Both men were covered in sweat, and their hands shook.
In the end, eight American soldiers and forty-one Afghanis were killed in the attack.
An Air Force colonel at the Pentagon stood in front of the seventy-two-inch monitor that had, up until the screen went black two minutes earlier, displayed the entire event.
“Suggest we demo in place,” he said.
He was asking his higher-ups for permission to send a second UAV into the area to launch enough munitions onto the downed UAV to demolish it where it lay, destroying every shred of evidence that it was an American drone. With a little luck — and with a lot of Hellfire missiles — the UAV might just cease to exist completely.
There were expressions of agreement throughout the room, though many in attendance remained silent. There were protocols in place for destroying a UAV that crashed over the border in Al-Qaeda country so that they could keep its secrets hidden and remove the enemy’s propaganda value.
Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess sat at the end of the long table. He tapped his pen on a legal pad in front of him while he thought. When the beating of the pen stopped, he asked, “Colonel, what assurances can you give me that the follow-up UAV will not be hijacked and put down right alongside Cyclops 04 or, worse, fly over the border and attack blue forces.”
The colonel looked at SecDef, and then he shook his head. “Frankly, sir, until we know more about what just happened, I can’t give you any assurances whatsoever.”
Burgess said, “Then let’s save our drones while we still have some left.”
The colonel nodded. He didn’t like SecDef’s sarcasm, but the man’s logic was solid.
“Yes, sir.”
SecDef had been spending the past half-hour conferring with admirals, generals, colonels, CIA execs, and the White House. But of all his communications since this rapid crisis had begun, his most informative conversation had been with a General Atomics technician who happened to be in the Pentagon at the time and had been rushed into a five-minute meeting with SecDef before being put in a holding area, awaiting further consultations. When the scope of the crisis was explained to him he declared, in terms forceful enough to get his point across, that however the hacking of the UAV had been accomplished, it would be dangerous to presume that there were any technological limitations to the geographical reach of the perpetrator. No one in the military or at General Atomics could say, at this early stage, that an operator who takes control of a drone in Pakistan could not also take control of a U.S. drone flying over the Mexican/American border or a drone flying in Southeast Asia or in Africa.
Secretary of Defense Burgess used this information when he announced to the room, “We don’t know where the attacker is, or what his access points are into our network. Therefore I am ordering, at this moment, a full ground stop of all Reaper drones.”
A colonel involved with UAV operations raised his hand. “Sir. We do not know if the access point is limited to the Reaper system and fleet. It may well be that someone with the capability we just witnessed might have the ability to hack into the other UAV frames.”
SecDef had thought about this. He stood, grabbed his suit coat from the back of his chair, and slipped it on. “For now, just the Reaper. Between us and CIA and Homeland Security we have, what? A hundred drone ops running at any one time?” He looked to a subordinate. “I need that number for POTUS.”
The woman nodded and rushed out of the room.
Burgess continued, “There are a hell of a lot of soldiers, border patrol, and others who owe their safety to the situational awareness those UAVs provide. I’m heading over to the White House and will talk it over with the President. I will give him both sides of the argument on this, and he’ll make the call as to whether or not we shut down all UAVs worldwide until we figure out what this… until we figure out what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, I need information. I need to know who, how, and why. This incident is going to be an ugly mess for all of us, but if we can’t answer those three questions asap then it’s only going to get uglier and last longer. If you and your people are not working on getting me answers to those three questions, then I don’t want you bothering me or my people.”
There was a crisp round of Yes, sirs from the room, and Bob Burgess left, an entourage of suits and uniforms moving out behind him.
In the end, President of the United States Jack Ryan did not have time to decide whether or not it was necessary to shut down all of the UAVs in the U.S. military and intelligence. As the secretary of defense’s black Suburban pulled through the White House gates one hour after the crash of the Reaper in Pakistan, a massive Global Hawk drone, the largest unmanned vehicle in the U.S. inventory, lost contact with its flight crew while flying at sixty thousand feet off the coast of Ethiopia.
It was another hijacking — this became clear as the phantom pilot disengaged the autopilot and began making gentle adjustments to the pitch and roll of the aircraft, as if testing out his control of the big machine.
The men and women watching the feed recognized quickly that either the phantom pilot of this incident was not as experienced as the one who expertly operated the Reaper over eastern Afghanistan, or else it was the same pilot, but his familiarity with this larger and more complex airframe was not as good. For whichever reason, within moments of the hijacking the Global Hawk began to lose control. Systems were shut off incorrectly and restarted out of sequence, and any chance to right the aircraft was lost while it was still several miles in the air.
It crashed in the Gulf of Aden like a piano falling from the sky.
This was seen, by virtually everyone cleared to know about it at all, as a message from the hackers. Your entire unmanned fleet is compromised. Continue to operate your drones at your peril.
TWENTY-SEVEN
CIA officer Adam Yao was dressed in a black baseball cap, a white T-shirt, and dirty blue jeans. He looked like most every other male his age in Mong Kok, and he moved through the street crowds like a man who lived here in the lower-income neighborhood, not like he lived in Soho Central, one of the ritziest parts of Hong Kong. He was playing the role of a local merchant coming to get the mail for his shop, like any one of hundreds of other men in and out of the Kwong Wa Street post office.
Of course he had no shop, and he had no address in Mong Kok, which also meant he had no mail at Kwong Wa. In truth he was there to pick the lock of Zha Shu Hai’s P.O. box and to get a look at the young man’s mail.
The post office was crowded; it was shoulder to shoulder coming through the door. Adam elected to arrive just before noon, during the busiest part of the day here in always congested Mong Kok, hoping to use the chaos to his advantage.
Adam had always operated in the field with a simple credo: “Sell it.” Whatever he was doing, whether he was playing the part of a homeless person or a high-flying young trader on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Adam embraced his role totally. It allowed him to get into and out of buildings without proper credentials, to walk right past Triad gunmen without them giving him a second glance, and it meant secretaries in line for noodles and tea on their lunch break might well chat about work within earshot of Adam without knowing, allowing him to learn more about a company and its secrets during lunch hour than he would by breaking into the company over the weekend and rummaging through file cabinets.
Adam was an actor, a con man, a spy.
And he was selling it now. He had a set of lock picks in his hand, and he pushed into the post office, walked directly up to Zha Shu Hai’s P.O. box, and knelt down. With men and women within inches of him on both sides, no one paid an instant’s attention to him.