Blue Warrior Read online

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2014 by Mike Maden

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maden, Mike.

  Blue warrior / Mike Maden.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-14110-0

  1. Insurgency—Fiction. 2. Drone aircraft—Fiction. 3. Sahara—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3613.A284327B58 2014 2014027615

  813'.6—dc23

  This 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, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Angela, my wife

  Always.

  Everything.

  Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ch. xiii

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  MAP

  2015

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  CELLA & TROY: 2003

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  CELLA & TROY: 2009

  Chapter 28

  2015

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

  DRONE AND OTHER SYSTEMS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  2015

  1

  Maputo International Airport

  Maputo, Mozambique

  1 May

  The gusting wind battered Troy Pearce’s bearded face. He didn’t care. It kept the humidity low and the stink of jet fuel at bay while he and Johnny Paloma finished loading up the last of the gear into a rented Toyota Land Cruiser pickup. They had two drone contracts to fulfill this trip.

  Johnny hardly said a word. Unusual for the former LAPD detective.

  “Something on your mind?” Pearce asked. A pair of dark aviators hid his world-weary blue eyes.

  “Been meaning to ask you something.”

  “So why haven’t you?”

  “Seems like the last couple of weeks you haven’t been yourself.”

  More like a couple of months, Pearce thought. He didn’t think it showed.

  Even though Pearce was the CEO of his global contracting firm, he liked getting his hands dirty out in the field. Didn’t believe in leading from behind. He slammed the truck gate shut. “So ask.”

  “How about I run this first training consult by myself?”

  Pearce liked Johnny a lot. He was street smart and fearless, a real door buster. Proved his worth last year in the ops they ran against the Mexicans and Iranians. Since then, Johnny had picked up on the basic technical aspects of drone operations and proved himself a decent small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) operator.

  Pearce Systems specialized in drone operations. Their first gig this week was an sUAS delivery and training consult with Sandra Gallez and the World Wildlife Alliance. Four days from now, they would deliver a security package to the South African special forces training center at Fort Scorpio.

  For the first time in a while, Pearce smiled. “You want that Gallez woman all to yourself.”

  “She’s a friend, that’s all. I just think I’m ready to lead the training. Don’t need you to wet-nurse me.”

  Sandra Gallez had flown up to Addis to sign the WWA contract three months before. The two of them obviously hit it off.

  “I call bullshit.” Pearce saw the way he looked at her when she came into their office.

  “We’ve stayed in touch.” Johnny grinned. “By phone, mostly.”

  Pearce couldn’t blame him. The Belgian wildlife conservationist was a real looker, and bright. It was a good match.

  “Maybe it is time you took point.” Pearce tossed him the truck keys. “No point in wasting that picnic basket, either.” He’d seen Johnny sneak it into the pickup that morning. “Unless you packed it for me.”

  Johnny smiled. “Not exactly.”

  “I’ll secure the Aviocar.”

  Pearce was glad to let Johnny do the training. Their destination today was the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, but Lake Massingir bordered the wilderness reserve. Pearce had fished all of his life, all over the world. He thought he wouldn’t get a chance to bait a hook this trip, but now Johnny made that possible. Maybe things were looking up after all.

  He headed back into the rented hangar. Pearce and Johnny had arrived with Dr. Rao’s shipment last night from Addis in the Pearce Systems C-212 Aviocar, a boxy, top-winged, twin-propped STOL cargo plane. Pearce was doing most of his own flying these days now that his personal pilot, Judy Hopper, was gone.

  The South African equipment was stowed away in a secret, locked compartment under the deck. Pearce shut and locked the plane’s cargo door, then shut and locked the hangar doors. Determined thieves could still break in, but he hired an armed security service to keep an eye on things while they w
ere in the field.

  Pearce climbed into the truck cab on the passenger side. The a/c was blowing good and cold.

  Johnny checked the map on his satellite phone. Didn’t look at Pearce.

  “You see those two jokers in the silver Mercedes G-Class, by the fence?”

  “They picked us up back at the hotel an hour ago,” Pearce said.

  “You could’ve said something.”

