Sting of the Drone (27 page)

“How long is that wingspan?” he asked the man who appeared to be the owner.

“Six feet on each side,” the bomber’s owner beamed. “You like it?”

“She’s a beauty,” Ghazi replied. “I’ve never seen a radio controlled plane this big. Is it the biggest?”

“One of the biggest. Was the biggest for a while, but newcomers, you know. Tom Harris over there, his C-17 is now the biggest, but Linda Cahill and her boy made that DC-3, or C-47 I should say. It’s pretty huge.”

“May I?” Ghazi asked, as he went to kneel down by the fuselage for a closer look. “So she has four engines that all work?”

“JetCat P120s. Course, the real B-52 have eight engines, four pairs, but they’re little compared to what you would see on a real 777. You know, for ETOPS, those mothers are huge. A man can stand upright in one and still be dwarfed. Amazing.”

“And this is all battery powered?” Ghazi asked.

“No, real Jet A-1 fuel. Plus a bunch of lithium batteries in sequence. The C-17 has four kerosene-fueled engines. That’s why we have this new requirement that we all have to carry fire extinguishers. Just another expense.”

Ghazi nodded, knowingly. He wandered down the flight line, amazed at the number and diversity of the model aircraft, and at their size. The owners were mostly middle-aged men, or older. They wore baseball hats with patches and buttons. Some wore old military-style jackets, but there were also teenagers in jeans and hoodies. The children, or maybe grandchildren, of the owners seemed just as enthusiastic as their elders. He stopped by one young man who was showing off to friends.

“Yeah, so I hacked the app for this Chinese RC model helicopter and made a few adjustments and, ta-da, now I can fly the Sukhoi from my iPad,” the teenager was explaining. The Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker was one of the bigger fighters on the strip. Painted up in Russian Air Force livery, it looked so real that Ghazi caught himself thinking about
Gulliver’s Travels
. Had he become a giant or had all the world’s aircraft been shrunk?

“Mind if I ask you a question?” Ghazi said to the three teenagers with the Sukhoi. They nodded and mumbled agreement. “What is this airplane made out of? Is it aluminum?”

The boys shook their heads, no. “That would be way too heavy, dude. It’s fiberglass mainly, some carbon fiber. And balsa wood. Got some metal parts, sure, but we try to keep the weight down so it can get off the ground and stay up for a while.”

While these people all looked like the quintessential American patriots, Ghazi thought, their allegiance to the United States did not seem to extend to all of their aircraft. There were several British Spitfires, at least one Japanese Zero, the French Concorde, and a Chinese flagged MiG-21. Ghazi had been to the Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington. This field in Chino, California, looked like someone had stolen the museum’s content and put it all in a miniaturizing machine.

As he walked down the line, aircraft continued to take off, perform aerobatics, and land. Speakers mounted on posts announced which aircraft was performing and who owned it. The crowd applauded often, although it was not all together clear to him what prompted some of the clapping. From what he could gather from the announcer, there were to be prizes given out later in the day.

“Are you Tom Harris?” he asked the man standing by the C-17.

“Pleased to meet you.”

“I heard that yours is the biggest aircraft here. Is that right?” Ghazi asked.

“For now. Jimmy Yang is working on an Airbus-380, you know, the one with the double deck. It’ll be a monster, like the real one,” Harris said.

“I was wondering, how long did it take you to build the C-17?” Ghazi asked.

“I call her the Globemaster II, that’s the Air Force designator. Took me about ten months, start to finish. Why, you thinking of trying to build something?”

Ghazi lowered his chin, looking dejected. “Well, I was, but I assume that as a first timer it would take me at least twice as long, but I don’t think we have two years.”

“Why not? It’s a great hobby. You can spend the nights out in the garage by yourself, with a little TV and a beer chiller. It’s probably saved my marriage, I’ll tell yah.”

“I’m sure, but it’s just that it’s for my nephew, Sanjay. He loves these planes. But the doctors aren’t sure how long he has. They told us one to three years, unless of course there is a breakthrough. Of course, we are all praying very hard to Jesus for a breakthrough. It would be a miracle of sorts,” Ghazi said.

The C-17 owner looked at Ghazi for a long time, thinking, nodding his head. “You know, Jesus acts in all kind of ways, through all kinds of people. Maybe it’s not always all that we pray for, but he knows best.”

