Threat Vector

TWENTY-SIX

It might come as a surprise to many of the patrons of the Indian Springs Casino on Nevada’s Route 95 to know that America’s most distant and most secret wars are fought from a cluster of single-wide trailers a little more than a half-mile from the blackjack tables.

In the Mojave Desert northwest of Las Vegas, the runways, taxiways, hangars, and other structures of Creech Air Force Base serve as home to the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, the only wing dedicated to unmanned aircraft. From here, within sight of the Indian Springs Casino, pilots and sensor operators fly drones over denied territory in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.

Drone pilots don’t climb into a cockpit for takeoff; instead they enter their ground-control station, a thirty-foot-by-eight-foot trailer in a parking lot on the grounds at Creech. Detractors, often “real” pilots, refer to the 432nd as the Chair Force, but even though the men and women of Creech are some 7,500 miles from the battle space over which their aircraft fly, with their state-of-the-art computers, cameras, and satellite control systems they are as connected to the action as any fighter pilot looking out a canopy.

Major Bryce Reynolds was the pilot of Cyclops 04, and Captain Calvin Pratt served as the aircraft’s sensor operator. While Reynolds and Pratt sat comfortably at the far end of their ground-control station, their drone, an MQ-9 Reaper, flew just inside the Pakistani border, twenty thousand feet over Baluchistan.

A few feet behind the pilot and sensor-operator seats in the GCS was master control, a lieutenant colonel overseeing the Reaper’s mission, coordinating with units in the Afghanistan theater, the UAV’s physical base at Bagram in Afghanistan, and intelligence operatives monitoring the flight in both hemispheres.

Though this evening’s flight was designated reconnaissance and not a hunter/killer mission, the Reaper’s wings carried a full weapons loadout, four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs. Reconnaissance flights often came upon targets of opportunity, and Cyclops 04 was ready to wreak destruction, should the need arise.

Reynolds and Pratt were three hours into their six-hour mission, monitoring ground traffic on Pakistan’s National Highway N-50 near Muslim Bagh, when the flight’s master controller voice came over their headsets.

“Pilot, MC. Proceed to the next waypoint.”

“MC, pilot, roger,” Reynolds said, and he tilted the joystick to the left to give Cyclops 04 twenty degrees of bank, then looked down to take a sip of his coffee. When he glanced back up he expected to see his monitor displaying the downward-looking infrared camera indicating a bank to the west.

But the monitor showed the vehicle was continuing its straight path.

He looked at the attitude indicator to check this, and saw the wings were level. He knew he did not have the autopilot engaged, but he checked again.

No.

Major Reynolds pushed the stick a little harder, but none of the relevant displays responded.

He tried banking to the right now, but still there was no response from the bird.

“MC, pilot. I’ve got a dead stick here. Not getting any positive reaction. I think we’ve got a lost link.”

“MC copies, understood Cyclops 04 has gone stupid.” Gone stupid was a term UAV pilots used to indicate the platform was no longer responding to operator commands. It happened sometimes, but it was a rare enough occurrence to warrant immediate attention from the base’s technicians.

Sensor operator Captain Pratt, seated on Reynolds’s right, said, “Sensor confirms. I’m not getting any response from the UAV.”

“Roger,” said master control. “Wait one. We’ll troubleshoot.”

While Reynolds watched his aircraft fly due north, the heading he had given the Reaper several minutes earlier, he hoped to hear the MC report back that they had identified some glitch in the software or the sat link. In the meantime, there was nothing he could do but watch the screens in front of him, as uninhabited rocky hills passed by twenty thousand feet under his drone.

The Reaper software contained an important fail-safe that the pilot in the GCS expected to see initiated in the next few moments if the technicians were unable to get the UAV back online. Once Cyclops 04 went a certain amount of time with a broken link to the GCS, it would execute an autopilot landing sequence that would send the vehicle to a predetermined rally point and put it safely on the ground.

After a few more minutes of flying untethered to the GCS and unsuccessful attempts by technicians to find what was going on with the Linux-based software, Reynolds saw the attitude indicator move. The starboard wing lifted above the artificial horizon, and the port wing dropped below it.

But the emergency autopilot landing fail-safe had not kicked in. The drone was making a course correction.

Major Reynolds let go of the joystick completely to confirm he was not affecting the Reaper accidentally. The wings continued to tilt; all camera displays showed the vehicle was turning to the east.

The UAV was banking at twenty-five degrees.

