Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24TH

PARK STREET MBTA STATION

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

The young Somali-American from Portland stepped off the Green Line trolley at Park Street Over, looking like another of the tens of thousands of students who went through that T station every morning. There were over twenty colleges and universities within two miles of that subway stop, in both Boston and Cambridge. There were a quarter of a million college students in the metropolitan area and it seemed like half of them were on the T headed out for Thanksgiving break.

He wore a backpack over his hoodie, had on a Patriots cap, and kept playing with his iPhone. He moved with the crowd toward Park Street Under and the Red Line trains to Harvard and Braintree. He took the stair that led to the middle platform, where he could get a train in either direction. He started walking behind the staircase to the end of the platform, where there were almost no people waiting. His mission for today was simple. Slip down into the tunnel and check it out for a place where, next time, he could leave his parcel.

A man from South Boston who had just turned eighty-two said to the young Portland man in the hoodie, “Trains don’t stop that far down the platform. Only four-car trains this time a day.”

“Fuck off, granddad,” the young man replied and kept walking, disappearing behind the staircase.

The old man walked in the other direction, to the MBTA police officer who had just stepped out of the train from Ashmont. “The poster says ‘If you see something, say something,’” he said to the officer and then he told him about the student.

As the officer walked around the staircase, he saw the young man holding a video camera and approaching the gate at the top of the ladder down from the platform to the tunnel. “Hey, hold up there,” the officer called out.

The young man in the hoodie started to run toward the ladder. The officer bolted toward him. The student was over the gate and on the ladder before the officer could reach him. The old man, who had slowly followed them, saw both the student and then the officer jump over the gate and climb down into the dark subway tunnel.

In the tunnel, the officer moved quickly on the gravel path by the side of the track, on the opposite side of the railbed from the lethal third rail. As he approached the man in the hoodie, the officer reached out and grabbed the backpack, which came off in his hand. The officer lost his balance, staggering forward. The young man put his hands together and brought them swiftly down on the back of the officer’s neck. The officer fell, hitting his head on the track. He did not get up.

Minutes later the old man saw the lights coming down the tunnel, the Red Line train from Harvard. As the lights grew close, the student climbed back over the gate onto the platform. His backpack was gone, as was his Patriots cap. His hood was hanging behind him. Once over the gate, he began to run up the platform.

“Hey, stop, where’s the cop?” the old man yelled, grabbing onto the student.

The younger man pushed with both hands, knocking the old man down onto the hard concrete platform. “I told you to fuck off,” the young man said as he ran off.

The driver on the Red Line train hit the horn and the brakes when he saw the body on the tracks in the tunnel, just a few meters outside of Park Street Station. When the alarm went off in the MBTA Operations Center at Arborway, the image from the surveillance camera on the platform showed the front car of the train stopped where the emergency brake had brought it to a halt, just inside the entrance to the station.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26

NAVY HILL

WASHINGTON, DC

The heavy rains from earlier in the week were still moving down the creeks and into the streams that fed the Potomac, making it high, fast, and almost milk chocolate in color. Raymond Bowman sat on what he thought of as his bench, high above the rest of the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, on Navy Hill. His field of view included the green forest patch of Theodore Roosevelt Island in the middle of the river, with the high-rises in Virginia beyond. To the right was the giant Kleenex box that was the Kennedy Center and beyond it the riverside in Georgetown. To his left was what he thought of as an architectural travesty and an even more dubious use of money, the building housing the U.S. Institute for Peace.

It was where he came, behind Donovan Hall, a few hundred meters from his office, to think. The gray sky, the aroma from the black Dunkin’s Bold, the breeze off the river all combined to relax him enough that he felt for the first time in months that his mind was clear, that for a moment his brain was not racing, processing, planning. And then Dugout sat down next to him.

“I think it was because the Navy guys were using the new Thuraya satellite over the Mediterranean,” Dugout began, as he balanced his mug of green tea and his iPad on his lap.

“I was just sitting here quietly thinking about how George Washington and his friends lost money on the Potomac canal and locks. What the hell are you talking about, Thuraya, and by the way, hello,” Ray replied. “Happy Dead Turkey Day. Shouldn’t you be watching football or stuffing yourself while visiting family members?”

“Happy Thanksgiving, yourself. What I should be doing is having dinner with my band. Here, have a Cohiba. It’s your Dead Turkey Day present. I know you will never buy these things for yourself. You wait for me to be your Enabler.”

Ray unwrapped the cigar and smelled its freshness. “You, in a band?” he asked.

“Yeah, tenor sax in a jazz combo. My undergrad degree is in music, from Berklee. Anyway, you do realize that it’s like drizzling out here? I saw you sitting in the rain on the video cam feed and thought, maybe I should come out and give you a weather report,” Dugout said.

“You’ve hacked our own video cameras?” Ray asked. “Yes, I know it’s drizzling. It’s nice. You know Wild Bill Donovan created this complex up here in like ’43? First real home of U.S. Intelligence.”

“Yes, I knew that,” Dugout replied and handed Bowman a box of wooden matches.

“You know that he had a drone program?” Ray asked. “He put little bombs on this species of really big bats and released them to fly behind Nazi lines.”

“That work?” Dugout asked.

Bowman lit the Cohiba and tried to blow a smoke ring. He failed. “Shit no, of course, it didn’t work. Now what was that you said about the Navy?”

“So, I’ve been working on how that Navy drone went down in Libya,” Dugout replied. “The Navy uses a commercial satellite for its link from its drones in the Med, using X band frequencies. Sometimes when their bandwidth gets too thin, they drop the encryption. It’s against policy, but the operators do it when they have to.”

“So, that’s what they did on the Sea Ghost op in Libya and somebody was waiting. The bad guys had probably seen it happen before and just kept a bot on that link looking for it to happen again. When it did, zap, they slipped into the data stream and nose-dived the bird into the sand. Just your luck it happened when you were trying to stop the Hezbollah guys from stealing some sarin.”

Ray continued gazing out at the river. “The Antonov had engine trouble later. Crashed off Cyprus.”

Dugout chuckled. “I heard. Engine trouble? Is that what you call it when an Israeli F-15 sends four, count them four, air to air missiles through your fuselage and you and your planeload of sarin plunge into the Med?”

“Don’t eat the fish next time you are in Cyprus,” Ray replied.