Super Sniper Read online

  Jack Hunter

  Super Sniper

  Rawlin Cash

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  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

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  One

  The F/A-18 Super Hornet was close to its forty thousand foot ceiling. Its two General Electric turbofan engines delivered a combined thirteen thousand foot pounds of dry thrust. Speed was Mach 1.8, almost twelve hundred miles per hour.

  Lieutenant Buddy Geiger had been a Navy pilot for ten years. He had thousands of hours of flight time under his belt. He knew how to read the dials in front of his face.

  But this time he wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

  It was the new radar system. It picked up things they’d never been able to track before.

  Boeing and Lockheed had been pitching Infrared Search and Track sensors to the Navy for years. Bud’s plane was one of the first to receive the upgrade, replacing his Reagan era system with something an order of magnitude more sensitive.

  A white dot sped across his monitor and the system attempted to track it. The dot was too fast. The system missed and panned forward for another attempt. The autotrack acted like a photographer trying to get a shot of a flying bird. It panned ahead to where the object was going to be and tried for another lock. It caught the object on the third try.

  “Whoa, boy,” Buddy cried into his comms, the adrenaline momentarily getting the better of him. “Got the bastard.”

  He looked out the cockpit window but couldn’t make visual. It wasn’t a false read though, he knew that much. It was there, clear as day on the IR screen. The whole point of the new system was to detect and track objects that couldn’t be seen otherwise. It was working. For eighty-nine million dollars, it ought to work. Buddy would have been angry if it didn’t. It operated by sensing two things the previous system couldn’t see, heat and static. Aircraft engines generate heat. As they fly through the air, the sky-on-skin friction also generates static electricity. The object on Bud’s screen was generating both.

  There was no hiding.

  He had the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt on his comms.

  “Did you box that?” the operator said.

  “No,” Bud said. “I took an auto track.”

  “Fuck.”

  He and the operator watched it together for a second in silence.

  “That’s definitely a fucking drone, dude,” the operator said.

  “Look on the ST. It’s at thirty-eight thousand feet. There’s two more.”

  “My gosh.”

  The objects were moving fast, in formation, roughly on a course parallel to Buddy.

  “They’re going against the wind,” he said. “Wind’s coming in at 130 knots to the west.”

  He took another moment to admire the three dots as they sped along in perfect formation. In all his years flying he’d never seen anything like it.

  “Look at those things go,” the operator said.

  “They’re slowing down.”

  “They’re not …” the operator said before cutting off in a patch of static.

  Bud had locked the lead object. He still couldn’t make visual but it was definitely there on the IR. A glitch didn’t come in that clear, and it certainly didn’t read in the shape of a solid object that looked exactly like a futuristic aircraft. The three dots came to a complete stop as Bud caught up to them, then two sped off in opposite directions and the one Bud was tracking stayed put. He got a crystal clear image of it on the sensor as he flew by. It had a domed top and was pointed toward the front.

  “It’s rotating,” he said.

  The object did a full ninety degree rotation and then began descending rapidly.

  “What’s it doing?” the operator said.

  Bud pushed forward on his controls and brought his plane into a dive, following the object. He descended rapidly, the g-forces rushing through his body like a hit of amphetamine.

  “Whoa,” the operator said, monitoring his vitals.

  He dropped to 3,000 feet and leveled out.

  “Easy, bro.”

  He’d just stabilized altitude and was still following the object when one of the others whizzed by him. It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet from his starboard.

  “Holy shit,” he cried. He was amped way beyond what he was supposed to be.

  “What was that?”

  “That fucker almost hit me.”

  “Come back in, Buddy,” the operator said. “You’re in view of the coast.”

  He was over the Persian Gulf. The objects were gone. There was nothing on his tracker.

  “Roger that,” he said. His hands were shaking.

  “Oh my gosh, dude,” the operator said again.

  Buddy brought the plane back to the carrier and, after landing, was debriefed not by one of his own officers but by two men from the Defense Intelligence Agency. The fact they were already on board was unusual. They’d known something was up there. They’d been expecting this.

  Everything about the debrief was strange. There was a camera in the room as the two men grilled him for over an hour. At the end of the interview he was asked to sign a non-disclosure document he’d never seen before.

