“Tracking,” she said.
The track locked the targeting pod to Viper Two Two. I kept an eye on the screen and turned the Predator slowly, keeping the pod at ninety degrees to the F-16. I pulled the power back as I turned, slowing the Predator to just a couple of knots above stall speed. I had no idea what the actual characteristics of the F-16 were at the time, or the variant the guys flew, but I figured if I flew slowly enough it would be hard to see us on radar.
We watched as the fighter drew close. It was nerve-racking.
At twenty miles, he was an indistinguishable spot with a bright flare from his heat signature. The radio crackled with background static. At ten miles, he filled our HUD with his distinctive lines and large air intake under his nose.
I adjusted my heading to keep my wingtip on him. I kept a close eye on my airspeed. I was sure Viper Two Two had us on radar, but we were going so slow he’d have to slow too, limiting the fighter’s maneuverability.
I dipped the nose of the Predator to pick up a little more speed and tried to hide in the ground clutter. I looked at the tracker map above my HUD. Viper Two Two was within two miles. He must’ve seen a momentary blip as he wrenched the aircraft into a hard turn to orbit near me. There was no outrunning him. My only defense was my slow speed. Any second I expected him to call in with my location.
Finally, I broke the silence.
“Viper Two Two, Deadly One One. Confirm visual.”
I wanted to know if he saw me. He was close enough to read our tail number.
“Negative visual.”
I was shocked. I had flown out of pure instinct and managed to defeat a proficient fighter pilot. A single comment came from behind me.
“Interesting.”
Glenn hadn’t expected that either. I smiled to myself.
“Copy that, we are at your two o’clock, two miles, low.”
It took a few moments before he could see us. We did five engagements in all. Three times Viper Two Two failed to see us, meaning he couldn’t achieve radar lock for a missile or gain visual contact for a gun run. I counted these as victories even though I posed no threat to his advanced fighter jet.
After my flight, I used my notes to write up what I’d learned for the tactics manual. Five engagements wasn’t enough to build a true tactic, but I gave the Air Force Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base enough to test it in detail later.
That was my final test. I performed well on my last training missions and aced my check ride. I was now an RPA pilot in the eyes of the Air Force. As I walked out of my last debrief with Glenn, my mind was on my next assignment.
—
There were two operations squadrons.
The 17th Reconnaissance Squadron was the special tactics unit for the Predators. They were the guys who worked in the shadows. Their mission was operational test; they designed the tactics we used on new weapons. Only the best crews from each class were selected for the 17th. It was the most coveted job in Predator at the time. The rest of the crews went to the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base. Mike was the only one who seemed somewhat unconcerned about where he would go. He had the top spot in the class and would likely be going to the 17th. For my part, I worried a little. The idea of working in the 17th fascinated me, and I wanted nothing else. But the busted ride early in my training haunted me. I feared my name was too far down the ladder to make the cut.
On the last night in training, we all met at the squadron bar. Part lunchroom, part snack bar, part watering hole, it was the center of the squadron’s social scene. The commander was going to give us our orders. Afterward, we’d all depart for the operational squadrons and the war.
The bar itself was equipped with a keg dispenser and fridges full of beer. The counters behind the bar were jammed with snacks. The ceiling of the bar was littered with tiles painted and signed by each class. A single tile was missing where ours had been removed prior to the ceremony. In one corner, a cardboard Hellfire missile was suspended.
The room was packed with squadron aviators and their family members. We were waiting for Batman, the commander, to arrive. Tradition held in the Air Force that a student class presented gifts to the squadron and any instructors they chose as a means of saying thank you for the quality training. I helped carry the yellow-and-white mottled boa constrictor into the squadron bar. The boa was our gift, since the squadron’s mascot was a snake. The snake stayed in the squadron bar ever after. Each class was given the responsibility of caring for and feeding the animal. None of the career aviators in the squadron had ever seen such a gift presented to a unit. Most were usually signed pictures or plaques.
The snake appeared unimpressed by it all.
Lastly, our class leader, Oaf, presented gifts to the instructors. We passed out the regular plaques—Best Instructor Pilot, Best Instructor Sensor, and the Purple Helmet. Glenn seemed nonplussed when Oaf called him forward. Oaf said every class had an instructor who offered such a profound impact on the team that a simple award was not sufficient. The class’s decision was unanimous. Glenn earned the Purple Helmet award, a child’s plastic army helmet painted purple, because he had a reputation as a dick.
I never thought he was a dick. Glenn rode me hard, but his intention was clear to me—he wanted to make me a better Predator pilot. He had no ulterior motive or need to feed his self-esteem. He simply wanted pilots to perform better. Glenn proudly displayed that one gift on his desk for many years after.
After presenting the mementos, the commander stood up and announced the assignments. To my surprise, Mike was going to the 15th. He was clearly the number one student in the class. When it was my turn, I was tense.
“Squirrel,” the commander said, “you’re going to the 17th.”
Two other classmates joined me in the 17th. It was an unusual assignment since the 17th took only one pilot from each class on other days.
