Kill Decision Read online

  ALSO BY DANIEL SUAREZ

  Daemon

  Freedom™

  KILL

  DECISION

  Daniel Suarez

  DUTTON

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, July 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Suarez

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Suarez, Daniel, 1964–

  Kill decision / Daniel Suarez.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-525-95261-9 (hardcover)

  1. United States. Army. Special Forces—Fiction. 2. Women scientists—Fiction. 3. Drone aircraft—Fiction. 4. Artificial intelligence—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.U327K55 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2011052061

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Also by Daniel Suarez

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Boomerang

  Warning Order

  Raconteur

  Intrusion Detection

  Omen

  Wake-up Call

  The Activity

  Lost in Action

  Influence Operations

  Deconfliction

  Eye in the Sky

  Underground Drive

  Close Hold

  Insomnia

  Closed Loop

  Damage Control

  Safari-One-Six

  Firestorm

  Hot Wash

  Oscar Mike

  War Mask

  Sanctuary

  Collateral Damage

  Myrmidons

  Personae Management

  The Puppet Master

  Proof-of-Concept

  Brood Chamber

  Improvise

  The Swarm

  Reap the Whirlwind

  Prodigal Son

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  - The First Truth -

  Humans are more important than hardware.

  CHAPTER 1

  Boomerang

  From eight thousand feet the rescue workers looked like agitated ants as they scurried around the wreckage of a car bomb. An MQ-1B Predator drone zoomed its cameras in for a close-up. Debris and body parts littered a marketplace. Scorched dirt slick with blood filled the frame. The dying and wounded groped silently for help.

  The techs called it “Death TV”—the live video feed from America’s fleet of unmanned Predator, Global Hawk, and Reaper drones. The images poured in via satellite onto ten large HD screens suspended at intervals from the rafters of the U.S. Air Force’s dimly lit cubicle farm in Hampton, Virginia. Officially known as Distributed Common Ground System-1, it was half a world away from the daytime on most of those screens. The local time was two A.M.

  Monitoring the feeds and clattering at keyboards in response to what they saw were scores of young airmen first class arrayed in groups of six before banks of flat-panel computer monitors, watched over by technical sergeants pacing behind them. And watched in turn by their officers, like pit bosses and floor managers in some macabre casino.

  At his workstation in the semidarkness, twenty-six-year-old First Lieutenant Anthony Jordan glanced up occasionally to gauge the mood of the world. From the look of things it was shaping up to be a pretty typical day: scattered violence.

  Between glances Jordan typed chat messages to an army civil affairs team at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone, just a few miles down the road from the car bomb blast on-screen. He simultaneously monitored chat threads from two other operations in theater and satellite radio chatter in his headset, all while his desk phone lit up at intervals. He sensed a presence behind him, and a sheet of paper slid into view from his left. He spoke without looking up. “Lazzo, goddammit, IM me. You’re messing with my work flow.”

  Technical Sergeant Albert Lazzo leaned in from the right, his jowls hanging to the side like a plumb line. “Urgent, sir.”

  “Well . . .” Jordan gestured up to the carnage on the big screen above them. “There’s your benchmark. Start talking.”

  Lazzo smacked the sheet of paper. “AWACS is tracking a gopher south of Karbala. They want us to get eyes on.”

  Jordan’s fingers clattered over his keyboard. “Send the bogey dope, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “It’s the Day of Ashura, Lieutenant.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  Lazzo sighed the sigh of the knowledgeable underling. “A million Shiite pilgrims on foot commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala. The pilgrimage has been attacked by Sunni militants in the past, and we’ve got an unidentified aircraft inbound.”

  “Ah . . . right . . .” Jordan frowned as he finished typing a reply to a military intelligence unit. “What are we looking at?”

  “First showed up three clicks west of Al Hiyadha. Altitude two zero, speed two hundred knots. Heading three-five-zero.” Lazzo studied the printout. “A single-engine plane, maybe. Smugglers or local VIPs. But then again . . .”

  The civil affairs folks had briefed Jordan on the sensitivities of his sector. He recalled that the shrines of Imam Husayn and Al Abbas at Karbala were among the holiest sites to the Shia Islamic faith—that is, to about a quarter billion people.

  Lazzo offered the printed report again. “According to Geeks, you’ve got the closest tail, sir.”

  “Okay, I got it. I got it.” Jordan grabbed the printout and clicked on one of the three LCD monitors on his desk. He brought up GCCS, the Global Command and Control System that tracked the real-time location of all friendly forces in the field.

