Sting of the Drone

29

^{SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6}

^{DJIBOUTI-AMBOULI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT}

^DJIBOUTI

France’s Charles de Gaulle and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser had little in common except the year of their death, 1970, and the corner in Djibouti where the streets named after them intersected. Nearby, the école was quiet early in the morning. In its courtyard, five men pulled the tarp off the back of the truck and went to work setting up the equipment.

The sound was a combination of a whoosh and a muffled thud. Then again. Then a third time.

As soon as the third mortar round jumped from the tube of the Ukrainian Sani 2B11M launcher, the five men ran from the big truck in the school courtyard to their motorbikes. In less than a minute, they were speeding down the narrow streets of the district, in three different directions. When he was three blocks away on the Rue de Zeila, the fifth man stopped his bike, pulled the transmitter from his pocket, turned it on, and then hit the button that caused the fourth mortar round to explode inside the 120mm tube, destroying the launcher, the truck, and much of the empty schoolhouse.

By then the three GPS-equipped Gran bomblets that had flown out of their tubes had opened stabilizing fins, adjusted their trajectories, and fallen on the aircraft hangar that was two and a half miles from the school courtyard, inside what had been the old French Air Force Camp Lemonnier, at the far side of Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport. Two rounds exploded on contact with the roof. The third hit on the runway axis ramp outside of the hangar.

Three Predators and two of the larger Reapers that had been in the hangar were damaged beyond repair. None had been mated with Hellfire missiles or the new 250-pound laser-guided bombs. Missile and bomb mating with the aircraft occurred in the separate weaponization hangar, behind a berm at the end of the main runway. It was untouched by the mortar rounds. Four Reapers from the Djibouti base were flying missions when the attack took place. Three Predators were in a separate hangar undergoing electronics upgrades.

Of the seven men who died, all were American civilians. Six of them worked for General Avionics. The seventh was a CIA logistics officer. Twelve others, all Americans, were injured from the blasts.

^{SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6}

^{PEG HEADQUARTERS}

^{NAVY HILL}

^{WASHINGTON, DC}

Ray cherished his Sunday mornings. Sunday was the only day of the week when he could sleep in, when he could throw on gym shorts, grab the Times outside the town house door, brew coffee, toast English muffins, play Bach on his elaborate sound system, and ease into the day. Not this Sunday. The videoconference had started at seven. He sat sullenly, listening, watching, alone in the conference room at the Policy Evaluation Group. In silent protest, he had come in wearing the gym shorts and an old Brown sweatshirt. He had not bothered to comb his mop of hair.

“Coincidences do happen,” Sandra was saying, “and Bagram Air Base has been hit with Taliban mortars hundreds of times. One mortar even hit the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ aircraft a while back, but a direct hit on the Hellfire missile bunker the same morning that we get a mortar attack on our base in Djibouti?”

It occurred to Ray that it was only a little after five in the morning where Sandra was, outside Vegas. Maybe she had been up all night working on what had happened.

“Here’s why we think it was coincidence,” the CIA analyst replied in Virginia. “We have no evidence of any current, operational link between the Taliban in Afghanistan and anybody who might be operating a terrorist cell in Djibouti. So, it may just be that a hangar with our UAVs got hit in Djibouti and two thousand kilometers away at about the same time an ammo storage area with Hellfire missiles for our UAVs in Afghanistan also gets hit.”

There was a Marine one-star General representing the Pentagon on the video link. Ray wondered what the Marine had done wrong to get the Sunday morning shift at the Pentagon. “We operate military forces all across the nation and all around the world,” the General said. “And things happen simultaneously, or near simultaneously, all the time with us. A helicopter crashes at Twentynine Palms in California and a different kind of chopper off the USS Inchon in the Med goes down at the same time. No connection.”

They began to discuss the operational effects of the losses at the two bases. Missions into Yemen and Somalia could still be run from Djibouti once replacement personnel arrived in forty-eight hours. Armament for missions over Afghanistan and Pakistan was also stored at Kandahar and some of that was being flown up to the huge Bagram base. A C-17 was already in the air from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, loaded with Hellfire missiles for the UAVs in Afghanistan. Everything would be back to normal in a few days. The meeting on drones, Ray thought, was droning on. He chuckled to himself at that thought and took a gulp of the now cold coffee he had grabbed at the 7-Eleven on the way in.

“What’s so funny?” Dugout asked as he walked into the conference room.

“What the hell are you doing here on a Sunday morning?” Ray asked. He checked to make sure his microphone was on mute and that the other participants in the conference could not hear him or see Dugout.

“I never left last night,” Dugout replied. “I played a midnight set at the Hamilton, but then I came back afterward to see what was happening and just lost track of time. Pretty heavy shit, huh?”