“Yes, it’s true,” Ghazi replied. He stared down at the C-17.

“Tell you what,” the man said, “I’ve been thinking I need a new project. Thinking of building something bigger than Jimmy Yang’s 380. Otherwise my wife has her Honey Do list, you know? You think you could scrape together ten thousand? That’s about what it cost me, without the labor.”

“You would sell me your Globemaster II?” Ghazi seemed incredulous. “Then, yes, I could pay cash. I had a very good year. I am in venture capital. In Palo Alto. I would give you twelve thousand for her. She is a beauty and Sanjay will love it. It will give him a new burst of energy.”

The Globemaster pilot smiled broadly. “Have you got a pickup by any chance? May need that to pull the custom trailer.”

“I have a Ford 150 here. And, I can go back into town to the Bank of America and get the money in cash,” Ghazi offered.

“Now that’s just icing on the cake. No need to involve the IRS. You know, sometimes it’s little white lies that keep a marriage together. I may just tell Cynthia that the Globemaster crashed, otherwise she’ll be wanting some of the proceeds for her damn landscaping. She wants an underground irrigation system. That woman never leaves her garden.”

The men shook hands as red tri-winged aircraft flew low overhead. Now my squadron is complete, Ghazi thought, six beautiful, radio-controlled model planes, one of the best collections in the United States of America. “That’s Joel Rubin, he calls himself the Red Baron. We call him Snoopy.”

34

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13

SOUTHWEST GATE, THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

Three large, green helicopters took off in sequence, headed south. It happened every Sunday afternoon. The First Family returning from Camp David, where the President and his wife liked to take the twins for the weekend. Ray Bowman was not allowed to enter until the “movement” was complete. As the three ships moved off, he inserted his badge into the card reader and punched in his PIN, nodded to the Uniformed Secret Service officer and walked up the snow-lined West Executive Avenue.

It was what one National Security Advisor had called the broadest narrow street in the world. On one side was more power than any one person had anywhere else, but also unrealistic expectation of what could be done with it. On the other side were the staff in the massive Eisenhower Executive Office Building, who knew the limits of power because they could never get everything done that the people across the alley wanted accomplished.

As he walked under the awning and into the ground floor of the West Wing, Ray thought about the job of the National Security Advisor. It had incredible scope and enormous influence, without all of the glare of media attention and the harassment of Congressional hearings. He wondered if, one day, he might be able to convince a President to let him have the job. To get there, he had to avoid disasters on his watch at the PEG. He knew that was not going to be easy.

Winston Burrell met him in a small conference room in the Situation Room. It seemed more like a private dining room for four, maybe six, except that in addition to all the dark wood there were lots of digital clocks and a very large flat screen. Burrell looked like an old city political boss, a rotund man in his early sixties, sitting in his little back room on a Sunday afternoon, receiving his ward leaders one at a time. In a way, Ray thought, that is what Winston Burrell was, more political than strategic, more boss than CEO. He saw his job as dealing with constituencies, here and abroad. For Burrell, Ray was an enforcer, someone he could trust to deal with difficult problems, discreetly, not someone he ever had to put on a State Dinner guest list.

“Some guardian angel you are,” Burrell began.

“I know.”

“Let’s see, we have six hearings scheduled on the Hill on our drone policies. The UN has created a Special Rapporteur, whatever the fuck that is, to keep an eye on our use of drones. She’s in Geneva, must be a cushy job. And the AG tells me there are now twelve distinct lawsuits filed in various courts around the country to stop us killing Americans with drones, to stop us from violating international law and Human Rights agreements we are party to, and to get all sorts of data on our use of flying killer robots under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Ray poured himself a coffee from the decanter in the middle of the conference table. “To say nothing of the media frenzy. Especially WWN. It’s a ratings thing for them. Now
60 Minutes
is piling on, planning an entire show on drones next week. And our best pilot just got flattened by a semi on the interstate. It’s all going great, Win. Got anything else you want me to look after while I’m at it?”

“Is there any good news?” Burrell asked.

“Some. We seem to have scared the terrorists—at least, they haven’t used a Stinger against us in a while, since we started firing back at the shooters. We foiled an attempt to hijack another drone and shot down the aircraft involved, linked it to ex-Pakistani intelligence by the way.”

