Hunter Killer

by T. Mark McCurley

  I was a few minutes behind Roulette and Pacman, so their feeds gave me a preview of what I faced. Both crews struggled to find a hole. I watched the monitors as the pilots wound through the clouds looking for a clear line. Roulette found a hole first. I heard him over the radio tell the controllers that he was going to try to make it through.

  As he turned to fly through it, the clouds quickly closed around the Predator. Without the benefit of weather radar, the Predator had no chance. The pilot was lost. The HUD rolled as he tried to find a way out of the clouds. After a few minutes of nothing but gray clouds, he started to head back the way he’d come. It was the only airspace he knew.

  The clouds had started to thin when a bright flash erupted on the monitor. The screen turned to static. “Loss of Clock, Loss of Data” flashed across the blank screen. The satellite link to the aircraft was severed after the lightning strike. After the shift, we reviewed the video. It was so good that the camera captured the light of a lightning flash a couple of frames before the current fried the aircraft.

  Roulette was gone.

  I watched the yellow icon work its way around the new cell. Pacman followed Roulette on a nearly identical course. She avoided the cell that had doomed Roulette and worked her way to the thinnest part of the line of storms. The thin line either meant a break in the clouds or the radar wasn’t powerful enough to see through a thick area.

  Pacman shot the gap and started toward the thinning clouds when the Predator’s nose pitched up. The horizon bar was pinned against the top of the HUD. A couple of bursts of static flashed across the screen before the dreaded “Loss of Clock, Loss of Data” message appeared. The whole incident took about seven seconds.

  I had seen this before. When a Predator was flying near a storm, ice built up on the aircraft. You couldn’t see it. It just showed up. An attentive crew would do frequent weather sweeps to detect the lift-killing substance. Ice must have built up on Pacman’s “angle of attack probe,” which measured the aircraft’s deck angle. If the nose rose too high, then the computer thought the aircraft was about to stall and would adjust pitch and power to correct it. When Pacman dipped into the cloud, ice forced the probe up, indicating a stall. The autopilot slammed the nose down, breaking the ice loose. The aircraft realized it was diving at full power and the autopilot pulled the nose up. The sudden g-force snapped the tail off and the aircraft disappeared.

  Two down, one to go.

  It was my turn.

  I didn’t have a better answer than the other two pilots. But their failed attempts gave me a chance to see what didn’t work. Before diving into the clouds, I took a second to plan my route. I would be no good to the SEALs on the ground if I crashed.

  The storm that took Roulette fizzled out almost as quickly as it had built. I aimed in that direction hoping that the collapsed storm would leave a void through which I could pass. The path took me about sixty miles west of where Roulette and Pacman had met their fates. The bigger cells were pushing east. A small gap showed on the weather loop. I called the Marine Air Traffic Control, which oversaw the airspace, and told them I was going to descend.

  “Roger,” the Marine said. “You’re the only thing flying. The country is yours.”

  I brought up the nose camera on my HUD. The Predator had a small forward-facing camera built into the fuselage. We rarely used it to fly. The targeting pod had a better camera, but I needed the targeting pod to clear turns and find open air. Two cameras were better than one.

  “Katie, I need you to scan for me,” I said. “I’m going to find a hole to fly through. I need you to clear my turns and help me find a seam.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Katie was one of several female sensor operators in the squadron. She was the sensor operator when the Predator was shot down over Baghdad. I hadn’t flown with her much, since I mostly got the new guys in my role as chief pilot. It was comforting to have her level of experience in the cockpit with me as we tried to shoot through the storms.

  I pointed at my weather display on a side monitor.

  “I’m going to aim at these gaps,” I said. “Spend most of your time ahead of us.”

  We worked our way into a bank of clouds. A large storm cell billowed out of the deck in front of me and bubbled skyward. We couldn’t go over it. We could only go around it.

  “Scan left,” I said.

  Despite the high stress level, no one raised his or her voice. I couldn’t hear any tension in Katie’s voice. Knowing the stakes on the ground, we weren’t afraid to push the aircraft. I leaned forward as if doing so would make the picture any clearer. Katie rotated the pod to the left. All we could see was a solid wall of cloud.

  “Anything to the right?”

  The pod swung about. The sky was a little clearer in that direction. I could just make out some sunlight poking through. I pushed the control stick to the right and swung around to match where the targeting pod was pointing. The aircraft started a lazy turn and rolled out to match the targeting pod’s heading. The clear air lasted about a minute before the clouds closed in around us.

  “Scan left.”

  I felt like a broken record. We zigzagged between cloud banks for a few minutes, jumping between patches of clear air. If we went left, we headed across the line of storms. Right put us parallel to them. We worked our way down the line until finally a hole in the clouds opened. Two towering cumulus clouds framed clear sky. It looked remarkably like the one Roulette saw.

  I checked the satellite feed. It showed nothing on the other side of the weather line. It also showed us nearing the mountains, where turbulence and stalled thunderstorms awaited us. It was now or never.

