Game of Drones Read online

  #

  Saj Usmani was so incensed that he placed a call via satellite phone while descending the steps of the Parliament House Building. The voice on the other end was electronically masked, but the men knew each other without resorting to using names.

  “Problems?”

  “Timeframe just moved up a bit,” said Usmani. “Al-Zawahiri is to be turned over to the Americans within the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Understood.”

  “Act quickly. Zawahiri must never get into their hands.”

  “Don’t fret,” said the voice. “America will have much more to worry about than al-Zawahiri come the next few hours. Trust me.”

  “Of that I have no doubt.” Usmani pressed the End Call button. Although he was not al-Qaeda, Saj Usmani was definitely a sympathizer, one of many within the Pakistani Council who had condemned America’s raid against Osama bin Laden. He had demanded that action be taken against the U.S by international congresses, a demand that fell upon deaf ears. America was untouchable.

  Slipping the sat-phone into the inner pocket of his suit, Usmani got into a chauffeur-driven vehicle, closed the door, and stewed as the limo pulled away with the Parliament House Building falling behind.

  #

  Shazad stared at the sat-phone in his hand for a long moment after Usmani severed ties. The voice, like his, was masked, even though the chances of the call being intercepted were nil. But prudence reigned.

  Pocketing the phone, Shazad went to bunker’s main room and addressed everyone in a manner that was clipped and authoritative.

  “The calendar has moved up. It appears that al-Zawahiri is to be transferred to American authorities within twenty-four hours. Therefore, we must be diligent by pressing our needs upon the government.”

  He turned to his big man, to Lut, and addressed him directly in a commanding tone. “Gear up a Reaper with two Hellfires and four minis. Now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  To Naji: “I want lift-off within twenty minutes. Two targets from the payload of one drone. You know the targets, you know the coordinates.” Then with emphasis: “Two targets, one flight trajectory. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he murmured to himself, “I think it’s time to make a phone call."

  In light of the accelerated timetable, it was time to contact President Carmichael and set his terms--terms that would be underscored by the power he wielded at his fingertips.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Chance Zanetti was labeled a ‘pretty boy’ with raven hair--hair that when he moved a certain way under the light, illuminated natural blue wreaths that danced along the crown of his head. But his most memorable physical feature were his piercing blue eyes. They were highly electric, as if incandescent. When he smiled he did so with ruler-straight teeth. Yet for all his GQ model looks, Chance Zanetti was also a former soldier with sixteen confirmed kills to his name.

  Naomi ‘Nay’ Washington was exceedingly beautiful, with an exotic appearance, having a short-styled haircut to frame her pixie-like face. She was African-American with long legs and an hourglass figure. Her skin was the color of deep cocoa. Her eyes shined like newly-minted pennies.

  Together, they looked the part of a perfect couple. And they were in fact deeply in love, having fashioned a relationship for more than a year with Chance finally punctuating their courtship with a diamond ring the night before. A wedding date had yet to be set, however.

  Although they had been lying awake for a while, they remained in bed with Nay holding her fingers up to appraise the diamond from every angle. This was something she had always wanted, a marquis-style gemstone. She had never been so happy.

  “You like?”

  Her smile broadened. “I like.”

  She leaned over and kissed him. First on the cheek, then on his lips, both working into each other’s embrace, and then into a sexual frenzy until the phone rang.

  The answering machine clicked on.

  It was Tanner.

  “Chance.” No response.

  “Chance! Pick up. I know you’re there.”

  Chance clicked his tongue, rolled over and grabbed the phone. “What?”

  “Is Nay with you?”

  He turned to her. Her smile was still there. Her face so beautiful. “No,” he said.

  “Liar. I need the both of you to get your clothes on and get down here.”

  He sat up. “Why? What’s up?”

  “We’re active,” he said. “Highest level.”

  Chance didn’t know what to say. The ‘highest level’ meant Tier One, which indicated that the order was coming down from the highest political seat in the land. “You’re kidding?”

  “No way.” In a condensed version of the facts, Tanner told him what he knew about the JBAB and the senator’s plane, and how they were connected. When everyone was gathered at headquarters, he would deliver a thorough briefing.

  “Twenty minutes,” he told him, then hung up.

  Chance turned to Naomi, who had a questioning look. “Get ready,” he told her.

  “Are we active?”

  He nodded. “At the highest level.”

  “Who’s our handler?”

  “Tanner wouldn’t say,” he told her. “But it’s obviously top tier.”

  She had more questions, to all of which he either had no answers, or answers that were skinny in detail because he didn’t know that much himself.

  But in time, they would know everything.

  #

  Dante Alvarez was six sheets to the wind from his binge the night before. He was lying in bed with half his body on the mattress, the other half on the floor. Apparently he failed in his endeavors to unclothe himself with his shirt having been removed from one arm only with most of the fabric wrapped around his neck like a scarf. His pants only made it to his knees.

  When the phone rang he pressed his hands to his ears. “Go . . . away!”

  But the phone continued to ring.

