McKinney eyed him suspiciously. “What’s your rank?”
“What does it matter?”
“I want to know who I’m dealing with.”
“I’m a master sergeant.”
“They sent a sergeant? I would have thought that tracking down the drones attacking America would have rated at least a lieutenant.”
“What is this, a class thing?”
“No, but it occurs to me that officers go to officer training school, where they presumably learn how to manage groups of people and complex operations—where they learn ethics. I mean, I study bugs, and I went to school for half my life.”
“For your information, I gave up all possibility of promotion to serve in this unit. Everyone in my unit is a sergeant—and we’ll stay sergeants our entire career.”
She was confused.
“Commissioned officers receive their commission from the Congress. That means the civilian government is answerable for their conduct. Noncommissioned officers answer only to the military high command. Our rank has to do with government exposure.”
“Meaning you skip around the globe breaking laws, and they’ll disown you if you’re caught.”
“Meaning I’m the guy who has to solve problems whether there’s an international legal framework for them or not. And for drones, there is not.”
McKinney felt convinced he was telling the truth, if only because the answer made her mad. “No uniforms, apparently.”
“Blending in is what we do.”
“Did it ever occur to you that the presence of American units like yours in foreign countries is precisely what’s causing these drone attacks against us?”
“And you really think the world would be a peaceful place if we left it alone?”
“I wasn’t arguing that the world is filled with unicorns and rainbows. I’ve spent a decade in the Third World. I’m no stranger to corruption and lawlessness in places like Africa. In fact, I’m godmother to a boy whose father was murdered by ivory poachers. So, I get that civil society needs to be defended by people with guns—but those people cannot be above the law. And you just described to me why you’re a sergeant—in order to better skirt international laws.”
“Okay. You don’t trust your government. But if you think drones in American hands are frightening, imagine them controlled by North Korea, or Burma, or narco-traffickers, or Dominionists, or AT&T. If you want to lobby for some international legal framework for these machines,more power to you—but until you civilians sort this shit out, I and my team have to deal with it. It’s not a fucking theory with me, okay? I’m concerned about whether humans will be combatants on future battlefields, or just targets. It matters a whole goddamned lot to me, maybe even more than it does to you, so I’d appreciate you setting aside your objections and pitching the fuck in.”
McKinney was taken aback. She had apparently managed to get under his skin. Finally. She nodded. “All right. Okay. Just laying my cards on the table.”
“Thank you.”
Foxy, the wild-haired Albanian man with the heavy metal T-shirt, ducked his head into the office. “Knock, knock. Sorry to interrupt the high velocity data exchange, but you need to see this, Odin.”
“What is it?”
“Cable news. They found something in Pakistan.”
“What?”
“Drones.”
“Goddammit.”
Odin cast a look to McKinney, and then nodded. “No time like the present, Professor.”
They headed toward the door.
Odin gestured to the Albanian soldier. “Professor, this is Foxy, my two-IC. If you need anything, and I’m not available, you talk to him.”
Foxy extended a calloused hand. “Pleased to meet you, Professor. Wish it was under better circumstances.”
“You and me both.”
Odin led them down a tiled institutional hallway. They soon arrived at an austere recreation room at the end of the deserted office wing. There, on sturdy sofas, sat Mooch, Hoov, and the woman she’d seen earlier wearing a maroon hijab and a chocolate brown abaya. There was also a Caucasian man, short and stocky, with a thick reddish-brown beard—possibly Scotch-Irish. The group was staring at a television bolted at an angle to the drop ceiling. The woman was leaning back with her sandaled feet up on a coffee table. She nodded to McKinney.
McKinney nodded back.
When Odin entered everyone stood, but all eyes were still glued to the television, where an American cable news channel was showing video of a workshop filled with aircraft components—wings and fuselages. Odin studied the screen.
Foxy spoke over the anchor’s voice. “Found a workshop in good ol’ Karachi. Reverse-engineering operation for American drone wreckage. The story is that whoever ran it was behind the attack in Karbala.”
“Who found it?” Odin was watching the screen impassively.
“Pakistani military. Maybe ISI. They tipped off CIA.” Foxy pointed at the rough, leaked video footage. “There’s a Predator tail. A few pieces of Reapers in the back.”
Odin turned to him. “I call bullshit.”
Foxy nodded. “No doubt.”
McKinney looked at him with surprise. “Why do you think it’s fake?”
“Too perfect. One of our drones commits an atrocity, and a week later we find a barnful of evidence that we’ve been framed by insurgents?” Odin shook his head, accentuating the length of his beard. “I’d say it’s an influence operation. Even if it’s true, most people abroad won’t believe it. Foxy, work your connections at CIA. Try to find out who’s hypnotizing the chickens. In the meantime, we proceed under the supposition it’s an IO focused at a domestic audience.”
Foxy frowned. “What if it’s the real deal? Shouldn’t we send someone to examine the site?”
