Odin stood up again. “Thank you, Professor.”
Singleton cleared his throat. “All of this would be incredibly useful information if we were facing hundreds of thousands of swarming robots—which we are not. Can we get down to business now?”
Odin just stared at Singleton for a moment. “Now that we know what risks we might face from swarming intelligence, let’s review recent operations.” Odin turned to the African-American scientist at the far end of the table. “Four, tell me what you learned from the Tanzanian video.”
The man put on glasses and started examining his laptop screen. “Pretty amazing to finally see one of these things flying, Odin. Your hunch about the target was dead on.” He glanced up at McKinney. “No offense intended, Six.”
“None taken.”
He tapped a combination of keys, and what was on his screen moved to a larger flat-screen monitor hanging on the wall where everyone could see it. It was the black-and-white FLIR footage of the drone that had attacked McKinney in Africa.
“From what we can tell, Odin, this isn’t an extant design.” He pointed at various features with a laser pointer. “Forward canards. Midsection dome. Slightly swept wing. What we’re looking at here is a Frankenstein machine—something put together from all sorts of different drone designs.”
“What’s the prognosis for recovering wreckage?”
“In the Amani jungle reserve? Approaching zero. Whole armies have disappeared in there.”
“What about its radar track? Where did it come from?”
“Came on radar off the east coast of Africa, near Zanzibar.”
“HUMINT?”
“CIA’s got some local stringers asking around, but that’s gonna take time. Could be weeks till we hear anything.”
“What about ships in the area?”
“There were dozens of ships and small craft. It’s near a major African port, but there were no satellite assets overhead at the time.”
The Korean scientist nodded. “The enemy’s probably monitoring orbit schedules.”
“Okay, so even though we were in the right time and place, we still have no idea where these things are originating.”
The African-American scientist nodded sadly. “It’ll be worse here in the States. The drones mix in with domestic air traffic—small private planes. There are thousands of unregistered private airstrips—runways on ranches and commercial and private lands that aren’t attended by flight controllers or anyone else. Radar echoes alone aren’t going to identify these things, and since they are remotely controlled we can’t listen for unique radio signatures.”
The Korean scientist nodded. “None of them have been picked up by DEA drones or coastal radar, so they might be being built and launched domestically. But with just two dozen attacks over three months, we don’t have much data to work with. There’s too much terrain to cover.”
The blond scientist added with a slight Germanic accent, “Without an intact specimen—”
The Korean scientist next to him shook his head vigorously. “The moment we try to grab it, it’ll explode in our faces—making it next to impossible to determine who built it, how it operates, and how to defend against it.”
Odin glanced down at the notes on his pad of paper and crossed an item off a list. “That’s being handled, Two. Next comes target prediction. Where are we?”
The Japanese researcher shook his head. “Nowhere, Odin. We’ve run the previous bombing victims through tens of thousands of link analysis filters, searching for any recognizable pattern or connection, but there’s nothing. A human rights activist, a financier, oil company executives . . .” He threw up his hands. “None of them knew each other or had interactions of any type. They didn’t work for the same companies or even in the same industry. They had no common financial interests, enemies, religious or political affiliations, social interests. Exchanged no communications. Not all of them were American, and on paper some of them would have been political adversaries—for example, the human rights activist in Chicago and the private prison lobbyist in Houston. Or the financial journalists killed in the New York café bombing or the retired East German Communist party boss living in Queens.”
Odin pondered it. “What were the journalists working on when they died?”
“Corruption at major investment houses. The activist was doing a documentary on sweatshops in Syria.” He shrugged. “If you’re going by a list of people they criticized—well, it’s a long list. It’s in the hundreds. We certainly can’t use it to predict an attack. We sliced and diced the data just about any way we can think of, and the only clear pattern is that these drones don’t attack in high winds, rain, or snow.”