Drone

Myers’s second phone call on the night of July 29 was to Attorney General Lancet. She was tasked with creating the legal framework for Drone Command. Lancet built organizational firewalls around Drone Command so that it would report directly to the president, completely insulating it from both the DNI and DoD command structures. Though a legal fiction, it was made an extension of JSOC, which operated with near impunity from congressional oversight and could invoke either Title 10 or Title 50 protections as needed.

Myers’s last phone call had been to Early. He immediately contacted T. J. Ashley with the Drone Command offer and she accepted it on the spot because it sounded “interesting,” knowing full well she would be shaping the future of U.S. drone warfare for the next decade—and maybe even changing the face of warfare itself.

Yes. Interesting.

Early brought her in to meet Myers six hours later. Ashley wasn’t the least bit intimidated by her first visit to the White House or her first meeting with the commander in chief. Myers immediately liked the self-possessed younger woman. So did Jeffers, yawning over a cup of coffee. Just over five feet tall, with short-cropped dirty blond hair and hazel eyes, the trim, athletic engineer was a firm handshake and all business.

“What do you think you’re going to need to begin operations in seven days?” Myers wanted to know.

“Depends on the targets,” Ashley said. “When will I have those?”

“Soon, including locations. Give me your best estimate.”

“More hours in the day and a boatload of money should do the trick,” Ashley said.

“Money I can find. More hours I can’t.”

“Then I’ll take the money and sleep less. Do you want to review the organizational plan I’ve put together?” Ashley opened a leather satchel and handed Myers an inch-thick document.

“How could you have possibly drawn up an organizational plan already?” Myers asked.

“I wrote it a year ago as a kind of thought experiment. It seemed to me that this was the natural direction our defense establishment would be taking in the near future. I just didn’t realize when I wrote it how near the future actually was.”

Myers mentioned Pearce’s suggestions for Drone Command organization. Ashley had already incorporated them. She and Pearce had discussed the essential concepts a few years ago when he was trying to recruit her into Pearce Systems.

Early grinned like a hyena. “Can Pearce pick ’em or what?”

Jeffers nodded. “He sure can.”

Myers dropped the organizational plan on her desk. “I don’t need to read this. You just be ready to jump when I give the go signal. The rest I’ll leave up to you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ashley couldn’t believe her good fortune.

“Mike will be your liaison with the attorney general. See her next. Any other details, run them past Sandy.”

“Anytime, day or night,” Jeffers said.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll take you up on that.” Ashley checked her watch. “Better get to work.” She glanced at Early and he nodded, grabbing his cell phone as they both exited the office.

“So far, so good, don’t you think?” Myers asked her chief of staff.

“Just one question,” Jeffers said, pouring himself another cup of coffee. “Have you thought about how you’re going to start building a coalition in Congress for this thing?”

“You played sports in college, didn’t you?”

“If you call intramural tennis a sport.”

“What do you know about old-school, smash-mouth football?” Myers asked.

“You know I suck at metaphors, especially at this time of day.”

“Give it a shot,” Myers said.

“I take it you mean a ground game with lots of mud?” Jeffers asked.

“No. More like a Hail Mary.”

Drone Command Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland

Having the most-wanted kill-list names and locations was one thing, but human targets had a nasty habit of moving around, especially if they ever got wind that they were on something like a kill list. With any luck, Drone Command would be able to take them all out in one fell swoop, but that was highly unlikely. Ashley needed to keep them under constant surveillance. For that she’d need to deploy the “persistent stare” technology of ARGUS-IS married to MQ-9 Reaper drones. The Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System provided live wide-area video images by employing a 1.8-gigapixel digital camera, itself a construct of 368 5-megapixel smartphone-camera CCD sensors. At high altitudes, the ARGUS-IS could track all of the movement within an entire city simultaneously, resolving objects as small as license plates. By storing almost three days of video imagery, analysts could replay suspicious movements and establish potentially threatening patterns of behavior.