Sting of the Drone

31

“Zebra Roger Papa, requesting permission to take off.”

“AP-ZRP, you are clear to take off,” the man in the tower said. The aircraft had a civilian call sign, its tail number. The aircraft was painted white with blue trim. There was no logo, no livery.

It was the only aircraft at the field. Pakistan Airlines flew in twice a day, weather permitting, but for twenty-two hours a day Gilgit was usually an airport without aircraft. Gilgit was a small mountain town near Pakistan’s border with China. It had been spared the presence of the Taliban and al Qaeda. It had been spared, therefore, the drones. For the last two weeks the unmarked, high wing, twin-engine aircraft had sat inside the old military hangar at Gilgit’s little airport, out of sight.

“Roger, Gilgit Tower, ZRP rolling,” the pilot said as the Chinese-made Y-11 began the full-powered run down the airstrip. He had flown the Y-11 when he was in the Pakistan Air Force. Now, he and the guys in the back of the plane were making more money in a month than they had made in a year in the military. Someone always wanted an unscheduled, off-the-books flight, with no questions about the cargo.

In the high, thin air of the Hindu Kush the twin-propellered aircraft would need every inch of the runway to lift off into the valley. The cargo, however, was light. Almost everything had been removed from the cabin, except for a table with computers and black boxes, and two men who sat watching them.

The aircraft banked and headed southwest, passing under the monstrous peak of Nanga Parbat. The pilot had the aircraft pointed toward the Swat Valley, an area of beauty once called the Switzerland of South Asia. For over a decade its resorts had seen few foreign tourists. Its morgue, however, had seen many victims of the fighting, some killed by the drones. Today, it was the drone that was being hunted.

In a short time, a drone was expected over the Swat Valley. The Pakistani ISI had passed word to the Americans, word that one of the few remaining leaders of al Qaeda Central was going to a meeting near the base of Tirch Mir, the 7,700-meter peak outside of Chitral. The Americans would likely come to look, perhaps to kill.

The men in the back watched their computers as the radios that had been added to the aircraft scanned the frequencies used by the drones. Other radios were standing by, not to receive, but to broadcast through the new antenna blister that had been added under the tail of the Y-11. One radio would overpower the satellite signal on which the drone’s pilot was sending his commands to the aircraft. Another radio would send a loud noise onto the frequency the Americans used to transmit their encrypted GPS signal to their military receivers. Finally, a third radio would send a loud signal on the same frequency that was used for civilian navigation data, a false GPS signal. The result would be that the drone, unable to phone home, would fly home, or where it thought home was, based on the false GPS data. It would land at Mardan. There would be people there to meet it.

First, however, the Y-11 pilot needed to find the drone and fly his aircraft just a little higher, maybe at fifteen thousand feet, and just a little bit abeam, maybe one thousand meters. He had been told that the Americans could change the color of their drones to blend into the sky, but they could not do that on the top of the wings, just on the bottom. So, while you could not easily see the drone from below, from above it would stand out. He wished that his friends in the Pakistani Air Force, his former colleagues, could radio him when they saw the drone on their radar, but he knew they could not. The Americans were always listening, listening to everything. So he, and his copilot, scanned the sky below them as they approached the Swat Valley.

“It was a gas leak. That little park, that lot next to his house, it had a big gas pipeline and a pump underground. That’s why there was no house on the lot. The Wongs didn’t know that. We all wondered who paid for the landscaping on that empty lot. But it was a gas leak, I asked the Clark County Sheriff’s office. They’re not treating it as a homicide. They say the pipe corroded,” Erik Parsons told Sandra Vittonelli in her office.

“Erik, all I am saying is that Ray and Dugout think it was murder. They think someone hacked the control system for the long-distance pipeline and did something with the valve on that pump station. They say something like this happened in San Bruno, outside the San Francisco airport a few years ago,” Sandra said, rising from behind her desk.

“Dugout? Now we’re believing someone calls himself Dugout, over the Sheriff and Air Force OSI?” Erik asked.

“Didn’t know Office of Special Investigations is involved.” Sandra said. “They run their own computer forensics?”

“I don’t know. No, probably not. They told me to talk to the Sheriff. They kind of begged off doing anything of their own. This Dugout do some computer forensics?”

“Yes, he did. He works at the Policy Evaluation Group and he’s good, real good. Ray gave the results to the Fibbies. They opened a case,” Sandra replied.

“The FBI has opened a case to see if the Wongs were murdered?” Erik asked.

“Yes, they have,” Sandra said as she approached the door to her office, “but keep that to yourself for now. Until we really know what happened, I don’t want to freak out every pilot on that floor out there. Now, let’s go take a look at this Swat Valley mission.”

Sandra Vittonelli walked to a central area on the operations floor of the Global Coordination Center. Unlike the other cubicles, which were small and had a seat for only one pilot, this area was open, designed for complex, multibird missions. Major Bruce Dougherty sat in the middle of the three seats, supported by a civilian signals intelligence expert detailed from NSA and a senior enlisted officer who acted as a back-up pilot and communications expert.

“Okay, Major, what have we got?” she asked.

“Well, we’re flying this specially configured Reaper. It’s got the standard Ku-band satellite radio for my control links, just like all the other Preds and Reaps. That’s off the commercial satellites, but it’s encrypted. This Reap, however, has also got an X-band satellite radio and it’s using a frequency that NRO let us use for a week only. NRO normally uses this freq for talking to its own secret satellites.”