Captain Pratt, the sensor operator, asked softly, “Bryce, is that you?”

“Uh… negative. That is not my input. Pilot, MC, Cyclops 04 just altered course.” As he finished his transmission he saw the wings level out. “Now it’s holding level at zero-two-five degrees. Altitude and speed unchanged.”

“Uh… repeat last?”

“Pilot, MC. Cyclops flight is doing its own thing here.”

A moment after this, Major Reynolds saw that the speed of Cyclops 04 was ticking up quickly.

“Pilot, MC. Ground speed just went up to one-forty, one-fifty… one-sixty-five knots.”

While a nonresponsive aircraft that had temporarily “gone stupid” was not unheard of, a UAV executing its own turns and increasing speed without controller input was something never seen before by the operators in the GCS or any of the technicians in communication with them.

For the next several minutes the pilot, the sensor operator, and the MC worked quickly and professionally but with a growing level of concern. They cycled through programs on multiple screens, clearing out autopilot commands and waypoint coordinates and loitering information, all trying to clear some glitch command that had caused their armed aircraft to stray off course.

Their monitors showed the infrared image on the ground as the UAV proceeded to the east. None of their attempts to retake control had worked.

“Pilot, MC. Tell me we’ve got someone working on this?”

“Roger that. We’ve… we’re trying to reestablish link. We’ve established comms with General Atomics, and they are troubleshooting.”

The UAV made several more speed and course corrections as it neared the border with Afghanistan.

Sensor Operator Cal Pratt was the first man at Creech AFB to say aloud what everyone aware of the situation was thinking. “This isn’t a software glitch. Somebody’s hacked the PSL.” The primary satellite link was the satellite umbilical cord that sent messages from Creech to the Reaper. It was — theoretically, at least — impossible to disrupt and take over, but there was no other explanation anyone on the ground could come up with for what was happening to the UAV 7,500 miles away.

The GPS readout indicated that Cyclops 04 crossed the border into Afghanistan at 2:33 local time.

Reynolds plotted the current course. “Pilot. At present heading and speed, in fourteen minutes Cyclops 04 will arrive over a populated area. It will pass two klicks east of Qalat, Afghanistan.”

“MC copies.”

“Sensor copies.”

After a few more seconds: “MC. We are in contact with intelligence assets at Kandahar… They advise there is a forward operating base two kilometers east of Qalat. FOB Everett. U.S. and ANA forces on the ground there.”

“We’ll be passing directly overhead.”

It was quiet in the GCS for several seconds. Then Captain Pratt said, “Surely to God…” He paused, not even wanting to say the rest aloud. But he did say it. “Surely to God it can’t launch ordnance.”

“No,” answered back Reynolds, but he did not sound so sure. “Pilot, MC. Do we want to… uh… ascertain whether or not we have any air assets in the area that can, uh, shoot down the UAV?”

There was no response.

“Pilot, MC, did you copy my last? It is clearly in someone else’s hands and we do not know their intentions.”

“Copy, pilot. We are getting in contact with Bagram.”

Reynolds looked to Pratt. Shook his head. Bagram Air Force Base was too far away from Cyclops 04 to be of any use.

Within moments there was more activity in the GCS, the images on several displays changed, and the onboard cameras began switching through color mode to infrared/black-hot mode and then to infrared/white-hot mode. The display cycled through all settings multiple times but not at a constant speed. Finally it settled on infrared/white-hot.

Reynolds looked over at Pratt. “That’s a human hand making those inputs.”

“No doubt about it,” confirmed the sensor operator.

“MC, pilot. Bagram advises there is a flight of F-16s inbound. ETA thirty-six minutes.”

“Shit,” said Pratt, but he wasn’t transmitting. “We don’t have thirty-six minutes.”

“Not even close,” confirmed Reynolds.

The camera lens display on the primary control console began adjusting, finally zooming in on a distant hilltop, upon which several square structures lay in a circular pattern.

“MC. That’s going to be Everett.”

A green square appeared on the primary control console around the largest building on the hilltop.

“It’s locked up,” Pratt said. “Somebody has access to all capabilities of Cyclops.” He feverishly tried to break the target lock with keyboard controls, but there was no response from the vehicle.

Everyone in the GCS knew that their drone was targeting the American base. And everyone knew what would come next.

“Do we have somebody who can get in contact with this FOB? Warn them that they are about to receive fire?”

