Sting of the Drone

15

He had been standing in the line for over an hour. The lines for Americans were short, but they were making the wogs wait, he thought. Already he could see the way they treated the brown people. The Air India 747 had disgorged a lot of them into Logan’s Terminal E, International Arrivals.

He watched as people at the head of the line moved up to the booths where the policemen sat. The policemen asked them questions. Some went through quickly, but most were asked many questions. The policemen typed into computers, searching for any indication that the person standing before them should be barred from entry into the country. He noticed that the policemen were wearing pistols on their belts. Once, he noticed that a man was taken away from a booth and escorted by two policemen to a door on the sidewall. He wondered if that would happen to him. He worried, but he did not want to sweat. That, they had told him, would be a sign for the police to look more carefully. He should not look nervous.

He told himself there was no reason to worry. He was now Birbal Malhotra, Indian citizen, born in Delhi. Three months ago he had obtained the new Indian identity card, one of over three hundred million that they had issued so far. Only a billion left to issue, he thought. It had his picture and a computer chip with his fingerprints and iris scan. It had cost a lot to get from the Indian civil servant who worked in the Identity office, but it was real. He was now in the Indian government database. He was Hindi.

And as a Hindi with one of the new ID cards, he had had little difficulty getting the visa from the American embassy in Delhi. His mother needed special long-term cancer treatment in America. He needed to go in advance to get them an apartment. More money had created a Mrs. Malhotra, a letter from a real doctor in Delhi, and a real Indian-American doctor in Boston. The American doctor had family in Mumbai, now they were a more wealthy family. It was a solid legend. It would withstand scrutiny. He hoped.

Was it really necessary for him to be here? It would have been safer to send others, but he wanted to be sure. He needed to meet the men who would carry the bombs, look them in the eye, take their measure. Would they panic? Would they fuck up? He could have met them in Europe, but he did not want a record of them traveling abroad. It was a risk coming here, but he saw no other way.

“Next.”

The policeman yelling at him woke him from his daydream. He moved up to booth 8 and presented his passport and the I-94 form he had filled out on the airplane. He was surprised to see the police officer was a black man.

“What is the purpose of your visit?”

“I am here to prepare for my mother coming to get cancer treatment.” He knew that would be the first question.

“Where?”

He felt the sweat running down his back. “Dana-Farber,” he replied. “It is part of Harvard.”

“I know what it is,” the black man replied. “Where will you be staying?”

“Hotel Essex, long-term stay, in Back Bay.”

“How long will you be in the country?”

“They said the treatment could take two months for her. The visa is good for a year, but I will not be here that long, sir. I will probably leave before Christmas.”

“You know you can’t work while you are here? No employment here. What do you do in India, what is your occupation?”

“I am a solicitor, what you call a lawyer.” Could the policeman detect the Australian accented English? He had tried to sound like he was from Delhi, but he knew it did not work.

“Put your right hand on this screen. We are going to take your fingerprints. Look up, we are taking your picture. Do not smile.”

The policeman returned his passport to him. “Do not lose this I-94 stub. You have to turn it in when you leave the country. Now collect your bags and give this blue form to the officer at the exit. Good luck with your mother’s treatments.”

Good luck? Maybe he had worried too much. He had no luggage to collect. He had shipped it on ahead to the Essex. There was only his carry-on wheelie. Would they look through that? They could. They would find nothing.

They did not look in his bag. He could have had anything in it, but how was he to know they would not inspect it? He handed in the blue form to the last of the policemen and walked through a door, following the sign to Ground Transportation.

He found the right bus stop and took it to the blue train, the T they called it. T for target, he thought. He wanted to see it right away, so what better way to get to the hotel? Take the blue line to the green line, they had told him. Get off at Copley, walk two blocks to the hotel. It was beginning for Ahmed Bahadur. He was starting to think it would work.

Her mobile must have rung when she was in the shower, she thought, as she stood, drying herself off and deciding what to wear. The little voice mail light was blinking. Instinctively, she picked up the device to hear the message even before dressing.

“Hey, Sandy. It’s Ray. I’m in town for Black Hat, the hacker convention over at Caesar’s. But I see there’s a drone exhibition and conference at Mandalay. Wanna go? Call me.”

A drone exhibition? She tapped “drone, Mandalay” into the search engine on the MacBook Air on her coffee table. “No shit,” she muttered aloud as the Web page for the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Exhibition and Conference popped on the screen. UAVEC. “Well, why not?” She picked the mobile back up and scanned for Ray’s number.

Ninety minutes later they were wandering together on the floor of the Mandalay Hotel and Casino Convention Center, which was packed with exhibits and displays about drones. “This is the fifth Israeli company I have seen so far,” Ray observed as they stood in front of a scale model of a bright, white drone that seemed no bigger than three meters in length and about two in wingspan. The word SHERIFF in blue letters was painted on each side of the short fuselage.

