Sting of the Drone

10

^{SATURDAY, AUGUST 29}

^{TSENTRALNI TORGOVI LAZNI}

^{KIEV, UKRAINE}

Ghazi Faqir Nawarz did not like being naked with other men. And even though they all had big, thick towels wrapped around them, the men in the steam room were naked, as were the men in the pools and the spa and the locker room. It made him uncomfortable, but that’s what the men from the Merezha cartel had told him to do. Take the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Kiev, check in at the Hotel Slavutych, and then go to the baths in the park across the street. They would contact him within two hours. But they hadn’t and he was done sitting in the steam room waiting.

He got up, tightened the towel around himself, and walked back to the locker room. He would dress quickly and shower back at the hotel. Then, suddenly, there was a bag over his head and hands grabbing at his towel. He went to swing, but his arms were pinned and then forced into something. They were putting a robe on him. Then in English, “Don’t worry. We are not the Americans. Just walk with us. We aren’t going to hurt you. We are taking you to the meeting.”

He was aware that they had left the building, then that they were in a truck, and that, after what seemed like at least half an hour, he was escorted out of the truck and, suddenly, the bag was lifted quickly off of his head. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that he was standing in a large garage or warehouse with bright overhead lamps forty feet above, shining down on the concrete floor. Two white trucks were behind him, one with the back door still open.

“Please accept our apologies, Mr. Nawarz,” the slight, youngish man began. Dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt, wearing glasses and a scruffy beard, he looked like a graduate student. The two men behind Ghazi were much bigger and in suits. “I hope my colleagues were not too unpleasant. We had to be sure that you were not followed and that you were not bugged. I’m sure you understand these things. Please, we have a changing room for you. And we have some of your clothes from the Slavutych. When you are ready, Dmitri Bayurak will see you.”

Dmitri Bayurak looked like an older version of the man who greeted Ghazi. Older, heavier, with thinner hair, he wore a blue blazer with his jeans and polo shirt. His office, up a stairway from the warehouse floor, was decorated in a Scandinavian design, chrome, leather, and glass. Ghazi’s quick initial scan caught two flat screens running television news, two desktop computers, and three telephone handsets. It was an executive’s workplace.

“All is forgiven, I hope, for your arrival,” Bayurak began. “You should worry if we brought you here any other way. Security is number one for us. Which is why you are here, da? You have had security issues, your organization? Vienna? We can help you.” He thrust a shot glass of vodka at Ghazi. Ghazi took it, but only sipped from it. He did not empty it in one swallow, as the Ukrainian was doing.

“I have had a very useful relationship with you, hacking, stealing identities, credit cards, moving money from banks,” Ghazi said. “But all of that has been my personal work. Now, as you know, I come to you representing the Qazzani organization.”

Bayurak filled his own vodka glass, again. “Very lucrative for us both it has been. My favorite one is where we assume the identity of the company’s comptroller, submit bills for services, and then pay ourselves into accounts in the Caymans. Works every time with these big American companies. They never even notice, two or three hundred thousand dollars.”

Ghazi put down his glass, still half full. “What my organization wants from you is intelligence support from your cyber team. The Qazzanis need them for two special missions.”

Bayurak gestured for Ghazi to go on.

“The drones. We have had enough of them. We are going to go after them. We are going to swat them dead.”

“Well, my friend, we have some things that will help,” Bayurak began. “We have SA-24s from Russia, like the American Stinger missiles only better. But they are expensive. Very high end. Not available on the international arms black market, but we can get them for your organization, given all that we have done together in the past, all that we want to do together in the future.”

“We already have SA-24s, I just got them from Libyans. Remember Qadhafi left the doors unlocked?” Ghazi said. “What I said I want is intelligence support. I need answers to five questions: Where are the drone bases and what can we know about them? Who are the drone pilots and where do they live? How do they operate, their rules? Where is their technology vulnerable to disruptions? And, last, how do we get some drones of our own?”

Bayurak rose and walked to a window. He pulled back drapes and revealed a room below where perhaps thirty young men sat around computer screens, seemingly randomly scattered in clusters across the large open space. “These boys can get any information in the world, but what people do with that information can be a problem for them, for me. If what you do with that information gets the wrong people mad enough, maybe they come looking for me. Maybe they find me. Not good.”