The MC came over their headsets. “Kandahar is on it, but there is going to be a lag.” He followed that with, “Anything that’s about to happen is going to happen before we can get a message to them.”

“Christ Almighty,” said Reynolds. “Fuck!” He jammed his joystick hard to the left and right, and then forward and back. There was no reaction on the screen. He was nothing more than a spectator to this looming disaster.

“Master arm is on,” reported Captain Pratt now.

And then he began reading off information as it appeared on his displays. There was nothing else he could do but provide narration for the disaster. “Midstore pylons, selected.”

“Pilot copies.”

“Sensor, pilot,” Pratt said, his voice quavering slightly now. “Hellfire is spinning up. Weapon power is on. Laser is armed. Weapon is hot. Where are those goddamned F-16s?”

“MC, sensor. Thirty minutes out.”

“Damn it! Warn the fucking FOB!”

“Laser fired!” This would give the exact range-to-target information to the UAV. It was the last step before launching a Hellfire.

Seconds later the Reaper let loose a missile. Its five-hundred-pound warhead raced away at the lower edge of the monitor, the flame behind it whiting out the camera for a moment before the screen cleared up and only a bright, fast-moving speck was visible.

“Rifle!” Reynolds shouted. Rifle was the term used to indicate the pilot had fired a missile, but there was no term to use for a phantom launch, so he said it anyway. He then read aloud the targeting data on his PCC. “Time of flight, thirteen seconds.”

His stomach tightened.

“Five, four, three, two, one.”

The impact of the Hellfire whited out the center of the monitor. It was a massive detonation, with several secondary explosions, indicating that munitions or fuel had been hit by the missile.

“Son of a bitch, Bryce,” muttered Pratt from his seat on Major Bryce Reynolds’s right.

“Yeah.”

“Shit!” Pratt said. “Another Hellfire is spinning up.”

Thirty seconds later Reynolds called “Rifle!” again. “Looks like the same target.”

A pause. “Roger that.”

Together they sat, watching the feed through the eyes of their aircraft as it attacked friendly forces.

All four Hellfires launched from the Air Force Reaper, striking three different prefabricated buildings in the FOB.

The two bombs then dropped, detonating on an unoccupied rocky hillside.

After the launching of all its weapons, Cyclops 04 made an abrupt turn, increased speed to two hundred knots, virtually the UAV’s top speed, and shot south toward the Pakistan border.

MC gave updates on the location of the F-16s; they were twenty minutes out, they were ten minutes out, they were just five minutes from having the drone in range of their AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles.

At this point it was not about saving lives. At this point it was about destroying the Reaper before it “escaped” into Pakistan, where it could end up in enemy hands.

The drone made it over the border before they could bring it down, however. The F-16s hopped the border themselves in a desperate attempt to destroy the sensitive equipment, but the drone dropped to five thousand feet and arrived over the outskirts of heavily populated Quetta, and the flight of F-16s were ordered to return to base.

Finally the men and women at Creech, along with the men and women in Afghanistan and at CIA and at the Pentagon who were now watching real-time feeds from the runaway Reaper, watched in dismay as Cyclops 04 circled a wheat field just a few hundred meters from the Quetta suburb of Samungli.

The pilots could tell that even the crash was a controlled setup. The descent had been nearly perfectly executed, the airspeed had decreased as the phantom pilot backed off on the throttle, and the Reaper had made a forward scan of the landing site with its cameras. Only at the last instant, as the UAV floated sixty feet above the ground alongside a well-trafficked four-lane road on final approach, did the phantom pull hard on the control stick, pitching the drone into a left down attitude and removing all lift. Then the aircraft dropped from the sky, hit the field, cartwheeled in the hard dirt a few times, and came to rest.

The men and women at Creech, at Langley, and in Arlington who possessed a front-row seat to this nightmare lurched back in unison at the violence of the surprise intentional crash at the end of a smooth flight.

At the GCS at Creech Air Force Base, Major Reynolds and Captain Pratt, both men stunned and furious, pulled off their headsets, walked outside into a warm, breezy afternoon, and waited to hear casualty reports from FOB Everett.

Both men were covered in sweat, and their hands shook.

In the end, eight American soldiers and forty-one Afghanis were killed in the attack.

An Air Force colonel at the Pentagon stood in front of the seventy-two-inch monitor that had, up until the screen went black two minutes earlier, displayed the entire event.

“Suggest we demo in place,” he said.

