Hunter Killer

by T. Mark McCurley

  “You ready, Alan?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  We had only moments before entering the launch window.

  “One minute, laser on.”

  Alan pressed a couple of buttons and the aircraft laser fired. I reviewed the HUD. A bright red “Laser Firing” flashed prominently. Satisfied, I focused on the target. The Facilitator gave no indication that he heard us. I wondered how he didn’t hear the Predator. I figured the hum of the prop was echoing across the valley. He must have been very confident in the bad weather to actually ignore his surroundings.

  “Thirty seconds,” I intoned without inflection. When I reviewed the tapes later, I was surprised how dead my voice was.

  Pusher broke in over the radio.

  “We need you to hurry, Squirrel,” he said. “He’s almost gone.”

  “Shut up, Pusher,” I said.

  The target showed large on our screen now. We were almost to the minimum range when he disappeared behind the passenger side of the van. I selected both missiles to maximize the frag pattern.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  I checked my instruments. My alignment was good. I was still in the weapons engagement zone. I pressed and held the “Release to Consent” button. “Ready to Launch Both Missiles” flashed on the HUD.

  Clouds flashed through my screen. I prayed that the ceiling wasn’t dropping. I couldn’t go any lower. As we sped toward the Facilitator, the Predator broke into clear air.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Alan flexed in his seat. The target was so close the camera became extremely sensitive to motion. Any adjustment was overly exaggerated. Alan kept the cross hairs locked on the al Qaeda leader, tracking him as he moved around the van.

  “Three, two, one . . .”

  I pulled the trigger. Twin white-hot flashes erupted into the HUD as the missiles left the rails and raced toward the target.

  “Rifle,” I said, indicating I’d fired the missiles.

  The Hellfire’s icons disappeared from my HUD. I watched the first missile’s trail as it went into the clouds following Alan’s laser marker. I continued the countdown.

  “Five, four . . .”

  The Facilitator’s head snapped up. His cell phone was still pressed against his right ear, but he’d heard the twin sonic booms of the missiles. In the HUD, it seemed like he was looking right at us. His gaze was locked in the targeting pod for a brief moment before he ran.

  “Follow the runner,” I said.

  Alan pressed the stick and the camera’s cross hairs started to move. The Facilitator ran for a nearby gully. It was his only chance at cover. The cross hairs jerked to life and lagged the man by a few feet. He got three steps before the first missile entered the camera’s field of view, arcing to follow the moving laser spot.

  A split second after I saw the exhaust trail, the missile detonated in a blinding flash that whited out our screen. About a second later, another almost imperceptible flash blotted out the screen again. It took a few seconds for the HUD to clear as the heat of the explosions subsided.

  “Cease laser, safe laser,” I said to Alan.

  Alan shut off the laser and engaged the safety. I returned the weapons panel to safe as well.

  “Okay, guys,” Pusher said. “Let’s get some BDA.”

  Pusher wanted us to conduct a battle damage assessment to confirm that the missile had killed the Facilitator.

  Alan was already scanning the wreckage. Smoke still hung in the air. The van was a scorched chassis and engine block. The missiles had vaporized the rest. Streaks of debris radiated out of the impact crater near the van like compass points. I studied the debris field, looking for a body.

  “Zoom out,” I ordered. “Look for the target.”

  Alan pulled out. I noticed something dark about thirty yards from the shredded van.

  “What’s that?” I pointed at my monitor.

  Alan leaned over to see where my finger indicated.

  “A body?” he said.

  His cross hairs moved over to the spot I marked.

  “Guys, we need to find the target,” Pusher said.

  “I think we found him,” I said. “Under cross hairs now.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s the only thing around here hot enough to be a body.”

  The Facilitator’s sightless eyes stared up at us as we passed directly overhead. His body was burned and unrecognizable. The driver, a regional warlord, was so badly mangled that local authorities identified him by association.

  “Pusher,” I said. “We’ll climb back up to altitude.”

  I wanted to get to clear air and away from the ground.

  “Uh, you guys are cleared to RTB”—return to base, Pusher said. “We have to vacate the airspace.”

  “Copy.”

  We climbed out and headed back to base. The weather remained bad, so we rotated the targeting pod in a circle to ensure that no storms were building around us. On each rotation, we paused on the empty rails, naked without their missiles.

  In a way, we were happy we took out the target. We had had our chance, which few others got, and I was able to fulfill my promise to make a difference in the war.

  When the landing team took control of the Predator, Alan and I swapped out with a new crew. Before I drove home, I stopped by the office to draft an after action report. The paperwork after a shot took a couple of hours to complete. While I worked, some of my squadron mates stopped in to talk about the mission. It made a long day a bit more exhausting.

  When we shot, part of our mission commander checklist was to call the chaplain. He was present following the after action report to serve as a counselor, if necessary. I passed him in the ops cell on my way out. I didn’t think I needed to talk with him. I’d seen this stuff before. I did point him toward Alan, just in case.

  —

  It was after dark when I pulled into traffic and headed back toward the lights of Las Vegas. My daily metamorphosis on Interstate 215 from combat aviator to normal civilian started after I cleared the gate.

