“The drone descended at speed toward the port facility just as the cargo container passed under the PVT arch. It impacted the container with a considerable amount of force. The drone wasn’t carrying any weaponry, but simple physics was enough to catastrophically damage the cargo container. Its structural integrity was compromised and its contents were dispersed over a wide area. Some of the nonmetallic components inside, like those rubber gloves, were aerosolized in the impact.
“What that means is that a large quantity of radioactive material was dispersed across the port facility, in some cases traveling a quarter mile before it settled out of the air. Dust from the gloves and clothing may have been carried much farther. Preliminary analysis shows that a significant area of the port has been affected.”
She clicked a button and a new picture came up, this showing an overhead view of the enormous port facility. A red stain covered almost half of the view, looking like a spray of blood from a cut artery, to indicate the spread of radioactive material.
“The port was evacuated just after the event. There was only one direct injury — a Charles Mitchell, the operator of the PVT arch, was hit by flying debris. He was found dead on the scene. Meanwhile, we have hazmat crews all over the port trying to collect as much of the debris as possible. Though the overall levels of radiation are very low, it just isn’t safe to let workers back inside the facility until we can complete our cleanup.”
She clicked her remote and the view returned to the video Chapel had seen before — the dust-shrouded pile of cargo containers.
“Ladies and gentleman,” Foster said, “Mr. Secretary. The impact — the crash — of this drone was intentional. It was very well planned. What it boils down to is that terrorists have just exploded a dirty bomb on American soil.”
Half the room started talking at once then, people firing questions at Melinda Foster, others calling for immediate action. Chapel couldn’t follow all the rapid-fire discussions, and apparently neither could the room’s most important occupant.
The secretary of defense slapped the table with the flat of his hand. It was enough to get absolute, instant quiet.
In the silence he looked around the room, from one tense face to another. “The president has personally asked me to lead the task force on this. The director of national intelligence is on board — so all you civilians here, you’re working for me now. Everybody here is working for me until this is over. Understood?”
The room rumbled with agreement. There had been times in the past — September eleventh, for example — when the various agencies in the intelligence community had failed to work together and bad things happened. Clearly the president wasn’t going to let that happen again. The authority he’d given to Norton might be unprecedented, but nobody in that room was going to question it.
“We’re going to get whoever did this,” Norton said. “We’re going to make an example of them.”
The room briefly erupted in a chorus of assent, which stopped as soon as Norton slapped the table again.
“No one is leaving this room until we have a plan for moving forward. I need all of you working together — every agency, every organization, from this moment, is going to make this their top priority. What we’re talking about here is escalation. This is terrorism of a kind we haven’t seen before and we’re not going to let it get out of control. The world needs to know we won’t allow this to happen again. First things first, though. We need to know who’s responsible.” He turned and looked at one of the civilians — one Chapel didn’t recognize. “CIA. What groups do we think are even capable of something like this? Hijacking a Predator — could al-Qaeda do that? IS? The Khorasan Group?”
The civilian grimaced. “They’ve never done anything like it before. They stick to low-tech methods, mostly. But we can’t rule them out. A Predator is like any other machine. It’s designed to accept input from a remote user and it doesn’t care who that user is as long as they’re broadcasting on the right frequency, with the right encryption. It’s not smart enough to ask why it’s being told to do something.”
“But our encryption is the best in the world,” the SecDef insisted. Norton looked to another man halfway across the room. “NSA. Am I wrong in believing that?”
“No,” the NSA director replied, though he looked a little dubious. “Our stuff should be uncrackable. But we can’t rule out the possibility that some very smart hacker in, say, Indonesia or Taiwan discovered a new exploit or just got lucky or—”
Norton shook his head. “I’m hearing a lot of qualifiers. A lot of ‘we can’t rule this out.’ I want real answers. Have we picked up any chatter about this? Anybody talking about planning an operation with a Predator drone, anyone discussing a cargo container full of radioactive waste?”
“Nothing,” the NSA man said. “The terror groups have been quiet lately. Most of what we hear is about money problems and recruiting. Nothing like this.”
“At least that’s definite,” Norton replied. “Okay. Let’s hear from the military. Who did this Predator belong to?”
“That would be us,” an air force general said. “It was one of our fleet. I’ve taken the liberty of tracking it through the system, and I can have a document on your desk tomorrow showing every individual who’s ever flown it, maintained it, or inspected it. I can tell you right now that it’s been sitting in a hangar for the last year, under armed guard the whole time. It hadn’t been modified or repaired for nine months. Nobody physically altered it.”
“What was it doing in the air?”
The general looked like he very much wanted to shrug. But he must have known this wasn’t the time to admit he didn’t know something. “It was signed out last night, by official e-mail. Fueled up and launched just after midnight, eastern time.”
“By whom? Who signed it out?” Norton demanded.
“The CIA,” the general replied.
That started some real shouting. People visibly moved away from the CIA director, who kept waving his hands in the air demanding quiet, insisting he had a response.
“I guarantee you we did not sign out that drone,” he shouted over the babble. “Whatever paperwork the air force got was a forgery. Drone operations have to cross my desk, and I saw nothing like this. Whoever these terrorists are, they have access to CIA watermarks, that’s all, they have—”
“Sir,” a navy admiral said, raising his voice, “if we can’t figure out who it was, why don’t we just hit them all — punitive raids, keep up the pressure until one of the terrorist groups cracks—”
“That’s going to kill our reputation overseas,” one of the civilian directors insisted. “It’s going to make it impossible for our people on the ground to—”
“We can afford to lose some human assets,” the CIA director insisted, “if it means flushing these assholes out of hiding; I’m willing to sacrifice as much as half of my—”
“You’re talking about mobilizing every Special Forces group,” an army general shouted, “right at the worst possible time, when things in Syria are going to hell and we need more people than ever in Yemen—”
“Ah,” someone said, a quiet sound in the furor. “If I may.” No one paid any attention.
Nobody except the SecDef. He turned and looked straight at Rupert Hollingshead.
Little by little the noise dropped away. People noticed that Norton had switched focus, and they decided they needed to know why.
Hollingshead leaned back in his chair and cleaned his glasses with a pocket handkerchief. He made a flourish of the cloth, then stuffed it back in his breast pocket while we waited for the room to quiet down so he could be heard.