“Too risky. They’ll be closely watching whoever goes there. If the same extremely careful people carrying out the drone attacks Stateside are behind the Karbala attack, then they probably intended us to find this orgy of evidence—which means it’s worse than useless; it’s a deception. And if they weren’t behind Karbala, then this has no bearing on our mission.”
Above them a Ford pickup truck commercial had come on, depicting trucks towing improbable loads up improbable inclines in improbable ways.
Odin made a slashing gesture across his throat, and someone muted the television. He placed his hand on McKinney’s shoulder. “Everyone. Cornell University professor Linda McKinney is now a member of this team. You are to defend her with your lives. From this point onward, you will refer to her as Expert Six or simply as ‘Professor.’ Is that understood?”
The team members nodded.
“Professor, this is my team. You’ve already met Foxy.” He pointed to the woman in the maroon hijab. “Ripper. Human intel. Pay no attention to her outfit. She’s about as Muslim as a Vegas casino.” He pointed at the Eurasian kid who worked the electronics board on the plane. “This is Hoov. Signals intelligence—our knob turner.”
Hoov displayed mild impatience. “He means commo—I trained with the 704th—”
“Hoov, this isn’t your goddamned high school reunion.”
Hoov nodded and closed his mouth.
Odin gestured next to the handsome Asian Indian man whom McKinney recognized as being the one with the stethoscope—and who had cut her loose on the plane. “Mooch, team surgeon.”
McKinney and he exchanged polite nods.
Odin now pointed to the red-bearded man she hadn’t seen on the plane. “And this is Tin Man. Human intel.”
Odin turned to McKinney. “We’ll hook up Stateside with the last two team members, Troll and Smokey. They handle signals and human intel.” He grabbed the television remote and killed the TV. “All right, listen up. I want you all ready to ship out the moment the tail numbers on the C-37 have been repainted.” He looked at his watch. “Make good use of the time en route to examine every bit of intel we got from last night’s operation. I want detailed reports and recommendations when I
get back.”
McKinney glanced at the others, then at Odin. “You’re not heading back to the U.S.?”
Odin shook his head. “Hoov and I will catch up with you all later. There’s somewhere I need to go first.”
CHAPTER 11
Eye in the Sky
Kinshasa and Brazzaville were the quintessential Third World cities of the twenty-first century. Large—with a combined population around thirteen million—and growing rapidly, they teemed with young men and guns. As the capitals of neighboring nations, they occupied opposite banks of the Congo River but nonetheless formed a single metropolitan area. They were essentially Africa’s liver—circulating the population of the riverine interior through a pitiless Darwinian filter.
Without an urban plan sprawling shantytowns accreted around the colonial and corporate buildings in the heart of downtown. These shantytowns were some of the most crime-ridden and dangerous places in all of Africa.
The common refrain from the West was that only economic development and modernization could address such problems, but Odin knew that the modern world itself was what made this region of Africa so violent. That was because the Democratic Republic of the Congo contained nearly eighty percent of the world’s supply of coltan—the mineral of the information age. Coltan was the industrial name for columbite–tantalite, a dull black metallic mineral from which the elements niobium and tantalum were extracted. The tantalum from coltan was used to manufacture electronic capacitors, which were needed to make cell phones, DVD players, video game systems, and computers. And at one hundred U.S. dollars per pound on the street, coltan had financed a civil war that since 1998 had killed an estimated five and a half million people. These were World War II–level casualties.
But the information age was selective about its information, and the same industrial world that fueled the conflict barely registered this war’s existence. The U.S. and British only grew interested when the Congolese government attempted to nationalize the coltan mines—at which point the war became an intolerable human crisis. It now simmered in dozens of local embers, ready to flare up the moment the opportunity arose. Alternately stoking and dousing those embers was what would keep local governments disorganized and the cheap coltan flowing.
There were Westerners who looked with concern at the suffering of burgeoning Third World populations, but Odin knew that Mother Nature wasn’t the nurturing type. In fact, she might view the stable populations of the West as a failure—a rebellion against primordial order. Nature wanted only one thing: for creatures to produce viable offspring. After that, you were genetically dead. Nature had no more use for you. Your extended lifespan, your biography, your Hummel figurine collection, were all just taking up space. By some cosmic joke, nearly the entire scope of human experience was at odds with the biological world.
So by Nature’s measure both Kinshasa and Brazzaville were a resounding success. Happiness and contentment weren’t in great supply, but there were lots of young people, eager to lay the groundwork for another generation. The rage here was of a type Odin had seen in all the shantytowns and slums of the world: Young men without prospects were not happy about their situation. In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat—and some smartass had sold them guns.
This was the root of most conflict in the world—people asserting their will to survive, to flourish, and to procreate. Evil had nothing to do with it. And although he’d worked these hidden conflicts for years, Odin knew that most fighting was just a symptom of another problem: too many people competing for limited resources. And yet fighting wouldn’t resolve this either. Rwanda, for example, was still the most densely populated country in sub-Saharan Africa even after the genocide. No, the best way he knew of to defuse these conflicts was to provide opportunities and education to women. Independence. Once that took, population growth would ebb, and actual plans could be made for the future.
