By 2005, Predators were integrated into the operational scheme. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army realized the utility of having an eye in the sky watching over them. Predators watched the compounds pre-raid and then moved on to the next target just as the raid started. The teams wanted up-to-the-second intelligence just before going in, and with a Predator on station, we could provide it.
Video feeds popped up in most of the bases in both theaters. Troops watched with rapt attention missions we considered dull. We called it Pred porn. I admit it sucked me in at times. I always had the feeling that something was about to happen, and most people watched hoping to see a Hellfire missile flash onto the screen.
As we monitored the compound from the cockpit, I reviewed the plan. Three UH-60 Black Hawks would insert the assault force in and around the compound. Space allowed for only one helicopter to hover over the courtyard. The other two would land just outside and Rangers would breach the main gate. Once inside, they would clear the buildings. Three chalks, three buildings.
I flipped through the briefing posted by my intelligence coordinator on one of my monitors. My sensor, Jack, and I watched intently as we waited for the assault force to arrive.
Jack was an experienced noncommissioned officer in the squadron. I didn’t know him well, as we had never flown together before tonight. Unlike on some missions, we were busy, so I didn’t have time to get to know him during the flight. We were both focused on the monitor and any signs of movement. We took being the Rangers’ eye in the sky seriously. Like shooting, this kind of mission always felt worthwhile because there was instant feedback. If the Rangers caught the target, it was like we caught him too.
I checked in with the TOC. The JTAC was not on the ground for the mission. The only way we could communicate was in a secure chat room. His call sign was Brigham Two One, or BR_21 in chat.
ROULETTE_21> BR_21, on station.
BRIGHAM_21> c, watch for any activity.
ROULETTE_21> c.
I sighed. We worked to keep the chat rooms efficient. “C” meant copy. The chat room’s messages came in streams like in The Matrix. You had to watch it closely or risk missing vital information before it was pushed off the screen. Typing while flying was a pain in the neck. I was as likely to do something stupid with the aircraft while typing on a keyboard as I was if I were texting behind the wheel of a car.
My eyes tracked from the HUD to the tracker and back to the chat room. Then I saw it.
BRIGHAM_21> Drummer 44 airborne, eta 30 mikes.
The raid was on. Drummer, the Black Hawk helicopter, was thirty minutes out.
ROULETTE_21> c.
My focus went back to the compound. Anything we picked up now—movement, squirters (people escaping the raid), more fighters—would be valuable information for the troops heading toward us.
Half an hour later, the three Black Hawks slipped underneath us. A plume of dust emerged below the helicopters as they flared out and started to land near the compound. One helicopter was supposed to hover above the compound as the soldiers fast roped into the courtyard, but that had been called off. I wasn’t sure why.
Instead, it circled protectively overhead.
The other two choppers landed outside the west and south walls. Their rotor blades couldn’t have been more than twenty feet apart. Tight formations of soldiers raced under the whirling blades and headed toward their breaching points. One group arrowed for the main gate. The other aimed for a small side entrance. As the soldiers moved toward the compound, the helicopters lifted off and disappeared, maintaining an orbit nearby.
“Watch the doors,” I said.
Jack shifted his cross hairs to the center of the courtyard. From there we could see the doors of all three buildings and the men approaching the gates.
Nothing moved inside the compound.
“Breaching,” Jack said.
I focused on the gate.
Jack zoomed in as the soldiers stuck explosive charges over the gate’s lock. We could see small flashes as the charges blew. The Rangers streamed into the courtyard. Everyone moved with a purpose. The soldiers knew their targets and moved quickly to their assigned positions. I admired their precision.
One small group peeled off to search a building.
I inwardly cringed. A few months back, I’d watched as a similar raid, led by conventional troops, assaulted a suspected weapons storage facility. The line of men gathered outside and then slowly entered the building. A moment later, a massive explosion obliterated the building and took the men with it. There was nothing I could do to save those men then, and there was nothing I’d be able to do now. I silently prayed for their safety.
Each of the three chocks paused briefly outside the three buildings and then filed quickly inside. I held my breath a moment, but nothing happened. There was no firefight, no explosions. The TOC chat room remained silent. Jack kept the targeting pod fixed on the compound as we flew an orbit nearby. The autopilot allowed me to concentrate on the image. Jack was a seasoned sensor operator, but another set of eyes didn’t hurt.
Jack saw them first. It looked like two figures—men by the way they were dressed—coming out of the northernmost building. They crawled out of a window at the back and jumped the east fence.
When cornered, the insurgents usually fought while the leaders escaped. These two ran, which meant one could be the target, leaving his fighters to die. It was cowardly and pathetic.
“Rabbit,” Jack said, as the cross hairs tracked the two men as they cleared the wall.
“Follow him,” I said.
Jack broke his track, and the targeting pod’s cross hairs followed the men jumping the gate. The men were deep ebony against the cooler vegetation around them. I had a second thought.
“Try to keep the compound in sight.”
