Collateral Damage, page 20
The boy didn’t answer.
“I cannot speak Arabic well,” said Rubeo. “But this device will translate for me.”
He took out his phone and queued up a translation program. He pressed the large circle in the middle of the screen, scrolled through his most recent lines, and highlighted the questions. The machine repeated them in fluent Arabic.
“Go to the devil,” said the boy.
Even Rubeo’s Arabic was good enough to figure out what he had said without the program. He reached into his pocket and slipped out a ten euro note.
“Would this help?”
The boy grabbed at it.
Rubeo pulled it back. “Tell them I’m coming.” He double-tapped his screen without looking; the machine gave the translation almost instantly. Then he handed the boy the money.
“I say he’s a purse snatcher,” said Jons as the boy ran off.
“That is why you are the brawn of the company, Levon.” Rubeo flicked the app on his screen to the tracking display. While holding the kid, Jons had placed a small video fly on his shoulder. The fly transmitted his location, displaying it on an overhead map.
He ran straight to the alley where they were supposed to meet the men. Rubeo brought up another app, and images appeared on the screen.
“All right. I’m an asshole,” said Jons glumly as he took the phone from his boss.
Ten minutes later Rubeo and Jons climbed over a short fence that ran behind the building where the boy had run. Jons knocked on the back door, then put his shoulder to it, breaking it off its hinges. Rubeo walked inside.
The three men the kid had reported to were still questioning him about Rubeo.
“Excuse my dramatic entrance,” Rubeo told them. “I was somewhat disconcerted by the fact that you had a child shadowing me.”
Jons held his gun on the men, but that was superfluous: they were all too surprised to react.
“Which one of you is Halit?” asked Rubeo. He had practiced the phrase several times, and said it smoothly.
A man in a white-and-blue striped sweater raised his hand.
“These are my brothers,” said the man in English. “They have just been here with me, to keep company.”
“I’ll bet,” said Jons. “Come here.”
The squat Libyan tried to suck in his gut as he got up. He wore a gray warm-up jacket and black jeans, along with black shoes polished to a high shine.
“Spit,” said Jons, holding out a small device with what looked like an air scoop on the edge. “Into it.”
Halit did so. The device analyzed the DNA in the spit, uploading parts to a database back at Rubeo’s company headquarters. It worked quickly, picking out only small parts of the complicated code, looking for signatures that would be compared to known agents, terrorists, or criminals in the federal database.
The system was not foolproof. From a scientific standpoint, there was too much potential for a bad match: about 122 chances out of 65,000; roughly the standards law enforcement had used for preliminary DNA matches with limited markers just a few years before. But it was fine for Rubeo’s purposes.
The small screen on the device went green, indicating the sample was sufficient to be tested. A minute later the screen blanked, then flashed green, yellow, then green again. Halit was not a criminal or a known terrorist. Or anyone else in the U.S. data banks, for that matter.
A start, at least.
Rubeo reached into his pocket and took out a few euros. He threw them on the floor.
“Halit comes with us. The rest stay, or that money will be used for your funerals.”
Rubeo looked at his phone, where the feed from the video fly was still operating. The boy was outside; the area was clear.
Jons took hold of Halit’s elbow and they went out the front door. Rubeo, more relaxed, walked behind them, looking back and forth.
There was something invigorating in dealing with danger, he thought. He liked the way his heart pounded in his chest.
They brought Halit to the truck. After checking the monitoring system to make sure the vehicle had not been tampered with, Jons put Halit in the backseat.
Rubeo climbed in the front. He let Jons drive.
“Do you know the head of the guards at the gate below Tripoli?” Rubeo asked Halit.
“I know them, yes. Why do you treat me like a prisoner? I was told you need a guide. I am a guide, the best.”
“I don’t trust you,” said Rubeo. “You used a child to spy on me.”
“Only to see when you are coming. My son.”
“He wasn’t your son,” snapped Rubeo. He hated being lied to.
“My son, yes.”
Rubeo stared at him with contempt. The two couldn’t appear more different. The boy had been rail thin, with light features and blue eyes; the man was dark and pudgy, very short, with curly hair where the boy’s was straight.
Which was worse? The fact that he would lie on such a petty matter—or that he would think it OK to put his own son in danger?
