“You said a minute and a half fall time for the bomb?” John asked.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Has it been dropped yet?”
“No.”
“Then I’m waiting until it drops,” John replied. He turned and shouted up the stairwell. “Nancy, get Ed and get out of the cabin. You need to be at least two hundred yards away from the building! Do you understand?”
“Got it,” she yelled back.
John checked with his people at the distribution center. They were clear. I could hear the sound of the explosion over John’s cell phone from twenty feet away.
“Tia,” I said, “what is the direction of your drone now?”
“Three hundred and twenty degrees,” she replied.
I stopped and tried to visualize what would be in that direction.
“Boulder?” I said, “John, you have anything in Boulder?”
“Corporate headquarters,” John replied.
“Empty the building now,” I said. “Drone on its way to that location. ETA less than ten minutes.”
John speed dialed another number.
“How are we going to take control of these drones?” Tia asked.
I took a deep breath and exhaled. “Press control, alt, “L” and “I”, all at the same time.”
“It’s a login window,” she said.
“Username SH double oh seven.” I gave her the password and she typed it in.
“Okay,” Tia said, “I’ve got administrative access, now what?”
“Enter the command, all upper case letters, LOC, underscore, WEP, underscore, ABS.”
“Okay,” she replied, “and what does that do?”
“It’s an override command. It locks all of the weapons to the drone with a titanium pin. It has to be removed manually after the drone lands,” I explained. “They can’t drop any more bombs.”
“What about missiles?” Tia asked. “I thought drones all had missiles on them.”
“Mostly they do,” I replied, “but missiles leave smoke trails coming down from the sky. If you want to stay invisible you use laser guided bombs.”
“Okay, now what?” she asked.
“The picture you see on your screen comes from the onboard camera. Are you familiar with flight simulators?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” she replied.
“It’s crude,” I explained. “Arrows for up, down, right and left, plus for more speed, minus for less. The letter L to move the camera left, R for right, F for forward and B for back. Aim the camera straight forward so you can see where you are going.”
“Got it,” she replied.
“John,” I said, “you have a protected place where you are keeping your Learjet 45?”
“Yeah.”
“I need the GPS coordinates and the direction for the landing strip.”
“You mean?”
“You’re about to be the proud owner of two military drones, one Laser Guided Bomb on each.”
“I’ll make the call,” John replied.
“Tia, the pilots of the drones will know they lost control. Spiral down in a gentle circle so they think it’s a malfunction. Once the drones drop below the radar level we head for the landing strip. That way they won’t know where they are.”
“Sneaky,” she replied.
“So why are military drones attacking my places of business?” John asked. “And in America?”
“I don’t think it’s just you,” I replied. “I suspect the DIA has figured out I’m working for you now. I think they’re after me.”
“The DIA has its own drones?” John asked.
“The DIA budget is larger than the entire CIA budget,” I said. “Plus they have access to any and all the military equipment and people they want. No questions asked.”
John looked at the floor.
“I told you, you were better off not being around me when we first met.”
“Without you we would have been totally unprepared for the meteor storm,” John replied. “Bringing you in was the best thing that has ever happened to us. Considering the alternative, I’m happy to have you here. Period.”
Once we landed the drones Tia sat back and looked at me.
“I know who you are,” she said, “what I don’t know is what happened to you.”
John looked over at us. “It’s time to tell her the truth,” he said. “You can trust her.” He turned and headed slowly up the stairs.
There were two things that terrified me: telling Tia the truth about me because I was sure I would lose her forever, and physical intimacy. I had fallen in love with her and realized now was the time for the truth I had been promising I would share with her. As much as I wanted to be with her, I knew that could never happen without a foundation of truth between us. As terrified as I was, the only way to get through this was to take it one thing at a time. I took a deep breath and began.
“I was the Shadow Hawk. I hacked into the Pentagon computer system. I got through all three firewalls. I had read that there were billions of dollars that the Pentagon lost track of. I wanted to know where the money went. I found the financial files. There was a complete accounting of money that went to foreign rulers, private contractors and politicians with Swiss bank accounts, some of them political figures in the U.S. congress. I stayed in the system too long, and they found me.
“I was sentenced to thirty years in a federal prison. I was only seventeen years old. When I arrived at the prison, the inmates immediately called me pretty boy. I didn’t understand at first. My first night there I was beaten up and gang raped. I spent the next month in the prison infirmary.”
Tears started to run down Tia’s cheeks. I began shaking. I took several deep breaths, trying to calm the fear rising within me. Slowly I continued.
“When I got out of the infirmary, I was returned to the general population in the prison. That night I was beat up and gang raped again. After another month in the infirmary, the warden moved me into solitary confinement for my own protection. I spiraled down into a black emotional abyss. I barely ate, I couldn’t sleep. They put me on drugs. I lost all track of time.”
I looked Tia in the eyes. The look of anguish on her face was almost more than I could bear. Tears began running down my cheeks. I breathed deeply several more times, trying to lower the level of panic swelling up inside my chest.
“After what turned out to be five months, an officer from the Pentagon came to visit me. He offered to move me to a lower security prison, where I would be safe, if I did some work for him. I agreed. That’s when I met General Strom. He had me revamp the triple firewall for the pentagon and add the reverse trackers so they could find hackers quickly. I wrote the program that found your friends and landed them in court. I’m so sorry. I didn’t have a choice.”
Tia’s hands were starting to shake. The tears flooded down her cheeks. I paused, trying to stem the panic that was now shaking my whole body. Somehow I managed to summon the courage to continue.
“They were impressed enough with my programs that they offered to commute my sentence if I would continue to work for them. They created a new identity for me, Carl Palminteri, and enrolled me at MIT. I finished my Electrical Engineering degree and a Master’s degree in Computer Science in three and a half years. I had a talent for controlling mechanical things.”
“I wondered,” Tia said. “Nobody hacks into a system for drones like that and knows the administrative override commands.”
“I wrote the program for the drones,” I said. “I distributed the login and administrative commands throughout the program so they wouldn’t be easy to find. It looks like that part worked. It’s just that all of the people who have died from drone attacks did so because of me.”
“No,” Tia said. “That’s not on you. That’s on the people who operate and fly the drones. If you hadn’t written the program, someone else would have, and hundreds of John’s people would be dead right now, including us. The only way we could save them is because you did write the program and you put in a back door that we could use to gain access to the drones. You didn’t kill anyone; you saved hundreds of people today.”