Drone Command

THIRTY-SIX

Myers shot through the door of her suite with Stella Kang hot on her tail. The young Korean-American woman was one of Pearce’s top small-drone operators, earning her skills during a couple of tours flying Ravens in the U.S. Army. Since the death of Johnny Paloma, Pearce relied more and more on Stella for his personal security detail.

“Ready to get to work?” Myers asked. She had called ahead and told Ian about Pearce’s status.

“Ready,” Ian said in his thick Scottish brogue. Pearce’s IT division chief was normally located at corporate headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, but Pearce wanted Ian close by for this op. The former IT executive turned his considerable computer skills to antiterror operations soon after losing both of his legs in the 7/7 bombing attack in London. He was one of Pearce’s most formidable weapons.

“I’ll be just another minute. I hope you’ve ordered room service for yourself while you were waiting.”

“Indeed, I did. Thank you.”

“You, too, Stella. Get something for yourself. There’s Fiji Water and Sapporo in the fridge.”

“I’m fine for now, ma’am, but thanks.” Stella was worried about her boss. Troy was the best employer she ever had, but also a good friend. She knew what the Chinese were capable of. Her family barely survived the brutal Communist Chinese invasion of the Korean peninsula in 1950. They had passed along the horror stories of rape and slaughter to their children and grandchildren.

Myers marched into her bathroom and opened a drawer. She removed a small metal case the size of a pack of cigarettes and opened it. Inside was a small rubber insertion/removal device used for glass contact lenses. She picked up the little rubber suction cup and leaned close to the wall-length bathroom mirror, carefully touching each lens with the suction head and removing them from her eyes. The hard lenses were embedded with wireless cameras and sensors, making them, in effect, contact-lens cameras. She placed both glass lenses back into the metal case and closed it. She rubbed her itching and irritated eyes for a few moments. Her eyes were used to the soft, permeable contacts she normally wore. Myers grabbed a bottle of saline solution and flushed her eyes out, then pulled out a pair of old reliable eyeglasses to give her aching eyeballs a rest.

Myers headed back to the living room, where Ian was set up and laid the case next to his laptop. “Ready when you are, Ian. Do I need to take off my blouse or anything?”

Ian blushed, the inbred reaction of three hundred years of Presbyterian modesty coursing through his veins. “No, ma’am. We’ll manage.”

Not that he would’ve minded. She was a wee smasher.

Ian opened up the first app on his laptop and connected wirelessly to Myers’s insulin pump that served double duty as a hard-drive storage device for the contact-lens video camera. Sensors embedded on the lens surface allowed Myers to shoot video just by blinking her left eye. Her right eye was a toggle switch, allowing her to zoom in tight or go wide at fixed focal lengths. Unfortunately, audio wasn’t available.

“There’s a woman I shot in the last few minutes of the visit at the hangar. I need you to jump ahead and capture her image.”

“Does she have something to do with Troy’s predicament?”

“That’s what I need you to figure out as soon as you can.”

Myers had captured incredible footage of the Ningbo naval base, along with its equipment and personnel. She thought DARPA would be particularly interested in their war-gaming setup and the three-dimensional holographic board that DARPA had been developing for years. More important to the mission, she’d grabbed several minutes of extreme close-up shots of the Wu-14.

While the video footage downloaded, Ian opened up another app on the insulin pump hard drive. Before Myers left for Ningbo, Ian had loaded it with three powerful self-propagating bots — hacker software he’d taken from the late Jasmine Bath’s incredible cyberwarfare arsenal and then modified for this mission.

The first bot broke into the Wu-14’s CPU and downloaded its operating software. By analyzing the Wu-14’s software architecture, Ian could determine whether or not the HGV was fully operational on the basis of the software program’s integrity alone. The added bonus was that a complete download of the Wu-14’s operating software would provide him with a virtual blueprint of its hardware design and functionality. Knowing how the Wu-14 worked and whether or not it was fully functional was the primary purpose of their clandestine mission.

The second bot was designed to move from the Wu-14 computer back into the Chinese mainframe controlling it and spreading out from there. This would not only give Ian a big-picture view of the Wu-14’s mission-control operation but also, with any luck, the entire Chinese missile program. The bot would also find and download any test data or other physical evidence the Chinese had collected on the Wu-14, once again allowing him to confirm or deny the Wu-14’s operability.

The third bot was written for Pearce. President Lane was not made aware of its existence, let alone its purpose. It would lie dormant inside the Wu-14’s computer and wouldn’t activate until the Wu-14 was powered up and connected with its mission-control computers.

When Lane, Myers, and Pearce first conceived of the plan to steal the Wu-14’s secrets, Lane had recommended simply knocking the HGV out of commission with an implanted virus. Myers explained to him that the Chinese would not only debug the missile computer and get it back online, they’d also probably figure out she was the one who had infected it, and they wouldn’t get a second chance to get a peek inside. It was riskier in the short term to leave the missile operational — if, indeed, it was — but for the long term, it was the better play.

“Downloading now,” Ian said. “Should take only a few minutes.”

Myers watched the progress bar begin to inch its way across his screen. She walked over to the well-stocked bar and poured herself two fingers of Maker’s Mark. She downed it in a single throw, then poured herself another. She wanted to scream. Wanted to get back on the plane and fly to Ningbo or Beijing or whatever shit hole they were hiding Pearce in and tear it apart brick by brick until she could find him.

“Got it!” Ian shouted. The first bot had successfully copied the Wu-14’s operating software.

Myers sighed. “Thank God.”

“I can’t wait to dive into this.”

“After we analyze the video.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Myers hoped it was worth it. Hoped everything they’d captured was worth Troy’s life.

She doubted it.

She hoped Ian could identify the woman. She was obviously connected to Feng, but how? If Myers could figure out that connection, it might give her the tool she needed to save Troy. She couldn’t wait for Lane to help him. If she were still president, she wouldn’t have taken the chance of blowing the mission, either. She’d give it a few more days if she were him.

But she wasn’t.

She had seen the look in Feng’s eyes. Troy didn’t have a few more days.

He might already be dead.