He watched as the drone began to descend and the features of the drab terrain became distinct – he could see individual outcroppings of rock now. The tower was clearly visible: it must have been fifty feet high, though it looked taller, looming out of the flat sea of sandy gravel bed. It had been put up by a squad of US marines the month before.
‘How’s it going, Lieutenant?’
Cottinger turned to find Galsworthy standing behind his chair. ‘Okay, sir. We’ll be simulating firing in about two minutes.’
‘Okey-dokey,’ he said, and walked away. Galsworthy was pretty relaxed today, thought Cottinger, but then they’d now had days of these exercises without a hitch.
He noticed that the drone had speeded up slightly, and the tower was getting alarmingly big on the screen. It was a simple affair of steel piping, put up purely for the purposes of the exercise.
‘Reduce speed to eighty miles per hour.’
To his surprise the drone accelerated instead, surging to 150 m.p.h. according to his console. ‘Reduce speed to eighty miles per hour,’ Cottinger repeated, his voice rising. He looked at the altimeter dial on the console and saw the drone was also too low – it had descended to three hundred feet and falling. On the screen below the ground was whizzing past in a blur.
‘What’s the matter, Lieutenant?’ Colonel Galsworthy was suddenly back behind him.
Cottinger pointed to the screen. ‘It’s going way too fast.’
‘Well, tell it to slow down,’ Galsworthy said, sounding edgy.
‘I have, sir.’ He leaned forward towards the microphone on the panel at the front of his desk. ‘Reduce speed. Eighty miles per hour.’
By now the drone was flying at close to 200 m.p.h., and the tower loomed less than a mile away. Looking at the altimeter, Cottinger saw the drone was down to fifty feet; on the screen its nose looked to be level with the top of the tower.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Galsworthy exclaimed. ‘What is it doing?’
‘Ascend to five hundred feet,’ Cottinger shouted. Then, forgetting his carefully learned commands, ‘Get up, get up, get up!’ he shouted. He’d left his chair now and was standing up, staring at the monitor, sweat standing out on his brow as the drone hurtled towards the tower. Would it clear it? ‘Ascend to five hundred feet,’ he tried again, but there was no response.
He clenched both fists and waited tensely as the drone narrowed in on the tower. Closer and closer – he closed his eyes for a second. And then suddenly, as the screen filled with an image of steel piping tied together like metal latticework, his terminal screen went blank.
‘What the hell!’ shouted Galsworthy.
Cottinger ignored him and, grabbing his keyboard, typed in a series of commands. The terminal screen refreshed, and a satellite view of Oman filled the screen – nothing came from the drone. The satellite camera zoomed, gradually magnifying. A dark smear appeared in the centre of the screen and grew in size as the camera zeroed in. The smear was an ascending trail of wispy smoke and through it, as the magnification increased, Cottinger could glimpse a tangled mess of steel on the ground where seconds before the tower had stood. Nearby a fire was blazing; he could make out the skeletal remains of the drone burning on the desert floor.
Galsworthy cursed loudly. ‘What happened?’ he demanded.
Cottinger stared at the smouldering wreckage on his screen. He knew the drone was expected to take charge of itself one day, but this had come a lot earlier than expected.
‘Well, sir, how can I put it?’ he said at last. ‘It looks as if our drone just committed suicide.’
Chapter 41
This time Bokus called on Fane, who must have alerted Liz Carlyle as she was there when the American arrived, standing by the window, looking down at the Thames at high tide. Though Bokus hadn’t asked for her to be there, he was glad she was; he could get the bad news over in one fell swoop.
‘Thanks for seeing me,’ he said as they sat down in the corner, round a table which Fane claimed had belonged to his great-grandfather. Trust him to bring his family heirlooms to work, thought Bokus sourly. Fane’s office was much smaller than his at Grosvenor Square, yet there was something undeniably impressive about it. Its elegant furniture and expensive curtains seemed to say that you didn’t need an office the size of a tennis court to show your status. It made Bokus wonder grudgingly if there wasn’t something to the British liking for understatement.
‘You said it was important,’ said Fane, going straight to the point without the usual small talk.
Bokus was sweating, slightly nervous about the news he was about to break.
He took a deep breath. ‘Operation Clarity has had a bit of a setback and it’s been temporarily suspended.’
‘What setback?’ asked Liz Carlyle. ‘We’ve heard nothing.’
‘It was in Oman. That’s where they’ve been running trials on the new control system. We’ve lost one.’
‘Lost one?’ she asked incredulously.
Bokus nodded.
‘What happened?’ Fane said, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward in his chair.
‘Nobody knows for sure. It seems one minute the test drone was flying along just fine, being directed by the voice commands, then all of a sudden it went nose down into a target it was meant to photograph. Like a dog deciding to ignore its master’s voice.’ Bokus smiled weakly, but neither Liz nor Fane smiled back. ‘So it seems you two were right to think we have a problem.’
‘Are they sure it was external interference?’ asked Fane. ‘You know, Andy, these technological marvels are so beyond the ken of us mere mortals that we sometimes forget they can foul up in the same way people do. ‘‘To err is human’’ and all that sort of thing, but the worst mistakes in my view are technical.’
Bokus shook his head regretfully. ‘It would be nice to think so, but Langley’s told me there was unauthorised intervention in the commands sent to the drone. Don’t ask me for the technical detail, but they think the Air Force commands were somehow overlaid with contradictory ones. The drone didn’t know which set to believe, so it pretty much said “what the hell”, and looked for the nearest exit sign. It’s made them look back at another glitch which they’d previously put down to a technical malfunction.’
Fane asked, ‘Could this sabotage have come from some other source? I mean, how do you know it’s connected to Operation Clarity?’
‘Unfortunately, Clarity’s the only place it could have come from. To overlay the legitimate orders, the bogus ones would have to unravel their encryption, and then duplicate it themselves. To do that they’d have to go to the source of the encryption code. That’s your MOD project.’
‘Bugger,’ said Fane, and sat further forward in his chair, crossing his arms.
‘So we need to find this mole right away,’ said Liz. ‘Has Langley come back to you about Park Woo-jin?’
‘Yes,’ said Bokus, wondering if he should mention his source Ujin Wong. Better not, he decided. They’d met again briefly in a pub near Victoria, and Wong had told him he could find nothing at all suspicious about the programmer Park Woo-jin. ‘But I’m sure it’s not Park. They’ve gone through the original vetting, and checked with the Koreans as well. Both are certain he’s clean.’
‘Well, that’s obviously not true,’ said Liz, a split second before Fane angrily said, ‘Balls.’
‘What makes you so sure?’ asked Bokus crossly.
Liz snapped, ‘We’ve had surveillance on Park Woo-jin for the last ten days. He made a drop in St James’s Park on his way to work. It was crystal clear. Either your people aren’t looking hard enough, or the Koreans are pulling the wool.’