Or any child, now that he thought of it.
Rubeo found most people venal and petty. A good number were stupid as well. Navigating around them was one thing; inevitably, though, there were situations where you had to count on them.
Jons had found three men capable of getting them south into the government-held areas. Halit was the most highly recommended.
Rubeo couldn’t help but imagine how horrible the other two must be.
“Your job is to get us past the guards,” he told the man as they drove. “You will stay with us at all times. If you say anything beyond what I ask you to say, if you attempt to leave us, if you do anything that puts us in danger, you will die.”
“A lot of words,” said the Libyan, holding his hands out. “I don’t understand.”
“Let me explain,” said Jons. He pulled one of his pistols out and pointed it toward the backseat. “Fuck up and we kill you.”
They drove back over to the airport. Two associates were waiting, sitting on the front bumper of a large Ford 250. The diesel-powered pickup had been flown in only an hour before.
The taller of the two men sprang off the bumper as they approached. Rubeo had met him when he’d helped pull security for him during some travels in China. His name was Lawson, and he had been a Ranger in the Army. He was personable, a talker—rare for the profession, in Rubeo’s experience.
The other man was Abas, an Iranian-American who had been a SEAL and done some work for the CIA before joining a private company Jons often called on for backup. Abas was silent to the point of being rocklike. He never smiled, and if he blinked his eyes or even closed them, Rubeo had never seen it.
“Boss, how’s it going?” said Lawson, stalking over. He was tall and thin. His right knee had been torn up in Afghanistan. For some reason it didn’t keep him from running, but he walked with the slightest of limps. The others sometimes called him “Igor” because of it.
“Where is everybody?” asked Jons.
“Siesta in the warehouse,” said Lawson. “And Kimmy’s out with the helucopper.”
Lawson thought his mispronunciation was funny and began chuckling. The men in the warehouse were four Filipinos, trusted by Jons but unknown to Rubeo. Between them they had plenty of firepower, ranging up to a pair of automatic grenade launchers.
Unlike Rubeo and Jons, the team used commercial weapons and tactical gear. The only thing supplied by Rubeo’s company were the com units—small ear sets with a pocket broadcast device. The units linked through a satellite connection and could share data; they worked solely by voice command.
“Go wake them up,” said Jons. “When’s Kimmy getting back?”
“Oughta be here any minute. She’s just shay-uh-aching the chopper down.”
Laughing again, Lawson turned and walked over to the warehouse to get the others.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t just take the helicopter in?” Jons asked.
“It’ll attract too much attention,” said Rubeo. The helicopter was a backup, in case they needed to be extracted quickly. While it was tempting to fly directly in and out, the chopper brought its own risks. It would be a target not only for the government and the rebels, but the Western coalition as well. While Rubeo assumed they wouldn’t shoot him down, he wanted to avoid telling them that he was here.
Jons took Halit over to the pickup and put him in the front seat. With Abas looking on, he showed him the GPS mapping system, which had a seven-inch screen mounted on a flexible arm between the driver and the front passenger.
The 250 cab had another row of seats in the back. Abas would drive; Jons and Rubeo would be in the back. Lawson and three of the Filipinos would be in the other truck. The last Filipino and Kimmy would stay back in the helicopter, on alert.
Rubeo turned his attention to the horizon. The desert was calm. There was no wind to speak of. A few pancake clouds sat on the horizon. The temperature was mild, considering where they were.
“Kimmy’s about five minutes away,” said Jons. “You want to wait for her, or should we hit the road?”
“There’s no reason to wait.”
“Let’s go, then.” Jons turned to the others. “You want to hit the can, better do it now. We ain’t stoppin’ for nothing and nobody once we leave.”
17
Sicily
With the rest of the afternoon off, Turk decided he would work out back at his hotel, then maybe go for a swim in the pool there. He hoped the activity would give his mind a break. He was almost at his car when his phone buzzed with a text message.
It was from Li Pike:
R U AROUND?
He answered yes.
COL WANTS TO KNOW—CAN U FLY TONIGHT? MISSION. IMPRTNT
ON MY WAY.
