Sting of the Drone

19

When Ray got up quietly from his bed, he saw on his Blackberry that it was almost four o’clock in the morning. It was about the only time of day when the neighborhood around his townhouse was quiet. When he came back to bed a few minutes later with two bottles of water, Sandra was awake. She had thrown off the sheet and the street lamp cast a soft orange light across her naked body. “You know we’re crazy on all sorts of levels for doing this,” Sandra whispered as he sat on the edge of the bed.

“No, I don’t know that,” Ray replied, as he slowly moved his hand along her leg. He spoke softly, slowly. “We’re both single again. We work in different organizations. No rules broken, no harm, no foul. Just good conversation and great sex. Don’t overthink it.”

She sat up in the middle of the bed and leaned over to kiss him, then moved behind him and put her head on his left shoulder and her legs around his waist. They sat there quietly for a moment looking together out of the second-story window at the quiet street below. She spoke into his ear, “It is great. And you’re the only one who understands me, my job, where I am in life. It’s all good, I just don’t want…”

“Complications, I know. Look, I meant what I said that night at the Ritz. I like being single, too. I get that right now your career is central, mine is for me, too. Marriage didn’t work for either of us and we don’t need any more obligations than we’ve got. I’m fine with being in the moment, it’s just that I’ve never been very good at it.”

“You did a pretty good job of being in the moment a few hours ago,” she laughed. “I like what we’ve got. We’re so much alike, I mean aside from the fact that I’m short and Italian and you’re tall and WASPy.” She rolled over and sat on his stomach, straddling his wide frame, looking into his eyes. She slipped her fingers slowly through the hair on his chest. “It’s good. We’re a good pair. Neither one of us would ever have been happy breeding, raising kids in some dreadful suburban wasteland, punching clocks, sitting in commuter traffic. I’d have gone mad and become an axe murderer.”

“Some people think we are murderers,” Ray replied.

“Does that bother you still?” she sighed.

“No, never did,” he said. “I know who the murderers are. The guys we go after.” He took both of her breasts in his hands and buried his head in between them.

She felt behind her with her right hand until she found it. “Seems like you’re ready for me to show you something this time. In this one, I play the cowgirl and you play the horsey.” He let out a loud neighing noise. The secure Blackberry on the bedside table replied with a shrill chirping. Sandra let go of him and reached for the Blackberry, handing him the mobile.

“Why did we land it at a civilian airport?” he asked whoever it was on the other end. “Then who did land it there?” He looked at Sandra as her eyes widened. “Goddamn it. I’ll be right in. Give me fifteen minutes.”

“What happened?” she asked when the call was over.

“We lost control of a Predator and someone else took over control. Landed it at some backwater airport in Pakistan where that pretty boy from WWN just happened to be waiting with a camera crew and a satellite uplink.”

“Fuck!” Sandra exclaimed.

Ray laughed. “I will, just not now.”

“I have to get back to Las Vegas,” Sandra Vittonelli said as she sat down in Raymond Bowman’s office.

“Well, gee, good morning. You finally roll in to work. I had a good time last night, too,” he replied. “A night in bed with me again and you have to catch the next plane west.”

“Keep it down,” she said. “Last night was fun, but there is so much going on, I have to get back to the GCC. I am on the twelve thirty out of Reagan.”

“National,” he replied.

“All right, Reagan National,” she said.

“DCA. Anyway, I want you to meet Dugout, my hacker who I went to Black Hat with,” he said.

“Whom. With whom I went to Defcon,” Dugout corrected, as he walked in, prying the top off of his Dunkin Donuts large black coffee, and sat down at the small table in Ray’s office. “Pleasure to meet you, Sandra, when you are not on a video screen.”

Ray walked from behind his desk to the small table and sat with Sandra and Dugout. “I asked Dug to run some artificial intelligence analytical programs on all our data from the program, see what he could spot.” He turned to Dugout. “Why don’t you run through it?”

