Drone (8 page)

Diele grunted. “Who cares what the Mexicans think?”

“I’m talking about the Chinese. Do you remember back during the Clinton administration when a couple of our JDAMs accidentally hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade? The Chi-Coms went absolutely apeshit. I was visiting the U.S. embassy in Beijing at the time. Tens of thousands of protestors surrounded the compound, throwing rocks and raising a
ruckus. It looked like the damn Boxer Rebellion all over again. We were all trapped in there for days, including the ambassador.”

Diele chuckled. “I remember the picture of Jim Sasser’s face peering through the broken door glass. Looked like a scalded cat.”

“Of course, the Chinese government had organized all of that. They would no more allow a spontaneous riot in the capital than they would authorize a gay pride parade in the Forbidden City. The hell of it is, poor old Clinton kowtowed to the State Department China hands and taped a slobbering apology to the Chinese for allowing our ‘smart bombs’ to turn dumb all of a sudden. And you know what? The Chi-Coms wouldn’t let it air on Chinese television! Do you see my point? What we see as restraint, they see as weakness. What we view as an accident, they view as a direct assault. If they think they can get away with something, they will. They have the long view and the will to chase it. How do you think the Chinese government would have responded if the premier’s son had been the one gunned down in El Paso? There’d be Chinese paratroopers goose-stepping in the Zócalo before the week was out, and they’d dare us to do something about it.”

“Calm down, you’ll spoil your lunch,” Diele said. He took another bite of his porterhouse. “You and I are in complete agreement. But what can we do?”

The general cut a piece of bloody red steak and forked it into his mouth. “We’re going to lose air supremacy to the goddamn Chinese within ten years, maybe five, if we don’t keep pushing on the new ATF systems.” Winchell was referring to the Pentagon’s enduring pursuit of the world’s most advanced tactical fighters. “The F-22 was killed in 2011 under Obama, now this administration is threatening the slowdown of the F-35s.”

“Can’t be helped, Winston. Myers is a grocery clerk masquerading as a commander in chief. It’s the times we live in.” Diele took a sip of his Seagram’s 7 and 7. “It’s all about the pennies with this woman. She fails to see the big picture. That’s what you get when you elect a businesswoman
to the White House instead of a strategic thinker. And I can’t muster enough senators on either side of the aisle to filibuster her sweet ass. It’s the damn Tea Party tyranny. Do you know, we’ve lost six thousand defense-related jobs in just the last month because of her? It’s insane. Defense work is the best kind of manufacturing job there is these days. It’s good, solid, middle-class work, whether you’re blue collar or white collar.” Diele cut another slice of beef.

The two men chewed in silence. There was no doubt that the defense budget was being ground down, though technically it was only frozen to last year’s record level. But rising health care costs, automatic salary increases, and mandatory retirement payouts were consuming a larger share of the Pentagon budget every year. A defense budget freeze actually cut deeply into new weapons acquisition.

What neither man acknowledged was that the Pentagon’s weapons acquisition programs were badly flawed and ill suited for the challenges of the twenty-first century. The F-22 Raptor fighter jets cost over $140 million apiece and still suffered a mysterious malfunction in the oxygen system. The problem was so bad that some air force pilots reportedly refused to fly the plane.

The F-35 series was the next fighter behind the F-22 that was designed to give America air combat superiority. Ironically, the F-35 was going to be sold to several nations, including Japan and Turkey, thus technically eliminating “American” air superiority. But the partnerships were considered necessary to help offset the astronomical expense of development and production, and yet it still cost American taxpayers over $300 million per plane. But the F-35 program continued to experience significant setbacks in production problems, cost overruns, and testing, including losing one computer-simulated combat scenario against fourth-generation Russian fighters.

The ultimate irony, of course, was that the United States hadn’t fought a single air-to-air combat engagement since the first Gulf War twenty years ago. Seemingly, the U.S. was building fighters for future air battles
it wasn’t going to fight anytime soon. Defense analysts outside of the Pentagon had reached similar conclusions for other weapons systems in other service areas. Not only do generals and admirals prepare to fight the last war, they procure the weapons systems needed to fight them.

