Sting of the Drone (23 page)

He walked out of the station and across the street toward the Center City area. There was the man in the blue and gold Drexel University jacket. Bahadur approached him, stood next to him, and said the Hadith phrase the man hoped to hear, “Shall I not inform you about the inmates of Hell? It is every violent, impertinent, and proud person.”

They began to walk together down Kennedy Boulevard. “You are a Saudi or a Yemeni?” Bahadur asked him after they had exchanged the meeting phrases.

“Both. My father is a Saudi, my mother is Yemeni. I was born here, in Philadelphia. I grew up in Lewisburg. My father taught at Bucknell,” the man explained.

“And you are a good Muslim?”

“I practice Islam, maybe not the same way you do, but I am a Muslim.”

“And you are willing to do this thing why?” Bahadur asked.

“Because all of my life, and especially since I was seven, since 9/11, they have taunted me because I am a Muslim, because I am a Saudi,” he said.

“But you are not a Saudi, you are an American by birth, a citizen, correct?” Bahadur asked.

“Not to them. To them I am a raghead. The Americans are so arrogant. They did not learn the right lesson from 9/11. They are still killing Muslims. They need to be taught again. They need to be deterred from waging war on Islam. They need to pay a high price. I hope I am not all that you are doing,” the student said. “I alone cannot make them hurt enough.”

Bahadur stopped walking and faced the young man. “There are many more. It will all happen at once. That is why it is essential that you do not go early or late.” Bahadur moved as close as he could to the student, their belts touching. “Once you are in this, you cannot back out or you, and your family, will pay the ultimate price for desertion. Do you understand? Not early, not late, no backing out.”

“Yeah, I get it, I get it,” the student said. “I am doing this.”

“And the money, what will you do with the money?” Bahadur asked.

“When I graduate in May, I am going to move to Beirut. There are engineering jobs there. And with the money, I can get a nice apartment on the Corniche to start. And a Porsche.”

“You will only get a little in cash now and when it happens. The rest will be in a bank in Beirut,” Bahadur explained.

“Okay, as long as it’s there.”

“It will be, if you do the job right. This is a matter of Islamic honor between us. We will pay.” Bahadur tried to sound convincing. “You will get the material that morning from the men who you know, from Lewisburg. You will have figured out how to leave it at the place on the plans and set the timer. You will be in a public place at the university when it happens. You can walk there easily from the train station. You will be shocked, horrified, by the attack. And then you will have only one more semester before you are living the good life in Beirut.”

They had arrived at the end of the Boulevard. There was a giant clothes pin, soaring many stories high in front of a skyscraper. Bahadur didn’t even bother to ask its religious significance.

“Now, there is another subway system that goes to New Jersey near here,” Bahadur stated. “Can you walk me to near where the station is?”

“PATCO, it’s this way.”

28

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5

DESERT HILLS

NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

“Did you buy the house because the street was called Wind Warrior Drive?” Sandra Vittonelli asked Jennifer Parsons. The two women lay poolside in the Parsons’ backyard in North Las Vegas.

“I think it helped me to persuade Erik, seemed somehow job connected,” Jen replied. “He says he is a Wind Warrior, but I think in the comics Wind Warrior was a woman. I haven’t told him that yet. But the truth is that the house was not far from the base, and it was the right price, less than three hundred. It’s a relatively small lot, but we do have the walled-in backyard with the pool, the hot tub, the big gas grill. Great for a quiet Saturday night like this. Glad you finally agreed to come over.”

“I am, too. But beyond the great name of the street, why here? Why not get a ranch out in the desert?” Sandra asked.

“College. The girls went to Dartmouth and Brown, not cheap,” Jen said. “Erik transferred his GI Bill education benefits to the kids, but it still costs a lot. And they both want to go to med school, so we have invested in other things. Real estate just is not the growth ticket it used to be.”

“That’s great they wanted to go to med school like their mom,” Sandra said as she reached for her beer. “Ray went to Brown.”

“That’s the third time today you have mentioned this Ray guy. Is there something I should know?”