“So, the overall observation is that this is not a static environment,” Dugout said. “It’s more like classic two-player game theory. We each learn about the other’s behavior and adjust, but since we are both doing that at the same time, neither side is ever really optimized.”

“Ah, yah. That’s really helpful, I’m sure,” Sandra said while looking at her Blackberry.

“So, there are more specifics. They realized that rifles aren’t very useful against the drones, so some of them acquired Manpads.”

Sandra looked up. “Whose pads?”

“Man portable air defense systems,” Ray added.

“So, Stinger-class weapons. In response, you have kept most flights above ten thousand feet,” Dugout continued. “They noticed that single aircraft are usually unarmed reconnaissance missions, so they do not run from them. In response, you have begun flying some solo weaponized flights and have been able to get some targets who might otherwise have gotten out of sight.”

Sandra looked at Ray. “I know all this,” she said. “We’re putting infrared countermeasure boxes on the Preds to jam their missiles.”

“See, action, reaction. So, did you know that they have greatly expanded the use of tunneling? It is not just a one-off at the fake orphanage. Using the multispectral imaging satellite, we have found over twenty houses associated with targets where they have tunneled between buildings. Enter one and then move to another.

“And, they are no longer meeting in buildings. They know you blow up buildings. So, now they meet in cars. One guy gets out of a car on a busy street and then another guy he’s meeting with pulls up. Guy number one gets in and they drive around the crowded neighborhood, having their meeting.”

Sandra looked at Ray in a way that said I’m bored with all of this.

“Tell her your theory about the drone hijacking last night,” Ray suggested to Dugout.

“Okay, so they jammed the command data link from the satellite and then they jammed the military GPS signal. The bird switched to the commercial GPS signal, as programmed. Except they overpowered that signal from the satellite with their own phony data. When the aircraft couldn’t phone home for fifteen minutes, it did as it was programmed and went home, or at least where it thought home was based on the phony GPS data. And it landed at Mashhad, Pakistan, thinking it was Bagram, Afghanistan,” Dugout said rapidly.

“That’s impossible. To do that, they’d have to be really close to the Pred all the time,” Sandra replied.

“Yeah, like in an airplane maybe?” Dugout shot back.

“If they did that, that would indicate a level of planning and sophistication, aimed at the Program,” Sandra suggested.

“Lady, what don’t you get? They’re after you. They started using Manpads. They knew enough to lure you to a target where they set you up to kill kids. Then they had WWN right there the next day. They know your Rules of Engagement so they use women and kids as human shields. They steal your drone and again WWN just happens to be there waiting. You think this is all just coincidence?” Dugout asked. “They’re not just improving their defensive tactics. They’re on offense against you.”

Ray’s eye was drawn to the cable news show running on the screen behind Dugout. He picked up the remote, to take it off mute.

It was Congressman O’Connell. “I’m here with Dr. Janet Stroeder of Philadelphia, who today filed a wrongful death suit in federal district court in Washington in connection with the death of her son Wilhelm Stroeder, an American citizen, whom we believe was killed by an American drone attack in Vienna, Austria, earlier this year. The suit names a series of individuals including the National Security Advisor and CIA officials as defendants. It also alleges that they engaged in a cover-up of the operation.”

“That son of a bitch. That’s classified information, top secret,” Sandra said at the television.

O’Connell continued, “We have obtained surveillance camera video footage from across the street from the hotel that was attacked, clearly showing a drone.” As he spoke MSNBC showed the grainy video. “This was not a terrorist bomb that went off in the hotel, not two drug gangs fighting each other as has been suggested, but a terrorist drone attack in the heart of a major European city. And the terrorists in question were CIA officers.”

Ray hit Mute.

“So, as I was saying about adaptive behavior and two-person game theory,” Dugout observed. “There is an organized, sophisticated, well-planned effort to attack the Program. And, it looks like, maybe you personally.”