  I turned the aircraft to point down the hole. Katie and I watched as the cumulus clouds passed us by. I knew it was a trick of the camera. The clouds were still in front but outside the nose camera’s thirty-degree field of view. I began to let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, until a wisp of cloud popped back into view.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  I initiated a ten-degree turn away from the cloud.

  “What?” Katie said.

  “Scan left,” I ordered.

  I was still calm on the outside. Inside, I started to sweat. The pod moved left. The picture showed a cumulus cloud about to overrun the aircraft. If it enveloped us, a third aircraft was lost. My best bet at survival was to turn right and run from it.

  “Scan right,” I said as I turned the Predator.

  I wanted to see where we were going. Katie didn’t ask questions. She was tracking the same threat. The pod slewed right. Another wall of cloud rose right where we were turning. One cell had stagnated while the other kept moving, closing the trap. I turned back toward the hole and decided to take my chances shooting the gap.

  Tendrils of clouds reached out on both sides, attempting to claw the bird out of the sky. The hole collapsed until only a tiny pinhole not much larger than the aircraft remained. I aimed the cross hairs at the center of the hole and waited. The cloud closed in, blocking the remaining light. Then the screen went dark gray as we penetrated the cloud itself. I counted three seconds, expecting to see the dreaded “Loss of Clock, Loss of Data” warning.

  I was barely at three in my countdown when the aircraft burst from the cloud into bright sunlight. We were finally clear of the weather and surprisingly close to the target area in Kunar. I took a deep breath and looked at the tracker above the HUD to get my bearings.

  No one spoke. There was no reason to congratulate us, because the most important part of the mission was still unfinished.

  I breathed a sigh of relief as I typed in chat.

  WF_81> through wx, proceeding to coords. [We’re through the weather, proceeding to coordinates.]

  The mission commander came back right away.

  17RS_MCC> c.

  Katie plugged in the target coordinates. The pod
fidgeted while she typed; then it locked onto a gray nothingness.

  “Is that ice on the pod?” I asked.

  Katie worked her controls. The camera was in IR mode and suffering from thermal crossover. The outside air temperature matched the terrain’s temperature. We weren’t going to see a person in this mess.

  “Okay,” I said. “Zoom out and look for a hot spot.”

  Immediately, a bright spot materialized in one corner of the HUD. Katie centered the picture and zoomed back in. The QRF’s CH-47 wreckage came into view. The helicopter had fallen into a wooded area and exploded. The engines and fuel tanks still burned brightly. The broken rotors and downed trees glowed in the light from the fire. There could be no survivors.

  “MC, we’re on the wreckage,” I said. “You got a vector?”

  “Head up the ridgeline at the top of your screen,” the intelligence officer said. “Follow it for about five miles. That should be the area of their last known location. You are looking for up to four individuals.”

  The intelligence officer didn’t have to say “moving with discipline.” It was understood. The Taliban would scramble over the rocks in a disorderly fashion. SEALs would make coordinated movements, always covering one another. We had no issues telling friend from foe in these circumstances.

  Katie scanned the ridgeline in silence. She was still battling the thermal crossover. Katie drew a box pattern around the Chinook as she examined every gully, crevasse, and outcropping. For all we knew, the team was still on the move.

  I fidgeted in my seat and leaned in closer to the screen. If I were the team on the ground, I wouldn’t want air cover to give up on me because of a little thermal crossover.

  “You see anything?” I asked, just to break up the silence.

  “Negative,” Katie said.

  I didn’t speak much more than that for fear of losing my focus. We wanted to find these guys. God only knew under what conditions they found themselves. I wanted to get them to safety. Were they wounded? Dead? We had no communications with them or their leadership. We didn’t know it at the time, but their leadership was in the Chinook that we’d just seen burning on the mountainside.

  For the next hour and a half, we combed over every inch of the ridgeline and valley. Nothing moved. Even the Taliban seemed to be taking a breather. Katie was slowly scanning every rock and tree when she started to talk with the intelligence officer about movies they’d watched that month. I didn’t even register the names since I was too absorbed in watching the screen for any movement. The conversation between them was less about the content and more to keep their minds engaged. It was difficult to stay sharp when every rock and tree looked the same. There were supposed to be more than two hundred Taliban crawling through these hills. Where the hell were they?

  Then I heard it. A garbled transmission came across the radio. The voice was low, almost a whisper. I didn’t hear the first part of the message, only the last part.

  “[GARBLED] . . . Come in.”

  Whoever was on the radio was trying to raise someone.

  I cocked my head and pressed the ear cup tighter to my head. The voice was on the radio, not the intercom. I checked the frequency. It was set to the CSAR emergency frequency. Our radios were terrible and couldn’t talk with anyone more than five miles away, which meant air traffic control wouldn’t get me even if they were on the frequency. I checked the clock. It was five past the hour, the standard check-in time. It had to be someone on an emergency radio.

  The message came in garbled again. I could understand only “come in.” But it was a man’s voice, speaking at a whisper.

  “Everybody shut up,” I yelled into the mic. “I think I hear something.”