  The two men compiled their report on board the Roosevelt. It consisted of the flight recording, the ship’s incident report, and the interview footage. All the data was transferred to hard copy, physical sheets of printed paper and bulky magnetic cartridges with handwritten labels on the side. The digital record was then erased and the hard copy was packed up and sent to a small office on the fifth floor of the Pentagon, deep within the maze of offices in C Ring. The office belonged to a shadowy Pentagon program known internally as Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification. It operated entirely on black money, funds that were purposefully disguised to avoid congressional oversight, and only a handful of people in the government knew of its existence.

  Inside the office was a desk, a chair, a lamp, a steel dropbox, an encrypted landline, an AV unit, and a computer. There was no window. No ornamentation. There was no access list to the dropbox, meaning that anyone who had a key did not know who else had access.


  One of the people with a key was CIA Agent and Director of Paramilitary Black Ops, Fawn Aspen. She’d been sent the key and instructions anonymously, years earlier, when she still worked in SIGINT. The instructions came from the Defense Intelligence Agency and had been authorized by a code regulating cooperation between the two agencies. She wasn’t authorized to speak to anyone else in the CIA about the role, and as far as she knew, no one there knew she performed it. She often wondered if anyone in the Defense Intelligence Agency, or anyone in any part of the government at all, knew she still did it. It wasn’t unheard of for some poor schlep in the Defense Department to work for years on a vestigial, classified program that had long since been cancelled without his knowledge.

  The thought that this might be one of those programs didn’t bother Fawn. It intrigued her. It was a break from the high stress of her current role. It reminded her of the old, Cold War spy novels she read where agents and double agents got tied into such knots no one knew what side they were on anymore.

  She’d even tried a few classic spy tricks to see if anyone else ever accessed the lockbox. All the files she’d ever received were still in there. They never went anywhere. There were forty-three of them now, and there was only room for about ten more. She wondered what would happen when the box was full. Would they just sit the new files on top of the box?

  She’d tried attaching a hair to the box. If it was opened, the hair would break. It wasn’t broken. She’d also put a thin film of vaseline to the inside wall. Any movement would mark the gel. There’d been no marks. She’d tried chalk dust, ink, dusting for fingerprints, she’d even swabbed the box for DNA and sent the swab to the CIA’s lab for analysis. The only match was herself. As far as she could tell, she was the only person who ever accessed the box.

  If she’d hated the job, she would have gotten to the bottom of it by speaking to the Director. He’d have access to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s cooperation codes and could have found out if the program was still active.

  But there was no rush.

  The trip to Arlington gave her a rare chance to relax. She usually went on Sunday mornings if there was nothing more pressing for her to do at work. She caught the subway at Dupont Circle. The trains were almost empty at that time. She brought a book. It was the only time of week she could sit still long enough to get through a chapter. There was a Starbucks at the Pentagon’s west lobby that was open on weekends and she’d order a latte. Sometimes she’d even add caramel.

  She’d lock herself in the office with the latte and check the box for any new reports. They were fairly rare, about one per month. If there was nothing in the box, she’d sit in the Starbucks with her book and read for a while. If there was a report, she’d read that in the office, at the desk, and afterwords she’d call a special number at the Defense Intelligence Agency and record a message summarizing what she’d read.

  Her job wasn’t to come up with explanations, just to summarize the sightings, but she could usually think of something plausible to explain what the pilot might have seen. In her other role, she had access to all the intelligence reports relating to new aircraft being developed by other nations, the technology being used, the locations of test flights. Often, the sightings could be explained by reference to known foreign test flights.

  Sometimes, they couldn’t.

  That was when the conspiracy theories came to mind. That was what Fawn loved about it. The reports were the closest thing the military had to a record of possible extra-terrestrial sightings.

  Lieutenant Buddy Geiger’s report was maybe the most interesting one she’d ever received. The little tic-tac on the screen was larger and faster than any military drone she knew of, and the way it moved, going from stationary to high speed, hovering to vertical descent, was completely new.

  It left no contrails, no engine signature, no visible signs of propulsion or means of lift. Whatever it was, it was beyond-next-generation.

  She watched the video debrief of the pilot. His face was white with shock.

  “I almost hit that thing,” he said. There was anger in his voice, like he knew it had been an intentionally hostile act. A warning.