Jack zoomed out. The wider field of view allowed us to see the compound on one side and the black dots fleeing on the other. We took the initiative to follow the rabbits, even though our mission was to watch the compound. Normally, we would have stayed on the scene until the troops finished the raid, collected any intelligence like papers, maps, and computers, and eventually departed. The runners were too suspicious to pass up.
To the east of the compound was an open field. We could see the night breeze blow against a crop of some kind, but we couldn’t determine what type or how tall it was. The pair separated at first and then merged their paths about half a mile from the compound. They continued to run together for a little more than half a mile.
I typed in chat.
ROULETTE_21> BR_21, we have two squirters east of the compound.
BRIGHAM_21> c.
Was he watching the feed? Usually, the collection managers or JTACs got pretty riled up if you unilaterally pulled off target.
ROULETTE_21> Did we get the jackpot?
BRIGHAM_21> neg, not home.
The raid from the Army’s standpoint was a dry hole. That’s when I thought we might have the target in our cross hairs.
ROULETTE_21> c, rabbit under the cross hairs, came from main building.
BRIGHAM_21> say loc.
He wanted our location. I passed the coordinates and waited. Finally, Brigham came back online.
BRIGHAM_21> Stay on target. Vectoring QRF to intercept.
The Rangers set up a blocking position a few miles up the road. They would act as the quick reaction force, or QRF, and capture any squirters from the main target. The TOC alerted them, and the soldiers climbed into their HMMWVs and headed toward the compound. The TOC came back to us, asking for assistance locating the squirters.
—
I remembered that a pilot—Travis—had used the Predator’s IR pointer to light up some insurgents so soldiers on the ground could locate them.
Travis had been conducting route scans over Baghdad. He was searching the road for bom
bs when insurgents ambushed a convoy. The Army patrol reported fire from what appeared to be apartments in the distance. Between them was an open field obscured by a raised earth berm.
The Predator’s sensor ball could see three bright objects on the other side of the berm. Then one of the objects rose and threw something toward the soldiers. A moment later, a small explosion blew sand and dust into the air above the soldiers’ heads.
Travis told the soldiers he had eyes on the target, but the soldiers still couldn’t see the insurgents. Travis’s sensor operator turned on the IR pointer and shot it like a flashlight at where the insurgents were hiding. The Predator was at an angle where the IR beam overlapped the soldiers. The ground commander was convinced that the Predator was targeting them, so Travis directed the soldiers to drive one hundred meters forward. Anyone left behind was a target.
The soldiers pulled forward and the little black dots remained on the earth berm lobbing grenades and unloading their AK-47s in the direction of the soldiers. A few minutes later, Travis ended the threat with a Hellfire missile.
We called it “sparkle.” The beam was invisible to the naked eye, but under night vision goggles it looked like the finger of God stabbing accusingly at the ground.
ROULETTE_21> BR-21 say pos of QRF.
We saw nothing in our HUD and we didn’t want to zoom too far out for fear of losing the targets in ground clutter.
BRIGHAM_21> They are near, unable to see targets with nogs.
The QRF’s night vision goggles, or nogs, couldn’t see the squirters.
The two men huddled together in the same spot. Maybe they were catching their breaths. Then it occurred to me. If they were sitting, it was possible the HMMWVs couldn’t see them through all the crops.
ROULETTE_21> We’ll mark the tgt, stby sparkle.
“Go ahead, Jack,” I said.
The squirters were resting. They had run about a mile in a short time and were gased. There was no way those guys could see the laser, but the soldiers looking for them could see it in their night vision goggles. Jack turned on the IR pointer and fired it at the two squirters.
BRIGHAM_21> Good sparkle. QRF en route.
Time passed slowly and I was concerned because the soldiers from the blocking position still hadn’t found the men. There was no communication in the chat room. I scanned our data readouts; the IR illuminator was starting to overheat.
Though a low-power laser, it was still a relatively high-energy device. Temperatures in the targeting pod slowly increased until reaching the warning region. Only the cool winter air kept it out of the red for now. I pulled the keyboard into the middle of my table and started to type.
ROULETTE_21> confirm QRF has targets in sight.
Even without our IR illuminator pointing at the target, the soldiers’ night vision goggles should have been sufficient to pick out the two men in a field.
BRIGHAM_21> affirm, package is secure.
I looked back at the HUD. They hadn’t reported anything and we hadn’t seen any movement. The two black dots were frozen in place. Jack zoomed in a little closer to the two men. I noticed the motion first. It was subtle, then more pronounced as I made out our soldiers walking around the prisoners. They were almost invisible to the targeting pod in IR mode because their body armor contained their body heat. In contrast, the two prisoners radiated a deep black glow on the camera.
“Jack,” I said. “Zoom out one.”
Jack did. Just outside the original field of view was parked a handful of brightly glowing HMMWVs.
“Cease laser.”
We circled the target until the troops left. The rest of the flight was uneventful and we changed over with another crew soon after.
—
Leaving the compound after my shift, I noticed a news crew setting up outside the turnstile leading to the operations center. A public affairs officer stood with them.
