Hunter Killer

by T. Mark McCurley

  Stern, who’d led the advon, was from Pittsburgh and had selected the names. We programmed the names of our GCS units into Skynet, the computer program we used to track and schedule aircraft. It was named after the program from the Terminator movies, and when it went live, I was on duty at the WOC and got the pleasure of alerting my fellow pilots. “Skynet is active.” The joke was never lost on me. Each GCS was assigned a set of frequencies. I happened to like the Steelers, since I was a fan of the team, and we were the Pirates. I let the names stand. Besides, I didn’t want to deal with resetting Skynet.

  It might have fought back.

  Setting up the computer to see the airplane took only a couple of minutes. We pointed the receiver out to sea and waited. A grainy image materialized in the static. The receiver recognized the signal and rotated so it pointed right at the aircraft. The picture cleared instantly.

  “What the hell are they doing on course?” my sensor said.

  The 3rd Special Operations Squadron crew had flown the planned route back. With an engine malfunction, they should have flown straight back to base. The planned route added thirty minutes to the transit time as it detoured around airspace restrictions. We started the handover procedure and were just about to take control of the aircraft when the sensor noticed the altimeter.

  “Sir, aircraft is descending,” the sensor said.

  Normally, the aircraft maintained altitude during the procedure, but this one didn’t. I glanced at the engine readouts. Several of the indicators climbed into the red.

  Red was bad.

  The RPM dropped to zero as the engine froze. The plane was fifty miles away. I did a mental calculation. No way the Predator could glide back to land from that far out.

  “We just lost an aircraft,” I said.

  Off the north coast of Djibouti, Tail 228 glided, but only for a few more minutes. There was nothing we could do to save it. There was nowhere to land except for a rocky beach. Our only chance was to ditch it in the water and hope to recover it before it sank. Theoretically, the Predator would float. Air in the fuel tanks could make the aircraft buoyant. On the other hand, the unsealed aircraft would take on a lot of water as well. The results were uncertain, especially since no one had attempted to ditch a Predator before.

  The airplane remained perfectly level as the water rose to meet it. The little aircraft skipped across two waves before the third splashed over the nose. We watched the aircraft bob for a few seconds before the transmitters shorted out.

  I switched the radio to the launch frequency.

  “Chief, Pirates,” I called on the radio.

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  “Two Two Eight’s down.”

  There was silence on the radio for a moment. The guys on the ramp were likely expressing themselves in a manner they didn’t want me to witness.

  “Copy, sir,” he finally said.

  I sent my sensor to find the Air Force safety officer on base. He had to officially start the Safety Investigation Board process. I was the only certified board president on base, but ethics didn’t allow me to analyze the accident since my squadron was involved, so I collected all the maintenance and operator records required for a safety board and waited.

  A rescue helicopter raced out to sea to recover the Predator. They searched for more than an hour looking for a gray object floating on dark water. They did manage to drop a raft and pararescue jumpers to secure the waterlogged aircraft once they found it. But aircraft 228 could wait no longer. The helicopter crew watched helplessly as it slipped beneath the waves as the swimmers reached it.

  I left the GCS and headed straight to my desk. Instead of twelve hours, my day turned into nearly thirty-six as I spent my time answering questions from my headquarters, the Task Force, and the embassy. This was our first loss and suddenly every headquarters in the region wanted information.

  A major from the Task Force was the most persistent. Every time I hung up the phone, it seemed like he was calling me for something else. I knew he was getting pressure from his chain of command, but I didn’t have answers. I finally lost my patience.

  “Major,” I barked. “This is not your aircraft. I don’t care what information you want or who is asking for it. I will pass it when I have time and not a moment sooner. Now I need to talk to my leadership.”

  With that, I hung up the phone.

  Within a week, the Air Force Safety Center appointed an A-10 pilot as the formal Safety Investigation Board president. He called to coordinate with me.

  “Squirrel,” he said. “This is I.V.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. I didn’t know him. “I’ve got all your records collected.”

  “Good,” he said. “Ship them to Creech. I’ll be running the board from there.”

  “Okay, we’ll get those out today.”

  I heard car noise over the phone.

  “You driving right now?”

  “Yeah, I am still en route,” he said. “I will get there in a couple days and start looking things over. Confirm you didn’t get the wreckage?”

  “No wreckage.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “It’s going to make it hard only looking at the logs.”

  The data loggers in the GCS acted like the aircraft’s black box. We had two sets of logs from Creech and Djibouti that recorded the engine seizure. From them we could tell exactly what part had failed.

  “When will you guys get out here?”

  “Oh, we won’t be coming out,” he said.

  My eyes narrowed.

  “You probably should,” I said. “You can get a better feel for the aircraft and our conditions if you see them firsthand.”

  “You are probably right, but we can do everything from Creech.”

  As I hung up the receiver, I made a mental note to closely track the progress of the investigation. I had a bad feeling about it, which was well founded in short order.