  “How’d you manage to survive in LA with eyes like yours?”

  “High-capacity magazines.” Johnny chambered a round into his Glock 19 pistol. “Any idea who they are?”

  “SVR. Russian intelligence service.”

  “What do you think they want?”

  “My head.” Pearce had killed Ambassador Britnev for masterminding the plot that murdered President Myers’s son last year and nearly drew the United States into a shooting war with the Russians.

  “I thought you got away clean on that one.”

  “So did I.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “They had a clear shot at me. So taking me out isn’t the objective.”

  “An exfil back to the Motherland? They must be really pissed.”

  “Britnev was a douche bag, but he was their douche bag.”

  “Two against two. We can take them.”

  “Too risky.”

  “Got a better idea?”

  “I always liked the G-Class. Reminds me of a Tonka truck.” Pearce pulled out his smartphone. “Let’s roll.”

  Johnny pulled away from the hangar and through the fence gate, heading for the road exiting the airport. The boxy German SUV sat tight as Johnny passed by their parking place, just as Pearce instructed.

  By the time Johnny cleared the airport, the Mercedes was in his rearview mirror, keeping a discreet distance.

  “The driver’s good,” Johnny said.

  Pearce tapped keys on his phone screen. “The SVR only sends the best. They won’t try anything until we’ve cleared the city.”

  —

  Thirty minutes outside of Maputo, traffic disappeared. The highway was an empty straight line for miles. The silver Mercedes glinted in Johnny’s rearview mirror a mile back. Couldn’t miss it.

  “That G-Class AMG is a sweet ride,” Johnny said. “Hundred thirty grand plus, just to drive it off the lot.”

  “It’s an amazing piece of technology. All the latest bells and whistles.”

  “Ready?” Pearce asked.

  Johnny smiled. “Say the word.”

  “Red-line it,” Pearce said.

  “God, I love this job.” Johnny mashed the gas pedal to the floorboard.

  The Toyota rocketed forward, but the straight-six engine was topping out at 180 kph. Not good enough.

  Pearce glanced in the side mirror. “He’s coming on, fast.”

  The Mercedes’s thundering 5.5-liter turbocharged V-8 was still accelerating. They were just a quarter mile back.

  Shooting distance.

  Pearce tapped his phone screen, capturing the Mercedes Distronic Plus radar-controlled cruise control. Ran his finger along a slider. Told the radar unit that an object was just one inch away from the Mercedes’s front bumper.

  The power disc brakes locked. Pads and rotors screamed.

  The big Mercedes tumbled end over end on the asphalt, glass flying, steel crunching, doors exploding. On the third rotation, a body flew out, cartwheeling on the asphalt. Four more devastating rotations, and the crumpled Mercedes finally landed in a shattered heap on the side of the road.

  “How’d you manage that?” Johnny asked. He pulled his foot off of the gas pedal, dropping back down to the legal speed limit.

  “Pirated his Bluetooth back at the parking lot.”

  Johnny chuckled. “Technology’s a bitch.”

  Pearce powered down his smartphone. “Let’s go find your girl.”

  2

  CIOS Corporate Offices

  Rockville, Maryland

  1 May

  She was there at the beginning, when the U.S. government first weaponized the Internet. In fact, she had loaded some of the first rounds into the cylinder and cocked the hammer.

  Jasmine Bath was twenty-four years old when she earned her M.S. in computer science from UC Berkeley, one of the first recruits into the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO) program. They started her at Fort Meade but moved her around, grooming her for bigger things. She was a software specialist but became familiar with hardware operations, too. She helped write some of the first coding for the NSA’s pervasive XKEYSCORE surveillance software before moving up into senior development positions within TAO’s aggressive counterintelligence ANT program. Her coding fingerprints were all over persistent software implants like JETPLOW (firewall firmware), HEADWATER (software backdoors), and SOMBERKNAVE (wireless Internet traffic rerouting). Those successes earned her multiple commendations and promotions, leading to training and supervisory positions in newly developed TAO sites in Hawaii, Texas, Colorado, and even the Dagger Complex in Germany.