  She called the number on the landline and summarized the sighting. She referred to it as an ‘unexplained aerial phenomenon,’ the closest term the DoD accepted for anything that could possibly be construed as a UFO sighting.

  Two

  The Utah Data Center rose out of the rocky scrub like a lunar colony. Seventeen buildings, a 65 megawatt power plant, two cooling towers fed by two million gallons of water daily. The whole compound was surrounded by a twelve foot high chain-link fence, a hundred yards of no man’s land, and then a second fence, higher than the first and electrified. Flood lights triggered by motion sensors lit up no man’s land at the slightest provocation. A coyote, a wolf, even the occasional tumbleweed could trip the whole thing and trigger lights brighter than a Hollywood movie set.

  Hunter looked at it all through the night vision scope of an M82 sniper rifle. The gun was a beast, over thirty pounds with its case and equipment, but it was the right tool for the job. In these conditions it could fire a bullet over two and a half miles, and the bullet it fired was a five inch, .50 caliber BMG behemoth. It left the muzzle at fifteen thousand foot pounds, about five times what you’d get from a thirty-ought-six Springfield.

  Hunter had it loaded with silver-tipped M8 armor-piercing incendiary rounds.

  It was the perfect long-range anti-materiel gun.

  He wasn’t there to shoot guards.

  In and out with zero casualties, that was the plan. His beef was not with the employees of the private security firm contracted to protect the site. He didn’t intend to harm the dogs either.

  The site, referred to in official documents as Mission Data Repository, was operated by the National Security Agency and was capable of storing and processing data in excess of twelve exabytes. As far as Hunter was concerned, an exabyte was a gigabyte on steroids. He’d done his homework. A paper published by UC Berkeley’s School of Information estimated that all human speech, from the dawn of time to the present, was enough to fill five exabytes.

  This facility stored twelve.

  Its precise role was classified, but the public website was happy to state its mission of supporting the intelligence community’s efforts to monitor, strengthen, and protect the nation.

  That made Hunter smile.

  It was common knowledge that the PRISM program for instance, just one of its many operations, stored all email, cell phone, and internet traffic, all financial transactions, and all GPS location data globally. It did not distinguish between data inside and outside the United States, or data relating to US citizens which was theoretically protected by the Fourth Amendment.

  The data could be used for in-depth surveillance of the internet in real time, for storing all internet past states, for data mining and trend analysis, and also, crucially, for monitoring every digital breadcrumb relating to every individual on the planet.

  The Department of Justice had been forced to admit all this a few years earlier following disclosures by ex-NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, and a series of accompanying articles in the New York Times. The newspaper, and subsequently the government itself, made it amply clear that the law, as it applied to the surveillance of US citizens by the government, no longer applied.

  They could track and store everything. Every search. Every trip. Every purchase. Every word. Soon they’d be tracking every heartbeat, every step, every gesture and eye movement.

  The system was on and would never be turned off. From the point in time that Mission Data Repository came online, human activity changed from being transitory and experiential to being fully recorded data, available for analysis by sophisticated AI algorithms.

  And the courts sanctioned all of it.

  Of the 33,942 FISA warrant requests the NSA ever made, only seven were denied by the court. Some people in judicial circles called the FISA court a shadow supre
me court, and said it was writing a shadow constitution that the public would never be allowed to read.

  Long before the data center was completed in 2014, at a cost of four billion dollars, the NSA had etched in stone its unassailable and absolute right to listen to all networked human communication.

  This data center took that program to the limits of what was capable.

  Its server arrays and support buildings occupied a million square feet. Some of the blueprints had been declassified, and for God only knew what reason, were freely available online. Others, Hunter had purchased illegally from a former employee of EMC Corporation in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, who’d been involved in designing the filesystem and data architecture for the NSA.

  Hunter had familiarized himself with not just the physical layout of the facility, but also the digital architecture of the filesystem and databases that had been custom designed for the project. Commercial filesystems and disk formats, including the mega-systems used by companies like Google and Facebook, were incapable of handling the throughput.

  He peered through his scope and zeroed in on the guard posts. There were four along the perimeter, roughly at the four corners of the inside fence. There was an additional security station at the main gate that controlled access to and from the facility, and monitored the cameras and communications. Each of the four posts contained two men and two dogs. The men were armed with M16 rifles. Hunter could make out through his scope the four guards on the western side of the compound and their dogs.