  I.V. treated interviews with my maintenance chief as an opportunity to attack junior officers, and it had me on edge. I knew this would be a benchmark case for me. I never wanted an accident, but I also wanted to show the world that Holloman maintenance was as sharp as we claimed.

  Maintenance discussed the problem with the engine installed on Tail 228 during one of the interviews. Over the phone line, the chief heard the factory representative say, “Nothing wrong with our engines. It’s maintenance’s fault.”

  I.V. jumped to his conclusion that it was our error.

  “See, you guys did something wrong,” he said to me when I talked to him about the incident later.

  It felt like we were getting railroaded.

  When the phone rang a few days later, I knew the news wasn’t good. It was about two hours before I was to wake for my shift.

  “Colonel McCurley,” I said, wiping sleep from my eyes.

  I still hadn’t adjusted to the time even though I had been in Djibouti for nearly a month.

  “Sir,” Ziggy said. “We just lost another aircraft.”

  I groaned. I put on my uniform and hiked the mile to the compound.

  “What happened?” I asked as I walked into the ops tent.

  “We landed and I couldn’t stop the aircraft,” Ziggy said. “It went through the fence line next to the water.”

  “Okay.”

  Ziggy was sitting at the desk. He looked at the other crews collecting records.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” I said. “Sit this one out. It’s better if you don’t touch anything.”

  I didn’t want any accusations of doctored records by the mishap crew. Seeing that the ops team had everything under control, I stepped outside and grabbed the first maintainer I could find.

  “Is the senior at the crash site?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, I need a ride
.”

  Moments later, I pulled up to the end of the runway. The airfield manager, a Navy lieutenant, was yelling and gesticulating wildly at a group of my troops. One of them was Jon.

  Behind the maintainers, the Predator was embedded in a dirt berm about twenty yards past the flattened fence. The aircraft had passed between two reinforced poles, which sheared the wings off. A forklift drove into position to lift the stricken aircraft onto a flatbed trailer.

  The lieutenant was cursing at Jon as I walked up.

  “What’s the situation?” I said to Jon, ignoring the lieutenant.

  Jon turned his attention to me. The lieutenant reddened in the face.

  “Sir, we’re just about ready to lift the aircraft.”

  “Very well,” I said. “Let me look at the scene first.”

  I turned to the lieutenant.

  “Walk with me.”

  It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. I guided him out of earshot toward his truck.

  “You’re being a little rough on the guys, aren’t you?”

  “Sir,” he said. “The airfield’s been closed for an hour. An airliner had to divert. I am getting a lot of pressure to get this cleared up.”

  He had the gall to blast a senior sergeant in such an ungentlemanly manner and yet took the time to completely kiss my ass. He was pathetic.

  “You know,” I said, “we had a belly landing a couple months back.”

  One of our aircraft had a gear get stuck in the wheel well. The crew landed the Predator by skidding it down the runway on its belly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It took these guys only twenty minutes to clear the runway.”

  “I don’t know anything about that, sir.”

  “Weren’t you here?” I asked.

  “No, sir,” the lieutenant said. “I was on my midtour leave.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I see. You’re holding things up. Why don’t you wait right here and let the experts do their job.”

  I turned and walked back to Jon, leaving the lieutenant with no chance to respond. I sketched a diagram of the accident. Accident investigations normally did this, but time didn’t allow a team to get here and look at the wreckage. I drew one out of courtesy since we needed to clear the runway quickly. I noticed that the Army and one of my security forces troops had formed a protective perimeter outside the fence line. A light wind blew across the aircraft and directly at my troop.

  “Hey, Jon,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pull the airman back. I don’t want him breathing any carbon fibers.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jon sent the troop upwind of the aircraft.

  The Predator’s carbon-fiber body was highly carcinogenic if fractured into its individual fibers. I had no reason to believe there was any danger this long after the accident. Still, I didn’t want to take any chances, either.

  After finishing the sketch, I let Jon and the maintainers pick up the aircraft. The lieutenant seethed at his truck but did nothing. Our maintenance recovery team had the runway clear within fifteen minutes of my arrival on scene. They just needed me to remove the oafish obstacle.

  I pulled Jon aside before I left the scene.

  I told him, “I’m going to head back to the compound and see how collection is going there.”

  Jon eyed the lieutenant.

  “What about him?”

  “He should leave you alone,” I said. “If not, call me. I’ll set him straight and I won’t be nice this time.”

  “You got it, sir.”

  As I drove back to the compound, I reviewed my first weeks in command. I now had two concurrent Safety Investigation Boards and I had to order a replacement aircraft to cover my losses. I also had to make sure we had the parts to keep the working Predators airborne. The job felt more like staff work than command.

  I was back to putting out fires.

  CHAPTER 17

  A Fine Mess

  Jon looked nervous as he stood in front of my desk with a pair of crew chiefs hiding slightly behind him.