“What are they here for?” I asked a buddy leaving with me.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it can’t be good.”
As a practice, we didn’t talk to the media about our work. The Office of Special Investigations, the Air Force’s counterintelligence network, told us al Qaeda was looking for members of the Predator program.
Letters recovered after Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 showed how paranoid he was about our ability to monitor the tribal areas of Pakistan and track al Qaeda operatives.
“They can distinguish between houses frequented by men at a higher rate than usual,” he wrote to Atiyya Abdul Rahman, al Qaeda’s top operational planner, in 2010. “Also, the visiting person might be tracked without him knowing.”
He urged Rahman to move al Qaeda’s leaders out of Waziristan. He said the best place to hide was on the outskirts of cities. Meetings should be limited to once or twice a week and “the leaders” should move only in bad weather.
“A warning to the brothers: They should not meet on the road and move in their cars because many of them got targeted while they were meeting on the road. They should move only when the clouds are heavy.”
Despite denials and covers, the enemy knew someone pulled the triggers. They just couldn’t pinpoint who we were. That was a status I wished to preserve. As far as my neighbors knew, I was just an Air Force guy. Even if they saw me in uniform, they still didn’t know exactly what I did while I was gone. It wasn’t uncommon to see Air Force uniforms in Las Vegas, since there were two bases in the area.
I also understood the need for publicity. Good press sells a product, and every service was battling for a bigger slice of the budget. But the reporters were broadcasting from our front door. I wondered why they didn’t do the interview at a more generic place. Maybe it was my intelligence training, but I never understood giving up information, even basic stuff, when it wasn’t necessary.
Do the interview. Explain the aircraft. But don’t stand right in front of the building where we went to work. Go out to the gate or something.
The 15th’s squadron commander emerged from the turnstile dressed in a green flight suit and a big smile. The lights came on and the reporter asked a question. We turned away as he started to talk. There was nothing we could do but make sure we didn’t get caught in the shot.
But as I walked out to my car, I thought back to the two runners in Iraq. They’d had no idea we were watching and they’d had no chance of escape. On the flip side, I knew they also had no way of knowing where we were as we controlled the Predator circling above. We had anonymity and security that other units didn’t have. We were never face-to-face with the enemy, but when the lights from the camera went on, I was sure the enemy knew where we lived and where we worked now. It was one thing to say we were based at Nellis or Creech, but another to show exactly where on the base. For the first time, I felt like we were in harm’s way.
CHAPTER 7
Pattern of Life
The motorcycle raced down the dirt road.
The HUD cross hairs sped across the terrain to keep up with it. There were two men on the bike. Our target, an al Qaeda captain, was riding on the back behind his driver. Like almost all of our targets, he wore the traditional clothes of the region and had a thick black beard.
Our intelligence analysts believed he was rising fast in al Qaeda’s chain of command. His current focus had been to control the group’s US and UK operations. He fled to the area after pushing his luck with the local government.
Our analysts believed he knew where Bin Laden and Ayman Muhammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, were hiding. If Osama bin Laden was the head of the snake, the Captain was the fangs.
The driver darted in and out of traffic as the target clung to the back of the bike. Periodically, we passed coordinates to the JOC, who sent them to the guys on the ground. The twists and bends in the road made tracking him a challenge.
We’d been trying to link
the Captain to Osama bin Laden for months.
The 17th was now at full strength in the Nellis compound and we had started to pursue midlevel al Qaeda leadership.
Someone high in the government shifted our pursuit away from Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician. They both had run to ground, and that made it difficult to recruit sources. We kept our ears open for tips and information, but we no longer combed the mountains looking for them.
Al, one of the JOC’s managers, changed our focus to the next link in the chain of command. Over the next year, we hunted midlevel facilitators and even Bin Laden’s main courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. The courier would eventually lead American intelligence officials to Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
But at the time, we were still years away from finding him. What we did know was that al Qaeda facilitators operated in the mountains around northeast Afghanistan. Most of the fighters fought there alongside their Taliban brothers. The Taliban and al Qaeda weren’t really allies. That was a relationship forced upon them by the Americans.
The hunt started months before I had the Captain in my cross hairs.
We gathered in the squadron briefing room where intelligence briefed us on the mission change. Maps of the target area showed a shift from the region on which we had been concentrating. We were headed into the Hindu Kush to find the Captain and use him to lead us up to the next link in the chain.
The next day, I was in the cockpit. I noticed the change in terrain on my first flight. I marveled at the mountains. Deep valleys cut through the region like unhealed wounds. Small settlements spotted the terraced slopes at odd intervals. Dirt roads snaked through and around the ruined landscape, providing the only means of contact with the villages. Seasonal rains or snows frequently cut off areas for weeks or months.
I surveyed the ground as we slowly passed over Kunar Province. Houses started to expand in our HUDs to uncomfortable proportions. The land rose to meet us and we had to maintain an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet to minimize the chance of alerting people on the ground to our presence. We had to be careful. The sound of the aircraft engine would give us away.
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