Ghazi ignored Bayurak’s remarks and kept going. “The second special operation we need intelligence support for is a day of bombings in the subways, the metros, in America.”

Bayurak laughed and closed the curtains. “You’re mad, you people. You want to bring all the shit in the world on your heads? It’s not enough you want to go after the drones, now you want to bomb their trains? What do you think the Americans will do if you succeed, run away and hide? They will hunt you down if it takes them a decade, like they did with Osama. And one of you will tell them, when they pour water up your nose, that you got all the help from me. And then they come after me and my family. Do you think I am crazy?”

Ghazi stood, crossed the room, carrying his vodka, and looked out between the curtain. “You do this and the Qazzani organization will make you its exclusive distributor of heroin throughout Europe.”

Bayurak scratched his forehead. “The risks are too big even at that price.”

“No, no they’re not,” Ghazi pushed back. “Nobody in our organization will know you are supporting us on these two operations, just me and our leader. You can take all the security precautions you want.” Ghazi emptied his vodka. “Or, or, I can fly tonight to Moscow. I have some friends there who are very close to the Czar. The Czar also has people who are very good at getting information. And Czar Vladimir is not so happy with the Americans. He also knows how to keep his fingerprints off dead bodies. But then you have seen proof of that here in Kiev, haven’t you?”

Bayurak walked to his desk and sat behind it. “You people are such bad businessmen. You let your crazy ideology cost you so much money.” He opened a red leather folder and took out a Montblanc pen. “All of Europe, no competition. At the same price we buy it now for the Ukrainian market?”

“Yes,” Ghazi replied. “And let me assure you, this is not about ideology. For us, this is good business. For you, it will be, too. You will make a lot of money.”

Bayurak nodded. “All right, now what were those six questions you wanted answers to?”

^{SATURDAY, AUGUST 29}

^{GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER}

^{CREECH AFB, NEVADA}

Bruce Dougherty hated sleeping during the daytime in Vegas and flying the birds in the daytime in AfPak. It upset his body clock and he didn’t sleep well as a result. He had been using Ambien for so long that it didn’t seem to help much anymore. It just put him into a strange, waking, trance-like state while he tossed and turned, twisting the sheets and blankets. Then when it was time to get up and go to the base, he needed lots of strong coffee. Then Red Bull at work. This had been a bad week. He kept wondering about the boy in the hotel in Vienna, kept thinking of what his life was like, what it would have been like, if he had only seen him earlier, if he had not killed him. He knew it was crazy, after all of the other deaths, but he could not clear it from his mind.

Today, it was a recce mission, unarmed. HUMINT had reported an HVI holed up in a high perch just inside Afghanistan. No one had ever flown a mission to look up there before, but from the maps and the satellite images, it made sense that someone would hide there, at least in the summer. It was pretty inaccessible and you could surely see anyone coming. Anything that looked like a road ended ten miles away, then the goat path went up, and up, and up. The sheer mountain faces on either side of the wide valley formed a box canyon that ran for almost six miles before it ended in another mountain wall, with a little flat space, high up near a small waterfall.

Bruce could not help but think that it must have been really beautiful at the end of the box canyon, on that cliff, just below the top, in the cool shade, with a natural shower and pool, and a view of the mountains and the valley. He would see it up close fairly soon. The challenge was going to be flying through the box canyon without being seen, then maintaining an orbit long enough to start developing the Pattern of Life on the HVI, the data that would be needed to support an attack decision later on. The chameleon software would help, electronically changing the color of the skin on the bottom side of the bird to what the sky above it would look like from the ground below. But first, even though the HUMINT source was supposed to be good, he had to see if there were any signs of human life up there at all.

It had been ten days for the men in the rocks, ten days in the thin atmosphere at twelve thousand feet. That did not bother them, since they had lived at altitude for years. What bothered them was trying to figure out the electronic equipment they had been given, the short-range line of sight radios, the heat detecting binoculars, and the Russian Stingers with their precious batteries. Finally, that day when they turned on the Thuraya satellite phone for the one minute at a time they used it, there was the text message, “Storm front moving generally north.” It meant a drone had taken off and been tracked by the Pakistani radar moving toward their general location. Before they could alert the others, farther up the canyon, they saw it approaching from the south. As they had been told it might be, the drone was below them and its dark gray fuselage stood out. The electronic chameleon skin was only on the bottom of the drone. They were above it.