Of course, Americans weren’t the only ones guilty of this. In the period between the world wars, few generals or admirals anywhere realized the potential for tanks, airplanes, submarines, or aircraft carriers as revolutionary weapons technologies. European and American defense budgets were squandered on outmoded technologies like giant battleships, the Maginot Line, and other weapons systems perfectly designed to fight and win World War I. Unfortunately, the Germans and Japanese had prepared for World War II and nearly won it.

But these history lessons were lost on much of the current Pentagon establishment. That was partly due to the culture. The very highest air force and navy ranks were only achieved by the men and women who wore pilots’ wings or who had captained warships or submarines. Naturally, they favored the most advanced weapons systems and promoted the warriors who mastered them.

Unfortunately, history taught still another lesson the Pentagon hadn’t learned.

The only wars America had lost since World War II were those fought against technologically inferior opponents. America’s famous B-2 stealth bombers cost over $2 billion each, counting the entire cost of development and production, but the Afghanistan countryside was dominated by illiterate Muslim peasants carrying $200 AK-47s a decade after the invasion.

“I’m afraid for this country, Winston. I thank God every day for men and women like you who are standing guard over us. I just want to put the right tools in your hands so that you can do your job,” Diele said. What Diele didn’t say was that he wanted to hand him the weapons systems the big lobbyists wanted purchased, sometimes even over the protests of the generals and admirals. Congress was famous for buying unrequested
weapons because they brought a direct material benefit to their home districts and states, and virtually every congressional district had at least one DoD contract of one sort or another in any given ten-year period.

Nearly all of the current pilots of the venerable B-52, first introduced in 1955, were younger than the airplanes they flew. B-52s were scheduled to remain in service until 2040. That meant, theoretically, a B-52 pilot in 2040 could be flying a plane his grandfather flew in.

“Gary, I’m just an old soldier. You tell me what I need to do, and I’ll do it,” the general said.

Diele laughed to himself. The general was about as political as they come. When Winchell was appointed the superintendent of the Air Force Academy, he stated that the primary purpose of the school was to promote racial and sexual diversity in the service, and its secondary purpose was to promote military preparedness. He did that knowing full well that one day he’d need that kind of politically correct gold star in his record if he wanted the Senate to confirm his appointment as a major general, which it recently did, thanks to Diele.

“Well, I’m no soldier, Winston, but I’ve read a little history, and it seems to me that patience is a virtue in both politics and war. We’ll wait and see for now. I have a feeling that Myers will hand us the nylons we need to strangle her with.”

8

Isla Paraíso, Mexico

The .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle roared. Another massive brass casing tumbled onto the stony ground.

Water sprayed up a half meter to the left of an orange target buoy bobbing in the bright blue Pacific water five hundred meters away.

“¡Hijo de puta!”
César barked. He lay prone on the ground as he fired the tripod-mounted weapon, Ali next to him. A pair of oversize earmuffs made the crime lord look more like a DJ than a sniper. Ali wore a similar pair. The Barrett’s big-caliber rounds were designed to pierce armor and the blast was deafening, literally.

César stood up and pulled the muffs down around his neck. So did Ali.

“No,
jefe
. It was an excellent shot. The wind has risen.”

The gusting wind on top of the island’s mountain peak buffeted them, fluttering their hair and shirts.

“I’m worried, Ali.”

“About Hater?”

“I have tried to reach out to him, but nobody can find the bastard.”

“If he has gone to the Americans, they would already have been here and your sons killed—or worse. Trust me, there is no evidence linking your sons to the massacre. The fact that they are still breathing proves this.”

“You seem certain,” César said.

“I am,
jefe
. I trained your sons myself. I am certain they left no clues behind.”

César stared hard into Ali’s eyes, probing him for lies. He found none.

