Ultimately, this precaution would prove to be his downfall.
The Predators and Reapers providing the coverage for the Task Force converged on his suspected location. We knew he operated around Al Jawf, but now the pilots were on the lookout for the pair of trucks.
Temperatures soared in the summer, despite the high altitude. Daytime activities across the region slowed after noon, only to resume again after the heat broke for the day. Al-Awlaki drove to meetings in the afternoons, when few people were outside. We found him during these off-peak times.
A convoy of two four-by-four trucks, both extended king cabs, worked from village to village, racing on the highways, driving cautiously in the cities. They stopped occasionally outside houses. Sometimes the trucks’ occupants got out and walked into the buildings. Other times, the locals walked up to the trucks to chat.
Each time, we had difficulty gaining a positive identification on al-Awlaki. We flew at a distance to avoid detection, and that affected our optics enough that the few face shots we got weren’t conclusive. The target was basically the right height, but the bearded face resembled everyone else in the region.
It wasn’t enough—until a second source confirmed the two-truck convoy with a date and time for a meeting. We camped out over the house and waited. The trucks arrived at the appointed hour. They were the trucks we had been following.
The noose was tightening.
CHAPTER 20
Al-Awlaki
The Task Force was ready to take action against al-Awlaki by mid-September.
The right cues had been met to trigger direct action. In this case, enough pattern of life had been collected that the analysts could positively identify al-Awlaki in the convoy. We set up the alert aircraft as we had before. The Reaper and one Predator would share time above the target. That would be sufficient to maintain a constant stare while the two other birds stood ready to launch with a full load of missiles. I kept a third in reserve under the sunshade.
We set up the constant stare near Al Jawf. Al-Awlaki would be easy to identify. The American terrorist rode in the passenger seat wherever he went. The others in the car deferred to him through their body language. That, and they were armed with AK-47s.
Al-Awlaki wasn’t.
The second car carried additional security. At each stop, they typically got out of the truck and moved in a coordinated manner to scout the perimeter of the meeting location or to discreetly position themselves to watch avenues of approach.
We had to maintain additional missiles on the ramp. I went to tell Cruiser.
“Cruiser,” I said. “I’m surging again.”
He smiled.
“You seem to do that a lot.”
We had surged about 170 days since my arrival.
“Yeah,” I continued. “This one’s important.”
“Aren’t they all?” he said.
He was right. Anything with the Task Force was advertised as important or critical. Nothing was ever routine.
“This one especially so,” I said. “Can you help out?”
He regarded me a moment.
“What do you need?”
I could see he was on guard.
“We are keeping three on alert,” I said. “I need missiles on the ramp for all of them.”
“You know you can only have two.”
I didn’t budge. The Air Force said I could have around 150 missiles. Only the Navy put the restrictions on me.
“I get that,” I said, “but going to the ASP takes too long. Any delay and we miss the window.”
Cruiser just looked at me. I pressed.
“I need six missiles.”
Cruiser looked down at his pad as he scribbled down my list. He considered the text a moment, nodded as if making a decision, and then looked up at me.
“You got it.”
My next stop was the maintenance tent. It was decidedly cooler than ops since the ops tent AC had melted down. One of the maintenance troops was sitting in the 120-degree sun trying to rewire it. She’d already fixed half the squadron’s ACs that summer.
The old Gulf War–era units chugged loudly. A canvas tube wound down from the ceiling and aimed at a bank of handheld radios. The blast of air that greeted me at the door felt truly arctic compared to outside.
I walked up to the status board in the back of the tent. This was a large dry-erase whiteboard on which were written the seven aircraft tail numbers and the maintenance status.
“’57 Chevy,” “Marissa,” and “Kate II” stood ready.
Z-man looked up from his desk. He was a fiery master sergeant from Holloman. While Jon oversaw all of the maintainers, Z-man still worked on the aircraft side by side with the other wrench turners. I had grown to respect his ethic and inherent capacity to herd the maintenance cats. I was sorry to hear he would be retiring upon his return home in a week.
“Sir, when did you come in?”
Maintenance never seemed to hear me walk into their tent. Their space was no louder than any other. For some reason, they just never seemed to notice until the last minute. The other maintainers instantly stood. I waved at them to sit back down. I wasn’t there to disrupt their work.
“Just practicing my HUMINT [human intelligence] skills, Z.”
He stood and joined me at the board.
“Everything is still green, sir,” he said. “Any leads?”
“Not that they’ve said.”
“We’ve had to move the birds.”
I noticed that our three alert birds were no longer out on the parking ramp.
“And?”
“The heat is too much,” he explained. “We can keep them on the ramp for part of the day, but the afternoon is brutal. We put them back in the hangar to get them out of the sun.”
“Okay.”
It was a prudent move. When the call came, maintenance could roll them out to the parking ramp, load the weapons, and launch them. Until then, the Predators waited in the cooler tents.
“We’d like to keep them in there,” Z said.
