The little pink Predator icon on my tracker merged with my target indicator. It was well after sunset when we got to the area and started our search. The small village was high in the mountains. A low-level facilitator was supposed to meet with a courier after sunset. We knew from experience that his meetings usually happened around ten P.M. and concluded by midnight.
I checked the HUD against the satellite imagery. The photo was taken from about three hundred miles up, which gave us only the God’s-eye view. We flew to the side of the village and saw only the sides of the buildings.
“Tony,” I called into my mic once I was convinced of our location. “Wildfire is in the target area.”
“Roger,” came the immediate response. Tony was sitting LNO for us at the JOC.
The HUD jerked from side to side as Jantz, the sensor operator, searched the village for the target house. I set up a circle around the target area to help him. The top-down photo left a lot to be desired. We both searched for identifiable features like the house’s fire pit, water storage, trail, or animal pen.
“Sir, is that it?” Jantz said.
I compared the imagery displayed on my side monitor. The features seemed to match.
“Looks right,” I said.
Jantz and I had flown together a lot over the past month. I was in charge of the squadron’s standards, so it was my job to meet all the new pilots and sensor operators and give them the welcome brief. Jantz graduated the training course on a Friday and got his welcome brief on Saturday. That Sunday, he was flying his first real combat mission. Ours is the only Air Force career field where the day after you graduate training you’re in combat.
Jantz wanted the weekend off. He’d earned it after five months of training for the war. We needed the bodies. He made it a point to let folks know he didn’t care for the early report. I finally had to pull one of our senior sergeants aside and get him to counsel Jantz.
Since I was the senior guy flying that day, I had to fly with the problem child. It is common practice to pair a new crew member with an experienced counterpart. That way a new sensor, like Jantz, could learn the tricks of the trade from a “graybeard.” I didn’t mind being labeled a graybeard since I enjoyed teaching, but I was annoyed to see myself paired with him at first.
For the month I flew with him, I challenged him with difficult practice shots against moving targets. The first couple of shots were rough, but he quickly developed a rhythm in the seat, a sense of where he was and what needed to be done without spoiling a shot. He excelled to the point that I wanted him in the seat if we had to shoot.
He was also good company in the cockpit. Our missions were often boring, so we’d all become skilled at staying engaged. Jantz and I played hangman on the whiteboards mounted to the walls or just talked about his upbringing in Oregon and his wife. He was recently married.
We were less rank conscious in flight. It started in training. We pushed the enlisted sensor operators to forget that the pilots were officers. We were just “two crew dogs” doing a job. I didn’t want the sensors to be afraid to point out something if I was doing it wrong. That kind of rapport was key, especially when it was time to shoot.
Jantz and I had an epic game of six degrees of separation. After setting up to watch the house, we started to play. He worked hard to stump me. The game was simple. He’d pick two actors—in our game one of them didn’t have to be Kevin Bacon—and I’d link them within six movie roles.
“Arnold Schwarzenegger and Alyssa Milano,” Jantz said.
I almost laughed.
“Commando,” I replied.
It took me less than a second to come up with the 1985 cult-classic action thriller. Schwarzenegger played Milano’s father, who had to rescue her after she was kidnapped by mercenaries. The plot of the movie didn’t matter as much as the action.
“What movie?” Jantz said.
He looked bewildered. He’d never seen the movie and had no idea both actors were in it. Jantz, born well after the movie was released, didn’t know Milano was a child actor. He was about to call foul until he typed the title into the computer.
Jantz never stumped me. I guess all those nights watching bad eighties movies paid off.
The games kept us mentally engaged. I could monitor the feed and the radio while we played. A shift could last eight hours, so we brought water and snacks into the GCS despite regulations banning both.
Before one flight, I stopped on the way at Boston Market and got a dinner tray. It was during the NBA play-offs and I had the game on one monitor and the tray propped on the table near the keyboard. The Predator was on autopilot orbiting a target. The radios were silent and the chat room was quiet. I was a few forkfuls into my dinner when the commander poked his head into the GCS. I watched as his eyes tracked down to my dinner and then up to the monitor showing the game. He just shook his head and closed the door.
It was common to eat in the AWACS and other heavy aircraft in the Air Force, but the GCS was governed by OSHA regulations. The federal agency tasked with workplace safety said the cockpit was a computer station on the ground. Under their regulations, food or drink was banned in the cockpit.
OSHA didn’t take into account that a person at a regular workstation could get up to take a break. We could not, due to the need to maintain positive control of the aircraft. Food was a necessity over an eight-hour flight, just like in any other cockpit. There were some times that empty bottles were filled in flight too.
There was another problem. I had failed to exhibit the professionalism the commander expected.
The next day, we got a memo from the commander reminding us not to eat in the GCS. That didn’t stop us from taking in snacks and bottles of water and soda. But I never stopped at Boston Market for takeout again before my shift.
