not just smarter defensive tactics, but going on the offense against them.”

Sandra laughed. “Yeah, well good luck with that. That’s the beauty of drones. There’s not a lot you can do to fight back against them and even if you get off a lucky shot like that one … the pilot, Major Dougherty, went out and played a round of golf after his plane was shot down. Let’s go over to the Homeland Security Department display. I want to see what Coast Guard and Border Patrol are showing off.”

As they moved down the aisle, they passed a scale model of what looked like the large Reaper drone made by the U.S. firm General Atomics. The sixty-five-foot-long giant had a jet engine mounted on top of the fuselage, just in front of a V-shaped tail. The sign in front read CHINA AVIATION CORPORATION UCAV MODEL 7. Four Arab-looking men in military uniforms stood looking at the mock-up and talking with two Chinese salesmen. “This is the submarine-hunter version. It can drop sonar buoys and torpedoes,” one of the salesman said. “Also comes in an air-to-air fighter aircraft version with missiles to shoot down fighter planes, or other drones.”