Hunter Killer

by T. Mark McCurley

  “The analysts are pretty excited,” he said. “They’ve been running confirmations for a while.”

  Confirmations were always the problem. Short of Bin Laden waving at us or giving us the finger, we had only a few protocols remaining that could confirm the identity of the man below with any reasonable amount of certainty.

  Protocols or rules of engagement defined how, when, and if we could engage a target. Unlike fighters, directors at the JOC all the way up to the president had to weigh in on every Predator shot. Bin Laden meant a call to the White House. A “no” at any level stopped the shot.

  In case we got the thumbs-up to shoot, I started to discuss options with Dani. I also started to spin up the Hellfire missiles so we would be ready to go.

  “The guards are irrelevant, expendable,” I said. “Only one target matters.”

  But the rocks could be a problem. They provided some cover for the men. At impact, the Hellfire buried itself before the contact fuse detonated the charge. The shot could fail if it hit behind a rock.

  “We could aim for the high rocks and maximize the frag pattern,” Dani said.

  I agreed and started thinking of attack headings.

  Tony broke up the meeting.

  “Al’s off the line,” he said. “He doesn’t look happy.”

  After a long silence, Tony came over the radio.

  “I’m posting coordinates in chat,” he said.

  I plotted the coordinates. We were headed to a random area far to the west. It was nowhere near our original target, which was still about thirty miles to the north of us.

  “Tony,” I said. “This is in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Go to the coordinates and wait.”

  Tony’s response was terse, devoid of the friendly personality he’d had a few minutes before. It felt like he was being told what to say. Someone upstairs didn’t want us to go after this target. They were so against it that they were willing to force the JOC to drop their planned operation for the day, punching a large hole in the pattern of life we were building on our main target.

  I took the Predator out of orbit and flew to the coordinates. We returned the missiles to their dormant state. Dani put the cross hairs of the camera on the spot and we stared at rocks for the next three hours.

  I never understood why we were forced out of the area. The JOC should have cleared us to our original target. Someone didn’t want us looking at UBL enough that they were willing to destroy a pattern-of-life operation. Like chain of evidence in a criminal investigation, pattern of life had to be constant, without breaks, in order to build a clear picture of the target’s life without the chance of accidentally following the wrong person. This frustrated me because I knew the impact watching rocks would have on our current mission.

  I wanted to know who that guy was and why someone felt the need to protect him.

  When the new crew finally came in to relieve us, I drove over to the JOC to chat with Al. The JOC was in an office building near our compound.

  —

  The JOC had a sterile smell. A table filled the center of the main room. On top were dividers sectioning the table into about a dozen stations, each with a phone and a shelf for binders. Colored cables snaked from the ceiling, down a corner, and across the floor to jury-rigged LAN stations. Analysts sat in front of computers around the room’s walls.

  Two sixty-inch plasma screens hung on opposite walls. Each showed a Predator feed. Beneath each monitor sat one of our pilots, a liaison officer like Tony.

  “Al around?” I asked the nearest analyst.

  “His shift is over,” the analyst said. “He’s gone for the day.”

  “Who is in charge now?”

  “Carly,” the analyst said, pointing to a thin, athletic, thirtysomething blonde.

  She’d flown fighters in the Air Force prior to joining the JOC. I took a deep breath and reached back to my intelligence training. I remembered a thing or two about teasing information out of people. I was technically the oncoming mission commander now that my flying was done for the day. It would be my job to help coordinate flights and crews for the rest of my twelve-hour day.

  I used that to break the ice.

  “I heard there was some excitement earlier.”

  A mission commander would naturally want to know about this sort of thing. Of course, I was taking the chance that she didn’t know I was the guy in the seat.

  “Why’d they call it off?” I asked.

  If Al had given her a thorough briefing before leaving, he had left out my participation. She was frustrated the shot had been called off too.

  “Politics.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Politics,” Carly said. “Management between us and the boss called it off.”

  “They give a reason?” I asked.

  “Don’t have to,” she said. “It’s their call.”

  I didn’t have to be an interrogator to see her negative assessment of that office.

  “Was it him?” I asked.

  I had to know if I’d actually found Bin Laden.

  “We think it was him,” Carly said.

  In 2002, a Predator fired a Hellfire missile at three men near Zhawar Kili in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province. One of the men was tall and he was mistaken for Bin Laden, but they were just local tribesmen searching for scrap metal to sell for food.

  I looked sidelong at her.

  “So it was real?”

  She paused for a second.

  “We think it was.”

  I was having trouble keeping my frustration from boiling over.

  “Then why cancel the shot?”

  Carly sighed. I had got her this far and I hoped I hadn’t pressed her too hard.

  “There’s a manager who won’t let a shot like this go through,” she said. “He stops everyone.”

  Now I was really mad.

  “That’s treason,” I said.

  “No.” She shook her head. “That’s politics.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Shot Heard Round the World

  Bam. Bam.

  I knocked twice on the door of the GCS. The echo rumbled down the length of the container, alerting the crew that we were ready to take over. I waited for a reply.

