World War Drone Read online

“There are endless possibilities. You could have an agent in a city. Any city. Lebanon. Baghdad. Kabul. Wherever. And that one agent could operate a swarm of drones circling the city.”

  “A swarm?”

  “It’s getting to the point now where each pilot is in command of multiple drones at any given time. They call it a swarm. He can control one and leave each of the others in a holding pattern. Use the payload. Next.”

  I took another swig of whiskey and marveled at how it dulled the specific details of my memory and yet heightened other parts. The emotions. Maybe this is why my brother was an alcoholic.

  The reporter continued asking questions about the use of swarms. How many drones in a swarm? Are they used for surveillance? Ground support?

  “As many drones as you want,” I said. “And all of the above.”

  I don’t know why he was asking me questions that he already knew the answer to. Maybe he was just finding out how much I knew, how much Melanie had told me. How screwed they were. How screwed everyone was.

  “And you think it’s this new technology, the swarm… that’s responsible for the lost drones?”

  He brought up the lost drones without prompting. I was too drunk to notice.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “But I do know they rushed the new technology through. It was heavily automated. There was a weakness in the system. With the computer program. The code. I’m not sure of the specifics. The system was compromised. It was hacked. In one day they lost over a hundred UAV’s.”

  Melanie had told me that they had lost almost half the fleet in the span of a week. She had told me that the US drone fleet had been crippled. I didn’t tell the Spymaster/reporter this. I didn’t tell him because mostly I didn’t believe it.

  Half the fleet? No way.

  “How?” he asked. “How was the system compromised?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Sabotage?”

  “Possibly. Probably.”

  “That’s quite an allegation.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “How do you know this information? Do you have any solid evidence?”

  “I spoke with a pilot. She was in the new program. She was selected to test the new ‘swarm’ system.”

  He checked his notes. “Melanie Smith.”

  I turned away from the view of the Bellagio fountain and stared at the reporter. My vision was blurry; everything took a few seconds to come into focus. “How do you know her name?”

  I asked this question because at this point I was still too drunk and too stupid to figure out who this guy really was.

  I feel like such an idiot. It’s times like this I wish my brother were around. We haven’t spoken in a while. I read something, a Buddhist theory about death, or maybe it was a Hindu belief… I can’t remember, but basically the theory, the belief, states that when someone leaves your life, moves away, or becomes distant, when you’re no longer in contact with that person, it’s a kind of death.

  I don’t know why this matters. But yeah, I wish he was here looking out for me. Son of a bitch is a genuine, certified genius. He would’ve seen right through this guy’s charade in an instant. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t have. The Spymaster was damn convincing as John the Reporter.

  He looked down at his notes again. “She’s also been in contact with us,” he said, lying to me like an award winning, Oscar winning actor. “She has requested anonymity. But given the circumstances, your relationship, I figured it would be better if you guys knew you were both in this together.”

  I believed everything he said.

  And at that moment the room began to spin. I hadn’t seen Melanie in over a month. And before that, it was longer. Much longer. We had drifted apart. We had been broken, unable to be fixed. Unable to fix each other.

  “What did she say?” I asked. “Did she mention me?”

  There was desperation in my voice.

  “Yes. But I’d rather not get into specifics until I’ve spoken with her. I understand you two used to be close?”

  “Yeah. We were… ah…” I paused thinking of the right words. Boyfriend and girlfriend didn’t seem to cut it. ‘Engaged to be engaged’ sounded trivial. I felt the diamond ring in my pocket. Felt its weight. “Yeah. We were close.”

  The reporter cleared his throat and checked his notepad again. “Okay, I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Why don’t we start at the beginning?”

  Outside, a powerful jet stream of water shot into the night sky, reaching almost as high as the suite. The thirty-third floor. A split second later the sound reached us. The stream of water seemed to hang frozen in the air before falling back towards the pool of the fountain.

  “I understand you’ve only agreed to do this interview under the cover of anonymity,” John the reporter said. “But I think it would be good to establish your experiences as a drone pilot.”

  I knew this was coming. I knew it would be hard to talk about. But I had to get through it. My experiences. My first shot. The endless hours of watching and spying. I guess the one good thing about this fake interview was it gave me a chance to get everything off my chest and off my shoulders. I wouldn’t want to carry these things and the weight of these things into the afterlife.

  No way. More chance of sinking down into hell.

  So this interview, even though it was a fake interview, and this guy was lying to me and the whole thing was fucked up, it was good. There was a silver lining. It was like going to confession.

  Confessing my sins and repenting.

  Begging for forgiveness.

  I had another sip of whiskey. My mouth was numb. The liquor no longer burned.

  “Before you take a shot,” I said. “Before you fire that missile, you watch. You spend hours watching. Days. Weeks. Months. You watch these people on the other side of the world. You get to know their mannerisms, their daily routines. It’s this weird kind of distant intimacy. You know so much about their life. You know who lives together. You know the children. You know which child belongs to what parents. You get to know whole families. Whole villages. You know who is a stranger. A visiting relative. You know which houses, which families have dogs. And sometimes you know who the bad guys are. Sometimes, you see them take up arms. You see them plant and bury explosives and mines and IED’s. You see everything. And then you are ordered to attack. To strike.”