Ray’s reply was a combination of a sigh and a yawn. “I dunno. These guys all seem to think the two attacks were a coincidence and all will be well in no time, which does kind of cause me to wonder why I am here and not out jogging in Rock Creek.”

“Remember that Minerva BDA software procurement you signed a few months back?” Dugout asked.

“Bomb Damage Assessment software?”

“No, Big Data Analysis. It’s going to change the world, man. It’s like artificial intelligence running naked through databases. The new Big Data program is called Minerva. You ask it plaintext questions and it queries structured and unstructured databases and makes correlations all on its own. It’s the wave of the future for intel analysis,” Dugout effused.

“So did I buy it for you already?” Ray asked.

“Yes, you signed the purchase order and here is what happens when you ask the program a fairly unstructured, plaintext question like ‘What connections are there between the attacks on U.S. UAV assets in the last twenty-four hours?’” He handed Ray a stack of paper, the first page of which was a summary.

As he read, the discussion on the video link continued on. Ray flipped back and forth from the summary page to the tabbed detailed annexes. As he did, his eyes widened and he began looking back and forth at Dugout and the papers. What he read ended his lethargy. His synapses were now firing quickly, his blood flowing faster. While a State Department analyst was in midsentence, Ray unmuted his own microphone and interrupted.

“Can I go back to the Unified Coincidence Theory for a minute?” Not waiting for comment, he started. “I get that coincidences occur in life, but I didn’t hear anybody comment on the fact that the three attacks all occurred within five minutes of each other. And that the forensics says that two of them involved Ukrainian mortar rounds with highly accurate GPS guidance systems. That suggests that the mortar targets were not random, but selected. And our databases show no prior use of those Ukrainian rounds by the Taliban or al Qaeda, by anyone in AfPak, Yemen, or East Africa.”

The FBI representative was the first to reply. “Did you say three attacks? We have only been told about two.”

“Yes, I did,” Ray said. “And I bet that somewhere in the FBI you know about the third. You see part of the coincidence was that two minutes after the first mortar round hit in Djibouti and one minute before the first mortar hit in Afghanistan, the house of Lieutenant William Wong blew up outside of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

“Lieutenant Wong was a Predator pilot and his house exploded when the twenty-inch natural gas transit pipe running through his neighborhood coincidentally corroded and erupted, or so the gas pipeline company says. Also coincidentally, that gas pipeline company had a network breach about an hour earlier, a hack into its SCADA control system. Here’s the really big coincidence. The hacker was using a laptop with a cyrillic keyboard, like they use in the Ukraine.”

Ray waited a minute while it sank in. “Now then, there are some intelligence collection and analysis tasks I think we should set about fairly quickly….”

With the videoconference meeting over, Ray looked at Dugout. “I’m not sure those agencies will find anything. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.”

“Well, this is no longer just about shit happening overseas to the drone program. They’re here. So we look for them here,” Dugout suggested.

“They’re here because they blew up a gas pipeline? Couldn’t they do that from anywhere by hacking into the SCADA system? You taught me that,” Ray noted.

“Yes, but the fact that they figured out who Wong was, what he did for a living, where he lived, the fact that they knew a big gas pipeline was running through the yard nextdoor, that has the feel of some on-the-ground presence, as well as hacking. Why Wong? How many others on the drone team did they look at before they found someone whom they could kill remotely?” Dugout asked.

“What did you just say?” Ray said.

“How many other … you mean the ‘kill remotely’ part. Yeah, it’s like they are doing to us what we do to them,” Dugout noted.

“If so, this could just be the start of a campaign here, in the US. And, yeah, I get it, they would probably want to be here or have some presence here to help.” Ray Bowman suddenly looked up at the ceiling, as if he had just been hit by something falling on his head. “Damn it, Dug. Remember, way back during the summer when there was that report about somebody maybe doing attacks around Christmas? What if this is the start of it? What if they plan to attack the drone program like this and then maybe make other attacks around Christmas to blackmail us into stopping the drones?”

“Christmas isn’t even a month off and we haven’t seen any more about planned attacks since that one report last summer. That had everyone spun up then, but now they’ve forgotten about it,” Dugout observed. “I can run the Minerva Big Data program to see if they’ve overlooked some leads, see if there is a Disturbance in the Force anywhere.”

Ray sat quietly, running his own data analytics program in his head, his eyes darting back and forth as he thought through scenarios. Then he looked back up at Dugout. “Right. So let’s start looking for anything unusual, anything that could be reconnaissance, planning for attacks here. And don’t just look for typical AQ and Pakistani ISI types. What’s the Ukrainian connection? This has the feel of something new. Start running your data searches, Minerva, big data. I have to go to my gym, to see a reporter.”

“Not a good idea, Boss,” Dugout said.

“Tell me about it,” Ray replied.

