Thor's Hammer
Irregular. “This is fantastic!” President Al Gore couldn’t help but exclaim in admiration. Just as expected, the moment the memorial service ended, Afghanistan sent back its refusal, and the President was immediately moved to the White House’s underground bunker. From there, he issued the order to execute Operation Thor’s Hammer. Now he was receiving real-time reports from the battlefield, and he could feel with absolute clarity how much the world had advanced.
In the past, battlefield updates would have arrived only as text or voice. There might have been the occasional still image, but never in real time. Yet now? Live video footage was streaming directly from the field.
“Yes, sir! It’s truly astonishing!” It wasn’t only President Al Gore. Every senior official gathered in the bunker to monitor Operation Thor’s Hammer stood with mouths agape. The entire bunker hadn’t even been specially renovated for this operation. Installing Yoo Jae-won’s video-processing module on the military’s C4I servers and running the client program had been enough.
“How exactly does this real-time monitoring work?” The image on the screen was a black-and-white infrared feed looking down from roughly two thousand meters. Even though Kabul was currently in nighttime, the picture remained remarkably clear. No dramatic action had appeared on screen yet.
“The footage you’re seeing is live infrared video being captured by the mothership. It’s transmitted to the operations center through multiple CDMA EV-DO channels. After high-level encryption, it travels via undersea fiber-optic cable to the Pentagon’s C4I servers, allowing us to watch in real time. Despite the complex routing, the delay is only two hundred milliseconds—close enough to call it live.”
Al Gore couldn’t follow every technical detail spilling from National Security Advisor Dennis Mc’s mouth, but he understood the essential point: real-time video transmission was already possible with current technology.
“Entering Kabul airspace in one minute.”
“What about air defenses?”
“No response detected so far.”
The Taliban had seized Kabul in 1996 and taken power. Though the country’s foundations had crumbled afterward, they had not collapsed completely. Afghanistan still possessed an army, and Kabul still had what passed for an air-defense network. Even while the bombardment of al-Qaeda targets was underway and Kabul’s defenses were on high alert, no one had detected the large drone slipping into the city. The reason was simple: it was a perfect stealth drone.
The mothership was roughly half the size of a conventional fighter, powered by two turbojet engines. Its short, triangular wings and slender fuselage gave it the silhouette of a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft.
“Ah, entering Kabul now! Releasing reconnaissance drones from the mothership.”
The mothership’s bay doors opened and quadcopters poured out. On the main screen, new smaller windows appeared, each carrying live feeds from the reconnaissance drones.
“Delta Force on standby! Ready to move the moment the target is confirmed!”
The operator’s voice sent tension surging through the bunker. Operation Thor’s Hammer could succeed only if the reconnaissance drones located Osama bin Laden. Cross-referencing Yoo Jae-won’s digital evidence with traditional intelligence had placed bin Laden inside a luxury residential district in Kabul, but certainty was never one hundred percent. Everyone’s nerves were stretched to the breaking point.
— Armed personnel spotted! Bingo!
Yoo Jae-won clenched his fist at the voice transmitted from the pilot of one of the small reconnaissance quadcopters. In one of Kabul’s upscale neighborhoods, the drone had found a suspicious scene: multiple armed guards patrolling the perimeter of a large house. Everything about the building looked wrong. The guards moved with a sharpness and discipline far beyond ordinary security contractors. If it wasn’t Taliban leadership requiring such heavy protection, then only one answer remained: this was Osama bin Laden’s safe house.
— Face match confirmed!
— Ninety-two percent match with known al-Qaeda operative!
The reconnaissance quadcopter had crept close enough to photograph the guards’ faces. The images were instantly relayed to the United States and compared against existing intelligence databases. Image-search algorithms were now standard tools, and facial matching had become routine.
“It’s over,” Yoo Jae-won murmured, the knot in his chest loosening. Once bin Laden’s location was confirmed, his own role in the operation was essentially finished.
At the operations center, the waiting special-operations teams moved immediately. Kabul’s air defenses, which had been spared the initial bombardment, now found themselves targeted by the Eleventh Carrier Air Wing launching from the USS Nimitz. The moment the bombing began, Delta Force operators stormed bin Laden’s safe house. The signal was unmistakable: the heavily armed guards who had been standing watch collapsed like marionettes whose strings had been cut.
Through the pale gray feeds from the mothership and reconnaissance drones, Yoo Jae-won watched the assault unfold in vivid detail. Once the operators disappeared inside the building, however, all he could do was wait and worry. Even the miniaturized reconnaissance drones could not follow the team indoors. The operations center and the White House could monitor helmet-mounted live cameras, but as a mere observer, Yoo Jae-won was not granted that access.
Minutes crawled by. Then the speakers erupted with a deafening roar.
“What happened? What’s going on?” Yoo Jae-won asked urgently.
Colonel Andrei, who was piloting the mothership, and the reconnaissance-drone pilots were all shouting in excitement.
— We got him!
— We have the package!
“Alive?”