Jantz and I didn’t have time to eat or play games on this mission. Mountains and ridges obscured the target from certain directions. I flew the mission by hand. I needed the extra maneuverability so I could keep the target in sight. At times, I had to edge closer to the target so I could look straight down and see the road. I couldn’t do that with the autopilot limiting my bank angle to avoid a stall.
Wind was also an issue.
It was the change of the seasons, and this high in the mountains, drafts could reach one hundred miles an hour or more. The wind could push you miles off target if you weren’t careful. I kept the Predator in a tight bank angle to minimize the effects of the wind.
We set up to the north of the house, where we could see the winding road that led into the village. We needed to keep the approach in sight or risk missing the courier’s arrival. The house was perched precariously at the edge of a terrace. Thick wood beams supported the sections of the mud house that hung over the side. The loss of a single truss could spell disaster. I briefly imagined the house slowly toppling over the edge and landing on the house below and starting a cascading effect that would eliminate the entire village.
Tony, sitting LNO, shook me out of my strange daydream.
“Hang right there,” he said. “The analysts want you to watch for activity.”
“Roger,” I said.
The waiting was the worst part. I checked the clock. It was ten P.M. The meeting should start soon, give or take half an hour. Everyone in the region ran on his own clock. We spent the next several hours flying a ground track that resembled a bent Q-tip. It wasn’t difficult, but it required a lot of concentration to keep track of the variable winds. I was happy the house wasn’t moving or it would have been impossible.
The compound remained dark. The only bright spot in the IR feed was the fire pit. It had long since faded into the background. We saw a dog run around the compound’s courtyard area for a while. It beat a quick retreat into the warm house as the temperature rapidly dropped.
I checked the clock. It was midnight now and there was still no sign of the couri
er. Terrorists changed their tactics with frustrating regularity, but one consistency was the timing of meetings. They didn’t happen after midnight. The courier was not coming today.
He showed up a couple of nights later, when another crew was flying over the house, and they followed him to a new safe house in the valley. Within a couple of weeks we had followed the courier and mapped out an intricate network of contacts and potential targets. At one point a crew spotted the courier talking with a man on a motorcycle.
We knew from other sources that the Captain rode the motorcycle. It was allegedly the only one in the province. He used it to make his rounds. The Captain was an arrogant man, convinced that he was untouchable. He figured the Predators were far to the south chasing ghosts. The main American force was far to the west tied up with the Taliban.
He was safe.
Our next missions focused on the bike. We couldn’t identify the Captain yet. Facial recognition was difficult using the targeting pod. We needed to get too close to get a clear picture of a face, and secrecy outweighed confirmation. While we kept watch, intelligence officers on the ground worked their sources trying to confirm that the Captain was the man riding on the back of the motorcycle. Within days we received confirmation.
Next started an awful sixty days of trailing him across the countryside. We watched and monitored as he started his rounds early in the morning, just after sunrise. He visited the same houses in the region, stopping for just a few minutes to pass messages. We flew circles around him, always prepared to strike if called.
I climbed into the box a few weeks after my first mission and flew the Predator to his house. I’d been doing it for the better part of a month, and I already knew what I’d see during my shift. Around seven A.M., the Captain’s driver showed up on the motorcycle. The Captain was already awake. He rose around dawn and ate breakfast while he waited. He was punctual, rising at the same time every day.
The cross hairs in my HUD were fixed on the pair as they bounced down the dirt tracks to the paved roads and his daily route. The first stop was a gas station. This was a typical corner filling station, not unlike its American counterparts, minus the overhang above the pumps. An orange-and-white circular sign identified it. Like the other Pakistani buildings, this one was walled in with two metal gates that were opened during business hours.
The gas station stop took five minutes. We made one circle above him as he dismounted the bike, went into the office, and emerged promptly at the five-minute mark. He never bought gas.
I knew his next stop was a facilitator’s house nearby. I turned the Predator and headed eastbound into the valley. I flew close enough to keep the Captain in sight, but I already knew where he was headed. The house was modest, with a gate and small courtyard. As he had at the gas station, he hopped off the bike and went straight inside, leaving his driver to tend to the bike.
I looked at the clock. We had thirty minutes to wait. I put the Predator into an orbit and settled in. Half an hour later, the Captain was back on the bike and headed to his last stop of the day. This third stop was a small shack on a dirt road. We could see him in the HUD sitting on the back of the bike, a notebook in his hands. I knew from experience that he wasn’t getting off the bike. Instead, we watched his contact walk up the dirt driveway and take a pouch of papers or money from the Captain.
The contact stood at the end of the driveway and watched as the bike sped off. This activity happened every day until dinnertime. The Captain didn’t meet anyone at his home. Whatever he wanted accomplished was spread out around the world via those couriers and facilitators.
While I followed the Captain, a second Predator watched his house. His wife left at midmorning, the same time every day, to go to the market. The kids, those old enough to attend school, walked to the madrassa down the road. His wife returned a couple of hours later with the evening meal. She did the laundry and hung it to dry by midafternoon. Then she stoked the outdoor fire pit and prepared dinner in the kitchen.
