Taking up a prime amount of desk space was a big, complicated joystick mounted in front of the monitor. The stick belonging to the proverbial stick jockey. It was considerably more advanced than most video-game joysticks, but it had fewer buttons — just one, in fact, an orange key located where the jockey wouldn’t accidentally brush against it.
“From this station,” the colonel went on, “we can carry out executive-level missions anywhere in the world. All flight data and telemetry is carried over dedicated satellite links, allowing our people precision control with a minimum of lag time, while the draw rate on our imaging systems is—”
Norton inhaled sharply and the man shut up. “Do you know why we’re here?” he asked. “I mean, specifically.”
The colonel turned red. No military man liked being forced to guess what his superiors wanted, though it was hardly a rare occurrence. “Mr. Secretary,” he replied, “I’m assuming this has to do with the recent drone strikes on New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco.”
Norton fixed the man with his gaze. “That’s right.”
The colonel looked into the middle distance. “Sir. It is true that approximately ninety percent of all UAV missions are flown out of this base, including all but a handful of combat missions in overseas operations. I can well imagine, sir, that you would be concerned about our security here.”
“I’m worried,” Norton said, “that the drones you have here on base, and all the drones you control out in the field, around the world, could be hijacked. Turned against their masters. Now. Tell me. Exactly how worried should I be?”
“Not worried at all, sir,” the colonel said. He was all but standing at attention. “It would be impossible for anyone to take control of one of my UAVs. Physically impossible. The GCS network is completely self-contained. It does not connect to the public Internet on any level. Even the satellites we use to stream data to and from the UAVs are dedicated devices, meaning no one can access them except from a GCS. Whoever hijacked those other drones was using a public server to gain access. They hacked into drones that were cleared for civilian or at least nonmilitary use, either in law enforcement or civilian intelligence. That just can’t happen here.”
“You’re completely protected, then,” Norton said. “Fireproof.”
“Yes, sir, we—”
“Excuse me,” someone said from the back of the entourage.
The colonel turned on his heel to look for the source of the interruption. “Ma’am? How can I help you?”
Charlotte Holman smiled and stepped forward. She held out one hand and waited until the colonel shook it. “This is very impressive security,” she said. “Very impressive indeed. But those of us in network intelligence really don’t like it when people talk about one hundred percent security. I mean, there’s always a way to get in, if you’re persistent enough.”
“Not when you have an air gap like ours.”
Holman’s smile just grew brighter. She’d hoped he would use that silly term. An air gap referred to a physical disconnect between one’s servers and the wider Internet, a literal space of dead air between possible connections. An air gap was supposed to be even more secure than a firewall.
Holman had been working for the NSA long enough to know what words were worth. “An air gap that — I’m sorry, I don’t want to bring this up, but I have to. An air gap that failed to stop your system from picking up a keylogger virus back in 2011.”
The colonel’s face went white. “That was a significant problem, yes, ma’am. A keylogger isn’t particularly dangerous — it wouldn’t let anyone control the UAVs — but we took it very seriously. And we’ve taken care of it one hundred percent. All our drives had to be erased and rebuilt from scratch, but we did it.”
“Did you ever find out how it happened? How you picked up that virus? How it crossed your air gap?”
The colonel chewed on his lower lip for a second. “Hard drives were being exchanged between ground control stations.”
“For what purpose?” Holman asked.
The colonel glanced at the secretary of defense, but Norton didn’t offer him any chance to escape. “We needed to copy map updates and mission video between stations. The easiest and fastest way to do that was to move drives between servers. Unfortunately that meant the drives could leave the GCS rooms. One of them was connected to a public Internet server for a short time. The user in question didn’t think he was exposing the drive to public access, but somehow the keylogger virus got onto the drive. When it was returned to the GCS, the virus spread very quickly through our entire system.”
“And why exactly was the drive connected to the Internet?”
The colonel stared down at his shiny shoes. “A stick jockey wanted to send video of a drone strike to his girlfriend. To impress her.”
“Did it work?” Norton asked. Behind him his entourage chuckled.
The colonel shook his head. “I couldn’t comment on that, sir. I assume she was not impressed when he was court-martialed and given a dishonorable discharge.”
Holman nodded. “But the point is, your air gap was subject to human error.”
“Not anymore,” the colonel said. He walked over to a server rack and pointed at the hard drives it contained. Each one was held down by a tiny padlock. “Hard drives can no longer be removed from a GCS. Under any circumstances. We learn from our mistakes.”
“Good,” Norton said. “That’s what I needed to hear. We cannot afford to have even one more drone go rogue on us.” The entourage nodded and mumbled in agreement. “All right, Colonel. We’ve seen enough here. Now perhaps you’ll be good enough to show us the Predators and Reapers you keep on base.”
“Certainly, sir,” the colonel said. He led the group out of the cramped GCS and back into the hallway.
Charlotte Holman was the last one out. Nobody noticed when she slipped a tiny black box out of her jacket pocket and stuck it to the back of the server rack. The box was no bigger than a matchbook, and it didn’t have any blinking red lights on its surface, nor a tiny antenna, nor any other outward sign that would indicate it was capable of feeding information into the GCS servers through the keylogger virus.
The virus that, despite all appearances, was much more than just a harmless keylogger. The virus that, despite all the colonel’s efforts, was still present on every hard drive in the air force base. The virus he was convinced they’d erased.
The virus that Paul Moulton had written for exactly this purpose.
“Let me just turn the lights off,” the colonel said as she stepped out into the hallway. He stuck his head into the GCS and took a quick look around, then flipped the light switch. Clearly he had no idea that his entire system had just been compromised.
The two of them worked in silence.
It took a long time to dig the grave. Chapel could barely bend over, the bandage around his midriff constricting every time he tried. Wilkes didn’t seem to have his heart in the job, though he clearly didn’t want Chapel to think he was a shirker.
It didn’t help that neither of them had a shovel. There was a trowel in the tool bag Chapel had stolen from the motel, and Wilkes had turned up a hoe from an old outbuilding behind the mansion.