  “Go—”

  He heard his voicemail recording play and then a male voice leaving a message. “Dante, it’s Tanner. We’re active. I need you to report now. We have been ordered from the highest level. I'll say it again. We have—”

  Alvarez reached out and picked up the phone. “Tanner. Situation, huh?” He sounded not quite sober, but not quite drunk, either.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  Alvarez brought a cupped hand to his mouth and breathed into it as if trying to smell his own alcohol-laden breath. “Nah,” he finally said. “You just woke me up, that’s all.”

  “Highest level, Dante. I’ll fill you in when you get here. How soon?”

  He looked around his apartment. That must have been some bender, he thought. The place looked like it was hit by a cyclone, and it was immaculate before he hit the bars. He looked over at the mattress, hoping to see a female companion of unknown name. But the bed was empty. Struck out again.

  “Steve! How soon before you get here?”

  “Give me an hour.”

  “You have thirty minutes.”

  Tanner disconnected.

  #

  Danielle Sunderland sat at her computer, doing what she'd been doing every day in recent years--trawling databases in an attempt to locate her son. The young boy had been taken by his biological father during the course of a very ugly divorce situation years ago. Since then, she had suffered repeated failures to locate them, their tracks always proving cold. Right now she was testing the veracity of a website that, for a fee, could age-progress a scanned photo of a child. In her eyes he was the handsomest boy that she had ever seen. At age fourteen, if the progression was true, he would have his father’s eyes, nose and ears, and her chin and brow, the combination giving him the features of a strong, young man.

  She pined for him as a mother would, longing to embrace her child once again. But even more so, and deep down, she prayed that he would never forget her, always afraid that she had become nothing more than a vag
ue memory to him.

  She was taken from her dark thoughts when the phone rang. The caller ID read: TANNER WILSON.

  She picked it up. “Hi, Tanner.” Her voice was thick with emotion.

  “Danielle, is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine. What’s up?”

  “We’re active. I need you down here ASAP.”

  “Give me twenty minutes.”

  “You got it.”

  The line went dead.

  #

  After having written a bestselling book about his membership in SEAL Team 6 on the night they killed Osama bin Laden, Liam Reilly was dismissed from the unit on charges of dishonor because no one ever described a team’s undertaking in detail. Especially in a mass-market way that could reach millions of readers. But in the end he had chosen exile, resulting in debasing tags such as ‘disloyal’ and ‘dishonorable,’ terms that wounded him deeply—even now, long after having been released from SEAL Team 6.

  Liam was at a martial arts studio practicing his moves against three opponents. Moving to his left and setting his feet, he waited for his challengers to attack as they fanned out.

  They circled around him, cautiously, and eventually formed a triangle, the men positioning themselves from all angles.

  Then they attacked.

  Liam kicked a leg out behind him, striking the first man in the solar plexus and sending him to the floor with his hand to his chest. He then went after the man in front of him, striking him repeatedly in the chest with continuous hammer blows that moved with the blinding speed of pistons—left, right, left, right, left, right—until the man went down. With fluid motion he turned to his last opponent and, as the man struck out at him, Liam grabbed the man’s hand, torqued it and raised it high, then kicked his feet out from under him. The fighter landed hard on the mat as Liam continued through with feigned blows to the man’s face.

  And just like that it was over. He had taken out three men in less than thirty seconds.

  “Liam!” The office manager stuck his head out into the studio, holding up a phone. “You got a call.”

  Liam helped the men to their feet, patted them on the back, and went to the office where the phone was lying on top of the desk. “This is Liam.”

  “Hey.”

  Liam recognized the voice as Tanner’s. “What’s up?”

  The OUTCAST leader spoke in terse, all-business bursts. “We’re active. The team’s assembling. I need you here now. No questions on this line. I’ll brief you when you get here. But I will say this: It’s top priority coming from the highest level.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty.”

  “See you then.”

  Liam hung up the phone and left the facility still in his martial arts attire.

  #

  Stephen Shah had almost finished tying a fishing fly to a line with a complex knot he'd been trying to master when he got the call. He was wearing a pocket vest, a boonie cap with fly-fishing lures attached, and hip waders.

  Trying to keep his knot from coming unraveled with one hand while he flipped open the phone with the other, he said, “Yeah.”

  “Steve?”

  “Speaking.” He grimaced as he felt the knot loosening under the control of only one hand. He held the phone away from his ear long enough to switch it to speaker mode and then lay it on the table, freeing both hands to work on the lure.

  “It’s Tanner.”

  “Hey, man, what’s up?” He patiently threaded his line.

  “Listen. I need your presence here right away. We’re active. And so that you know, this is top-level.”

  “How top?”

  “The highest priority.”

  “On my way.”

  Stephen dropped his lure, the incomplete knot coming undone. Still dressed in his fishing gear, he got into his SUV and drove rapidly to The Facility.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  OUTCAST Facility,

  Bethesda, Maryland.