“I’ve been thinking of designating them, ISI, as a terrorist organization,” Burrell observed. “What’d you think? State is bullshit with me for suggesting it.”

Ray decided to let that question pass. “Drones are still the only game in town, Win. Without them Qadhafi would still be running around in the desert in Chad or someplace plotting a comeback. Al Qaeda would still have a Shura Council of experienced managers in Pakistan. The Taliban would be running even more of Afghanistan. Half a dozen Americans would still be hostage in Somalia and the President of Yemen would be toast, literally.”

“You don’t have to sell me, Ray. It’s the only thing CIA can do. And the Pentagon says it’s either drones or it’s huge commando raids with SEALs, or better yet, plastering the countryside with B-2s. But there have been too many mistakes. You know what the President said when I told him drones were the only way we had to deal with al Qaeda in Yemen? He said drones were doing the recruiting for al Qaeda in Yemen. He’d heard it on television. It could be right, you know.”

“I will get an analysis, but I doubt it’s right,” Ray replied.

“You remember that the Agency had a very sensitive human source who tipped them off about the gathering in Vienna? They won’t even tell me anything about who the source is or how they got him. My guess is that the Jords or the Brits, maybe the Indians or the Emiratis developed the source, not CIA.”

“Well, whoever it was, he was right about Vienna. The group we hit were Qazzani’s men in Europe, but they were planning to do some contract work for al Qaeda, bombing German subways,” Ray recalled. “What’s that got to do with anything now?”

“The same source, whoever that may be, has reconnected and sent word that as a result of our attack in Vienna, there is a major plot afoot to seek revenge. Two groups are operating independently, but both will strike simultaneously, allegedly in the U.S. Two falcons, whatever that means. The source personally overheard that phrase ‘two falcons.’ That’s all we’ve got, no where, when, how, who,” Burrell said.

“That squares with another report we had last summer about something big happening around Christmas,” Ray replied. “So, maybe, just maybe, something’s going to happen somewhere, possibly someday in the next couple of weeks, but we don’t know what it is or who is going to do it. Sounds like the summer of 2001. Nothing actionable, but be afraid. Be very afraid. Great.” Ray replied.

“Yeah, well I am not telling the President or anybody else to deliver that message to the public, not yet. The FBI is chasing down all their informants, shaking all the trees. Maybe it will turn out to be nothing. Meanwhile, I want you to stay focused on saving the drone program. I assume you know about the latest Inspector General investigation, the Red Sea incident?” Burrell asked.

Ray shook his head. “No, what incident?”

“Seems like there were civilians, including kids, killed when we blew up that yacht with the AQAP and Shabab summit going on it. The Pentagon IG says there was a cover-up, focusing in on the Air Force pilot running the Vegas squadron. Was he the one that just got hit by the truck?”

“Wasn’t him,” Ray replied, “but it sounds like he is about to be.”

Burrell slipped on his half glasses, balancing them near the tip of his nose. “We have to announce some changes, buy us some time.”

“What have you got in mind?” Ray knew what was coming was not good. He stifled the obvious questions: Who wrote this paper you are reading from? Why wasn’t I involved in whatever process came up with the “changes?”

Winston Burrell slipped on his half glasses to read from the file. “So right now we have two kinds of targets, people who are called High Value Individuals, and places which have the signature of terrorist bases, which are put on a High Priority Target List. But we have used those two lists to provide close air support to the Yemeni Army, and the African Union troops in Somalia, and now the Nigerians and the fucking Mali government. You know we did an air strike in Timbuktu for Christ sakes? Who gives a shit about Timbuktu? I didn’t even know it was a real place ’til we bombed it. We’ve become like Rent an Airstrike. Some of these guys we’re flying in support of are not nice people. No peace prize candidates among them.”

Raymond Bowman exhaled loudly. “Yes, but. We do not run those missions to support those governments as much as we fly them to stop al Qaeda and its affiliates from creating more failed states where they can set up terrorist training camps like bin Laden had in Afghanistan. You know what happens next in that scenario. They recruit thousands more nut jobs into being terrorists and then some of them start blowing up Americans abroad and, eventually, here. Has State or CIA got anywhere with their soft-power bullshit, preradicalization deradicalization? No, they haven’t. So what are you going to do, ask USAID to dig wells in Mali? That won’t stop AQIM.”