“Interested in our Police Patroller?” a chubby man said as he emerged from around the wall of television screens showing videos of the UAV in action. “Take a precinct where you now use ten police cars and you can reduce that to two. And with Police Patroller you will know before you dispatch a car that it’s worth doing. And for tactical response, we can beam live shots to the police cars, so they know what kind of situation they are driving into before they get there.” He walked over to the scale model and began pointing things out with a handheld laser. “It comes standard with a forty million candlepower spotlight and a loudspeaker.”

“Does it come with a shotgun capability?” Ray asked. Sandra Vittonelli looked at him with incredulity apparent on her face.

“That is an option, not in the standard config,” the salesman replied. “But you have to check to see whether that option is street legal in the U.S. I don’t think it is yet, but we hope it will be soon. Lotta interest in that.”

Sandra began to move on. “Are you the buyer, sir?” the salesman asked Ray. “City police? County?”

Ray pointed at the retreating Vittonelli, “Actually, she’s the sheriff of Jefferson County. I’m just a deputy.…” He smiled at the salesman. “Got to catch up with her. You know that kind of boss.…”

She stood in front of a four-meter-tall circular device that appeared to be a helicopter drone. The sign in front of it said THE PERFECT HOVERING SURVEILLANCE PLATFORM. It was from Canada. “Where the hell is this Jefferson County where I’m sheriff?” she asked Ray as he caught up to her.

“Oh, you heard that,” Ray replied. “There must be half a dozen Jefferson Counties around the U.S. Do you have any helicopter drones?”

She gave him a look that suggested she did not quite share his sense of humor. “I don’t,” she said. “Homeland Security might. They’re buying all sorts of stuff like that.”

“We have a much larger model coming out next year that can shoot suppressant foam under high pressure right down into the heart of a fire. Are you from a fire department?” the Canadian saleswoman asked.

“I am the sheriff of Jefferson County.” Sandra replied, “Do we look like firemen?”

“Oh, sorry. No, of course not. No you don’t,” the Canadian reassured. “But the Hovering Fire Truck model also comes in a crowd control and dispersal version, too, with tear gas, slippery solution spray nozzle, even an option for a noise generator that operates at a frequency and power that makes people void.”

“Void?” Sandra asked.

“Shit themselves,” Ray offered.

“Yes, that’s right,” the Canadian woman agreed. “We don’t make that piece of equipment ourselves, but we can add it. The Hovering Fire Truck model is designed for the Crowd Control Sound System to be just plug and play.” She smiled broadly.

“I guess that would make rioting difficult,” Sandra observed as she started to walk away. “Lovely. We’ll think about it.”

“We have a whole range of nonlethal options.…” the Canadian called after the short woman and the tall man as they moved on down the aisle of display booths. Sandra spotted a coffee bar and café in the corner of the sprawling exhibit hall and moved to it.

Sitting with her Caramel Macchiato, Sandra looked at the ingredients list on the energy drink bottle that Ray put down on the small round table. “Careful with this stuff,” she said, “there’s enough five-syllable chemicals in it to make you short-circuit.”

“You mean void?” he asked as he sat down.

“That, too. So what are you really doing here? Did you come all the way to Vegas to make the point that the use of drones is getting out of control? Because I still disagree with you.”

“Actually, no. I didn’t even know that there was a drone show until I checked in last night at the hotel,” he said. “I’m here for the hacker convention. My chief hacker, Dugout, has been on my case for a couple of years now to come. He says he always learns new tricks here. And he reconnects with the hacker underworld types he uses sometimes.”

“Dugout?” she asked.

“It’s his hacker handle. His real name is Douglas Carter the third, so in prep school they called him Trip. He hated it. But he’s a big Red Sox fan and he’s helped them with a software program, so they let him sit in the dugout once. Hence, Dugout.”

“I won’t even ask how you gave a hacker a security clearance. You guys at PEG clearly have different standards than we do at the Agency,” she said.

“He’s a national asset, helped us a bundle already. But you’re right, we look for the iconoclasts, the force multiplier geniuses. Want to avoid groupthink. That’s how we can have such great analytical capability with fewer than a hundred staff. We beat the pants off the Agency analysts every time, even though we are way outnumbered,” Ray said. “I’ve had Dugout create some software to look for patterns on the thousands of hours of video you guys collect from your birds.”

A small, round drone with four rotors flew up and hovered above the café. Three others quickly followed. Then the formation of four mini-helicopters formed into a line and began slowly to move down the length of the exhibit hall like a flock of ducks in a line abreast. Sandra and Ray watched and then, without commenting on the flying flock, resumed their conversation.

“Here’s what he has found so far. He’s detected four new patterns. First, the HVIs don’t seem to be meeting in buildings anymore. He thinks they know we look for meetings and then we blow up the buildings. So they are meeting in cars. One car goes to a meeting spot and an HVI gets out, the car keeps going. Then another car with the second HVI comes along and the first guy hops in. The meet occurs in a car in a crowded neighborhood with lots of potential collateral damage if we strike. This way the classical signature of a meeting that you look for never happens.”

“We do have a fixation on blowing up buildings,” she admitted. “But we also pick off HVIs in cars if they are alone on a road. Meetings in cars parked in crowded market streets will give us a problem. What else?”