  One knock in response meant to stand by.

  Two knocks was code to come in.

  Three knocks told us to shut up and wait.

  We were standing just outside the Predator Operations Center at Nellis Air Force Base. Today was my first day flying with the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron. The 17th had just moved back to Nellis at the end of August. Some of the crews were sent to help the 15th stand up a new CAP.

  The Air Force moved both squadrons into a compound enclosed behind a seven-foot cinder-block wall. Other than the ops cell, the other “buildings” were triple-wide trailers cheaply stapled together. A single Cadillac, which is what we called a portable bathroom/shower trailer, was in the back of the compound. A handful of GCSs belonging to both squadrons sat in the center of the compound.

  I was back in a green flight suit and far from the humidity at our compound. It was midday and the high desert sun beat mercilessly down on us. Las Vegas was hot in September. The temperature hadn’t dropped below 105 degrees for the whole month, but at least it was a dry heat.

  The 15th had asked for additional help when they stood up another CAP. They didn’t have the manning yet to fully support it, and the 17th had a few extra bodies waiting for the rest of the squadron to move back to Las Vegas. I didn’t mind helping out. It beat sitting around. Plus, after spending a lot of time over Afghanistan, I wanted to help with the war in Iraq. That was the real fight at the time.

  The knock had barely subsided when the rear door flew open.

  The pilot, a medium-height blond man with a slight build, stal
ked out of the GCS. He looked angry, though I could see no reason why, since we were five minutes early. As he pushed passed me, I heard him mumble, “Plane’s yours.”

  He disappeared around the corner before I could say anything.

  What the hell?

  I ducked my head into the box and saw a panicked sensor operator looking back at me.

  He mouthed the words “What do I do?” I ran to the seat and looked at the HUD and tracker. The plane was on a direct course into Iran.

  That wasn’t a big deal if the Predator was flying over Baghdad. But this Predator was just north of Basra. The border was close. The aircraft would cross into Iranian airspace in moments.

  There wasn’t time for me to sit down. I pressed the button on the stick that shut off the autopilot and gently rolled into a steep bank back toward Iraq. With the black line of the border about to overlap my icon on the tracker, I edged the bank up to sixty degrees. Twenty degrees was the limit in the pilot’s manual, but I needed to turn fast.

  In the HUD, the world tilted as the aircraft attempted to match the bank I commanded. The pink tracker icon twitched and rotated. Data from the plane refreshed every couple of seconds, making the turn appear erratic on the tracker. The landscape slewed sideways.

  Once the nose turned far enough south, I slowly relaxed the bank and let the plane roll out. I then reengaged the autopilot to ensure that we continued to track away from Iran. With the plane flying southwest, I sat down and put on my headset.

  I saw a chat from the Roulette mission coordinator (MC). Roulette was our mission call sign.

  ROULETTE_MC> Iran is calling on Guard.

  Guard was the international emergency frequency. Air defense units from nearly every country used it to identify aircraft and to warn them against airspace incursions. Aircraft could get shot down if they didn’t heed the air defense directions.

  They don’t have the balls to shoot me down, I thought.

  The sensor operator still looked a bit shaken. He didn’t want Iran to join the war any more than I did.

  I took a deep breath and smiled.

  “You guys can change out now,” I said.

  It was a quick changeover brief, and my sensor operator, a crusty technical sergeant who had been with the program since Bosnia, took over.

  The 15th worked for Multi-National Force—Iraq. The command in Baghdad decided the priority each day and delivered our orders via email and mIRC chat. I checked in via the chat room and flew to the coordinates they provided. We spent most of our time tracking small time-bomb makers, couriers, and occasional insurgent cell leaders. The job remained tedious and boring. This was mostly because the Army was running the operation in Iraq and they didn’t really know what to do with us.

  I opened the Roulette mission chat room.

  ROULETTE_33> Checking in, 5,000 feet.

  136_CM> c, proceed to target, pass ETA when able.

  I didn’t recognize the unit. I mentally calculated my distance from the coordinates. We were close, so transit wouldn’t take long. When we arrived, the sensor operator scanned the area. It was an open field and a single tree.

  ROULETTE_33> On tgt, confirm location plz. [On target, confirm location please.]

  136_CM> confirmed.

  My sensor operator put a track on the tree. Black brackets on the HUD clamped onto the tree’s image. The targeting pod jerked slightly as the brackets centered on the picture.

  ROULETTE_33> What are our EEIs?

  EEIs, or essential elements of information, could be anything from an odd hot spot on the ground that could be a weapons cache or roadside bomb to a chance meeting between two individuals.

  136_CM> Watch the target.

  ROULETTE_33> What cues are you looking for?

  I asked the question because knowing what he wanted was essential.

  136_CM> Just watch the target.

  Eight hours later, the tree remained fixed in our HUD. We didn’t get any subsequent messages from the Army unit. I heard two knocks as our scheduled replacements arrived. The sensor operator smashed his hand against the side of the GCS twice and the new crew walked into the box. We spent a few minutes briefing them on the mission and how the Predator was performing. As I climbed out of the seat, I was confident the new pilot knew exactly what needed to be done.