The briefing had already started by the time he got there. A French plane had gone down near a city held by the government in the southeast corner of the country, very close to the Chad border. The plane had apparently been lost to engine trouble; in any event, the government did not appear to know that it had crashed. A team of British SAS commandos was looking for the downed airman; the Hogs had been asked to join the second shift of air support tasked to aid the mission.
The A–10s would be equipped with Maverick missiles guided to their targets via laser designators; the bombs could be targeted either by the ground forces or the aircraft themselves.
All eight of Shooter Squadron’s planes were tasked for the mission, but they would be divided into two groups to extend coverage.
The first flight, with Paulson as lead, would take off at 2200. The second group, led by Ginella, would come off the runway three hours later, at 0100.
The two flights would overlap for a brief period, but the general idea was that the first flight would be relieved by the second, which would operate until daylight.
“What happens if they don’t find the guy by then?” asked Grizzly.
“Then he’s not alive,” said Ginella. She glanced at her watch. It was a little past 1900, or 7:00 P.M. “There’s a little time to grab something to eat, but make it quick. Anyone that’s too tired, I want that hand up now.”
She looked at Turk. He wasn’t about to admit fatigue.
Assigned to the second group, he would fly wing to Grizzly; Ginella explained that he had never flown at night with the special gear the Hogs used. Coop was flying as her wingman.
Li was in the first group as Paulson’s wing.
“I’m sorry for you,” Turk told her as they went over to get some dinner.
“For what?”
“Paulson can be a real prick.”
“I think he’s a pretty good pilot.” Turk felt a little stab in his heart, until she added, “A class A jackass and a jerk besides, but he flies well.”
While they ate, Grizzly regaled them with stories about his first nighttime refuel in a Hog—not particularly morale inducing, as he had fallen off the fuel probe not once, not twice, but three times, which the boomer—the crewman manning the refuel probe—had claimed was a new Hog record. Turk gathered that the difficulty of the refuel was the reason he’d been relegated to the back of the line.
“The boomer, though, claimed the worst pilots at night refuel are the F–22 jocks,” said Grizzly.
That got a jealous laugh from the others, even though it was probably not true.
Turk hardly touched his food, spending most of his time watching Li instead. She had long slim fingers. They were expressive, even just holding a fork.
He wanted to ask her why and how she had become a pilot, but Grizzly started another story about how he’d spent “a year one week” flying Hog missions with a SEAL team.
His stories were too involved to be interrupted. The ops weren’t the interesting part; the shenanigans, missteps, complications, and above all the nightly parties with members of the SEAL team, were the real point. According to Grizzly, they had gotten into a total of ten fights in six days, including one all-out brawl with members of a mixed martial-arts troupe.
True or not, it was a good yarn. Li, anxious to get ready for her flight, excused herself before it ended. Unable to find an excuse to accompany her that wouldn’t sound overly corny, Turk watched her leave.
Even her walk was sexy.
He was glad that he didn’t have to fly with Paulson, but the long wait before the sortie weighed heavily. He finally found a couch in a corner of the room next to the ready room and bedded down.
He started to drift off. He saw Li in his mind, starting to slip into unconsciousness. The image was pleasant, but almost immediately it morphed into Ginella. They started having sex.
Turk opened his eyes. Grizzly was shaking him.
God!
Turk practically jumped to the ceiling.
“Rise and shine, bro,” laughed Grizzly, who fortunately had no idea of the dream he’d just woken him from. “We got some flyin’ to do.”
18
Libya
Following Halit’s advice, Rubeo decided to avoid the gate south of Tripoli, riding about twenty miles across open desert to reach a road that connected to the main highway south.
The road was barely discernible from the dirt, grit, and sand that washed over it. They drove up through a succession of hills. From a distance the terrain looked like the rumpled back of a giant sleeping facedown on the earth. Up close they were brown and almost featureless, bland nonentities that only slowed them down.
So much of life was like that, thought Rubeo. From a distance things looked remarkable. And then you got there and they were bland and boring.
Even his own life. For all his work in artificial intelligence systems, in related technologies, in the interface between man and machine—what accomplishments filled him with excitement?
The work that he was doing now on autonomous machines? On computers that really, truly, thought for themselves—not in the areas where they had been programmed to think, but in areas that they knew nothing about.
The Sabres were a small by-product of that work—a distant offshoot, really, because of course war had to be programmed into a machine.
