THE following Monday, Finn got up early, drove over to Torrance, picked up Gomez, then drove sixty miles east on the Riverside Freeway to March Air Reserve Base.
“You call the union?” said Gomez.
“No. You?”
Gomez shook his head.
“I was going to, but then I figured, I’m still getting paid. Why not take it easy for a while out at Riverside? Learn something new. Let things run their course.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Also, I did Taser him. There’s no denying that.”
“You did. Any regrets?” said Finn.
“Hell no.”
They talked shit about Figueroa for a while, then fell into an easy silence.
At March Air Reserve Base, they went through one security checkpoint at the perimeter, then a second one at the AMOC campus located within the base. An agent met them at the security gate. Young and friendly, she introduced herself as Leela. Finn only learned her last name—Santos—from her name tag. From the badge on her arm, he learned that she was a detection enforcement officer. She wore thick-rimmed spectacles and two diamond studs in each ear. He and Gomez followed her into a plain, warehouse-type structure that, Leela informed them, was known as Building 605C.
“605C. Pretty bland name for a place that watches half the world,” said Gomez.
“This isn’t a place that wants to draw attention to itself,” said Leela.
“How long have you been at AMOC?” said Finn.
“A year.”
“What were you doing before?”
“Before I joined CBP, you mean? I worked in retail while I was at college.”
“You went straight to AMOC out of college?”
“Yup.”
“What did you study at college?”
“Computer science.”
Finn nodded. Before he’d joined the CBP, he’d served in the navy’s Maritime Expeditionary Security Force in Iraq during the insurgency, guarding oil terminals from sabotage. Klein was right. Times were changing.
They came to a set of doors that required Leela to use her swipe card. Finn heard the door’s locking mechanism click, and he followed her and Gomez into a vast, dimly lit room.
“Welcome to the AMOC nerve center,” said Leela.
At the far end was a screen maybe eight feet high and thirty feet wide, onto which were projected four separate radar displays. The one in the center covered the entire continental United States. Finn recognized the outline of Florida on the right side of the screen, covered with thousands of moving green crosses. Below the wall screen were several rows of cubicles, along which were arranged dozens of monitors. There were about seventy or eighty people in the room, their faces softly lit by the monitors’ glow. It occurred to Finn that he hadn’t been in a command and control center like this since Iraq.
“So I was thinking I’d start by showing you what I do, then show you the different operations,” said Leela. She led them to her station, which comprised a triptych of monitors in a cubicle. Finn sat down on one side of her, Gomez on the other. Leela typed in a password, and all three screens lit up. She dragged the cursor over a projection of the coast of Southern California.
“So we get data from a bunch of different sources,” she said. “Air traffic control radars, satellites, radar balloons, aircraft like P-3 Orions, and UAVs. My job is to monitor it all and flag anything suspicious. This here, for example, is a satellite feed.”
Finn looked to the screen she was pointing at. He saw dozens of little green crosses moving across a digital map of the sea off Long Beach.
“It’s usually busier than that,” said Gomez.
“That’s only what the satellite’s showing us. If I add all the shipping data, it looks like this.” Leela clicked a checkbox on the menu on the right of the screen, and dozens more crosses appeared—vessel identifiers broadcast from transponders aboard cargo ships. Finn saw that most of the new crosses were crowded into the fairway leading into the Long Beach container terminal.
“And then I can overlay air traffic over all that,” said Leela, checking another box. Instantly, hundreds of red crosses appeared, clustered into the corridors leading into the various airports around LA. Now there was so much happening on the screen that it was almost impossible to read. He pointed at the jumble of dots and crosses.
“You can pick something suspicious out of all that?” he said.
“Sometimes. I look for signature behaviors. Like, for instance, if a plane veers outside its flight path, or a ship stops far out from the coast. But most of our useful maritime data comes from visuals. I usually check them before I flag anything for interception. Especially if the vessel is too small to pick up on radar or satellite.”
“Visuals from planes, you mean?”
“Sometimes. Although we’re using UAVs more and more. Like this.”
Leela typed, and an aerial view of the sea appeared on one of the monitors. Finn could see sailboats from above.
“This is live,” said Leela. She pointed at the sailboats. “We can’t see anything that small from satellites. That’s why the UAVs are so useful. Unlike regular aircraft, they can stay in the air for twenty-four hours.”
Finn pondered. Every intercept they’d made over the past three months had been that small. He looked around the room. “What’s its altitude?”
“Overland, the FAA says it has to stay above nineteen thousand feet. Overwater? Whatever we want. We usually cruise at five thousand feet.”