  Katie and the intel coordinator stopped talking. The tone in the GCS changed immediately. I thought I heard his call sign but couldn’t confirm. I took a chance and keyed the mic.

  “Calling Wildfire, say again.”

  Nothing.

  “Calling Wildfire, say again.”

  Silence.

  Either he didn’t hear us or wouldn’t respond without the code word.

  “Calling Wildfire,” I said. “Hold tight. We are triangulating your position. Friendlies are on the way. Friendlies are on the way.”

  It was terrible radio discipline that completely violated the CSAR standard communications. I didn’t care, though. The SEAL needed to know we were there, assuming he could still hear us.

  I dropped a marker on my tracker to indicate where I’d heard the radio call. I couldn’t truly confirm I had heard SEAL Team Five, but I had to report it. No one else should have been on this frequency. No one else would be whispering. I calculated the coordinates and passed them to the Joint Personnel Recovery Center.

  We strained to listen to the radio for the rest of our sortie, circling in the same spot in hopes of another transmission. We needed more contacts to triangulate his position. An hour later, my part in the mission ended. The relief crew came out, received our mission brief, and assumed control.

  The ops cell didn’t look excited at all when I walked in. There was a tension there that said, “We are still looking.” I knew they would, too. SEAL Team Five was still out there. I left the ops cell and walked to my car. The sun was rising and I knew most of Las Vegas was shaking off their Saturday night hangover. I felt the same way, but for a different reason. I’d really wanted to find the SEAL team, but I’d failed.

  As I drove back into town, I felt like the weight of the whole mission rested on my chest. It was worse than the stress of shooting. We were the only aircraft to make it to the site and we did our best to find them. There was little we could do, but I wouldn’t let myself off the hook.

  For the rest of the week I scoured news sites and hit up our intelligence officers for an update. The mission was unfinished in my mind. Finally, Army Rangers recovered Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor from the four-man team. He was holed up in a village only a couple of miles from where we heard his transmission. A local Pashtun tribe had protected Luttrell from the Taliban until the Rangers found him.

  We took pride in knowing we were the only aircraft able to make it to the area that day. The Predator’s unique qualities were an asset in such a dangerous location. The Air Force would never put a human pilot in harm’s way in those weather conditions given the threat from the Taliban, and even though we lost two Predators, my aircraft provided the first pictures of the crash site and possibly confirmed Luttrell’s position through his radio transmission. Without that information, it would have taken a lot longer to launch the rescue operation.

  I did get my closure on the mission when Luttrell visited the squadron while writing his book Lone Survivor. We had done well.

  CHAPTER 10

  Hunting Taliban

  The scrub that covered the mountains in eastern Afghanistan filled my HUD.

  We were tracking one of Osama bin Laden’s suspected couriers. We were just watching tonight, trying to catalog his movements and establish his pattern of life. Our ultimate mission remained the same—find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. The courier could hold the key to that operation.

  Our flight path took us close to Khost, a dreary place with crumbling Soviet-era concrete office buildings, garbage-strewn streets, and only a few paved roads. The province was one of the places where the hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had trained.

  As we flew, I practiced simulated Hellfire shots. We were told not to waste any mission time. If we found ourselves on a long flight across country, we had to practice by picking a spot in the landscape and simulating a shot. It wasn’t much different from what I’d done with Wang when I’d first started flying two years earlier. In transit we picked a spot, like that old fortress near our old airfield, and went through the procedures leading up to a shot. We couldn’t train on our off time because we were considered deployed, wh
ich was another way of saying that only combat operations were conducted.

  Even soldiers in theater went to the shooting range regularly.

  Not us.

  We just didn’t have time. Most shifts I’d fly eight hours and then spend another four hours doing collateral duties. So to make up for the lack of training, pilots in the 17th practiced Hellfire shots on every flight. The 15th’s crews didn’t. They were barely keeping up with the mission with many of their target areas surrounding their bases.

  The RPA community was expanding faster than the Air Force could train pilots. Aircraft like F-16s generated hundreds of hours of flight training at home before deploying to combat. A young wingman would spend at least six months in learning mode before being considered for deployment. Then the whole squadron would begin spin-up training ending in a Red Flag exercise at Nellis Air Force Base, where they flew in a large force practicing the exact missions they would execute overseas.

  Predator squadrons didn’t have that luxury.

  Over the years, training had been trimmed. Pilots graduated barely qualified for combat, a stark contrast to the full program I had completed nearly two years before. The ever-increasing need for crews in combat justified these cuts. A crew’s first flight with their permanent squadron was in combat over a live target with live weapons. Spin-up happened on the fly, literally.

  The 15th’s operations expanded to six combat air patrols covering both Afghanistan and Iraq. The 15th’s commander canceled leave requests and turned life in the squadron into a grind. It didn’t surprise me that the 15th’s pilots didn’t want to learn new techniques. Most of the guys looked like zombies, with dark circles under their eyes and pallid skin. Exhaustion sucked the life out of the crews and made them sloppy. I could understand the fatigue. I couldn’t understand the sloppiness.