  I walked back to the operations center to check out. I thought about how life in the two squadrons was so different. In the 17th, we enjoyed high morale because the mission felt important.

  The 15th felt irrelevant.

  The drudgery of twenty-four hour operations with little or no feedback from the field had taken its toll. There was no closure on a mission. The air crew didn’t have any idea if their participation helped an operation. The Army didn’t praise people for doing the job. The 15th got feedback only when mistakes were made. Silence meant they weren’t screwing up.

  It was difficult to sustain any motivation under those conditions. The lack of communication between the Army commanders and the pilots was an issue. Our pilots rarely checked in with the ground commanders in the field. My checkout pilot in the 15th told me to just announce I was on station in the tactical operations center, or TOC, chat room. The TOC controlled the ground unit’s movements. The TOC would then let the ground commander know we were on station, and they’d get back to us when they needed us. It was a lazy and unprofessional way for us to conduct operations. There was no rapport between the Predator crews and the soldiers on the ground. It was like we were fighting two different wars.

  That was still no excuse for the lack of professionalism I’d witnessed during that first changeover. I saw Mike in the compound later in the day walking from the 15th’s trailer to the ops cell. It was the first time I’d seen him since training.

  “Hey, Mike,” I called out and jogged over to meet him.

  I wanted to get his take on the episode.

  “Hey, hey, Squirrel. What’s up?” he said, smiling broadly.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  I explained what had happened during my changeover. I also gave him the pilot’s name. Mike instantly changed from affable to serious. He shook his head, no longer smiling.

  “That’s not good.”

  “It’s my first day flying with the 15th,” I asked. “Is that common here?”

  Mike sighed.

  “Unfortunately, it’s more common than not.”

  He didn’t like breaches in flight discipline.

  “We’ve got to fix this,” I said.

  We both knew I didn’t mean just this particular pilot. Mike and I had tried to fill a need with the training manual, and now we knew the community needed a shot of professionalism. The community as it stood was rotten to the core.

  When Predator stood up, the Air Force designated 85 percent of the slots for fighter pilots, and the rest went to the other aircraft. The fighter community used Predator as an opportunity to unload deadweight. Any pilot who’d screwed up, was substandard, or was just not good was dumped into the program. The pilots knew why they were there. They also knew the fighter community would not take them back. That bred bitterness to the point where they ceased comporting themselves as officers. They showed up late, turned in substandard work, and apparently abandoned aircraft in flight. Given that kind of example, the enlisted sensor operators devolved into a similar professional death spiral.

  We had a lot of work to do. It would take time, but it had to be done.

  I was named chief of standardizations and evaluations for the 17th. My job was to enforce regulations and flight discipline by going on check rides with my pilots. Mike and I also started a grassroots campaign to bring up the subject in our pilot meetings. Usually, these meetings discussed new software loads and safety issues. We decided that it was time to inject actual piloting skills into the meetings.

  —


  I ran into Mike again transiting between buildings a few weeks later.

  “Squirrel,” he called out, excited.

  “Hey, Mike. What’s up?”

  Mike’s eyes shined with an intensity I hadn’t seen recently. There was fire, purpose, pride even. My eyes narrowed.

  “What did you do?” I asked with mock suspicion.

  I thought he’d decertified one of the laggards. With the way some of them had been behaving, we both knew our troops on the ground deserved as much.

  “It wasn’t me,” he said. “But it was Droopy.”

  Droopy was an F-16 pilot like Mike. Where Mike exuded intensity, Droopy appeared the polar opposite. The pilots in his first Viper squadron came up with the call sign because he also looked somewhat like the cartoon character.

  Mike said Droopy was trained in close air support. He’d deployed before coming to Predator and knew the stakes for the ground units. It was his unit’s primary mission before he transferred to Predator. It galled him to check in with the TOC and then sit silently watching the action for eight hours.

  He wanted to get into the fight.

  So earlier that day, troops were attacked in Droopy’s sector. He pulled out an old mission card he’d saved from his Viper days. It was a close air support template printed on well-worn four-by-eight card stock. Droopy placed the card on the console behind the control stick and keyed the mic. Using his best fighter voice—an octave lower to sound more menacing—he called the JTAC, Bulldog Two One.

  “Bulldog Two One, Roulette Three Three, ready check-in.”

  The JTAC probably expected another silly “we’re here” kind of call from the Predator.

  “Go for Bulldog,” the JTAC said.

  “Bulldog, Roulette checking in flight level one four zero, one by MQ-1, orbiting ten miles south of your position, two hours playtime, two by AGM-114, pod and self-lase capable.”

  Droopy told the JTAC his altitude (fourteen thousand feet), his position, his weapons load (two missiles), and the aircraft special capabilities (targeting pod and laser designator).

  “Copy, Roulette,” Bulldog said crisply.

  He was talking to a fellow professional.