And programmed out. The machine needed to be taught limits so it would not turn on its master, as everyone who had ever picked up a scifi novel surely knew.
Had he not given the Sabres proper limits? Or was it a mechanical flaw?
Some combination, surely.
They had not yet ruled out direct action from the enemy. But that seemed to make little sense. Why do something to cause more casualties? The aim would be to have the plane destroy itself.
“What do you think of this?” asked Jons, handing him one of the team iPads. The device was equipped with a satellite modem in place of the usual cell and wireless connections; the com system used a series of anonymous servers to hide the identity and origins of the Web requests.
The screen showed a news story on the UAV incident. Labeled “Analysis,” it recounted some of the popular theories on what had happened. Most were far off base or so vague that they could be describing a car accident.
But the paragraphs Jons had highlighted speculated that the attack had been made because of software problems. And it cited anonymous e-mails from “developers” indicating that the aircraft were making targeting decisions on their own.
In contrast to the rest of the piece, there was plenty of well-reasoned thought on the subject, enough to convince Rubeo that the source knew a great deal about the problems involved. He scrolled back to the top and reread the story carefully. Much of it was generic, so much so that he couldn’t figure out whether the writer, as opposed to the source, actually knew what he was talking about.
“It’s not very specific,” said Rubeo, handing the iPad back. “This middle part is interesting, but I don’t know that he has any real sources inside our organization. He might know someone at another company that’s working on the problem.”
“That’s what I thought.” Jons opened the browser to a new page. “But I did a couple of searches on some of the phrases just to be sure. Look at this list.”
There were twenty-eight matches from bulletin boards and comment areas. All used similar language to describe the accident and the theory that the aircraft had been under their own autonomous control when the attack was made.
“These drones are being operated without human supervision,” read one. “They decide who to kill and who to spare. The man who invented them, Ray Rubeo, thinks machines are better than people.”
The latter was a rather common criticism, not just of Rubeo, but of practically any scientist who worked in the area. But the fact that it was being directed at one person, rather than a team, bothered Rubeo immensely. Coupled with the alleged e-mail, it looked as if someone either in his company or at least tangentially related was leaking information.
“What do you think?” asked Jons.
“I cannot speak Arabic well,” said Rubeo. “But this device will translate for me.”
He took out his phone and queued up a translation program. He pressed the large circle in the middle of the screen, scrolled through his most recent lines, and highlighted the questions. The machine repeated them in fluent Arabic.
“Go to the devil,” said the boy.
Even Rubeo’s Arabic was good enough to figure out what he had said without the program. He reached into his pocket and slipped out a ten euro note.
“Would this help?”
The boy grabbed at it.
Rubeo pulled it back. “Tell them I’m coming.” He double-tapped his screen without looking; the machine gave the translation almost instantly. Then he handed the boy the money.
“I say he’s a purse snatcher,” said Jons as the boy ran off.
“That is why you are the brawn of the company, Levon.” Rubeo flicked the app on his screen to the tracking display. While holding the kid, Jons had placed a small video fly on his shoulder. The fly transmitted his location, displaying it on an overhead map.
He ran straight to the alley where they were supposed to meet the men. Rubeo brought up another app, and images appeared on the screen.
“All right. I’m an asshole,” said Jons glumly as he took the phone from his boss.
Ten minutes later Rubeo and Jons climbed over a short fence that ran behind the building where the boy had run. Jons knocked on the back door, then put his shoulder to it, breaking it off its hinges. Rubeo walked inside.
The three men the kid had reported to were still questioning him about Rubeo.
“Excuse my dramatic entrance,” Rubeo told them. “I was somewhat disconcerted by the fact that you had a child shadowing me.”
Jons held his gun on the men, but that was superfluous: they were all too surprised to react.
“Which one of you is Halit?” asked Rubeo. He had practiced the phrase several times, and said it smoothly.
A man in a white-and-blue striped sweater raised his hand.
“These are my brothers,” said the man in English. “They have just been here with me, to keep company.”
“I’ll bet,” said Jons. “Come here.”
The squat Libyan tried to suck in his gut as he got up. He wore a gray warm-up jacket and black jeans, along with black shoes polished to a high shine.
“Spit,” said Jons, holding out a small device with what looked like an air scoop on the edge. “Into it.”
