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Predator is the third episode of NCIS: Los Angeles Season One.

Synopsis[]

A routine Marine Corps training exercise ends in tragedy when an MQ-1 Predator and Hellfire missile are hijacked and stolen, resulting in the death of a Marine. The OSP team are forced to step into the hacker underworld in order to find out answers concerning the circumstances surrounding the Marine's death and also rescue the missiles before they fall into enemy hands, therefore putting the entire country at risk from a rogue missile attack.

Cast[]

Main Characters[]

Name Portrayed by Occupation
G. Callen Chris O'Donnell Special Agent-in-Charge, NCIS:OSP
Kensi Blye Daniela Ruah Special Agent, NCIS:OSP
Sam Hanna LL Cool J Special Agent, NCIS:OSP
Henrietta Lange Linda Hunt Operations Manager, NCIS:OSP
Nate Getz Peter Cambor Operational Psychologist, NCIS:OSP
Dominic Vail Adam Jamal Craig Special Agent, NCIS:OSP

Recurring Characters[]

Name Portrayed by Occupation
Eric Beale Barrett Foa Tech Operator, NCIS:OSP

Guest Characters[]

Name Portrayed by Notes
Arthur Janson Andrew Borba Lost his sister, Rebecca to a UAF attack and later formed a partnership with Hamzi Khan who was married to Rebecca.
Mark Holden Briggs Warren Kole Air Force Captain and drone pilot who operated the drone at Match Air Reserve Base but lost control and sees the missile firing toward the humvee and a marine.
Joel Hardy Brian Kubach A student responsible for posting footage of the UAF hijacking online. Dom eventually found him dead in a bathroom.
Yousef Kaleem Nick McDow A radical Muslim who hijacked the UAF missile for his boss, Arthur Janson. Sam and Callen attempted to arrest him but he committed suicide by blowing himself up rather being captured.
Hamzi Khan Gino Salvano oel Hardy's murderer. He lost his wife, Rebecca to a UAF attack and began siding with Arthur Jansen, Rebecca's brother to seek revenge for her death by giving United States, particularly Los Angeles a taste of drone warfare.
Truck Driver Patrick Robert Smith Red Herring and a diversion so that Jansen could bring the drone online.
Black Ops Handler Christian Keiber
Tech Student A.C. Slamet
Party Girl Brooke Kuchuris
Student Jeffrey Wadlington
Jim Rivers Rob Evors Friend and contact of Hetty Lange's who works within the intelligence community on covert operations, uncredited.
James (Predator) Monty Jordan Colonel, uncredited.
Man in a suit Anthony DeSantis Uncredited

Detailed Summary[]

A man gets ready to launch a missile from an unmanned drone, however the drone misfires and veers off course. The men officially lose control of the drone and the missile takes down one of their men.

Kensi, Sam, and Callen discuss the merits of Kensi's dating life until they're called by Eric for a case. Eric informs them that an unmanned drone, UAV, killed a marine during a live-fire training exercise at Camp Pendleton and the drone has disappeared from radar.

To work around the bureaucracy, Sam and Callen meet with an unknown man who has connections to Hetty and supposedly is a black ops handler for the CIA, NSA, and DOD. He reveals that there were several hacks on similar UAVs, but they were practice runs to determine if the hackers could achieve the mission.

In the operations room, Eric finds where the drone landed and through the drone's camera, they spot a blue semi-truck and Middle-Eastern man taking off with the Drone. Eric uses the new visual query system, Kaleidoscope, to try and track them down. Meanwhile, footage of the drone attack ends up on the internet forcing Eric to crash the host website's server.

Callen and Sam interrogate Captain Mark Holden Briggs regarding the attack as he was the one behind the controller of the drone. Briggs maintains his innocence blaming it on the hackers and Nate corroborates that Briggs' body language is true to his word.

Meanwhile, Eric gets a lead on who leaked the UAV footage to the internet and that it came from a school campus with students taking a day-long class in advanced computer science.

Kaleidoscope gets a result on the driver of the blue semi-truck, Yousef Kaleem, and Callen and Sam visit his address only to find it empty. They catch hims approaching his residence however, and chase him down. Kaleem sets off a bomb in his satchel, and Sam and Callen try shooting him before they run as the bomb ignites.

Kensi goes undercover to the school campus as a guest lecturer who was formerly known as the razor mantis hacker. Kensi gets questioned by a student regarding her supposed knowledge on hacking, which Eric and Dom help her answer. Eric then identifies one of the student as an outlier with questionable financials suspecting him to be the UAV hacker, Joel Hardy. Kensi provides a break in the lecture to go talk to Joel, eventually grabbing a drink with him at a local bar for a first date. Joel goes for a bathroom break and Dom follows him thirty seconds later just to find Joel dead in a bathroom stall.

Callen and Sam interview Arthur Janson, Yousef Kaleem's employer. Janson confirms that Kaleem was skilled at writing computer code, but also held anti-American views.

The team reevaluates the case as their leads, Kaleem and Hardy have both died. Eric is able to breach Joel Hardy's laptop and finds a program that can hack into any quantum encryption code that Joel sent to AJ Concept Solutions. They identify a former cop in Kabul, Hamzi Khan, whose wife died in Afghanistan from a UAV attack. Callen points out that she's not ethnically Afgani and Sam notes that her name is Arabic for Rebecca, and she is Janson's sister.

Sam and Callen track down the truck used to take the drone, but Eric notifies the pair that Janson wasn't trying to move the drone out of the country as it's circling Los Angeles. With the UAV airborne, they identify that the target is William F. Cooley High School. Eric evacuates the school using the fire alarms while Dom convinces Briggs to use the joystick and throttle to redirect the UAV. Briggs is hesitant as he doesn't believe they can take over control, but through some persuasion from Dom, Briggs helps redirect the missile into the ocean.

Callen, Sam, and Kensi locate Janson at a boat dock and exchange fire resulting in Janson's death.

Major Events[]

  • It is revealed that Callen knows Arabic.

Trivia[]

  • This was the third episode of the first season to air. However, this was the fourth episode of the series filmed. The presentation order of the episodes was reordered so that this episode would air before Killshot. The portion of the press release detailing the credits for the episode mistakenly listed the credits for the previous episode.

External Links[]

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