  “How does that work? What is involved with a drone strike?”

  Again, he asked the question like he didn’t even know the answer.

  “There’s a list, a procedure we follow,” I continued. “But it boils down to this. We acquire a target. An individual or a house or whatever. We lock onto the target. We use a laser guided missile. Usually an air to ground Hellfire missile. And then we fire.”

  I pictured the image because I had watched the image so many times. I am no longer capable of seeing it any other way. The point of view of the drone, of the missile. Watching the Hellfire fly towards the target.

  “You fire the missile,” I said. “And a couple of seconds later it breaks the sound barrier. This noise, the noise of the rocket propulsion is the only thing that can possibly warn the enemy, the target on the ground that they are being fired upon. Sometimes they hear it. Most of the time they don’t. The co-pilot, the sensor operator, guides the missile to the target. We watch. All the way from launch, all the way to impact. The splash.”

  “Splash?”

  “The moment the missile hits its target.”

  “Why do you watch? Why can’t you fire and forget?”

  “There’s a short flight time of the missile. Sometimes the situation on the ground changes. Sometimes you have to intervene.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean if a child walks into the area. If an innocent walks into the area. You have to intervene. We can pull the missile away. Guide it to a clear area.”

  “So you and your co-pilot are sitting in a trailer, watching the whole thing unfold?”


  “Yeah. At first it was weird. Watching the conflict on the ground from an air conditioned trailer on the other side of the world. But you get used to it.”

  “I’ve heard people describe it like a video game?”

  “No. It’s not. You’re watching these people. You hold these people’s lives in the balance. You can see them moving. Running. Running for their lives. You can hear them sometimes. You can hear the fear in their voices. It’s not a game.”

  John wrote down some more notes because I’m not sure why. He asked more questions. Really specific and relevant questions. He was good.

  “And they’re not actually drones are they?” he asked. “The word ‘drone’ is a bit of a misnomer, right?”

  “Yeah, the aircraft are not fully automated. They’re not total drones. At least the ones I piloted were not fully automated. The aircraft itself is unmanned, but there is a human remote piloting the thing via a satellite connection.”

  “Where are the pilots operating from?”

  “Most likely an Air Force base. There are a lot of drone pilots situated at Creech Air Force base here in Nevada.”

  “And they fly drones, or UAV’s that operate in war zones all over the world?”

  “Correct. Iraq. Afghanistan. Syria. Pakistan. Anywhere. All you need is a satellite link.”

  “What if you lose the satellite connection?”

  The questions were coming thick and fast. John the reporter, the Spymaster, kept up the act the whole time. He never broke character. Not once. The more I think about it, the more I realize he was indeed a master.

  “The drone will fly in a holding pattern until the connection is re-established,” I explained, trying my very best to speak in plain English, trying my best to convey the complex operating procedure of a high tech weapon. “If the connection can’t be re-established the drone will eventually return to base or its point of takeoff and land by itself in order to be refueled.”

  “It sounds fairly heavily automated.”

  “Yeah. I guess the foundations were already there for a fully automated program to come in.”

  And I think to myself, the foundations for a new war had already been laid. Just like Melanie had warned me.

  “And you think the fully automated system was a weak point?” he asked.

  “Nothing is fully automated. That’s why we don’t like the word ‘drone’. But yeah, if there is indeed a new system, the longer a UAV is flying on auto-pilot, the longer it’s following a pre-programmed code, the greater the risk for the system to be compromised. For a cyber attack.”

  “Compromised?” he asked, playing dumb. “A cyber attack?”

  “Hacked.”

  “You think there’s someone, a nation or a military or an organization out there that has the technical capabilities to hack into a US designed and operated drone?”

  He asked this question like he really wanted to know the answer, like he didn’t already know the answer. I think about this.

  And the thought terrifies me.

  They don’t know.

  They don’t know who they’re up against. They don’t know who they’re fighting. They don’t know who is responsible.

  You can’t fight a war against an enemy that doesn’t exist.

  He leant forward in his chair slightly, pen pressed into his notepad. He wanted an answer bad. He wanted a theory. He wanted something. He needed something.

  I shook my head because all I had was nothing. All I had was hearsay. He said, she said. All I had was a friend of a friend of mine type things. But I told him anyway. I said, “I think so. I think anyone who has the will, the drive, the proper motivation, could do it. They would find a way. I’ve heard the craziest stories. Borderline science fiction. Borderline crazy.”

  “Please, enlighten me,” he said. “Entertain me.”

  I took a sip of whiskey and the bottle was almost empty and I was so drunk at this point it was getting hard to talk. But I talked. “I heard this one story about a group of hackers from South Korea. Young kids. They grew up online. And I mean, they grew up online. They spent hours, like, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week inside those internet gaming cafes, playing World of Warcraft and every other game. They learnt code as a second language. Hell, they could probably write code before they could speak or walk. It’s hard to understand if you don’t come from that world. It’s a different culture. They understand better than anyone, they understand the fundamental principles of online technology. Connected technology.”