Halit did so. The device analyzed the DNA in the spit, uploading parts to a database back at Rubeo’s company headquarters. It worked quickly, picking out only small parts of the complicated code, looking for signatures that would be compared to known agents, terrorists, or criminals in the federal database.
The system was not foolproof. From a scientific standpoint, there was too much potential for a bad match: about 122 chances out of 65,000; roughly the standards law enforcement had used for preliminary DNA matches with limited markers just a few years before. But it was fine for Rubeo’s purposes.
The small screen on the device went green, indicating the sample was sufficient to be tested. A minute later the screen blanked, then flashed green, yellow, then green again. Halit was not a criminal or a known terrorist. Or anyone else in the U.S. data banks, for that matter.
A start, at least.
Rubeo reached into his pocket and took out a few euros. He threw them on the floor.
“Halit comes with us. The rest stay, or that money will be used for your funerals.”
Rubeo looked at his phone, where the feed from the video fly was still operating. The boy was outside; the area was clear.
Jons took hold of Halit’s elbow and they went out the front door. Rubeo, more relaxed, walked behind them, looking back and forth.
There was something invigorating in dealing with danger, he thought. He liked the way his heart pounded in his chest.
They brought Halit to the truck. After checking the monitoring system to make sure the vehicle had not been tampered with, Jons put Halit in the backseat.
Rubeo climbed in the front. He let Jons drive.
“Do you know the head of the guards at the gate below Tripoli?” Rubeo asked Halit.
“I know them, yes. Why do you treat me like a prisoner? I was told you need a guide. I am a guide, the best.”
“I don’t trust you,” said Rubeo. “You used a child to spy on me.”
“Only to see when you are coming. My son.”
“He wasn’t your son,” snapped Rubeo. He hated being lied to.
“My son, yes.”
Rubeo stared at him with contempt. The two couldn’t appear more different. The boy had been rail thin, with light features and blue eyes; the man was dark and pudgy, very short, with curly hair where the boy’s was straight.
Which was worse? The fact that he would lie on such a petty matter—or that he would think it OK to put his own son in danger?
Or any child, now that he thought of it.
Rubeo found most people venal and petty. A good number were stupid as well. Navigating around them was one thing; inevitably, though, there were situations where you had to count on them.
Jons had found three men capable of getting them south into the government-held areas. Halit was the most highly recommended.
Rubeo couldn’t help but imagine how horrible the other two must be.
“Your job is to get us past the guards,” he told the man as they drove. “You will stay with us at all times. If you say anything beyond what I ask you to say, if you attempt to leave us, if you do anything that puts us in danger, you will die.”
“A lot of words,” said the Libyan, holding his hands out. “I don’t understand.”
“Let me explain,” said Jons. He pulled one of his pistols out and pointed it toward the backseat. “Fuck up and we kill you.”
They drove back over to the airport. Two associates were waiting, sitting on the front bumper of a large Ford 250. The diesel-powered pickup had been flown in only an hour before.
The taller of the two men sprang off the bumper as they approached. Rubeo had met him when he’d helped pull security for him during some travels in China. His name was Lawson, and he had been a Ranger in the Army. He was personable, a talker—rare for the profession, in Rubeo’s experience.
The other man was Abas, an Iranian-American who had been a SEAL and done some work for the CIA before joining a private company Jons often called on for backup. Abas was silent to the point of being rocklike. He never smiled, and if he blinked his eyes or even closed them, Rubeo had never seen it.
“Boss, how’s it going?” said Lawson, stalking over. He was tall and thin. His right knee had been torn up in Afghanistan. For some reason it didn’t keep him from running, but he walked with the slightest of limps. The others sometimes called him “Igor” because of it.
“Where is everybody?” asked Jons.
“Siesta in the warehouse,” said Lawson. “And Kimmy’s out with the helucopper.”
Lawson thought his mispronunciation was funny and began chuckling. The men in the warehouse were four Filipinos, trusted by Jons but unknown to Rubeo. Between them they had plenty of firepower, ranging up to a pair of automatic grenade launchers.
Unlike Rubeo and Jons, the team used commercial weapons and tactical gear. The only thing supplied by Rubeo’s company were the com units—small ear sets with a pocket broadcast device. The units linked through a satellite connection and could share data; they worked solely by voice command.