  He scrolled the map view of his sector and noted the tail number of his Predator drone nearest the radar contact. He then clicked through another screen to establish an encrypted satellite radio link to the drone operators in Nevada. “Kodar Tree, Kodar Tree. We are tracking a gopher, slow and in the weeds. I need tail one-zero-seven to come off current target and move south. Check your feed. MCR. Out.” He typed the AWACS info and destination MGRS coordinates into a chat window directed to the pilot’s handle. He waited several moments.

  “Copy that, MCR. Proceeding to grid t
ree-eight, sierra, mike, bravo, one-two-tree-niner-zero-eight-zero-eight.”

  Jordan and Lazzo looked up at the large screen above them as the image switched from the car bombing to another scene entirely—a tan, flat horizon. It was eight hours later in Iraq, midmorning, and the horizon leaned right as tail one-zero-seven yawed over the brown, ancient city of Karbala at an altitude of nine thousand feet. At that height the drone would be inaudible and all but invisible to casual observers on the ground.

  Each Predator system consisted of a pilot, his sensor operator, and a set of four separate Predator drones that they controlled from inside an air-conditioned military shipping container—in this case at Creech Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, Nevada. They pulled twelve-hour shifts there in what were called “reachback” operations, and then went home for breakfast in the suburbs. Jordan sometimes suffered the same disorienting effects the Predator teams reported from remote operations. It made it hard to keep up a battle rhythm when you found yourself in a convenience store buying a Slurpee an hour after ordering the deaths of five insurgents half a world away. It was easy to forget this was all very real somewhere and not just a super-high-res game. There was counseling for that, but he didn’t think it was a good career move to take advantage of it.

  Jordan continued to monitor the contents of several screens at once.

  “SO, we’ve got forty degrees more of heading.”

  “Sensor copies.”

  A voice from higher up the command chain suddenly broke in on the radio. “Kodar Tree, this is Sentinel. Request weapons load-out.”

  Others were listening in, then. It underscored to Jordan the sensitivities of operations above the masses of Shia pilgrims moving through Karbala. U.S. combat forces had officially left the country—a pronouncement that seriously pissed off the U.S. troops who were still there. These drone flights were overhead to look for trouble and pass intelligence to the Iraqi army. And Lazzo was right; the Ashura festivities had been attacked by militant Sunnis before.

  “Sentinel, we are Winchester.”

  Unarmed. This close to the shrines, he damned well better be Winchester.

  “Kodar Tree, you may proceed. Sentinel out.”

  “Copy that, Sentinel. MCR, we are on-station, heading one-seven-eight. Pilot out.”

  They watched for several moments as the optics package zoomed in along Route 9, the wide, gritty boulevard stretching cracked, sun-blasted, and arrow-straight south through the city. Lined with run-down housing blocks, the road was packed with tens of thousands of pilgrims moving on foot. Jordan whistled. “That’s quite a crowd.” He keyed his mic. “Pilot, keep tracking south, and you should intercept that gopher momentarily.”

  “Wilco.”

  “There.” Sergeant Lazzo pointed up at the screen with a pocket laser pointer, but it was already obvious to them all.

  “MCR, we’ve got a visual on that gopher. It is a cyclops—repeat, cyclops—heading tree-fife-eight. Probably has a bent parrot.”

  Jordan saw the unmistakable outline of an American drone as it motored north at barely two thousand feet altitude. What the hell? “Kodar Tree, copy that cyclops. Designate cyclops Target One. Shadow Target One, and get me its tail number.”

  Lazzo raised his eyebrows.

  “Pilot copies.”

  “Sensor copies.”

  Lazzo shrugged. “One of our drones with a malfunctioning transponder, then.”

  Jordan studied the screen. “But how the hell did it get there? And why isn’t there a record in Blue Force Tracker? I mean, that’s a Reaper.” Jordan stared at the high-def video of a gray American MQ-9 Reaper drone, still tracking north above the highway. Visually similar to the smaller propeller-driven MQ-1 Predator, the Reaper was half again as large, and capable of carrying far more weaponry. This one was flying lower than any drone—especially a Reaper—should. Was it having engine trouble?

  “MCR, Target One has stars-and-bars, but no visible tail number. Repeat, no visible tail number.”

  “Copy that, Kodar Tree.” Jordan changed radio channels. “Sentinel, MCR, heads up. We have a visual on MQ-9 cyclops with bent parrot and no visible tail number over Karbala, slow and in the weeds, heading tree-fife-fife. No record of this flight. Please advise.”

  Radio and instant message chatter swelled in response, and Jordan muttered to Lazzo as he dialed an extension on his phone. “I thought CIA had stopped this cowboy shit.”

  Lazzo was still squinting at the screen. “But AWACS would have checked with JSOC before calling us.”

  Jordan held a finger to his headset switch, waiting for an answer. “Well, it’s somebody’s goddamned drone, and it couldn’t just wander into the neighborhood without anyone knowing about it.”