“The second thing is related. He thinks that now when HVIs do go into huts or houses, they seem to exit from a nearby house. He thinks they are using tunnels. They know we are watching them and we like to blow up the buildings they are in, so they go in one building then walk through a tunnel to a building nearby but beyond the blast range if we detonate the first building,” Ray said.

“Okay, we can look for signs of that, maybe use our multispectral cameras to look for indications of tunnels,” Sandra replied. “Sometimes a tunnel under a dirt field will show up as a different color, a line, on a multispectral image. We don’t have a lot of birds with cameras like that, but…”

Ray continued. “Dugout also thinks that the terrorists aren’t afraid of single Predators anymore. They seem to have figured out that we fly a lot of solo missions that are just recce, just looking for targets. When we are going to strike, there are two or even more birds circling. One to attack and one to film the strike, or a backup to fire missiles at anybody that shows up to rescue people from the rubble.”

“That’s an easy fix,” she said, “we start running a few lethal solo flights so we’re not so predictable.”

“Yeah, well if you kill the targets, how are they going to spread the word that solo drone flights can be lethal, too?” Ray asked.

“Not a problem,” she replied. “There are always squirters.”

“Squirters?” he asked.

“That’s what we call the guys who survive the detonation and run out of the rubble. That happens a lot. We usually pick them off on the run, but we can let a few go,” Sandra suggested. “Dugout sounds like he’s good. What’s his fourth idea?”

Ray casually looked around to confirm that they were still the only ones at the little round tables in the café. “He thinks that the bird that you lost recently was lured into an ambush, shot down by a Stingerlike missile fired from a mountaintop above the Predator.”

Sandra drained her cup. “Yeah, Colonel Parsons came to that conclusion, too, about the Stinger. Actually, probably a Russian knockoff like the SA-24. But Erik didn’t suggest it was a setup, a lure. That would indicate a level of sophistication, of premeditation.”

“That’s the point. My analysts think it could be indicative of a terrorist response to the drones that is not just smarter defensive tactics, but going on the offense against them.”

Sandra laughed. “Yeah, well good luck with that. That’s the beauty of drones. There’s not a lot you can do to fight back against them and even if you get off a lucky shot like that one … the pilot, Major Dougherty, went out and played a round of golf after his plane was shot down. Let’s go over to the Homeland Security Department display. I want to see what Coast Guard and Border Patrol are showing off.”

As they moved down the aisle, they passed a scale model of what looked like the large Reaper drone made by the U.S. firm General Atomics. The sixty-five-foot-long giant had a jet engine mounted on top of the fuselage, just in front of a V-shaped tail. The sign in front read CHINA AVIATION CORPORATION UCAV MODEL 7. Four Arab-looking men in military uniforms stood looking at the mock-up and talking with two Chinese salesmen. “This is the submarine-hunter version. It can drop sonar buoys and torpedoes,” one of the salesman said. “Also comes in an air-to-air fighter aircraft version with missiles to shoot down fighter planes, or other drones.”

“That’s a U.S. Reaper D the Chinese are selling,” Sandra said to Ray as they walked by.

“Yeah, they hacked in and got the plans for the modified Reaper,” Ray replied. “But it looks like they have improved upon it.”

A flat screen at one of the booth displays was showing WWN. The BREAKING NEWS logo appeared and both Sandra and Ray instinctively walked closer to hear the newscaster. “… exclusive film of the orphanage blown up by the American drone inside Afghanistan three days ago. We warn you that this report from WWN war correspondent Bryce Duggan is disturbing.”

The screen switched to a young American standing in front of the charred ruin of a house. “We have been told this building used to be an orphanage. What is clear is that children lived here, or rather died here. This video, provided to WWN by a local tribal elder, shows what is definitely this same building still smoking after a fire and here, inside, on the video are what appear to be the partially burned bodies of little boys, many of whom appeared to be in their sleeping bags when they died.

“We arrived two days ago in time to see the burials, which took place at sunset hours after what several of the locals told us was a drone attack. The tribal elder also gave us a video of what appears to be a U.S. drone firing missiles into what is almost certainly this area. We cannot account for the authenticity of these tapes, but we interviewed numerous villagers, including some we chose at random, all of whom confirm that they heard and then saw a drone overhead prior to what they say was a missile attack on this house. They say there are no al Qaeda people here, no terrorists, but they do say that they themselves would do harm to the Americans who did this attack on them, what they call this unprovoked attack. The American Embassy in Islamabad would not comment to this reporter, saying only that they do not discuss intelligence, and referring us to Washington. Bryce Duggan, World Wide News, reporting tonight from Waziristan.”

Sandra Vittonelli’s secure mobile phone vibrated in the left pocket of her jeans. It was Erik. “Boss, sorry to bug you on your day off. We have a problem. Looks like we may have had some collateral on that strike against those Qazzani HVIs on the AfPak border. And Dr. Burrell’s office just called to say he wants you and Mr. Bowman on a videoconference with him at noon our time. Where are you now?”