And partly it was because he was afraid of the implications of what he was about to say.
He cleared his throat and positioned his thumb on the remote control for the laptop, which he’d already hooked into the projection system.
“Thank you,” said Danny, clicking through to the first slide in his PowerPoint. “Uh, first of all, I apologize for the, uh, primitiveness of this. I just got back from Malaysia, and uh, I pulled this together…”
God, he told himself, calm down. He glanced at Breanna Stockard, who was sitting near the end of the table. She gave him a grim nod, as if to say, Get on with it.
“For the past twelve months a small rebel group in Malaysia known as 30 May Movement has been active on the island of Borneo, which as you know Malaysia shares with Brunei and Indonesia. Their activities have been primarily in the state of Sarawak, which is the largest part of East Malaysia. You have three countries sharing that island, each encircling the other. Borneo is on the coast, East Malaysia is around it, then Indonesia. That’s, um, East Malaysia.”
Danny paused for a quick sip of water, then continued. “The 30 May Movement is named after an alleged massacre that occurred on the island, near the border with Indonesia. The group is relatively small, thought to number perhaps five hundred active fighters. That is dwarfed by the size of the other two main groups, which are primarily fighting in the eastern portion of the island, where we’ve had, uh, where we’ve sent Marine advisors.”
Danny caught a glimpse of Jonathon Reid’s bored face. Reid was the head of the CIA half of Whiplash. Skip over the background, he’d said earlier. They know it!
“So, as you know, the group has not been of much concern to anyone. But a few weeks ago something happened to bring it to our attention. This.”
Danny clicked to the first slide. Scratchy video began to play — it was from the camera of a Malaysian fighter-bomber, a Northrup F-5E, which was considered ancient even in Malaysia. The “Freedom fighter” had been pressed into a ground-support role, and at the start of the video was pulling up from a strafing run at a rebel stronghold.
Suddenly, a black shadow appeared on the right side of the screen, flashing toward the plane. It passed quickly overhead.
The object looked like a missile, and apparently the pilot of the F-5E thought that’s what it was, since he immediately rolled his plane and fired off chaff and flares — an unnecessary precaution, most pilots would have agreed, since the trajectory of the object made it clear that it had missed his plane. Nothing outside of the U.S. arsenal could change course quickly enough to give him a problem.
But the Malaysian pilot was right to be worried. As his plane rolled away, a warning sounded in the cockpit, announcing that he was being tracked by a weapons radar.
“The sound you’re hearing is a warning that the plane is being tracked at close range,” said Danny as the video ended. “The plane was subsequently shot down. There are a couple of things to note,” he added, “starting with the fact that the object was not detected at close range; there was no threat indicated. And that the shoot-down occurred within moments of the radar being activated.”
“What shot it down?” asked the Secretary of State, Alistar Newhaven.
“We believe the object that we saw at the beginning of the video. We think it is a combat UAV.”
He flashed a few images on the screen. All were artists’ concepts based on the extremely brief and blurry image in the video.
“A combat UAV?” asked the Secretary of State. “Whose? I thought we were the only nation that had them.”
“That’s why we’re here,” said the President. She nodded at Danny to continue.
“We don’t have enough data to say for certain,” admitted Danny. “The aircraft was pretty beat up. The damage is consistent with gunfire, but frankly it could also have been a missile, and whatever hit it, there’s no way now of knowing whether it came from the air or the ground. The Malaysians thought it must have been a ground-launched missile, as none of the rebel groups have been known to use aircraft. They dismissed the item in the video you saw as simply another missile that for some reason hadn’t been detected.”
Danny flipped the slide to a map of an area near the western coast of the island.
“The incident was pretty much dismissed until a group of four Su-29s were attacked in roughly the same area two weeks ago. They were shot down in the space of about ten minutes.”
“The Malaysians have Su-29s?” asked the vice president, Jay Mantis.
“Yes, sir, they do.” Danny nodded. While the Russian-made Su-29 was a few decades and at least a generation and a half old, it was still considered a front-line fighter, and Danny wasn’t surprised that some members of the government weren’t aware that it was in a third-world nation’s inventory. “They have a pretty unique mix of aircraft. The fortunate thing that happened here, and it seems by accident — as the UAV was engaging the last aircraft, it appears to have inadvertently been struck by debris from one of the planes it had fired on earlier. The debris sheered one of its wings; it went into a high speed spin and another of the wings came off. Part of the fuselage landed in this area here.”
Danny clicked on the slide showing where he had found the main part of the aircraft.
“I picked it up myself two days ago.”
“It’s been a hectic few days for you, I’m sure,” said the President, leaning forward in her chair.
“Yes, ma’am.” Danny nodded. “The Malaysians blamed the Indonesians. The two countries have a complicated history. The Indonesians weren’t backing the rebels, at least not these rebels—”
“The Indonesians have given us assurances,” said the Secretary of State.
“Yes, sir. In any event, the technology that would have to be responsible is far beyond anything the Indonesians are capable of. It’s on par with the early Flighthawks. Maybe beyond.”
“A group of guerrillas are flying UAVs that are more advanced than ours?” said the vice president incredulously.
“It looks like that,” said Danny.
Mary Christine Todd glanced at her watch. The meeting had gone five minutes longer than her aides had allotted; it was time for her to bring it to a close if she had any hope of staying on schedule for the rest of the morning.
“The bottom line is, we need more information about what’s going on here,” said the President. “Colonel, do you have a recommendation?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do. I’d suggest we send a full team from Whiplash, try and capture these UAVs and find out what’s going on. We can have a team out there in three days.”
“What would that entail?”
Todd listened as the colonel outlined a plan to move a piloted and unpiloted aircraft as well as Ospreys and a ground team into the jungle. She knew what the objections would be well before he finished. And she knew that the colonel must know that as well.
“If we send that sort of firepower into the area, there’s bound to be a reaction from the Chinese,” said Newhaven. “Indonesia as well.”
China was key. Congress was pushing hard for a rapprochement, which even Todd admitted could benefit the U.S. Her administration was secretly negotiating with Beijing on a number of issues, including territorial claims in the South China Sea. The Chinese indicated they would renounce some of those claims if it could be done without losing face. The political dance was difficult: show too much force in the region, and the Chinese would have to reply with their own. Show too little, and the Chinese would have no incentive to back off their aggressive positions.