  Each day was the same. Wake up, complete the morning routine, and start the long, forty-five-minute drive to work. En route, I changed my mental state to that of someone capable of killing another human being without thought, hesitation, or remorse. The return trip home was worse. I had to remove myself from the war. The easiest days were the ones when nothing happened.

  The days drenched in blood remained difficult. How many convoys did I have to watch get hit by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)? I once watched helplessly as Taliban fighters executed suspected spies because the rules of engagement didn’t let us defend them.

  But that didn’t make it easier when the face of your enemy was staring back at you in high-definition. No other pilots got to see the target like we did. Most fighter pilots dropped only a couple of times on a deployment, some not at all. When they did hit a target, they had weeks or months remaining in theater to come to terms with their actions.

  Fighter pilots also rarely saw the whole engagement. They just got the call and put bombs on target. The closest they got to the fight was strafing runs and the occasional flash from the bomb or missile as it passed their windscreen. Their proximity to death and violence stirred their blood, but the images in their targeting pods were tiny and fuzzy compared to our high-def pods, keeping them remote to the effects on the ground. Our targeting pods not only showed us everything, but also lingered over the carnage, searing the images into our brains. Our experience was far different from that of the fighters.

  I was almost home when it hit me. Sitting at a traffic light, I was overtaken by the idea that I’d taken a life. It wasn’t the first one, but this one stuck with me because of the intimacy of it. My other shots were in defense of troops under fire. That made sense to me, and they were nameless
fighters, targets with guns aiming at my brothers-in-arms.

  But this one was different.

  The engagement was never a “him or me” scenario. There was no way the Facilitator could harm me. I had all the power. He also wasn’t shooting at American troops at the time. He was on the phone with his wife. I knew his name. I’d followed his every move for more than a month.

  One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the RPA community is that the aircraft allows us some distance from the killing, since we’re thousands of miles away. The opposite is true. We are too close. We know too much, and when it is time to shoot, we can zoom in until our target fills the screen. Because we are not face-to-face and our lives are not in danger, we can’t tell ourselves it was either us or them. It was never us, and they had no chance. There was coldness to the way we killed, but it never lacked humanity: At the end of the day, the pilots and sensor operators took the images home.

  The gravity of what I’d done overtook my emotions. My mind and body struggled to cope. I had just taken the one thing from two men that I could never return, no matter how hard I tried. I had ended their existence. Worse, I had removed one of God’s creatures from His world.

  What greater sin could I have committed?

  I looked around at the cars stopped at the light. Most of the civilians had no idea what I’d done. They fiddled with their phones, listened to the radio, and impatiently waited for the light to turn green. The snarled commute was at the forefront of their minds, but my mind was back on the target.

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.

  What had I done?

  None of them had any idea they were mere feet from a killer, a man with fresh blood on his hands.

  Only the sound of the engines revving as the light changed brought me back to reality. Traffic inched forward. I knew I had to get past this shock quickly. When I got home, I called a buddy from the squadron. He invited me over and I drove to his condo. I didn’t want to sit at home alone.

  When I got there, he already had a drink ready for me. We’d bagged a big target that would set enemy operations back. It was big news for the 17th and the Predator community in general. We were quickly making our mark as an effective counterterrorism tool.

  But my mind was still fixed on the last image of the Facilitator. My shock wasn’t unique. I was sure it wore on other pilots, but we didn’t talk about it.

  Savoring a cigar and a freshly mixed martini, I took a seat outside on his balcony. The lights of Las Vegas made it impossible to see any stars. We talked about the mission for a while. It felt better to tell the story. When my buddy brought out a new round, I made a toast to the man I killed.

  I raised my glass.

  We both drank to the death of an enemy.

  This mission was complete, but I still had a job to do.

  CHAPTER 9

  Never Alone

  The Predator Operations Center-N compound seemed deserted when I pushed through the security turnstile at the front gate to start my night shift.

  I was working vampire hours. It was the time when the crazies went to Walmart and the party on the Las Vegas Strip kicked into high gear. I left the house around ten o’clock at night and I was in the seat by midnight. The day shift relieved me at eight the next morning.

  I walked past the triple-wide trailer where we had office space and headed for the POC building. The trailers always made me laugh. We were located next to the building where the Air Force managed its massive “Red Flag” training exercises and across the road from the aggressor squadrons that flew against our fighter squadrons. Both were beautiful new facilities.

  We got trailers and no money for upgrades. The RPA squadrons all worked out of trailers. It was a common theme at Nellis Air Force Base. Predators were the redheaded stepchildren of the base despite the media attention making us sound like we were the cover models.

  The only brick-and-mortar building in the RPA compound was the operations center. The 15th and the 17th shared it. A single hallway separated the two squadrons and their independent ops cells. I walked through the steel door of the 15th’s ops cell. A sign hung by the door read, “Welcome to the CENTCOM AOR.” We were eight thousand miles from the Middle East. Yet the squadron wanted its crews to remember that inside the building, they were deployed to the US Central Command’s area of responsibility.