After the ceremony, we gathered in one of the flight rooms with the commander. He wanted a minute to speak candidly without the eyes and ears of our spouses. Gossip had its place in the military, just as anywhere else. Talking personnel decisions in front of civilians wouldn’t have been right. When he opened the floor for questions, I had the first one.
“Why so many assignments to the 17th?” I asked. “Don’t they usually take only one?”
The commander nodded.
“Yes, they do,” he said. “However, they asked for more than their usual number in this assignment drop.”
“Any idea why?” I asked.
“I’m sure you will find out when you get there,” he said.
After the meeting, I hung back with Mike as the others left to rejoin the party. He asked the question I had wanted to ask.
“Why did I go to the 15th?” Mike said.
The commander paused for a moment.
“Normally, the number one graduate gets his assignment of choice,” the commander said. “You would have gone to the 17th. But think of it this way: The 15th deserves the top graduate from time to time.”
In truth, the 15th got the top graduate every other class. Mike took the answer in stride. He was the class’s best pilot and his input on the tactics was invaluable. The RPA community was small and I was sure we’d have a chance to fly together at some point.
Before I out-processed, I dropped off the draft tactics manual with the instructors and recommended they push it forward for publication. The weapons officer looked skeptical, flipping through the folder.
“It’s not formatted correctly,” he said.
“I wanted to leave something for the weapons officer to do,” I said, leaving before I put my foot any deeper into it.
I ran into Glenn as I left the squadron. He stopped me as he walked from the simulators to the briefing rooms with a student from the next class.
“Squirrel, don’t pack any uniforms,” he said. “Y
ou won’t need them in the 17th.”
He was right.
CHAPTER 4
Tier One
The mountains in eastern Afghanistan near Tora Bora wrapped protectively around the small mud-brick house.
Flying above, I watched the house rotate lazily in the HUD. There was no activity, not even a stray dog looking for scraps. The fire-pit coals, which had glowed a few hours before when the sensor operator switched to the infrared camera, had cooled, leaving no hint of heat.
We were looking for a courier, a lackey, really. He was a small part of an operation meant to track down one of al Qaeda’s top facilitators. The cross hairs centered on the window of his bedroom, or living room for that matter. From the size of the house, it had only one room.
The missiles were cold. We weren’t here to shoot. We were here to watch.
It was May 2004. We’d deployed to an undisclosed location to be close to the JOC running our operations. The JOC acted as the clearinghouse for high-level operations. They coordinated our operations with teams in the field to hunt terrorists around the globe.
Even from twenty-five thousand feet, the mountains of the Hindu Kush looked massive. The mountainous region of western Waziristan sat along the border between Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. Only a few routes existed between the towering peaks and deep valleys. In the winter, these passes were buried in snow, cutting off access between the countries. The only road was one hundred miles south, where the Hindu Kush petered out into a pimply brown landscape.
People living in the region hunkered down to hibernate in the brutal winter. Al Qaeda and their allies, the Taliban, came out of hibernation in April when the first pass opened. Now we were tracking them as they started to build networks and move fighters into Afghanistan.
This was an opportunity to thoroughly document the courier’s actions. We were building a pattern of life so we could anticipate where he would be if or when the JOC decided to roll him up. Our mission was to capture, not kill. Alive, captured terrorists allowed us to piece together enemy networks. We wanted to pull intelligence from these guys, then use it to work our way up the chain until finally reaching the top.
The president’s ultimate goal was finding Osama bin Laden.
Videos continued to surface with Bin Laden dressed in his camouflage coat with an AK-47 resting behind him. It looked like the videos could have been filmed in southern New Mexico. The only way we were going to find him was to map out his network. So we watched the little house, hoping the courier would lead us to the bigger fish.
And we watched. It was the interminable hell of being.
“So we never shoot?” I asked Wang, my instructor pilot.
Like Glenn had, he sat behind me in a rolling desk chair. I was the new guy and it was Wang’s job to make sure I knew what I was doing before they let me fly a mission solo. I never asked where he got his call sign. He was a midlevel captain, soon to finish his two-year stint in the Predator. Originally from California, he carried himself with a mellow detachment, rarely allowing himself to become excited about anything. I imagined him surfing in his off time.
“Most of the guys here will finish their two-year tour without firing once in combat,” he said.
My heart sank.
I’d signed up to make an impact on the war effort. I wanted to do something productive to help keep Americans safe. Just watching a blacked-out hut in the middle of the night didn’t exactly fit that bill. Shooting was why I wanted to be a fighter pilot in the first place. It wasn’t like I wanted to kill people. But it felt like we were being productive if we destroyed something.
But the intelligence missions had to be done before the exciting ones could happen, I reasoned. Tracking and mapping al Qaeda’s network led to targets in the future. It was the only way I could focus on the mind-numbing missions.
The next crew came out to the box to relieve us at the end of our two-hour shift. I briefed them on our orbit, airspace clearance, guidance from the JOC, weather, and anything else that was important. After they took control of the Predator, we slipped out of the back of the GCS and stepped into the bright sunshine.