Sandra laughed and choked on her beer. “Just because I am lying down on a chaise longue, doctor, does not mean you get to analyze me. No, Jen, you’re right. I am thinking about him a lot.”

“And he’s your boss?” Jen asked.

“Not really, different outfit. But he is higher ranking. Younger, by three years, and higher by about four pay grades. Fucking overachiever, literally,” Sandra laughed again. “It’s the first time since the divorce that I—”

“Did I hear someone say overachiever? Talking about me again?” Erik said as he appeared carrying a platter from the grill. “Two Wagu steaks, rare, for us war fighters and one Copper River salmon for the doctor.” The two women rose from their lounge chairs and followed Erik to the picnic table.

“Did you ever think you would be living in Las Vegas?” Jen asked Sandra.

“No, not in my line of work,” she answered. “Not after Baghdad, Kabul, Dubai. But it’s actually a lot like Dubai here. Desert, high-rises, fancy shopping malls, resorts, nobody’s real home. Vegas just hasn’t put in the Dubai indoor snow ski thing yet.”

“Only a matter of time, boss,” Erik said. “I can see it now, a scale replica of the Matterhorn just beyond the Wynn Encore, overlooking the golf course. They’ll clean up.”

“Speaking of cleaning up, honey,” Jen began, “Did you—” The sudden noise sounded like a thunderclap on top of the house. The windows shook. The picture window shattered into spiderwebs. Erik jumped on top of the table to look around. Jennifer and Sandra turned around toward the direction of the blast in time to see the smoke begin to climb above a house farther down on the next street.

“Whoa,” Erik said as he moved to the wall separating his yard from his neighbor’s. “Four houses down on Loggers Mill,” he yelled back to Jennifer and Sandra.

“Four?” Jennifer asked. “Honey, that’s Patti and Bill’s place.” She turned to Sandra. “The Wongs. He’s one of your pilots.”

Erik vaulted over the six-foot-high stucco wall separating his house from the one on Loggers Mill Drive. He landed by the neighbor’s pool and ran through their gate out onto the street. The houses on Loggers Mill were emptying out quickly, women and children standing in the street staring at the flames and smoke coming from the house at 2704. Several men were running toward the burning house. Erik sprinted up the street. “Calling 911?” he yelled at an older man who stood in a driveway with a mobile phone to his ear.

“Already did. They’re on their way,” the man screamed after Erik.

As he saw the flames coming out of the front window, Erik’s heart sank. It was not the sort of fire that people would likely survive. It had engulfed the whole house in a few minutes and it was fierce. The heat created a force field out in the street beyond the end of the driveway. The Wongs had two little boys, he remembered, maybe aged six and four. There was no sign of any of the family in the group of people that had formed in the street next to the home.

“Did they get out?” Erik gasped as he ran up to the group. No one answered. Bill Wong’s Grand Cherokee was in the driveway, the Creech Air Base sticker on the left rear bumper. Erik pulled off his T-shirt and held it over his face to protect himself from the wall of heat as he approached the Jeep. He used the balled up shirt to grab the doorknob of the Jeep, but still he felt the sting of the hot surface as he pulled the door open. Inside, like all Air Force pilots, Wong kept a fire extinguisher under the driver’s seat. Erik ripped it from its mount and moved into the open garage. The flames had not yet reached the garage, but still it was like walking into a steel mill furnace. He knew immediately that his instinct to enter the house to search for the Wongs was insane. If he even tried to open the door from the garage into the house, he would be committing suicide.

Instead, he kicked open the rear door of the garage, and stepped into the backyard. A blackened body in a skirt was floating facedown in the pool. Patti Wong, he guessed. Near the brick grill was another form, charred and lifeless. There was no need to see if either body was still alive. They had been killed instantly by the blast and flame, then thrown several feet. He stood for a long moment looking at the blackened corpses, realizing that he had never seen the body of a victim up close before, only from the air or on the screen.

The stucco wall that demarcated the end of the Wong’s property had almost disappeared, revealing what had been an empty lot behind them. Now that vacant land was a large crater, a hole that looked like it might have been made by the impact of a fiery meteor.