  That meant the vast resources of the NSA were entirely at her disposal. She now had access to TAO’s shadow networks of servers and routers, used for covertly hijacking or herding unsuspecting Internet traffic through them. It was the Internet equivalent of the CIA opening up a cell phone store in Abbottabad and secretly selling supposedly untraceable burner phones to al-Qaeda terrorists.

  With the help of the CIA, FBI, and other national security agencies, TAO also planted hardware and software bugs and malware in electronic devices manufactured around the globe—including memory chips, hard drives, motherboards and cell phone cameras, to name just a few—to gain access to their data.

  TAO also remotely implanted software bugs and malware into network firewalls and security software programs, allowing the NSA to back-door more malware into, and harvest data out of, entire computer networks or individual computers, tablets, and phones. They even had their own manufacturing facilities, producing comprised keyboards, monitors, routers, and connector cables that secretly transmitted user data. The NSA also operated mirrored cell phone base stations that acted like legitimate cell phone towers, secretly capturing entire networks of cell phone users without their knowledge.

  In short, nearly every kind of commercially produced electronic device had been compromised, infected, and harnessed to TAO purposes, allowing them to hear, see, or read virtually any data-capable device on the planet without the knowledge of either the users or manufacturers. Best of all, these devices, once installed, remained in place, continuously harvesting data for future NSA use—data that Bath still had access to as well.

  But that wasn’t all.

  The NSA and its sister agencies successfully compromised nearly every social networking site on the planet. They even penetrated the “Dark Web,” where criminal and terrorist activity supposedly occurred without public knowledge or government interference.

  The NSA also created hundreds of fake jihadist, anarchist, and terrorist websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts in order to gather data from unsuspecting users, identify new suspects, compromise those individuals and organizations, and plant false data into hostile communities. They operated cybercafés around the world, offering free Internet access to unsuspecting users, not unlike the CIA conduct of fake vaccination campaigns to harvest DNA data on terror suspects. Conservative politicians who supported intrusive surveillance activities never realized that certain security agencies had also created virtual “Honey Pot” websites in order to draw out the most extremist elements within Tea Party, nationalist, constitutionalist, and “prepper” circles.

  Jasmine Bath had access to all of these fake portals as well.

  With all of these weapons in hand, Jasmine Bath could find out just about anything about anybody, or plant credible false evidence against any person. That ga
ve her the kind of power that state security agencies had sought since the time of the pharaohs but could only dream of.

  And that’s when she quit.

  Bath’s extensive experience and exposure gave her a big-picture overview of the NSA’s far-reaching capabilities and boundless resources. It also allowed her to secretly pocket a number of keys she would later use to pick her own locks at her former employer, which she would use to form her new company, CIOS. In effect, she used the NSA’s resources against them in order to exploit the NSA as her own spying agency. Who watches the watchers? Jasmine Bath does, she’d joke. She spied on the spies—or, more accurately, spied through the spies—without their even knowing it.

  With her top-security clearances, impeccable credentials, and agency contacts, she acquired several legitimate NSA contracts for CIOS just hours after tendering her resignation. But the real money to be made had nothing to do with honest work. She knew her unparalleled ability to find or fake information on virtually anybody, anywhere, would pry open the deepest wallets in Washington.

  She felt no guilt. She lost count of the number of “false flag” operations governments around the world—including her own—had used to start wars in the last forty years, or the lies told by politicians, bureaucrats, and advocacy groups to justify radically new domestic policy agendas. Venerable science journals and prestigious research institutions were plagued with falsified data in the scramble for federal grants and venture-capital investments. Bath just wanted her piece of the pie.

  All she lacked was the funding to launch the venture. But she didn’t have long to wait. A silent investor approached her and offered her unfettered control of her company. In exchange for no-strings-attached financing came his quid pro quo of no questions asked, and in turn, she was to be available when called upon, which would be both rare and remunerative.

  The silent investor’s name, she would discover much later after proving herself to him, was startling. One of the true power brokers in Washington. His connections provided her with all the cover she would ever need should her formidable defenses ever fail. Owing to his preeminence in her corporate life, she always referred to him as The Angel.

  3