Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

Wickes cleared his throat, and when he spoke his voice had assumed a conspiratorial edge. “Reminds me of something I saw when I was with the Royal Marines. This was in El Salvador a while back, 1981 or ’82. We were over from Belize, engaging in joint exercises with the Yanks. Back then, the country was on fire. Everyone jockeying for power. Communists, fascists, even a few democrats. The government was running death squads in the countryside, killing off all opposition. Nothing more than cold-blooded murder, really. A few of the soldiers were Indians and none too happy about what they were being asked to do. They’re a superstitious bunch. Believe in ghosts and the spirit world. Shamans. Shape-shifters. You name it. They’d a ritual to protect themselves against the ghosts of the men and women they killed. To stop the victims’ spirits from haunting them, they’d dip their bullets into poison. Kind of kill the soul before it left the body.”

“That’s terrible,” said Rohde.

“You know who trained those squads, don’t you?” asked Wickes.

“What do you mean, ‘trained them’?”

“Taught them their craft. Put them into the field. Made them do what they do.”

“I have no idea,” said Rohde.

“It was the Yanks. The Company. That’s what they called themselves back then. You want to find your killer, that’s where you better start looking.”

“With ‘the Company’? Do you mean the CIA?”

“That’s right. Bunch of bloody bastards.”

Wickes hung up without a goodbye.

Erwin Rohde sat down. He needed a moment to digest what he had just learned. Poisoned bullets. Assassins. Things like this simply didn’t happen in Switzerland.

Almost reluctantly, he picked up the phone and dialed the personal number of Chief Inspector Marcus von Daniken.

“You’ll never shoot it down,” said Brigadier General Claude Chabert, commander of the Swiss Air Force’s 3rd Fighter Wing. “Turboprops are hard enough. They only fly at two hundred kilometers per hour, but this little number has a jet in its tail. Forget it.”

“Can’t you fire a missile?” groused Alphons Marti, bullying his way closer to the center of the table so he could better survey the blueprints of the drone, or “unmanned aerial vehicle,” according to Chabert. “What about a Stinger? Like you say, it’s a jet. It has to have a heat signature.”

Chabert, Marti, and von Daniken were standing alongside a table in von Daniken’s office on Nussbaumstrasse. It was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon. Chabert, a trained electrical engineer and F/A-18 Hornet pilot with six thousand hours of flight time, had been rushed from his base in Payerne to provide an instant education in the destruction of unmanned aerial vehicles. Lean and blond with a shepherd’s wizened blue eyes, and still dressed in his flight suit, he was the picture of an accomplished aviator.

“A heat signature isn’t enough,” said Chabert patiently. “You must keep in mind that it is a small jet. The wingspan measures four meters. The fuselage runs barely two and a half by fifty centimeters. That’s not much of a target when it’s moving at five hundred kilometers an hour. Conventional radar arrays used by air traffic control are purposefully tuned down to avoid picking up small objects like birds and geese. And this one is stealthy. It has very few straight edges. The exhaust ducts are mounted by the tail fins. If I had to wager, I’d say that silver coating on the body was RAM.”

“What’s RAM?” asked Marti, as if it were something dredged up solely to annoy him.

“Radar absorbent material. The metallic color serves to make it more difficult to see with the human eye.” Chabert finished examining the plans, turning to face von Daniken. “I’m sorry, Marcus, but civilian radar would never see it. You’re out of luck.”

Von Daniken sat down in a chair and ran a hand over his scalp. The last hour had given him a devil’s education in the development and usage of drones as military weapons. In the 1990s, the Israeli Air Force had pioneered the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to overfly their northern border with Lebanon. Back then, a drone was no more than a radio-controlled toy with a camera strapped to its underside that took snapshots of the enemy. The latest models boasted wingspans of fifteen meters, carried Hellfire air-to-ground missiles under their wings, and were piloted via satellite by operators in secure bunkers thousands of miles away.

“Have any idea about the target?” asked Chabert.

“An aircraft,” said von Daniken. “Most probably here in Switzerland.”

“Any word as to where? Zurich, Geneva, Basel-Mulhouse?”

“None.” Von Daniken cleared his throat. The wear and tear of the last few days was taking its toll. Dogged circles ringed his eyes, and even seated, his posture was slumped. “Tell me, General, what kind of runway does this thing need to take off?”

“Two hundred meters of open road,” said Chabert. “A drone this size can be out of its transport packaging and up in the air in five minutes.”

Von Daniken recalled his meeting at Robotica AG, Lammers’s company, and the prideful description of sensor fusion technology that melded input from a variety of sources. For all he knew, the pilot-or “operator”-could be all the way in Brazil, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. “Any chance of jamming the signal?”

“You’re better off locating the ground station. The drone works on a three-legged principle. The ground station, the satellite, and the drone itself, with signals constantly passing back and forth between them.”

“How big is the ground station?”

“It depends. But if the pilot is flying it out of line of sight-that is, if he’s relying on the drone’s onboard cameras-he’ll require video monitors, radar, a stable power source, and uninterrupted satellite reception.”

“Could it be mobile?” von Daniken asked. “Something, say, he could stick in the back of a van?”

“Definitely not,” declared Chabert. “The operator will have to be in some kind of fixed installation. Otherwise, he won’t have enough power to boost the signal a long distance. You said they intend on taking down a plane. This UAV doesn’t have the size to carry air-to-air missiles. Is it your belief that whoever is behind this intends on flying the drone into another aircraft? If that’s the case, they’ll want to be in visual range of the target. It’s a damned tricky business to fly these things by camera and radar.”

“I can’t say with any certainty,” responded von Daniken. “But it’s probable that plastic explosives will be used.”

“Well,” said Chabert, brightening. “Then at least we know what the nacelle is for. I’d assumed it was for more avionics.”

“What nacelle are you talking about?”

Using a ballpoint pen, Chabert tapped at a teardrop-shaped canister that appeared to hang from the nose of the drone. “The maximum weight allowance is thirty kilos.”

Von Daniken groaned inwardly. Some twenty kilos of Semtex was missing from Blitz’s garage.

“Is that enough to bring down a plane?” asked Marti.

“More than enough,” said Chabert. “The bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie fit inside a cassette recorder. It needed less than a half kilo of C-4 to tear a hole two meters by four out of the side of a Boeing 747. At ten thousand meters altitude, the plane didn’t stand a chance. Imagine a drone traveling at five hundred kilometers an hour delivering a charge fifty times as big.”

Marti backed away from the table, his complexion the color of curdled milk.

“But that’s only half your problem,” said Brigadier General Claude Chabert.