As the bird passed below them and made its way slowly up the canyon, they could hear the buzzing. They hit the alarm on their special radio. Three men farther up the canyon, sitting on the high edge of the canyon wall, grabbed for the SA-24. They flipped all of the switches to “on” and to “arm.” The long tube started to make noises, beeps and whines. The gunner saw the drone head on through the optical sight and hit the Target Designator button. He threw off the safety. The tones coming from the tube changed into one long, high beep. As the drone passed by them, he pulled the launch trigger. The tube jumped and shook. A flame leaped from the back of the tube as the missile shot out into the sky and after the drone, now ahead and below.

The image on Bruce Dougherty’s screen dissolved into a bright blue rectangle. “Jesus! This is no time for the blue screen of death, man.” He stood up in his cubicle and screamed at the computer support contractor who sat toward the front of the room. “IT, I need connectivity back to my bird, now, or she will just turn around and fly home in a few minutes.”

“Dude,” the civilian contractor yelled back, “chill. There ain’t no signal coming from your bird. The link shut down just as that flash started.”

“What flash? What are you talking about? I didn’t—” Bruce stopped, wondering if he had missed something on the video feed while he was watching the instruments, or rubbing his eyes to stay awake. “Listen, just reboot or whatever you do.”

There was still a smudge of smoke hanging in the high, thin air above the canyon and a dozen small fires in the grass and scrub bushes on the canyon floor below where the fuel and the pieces of the drone had fallen, scattered across a wide area.

The men on the top of the canyon wall packed up. They did not call in. They would tell their story in person. It was safer that way.

Dougherty filed an incident report, unexplained loss of connectivity to UAV, probable crash. The drones crashed far more often than the public was aware. The Predators especially were fairly fragile, underpowered aircraft. At the end of his shift, he went to his boss, Colonel Parsons, to discuss his suspicions that maybe something unusual had happened. Before he could raise his hunch, however, Parsons stood up on a chair and asked the other pilots and support team to gather around.

“What we do is secret, you all know. Therefore, we can’t have the big, public ceremonies that they do in the rest of the Air Force. But that does not mean that the Pentagon leadership or the President is unaware of what we do or who we are. Nor does it mean that they are ungrateful, quite the opposite.” Erik scanned the group, making eye contact with as many as he could.

“In fact, they have created a special honor for UAV pilots and team members, the Distinguished Warfare Award. It can only be given to those of us in the UAV units and to our nation’s new cyber warriors. It recognizes what we do is warfare and it is the new way of war.

“I am pleased today, on behalf of the Secretary of the Air Force, to present the Distinguished Warfare Award to Major Bruce Dougherty for his essential role in a recent classified mission.” Erik jumped off the chair and handed a folder to Sergeant Miller, who read the citation aloud to the group.

“Attention to Orders,” Miller began and then read a brief, uninformative script while Erik placed a medal on Bruce Dougherty’s flight suit. There was a brief round of applause and handshaking.

“All right, everyone back to work. We got birds to fly,” Erik ordered. He then walked Bruce Dougherty out of the building and to his car in the parking lot. Bruce sat up on the hood of his Mustang.

“You know what they call those medals in the real Air Force? The Desk Warfare Award, for guys who go to war without ever leaving their desks. Cyber geeks and Xbox gamers, us. It says right in the regs that the medal cannot ever be given for valor in combat,” Bruce explained.

“You wanna give it back?” Erik asked.

“No, boss, I want to fly again, like you and I used to do. F-16s. What I’d really like is a crack at an F-22.”

“Bruce, we have had the few F-22s we got for how many years now? And not one has ever flown in combat. You fly in combat every day. How many enemy have you killed so far? Bruce, the era of manned aircraft is over. We are the future of military aircraft. You want to be in something that goes fast? Take your Mustang out on the back road. Never any sheriffs out here.”

Dougherty laughed. “That’s the way I go home every day. Zero to a hundred in nine seconds.”

“Great,” Erik Parsons said, patting his friend on the shoulder. “And, Bruce, keep the Desk Warrior medal. You saved a lot of lives by the mission you flew in Vienna. We just can never tell anyone, about the bad stuff, or even the good.”