Foreign Enemies and Traitors (28 page)

Young soldiers, their Kalashnikov rifles slung on their backs, stood by the lowered rear tailgate of the truck.  A wooden crate had been set behind the truck for a first step.  Steel rungs on the hanging tailgate served as other steps.  Her mind still reeling, Jenny climbed up into the open back of the truck, “helped” along by hands that grabbed and squeezed at her rear end and breasts.  Wooden benches ran along both sides of the truck’s cargo area, beneath the heavy fabric roof.  She immediately found a place at the very front, behind the cab.  A dot of light caught her attention, and she peeked out of a rip in the tightly stretched canvas.  Across the road from the high school, she noticed that another troop of cavalry had surrounded Hope Baptist.  She shrank down into her corner in horror, trying to absorb the events of the fifteen minutes since the arrival of the helicopters, piled on top of the horror that had been her life for a year since the earthquake.

More girls were forced up into the truck, perhaps a dozen or fifteen in all.  Then a squad of the foreign soldiers climbed up after them, and the giant tailgate was raised and latched into place with a metallic bang.  The engine was started with a rattle of noise and a burst of black diesel smoke from the exhaust pipe above the cab.  The truck lurched forward, the gears grinding audibly.  Jenny dared to turn to look behind her at the other girls, and the soldiers, and gradually a new reality came into focus.  She was not in a truck with a random assortment of toddlers, old women, and small boys.  She was in a truck loaded exclusively with young women and teenage girls.  She looked from crying face to crying face and tried to picture them in happier times.  Even underfed and unwashed, they were all at least attractive—or so it seemed to Jenny after a quick assessment.  The soldiers sitting behind them grabbed at the closest girls, laughing and smiling, semi-Asiatic eyes narrowed to slits.  Who were these troops, and what was this relocation camp they were going to?

The space above the tailgate was left open, to allow light and air into the cargo area.  The military truck passed a pair of yellow school buses parked one behind the other in the middle of Main Street.  A long line of women and children was being led to the waiting buses by soldiers forming a gantlet.  Sudden shadow extinguished the day’s bright sunlight, and the temperature dropped as a line of iron-gray clouds moved in from the north. 

                                        
          9

Dwight Granger was a supervisor at the UAV Operations Center,
located within a former fitness center on a closed part of Fort Campbell.  With so many Army units decommissioned since the last election, almost half of the base was a ghost town, available for other uses.  His retirement pay from twenty years in the Air Force should have been enough to live on, but now it wouldn’t even buy his groceries.  Not after being “adjusted” and converted to North American Dollars at the new ten-to-one rate.  So here he was at the age of fifty, back working for Uncle Sam. 

It wasn’t all bad.  At least he wasn’t being paid in red TEDs, like the locals.  The Temporary Emergency Dollars were not exchangeable and had no value outside the South.  In addition, he was able to shop at the Army commissary on Fort Campbell, which at least had regular food deliveries.  Not only that, but he also was eligible for free military health care on an “as available” basis.  The government even paid for his eyeglasses, and he didn’t even mind their ugly black plastic frames: free was free.  Dwight Granger was well beyond the years of caring about his style or appearance.

On Saturday he was overseeing four Predator Bs on routine patrol over Middle Tennessee, the region around Nashville and south to Alabama.  Once launched from the flight line two miles away on a secondary runway of Campbell Army Airfield, each Predator was controlled by a two-person crew, consisting of a pilot and an ISR technician.  ISR for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.  Each Predator B filmed the earth below in both color and infrared video. 

They also soaked up the electromagnetic spectrum, listening for insurgent radio communications on walkie-talkies and CB radios.  Outside the Nashville-Clarksville metro area, there was still practically no cell phone coverage, so any radio transmissions from the ground were immediately pounced upon, analyzed, recorded, and RDF’d.  Radio Direction Finding was an automatic function.  With this information, ground teams could be vectored to the site of any suspicious unauthorized transmissions.  At the same time, paradoxically, the Predators provided a secure radio relay for the government forces on the ground.

With no more low-earth-orbit satellites, the surveillance function provided by the Predators had become more critical than ever.  Last year’s undeclared and practically unacknowledged space war with China and Russia had seen to that.  It was still an open question as to which country had fired the first hostile shot into space.  Most people believed the government line, that it was China, since they had less to lose through the destruction of their much smaller and less sophisticated satellite fleet.  Many believed they had taken out America’s lumbering low-orbiting spy satellites to cloak their preparations for last year’s invasion of Taiwan.  Whatever the reason, tit had led to tat, until everybody’s spy sats had been destroyed up to almost four hundred miles into space, and many had been rendered inoperable at much greater altitudes.

“Open skies” for satellites, which had been the unofficial policy of both sides during the old Cold War, had fallen by the wayside with the advent of ground-based gigawatt chemical lasers and kinetic killers traveling at 18,000 miles per hour.  The kinetic weapons took out the low satellites, and the lasers fried or blinded the ones further out.  Only the GPS birds and commsats orbiting above 12,000 miles had been left intact.  But those distant communication and navigation satellites could not stare down at the earth with an eagle’s all-seeing eye.  Uncle Sam’s fleet of low-earth-orbiting spy satellites had been destroyed or rendered useless.  Millions of pieces of satellite debris now littered low space, making their replacement a futile exercise.  Even if new spy sats could somehow avoid the welter of hyper-velocity space debris, China or Russia would simply zap them the next time they flew above their territory. 

After the unexpected demise of most of America’s space fleet, the Predators and the other UAVs had surged to the position of primary importance for regional ISR.  It also didn’t hurt that UAVs cost only a tiny fraction of the old spy satellites and their launch rockets, a key consideration during the Greater Depression.  The USA could no longer rely on outspending its enemies in order to retain military supremacy, not with the dollar relegated to peso status.  America was no longer the uncontested global superpower it had been for most of Dwight Granger’s life.  In the new downsized America, UAVs were the affordable replacement for satellites, at least over American territory.