“So, we’re also using a channel they normally use for their intelligence collection satellites, neat,” Erik commented as he joined them.

“Right and we also have an X-band radio on the stealth bird, the Peregrine, that we’re flying in trail at 22,000,” Bruce Dougherty explained. “So we got back-up comms and using the two birds we can geolocate a signal source in the Ku band.”

“Great. Let the games begin,” Sandra said as she plunked down into one of the row of observer seats set behind and slightly above the operators.

“I’ll throw the view from the Peregrine up on the Big Board,” Bruce said as a scene of snow-covered mountains appeared at the front of the theaterlike operations center. The view then zoomed in on a gray-white Reaper drone, slowly flying ahead and below. Four missiles, but not Hellfires, were visible under its wings. The Reaper banked to the right and began a long, slow circle over the Swat Valley.

Halfway through the Peregrine’s second time around the Valley an alarm sounded on the console next to Bruce Dougherty, taking Sandra out of her daydream. “Strong jamming on the Ku-band command link, Major,” the sergeant read off of her computer screen.

“Roger that, switch command link to X band and continue circling,” Bruce replied.

“The bird would have continued to circle anyway,” Erik, seated in an observer chair, said to Sandra. “The guys in the jammer aircraft won’t think that unusual.”

“Triangulate on the jamming signal, slew the Peregrine’s camera to the jammer,” Bruce instructed.

The on-board computers on the two drones calculated where the jamming signal was originating. Their information was bounced up to a satellite, down to the GCC’s computers, which correlated the data from both aircraft, computed the most likely point of origin, and then sent a signal to the higher-altitude stealth drone to point its camera.

The Y-11 aircraft suddenly appeared on the Big Board. “Two-engine prop job, tail number Alpha Poppa dash Zebra Romeo Poppa,” Bruce read out.

“Chinese-made aircraft. Pakistani civilian aircraft designator,” the NSA officer announced as she tapped into her computer. “And it’s not in their database. It does not exist.”

“Of course not,” Sandra said.

The alarm sounded again. “Military GPS signal being jammed. And, wait for it, it’s the same source,” the sergeant said.

“Okay, Bruce, bring the Peregrine alongside that Y-11. I want to look in the windows,” Erik ordered.

“That should be fun, boss,” Bruce replied. “Never done that before with a drone.”

“No, but you and I have done it a few times when we flew F-16s. Same thing.”

On the Big Board, the image of the Y-11 rolled about as the Peregrine drone came out of steady flight and moved into an intercept course. The screen split into two images. The new image was of three dots, one red, one blue, one green. It was a simulated radar screen, showing the location of the two drones and the Y-11 relative to each other. The blue dot, the Peregrine drone, was moving quickly toward the green dot, the jamming aircraft.

As the blue dot circled the green dot on the screen on the right, the screen on the left showed a camera feed from the Peregrine. The image zoomed into a side window on the Y-11. Then, as the Peregrine moved ahead, it looked back at the cockpit of the aircraft. Two astonished looking men sat in the Y-11’s cockpit, pointing at the drone’s front camera pod. As the Peregrine came around, the camera zoomed in on the newly installed antenna blister under the tail of the Y-11.

“Ms. Vittonelli, it is my professional opinion as a fighter pilot that the Y-11 aircraft is a hostile attempting to interfere with U.S. military operations and that it does not have onboard protected classes, such as women or children,” Bruce said somewhat formally.

Erik stood up. “I concur.”

“Very well, under the preapproved guidelines for handling hostile aircraft attempting to interfere with U.S. military operations,” Sandra began, “Colonel Parsons, take out the hostile.”

“Roger that,” Erik replied. “Major, engage with two Sidewinders.”

Bruce pulled the stick back, bringing the Peregrine quickly away from the Y-11, and then he handed off control. “Sarge, take over the Peregrine, keep it up at angels 25 and a klik off beam, keep its camera on the hostile.”

Bruce then assumed control of the Reaper, bringing it out of its autopilot circling mode. The Reaper went into a tight turn, until it was pointed at the Y-11, which had been above and behind it. The Big Board image now split between the Reaper’s view of the Y-11 from below and the Peregrine’s view from above and off to the side.

A high-pitched beep came from Bruce’s console. “I have a lock on the Y-11 with Fox two.” A long two seconds passed. “And firing, one and two away.”

The split screen showed on the left the smoke from contrails of two missiles leaving the Reaper and on the right a view of the Reaper itself and two darts, trailing smoke, streaking toward the Y-11.

“And impact,” Bruce said softly. The two screens showed an orange flash, and then another, and then what looked something like an elaborate fireworks display as fingers of white smoke shot in every direction. There was no noise of an explosion in the GCC, no sound effects.

“Bruce, congratulations, you are the first drone ace. The first drone pilot with an air-to-air kill. Maybe we should tell the Pakistanis that one of our drones exploded, or got shot down, over the Swat Valley,” Erik suggested.

“They’ll know what happened,” Sandra said, as she stood up. She shook hands with Bruce Dougherty and his two teammates. When she was ten feet away and moving toward her office, she spoke just loud enough to be heard by the team behind her. “Try to fucking steal my drones.”