— Yes, sir! Successful capture!
The very news everyone had been waiting for: Osama bin Laden had been taken alive. At the sound of Colonel Andrei’s voice, every ounce of tension drained from Yoo Jae-won’s body.
It had all begun with sending the drone team from ID High Tech’s research headquarters on a business trip to Iraq. He remembered the exhausting work of preparing countermeasures for a possible 9/11-style attack, only to be blindsided when events unfolded differently from his memories. The Pentagon and the Capitol had suffered far heavier damage than before. Jacob, once Chevron’s heir, had survived the attacks in the previous timeline; this time he had died in Washington, throwing Chevron’s succession into chaos. Most unexpectedly, Yoo Jae-won had even been forced to create the Rainbow Table for the iPhone S just to convince the White House.
Yet Operation Thor’s Hammer had succeeded. Bin Laden was in custody. It felt like a reward for every effort he had made.
“Thank God. But it’s not finished yet.”
The thread of tension could not be fully released. Transporting bin Laden was only the first of many tasks. On a larger scale, the follow-up campaign to eradicate al-Qaeda must not be allowed to escalate into a full-scale war in Afghanistan. The unjustified war in Iraq that had occurred in the previous timeline must also be prevented. If stopping those two wars kept America from squandering the enormous potential it had built through the IT revolution, that alone would be an enormous victory. ID Group’s business foundation rested in the United States; the stronger America’s economy grew, the more Yoo Jae-won’s own interests would be maximized. Above all, no better instrument existed for containing China’s ambitions to become another superpower in the twenty-first century.
— As expected of Chairman Yoo!
“Yes, yes. Everyone, excellent work.”
Communications flooded in from every direction. The situation had become even more chaotic than during the actual raid. Praise poured toward Yoo Jae-won from every quarter—from the Joint Special Operations commander who had led the mission on the ground to direct calls from the White House. The common refrain was that without Yoo Jae-won, the capture operation itself could never have been attempted.
Afterward, Yoo Jae-won stayed online until the mothership—the technological heart of Operation Thor’s Hammer—had safely returned. Losing such an over-technology asset during recovery would have been catastrophic. He also confirmed the retrieval of every reconnaissance quadcopter. Although the small drones could not dock back aboard the mothership due to differences in speed and altitude, Delta Force personnel recovered them manually near the landing zone. Every unit was accounted for without incident.
Once the final recovery was confirmed, Yoo Jae-won ended the connection, promising to discuss details in person later.
Evening.
— Extra! Extra!
— Osama bin Laden captured alive!
— Operation Thor’s Hammer executed without warning!
— U.S. forces conducting precision strikes in Afghanistan!
— Part of the al-Qaeda eradication campaign!
From evening onward, the American scoop spread across the globe. Live footage showed the helicopter carrying Delta Force operators and their prisoner landing on the deck of the USS Nimitz. Only CNN broadcast that historic moment. It was, of course, Yoo Jae-won’s arrangement. When he had chartered a private jet to send ID High Tech’s drone team, he had also seated CNN correspondents aboard. CNN was a subsidiary of Time Warner Nextcom, so the network had received an extraordinary exclusive.
Only hours earlier, the journalists had been furious. Iraq had already grown stale; their supply of stories had dried up. Then 9/11 struck the American homeland. They had demanded an immediate return to the United States, and considerable persuasion had been required to keep them in place. Once they were transferred to the USS Nimitz, however, their fortunes changed completely. An embargo imposed for operational security had prevented live coverage of the raid itself, but they had been allowed to film carrier aircraft launching and cruise missiles streaking from escort ships. They had even captured the launch of the stealth drone—ID High Tech’s hidden ace.
The moment the White House lifted the embargo with an emergency announcement, CNN delivered. The most spectacular footage showed the Delta Force helicopter touching down on the Nimitz and Osama bin Laden, bound hand and foot, being led down the ramp. For a news network, it was priceless.
America ignited in an instant. Earlier that day, during the memorial service, frustration had been palpable. President Al Gore’s cautious response to the deaths of nearly a thousand Americans in the 9/11 attacks had left many citizens dissatisfied despite his high approval rating. Now, with the capture of bin Laden splashed across the evening news in high-definition video, the public erupted in celebration. In Washington, D.C., crowds surged toward the White House, chanting “U-S-A!” The reaction was the same across the country.
At the same time, the world watched in awe at America’s terrifying special-operations capability. Even the Soviet Union had eventually retreated from Afghanistan in defeat; seeing the United States penetrate that dangerous country so swiftly and extract bin Laden alive left every nation stunned. How, only days after the attacks, had America located and captured the terrorist leader with such speed and precision? That question consumed the global media.
The media’s job was to answer what everyone wanted to know. Reporters mobilized every resource to uncover the story behind the operation. Naturally, Yoo Jae-won’s movements were the first to appear on their radar, and the spotlight turned on him with blinding intensity. What no one had anticipated was how quickly that attention would ignite an entirely new controversy.