Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

“They’ll know what happened,” Sandra said, as she stood up. She shook hands with Bruce Dougherty and his two teammates. When she was ten feet away and moving toward her office, she spoke just loud enough to be heard by the team behind her. “Try to fucking steal my drones.”

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 9

GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER

CREECH AFB, NEVADA

The red capsule or the black capsule, he wondered. Erik Parsons had been working most of the day, but he had to stay at work for at least another six hours to oversee a sensitive flight over Syria. He needed a caffeine infusion. Black was intensity ten. He inserted the purple capsule in the Nespresso machine in the break room.

“Goddamn Mustangs.” Bruce Dougherty had burst into the Break Room and thrown his car keys on the table.

“Some people like Mustangs, Major, my Jennifer for example,” Erik responded. “Seriously, Bruce, chill. What’s such a big deal?”

Bruce Dougherty collapsed into one of the plastic-molded chairs by the table. He held his left hand to his forehead, closed his eyes, and shook his head. “My car has another flat. I’m already driving on the little bitty spare. I can’t get the Ford dealer’s truck to come onto the base and they’re closing the dealership for the night in half an hour. It’s just everything is fucked, man, fucked.”

Erik sat down next to Dougherty. “This isn’t just about the car, Bruce, is it?”

“No, boss, it’s not. I mean, everything was going so good after the problems I had at the beginning of the year with the divorce. You let me fly the Vienna op and then go after the guys with the Stingers. But then we find out that I killed that American guy in Vienna and Sandra gets sued for it. Then I fucking bomb an orphanage. Did you see the video of those little bodies all charred up? Somehow somebody steals one of our drones and there are all these special investigator guys from CIA crawling around the GCC trying to figure out how, like it was one of us who did it. Then Wong and his wife get killed by some freak gas pipeline explosion. Boss, sometimes I just don’t know what I am doing here. I wanna fly, not play video games that kill real people, that kill little kids. I am like that freak who shot the kids in Connecticut, a baby killer, that’s what they called the ‘unknown pilot’ on TV. It’s me, I am the baby killer.”

Erik Parsons looked at the younger pilot and wished Jennifer were there to help. She would know what to say. “Tell you what, Carrot Top. Take my car. No, seriously, take it. Jen can swing by and pick me up later. She has a base tag on the Edge.”

“Boss, I can’t just take—”

“Major, it’s an order. Go home. Better yet, go to Caesar’s, over by the roulette. Take one of the ladies who hang out there upstairs. Get drunk. Get laid. You’re off the next two days anyway, right? Do it. You need it. When was the last time you got laid? Don’t answer that. Just go do it. Then we can talk on Friday. Here, take the fucking keys, I have to get back into the Ops Room.” With that, Erik walked out of the Break Room.

Bruce looked at the two sets of keys on the table, picked up both, and walked out into the parking lot. He got into the black Camaro.

Forty minutes later he pulled up to the valet stand at Caesar’s Palace. A Cadillac XTS pulled up behind him. Bruce headed for the casino floor, but not to roulette, to the blackjack tables. No sooner had he bought his chips and sat down at a table than the waitress asked him what he was drinking. “Scotch, but not the rail one, not the free one. A single malt, Glenfiddich neat. And make it a double.” He handed her his AAFI MasterCard. “Run a tab.”

At the valet stand outside, the Cadillac driver had returned. “Hey, I left my iPhone in the Caddy you guys just parked. I don’t want you to pull it up here again. Can I just go down to the garage and get the phone out.”

“We’re not supposed to let anyone down there, sir,” the valet replied.

“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Ghazi said, as he slipped the valet a twenty.

“No, sir, of course not. The cars are on level P4, in the back, spaces 400 to 600. The Caddy is probably like 480.”

As he approached the Camaro, Ghazi reached under the back bumper and removed the small tracking device he had left there a week earlier. He had tracked Colonel Parsons’s car, but the redheaded man who had walked out of it matched the description of Major Dougherty. Strange, he thought. Then he removed a modified iPhone from his pocket and activated a custom app that the Ukrainians had created. It simulated an OnStar signal. The device interrogated the Camaro through the satellite antenna and then, pop, and the driver’s side door unlocked. Inside, Ghazi found the USB connector and inserted a thumb drive. The OnStar signal had turned on one of the onboard computers, one of five. Now that computer had additional code running on it from the thumb drive. Ghazi removed the thumb drive and relocked the car.

Nine minutes later, back in the casino, still using his modified iPhone, Ghazi tracked Bruce’s mobile to the blackjack table. Ghazi sat at the next table and watched. The Major drank for two hours and seldom won. Then, finally, he scored. To Ghazi’s surprise, Dougherty then got up from the table and headed toward the teller window with his chips. Ghazi walked quickly to the valet stand and ordered up the Cadillac. As he was getting in, he noticed Dougherty giving his ticket to the valet. The Camaro would be pulled up soon.

Six minutes later, Bruce turned left on to Flamingo and then up the ramp on to I-15 North. He knew he was drunk, but he could still drive perfectly well. After all, he was a pilot, or used to be. The trick was not doing anything that would cause him to be pulled over by the Sheriff. There was no way he could blow the breathalyzer without getting arrested.

He took the left exit on to the Gragson Freeway west. He checked the side mirror as he merged into the flow of traffic. An 18-wheeler was coming fast in the right lane. No problem, Bruce thought, go to afterburners. The Camaro SS, he knew, had great pick up, not great rear visibility, but a lot of power under the hood. He punched the accelerator.

Instead, the brakes came on. Bruce knew he had hit the correct pedal, but the Camaro shuddered to a stop. He heard the doors click, as they locked. He looked up into the mirror and saw the grille of the Mack truck.

The Mack rode up over the Camaro and dragged it for 150 feet, scraping and sparking, before the entire mass of metal slowed to a halt. The truck’s driver was unhurt, the Sheriff’s Deputy later noted in the highway fatality report. The body in the Camaro was badly mangled. Death had been instant when the neck had snapped from the spinal column.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13

PRADO PARK

CHINO, CALIFORNIA

The B-52 circled the field and then lined up with the runway for final approach. There was a slight crosswind, which caused the aircraft’s nose to point a little to the left, but soon the pilot had righted the bomber as it descended and then touched down. It taxied down the runway and then pulled off to a parking apron. Then three men picked it up and carried it off to the grassy area where the other aircraft were on display.

“How long is that wingspan?” he asked the man who appeared to be the owner.

“Six feet on each side,” the bomber’s owner beamed. “You like it?”

“She’s a beauty,” Ghazi replied. “I’ve never seen a radio controlled plane this big. Is it the biggest?”

“One of the biggest. Was the biggest for a while, but newcomers, you know. Tom Harris over there, his C-17 is now the biggest, but Linda Cahill and her boy made that DC-3, or C-47 I should say. It’s pretty huge.”