“How long will that delay a launch?”
Z-man considered his response.
“Thirty minutes max for the first,” he said. “No change for the others.”
The target area lay at least three hours away. A decision to launch would occur well in advance of a strike. The most likely scenario in my book was the Task Force would want to have aircraft overhead for at least an hour before a potential strike. We’d already have at least one other aircraft out there covering any gap the delay caused.
“Okay.”
“Want me to tell Task Force?”
“No,” I said. “The less they know, the less they’ll hold against us later.”
Thirty minutes wouldn’t matter in the end.
With limited sorties, we kept enough crews on hand to immediately launch the strikers when the call came down. I knew the Task Force would be jumpy when the time came. A couple of weeks back, they had changed the configuration of a mission six times while it tried to launch.
I ordered a third alert bird just in case. It was a blank canvas in the event that the Task Force decided to change anything as we launched.
We were ready. All we could do now was wait.
The pilots milled around the ops tent crew lounge waiting. “Hurry up and wait” became the order of the day while the Task Force tracked al-Awlaki. Movies and video games replaced work in the ops cell. Notification would happen via phone call so we stayed close. Every so often, Jose, one of the sensor operators, checked the chat rooms for an update.
Jose was of Mexican descent. An avid bodybuilder, he had thick arms and a barrel chest. When he wasn’t working or in the gym, he was doing boneheaded stuff. He was a smart guy with a penchant for blond moments, which made him the target of our practical jokes.
> One constant was his ability to lose his ID card. It was almost a habit, which was a problem because the card was required in order to gain access to the chow hall, gym, and even work computers.
“Hey, where’s my ID?” Jose called out as he went over to check the chat room for an update.
The crews paid no attention. Everyone was watching an episode of The Walking Dead on the Xbox.
“Well?” he said.
No one looked in his direction. Someone sniggered. With a huff, Jose stomped back into the computer room and dug through papers on one of the desks. I could hear him tear through a second desk.
“Seriously, guys, I need that ID,” Jose said.
“Isn’t it about time you kept track of that thing?” someone said from the crew lounge.
Jose paused and then slowly looked at the tent’s door. Above it, at the apex of the rounded ceiling, was a little clock caked in black diesel residue. It had fallen at one time, cracking the glass and leaving an opening into which we could fit his ID.
“Oh, come on, guys.”
The ID was resting at the bottom of the clock, covering the six. The clock was too high to reach without help. The office chairs rolled and were too unsafe to stand on. Jose looked for the stepladder behind the large wooden stand that held the computers and Internet servers for the GCS and squadron.
It wasn’t there.
He rushed out of the ops tent and made a beeline for maintenance. Surely, they had ladders for everything.
“Sorry,” the supply tech said, scrolling through his laptop. “All the ladders are checked out. Not sure when they will be back.”
“Who checked them out?”
The tech gave a name.
“He’s not even on shift,” the sensor said. “Wasn’t he required to turn them in before leaving?”
“Yes,” the tech said. “It’s strange.”
“Can you help me find them?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t leave the tent,” he said. “I have to maintain positive control of the tools.”
The tech’s face remained neutral.
Frustrated, the sensor operator stalked out of the tent. It took Jose the better part of an hour before he found a chair without rollers. We all watched as he climbed up on the chair and reached for the clock. His fingers brushed the face.
Someone stifled a laugh.
Jose spent several minutes working the clock off its mount. He sat on the chair and monkeyed with the glass. When he finally freed his ID, the ops cell burst into laughter.
As soon as he recovered the ID, we started planning another prank. We debated freezing it in a block of ice or letting it fly a sortie by sticking it in a Predator. We knew there would be a next time with this kid.
Finally, the phone rang in the squadron operations center and I immediately picked it up. It was the private line direct to the JOC.
“Squirrel here,” I said.
“Launch.”
It was the Predator LNO.
“How many?” I said.
“All three.”
The line clicked dead.
All three aircraft meant we had al-Awlaki. The LNO couldn’t tell me more over the phone. The line wasn’t secure enough to pass target information. But I knew one thing as I hung up the phone.
Today, the Pirates hunted.
We were going after the target like German U-boats tracked convoys in World War II. Attack en masse. Attack like a wolf pack.
“Fire up the GCS,” I told the watch pilot as I left the ops cell.
I had two crews on shift today. MaDrawers was due to rotate out and his replacement had already assumed his night shift. He ran out to help. I stopped in the maintenance tent. Z-man had already gotten the call.
“We’re pushing the first one out now,” Z-man said.
“Anything I can do to help?”
As we spoke, several maintainers were pushing the first bird out of the hangar. She crouched under the full load of gas, dragging her tail. The plane looked eager to launch.
“I could push,” I said.
“Not a chance, sir,” he said. “We can’t let you do that.”
I nodded. Maintenance regulations were quite specific. Only certified personnel could move the aircraft on the ground. As much as I wanted to help, I couldn’t.