Jam-proof encrypted broad-spectrum digital microwave beams sent the data collected by the Predators back to the ground data terminal, located on a tower a mile away from UAV Flight Ops.  A fiber optic cable brought the data to the ops center, and then to the flight control teams operating each Predator and the other smaller UAVs.  This Saturday the sky over Tennessee was clear, with visibility unlimited for a change, and the pictures coming in were unusually crisp.  When the weather turned bad, as it often had this winter, the video quality was greatly reduced.  Often the Predators were simply grounded, unable to record anything worthwhile.  They were far too valuable to put at risk by flying them in extreme conditions.  Predators lost to weather or system failures were not replaced.  Even when they could fly above the weather, they could not see through thick cloud cover, at least not with video or infrared lenses.  Their narrowaperture radar could sometimes detect large objects like moving trucks through cloud cover, but the radar could not see people.

Granger knew that an especially sensitive operation was going to take place today, when he watched Director Bullard and his team enter the building and disappear into the hall leading to the ISR Oversight offices.  The controllers in the ISRO monitored all of the flights in the Ops Center.  Whenever they wanted to, they could assume control of a drone, temporarily blanking out the screens of the technicians in the main room on the gym floor. 

It amused him when Bullard visited flight ops and went directly to Oversight, believing that they were operating in complete secrecy and isolation.  Obviously, they failed to understand that he had personally configured and installed most of the data link hardware in flight ops.  But even after all of his hard work in setting up the Ops Center six months ago, he had not been invited to join the so-called elite team of controllers in Oversight.  Twenty years in the Air Force with a Top Secret security clearance apparently wasn’t good enough for them.

Naturally, Granger had provided his own undetectable backdoor access to the computers and monitors located in the ISRO office.  Networks, hardware, fiber optics and computer code were Dwight Granger’s passion.  So what if he had not been selected for the Oversight team?  Of course, he had set up his private channel into the ISRO to work in one direction only, and to be completely undetectable.

The only supervisor on duty this Saturday above Granger in the chain of command was busy reading magazines and drinking ersatz coffee in his own cubicle fifty feet away.  The man was clearly appointed based on political connections; he didn’t know a sheep from a RAM.  Typically, he would not emerge until the end of his shift at three o’clock, asking just enough off-point questions about the day’s operations to verify his cluelessness.

Granger typed in his own private command, and accessed the monitors in Oversight.  There was little risk of being found out while clandestinely checking into ISR Oversight.  Because he was in charge of four Predator teams today, it was routine for him to click from UAV to UAV on his own monitors.  He could not control the data throughput from the Predators once they passed over to the control of Oversight, but he could watch their video and digitally record it.  The team in Oversight didn’t have a clue about his backdoor access.  Dwight Granger had designed and practically installed the entire UAV flight control network on Fort Campbell, from the off-site Ground Data Terminal via optical cable to each monitor in flight ops.  The guys in Oversight thought that they could operate in secrecy from him?  They thought that they could exclude him from their secret business?  Morons.

Seen on his monitors, the UAV flights controlled by Oversight didn’t appear to be any different from the standard ISR missions controlled in the gym, the main room of flight ops.  But their armed Predators and smaller drones as often as not ended up dropping missiles on insurgents.  Granger enjoyed observing them at their work.  It gave him a sense of satisfaction to know that they could not keep him out of the ISRO with a heavy steel cover on their door and special keypad code locks.  He had even compiled personal “best of” clips of their missile strikes and shootings from the smaller UAV SniperHawks.  Like the one that had killed the former commanding officer of the Kazak battalion.

It was a distant and sterile way to conduct a counterinsurgency, but this was nothing new to Granger.  He had spent years controlling UAV missions all over the globe from Nellis Air Force Base, outside Las Vegas.  Pull a shift out there with the 3rd Special Ops Squadron, and you could drop a Hellfire missile on a terrorist safe house in Afghanistan one hour and be playing blackjack in a casino the next.  Surreal is what it was.  Of course, in those days they were using satellites to communicate with UAVs spread around the globe.

Typically these days in Tennessee and Kentucky, three or four white blobs would be seen crossing a field or walking along a road.  These were the heat signatures of human beings, usually sneaking around at night after curfew.  Zooming in would reveal more details of size, dress, and items being carried.  If they were out after curfew or were seen to be carrying weapons, they were often targeted by the team in Oversight.  The big Hellfire rockets would blow insurgents into tiny bits, leaving a hot crater in the ground to mark the point of impact.  The Hellfires could level an entire house and make vehicles disappear. 

The new miniature 30mm laser-guided missiles did much less damage.  They would leave their human targets in scattered pieces on the ground, gradually lightening in color as they cooled off.  Cars hit by them would often continue rolling, usually on fire, until they ran off the road or impacted something to stop them.  Nobody ever crawled out of the burning wrecks, even when they were hit by the smaller missiles.  From 20,000 feet up, it was difficult to tell one car or truck from another before they were blown to Kingdom Come.  Dwight Granger could only suppose that the deadly missile strikes were based on some kind of solid intelligence work, but target selection was outside his area of responsibility.

Today the armed Predator controlled by Oversight was operating in the bottom of West Tennessee, not far from where the Tennessee River touched the corners of Mississippi and Alabama.  Granger split his screen and selected a topographical map of the area, zooming it down to the same scale as the video coming from the Predator.  The UAV was orbiting 20,000 feet above the small crossroads village of Mannville in Radford County, a town he had never heard of before.  Black squares on the computer-generated topo map represented each house and structure.