That was because Ali was supremely confident about Hater. He had ordered the Mara gangbanger crushed to death in a thirty-ton hydraulic press the day after the massacre. Hater’s tattooed remains were scooped into a sealed barrel and sunk to the gulf floor where the drum settled in the middle of an abandoned dumping ground for American military ordnance. The Mara had to be killed. Hater was the only link anyone had to the massacre—and Ali.

But the inability of either the Mexican or American government to find other hard evidence against the Castillos and launch an attack had come as a complete surprise to the Iranian.
The boys really had covered their tracks.

Now Ali wondered if the feckless Americans would ever seek their revenge against the Mexicans. If evidence was the problem, he’d have to provide it. Fortunately, he’d planned for this contingency, too.

César laughed. “Yes, you trained them well, didn’t you?” He clapped Ali on the back, then turned the Iranian back toward the big sniper rifle. “So tell me, maestro, why can’t I hit the fucking target with that thing?”

“It takes patience,
jefe
. You just need to practice. Trust me,” Ali said, smiling.

—

Three hours later, the three Castillos and five premium escort girls were barricaded behind the gilded doors of the mansion’s Fiesta Room, a sordid collection of vibrating beds, leather sex swings, exotic animal skins, glittering disco balls, thundering audio, and a bank of digital projectors looping porn on every wall.

When he was certain they were all passed out from copious amounts of Cristal, meth, dope, and perversion, Ali slipped into his own private
quarters and locked the door behind him. He opened up his encrypted cell phone and dialed an untraceable number that bounced off of a series of satellites and cell towers, sending the signal halfway around the world and back again until someone on the other end of the line picked up.

“Yes, Commander?” a man asked in Farsi. The Western-trained computer specialist was speaking from Quds Force headquarters in Ramazan, Iran.

“The dog needs her bone,” Ali said.

“It will be done within the hour.”

Ali clicked off his phone. The technician he had spoken with was first-rate. By this time tomorrow, Myers should be howling with rage, and by the grace of Allah, tearing at Castillo’s throat with her sharpest teeth.

9

Arlington, Virginia

Within the last fifteen minutes, there had been an explosion in tweets and retweets on a string of highly related, red-flagged search topics: #elpaso, #cincodemayo, #massacre, #myers, #killers, #aztlan, and others.

What was going on?

Sergio Navarro was at his computer workstation inside the Intelligence Division of the DEA headquarters building. It was 4 a.m., he was the shift supervisor, and he was bone-tired.

The twenty-six-year-old intelligence analyst had helped form the new Social Media Task Force organized around RIOT, Raytheon’s new social-media data-mining software. Rapid Information Overlay Technology not only hoovered data on suspects using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, it also predicted their future behavior. Drug dealers were as attracted to social media as the rest of the world was, and their desire for more human interaction through inhuman computers enabled the DEA to harvest terabytes’ worth of vital intelligence information that they might not have otherwise acquired.

Navarro had been slumped behind his computer working on his master’s thesis project, designing hardware and software for an open-sourced, Arduino-based crowdmapping device to locate and track drug dealers. Because it was all open-sourced, he could distribute the devices for free to poor communities victimized by drug violence all over the world. But
with the budget freeze, the DEA couldn’t pay for it, so Navarro had turned to Kickstarter and crowdfunded six figures for the project. When the RIOT software alarms rang, Navarro quickly pulled up the search window.

Tonight’s automated search had focused on El Paso and the terrible massacre that had occurred just over a week ago. RIOT had just found the string of tweets, and they were all being generated by a single event: an uploaded video file. RIOT had found the video link as well, so Navarro opened it.

It was a cell-phone video of the Cinco de Mayo massacre.

Holy crap!

This was the smoking gun his division had been looking for.

The video was dark, shaky, and suffering the pangs of autofocus—the attack had been at night and the scene was lit primarily by a distant street lamp. Nevertheless, the video was generating quite a stir in the blogosphere. The video showed the two killers blasting away with their machine guns, death-metal music screaming in the background. Unfortunately, audio quality was poor because of the cheap microphone in the cell phone that shot the video.