Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

The two men put on ski masks just before the door opened. They carried a box, gift-wrapped for Christmas. “Here is your present,” the taller man said when the door opened. “Let us come in and explain how to use it.”

The three men sat at the small table in the living room–dining area. The taller man in the ski mask explained. “You sit on a bench in the station. In the main hall, but over by the food stands on the Market Street side. You unwrap the gift, like you can’t wait until you get home. Inside is a remote controlled racecar in a lot of packaging. Take the toy, just the car. Throw everything else and the packaging in the waste bin. The plastic explosives are in the packaging. As you walk away, hit the horn on the car and you will start the timer. You will have twenty minutes to be somewhere in public, somewhere on a surveillance tape when it goes off. Do not let on that you know what happened. Be confused looking.”

“That’s not much explosive,” the student said.

“It’s concentrated, compacted. Feel how heavy it is,” the man suggested. “And here is the first part of the money. Untraceable bills, all one hundreds. Count it out.”

“It’s good,” the student said after several minutes of counting. “When?”

“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. Very soon. We will give you two hours’ notice. Now, we have to get going.”

“More Christmas presents for Santa to deliver tonight?” the student asked as he walked them to the door.

“Exactly,” the shorter man said as they walked out.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20

TERMINAL FIVE, LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT

LONDON, UK

He followed the signs for passengers in transit. There were too many passengers, he thought. Even the newer Terminal 5 was too crowded. He had designed his flights so that he did not need to change terminals. He had taken a puddle jumper from Tortola to St. Kitts and then a BA flight nonstop to Heathrow. Now he would take a BA flight out to Dubai, never leaving the In Transit area in Terminal 5.

Within the vast BA Terminal, he took the train from Concourse C over to Concourse A, following the purple Transit Passengers signs. Then he saw the security checkpoint.

“But I am just in transit,” he said to the woman in the information booth. “And I am staying on British, staying in Terminal Five. Why do I need to wait in line?”

“Sorry, sir, everyone in transit has to go through security,” she said in a singsong voice. “It’s the rules, love.”

He felt the sweat again. British security was good and they probably had data ties to the Americans and maybe even the Australians. He knew that his Australian identity was solid. He had used it many times. He told himself to relax, again, and exhale. The line was mercifully short.

“Where are you coming from?”

“St. Kitts.”

“Going where?”

“Back home, Melbourne, via Dubai.”

The Immigration man in the cubicle typed into his computer. Now was the moment of truth, Bahadur knew.

“Thank you. Next,” the officer yelled out and handed him back his boarding pass and passport.

Bahadur moved quickly to the Duty Free Shopping area in the main part of the Terminal. Concourse A was just a walk away. He walked in and sat down at a bar off the main hall and ordered a scotch, neat. He had two hours to kill.

It was forty minutes later that the officer at the booth Bahadur had gone through was handed the picture on a “look out” flyer. As his supervisor began to move along, the officer called him back.

“Are you absolutely certain?” the supervisor asked.

“Positive, sir. Within the hour,” the officer explained. “Said he was going home to Australia, via Dubai.”

“But this man they want has an Indian passport,” the supervisor noted.

“Your flyer says it’s a false Indian document, sir.”

“When does the BA flight to Dubai leave?” the supervisor asked into his microphone. “Right. Switch me over to the Armed Police desk.”

Bahadur was still at the bar, reading a two-day-old Times of India when he sensed something happening. He looked halfway up from his paper and saw two pairs of police with automatic weapons standing about ten feet apart in the passageway beyond the bar.

At almost the same instant, he felt a strong hand grabbing his left arm. Bahadur used the bar stool to swing around quickly, and his boot to push up between the plainclothes policeman’s legs. He leaped from the stool and drove his head straight into the second detective’s stomach, causing him to drop his handgun. Bahadur grabbed the weapon and fired two rounds at the first officer’s head. He rolled on the floor and let off another round at the second man, the man whose gun he was using, hitting him in the stomach. The three shots sounded like explosions in the low-ceilinged airport bar. He heard screaming in the hall and a man yelling, “I have it.”

Then there was a much louder noise as the armed police sergeant fired six shots from the hallway into the bar, into the man on the floor with the gun, moving the shots up from the bottom of his torso and ending at the top of Bahadur’s head. The screaming grew louder in the hallway and in the bar, and the stampeding away from the shooting turned Heathrow Terminal 5 into chaos.

“How did he think he could ever get away, Sarge?” the younger armed policeman asked as he and the three other men with assault weapons entered the bar.

“He didn’t think he could get away, Jeremy, but he also didn’t want to be taken alive,” the sergeant said. “You’ve just seen suicide by police, he made me become a killer, but he didn’t give me much choice.”

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20

SPECIAL OPERATIONS ROOM

GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER

CREECH AFB, NEVADA

“Did you get any sleep?” Sandra Vittonelli asked Colonel Erik Parsons as she, Ray, and Dugout entered her office.

“How could I,” he replied. “Not with Jen out there, somewhere. And we don’t even know if she’s alive or dead.”

“The FBI profiler believes she is alive,” Ray offered. “She thinks the kidnappers plan to use Dr. Parsons in some way to get to you. Killing her would serve little purpose.”

“The FBI guys are nice, but they don’t have a clue about what to do next, not a single lead,” Erik said.

“I read their reports,” Dugout commented. “Seems Jen’s cell is missing. What kind of mobile did she have?”

“The new iPhone,” Erik answered. “I got it for her birthday.”

“Yes!” Dugout said, punching the air. “But you guys never added the remote activation antenna and software to some of the Predators.”

“We didn’t do what?” Sandra asked.

“You can’t remove the battery from the iPhone like you can on most mobiles,” Dugout explained. “So it’s never fully dead, even when it’s off. It still leaks a little juice from the battery to keep the clock going and on the new iPhone it also powers the Find My iPhone app when the phone can link to an open WiFi network. It’s a fix from earlier versions of the app. It’s designed to find stolen iPhones even if the thief never turns the device on. It doesn’t search for a cell tower because that would drain the battery, but every hour it looks briefly for a WiFi network and when one sends out a ping to the Finder app, it will send back an ack packet, an acknowledgment, with its coordinates.”

“So, how does that help us?” Erik asked.

“Simple, we add the new antenna and software to a bunch of Preds over Vegas and establish open WiFi networks from them. We activate her Find My iPhone app and broadcast that out over the WiFi nets. If her device is still in one piece, it will get the message and will beep back its location. If we have two Preds up that can get the signal, we can triangulate to within a few feet.”