Mike Maden - Drone

An hour after Pearce called with the good news about Cruzalta, Jackson reported that all fifty targets had been identified and were being tracked. He couldn’t guarantee how long that would last, so time was of the essence.

Myers’s second phone call on the night of July 29 was to Attorney General Lancet. She was tasked with creating the legal framework for Drone Command. Lancet built organizational firewalls around Drone Command so that it would report directly to the president, completely insulating it from both the DNI and DoD command structures. Though a legal fiction, it was made an extension of JSOC, which operated with near impunity from congressional oversight and could invoke either Title 10 or Title 50 protections as needed.

Myers’s last phone call had been to Early. He immediately contacted T. J. Ashley with the Drone Command offer and she accepted it on the spot because it sounded “interesting,” knowing full well she would be shaping the future of U.S. drone warfare for the next decade—and maybe even changing the face of warfare itself.

Yes. Interesting.

Early brought her in to meet Myers six hours later. Ashley wasn’t the least bit intimidated by her first visit to the White House or her first meeting with the commander in chief. Myers immediately liked the self-possessed younger woman. So did Jeffers, yawning over a cup of coffee. Just over five feet tall, with short-cropped dirty blond hair and hazel eyes, the trim, athletic engineer was a firm handshake and all business.

“What do you think you’re going to need to begin operations in seven days?” Myers wanted to know.

“Depends on the targets,” Ashley said. “When will I have those?”

“Soon, including locations. Give me your best estimate.”

“More hours in the day and a boatload of money should do the trick,” Ashley said.

“Money I can find. More hours I can’t.”

“Then I’ll take the money and sleep less. Do you want to review the organizational plan I’ve put together?” Ashley opened a leather satchel and handed Myers an inch-thick document.

“How could you have possibly drawn up an organizational plan already?” Myers asked.

“I wrote it a year ago as a kind of thought experiment. It seemed to me that this was the natural direction our defense establishment would be taking in the near future. I just didn’t realize when I wrote it how near the future actually was.”

Myers mentioned Pearce’s suggestions for Drone Command organization. Ashley had already incorporated them. She and Pearce had discussed the essential concepts a few years ago when he was trying to recruit her into Pearce Systems.

Early grinned like a hyena. “Can Pearce pick ’em or what?”

Jeffers nodded. “He sure can.”

Myers dropped the organizational plan on her desk. “I don’t need to read this. You just be ready to jump when I give the go signal. The rest I’ll leave up to you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ashley couldn’t believe her good fortune.

“Mike will be your liaison with the attorney general. See her next. Any other details, run them past Sandy.”

“Anytime, day or night,” Jeffers said.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll take you up on that.” Ashley checked her watch. “Better get to work.” She glanced at Early and he nodded, grabbing his cell phone as they both exited the office.

“So far, so good, don’t you think?” Myers asked her chief of staff.

“Just one question,” Jeffers said, pouring himself another cup of coffee. “Have you thought about how you’re going to start building a coalition in Congress for this thing?”

“You played sports in college, didn’t you?”

“If you call intramural tennis a sport.”

“What do you know about old-school, smash-mouth football?” Myers asked.

“You know I suck at metaphors, especially at this time of day.”

“Give it a shot,” Myers said.

“I take it you mean a ground game with lots of mud?” Jeffers asked.

“No. More like a Hail Mary.”

Drone Command Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland

Having the most-wanted kill-list names and locations was one thing, but human targets had a nasty habit of moving around, especially if they ever got wind that they were on something like a kill list. With any luck, Drone Command would be able to take them all out in one fell swoop, but that was highly unlikely. Ashley needed to keep them under constant surveillance. For that she’d need to deploy the “persistent stare” technology of ARGUS-IS married to MQ-9 Reaper drones. The Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System provided live wide-area video images by employing a 1.8-gigapixel digital camera, itself a construct of 368 5-megapixel smartphone-camera CCD sensors. At high altitudes, the ARGUS-IS could track all of the movement within an entire city simultaneously, resolving objects as small as license plates. By storing almost three days of video imagery, analysts could replay suspicious movements and establish potentially threatening patterns of behavior.

ARGUS-IS was an ideal surveillance platform for battlefield commanders, but civil libertarians in the United States claimed that such “persistent stare” capabilities were the equivalent of warrantless searches of private individuals. Ashley deployed ARGUS-IS over her U.S. targets anyway because Lancet had drafted an executive order exonerating Drone Command from any such legal liabilities should the issue arise.

With the proven ARGUS-IS system in place, Ashley decided to experiment with two other systems. She paired the new Stalker drones that, in theory, could stay aloft forever by means of an electric battery that was recharged by either a ground-based or air-based laser, to the new Hitachi camera facial-recognition systems, capable of scanning 36 million biometric faces per second—equal to the entire population of Canada. A perfect combination for finding their target needles in human haystacks.

Ashley even managed to borrow one of NASA’s repurposed RQ-4 Global Hawks. With a range of over eight thousand miles and an integrated sensor suite of infrared, optical, and radar systems, the Global Hawk could provide reliable high-altitude surveillance capacity if needed.

All the data collected by these various systems would be bounced off of satellites and then pumped into a specially designated terminal at the Utah Data Center, the NSA’s massive, multibillion-dollar data collection, storage, and processing facility near Bluffdale.

Ashley’s strike plans also fell into place rapidly. Radar-jamming UAVs would provide electronic cover in Mexican airspace if needed. She was confident that Drone Command would be ready to launch by the time Myers gave her the command to strike. Once the first attack was launched, Ashley and her team had just sixty days to complete the mission in the unlikely event that War Powers would be invoked by Congress and funding withdrawn for operations. Her personal goal was to complete the mission in twenty.

Washington, D.C.

On the morning of August 11, the White House communications director made a surprise announcement to the networks, notifying C-SPAN and the other news media outlets that President Myers was going to make a major policy address that evening at the unusual hour of 11 p.m. EST.

When asked what the announcement was, or why it was being held at such a late hour, the director replied, “No comment,” because she did not, in fact, have any idea what the speech was all about, which was highly unusual, and even more startling was the lack of a written transcript of the speech, which was typically provided several hours before any presidential broadcast so that both pundits and producers could prepare. Speculation was rampant.