  “Sir, we’ve got a problem,” he said.

  I didn’t need another jolt. Not today.

  The Task Force had asked us to surge and I was scrambling to meet the demand. They had leads on important facilitators and needed the extra Predators to find them, and I couldn’t tell them no. No one said no to the Task Force. But my yes answer had a large “but” attached to it. I could surge the squadron. But there would be a cost. I was down a couple of aircraft after our early losses and I was barely keeping the others airborne. I needed replacements, and one was supposed to have arrived today. If we surged, it would mean the squadron couldn’t do other missions. We were all in to get al-Awlaki.

  Jon’s presence concerned me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I think it’s best if you see it,” he said.

  I stood to follow him out. Jon led me to the supply hangar. A group of maintainers were gathered near the entrance. To one side were the remains of Tail 126. After it had crashed into the berm, we’d packaged it up and planned to send it back to the States for analysis.

  Inside the hangar, the men stood around the casket, the slang term for the massive Pelican case–style container that protected the Predators during transport. This was our new bird shipped from Kandahar Air Base by a C-130 Hercules transport. The lid was closed, but I could see that the latches had already been released.

  “So what am I looking at?”

  Jon signaled one of the troops. The airman used a small crane to lift the lid. I expected to see the gray skin of a new aircraft, but as the lid opened, only plastic and paper spilled out. The white Styrofoam bed molded to fit the contour of the Predator’s fuselage was inside, but not the aircraft.

  My first reaction was to laugh.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Sir,” Jon started.

  I covered my mouth as I laughed at the absurdity, waving him off. Kandahar had shipped me an empty container.

  Jon didn’t know what to say. The look on his face suggested he thought I had finally lost my mind.

  I hadn’t. I had just realized I was reliving Yossarian’s life.

  Back in the ops cell, I checked Skynet to see where Tail 203 was located and then called NASA, the commander of the squadron at Kandahar.

  “NASA,” I said when he answered.

  “Hey, Squirrel,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  “Well,” I said. “Thanks for sending us a new bird.”

  “No worries,” he said. “I trust it got there okay.”

  “No, not quite.”

  “Come again?”

  “We got the casket for Tail 203.”

  NASA was silent for a second. I could hear him tapping the keys on his computer.

  “Two Oh Three is flying here right now,” NASA said.

  Skynet showed the aircraft active somewhere in Afghanistan.

  “I know.”

  “Okay, let me look into it,” he said and hung up.

  NASA called me back and explained the error. The empty casket was accidentally stored with the full caskets. When the order came down from CENTCOM to ship 203 to us, the casket was pulled from storage and shipped. No one weighed it. A cargo plane flew an empty box two thousand miles for nothing. To make matters worse, the casket took at least two pallets’ worth of space in a cargo hold. Someone else missed a needed cargo shipment because of our empty pallets.

  The logistician in charge of shipping us the bird was fired immediately. But we were still short an aircraft at a time when the Task Force needed us. I still had a surge to sustain and not enough aircraft or parts to do it.

  If the weather wasn’t creating havoc for us, the lack of parts was. Some Air Force planner decided that it was cheaper to send our supplies on
commercial air carriers rather than military transport.

  The problem for us was that we were a good two to three weeks farther down the supply chain than the squadrons in Afghanistan. It simply took longer to get parts to us, so those snapshots rarely provided a clear picture of our needs. We were barely making ends meet when the civilian carrier lost our monthly supply shipment in Belgium. Then there were the inevitable delays through Djiboutian customs.

  At least the hunt for al-Awlaki was going better. The Task Force was hot on the trail of a facilitator who could lead us to the American terrorist. They wanted three missions so they could keep at least one aircraft over the man at all times. I pulled Jon into my office. He looked exhausted but so far had kept the Predators airborne chasing al-Awlaki leads.

  “We’re going to cannibalize the remaining aircraft to keep the others flying,” I told him.

  It was a drastic move but the only way we could keep up. I ordered Jon and the maintainers to take apart the worst aircraft in the squadron to create parts for the remaining aircraft. We ended up tearing apart five of the squadron’s seven aircraft.

  While Jon took apart the aircraft, I called over to the Task Force. There was no way I could keep flying three missions. I needed to lower it to two. My reasoning was simple. Would the Task Force prefer more potentially unreliable CAPs or just the scheduled ones?

  They went with the better odds.

  My Holloman maintenance team had turned the squadron around in just under two months. Operations were running smoothly. The Task Force recognized the results and were willing to give us some leeway. It didn’t hurt that I was willing to push as hard as they wanted. Accomplishing the mission was my main goal and cutting the third flight allowed me to do it.

  One of the JOC deputies called after I briefed them on the changes.

  “What can we do to help?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “We can make some calls, see what we can break loose,” the JOC deputy said. “We can even send a plane.”

  I appreciated the Task Force looking to help me out.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I have to work this through my channels.”