This was not a methodology favored by weapons manufacturers.
Odin stood at the visitors’ railing and studied a glowing constellation of high-definition screens arrayed around the control room. Sprawling shantytowns simmered below the surveillance platforms. A populace unaware that they were the test subjects for a grand experiment.
“Have you ever seen EITS in action, Master Sergeant?”
“I have not, General.”
A uniformed African-American JSOC brigadier general stood in the center of the control room as green-badge contractors in shirtsleeves manned most of the workstations in cubicles around him. The general took a sip from a white al-Qaeda–branded coffee mug. “Welcome to Stuttgart. What you’re looking at is nothing less than the future of low-intensity conflict management.”
“I appreciate you taking time for me, sir.”
“Always happy to assist The Activity.” He looked up at the screens lining the walls. “You might occupy a different command silo, but our systems could be a tremendous help in your group’s line of work.” The general reached out and straightened the visitor’s badge on Odin’s lanyard. It said merely Visitor.
“I’m eager to see what they can do, sir.”
The general took another sip from his al-Qaeda mug.
Odin had seen these mugs many times before in command centers. They were much sought after by the REMF crowd. Al-Qaeda was, after all, mostly a media organization—one with a Web presence that would put Ashton Kutcher to shame. They rolled out their own branded characters and products to jihadists worldwide on a regular basis. They even had professional-looking magazines and journals, along with podcast reality shows, making jihadi documentaries with Western video-editing software. Both sides could claim it as ironic with entirely different emphasis. If even terrorists ran franchise operations, maybe there was some common ground, after all.
Odin glanced up again at the array of high-definition screens and across the rows of control board operators. Dozens of people manning supporting systems. “I was told this is a test bed—a prototype—but it looks operational.”
“In a limited geographical zone, it is. This is a joint public-private SAP. Major private sector partners helped build this operations center to showcase what a truly unified twenty-first-century command looks like. We think this technology has a tremendous future.”
“We, sir?”
“It’s difficult not to take a proprietary interest. My staff and I have contributed time and effort to make sure this system meets real-world operational requirements.”
Odin actually knew quite a bit about the systems integrated into EITS, such as the Gorgon Stare, along with all the other systems that defense contractors were developing: automated 3-D mapping of Third World cities, building by building; as well as ARGUS-IR, the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Infrared system. They were networked, unmanned suborbital camera-and-narrow-aperture-radar platforms—airborne optics tiling together live, highly detailed imagery of a broad swath of terrain in real time. A persistent unblinking eye creating a digital, three-dimensional model of reality as it happened.
Odin nodded up at the main screen—a broad view of the smoke-shrouded shantytowns of Brazzaville. He’d run ops there numerous times in the past decade. “What are we looking at?”
“You don’t recognize it?”
“After a while all these shit-holes look alike, sir.”
The general raised an eyebrow. “The location isn’t important. It’s what the systems can do that’s important. Compared with a platform like Gorgon Stare, the imagery from a Predator drone is like taking Polaroid pictures through a goddamned straw. We can zoom in on any portion of a vast battle space—each airborne asset has one hundred and sixty-five individually controlled high-resolution cameras. Multiple assets can be networked to programmatically tile together contiguous, high-resolution surveillance of broad swaths of terrain in real time. Synthetic aperture radar allows us to see through both clouds and darkness. This is an all-seeing eye, Master
Sergeant, permanently recording all activity below from a height of sixty thousand feet—well above the weapon range of these populations.”
Odin nodded. No doubt the names from Greek mythology encouraged the impression of an unassailable Mount Olympus. “The technology, was it developed in the States or—”
“International partnership, but in full accordance with DOD EAR, ITAR, and OFAC export control requirements. Our international partners are just as eager to see counterterrorism operations succeed under every regional command.”
“And these are live images.”
“Live. Everything you see on the main screen is live, real world. But live imagery is the least of it.” The general moved over to a workstation manned by a uniformed JSOC first lieutenant wearing a headset—a strapping blond kid with clear skin and good posture. “Gartner, replay that truck sequence in sector H-Six we were looking at.”
The lieutenant immediately paused the imagery on his screen and tapped in some coordinates.
The general watched intently but spoke to Odin. “The critical difference of EITS over previous surveillance systems is that this high-resolution video imagery is retained over time in a data cloud, allowing analysts to ‘rewind’ the entire battle space—to see what might have taken place in a given locale over time.”
As Odin watched the nearby monitor, the image zoomed in to a tiny corner in the vast shantytown. People were walking past, but then they stopped in midstride. The video rapidly began to rewind, people and vehicles moving backward, until a faded red Toyota pickup moved into frame. The image then halted and began to play forward again, showing several armed men loading crates onto the truck bed.
Lieutenant Gartner was clearly used to doing demos with the general, because he was already doing what the general was about to ask.
“We can move in for a close-up of faces . . .”
The screen had already done so.
“. . . and we can even rotate the view.”
The image was already circling around to the other side of the men—not in a smooth pan, but in fifteen-degree leaps of POV.