  Within thirty minutes everyone had met up at The Facility. A nondescript building of gray cinderblock walls, there were no posted signs or outward indications of any kind as to the structure's purpose. The only hint that it was even occupied were the few cars sitting in its parking lot.

  Inside was a different matter altogether. The carpets were lush and immaculate. The furniture and electronics were all top-of-the-line. Even the palms and rubber trees were alive and thriving.

  In the meeting room, which was the largest space inside The Facility, the Outcast operators were seated in chairs made of the finest leather.

  Nay and Chance looked clean and beautiful, always trying to look their best for the sake of each other, Tanner supposed. Liam was dressed in his martial arts uniform--no real surprise there-- his black belt in contrast with the white of his attire. And Danielle, who always dressed in colors and hues that were intensely bright and nuclear, like some kind of post-modern hippy, stared through Lennon-like glasses that gave her eyes a slightly magnified look to them. Most bizarre in appearance was Dante Alvarez, who sported a five-o’clock shadow early in the day and looked very raw. Apparently he was unaware of the fact that he had his polo shirt on backwards, the V-neck revealing his hairy back. For a moment Tanner thought that he was standing on the set of Let’s Make a Deal, especially after laying eyes on Stephen Shah, who looked ready to step into a mountain stream.

  But in the end it came down to one thing: he measured all these people by the content of their character. And as far as he was concerned, these individuals, no matter their outward appearance, were the absolute best at what they did.

  There were none better.

  For the next forty-five minutes, Tanner went into detail about the raid on the JBAB, the number of drones taken, and the subsequent loss of life, including those on the senator’s plane. He also spoke of the key players, Aasif Shazad and Naji Mihran, who were American born and had served in elite U.S. military units. Everyone else on their team still remained unknown.

  “We’re going after our own people?” asked Chance. “These guys are Americans?”

  “Yes and no,” said Tanner. “They were born in the United States. But their religious culture is deeply rooted in Islam. You see where I’m going with this?”

  He went on to review their objectives and then to assign each of his operators to specific tasks. As usual, Danielle would remain at The Facility and helm the computer and radio stations. She would handle data acquisition and analysis, field communications, and the interception of third party transmissions via hacking, wire-tapping or radio frequency scanning, including for cellular calls and internal law enforcement broadcasts. All information into and out of OUTCAST would begin and end with her. The remaining specialists would serve in the field as soldiers, their skills imperative for enemy engagement. Tanner would lead these troops.

  “But we don’t even know where to begin,” said Nay after hearing Tanner's skeletal plan. “We need a real start-point. We need something. Anything.”

  Tanner agreed. He wished he could give his team more direction. All he could give at the moment were assumptions based on the travel capabilities of the drones. But that was something. "Let's review what we know," he began.

  The Reaper drones could fly a distance of nearly 500 miles one way, or half that for a round trip, which kept them within striking distance of the D.C. area. And since drones required a launch point that was most likely far from populated centers to avoid detection, Tanner believed Shazad to be west of D.C., somewhere within the wooded corridor between the northwest and southwest. The downing of the senator’s plane supported this notion when it was air-intercepted nearly two hundred miles west of D.C. According to the map hanging against the wall, locations west were forested areas far from the congested cities along the seaboard, but not so distant that certain positions could not be targeted. But the corridor was long, the landscape heavily forested.

  It made perfect sense.

  Tanner would contact Director John Casey to approve satellite
codes for real-time surveillance of the corridor in question. They would direct the attention of their eyes in the sky to areas most likely to be used as a garrison for covert operations—such as old warehouses or depositories, wasted buildings and factories, locations that had been forgotten over time.

  Still, they needed something more.

  They needed one of two things: either communication from Shazad, or another drone strike so that they could make an attempt to triangulate Shazad’s position.

  They would get both.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Raven Rock

  “Mr. President?” The aide's voice sounded hollow and tinny coming from the room’s intercom.

  “Yes?”

  “Permission to dispatch a live audio/video transmission to Raven Rock from the White House, Sir. Its point of origin is unknown. But the requestor --we think it's Shazad--is demanding a conversation with you regarding the 'state of the nation'.”

  “How do we know it's Shazad?”

  “When asked to identify himself, he said: 'five Reapers and twelve remoras'.”

  President Carmichael examined the faces of his team sitting at the table, each registering their certainty that this was Shazad, who was specifying the objects taken from the JBAB to confirm his identity, since the exact inventory of stolen hardware was only known to those at Raven Rock. “Patch it through.”

  On the far wall was a series of high-definition flat-screens that were pieced together to create a single massive screen. The picture quality was phenomenally clear, almost three-dimensional. When the mote of light in the center screen expanded to a full picture, everyone was looking at a head-and-shoulders image of a man wearing a ski mask with red piping around the eyes and mouth.

  “Good day, Mr. President.”

  Carmichael tried his best to take control of the situation. “You can knock off the masquerade, Shazad. We already know who you are.”

  The person on screen sat still for a long moment before raising his hand, grabbing the top of the mask and then pulling it free, the action leaving his hair in wild tangles, which he summarily smoothed over with quick sweeps of his hand.