“Go wake them up,” said Jons. “When’s Kimmy getting back?”
“Oughta be here any minute. She’s just shay-uh-aching the chopper down.”
Laughing again, Lawson turned and walked over to the warehouse to get the others.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t just take the helicopter in?” Jons asked.
“It’ll attract too much attention,” said Rubeo. The helicopter was a backup, in case they needed to be extracted quickly. While it was tempting to fly directly in and out, the chopper brought its own risks. It would be a target not only for the government and the rebels, but the Western coalition as well. While Rubeo assumed they wouldn’t shoot him down, he wanted to avoid telling them that he was here.
Jons took Halit over to the pickup and put him in the front seat. With Abas looking on, he showed him the GPS mapping system, which had a seven-inch screen mounted on a flexible arm between the driver and the front passenger.
The 250 cab had another row of seats in the back. Abas would drive; Jons and Rubeo would be in the back. Lawson and three of the Filipinos would be in the other truck. The last Filipino and Kimmy would stay back in the helicopter, on alert.
Rubeo turned his attention to the horizon. The desert was calm. There was no wind to speak of. A few pancake clouds sat on the horizon. The temperature was mild, considering where they were.
“Kimmy’s about five minutes away,” said Jons. “You want to wait for her, or should we hit the road?”
“There’s no reason to wait.”
“Let’s go, then.” Jons turned to the others. “You want to hit the can, better do it now. We ain’t stoppin’ for nothing and nobody once we leave.”
17
Sicily
With the rest of the afternoon off, Turk decided he would work out back at his hotel, then maybe go for a swim in the pool there. He hoped the activity would give his mind a break. He was almost at his car when his phone buzzed with a text message.
It was from Li Pike:
R U AROUND?
He answered yes.
COL WANTS TO KNOW—CAN U FLY TONIGHT? MISSION. IMPRTNT
ON MY WAY.
The briefing had already started by the time he got there. A French plane had gone down near a city held by the government in the southeast corner of the country, very close to the Chad border. The plane had apparently been lost to engine trouble; in any event, the government did not appear to know that it had crashed. A team of British SAS commandos was looking for the downed airman; the Hogs had been asked to join the second shift of air support tasked to aid the mission.
The A–10s would be equipped with Maverick missiles guided to their targets via laser designators; the bombs could be targeted either by the ground forces or the aircraft themselves.
All eight of Shooter Squadron’s planes were tasked for the mission, but they would be divided into two groups to extend coverage.
The first flight, with Paulson as lead, would take off at 2200. The second group, led by Ginella, would come off the runway three hours later, at 0100.
The two flights would overlap for a brief period, but the general idea was that the first flight would be relieved by the second, which would operate until daylight.
“What happens if they don’t find the guy by then?” asked Grizzly.
“Then he’s not alive,” said Ginella. She glanced at her watch. It was a little past 1900, or 7:00 P.M. “There’s a little time to grab something to eat, but make it quick. Anyone that’s too tired, I want that hand up now.”
She looked at Turk. He wasn’t about to admit fatigue.
Assigned to the second group, he would fly wing to Grizzly; Ginella explained that he had never flown at night with the special gear the Hogs used. Coop was flying as her wingman.
Li was in the first group as Paulson’s wing.
“I’m sorry for you,” Turk told her as they went over to get some dinner.
“For what?”
“Paulson can be a real prick.”
“I think he’s a pretty good pilot.” Turk felt a little stab in his heart, until she added, “A class A jackass and a jerk besides, but he flies well.”
While they ate, Grizzly regaled them with stories about his first nighttime refuel in a Hog—not particularly morale inducing, as he had fallen off the fuel probe not once, not twice, but three times, which the boomer—the crewman manning the refuel probe—had claimed was a new Hog record. Turk gathered that the difficulty of the refuel was the reason he’d been relegated to the back of the line.
“The boomer, though, claimed the worst pilots at night refuel are the F–22 jocks,” said Grizzly.
That got a jealous laugh from the others, even though it was probably not true.
Turk hardly touched his food, spending most of his time watching Li instead. She had long slim fingers. They were expressive, even just holding a fork.
