TWENTY-EIGHT
The conference room of the White House Situation Room is smaller than most people imagine. The narrow oval table seats ten, which means for many sensitive meetings the assistants of the principals are lined up standing along the walls.
The scene in the conference room was chaotic as the Situation Room staff prepared for the meeting. The walls were full of men and women, many in uniform, some arguing with one another and others desperately trying to get last-minute information about the events of the morning.
Half the seats were empty, but CIA Director Canfield and Secretary of Defense Burgess were in their places. The director of the NSA as well as the director of the FBI were present, but they stood and conferred with underlings, sharing details of anything new learned in the past ten minutes.
It was a fluid situation, to be sure, and everyone wanted to be ready to answer all POTUS’s questions.
Time ran out on those trying to prepare for POTUS when Jack Ryan walked through the door.
He came to the head of the table and looked around the room. “Where is Mary Pat?”
Director of National Intelligence Foley stepped into the room behind the President, a slight breach of protocol, though everyone in Ryan’s White House, from the housekeepers to the vice president, knew Ryan did not give a whit about ceremony.
“Excuse me, Mr. President,” she said as she took her place. “I’ve just found out there has been a third hijacking. A Homeland Security Predator drone working customs and enforcement on the Canadian border went rogue twenty minutes ago.”
“In the U.S.?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How the hell did this happen? I ordered a ground stop of UAVs. Homeland Security was notified.”
“Yes, sir. This Predator was on the tarmac at Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota. It had been prepped for a mission along the border today, but the mission was canceled per the ground stop. They were about to push it back into the hanger when the craft initiated its systems, rolled away from ground control, and took off from a taxiway. Presently it’s flying south at twenty thousand feet over South Dakota.”
“Jesus. Where is it going?”
“Unknown at this time. FAA is tracking it, rerouting air traffic. We have a flight of two Air Force interceptors en route to take it down. There are no weapons on board, of course, but it could be used as a low-yield missile. They might try to impact another aircraft or a building or even vehicles on the highway.”
“This is unreal,” muttered National Security Adviser Colleen Hurst.
Ryan said, “I want every last UAV in the U.S. inventory, regardless of ownership, model, or manufacturer, at home or abroad, physically dismantled in whatever way necessary to where it cannot take off.”
SecDef Burgess said, “Yes, sir. That process is under way on our end.”
Homeland Security and CIA both agreed they were doing the same thing with their drones.
Jack looked to Scott Adler, Secretary of State. “We need your office telling all of our allies who possess UAVs that they need to follow our lead until we have more information.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. What do we know about this cyberattack so far?”
Mary Pat said, “NSA is in the process of bringing in all of their people to look at how this was done. I’ve already been warned that we will not get answers in hours, and they only hope to know something in days. I am told that this was a very sophisticated attack.”
“What
“They suspect someone jammed the frequency of the drone’s communications to its satellite, which caused the Reaper to revert to autopilot. It does this anytime there is a break in communications.
“Once the aircraft was not under our control, someone used their own equipment to impersonate the valid secure signal. In order for them to do this, they had to have access deep inside the Department of Defense’s most secure network.”
“Who could have done this?”
CIA director Canfield said, “We’re looking at Iran.”
Mary Pat said, “Mr. President, keep in mind, it does not have to be a state actor.”
Ryan thought about this for a moment. “What you’re saying is that our threat matrix needs to include terrorist and criminal organizations, private businesses… hell, even rogue operators in our own government.”
CIA director Canfield said, “All we can do right now is look at the actors who had the motive and the means. Regarding the Afghanistan attack, that would be Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iran, as they all have been meddling in our Afghan operations for some time. When it comes to means, on the other hand, you can dismiss the Taliban. They have just about zilch in the technical-know-how department.
“Al-Qaeda is light-years ahead of the Taliban, which means they might be able to do some low-level website attacks at best. But they did
“So you think it was Iran?”
“If anyone in that part of the world did it, it was Iran.”
Ryan asked, “They are only hacking one UAV at a time. Does that mean anything about how they are doing this? Is that due to technical ability or because they only have one pilot trained to fly the drones?”
“Could be either, sir. Might just be that they have only set up one flight control center. I’ve got to say that considering the capability we witnessed today, I find it hard to believe there is a technical reason they can’t fly more than one UAV at a time.”
“Someone is sending us a message. As much as I’d like to send them a message right back, I think we need to be in receive mode at the moment.”
Mary Pat said, “I agree, sir. We’ll get to the bottom of just how this happened before we can start placing blame.”
Ryan nodded, then turned to SecDef. “You guys have been hacked before, right?”
Bob Burgess said, “Twenty-fourth Air Force detected a virus six months ago in the Reaper system software upgrade on the network at Creech. We executed a rolling stand-down of the fleet while we checked each and every drone. None had been infected. Nevertheless, we had to wipe clean every hard drive in every GCS at Creech and start from scratch.”
Ryan said, “The Defense Department’s secure network is not supposed to be connected to the Internet. How the hell did a virus infect the Reaper software?”
Burgess said, “Yes, it’s true there is what is called an ‘air gap,’ physical space between our secure network and the Internet, that should preclude this happening.”
“But?”
“But human beings are involved, and human beings are fallible. We found the virus on a portable drive used to update map software in one of the ground-control stations. It was a breach of protocol by a contractor.”
CIA Director Canfield said, “Iran has done this sort of thing before. A couple years back the Iranians successfully hacked into a Predator feed and downloaded videos from the cameras.”
DNI Foley interjected, “Grabbing the video off a camera’s sat transmission is not the same thing as taking total control of the unit, aiming and firing the weapons, and then crash-landing the UAV. That is several levels of magnitude more complicated.”
Ryan nodded, taking it all in and reserving judgment for now. “Okay,” he said. “I expect you to let me know when you learn anything of value about the investigation.”
SecDef said, “Mr. President, as you know, we lost eight members of First Cavalry Division, and forty-one Afghan Special Forces soldiers. We have not released information about the casualties yet, but—”
“Do it,” Ryan said. “And admit the UAV was involved and there was a technical malfunction. We need to get out in front of this and tell the world that we got hacked and American and Afghan servicemen were murdered.”
Burgess said, “Sir, I recommend against that. Our enemies will use that against us; it makes us look