^{SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6}

^{SPORTS CLUB/LA}

^{M STREET}

^{WASHINGTON, DC}

“Hi, I’m Bryce Duggan. If you don’t mind my saying so, that looks like crankcase sludge.” As had been suggested, he had shown up in gym attire. He was in a tank top and shorts. No notepad. No recorder. No place to hide one.

“It’s called Green Machine and it’s good for you, just like some other machines are good for you. Raymond Bowman. Sit down.”

For a time neither man spoke. Finally, the younger man began. “I don’t know which of our bosses asked for this meeting. I do know it is to be totally off the record.”

“Doesn’t matter who asked for it. You have questions for me. I have questions for you,” Ray said.

Bryce indicated for Ray to start. “Okay, the dead kids in Afghanistan. You do know that wasn’t an orphanage, right?”

“I tried to find out. They would only let me talk to certain people in the town. When I tried to get back later, the ANA troops wouldn’t let me in. They stopped me at a roadblock outside of the town. I reported all of that. I said I couldn’t confirm it was an orphanage,” Bryce replied.

“And the guys who told you to go there, who handled you there?” Ray asked.

“Qazzani guys, I think. I mean that was what I was told. I had no way to verify that. It’s not like the Qazzanis issue their men ID cards,” Bryce said. “Look, I put around that I wanted to interview people about what it was like to be hunted by drones. These guys, who said they were Qazzani guys, got back to me.”

Ray swallowed some of the green crankcase fluid. “And the drone they landed when you just happened to be in some little city in Pakistan. How’d that happen?”

“Same thing. Fares Sorhari, my cameraman and field producer, he’s an Emirati. From Dubai. Went to Georgetown. Hates the Islamists. He got a call when we were in Islamabad. ‘Fly to Mashhad tomorrow. In the afternoon, go back to the airport. Big story. It will win you the prize.’ So, we did.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t kidnapped,” Ray thought aloud.

“I know. We had GPS trackers hidden on us, but, yeah, we thought that could happen,” Bryce admitted. “Remind me to tell you about roadblocks in Yemen.”

“You know how much damage you have done to the program?” Ray asked.

“I know damage is being done. I’m not sure I’m the one who is doing it. We didn’t shoot down your drones. We didn’t hack the controls and hijack one. We reported on it,” Bryce replied. “Look, kids did die in that town and they did die because a drone attacked that building. You don’t deny that, you say it was a setup, but kids did die. That’s a fact and we report the facts.”

“The facts, Mr. Duggan, are that the terrorists kidnapped a bunch of little kids and they killed them by luring us into an attack. They wanted them to die and they killed them as surely as if they had put a bullet through each of their little heads. Did you report that?”

“We reported that you said that and that we were unable to prove who was right so far, because we can’t, but we haven’t given up trying to find out who was right,” Bryce replied.

“Moral equivalence, huh? Equal credibility to the U.S. government and to a bunch of terrorists who would just as gladly kill you if they couldn’t use you as their mouthpiece,” Ray shot back.

Bryce wanted to cool the conversation down. “You went to the Kennedy School for a year, so did I. Did you take Brenda Williams’s course on Government and the Media? She’s been teaching it for years, keeps updating it because it keeps happening? There’s a long record of the U.S. government lying to the media. So, yes, until we can independently verify something, all we can do is say that it is what the government tells us. And if their people say something else, we have to report that. If we can’t say we know which one appears to be right, people can judge for themselves,” Bryce said.

“Yes, I did take Williams’s course and yes, I know that government officials have lied and covered up over the years, less here than in other countries, less in recent years than in the past. But I don’t. I know you don’t know me, but, off the record, I don’t lie to the media. There are some things I don’t volunteer, some things I won’t talk about because doing so may get people killed, good people. But I do not lie, Bryce. Not to you, not to the Congress.”

“Okay, I buy that,” Bryce replied. As he said it, he wondered to himself if he really did buy it.

“What I am trying to do is stop a bunch of guys hopped up on some distorted version of Islam from continuing a wave of killing, to spread their control, to chop off hands and heads, to take girls out of schools, to burn down churches, and to blow up U.S. skyscrapers. That’s what I do, Bryce. That’s what I try to do and drones are one way I do it and there are not a lot of alternatives some times.”

“I get that, I really do,” Bryce replied. “I just got back from Nigeria. We were there last Sunday, by coincidence, no tip, when the Boko Haram guys, the local AQ types, set fire to a church with people in it and then shot at people fleeing. It’s amazing video.

“Week before, we were in Mali. We got near Timbuktu. We paid some Tuareg tribesmen, not Ansar Dine the AQ affiliate, but local guys. We caught, on camera, a Reaper strike you guys did on an Ansar Dine compound. My Tuareg friends applauded. Both the Africa stories and some stuff we shot in Djibouti and Somalia are running on an hour-long special on terrorism in Africa in the near future. It’s evenhanded, really.”

