Twelve Days

by Alex Berenson

  Ayoub rubbed the sleep from his eyes, washed his hands and face. In his bedroom he pulled on a light jacket and the hundred-euro Adidas sneakers that were his only indulgence. He had fifty pairs, in every conceivable color.

  His wife snored lightly, her arms cradled around their youngest daughter. He wished Rima wouldn’t keep the girl in their bed, but his wife didn’t care. I need something warm to hold when you’re not around. He kissed her cheek. She mumbled his name but didn’t wake.

  He walked through the lemon grove that separated his house from the outbuildings where his driver and personal guards lived. A cool wind rustled the empty branches, and a low ceiling of gray clouds obscured the stars. This night’s watchman was the weakest of Ayoub’s men, a dullard named Hamid. He sat on a folding chair, his eyes focused on what seemed to be an Arabic translation of a vampire novel. Not exactly full combat readiness. Ayoub crept close, tossed a pebble, hitting Hamid in the arm. He grabbed his rifle and jumped, the book sliding off his lap. Ayoub had never seen him move so fast.

  “Halt!” His eyes opened wide as he looked at his commander. “Sir?”

  “Vampires, Hamid?”

  Hamid bowed his head, as if the paperback would become a Quran if he stared at it long enough.

  “We’ll talk about that later. Wake the others. We have a meeting in Zahle.”

  —

  Baalbek was dark, its streets empty, its eighty thousand inhabitants tucked away until dawn. At the Hezbollah guard post that watched the intersection of the Beirut and Tripoli roads, Ayoub’s two-car convoy stopped only long enough to be waved through. Twenty minutes later, they reached the dirt lot behind the warehouse.

  A lemon grove had once sat behind this building, but a mysterious blight had hit the trees years before. The farmer who owned the orchard had burned it to keep the sickness from spreading. Now charred stumps covered the fields, speckled with a few taller trunks that had survived the fire. Hamid wandered into the field, then pulled back, like a scared child.

  “You want vampires, go that way.” Ayoub pointed east. Toward the Anti-Lebanon range, the low mountains that split the Bekaa from Syria and the brutal fighters of the Islamic State.

  “Sir?”

  “If you weren’t so useless, I’d send you there now.”

  The inside of the warehouse still smelled faintly of lemons. Ayoub’s lantern revealed a space twenty meters by forty. Empty crates lined the walls, awaiting the day when the groves were replanted. Ayoub’s guards waited by the door. He’d waved them off when they tried to follow him inside. He needed a few minutes to himself. He’d beaten Habibi here. No surprise. Habibi lived in West Beirut, an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean. After the 2006 invasion, Hezbollah had decided that not all of its leaders should live in the Bekaa Valley, its strongest territory but also the easiest to blockade.

  Fifteen minutes passed before tires crunched on the gravel outside. At least four vehicles. Through the open warehouse door, Ayoub glimpsed their lights. Suddenly, he worried he’d made a mistake coming here. Maybe a Maronite hit squad had somehow cracked their code. Then he heard his men shouting greetings at Habibi’s guards.

  He walked outside as Habibi’s men poured out. Habibi never traveled without at least a dozen guards. He was in the middle of the scrum, a heavy man with a beard too dark to be anything but dyed. He pushed his way through his guards, reached out for Ayoub.

  “Hussein.”

  “Habibi. Habibi!”

  “Habibi,” Habibi said. A minor joke. Habibi translated into “friend.” “You drag me out of bed, over the pass in the middle of the night. This better be important.”

  “I dragged you out? It’s the opposite, my friend.” He reached for his phone. “Look, look—”

  But Habibi was already pulling out his own phone—

  Both men realized at once.

  “NSA.”

  “NSA.”

  Ayoub’s stomach lurched. He had misjudged his enemy, underestimated its cunning. He hadn’t known what he didn’t know. Just like those Israeli soldiers in Tyre. For a moment, he felt their anguish—

  Habibi pushed him away, turned for his Toyota. “Go—”

  —

  Two miles overhead, two F-22A Raptor stealth fighters looped, hidden from the ground by the clouds and from Lebanon’s air-defense systems by their radar-defeating composite skins.

  The Air Force had initially envisioned the Raptor as a pure air-combat fighter. But aerial dogfights were in short supply these days. The Raptor had a three-hundred-sixty-million-dollar price tag and not enough to do. So the Air Force had modified the jet’s missile bays to carry a pair of thousand-pound bombs. With stealth a priority for this operation, the Raptors were the natural choice.

  The jets took off at 0130 from Incirlik, the giant NATO base in southeastern Turkey, on what was pegged as a routine night-training flight. They flew south over the Mediterranean until they were fifty kilometers northwest of Beirut, then east over the Mount Lebanon range, the mountains that separated the coast from the Bekaa Valley. After crossing the mountains, they made a ninety-degree right turn, south again.

  The Raptor could reach nearly Mach 2 with its afterburners at full power, but these jets flew at four hundred knots. No need to speed. They had time, and if radar did scrape them they’d get less attention flying slowly.

  But neither plane picked up a hint that it had been painted. No surprise. The Raptor’s twenty-year-old technology was no longer unbeatable. China and Russia had developed radar systems powerful enough to pick up its electronic traces. But the F-22A’s magic still worked in Lebanon.

  At 0210, the jets reached the target—named Tango United, an unsubtle reference to the reason for the mission. They would have to stay in Lebanese airspace at least thirty minutes. But since Israel had the only jets within two hundred miles remotely capable of engaging an F-22A, having to stay on station a few extra minutes shouldn’t matter.