He was asking his higher-ups for permission to send a second UAV into the area to launch enough munitions onto the downed UAV to demolish it where it lay, destroying every shred of evidence that it was an American drone. With a little luck — and with a lot of Hellfire missiles — the UAV might just cease to exist completely.

There were expressions of agreement throughout the room, though many in attendance remained silent. There were protocols in place for destroying a UAV that crashed over the border in Al-Qaeda country so that they could keep its secrets hidden and remove the enemy’s propaganda value.

Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess sat at the end of the long table. He tapped his pen on a legal pad in front of him while he thought. When the beating of the pen stopped, he asked, “Colonel, what assurances can you give me that the follow-up UAV will not be hijacked and put down right alongside Cyclops 04 or, worse, fly over the border and attack blue forces.”

The colonel looked at SecDef, and then he shook his head. “Frankly, sir, until we know more about what just happened, I can’t give you any assurances whatsoever.”

Burgess said, “Then let’s save our drones while we still have some left.”

The colonel nodded. He didn’t like SecDef’s sarcasm, but the man’s logic was solid.

“Yes, sir.”

SecDef had been spending the past half-hour conferring with admirals, generals, colonels, CIA execs, and the White House. But of all his communications since this rapid crisis had begun, his most informative conversation had been with a General Atomics technician who happened to be in the Pentagon at the time and had been rushed into a five-minute meeting with SecDef before being put in a holding area, awaiting further consultations. When the scope of the crisis was explained to him he declared, in terms forceful enough to get his point across, that however the hacking of the UAV had been accomplished, it would be dangerous to presume that there were any technological limitations to the geographical reach of the perpetrator. No one in the military or at General Atomics could say, at this early stage, that an operator who takes control of a drone in Pakistan could not also take control of a U.S. drone flying over the Mexican/American border or a drone flying in Southeast Asia or in Africa.

Secretary of Defense Burgess used this information when he announced to the room, “We don’t know where the attacker is, or what his access points are into our network. Therefore I am ordering, at this moment, a full ground stop of all Reaper drones.”

A colonel involved with UAV operations raised his hand. “Sir. We do not know if the access point is limited to the Reaper system and fleet. It may well be that someone with the capability we just witnessed might have the ability to hack into the other UAV frames.”

SecDef had thought about this. He stood, grabbed his suit coat from the back of his chair, and slipped it on. “For now, just the Reaper. Between us and CIA and Homeland Security we have, what? A hundred drone ops running at any one time?” He looked to a subordinate. “I need that number for POTUS.”

The woman nodded and rushed out of the room.

Burgess continued, “There are a hell of a lot of soldiers, border patrol, and others who owe their safety to the situational awareness those UAVs provide. I’m heading over to the White House and will talk it over with the President. I will give him both sides of the argument on this, and he’ll make the call as to whether or not we shut down all UAVs worldwide until we figure out what this… until we figure out what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, I need information. I need to know who, how, and why. This incident is going to be an ugly mess for all of us, but if we can’t answer those three questions asap then it’s only going to get uglier and last longer. If you and your people are not working on getting me answers to those three questions, then I don’t want you bothering me or my people.”

There was a crisp round of Yes, sirs from the room, and Bob Burgess left, an entourage of suits and uniforms moving out behind him.

In the end, President of the United States Jack Ryan did not have time to decide whether or not it was necessary to shut down all of the UAVs in the U.S. military and intelligence. As the secretary of defense’s black Suburban pulled through the White House gates one hour after the crash of the Reaper in Pakistan, a massive Global Hawk drone, the largest unmanned vehicle in the U.S. inventory, lost contact with its flight crew while flying at sixty thousand feet off the coast of Ethiopia.

It was another hijacking — this became clear as the phantom pilot disengaged the autopilot and began making gentle adjustments to the pitch and roll of the aircraft, as if testing out his control of the big machine.

The men and women watching the feed recognized quickly that either the phantom pilot of this incident was not as experienced as the one who expertly operated the Reaper over eastern Afghanistan, or else it was the same pilot, but his familiarity with this larger and more complex airframe was not as good. For whichever reason, within moments of the hijacking the Global Hawk began to lose control. Systems were shut off incorrectly and restarted out of sequence, and any chance to right the aircraft was lost while it was still several miles in the air.

It crashed in the Gulf of Aden like a piano falling from the sky.

This was seen, by virtually everyone cleared to know about it at all, as a message from the hackers. Your entire unmanned fleet is compromised. Continue to operate your drones at your peril.