He wanted to ask her why and how she had become a pilot, but Grizzly started another story about how he’d spent “a year one week” flying Hog missions with a SEAL team.
His stories were too involved to be interrupted. The ops weren’t the interesting part; the shenanigans, missteps, complications, and above all the nightly parties with members of the SEAL team, were the real point. According to Grizzly, they had gotten into a total of ten fights in six days, including one all-out brawl with members of a mixed martial-arts troupe.
True or not, it was a good yarn. Li, anxious to get ready for her flight, excused herself before it ended. Unable to find an excuse to accompany her that wouldn’t sound overly corny, Turk watched her leave.
Even her walk was sexy.
He was glad that he didn’t have to fly with Paulson, but the long wait before the sortie weighed heavily. He finally found a couch in a corner of the room next to the ready room and bedded down.
He started to drift off. He saw Li in his mind, starting to slip into unconsciousness. The image was pleasant, but almost immediately it morphed into Ginella. They started having sex.
Turk opened his eyes. Grizzly was shaking him.
God!
Turk practically jumped to the ceiling.
“Rise and shine, bro,” laughed Grizzly, who fortunately had no idea of the dream he’d just woken him from. “We got some flyin’ to do.”
18
Libya
Following Halit’s advice, Rubeo decided to avoid the gate south of Tripoli, riding about twenty miles across open desert to reach a road that connected to the main highway south.
The road was barely discernible from the dirt, grit, and sand that washed over it. They drove up through a succession of hills. From a distance the terrain looked like the rumpled back of a giant sleeping facedown on the earth. Up close they were brown and almost featureless, bland nonentities that only slowed them down.
So much of life was like that, thought Rubeo. From a distance things looked remarkable. And then you got there and they were bland and boring.
Even his own life. For all his work in artificial intelligence systems, in related technologies, in the interface between man and machine—what accomplishments filled him with excitement?
The work that he was doing now on autonomous machines? On computers that really, truly, thought for themselves—not in the areas where they had been programmed to think, but in areas that they knew nothing about.
The Sabres were a small by-product of that work—a distant offshoot, really, because of course war had to be programmed into a machine.
And programmed out. The machine needed to be taught limits so it would not turn on its master, as everyone who had ever picked up a scifi novel surely knew.
Had he not given the Sabres proper limits? Or was it a mechanical flaw?
Some combination, surely.
They had not yet ruled out direct action from the enemy. But that seemed to make little sense. Why do something to cause more casualties? The aim would be to have the plane destroy itself.
“What do you think of this?” asked Jons, handing him one of the team iPads. The device was equipped with a satellite modem in place of the usual cell and wireless connections; the com system used a series of anonymous servers to hide the identity and origins of the Web requests.
The screen showed a news story on the UAV incident. Labeled “Analysis,” it recounted some of the popular theories on what had happened. Most were far off base or so vague that they could be describing a car accident.
But the paragraphs Jons had highlighted speculated that the attack had been made because of software problems. And it cited anonymous e-mails from “developers” indicating that the aircraft were making targeting decisions on their own.
In contrast to the rest of the piece, there was plenty of well-reasoned thought on the subject, enough to convince Rubeo that the source knew a great deal about the problems involved. He scrolled back to the top and reread the story carefully. Much of it was generic, so much so that he couldn’t figure out whether the writer, as opposed to the source, actually knew what he was talking about.
“It’s not very specific,” said Rubeo, handing the iPad back. “This middle part is interesting, but I don’t know that he has any real sources inside our organization. He might know someone at another company that’s working on the problem.”
“That’s what I thought.” Jons opened the browser to a new page. “But I did a couple of searches on some of the phrases just to be sure. Look at this list.”
There were twenty-eight matches from bulletin boards and comment areas. All used similar language to describe the accident and the theory that the aircraft had been under their own autonomous control when the attack was made.
“These drones are being operated without human supervision,” read one. “They decide who to kill and who to spare. The man who invented them, Ray Rubeo, thinks machines are better than people.”
The latter was a rather common criticism, not just of Rubeo, but of practically any scientist who worked in the area. But the fact that it was being directed at one person, rather than a team, bothered Rubeo immensely. Coupled with the alleged e-mail, it looked as if someone either in his company or at least tangentially related was leaking information.
“What do you think?” asked Jons.