  The fastest way to get to my squadron, the 17th, was to cut through the 15th’s operations center. But the shortcut was a matter of contention between the crews. The 15th held a grudge because they were not cleared to enter our operations center, but we could use their ops cell as a hallway.

  We didn’t do it to annoy them. We did it to avoid the only bathroom in the building. It always reeked. I went the long way, seeing no reason to antagonize them. The hall between the squadrons smelled like raw sewage as I walked toward the door to the 17th’s ops cell. Apparently, the men’s bathroom was backed up again. It wouldn’t be fixed until the morning, if we were lucky.

  I opened the door to the 17th’s ops cell and was taken aback. This wasn’t the sleepy room I expected. It was abuzz with activity. Mongo looked tense behind the MCC’s massive desk. More tense than normal. He didn’t shoot me his gap-toothed grin when I came into the ops cell. I looked at the screens on the wall to see what was going on with our birds. Both aircraft were on the ground. The weather map showed that an intense band of thunderstorms was pushing through southern Afghanistan. I couldn’t tell why Mongo was so spun up.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We just lost a SEAL team,” Mongo said. “They’ll update you in the briefing.”

  That got my attention. Any joke I had prepared died on my tongue.

  His secure phone rang and he rushed to answer it. Mongo was MCC for the shift. He provided updated information on our missions and oversaw all of the 17th’s flights. He spelled us for latrine breaks during our shifts and worked with the JOC when our LNO wasn’t tied into the mission. He was the conductor of the orchestra.

  I gathered up my paperwork for the flight and went into the mass briefing room to get our mission. Whatever happened would be mine to deal with once I was in the box. The air in the room was tight. No one joked. Everyone knew something bad had happened. The intelligence officer stood first. This was rare, as the outgoing MCC usually started the brief, but Mongo was still at the desk, tied to the secure phones.

  “A SEAL team was overrun in the Kunar Province,” the intelligence officer said. “The customer has cut us loose to support.”

  The customer—the JOC—was good about that. Tier-one targets were important. But supporting Americans trumped everything.

  Four SEAL Team Five members were overrun on a surveillance and reconnaissance mission. The team had been sent into the Pech District of Afghanistan’s Kunar Province ahead of a Marine operation to secure the area in advance of the Afghan parliamentary elections. The SEALs were identifying safe houses used by Ahmad Shah, a Taliban leader in the area. Once the houses were identified, SEALs and Marines would capture or kill him.

  The team set up on the slopes of a mountain named Sawtalo Sar, twenty miles west of Asadabad. They were compromised by local goat herders and ambushed by Shah’s fighters. After the SEALs were ambushed, a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade shot down a CH-47 with the quick reaction force coming to help. Eight SEALs and eight Army aviators were killed in the crash.

  “Your mission,” he said. “Find the survivors.”

  I raised my hand.

  “What about CSAR?”

  Combat Search and Rescue, or CSAR, were usually the first guys on scene. A quick reaction force usually went ahead of them. I wanted to get the lay of the land as we rushed to help. Kunar was almost five hours from our base in Kandahar. A fighter from Bagram could get there in thirty minutes.

  The intelligence officer had anticipated the question.


  “The QRF was shot down,” he said. “Weather will tell you the rest.”

  The slide on the overhead projector changed to a map of Afghanistan overlaid with a massive red blob. Red was bad.

  “A line of thunderstorms is pushing through the theater right now,” the weather officer said. “Nothing is flying out of Bagram.”

  The radar picture showed a line of storms stretching southeast across our other major base in Kandahar. There was nothing in theater that could launch into that maelstrom. I still didn’t understand our role. The Predator was an electric aircraft. Its avionics were not sealed against the weather. We avoided light rain for fear of shorting out the delicate circuitry and possibly killing the aircraft. Thunderstorms were a guaranteed kill.

  “So where do we come in?” I asked.

  “You’re going to find a hole in the weather and find them,” the intelligence officer said.

  I started to object when Mongo walked in.

  “You’ll launch regardless,” he said. “You’ll be launching on a Chariot Directs. The Combined Air and Space Operations Center [CAOC] bought the aircraft.”

  We needed aircraft to break through a storm system without risking the lives of the pilot and crew. Finding SEAL Team Five was the goal and we were expendable.

  Mongo patted me affectionately on the shoulder.

  “You’re the first one in for us.”

  “Great,” I said.

  There was nothing else I could say.

  The 15th launched two lines as I did my preflight checks in the box. I watched Pacman’s yellow icon and Roulette’s red icon wind a path north as I passed Kandahar. Each icon twitched from side to side as if caught in an epileptic seizure.

  I put the planes’ HUD video feeds on my side monitors so I could see what they saw. A mass of boiling dark-gray clouds filled both screens. The feed flicked between day TV and IR cameras in a vain attempt to find a hole in the weather. IR could burn through haze to see a clear picture, but it sometimes missed ice. Day TV was less reliable but could show a downdraft that would toss the aircraft about and eventually tear it apart.