  He scribbled a note in his notepad and then asked. “So? Why would a bunch of gamers supposedly hack into a military system? There’s no motivation.”

  “Again, this is just a stupid story I heard. A myth. But the story goes that these kids were abducted by the north. Taken across the border. Held in an underground prison inside a mountain. Brainwashed. Tortured. They were turned.”

  “And now they consider the West and America an enemy?”

  “Yeah. Or so the story goes. Another rumor, another myth is out of China. Apparently half the country’s GDP was poured into a new computer system. And then they let the CIA and the NSA hack into their new system, this new super-computer. Once a connection was established they...” I trailed off because I’m not entirely sure how the rest of the story goes and I was too drunk to remember what my brother had told me and how he explained it.

  The technology is beyond me. Something about a self-replicating virus. A self aware virus.

  The reporter looked angry and sounded offended. “They what? They hacked into the NSA and the CIA?”

  “I don’t know how it would work. Like I said, it’s all science fiction to me. Maybe it was something simpler. Like someone from the inside leaking information to the outside world.”

  “Treason?”

  “Yeah, good old fashioned treason. Something like that. Maybe even if it was unintentional. The outcome, I mean. Not the act. But the outcome.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, what if some young, bright eyed, idealistic analyst decides he doesn’t agree with the NSA’s policy of spying on public citizens? What if he decides to level the playing field and release information or an algorithm or something? He does it because he thinks what he is doing is right. He thinks he is justified. But maybe the outcome of this act means something horrible. Maybe it means a drone is compromised and captured. Maybe the outcome is a reverse engineered drone in the wrong hands. Maybe the outcome is the creation of a new kind of enemy. A new kind of war.”

  I was rambling at that point. I was more conspiracy theorist than qualified informant. I was drunk and lonely and desperate and glad to have someone to talk to. Glad to have an opportunity to confess my sins before the world went to shit. Before it all ended.

  John the reporter on the other hand, he sat back in the chair. He was thinking. He was thinking hard.

  “But yeah, there were weaknesses,” I continued. “At least, that’s what Melanie thought. She thought a new kind of war was inevitable.”

  Again, there was desperation in my voice. And fear.

  I remembered Melanie sounding desperate. Angry. Alone. Afraid.

  I wonder if she had defected or committed treason. I wonder if she had released classified information to the world. The wrong hands. I will never know. But I do know that she was afraid. I clearly remember the fear in her voice.

  Even before she left my life, left for her new job.

  She was afraid.

  CHAPTER 5

  One year earlier...

  We were sitting on the hood of my pickup truck after a grueling twelve hour shift. Twelve hours of fighting a war on the other side of the world from an air conditioned trailer.

  We stepped out into the Nevada desert at sunrise. The sun was blindingly bright. The shadows it cast were long and dark.

  Melanie and I had been together for just over six months. But we didn’t want anyone to know about us. We weren’t ready to tell people. Well, I was. But I was afra
id. Afraid of what? I don’t know exactly. Losing my job? Like it mattered. Like it ever mattered.

  So we would sneak away into the desert and watch the sunrise. We would talk. It’s how we first fell in love.

  We talked.

  Drone pilots are notoriously tight lipped. No one talks. Not ever.

  But we found something in each other. A kind of trust. Something deeper.

  It was unbelievably comforting.

  And maybe ultimately it was destructive.

  I remember the end of that shift. I remember feeling numb.

  For months we had been watching and patrolling the skies in places that the US military weren’t supposed to be operating.

  We were ordered to observe and report. No contact.

  Watch. And wait.

  We were searching.

  We didn’t know it at the time but I know now. We were looking for the missing drones. We were looking for hidden bases of operations. Launch sites. Anything.

  They didn’t tell us this. Still haven’t. Like they would ever admit to it.

  But this shift, it was hours of watching. Watching for movement. Fresh footprints in the dirt.

  All of a sudden we were ordered to fire. In an instant, all hell broke loose. And Melanie couldn’t handle it any longer.

  “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” she whispered.

  Initially I didn’t know what she was talking about. Like an idiot, like a self-obsessed idiot, I thought she was talking about us. And my heart nearly exploded in my chest.

  My hand went to the pocket of my flight suit where I’d been carrying around a diamond ring for the past few weeks. I’d been watching her and waiting for the right moment to ask the damn question.

  I thought she was talking about us. But she wasn’t.

  She sighed heavily. She took a deep breath. “I can’t help the way I feel. I just can’t do it. I killed three men today. Don’t know who they were. Don’t know if they had a family. A wife. Kids. Don’t know anything about them. They were carrying rifles. But I don’t know if they were militia or not. Maybe they were hunters. I don’t know. I don’t think anyone on this side of the globe knows.”

  “Why don’t you talk to one of the psychologists on base about this?” I asked.

  But I already knew the answer. No one talked.

  “I don’t want anyone to know about the way I’m feeling. I don’t want them to think I’m weak. I need this job. I need this.”