Light filtered through the camouflage netting strung from the GCS to the massive oak trees surrounding the compound. The netting both shaded the compound and dappled the ground around me with golden blotches. The early summer humidity blunted the chill of the box. I hurried past the squadron’s other GCS and ducked into the ops center, hoping to avoid breaking a sweat.
“We’ll grab the launch in a couple hours,” Wang said. “Get something to eat.”
Wang left the ops center, but I lingered for a moment. The difference between the outside and inside was startling. We were in a new kind of war, one fought not on a battlefield but from a secluded spot thousands of miles from the action. The room felt sterile, cold, and medicinal. Conversations were always muted. It was like a library.
My attention was immediately drawn to the two fifty-inch plasma monitors mounted on the long wall. The flat screens—labeled “Blue” and “Green”—showed camera feeds from Predators overseas twenty-four hours a day. The house I had been watching for the past two hours rotated in the middle on the Blue-line screen. The Predator was still tracing its tedious circle about the house. The Green-line screen showed a column of camels being led along a trail. The Green line was heading back to the base for landing and was just scanning the ground for targets of opportunity.
Beneath the screens were two workstations occupied by intelligence officers who monitored the feed and supported the crews in flight. The analysts made sure pilots had up-to-date information on a target and monitored the chat rooms used to pass messages.
At the back of the room, the mission commander and the weather officer sat behind a bank of four computers each. The monitors displayed Internet chat rooms, email, and mission briefs. One monitor showed a scaled map of Afghanistan. We could use it to zoom all the way in to see imagery of each village and base. Three little Predators ticked across the screen in real time.
I stood in the back and watched the feeds. I wasn’t the only person to start watching and get mesmerized by the scenes.
“How was the flight?”
Mongo, a pilot sitting at the mission commander station, shook me out of my funk. Named after the character in Blazing Saddles, he was built like a football player. He was six feet five inches tall. Time had softened him, but he still looked fit. He wore a perpetual gap-toothed grin.
A former F-16 pilot, he was a class ahead of me. He planned on doing two years in the Predator before going back to the F-16 community.
“They always that boring?” I asked.
“Mostly.” He smiled, showing the gap between his teeth. “You’ll get used to it. Hours of boredom . . .”
“. . . interspersed with moments of sheer terror,” I finished for him. “Got it.”
Mongo explained the unit’s mission as part of my squadron in-processing. He scribbled his name on my checklist as he talked.
“You’ve seen the two GCSs,” he said. “We fly two CAPs [combat air patrols] in Afghanistan, all by satellite from here.”
I nodded at the monitor.
“I see three birds.”
Mongo considered the twitching icons on the map.
“The Blue and Green are our lines,” he said. “The yellow one—that’s Pacman. He’s with the 15th.”
The 15th—Mike’s squadron—was tasked with supporting the conventional units. Based at the Predator Operations Center at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, they had two CAPs that split their time between Afghanistan and Iraq. The 15th provided imagery and video to commanders on the ground. They also chased the Iraqi leaders posted on the deck of playing cards. These cards were a standard set of playing cards with images and names of the Iraqi leadership being hunted after the invasion. Occasionally, the 15th fired on targets, but mostly they just
watched.
“Don’t they have two CAPs as well?”
Mongo scaled out the map to reveal both Iraq and Afghanistan. A fourth icon was superimposed over Baghdad.
“They’re splitting theaters today,” Mongo said. “Don’t worry about them so much. They don’t get close to us. Usually, we only cross paths when we land.”
I looked at the monitor a little closer.
“We get the flight data from the Link, correct?”
Every friendly aircraft over Iraq and Afghanistan transmitted its location data to the Link. Like The Matrix, the Link provided a snapshot of every aircraft in the area. But the monitor showed only the four Predator flights.
“Yes,” Mongo said.
“Shouldn’t we be seeing the other aircraft out there?”
Mongo shrugged.
“I am afraid we haven’t cracked that nut yet,” he said.
He paused for a second.
“Sorry, Squirrel.”
I shook it off. Jokes about my namesake really didn’t bother me. I found it rather amusing that the other pilots were self-conscious when describing an aircraft malfunction to maintenance as “squirrelly.” They always apologized for offending me, for any inadvertent slip of the tongue, though they never really meant it. A chance to make fun of a fellow pilot was always a welcome source of entertainment.
All pilots knew this and had to develop a thick skin and an ability to fire back.
Mongo smiled as he returned to the day’s flight schedule.
“Hey, you should get some lunch,” he said, noticing a change. “The plane’s delayed.”
“How long?”
“An hour maybe,” he said.
I nodded.
The Launch and Recovery Element (LRE) was mostly maintenance troops and a few flight crews. We didn’t take off or land the Predators except during training. Crews stationed overseas alongside the aircraft in theater did that for us. Taking off and landing were specialty skills because of how difficult it was to fly the aircraft. We took control once the Predator was at twenty thousand feet and cruising toward the target. So the delay was on their end. They had their hands full keeping the little birds working around the clock in the harsh Central Asian environment.
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