“All right, how much time do you need?” I asked.
Z-man had the answer ready.
“Thirty minutes for the first, and then every thirty minutes after.”
“Okay,” I said. “Crews will be ready.”
Two crew chiefs positioned the first aircraft just outside the hangar. A tech driving a small forklift lifted a pallet of tools, then backed up to the Pred. The crew chiefs attached a tow bar and the first bird started her quarter-mile journey to the launch ramp.
As the plane trundled to the compound entrance, the crew chiefs raced into the hangar and pushed the second Predator out into the sun. Another tug had materialized in position to receive her. The Reaper squadron offered their tug next. They had little to do, with their one aircraft already in the air.
Within minutes, we had our Predators being towed in column toward the ramp. Navy maintainers working on the P-3s and troops working on the taxiways pulled into the dirt and silently watched the procession. Predators didn’t do “elephant walks.” Bombers did. The “walks” were common in World War II as numerous bombers taxied and launched all at once.
Predators went out solo, so it was strange to see three going out at the same time.
The weapons loaders waited on the ramp. They drove a truck ahead of the column and pulled up to a metal Sea-Land container where they kept the missiles out of the sun. They started loading the hundred-pound Hellfires the moment the crew chiefs chocked the Predators in place.
The chiefs ran their checklists and called ready. The crews eight thousand miles away in the United States scrambled to their cockpits, sitting at consoles in air-conditioned quarters in Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. I knew the feeling. Part of me wanted to be one of the crews on the hunt, but there would be no glory for them if the Predators never got off the tarmac.
As the aircraft started to spin up, I checked the thermometer hanging next to the ops tent. Outside, the temperature hovered at ninety-five degrees. We were in the “heat window,” the time when ambient temperatures could overheat the delicate electronics within the Predators. The temperatures would rise sharply now that the sun was approaching its zenith. I hoped the breeze would keep the ramp cool enough.
The planes taxied as individuals. I didn’t have enough maintenance crews or cockpits to launch them all together. The first two planes taxied minutes apart. The crews were still loading the third aircraft when I heard the familiar whirring of the Rotax motor of the first Predator.
Standing on a T-barrier, I could see the little gray aircraft start its roll. It was slow at first and then accelerated to a new stage of slow. The Predator looked as if it was moving fast, but it still took well over a minute to pass me. Almost reluctantly, the aircraft lifted off the ground. It hovered inches above the runway, engine straining to gain speed.
Over the water, the plane hit cooler air and climbed a little better. The landing gear started to retract as the Predator turned to the south to get out of the airport’s traffic pattern. I watched until the last bird disappeared in the distance. The sun had baked me. The temperature was now 110 degrees. I went inside to cool off as the planes flew across the Gulf of Aden and joined the Reaper over Al Jawf. I made a note of the time and made plans to head over to the Task Force to watch the mission.
—
The mission unfolded on the six fifty-inch plasma screens that lined the walls around the JOC commander’s podium.
“That him?” I asked the Predator LNO.
“We confirmed he was active about five hours ago,�
�� Frog said, not looking away from the monitors showing the Predators’ video feeds. “We are still looking to get eyes on him right now.”
On the monitor, I saw the feed shift to Al Jawf, a small village near Sana’a. The aircraft monitoring the communications picked up al-Awlaki’s signal and realized that he was on the move. Two trucks pulled up outside a house in the village. They were white Toyota HiLuxes, king cab trucks like Tacomas that sat about five.
“The target’s active,” one of the Army officers in the operations center said. “We are seeing indications he’s on the move.”
The officer gave the coordinates and I checked the Predators’ feeds. The two trucks sat very near the given coordinates. The Predators were close enough to count them as on target.
Suddenly, eight figures spilled out of a nearby house and quickly climbed into the trucks. The doors had barely shut before the driver took off. The other vehicle followed a moment later.
“Stay on them,” the JOC commander said.
Gordon took the lead and followed al-Awlaki out of the village and onto a highway. The road’s straightaway was the most logical place for the shot. The vehicles would maintain a constant speed on a predictable course. There were few ridgelines to block the missile or the targeting laser.
We all waited for the green light. Finally, the JOC director nodded and the JTAC transmitted the 9-Line. Gordon was ready to shoot.
“Copy, cleared hot,” the pilot in Cannon said.
Thirty seconds passed. The two HiLux trucks grew larger in the camera’s field of view.
“Laser on,” Gordon said.
A black icon reading “LRD Lase Des” flashed on the screen. The lead truck ferrying al-Awlaki grew to fill the screen. The picture twitched as the proximity made the controls hypersensitive.
The second vehicle was no longer in sight.
“In three, two, one . . .”
The familiar double-click overrode the audio as the fire signal interrupted the satellite signal. A moment later, the HUD went blank as the blinding white flash of the missile’s exhaust plume washed out the sensitive IR picture.
Hunter Killer Page 28