“Who’s flying it?” he said.
“The UAV operators. They work in crews like in real aircraft. One to fly the UAV, one to operate the cameras and sensors.”
“Where are they?”
“They’ve got their own room, just down the corridor. We call it the drone den.”
“Can we see it?” said Finn.
He detected a moment’s hesitation before Leela said, “Sure.”
Leela led them to a door with a sign on it that read UAV GROUND CONTROL. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. NO FOOD OR DRINK. Her swipe card didn’t work here. She had to knock.
The door swung open, and a tall young man stuck his head out, saw Leela, and smirked.
“Leela,” said the young man, drawing out the vowels—Lee-laa—and touching his tongue to his lip on the middle L in a way that struck Finn as discourteous, at best. Leela gave the dude an icy look. She turned to Finn and Gomez.
“This is Agent Nader. He operates the UAV’s sensors,” she said.
Nader glanced from Leela to Finn and Gomez. He scanned the badges on their uniforms. “You the guys from the Long Beach station?”
Finn nodded.
Nader held open the door. “Welcome to the den, gentlemen,” he said. “Please, step inside. You, too, Lee-laa.”
Finn, Gomez, and Leela entered the room. Nader shut the door behind them. It was a small, musty-smelling space crowded with equipment: screens and dials, keyboards and joysticks. In front of the controls were two large, padded, tilting chairs, not unlike La-Z-Boys. The space struck Finn as part flight simulator and part computer-game lounge. One of the two chairs contained a young man wearing a headset, holding a joystick, and drinking a can of Rip It energy drink, which he presently perched precariously on the control panel in front of him in order to give a wave to the visitors. Nader introduced him as Harrison Sperling.
“Harrison flies the aircraft. I’m the eyes,” said Nader, sitting down in the empty chair. Finn, Gomez, and Leela stood at the back.
The two largest screens in front of the operators showed the same bird’s-eye view of yachts crisscrossing a square of sea that Leela had shown them in the command center. The yachts’ sails cast long, triangular shadows on the water. Finn saw the numbers on the screen giving the UAV’s navigation data: airspeed, ground speed, altitude, heading. The drone was at five thousand feet, as Leela had told him. The resolution was extraordinary. As the drone traveled, a peninsula appeared at the top of the screen. Finn instantly recognized the round structure of Catalina Casino.
“Pretty cool, huh? You ever seen anything like this before?” said Nader.
“We had drones in Iraq.”
Finn figured neither operator was old enough to have served in Iraq.
“Not like this one,” said Nader, who seemed annoyed by Finn’s response. “The MQ-9 Predator drone. Costs $16 million. The cameras alone cost two and a half million bucks. They’re amazing. Watch this.”
He hit some dials, and the screen started zooming in on one of the yachts in Avalon Bay. Finn kept expecting the resolution to diminish, but it stayed sharp. Soon he could count the number of people in the cockpit. He could see that the man at the wheel was wearing a blue hat. Nader kept zooming. A woman wearing a bikini was sitting with her legs up in the yacht’s cockpit. Nader zoomed in on her breasts.
“It’s a blue-sky day.” Nader smirked. “Great visibility. Even from five thousand feet.”
“You’re not authorized to monitor U.S. citizens,” said Leela.
“You think she’s a citizen? I can’t tell from this angle,” said Nader.
Finn thought about what Klein had said, about scraping the bottom of the recruitment barrel. If this was the best that the CBP could attract to fly aircraft worth millions, the agency was in trouble.
“Explain to me why you’re flying over Catalina,” said Finn. “I’ve patrolled that sector for ten years. Traffickers don’t go to the islands. They head for the mainland.”
“I like the view,” said Nader.
The pilot, Sperling, was more circumspect.
“Mostly, we preset the trajectory,” he said. “Then we let the plane fly itself. That lets us focus on looking for any signature behaviors—overcrowded vessels, evasive actions, traveling dark, that kind of thing—that we can signal to you guys out on the water.”
“How do you determine the trajectory?” said Finn.
“It depends on a number of factors,” said Sperling. “We know traffickers like to be over the horizon when they cross the sea border, out of sight of land. We know they like to time it so that they start coming into shore under the cover of darkness—that’s another consideration. Add into that all the FAA’s regulations and airspace controls—we can’t put the drones in the way of airport approaches, for instance, and we need to stay above and below certain altitudes—as well as weather forecasts, and you start to get the idea. We can’t cover everything, so we try to cover a different sector each sortie. Anything to increase our chances of finding people doing things they shouldn’t be. We come up with a flight plan, then we discuss it with the operations director during the briefing. He has final say.”