“Can’t wait,” Ray replied. “Nigeria, Mali, what’s happening across Africa is that radical Islamists are moving south, into what were moderate Islamic settlements, areas where Muslims lived side by side with Christians and others. And they are trying to drive the non-Muslims out and suppress the majority Muslims. They start by cutting off body parts. They smash gravestones because they say the stones are idols that people worship. This is really a case of a tiny percentage of people trying to impose some fourteenth-century version of a religion on a bunch of people who do not want it,” Ray explained.

“I agree. It’s awful. I know. I’ve been there,” Bryce said. “But why is it our problem?”

“Because they made it our problem. They decided they were part of al Qaeda. They announced to everyone that they want to kill Americans and to spread this religious police state they set up when they take over anywhere, spread it to all parts of the world. One big caliphate. If they’re not held in check, pushed back, they will move forward and eventually they will get around to their announced intention of killing Americans. First they will kill Americans to drive us out of ‘their part of the world.’ Then, they will kill to expand their part of the world, to Europe, to here. I know it sounds crazy, but Hitler and the Bolsheviks did at first, too. And these AQ guys have a track record.”

Bryce had heard the arguments before. “I guess it’s a question of where we choose to fight and who we choose to back in the process. When we back regimes like those in Mali, we get tarred with all of their sins,” Bryce said. “The Mali government may not be as crazy as al Qaeda, but they are not people we would want to be associated with were it not for the fact that they are fighting, sort of, against AQ.”

“We know that. America tried the ‘enemy of my enemy’ thing in the Cold War and we got into bed with a lot of Latin American sadists,” Ray said. “We’re trying to reform the people we are working with, when we can.”

They both took a breath. And both scanned the few others in the little café off the gym to see if anyone appeared to be taking a special interest in them. Despite the ardor of what both men had been saying, they had kept the volume of the conversation level low.

“Collateral damage. There are a lot of independent observers who think that it has been much higher than you admit,” Bryce noted. “Did you happen to see my piece on the village in Yemen?”

Ray smiled for the first time in the meeting. “Don’t tell anyone, but yes, I have watched all of your drone stories. And yes, off the record, we probably did kill that guy’s brother to get to an AQAP leader who was renting a room in the house. But notice that the attack took place when most of the women and children were out. We thought they were all out. That kind of intelligence collection is hard to get, but we try to do it.”

“But the surviving brother. He wasn’t AQAP before, but now he effectively is. He wants to kill Americans. What have you gained?” Bryce asked.

“With our attack in Yemen we took off the battlefield a hardened terrorist who had trained Americans of Yemeni and Saudi ethnic background and tried to send them back to the U.S. to do attacks,” Ray said. “And because of where we had to get him, in that boardinghouse, which you think was so innocent, we pissed off an entire village and we now have one guy so mad he may join AQ. What lesson do I take from that personally? Lower the collateral damage even further. Wait till we can get the bad guy alone, preferably on the road.”

“Why don’t you want me to report that?” Bryce asked.

“Because the Yemeni government wants to keep the slight fiction that America is not using drones there. They judge that even as slight as that fiction is, it helps them. They want to say it was their Air Force, even though nobody really believes that.”

“What happened to the American Yemenis this AQ guy had trained?” Bryce asked.

“Completely off the record? The Yemeni Army stopped them at a roadblock and a firefight erupted. They all bought it,” Ray said. “Saved us from having to decide to do another drone strike on Americans.”

Bryce felt a shiver at the thought of people dying at a Yemeni roadblock. “But would you have?” he asked. “Would you have killed the American citizens?”

“No, I was advocating for having them arrested in Dubai where they were going to get on a Delta flight to Atlanta and an Emirates flight to LA.” Ray finished the Green Machine. “But they never left Yemen and Americans did not kill them.”

“But we might have been following them with a drone and told the Yemenis to set up a road block?” Bryce asked.

“As an old British TV show character used to say, ‘You might think that. I could not possibly comment.’ You see, you may report in color, but it’s a world of grays. We fuck up. We learn. We try to fuck up less. The bad guys are definitely bad, in this struggle. Our motives are good and we try real hard not to become bad in the process. It’s not always easy.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Bryce agreed.

“Where did you live when you were at the K School?” Ray asked.

“Somerville.”

“Ah yes, Slumahvil. So did I. Shitty apartment in a three-decker, but there was a great bar on the corner. Lots of Bruins fans.”

“I hope you think my Special Edition on Terrorism in Africa is fair,” Bryce said as they stood up.

“I doubt I will, but keep trying.” They shook hands. “And we will keep trying.” Ray went downstairs and hit the weights.