  “That thing’s loaded for bear.”

  As the optics zoomed in on the Reaper, Jordan could see the hard-points on the wings bearing a full complement of fourteen AGM Hellfire missiles. In the background below it, thousands of black- and white-robed pilgrims pointed up as the shadow of its wings passed over them.

  “This is one hell of a Charlie Foxtrot.” He could see pilgrims in the crowd filming the drone with video cameras and cell phones. “You watch, that’ll show up on Al Jazeera later.”

  Just then a tall, stern-looking air force colonel wearing ABUs marched into Jordan’s workspace. “What the hell’s going on, Lieutenant?”

  Jordan stood and saluted along with Sergeant Lazzo. “Colonel, sir. Unidentified Reaper above Karbala. No IFF. No tail number. We’re still trying to ID it.”

  The colonel pointed at Lazzo. “Get CIA on the line, and find out why the hell I didn’t know about this.” He then gazed up at the screen as several other techs were now doing. “Christ on a cracker, this breaks half a dozen airspace restrictions, and I’m not about to take the heat for it. Where is it now?”

  “Roughly three clicks south of the Imam Husayn and Al Abbas shrines.”

  “How did it get this far undetected?”

  “No idea, sir. AWACS only alerted us a few minutes ago.”

  “Find out who’s controlling that drone.”

  Jordan grabbed a phone and glanced at Lazzo, who simply shrugged in confusion as he manned a phone as well.

  As the colonel and other nearby airmen watched the screen, the view rotated. Their Predator was falling behind the faster, more powerful unidentified Reaper drone. Up ahead, they could see the golden domes of the twin shrines gleaming in the sunlight. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims filled the open squares around them. The Reaper was silhouetted, coming in low, like a spiked hornet against the city.

  The Predator pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “MCR, heads up. Target One appears engaged offensive. It’s sparkling the shrine. Repeat, cyclops is sparkling the shrine.”

  Now everyone was standing up, gazing at the overhead screen. Jordan lowered his phone receiver. “Which shrine is it lasing?”

  “It could be prepping for a missile launch.” The colonel turned on Jordan and Lazzo. “Give me that goddamned phone!”

  Lazzo shook his head. “CIA says it’s not their drone, Colonel.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Just then a Hellfire missile burst forth from the left wing of the Reaper in a puff of smoke, screaming skyward in an arc. A whole section of DCGS-1 staff gasped as the missile continued its trajectory, rising, and then suddenly arced straight down above the Imam Husayn shrine. By then two more missiles had launched and were beginning their upward arcs as well.

  “MCR, heads up. Ripple!”

  Lazzo called it out. “We’ve got multiple missile launches.”

  Jordan was stunned by the magnitude of what he was watching. As his eyes went wide, the Predator’s optics focused in on the packed crowd in the square. The first missile impacted, spreading a visible shock wave through the air—quickly followed by a sustained fireball that in turn sent an even more powerful shock wave through the crowd—disintegrating them. Pieces of human beings flew in all directions.

  “
Lieutenant!” The colonel turned to Jordan. “New picture. Shoot that drone down! Take it down!”

  Jordan came back to his senses and immediately got AWACS on the line. “Bandsaw-one-six. Bandsaw-one-six Sprint! Sprint! Sprint!”

  As he spoke, he could see the remaining missiles roaring forward from the hard-points on the Reaper wings, raining down in a broad pattern among the pilgrims.

  The colonel and most of the staff stared in disbelief. They had seen horrible sights on “Death TV” before, but this one was off the chart.

  Lazzo stared at the explosions silently blasting holes into the dense crowds. “The bastards are using thermobarics. How could they just . . .” His voice trailed off as several technicians around him covered their mouths in horror.

  The Predator’s optics played across the huge crowds roiling like ocean waves as they fled from the gore in the square between shrines, trampling each other in terror. Some of the DCGS staff actually howled in outrage.

  “MCR, recommend Target One be destroyed immediately.”

  The colonel looked truly livid—his face red, his eyes blazing.

  “Sir, we have Falcons inbound. ETA three minutes.”

  “Well, the damage is goddamn done already, son! I want that drone tracked, and I want to know who’s operating it! Get me some goddamned ELINT, and find out where it’s being controlled from.”

  As the smoke and flames rose above the city, they could see the Reaper banking away and descending even farther—having let loose every missile it had.

  “MCR, Target One turning to new heading . . . two-one.”

  “Kodar Tree, MCR copies.”

  They could now see the silent flash of small-arms fire from the crowds below. Their vantage point was still over a mile above the mystery Reaper—most likely their own Predator was still unseen by the crowd below, but the Reaper was in full view of hundreds of thousands of people.

  “MCR, I’m seeing SAF from the ground. Looks like IA is having a go.”