Kill Decision (12 page)

He flipped through the folder in his hand. “You contribute to human rights groups and antiwar organizations.”

“And I suppose you think that makes me some sort of traitor.”

“No. It gives me hope that you’ll help us.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Yes, it does.” He leaned close to her. “We have reason to think these enemy drones might be using a software model based on the behavior of weaver ants. A model developed by you.”

She felt the warm surge of adrenaline. “My God . . .”

He started dealing out full-color photographs into her lap. Photos of carbonized and torn bodies, maimed and injured people at bombing scenes—some of them children. “Scores of innocent people are dead. Politicians, scholars, human rights activists, business leaders, students. Someone has bypassed America’s defenses to kill these specific people. And more die every week. What you need to do is tell me how to stop it.”

She searched for anything to say as she gazed in horror at the images. “But I don’t . . . I have no idea how my work could—”

“Tell me why someone would choose to imbue a machine with the mind of a weaver ant. What’s so special about them? Why weavers?”

She felt nauseous, on the verge of tears, looking at the photo of a dead child. A twisted and burned stroller lay nearby. “Because the weaver ant is quite possibly the most warlike creature on the face of the earth.”

CHAPTER 8

Lost in Action

C
het Warner had
no desire to travel anywhere with the Pakistani army, let alone into the densely crowded slums of Lyari Town. It was like strapping on a deer costume to go out hiking on the opening day of hunting season.

One of the eighteen constituent towns in the city of Karachi, Lyari was a tangled warren of alleys, broken streets, and dilapidated buildings alongside the harbor on the west end of the city. Notwithstanding Pakistan’s population of Taliban sympathizers and Islamic fundamentalists, and orderly military neighborhoods, Lyari was controlled by narcotics gangs armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades; not even the police dared cross into it. Going in with the army seemed not much wiser, since the chief distinction between the police and the army was the color of their armored cars. Warner wouldn’t even have considered going there if it weren’t for Colonel Kayani’s personal assurances that Langley would be pleased.

Warner glanced over to the ornately uniformed Pakistani army colonel sitting across from him inside the cramped BRDM-2 armored car. Kayani must be expecting a photo op, since he had never dressed like this before. It made Warner feel more at ease.

He tried to distract his chronically loose bowels by peering through the narrow bulletproof portal in the side of the BRDM. The convoy was rolling along the Lyari Expressway that followed the river of the same name. As he looked out, the river was just a dusty no-man’s-land several hundred yards wide, bisected by a narrow channel of raw sewage and industrial effluent that reeked of ammonia. On the far side lay the Sindh Industrial and Trading Estate—or SITE town—a place every bit as fetching as its name implied.

Karachi had never been Warner’s choice, but then, he hadn’t distinguished himself in those early years, and accepting a clandestine service post seemed like a way to beef up his résumé—to get some respect. Then, just a few months after he arrived, the Russians started pulling out of Afghanistan. Colleagues sounded surprised he hadn’t known Pakistan was going to be a career dead-end. He pondered a long list of missed opportunities and unproductive, low-profile assignments that followed. It had taken him one divorce and a decade of patience to work his way Stateside once more.

Then, on September 11—
bam
. Suddenly Pakistan was important again, and so were Warner’s years of field experience and extensive army connections there. He soon found himself managing crews operating secretly out of remote places like Shamsi, Dalbandin, Jacobabad, and Pasni. Young teams. Technical teams. Experts doing split operations to launch and maintain unmanned surveillance drones that were being flown from inside trailers. Nobody knew then how important those little toys were going to become. If he was honest with himself, Warner knew that was probably why he’d been given the assignment; it was at first just a sideshow. Now, by chance, it was the main event.

Those days just after 9/11 were heady times, and he’d finally had a chance to shine. But as always, time marched on and new people with new skills followed the path he’d blazed. Drones were high profile now. Before long he found himself politically outmaneuvered by younger, more technologically adept Ivy Leaguers. The Garden Party set. His age-old nemesis.

When he looked back on his career, that had been the one consistent theme: being outmaneuvered. His ex-wife had called him timid, even though he’d spent half his life in war zones. Now here he was in Karachi again. Right where he’d started—and he’d been a lot more adventurous back in his twenties. Now he just kept worrying about oral-fecal disease transmission and kidnapping.

The colonel tapped Warner’s knee and laughed, shouting over the diesel engine of their armored car. “You should not be anxious, you know. Everything has been arranged for maximum safety.”

“Whenever you say things like that, Anil, you make me nervous. It sounds suspiciously like tempting fate.”

The colonel laughed uproariously. “Fates be damned, my friend. You will be very happy. This will put the whole bin Laden issue behind us. You will see.”

He’d known the colonel for twenty-five years—way back when he’d been a CIA paper-pusher, and Anil had been an ISI liaison. Back before Warner’s expertise and long-standing connections made him a valuable consultant. Now both in their fifties, they saw the prospect of retirement just over the horizon. A low-end condo on the Texas Riviera was never far from Warner’s thoughts. Now was the time to swing for the fences. One last pay grade boost before going to the consulting side.

