At first it appeared to be just bad luck, but as time went on, many were sure the Chinese had someone working in Beijing Station.
Adam, the one-man band, had always played his cards close to his vest. It came with being a NOC. But now he really was operating out on his own. He sent Langley as little cable traffic as possible and had no communication whatsoever with either Beijing Station or the CIA field officers at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong.
No, Adam would sit on his discovery of Zha Shu Hai, and he would find out on his own what this guy was doing here.
He just wished he had a little help. Being a one-man band made for long hours and frustrating setbacks.
That said, it was a hell of a lot better than getting burned.
TWENTY-SIX
It might come as a surprise to many of the patrons of the Indian Springs Casino on Nevada’s Route 95 to know that America’s most distant and most secret wars are fought from a cluster of single-wide trailers a little more than a half-mile from the blackjack tables.
In the Mojave Desert northwest of Las Vegas, the runways, taxiways, hangars, and other structures of Creech Air Force Base serve as home to the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, the only wing dedicated to unmanned aircraft. From here, within sight of the Indian Springs Casino, pilots and sensor operators fly drones over denied territory in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.
Drone pilots don’t climb into a cockpit for takeoff; instead they enter their ground-control station, a thirty-foot-by-eight-foot trailer in a parking lot on the grounds at Creech. Detractors, often “real” pilots, refer to the 432nd as the Chair Force, but even though the men and women of Creech are some 7,500 miles from the battle space over which their aircraft fly, with their state-of-the-art computers, cameras, and satellite control systems they are as connected to the action as any fighter pilot looking out a canopy.
Major Bryce Reynolds was the pilot of Cyclops 04, and Captain Calvin Pratt served as the aircraft’s sensor operator. While Reynolds and Pratt sat comfortably at the far end of their ground-control station, their drone, an MQ-9 Reaper, flew just inside the Pakistani border, twenty thousand feet over Baluchistan.
A few feet behind the pilot and sensor-operator seats in the GCS was master control, a lieutenant colonel overseeing the Reaper’s mission, coordinating with units in the Afghanistan theater, the UAV’s physical base at Bagram in Afghanistan, and intelligence operatives monitoring the flight in both hemispheres.
Though this evening’s flight was designated reconnaissance and not a hunter/killer mission, the Reaper’s wings carried a full weapons loadout, four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs. Reconnaissance flights often came upon targets of opportunity, and Cyclops 04 was ready to wreak destruction, should the need arise.
Reynolds and Pratt were three hours into their six-hour mission, monitoring ground traffic on Pakistan’s National Highway N-50 near Muslim Bagh, when the flight’s master controller voice came over their headsets.
“Pilot, MC. Proceed to the next waypoint.”
“MC, pilot, roger,” Reynolds said, and he tilted the joystick to the left to give Cyclops 04 twenty degrees of bank, then looked down to take a sip of his coffee. When he glanced back up he expected to see his monitor displaying the downward-looking infrared camera indicating a bank to the west.
But the monitor showed the vehicle was continuing its straight path.
He looked at the attitude indicator to check this, and saw the wings were level. He knew he did not have the autopilot engaged, but he checked again.
No.
Major Reynolds pushed the stick a little harder, but none of the relevant displays responded.
He tried banking to the right now, but still there was no response from the bird.
“MC, pilot. I’ve got a dead stick here. Not getting any positive reaction. I think we’ve got a lost link.”
“MC copies, understood Cyclops 04 has gone stupid.” Gone stupid was a term UAV pilots used to indicate the platform was no longer responding to operator commands. It happened sometimes, but it was a rare enough occurrence to warrant immediate attention from the base’s technicians.
Sensor operator Captain Pratt, seated on Reynolds’s right, said, “Sensor confirms. I’m not getting any response from the UAV.”
“Roger,” said master control. “Wait one. We’ll troubleshoot.”
While Reynolds watched his aircraft fly due north, the heading he had given the Reaper several minutes earlier, he hoped to hear the MC report back that they had identified some glitch in the software or the sat link. In the meantime, there was nothing he could do but watch the screens in front of him, as uninhabited rocky hills passed by twenty thousand feet under his drone.
The Reaper software contained an important fail-safe that the pilot in the GCS expected to see initiated in the next few moments if the technicians were unable to get the UAV back online. Once Cyclops 04 went a certain amount of time with a broken link to the GCS, it would execute an autopilot landing sequence that would send the vehicle to a predetermined rally point and put it safely on the ground.
After a few more minutes of flying untethered to the GCS and unsuccessful attempts by technicians to find what was going on with the Linux-based software, Reynolds saw the attitude indicator move. The starboard wing lifted above the artificial horizon, and the port wing dropped below it.
But the emergency autopilot landing fail-safe had not kicked in. The drone was making a course correction.
Major Reynolds let go of the joystick completely to confirm he was not affecting the Reaper accidentally. The wings continued to tilt; all camera displays showed the vehicle was turning to the east.
The UAV was banking at twenty-five degrees.
Captain Pratt, the sensor operator, asked softly, “Bryce, is that you?”
“Uh… negative. That is not my input. Pilot, MC, Cyclops 04 just altered course.” As he finished his transmission he saw the wings level out. “Now it’s holding level at zero-two-five degrees. Altitude and speed unchanged.”
“Uh… repeat last?”
“Pilot, MC. Cyclops flight is doing its own thing here.”
A moment after this, Major Reynolds saw that the speed of Cyclops 04 was ticking up quickly.
“Pilot, MC. Ground speed just went up to one-forty, one-fifty… one-sixty-five knots.”
While a nonresponsive aircraft that had temporarily “gone stupid” was not unheard of, a UAV executing its own turns and increasing speed without controller input was something never seen before by the operators in the GCS or any of the technicians in communication with them.
For the next several minutes the pilot, the sensor operator, and the MC worked quickly and professionally but with a growing level of concern. They cycled through programs on multiple screens, clearing out autopilot commands and waypoint coordinates and loitering information, all trying to clear some glitch command that had caused their armed aircraft to stray off course.
Their monitors showed the infrared image on the ground as the UAV proceeded to the east. None of their attempts to retake control had worked.
“Pilot, MC. Tell me we’ve got someone working on this?”
“Roger that. We’ve… we’re trying to reestablish link. We’ve established comms with General Atomics, and they are troubleshooting.”
The UAV made several more speed and course corrections as it neared the border with Afghanistan.
Sensor Operator Cal Pratt was the first man at Creech AFB to say aloud what everyone aware of the situation was thinking. “This isn’t a software glitch. Somebody’s hacked the PSL.” The primary satellite link was the satellite umbilical cord that sent messages from Creech to the Reaper. It was — theoretically, at least — impossible to disrupt and take over, but there was no other explanation anyone on the ground could come up with for what was happening to the UAV 7,500 miles away.