Erik felt powerless, ridiculous, as he stood there shirtless, in his bathing suit and bare feet, holding the little extinguisher. He heard sirens over the open-throated roar of the fire. He thought of the people whom he had seen on the Big Board, the ones who were always standing by the flaming houses that he had blown up. So this was what it felt like to be so close to the flames and not be able to do anything but watch.

Erik heard the loudest siren stop abruptly as the first fire truck braked outside the house.

29

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6

DJIBOUTI-AMBOULI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

DJIBOUTI

France’s Charles de Gaulle and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser had little in common except the year of their death, 1970, and the corner in Djibouti where the streets named after them intersected. Nearby, the école was quiet early in the morning. In its courtyard, five men pulled the tarp off the back of the truck and went to work setting up the equipment.

The sound was a combination of a
whoosh
and a muffled thud. Then again. Then a third time.

As soon as the third mortar round jumped from the tube of the Ukrainian Sani 2B11M launcher, the five men ran from the big truck in the school courtyard to their motorbikes. In less than a minute, they were speeding down the narrow streets of the district, in three different directions. When he was three blocks away on the Rue de Zeila, the fifth man stopped his bike, pulled the transmitter from his pocket, turned it on, and then hit the button that caused the fourth mortar round to explode inside the 120mm tube, destroying the launcher, the truck, and much of the empty schoolhouse.

By then the three GPS-equipped Gran bomblets that had flown out of their tubes had opened stabilizing fins, adjusted their trajectories, and fallen on the aircraft hangar that was two and a half miles from the school courtyard, inside what had been the old French Air Force Camp Lemonnier, at the far side of Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport. Two rounds exploded on contact with the roof. The third hit on the runway axis ramp outside of the hangar.

Three Predators and two of the larger Reapers that had been in the hangar were damaged beyond repair. None had been mated with Hellfire missiles or the new 250-pound laser-guided bombs. Missile and bomb mating with the aircraft occurred in the separate weaponization hangar, behind a berm at the end of the main runway. It was untouched by the mortar rounds. Four Reapers from the Djibouti base were flying missions when the attack took place. Three Predators were in a separate hangar undergoing electronics upgrades.

Of the seven men who died, all were American civilians. Six of them worked for General Avionics. The seventh was a CIA logistics officer. Twelve others, all Americans, were injured from the blasts.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6

PEG HEADQUARTERS

NAVY HILL

WASHINGTON, DC

Ray cherished his Sunday mornings. Sunday was the only day of the week when he could sleep in, when he could throw on gym shorts, grab the
Times
outside the town house door, brew coffee, toast English muffins, play Bach on his elaborate sound system, and ease into the day. Not this Sunday. The videoconference had started at seven. He sat sullenly, listening, watching, alone in the conference room at the Policy Evaluation Group. In silent protest, he had come in wearing the gym shorts and an old Brown sweatshirt. He had not bothered to comb his mop of hair.

“Coincidences do happen,” Sandra was saying, “and Bagram Air Base has been hit with Taliban mortars hundreds of times. One mortar even hit the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ aircraft a while back, but a direct hit on the Hellfire missile bunker the same morning that we get a mortar attack on our base in Djibouti?”

It occurred to Ray that it was only a little after five in the morning where Sandra was, outside Vegas. Maybe she had been up all night working on what had happened.

“Here’s why we think it was coincidence,” the CIA analyst replied in Virginia. “We have no evidence of any current, operational link between the Taliban in Afghanistan and anybody who might be operating a terrorist cell in Djibouti. So, it may just be that a hangar with our UAVs got hit in Djibouti and two thousand kilometers away at about the same time an ammo storage area with Hellfire missiles for our UAVs in Afghanistan also gets hit.”

There was a Marine one-star General representing the Pentagon on the video link. Ray wondered what the Marine had done wrong to get the Sunday morning shift at the Pentagon. “We operate military forces all across the nation and all around the world,” the General said. “And things happen simultaneously, or near simultaneously, all the time with us. A helicopter crashes at Twentynine Palms in California and a different kind of chopper off the USS
Inchon
in the Med goes down at the same time. No connection.”