The four-wheeled armored BRDM-2 slowed down, and Warner took a deep breath. They were cutting in on Tannery Road. From here things would only get dicier. This was PPP territory. Crawling through traffic would make them a sitting duck. One RPG at close range, and the passenger compartment would get punctured by a white-hot jet of molten metal that would ricochet around until everyone inside looked like undercooked meat loaf. He’d seen the tiny holes those armor-piercing warheads made in the hull of a tank. Why blast a huge hole when all you want to get at is the juicy center? But then, the convoy still seemed to be making good time. And they weren’t dead yet.

He peered out the portal again, and judging from the numerous heavily armed police he saw on the streets outside, Warner realized that the roads must have been blocked to civilian traffic. So much for the element of surprise. . . .

In a few minutes their vehicle slowed again and swerved right, down a tight lane. Warner’s view became a blur of passing masonry through the side portal. The sharp knock of a business sign being struck and bent back as they rolled past a shop front. All he could hear were sirens, car horns, and the rattle of the BRDM’s diesel engine. They were effectively blind. If someone hit them now, they’d never see it coming.

But no harm came to them, and in a few moments the vehicle rolled to a halt.

Kayani clapped Warner on the back. “We are here, my friend. I have something very special to show you.”

A soldier opened the heavy metal door, and what should have been fresh air flowing in was instead the familiar smell of the Third World—smoke, rotting garbage, and raw sewage. It was an odor Warner didn’t wax nostalgic about. If only he’d been young when 9/11 happened. What sort of career would he have had then? All these young guys out here now with their high-tech equipment. The contractors with their expense accounts and liberal rules of engagement. It still paid to work relationships, though. He still had some advantages the tech wizards did not.

Kayani motioned for Warner to follow as they passed a gauntlet of worried-looking soldiers training G3s at the upper stories of tenements all around them. There nonetheless were hundreds of curious faces peering from ledges and window frames down on them. Faces whispering to each other.

Warner ducked down and hoped his tan from years of deep-sea fishing would conceal his nationality long enough for him to get to cover. But by now it had to be apparent he was some sort of VIP on a tour. A glance ahead showed that Kayani was leading him through the corrugated tin gate of a warehouse/garage. It was a ramshackle place, with garbage strewn in the alleyways and near the entrance. As he entered, Warner had to slide between rusted Bedford trucks, covered in dust. They still retained some of their outrageously ornate decorations, but parts had been cannibalized. Here the smell of oil and rotting wood overcame the reek of sewage.

Just beyond these trucks lay another doorway, a subdoor within another larger gate. This is where Kayani stood beaming next to half a dozen soldiers. Warner could see bright work lights inside.

“This way . . .” Kayani entered, and Warner stepped through behind him. Inside he saw a surprisingly large workshop—easily fifty feet long and nearly as wide, with a tall ceiling hung with chains and winches. What rooted him in place was that the entire workshop was littered with the wreckage and components of what appeared to be American drone aircraft. Disembodied wings with American markings leaned against the far wall. There were entire drone sections, fuselage components, and electrical and optical assemblies, stretching along heavy wooden tables covered in clear plastic tarps.

“Holy mother of . . .”

Warner walked along the tables past oscilloscopes, soldering irons, and assorted tools littered across half a dozen workstations. Wrecked fuselage sections were in various states of disassembly, their components arrayed like the results of an electrical autopsy. Legal pads with scrawled notes in Arabic—not Urdu or Pashto, but Arabic—along with hasty diagrams were visible on the workbenches. He flipped aside a plastic tarpaulin and saw the rear section of an MQ-1 Predator, the downward-angled fins and propeller twisted from crash impact. He ran his hands along the ground power panel in the side of the fuselage, wiping away dirt and dust. Given the political waves this discovery would make, Warner had to be certain this was the real thing—absolutely certain.

He examined the panel. There was the release consent switch, still set to armed. The battery-off button, manual engine start switch, ground power. He pulled the tarp farther back to reveal the front section of the same or perhaps another MQ-1, the fuselage smashed, with dirt and pieces of branches confusing things even more. He tried to get his bearings, tapping each subassembly as he found it: the synthetic aperture radar antenna, a damaged Ku-band satellite dish. The APX-100 IFF transponder was missing and so was the video recording unit, but he found the primary control module, partially disassembled. Glancing up at the rest of the shop he saw at least four more MQ-1s.

Colonel Kayani smiled broadly. “Did I not promise it would be worth the trip, my friend? Of course, the Pakistani government has no reason to hide this from you. We have no use for American drones because we have our own Mukhbar and Burraq drones—of more advanced design.”

Warner stared at the walls in open wonder. And there, in front of him, hung what looked to be a large wiring schematic indicating the individual subsystems of an MQ-9 Reaper drone. The diagram was roughly quarter scale, and printed on professional blueprint paper. Warner could see the computer workstations and color plotters close at hand. They had the plans for an MQ-9. A Reaper.

This was a full-scale reverse engineering operation. He was nearly speechless.

“Well, what do you think?”

Warner, still wide-eyed, spoke without looking at Kayani. “I think I just got promoted.”

CHAPTER 9

Influence Operations

H
enry Clarke undid the buttons
on his Balmain jacket as he cast an arm over the back of a leather sofa in Marta’s K Street corner office. The tall windows had an expansive view over the broad intersections of Vermont and K Street, just off McPherson Square. It was a beautiful, sunny winter day, and he wondered where he should eat later—and with whom.