Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

Three Predators and two of the larger Reapers that had been in the hangar were damaged beyond repair. None had been mated with Hellfire missiles or the new 250-pound laser-guided bombs. Missile and bomb mating with the aircraft occurred in the separate weaponization hangar, behind a berm at the end of the main runway. It was untouched by the mortar rounds. Four Reapers from the Djibouti base were flying missions when the attack took place. Three Predators were in a separate hangar undergoing electronics upgrades.

Of the seven men who died, all were American civilians. Six of them worked for General Avionics. The seventh was a CIA logistics officer. Twelve others, all Americans, were injured from the blasts.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6

PEG HEADQUARTERS

NAVY HILL

WASHINGTON, DC

Ray cherished his Sunday mornings. Sunday was the only day of the week when he could sleep in, when he could throw on gym shorts, grab the Times outside the town house door, brew coffee, toast English muffins, play Bach on his elaborate sound system, and ease into the day. Not this Sunday. The videoconference had started at seven. He sat sullenly, listening, watching, alone in the conference room at the Policy Evaluation Group. In silent protest, he had come in wearing the gym shorts and an old Brown sweatshirt. He had not bothered to comb his mop of hair.

“Coincidences do happen,” Sandra was saying, “and Bagram Air Base has been hit with Taliban mortars hundreds of times. One mortar even hit the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ aircraft a while back, but a direct hit on the Hellfire missile bunker the same morning that we get a mortar attack on our base in Djibouti?”

It occurred to Ray that it was only a little after five in the morning where Sandra was, outside Vegas. Maybe she had been up all night working on what had happened.

“Here’s why we think it was coincidence,” the CIA analyst replied in Virginia. “We have no evidence of any current, operational link between the Taliban in Afghanistan and anybody who might be operating a terrorist cell in Djibouti. So, it may just be that a hangar with our UAVs got hit in Djibouti and two thousand kilometers away at about the same time an ammo storage area with Hellfire missiles for our UAVs in Afghanistan also gets hit.”

There was a Marine one-star General representing the Pentagon on the video link. Ray wondered what the Marine had done wrong to get the Sunday morning shift at the Pentagon. “We operate military forces all across the nation and all around the world,” the General said. “And things happen simultaneously, or near simultaneously, all the time with us. A helicopter crashes at Twentynine Palms in California and a different kind of chopper off the USS Inchon in the Med goes down at the same time. No connection.”

They began to discuss the operational effects of the losses at the two bases. Missions into Yemen and Somalia could still be run from Djibouti once replacement personnel arrived in forty-eight hours. Armament for missions over Afghanistan and Pakistan was also stored at Kandahar and some of that was being flown up to the huge Bagram base. A C-17 was already in the air from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, loaded with Hellfire missiles for the UAVs in Afghanistan. Everything would be back to normal in a few days. The meeting on drones, Ray thought, was droning on. He chuckled to himself at that thought and took a gulp of the now cold coffee he had grabbed at the 7-Eleven on the way in.

“What’s so funny?” Dugout asked as he walked into the conference room.

“What the hell are you doing here on a Sunday morning?” Ray asked. He checked to make sure his microphone was on mute and that the other participants in the conference could not hear him or see Dugout.

“I never left last night,” Dugout replied. “I played a midnight set at the Hamilton, but then I came back afterward to see what was happening and just lost track of time. Pretty heavy shit, huh?”

Ray’s reply was a combination of a sigh and a yawn. “I dunno. These guys all seem to think the two attacks were a coincidence and all will be well in no time, which does kind of cause me to wonder why I am here and not out jogging in Rock Creek.”

“Remember that Minerva BDA software procurement you signed a few months back?” Dugout asked.

“Bomb Damage Assessment software?”

“No, Big Data Analysis. It’s going to change the world, man. It’s like artificial intelligence running naked through databases. The new Big Data program is called Minerva. You ask it plaintext questions and it queries structured and unstructured databases and makes correlations all on its own. It’s the wave of the future for intel analysis,” Dugout effused.

“So did I buy it for you already?” Ray asked.

“Yes, you signed the purchase order and here is what happens when you ask the program a fairly unstructured, plaintext question like ‘What connections are there between the attacks on U.S. UAV assets in the last twenty-four hours?’” He handed Ray a stack of paper, the first page of which was a summary.

As he read, the discussion on the video link continued on. Ray flipped back and forth from the summary page to the tabbed detailed annexes. As he did, his eyes widened and he began looking back and forth at Dugout and the papers. What he read ended his lethargy. His synapses were now firing quickly, his blood flowing faster. While a State Department analyst was in midsentence, Ray unmuted his own microphone and interrupted.

“Can I go back to the Unified Coincidence Theory for a minute?” Not waiting for comment, he started. “I get that coincidences occur in life, but I didn’t hear anybody comment on the fact that the three attacks all occurred within five minutes of each other. And that the forensics says that two of them involved Ukrainian mortar rounds with highly accurate GPS guidance systems. That suggests that the mortar targets were not random, but selected. And our databases show no prior use of those Ukrainian rounds by the Taliban or al Qaeda, by anyone in AfPak, Yemen, or East Africa.”

The FBI representative was the first to reply. “Did you say three attacks? We have only been told about two.”

“Yes, I did,” Ray said. “And I bet that somewhere in the FBI you know about the third. You see part of the coincidence was that two minutes after the first mortar round hit in Djibouti and one minute before the first mortar hit in Afghanistan, the house of Lieutenant William Wong blew up outside of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

“Lieutenant Wong was a Predator pilot and his house exploded when the twenty-inch natural gas transit pipe running through his neighborhood coincidentally corroded and erupted, or so the gas pipeline company says. Also coincidentally, that gas pipeline company had a network breach about an hour earlier, a hack into its SCADA control system. Here’s the really big coincidence. The hacker was using a laptop with a cyrillic keyboard, like they use in the Ukraine.”

Ray waited a minute while it sank in. “Now then, there are some intelligence collection and analysis tasks I think we should set about fairly quickly….”

With the videoconference meeting over, Ray looked at Dugout. “I’m not sure those agencies will find anything. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.”

“Well, this is no longer just about shit happening overseas to the drone program. They’re here. So we look for them here,” Dugout suggested.

“They’re here because they blew up a gas pipeline? Couldn’t they do that from anywhere by hacking into the SCADA system? You taught me that,” Ray noted.

“Yes, but the fact that they figured out who Wong was, what he did for a living, where he lived, the fact that they knew a big gas pipeline was running through the yard nextdoor, that has the feel of some on-the-ground presence, as well as hacking. Why Wong? How many others on the drone team did they look at before they found someone whom they could kill remotely?” Dugout asked.