After about thirty days, we could look at a clock and tell where the Captain would be. Even a glance at a feed in the ops cell could tell us the location without looking at a grid reference. We didn’t need annotated charts and maps to give us a sense of where he was going.
We knew his every move.
After tracking him for forty-five days, we knew the exact time he arrived at any station along his daily route. If, for example, we lost him in weather, we would not bother trying to relocate him. We calculated the time he was missing and shifted the camera to a new spot just to see the little motorcycle flash into view. If weather delayed a launch by hours, which happened sometimes, we could go to a specific location knowing he would show within minutes of our arrival.
He couldn’t fart without us knowing about it. For a total of sixty days, we watched the same thing over and over again. But the mission wore on our nerves. There was no variety, no new targets, and no disruption of his routine. For the first time, I started to dread flying. I was becoming a zombie. It was like stamping an endless line of widgets at a factory. I knew before the chill of the GCS hit me what I’d see or do. I’d either track the bike or sit over his house and watch his wife do chores.
For the past sixty days, the daily brief was always the same too, which only added to the drudgery of the job. Imagine listening to the same song every day at the same time. It got to the point where I could lip-synch the whole brief. We sat in chairs around a conference table as the intelligence guys went over the PowerPoint slides and maps of his suspected but always accurate route. At the end of the first month, some joker in the intelligence shop overlaid an animated icon of a guy on a motorcycle blitzing around the map. A photo of the Captain’s face was pasted to the rider’s head. The first time I saw it, I chuckled. It was a nice break from the monotony of the brief.
Then things changed one day.
—
The morning brief was different. The cheesy graphic the intelligence shop had developed wasn’t there. A concept of operation, or CONOP, brief replaced it. We weren’t watching any longer. Today, the JOC intended to roll up the Captain.
I could feel a tingle of excitement shoot through my body. Finally, we were ready to act. I felt alert and engaged as the intelligence staff explained the plan. A team on the ground was going to ambush him outside the village during his daily run. I knew the village. It was seared into my mental map, since I’d flown over it for weeks now.
“Squirrel,” the major from the intelligence shop said. “You’re primary.”
It was my mission to track him on his rounds and make sure he ended up in the right place. If for some reason he changed his route, I would track him to the new location.
It felt strange to be flying what we hoped was our last mission against this target. There was an intimacy about following someone for months. We spent so much time with the family that I knew what the Captain’s kids looked like and what roads they took to school. I knew how his wife did the family laundry and where she shopped for dinner. In the back of my mind, I knew the Captain was a terrorist and plotted to kill Americans. But it was hard not to see him and his family as very human. He wasn’t a James Bond villain plotting from a massive mountain hideout. But his job was to kill Americans. On a visceral level, I wanted to return the favor. This guy was responsible for planning attacks. He was the very reason for our presence in Central Asia.
A few hours after I took control of the Predator, I was high above him as he dodged between cars. As usual, he was on time and on the correct route.
“Wildfire Eight One on target,” I announced to the JOC.
“Copy,” Tony said.
As I flew lazy S-turns to stay with the slower bike, I secretly wished he would change his schedule and take another route. Based on the brief, the team didn’t have a good backup plan. If the Captain escaped, I was confident the JOC would give me the thumbs-up to shoot.
We were approaching his next turn and I hoped he’d go straight.
“Right turn,” the sensor operator said into the mic and passed the coordinates.
I checked his reference against the readout on the HUD. He was on track.
“Wildfire, target on route Yellow.”
Yellow was the color of the predicted route overlaid on the CONOP map. The Captain was dressed in the baggy shirt and pants of the region and a wool Afghan pakol hat pulled over his dark hair. I could see the tails of his shirt flapping in the breeze as the motorcycle raced along the dirt road. He was headed straight into the trap. I cursed his arrogance and predictability. I really wanted a shot at him.
As he made the last turn, I could see the impromptu checkpoint in my HUD. It was in a remote area far enough between stops, or villages, that no one would miss him until it was far too late. Hidden on the side of the road was another team. They were disguised as locals traveling along the road. After he passed, they blocked the road with a barrier.
The road was no bigger than two lanes, with broken asphalt and no markings. Cars drove up and down, and people with bikes and carts traveled along the shoulder. The Captain didn’t notice the checkpoint behind him.
“Wildfire, target passed first checkpoint.”
It was only a matter of minutes before the team would spring the trap. I focused on the HUD and made sure we kept the cross hairs on the target. If he suspected something, he wasn’t showing it. Just ahead of him, I could see the team huddled near a graveyard. They were hidden under head-to-toe burqas. At a glance, they looked like a group of women visiting the family plot.
When he got close, I watched as the team rushed out from the graveyard and surrounded the bike. They had their pistols and submachine guns drawn. The Captain’s driver turned and attempted to flee. On the back of the bike, it looked like the Captain was trying to destroy his notebook. In the HUD, I could see the backup team from the block position close off the road and start running toward the bike. From more than twenty thousand feet, it looked like a baseball rundown.
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