  The Raptors weren’t the only planes the Air Force had sent to Lebanon. As Ayoub left his compound and headed for the warehouse, an Avenger drone followed. The Avenger was the newest drone in the American fleet, a major advance over the Predator and Reaper. Unlike its predecessors, the Avenger was powered with a jet engine. It could fly eighteen hundred miles at twice the speed of the propeller drones, without producing the distinctive mosquito-like buzz that jihadis all over the world now recognized—and ran from.

  The Avenger didn’t carry bombs or missiles. But its payload was arguably even more lethal: the newest radar, cameras, and electronics intercept systems in the American arsenal. Now it was flying at four thousand feet, inside a thick cloud layer, so its optical cameras were no use. But it didn’t need them. Nestled in its wings were two infrared cameras sensitive enough to track the heat signature of a groundhog in a burrow, much less a man in a basement. In its tail was a radar system whose software could monitor two hundred different targets simultaneously.

  But the Avenger’s most important tracking device was the three-foot dimpled sphere that hung below its composite belly. The ball was an electromagnetic sniffer as powerful as sixty-five cell phone towers. It could be used only when the Avenger was airborne. On the ground it emitted enough radiation to cause permanent damage. It was so precise that it could distinguish the signature of an iPhone from a Samsung Galaxy at a mile away. The Air Force techs who serviced the Avenger called it the Great Ball of Death.

  Ayoub thought he’d taken adequate precautions. He thought he was safe.

  He had all the protection of an ant under a magnifying glass.

  —

  The brave new world of drone warfare had pushed tricky technical issues on the Air Force. Foremost among them was the fact that drones were controlled through encrypted satellite links, while fighter pilots mostly radioed to local bases or E-3 Sentries that were effectively airborne command posts. Called AWACS—
Airborne Warning and Control System—the E-3s were modified Boeing 707s instantly recognizable by the thirty-foot radar domes attached to their fuselages. The satellite and radio networks didn’t overlap. As the Air Force integrated drones into its fleet, the need for real-time links between drone controllers and fighter jocks became more obvious by the day. The service was now installing drone workstations in the cabins of five E-3 Sentries, a tricky and expensive proposition. The first retrofit had been finished only a few weeks before to a Sentry that was flying a slow loop one hundred kilometers off the coast of Beirut.

  For the first time ever, a drone pilot was actually airborne.

  The Avenger had arrived at Ayoub’s house a few minutes before the NSA spoofed the phones belonging to Ayoub and Habibi. The Hezbollah commanders had made one crucial mistake. They’d believed that they could risk leaving the phones on as long as they didn’t use them. They were wrong. Twelve months before, an analyst at Fort Meade had noticed an odd coincidence, a series of phones with sequential numbers that were rarely used but popped up only in houses and offices belonging to Hezbollah’s most senior leaders.

  Ayoub and the other Hezbollah commanders used the phones to set up only a handful of meetings in the year that followed. But the connection was obvious once the NSA looked, the code even more so. The Quranic verses were not encrypted, merely correlated with meeting sites.

  The broken coms system neatly solved the issue of how to kill Ayoub and Habibi without civilian casualties—a problem acute in the case of Habibi, who lived in a fifteen-story apartment building filled with families and who surrounded himself with women and children in his rare public appearances. As a bonus, the operation would grab the attention of Hezbollah and Quds Force in a way that a simpler bombing would not. At its best, the NSA’s technical wizardry came off as nearly God-like, and not every commander in Baalbek or Tehran contemplated his own mortality with as much detachment as Ayoub. This mission would send the message clearly: Worry less about Allah and more about America, habibis.

  Meanwhile, if Ayoub and Habibi no longer used the phones or had switched to a more sophisticated code, they simply wouldn’t leave their houses. No harm.

  But the messages did the trick. Eight minutes after Ayoub received his, the Avenger’s sensors spotted a man leaving his house. Seven minutes after that, it picked up two cars leaving the compound. The Avenger then took the only real chance of the operation, dropping below the cloud layer for eleven seconds, long enough to get its optics on the convoy. At Langley and the Pentagon, analysts agreed they were looking at Ayoub. A few seconds later, the Sentry’s coms officer radioed the Raptors.

  “Tiger 1, Tiger 2, this is Sorcerer. We have confirmation on Alpha.” Ayoub. “Repeat, Alpha has left his nest.”

  “Copy. ETA to our station?”

  “Fifteen to eighteen minutes. Two vehicles. Small arms only, no SAMs.”

  “Copy. Fifteen to eighteen. We are at eleven thousand, all quiet. Anything to the east?”

  A few seconds of silence, then: “Nothing unusual.” The radar dome atop the E-3 could see all the way across Syria. If it wasn’t picking up Syrian jets, the Syrians didn’t have any jets in the air to pick up.

  “Good to hear. Any word on Beta?” Habibi.

  “Tiger 1, you read my mind. We have just received visual confirm that Beta has left his nest. Four vehicles, approximately fifteen men. ETA thirty-five minutes. Small arms only.” The report came not from the Avenger but from a CIA spotter in Beirut, the only American on the ground in the whole operation. Unlike Baalbek, Beirut was big and dense and easy for watchers.

  “Copy. Beta arrival at zero-two-four-five local. Breaking off.”

  “Roger that, Tiger 1.”

  —

  Then the pilots had nothing to do but wait. Tad Easterman, Tiger 1’s pilot, had eight years’ experience in the Raptor. As a technical challenge for him, this mission was right up there with a stadium overflight. In fact, stadium overflights were trickier. He was flying in circles waiting to drop satellite-guided bombs on a target that he would never see firsthand. Part of him wanted to break the cloud layer so that he’d at least have eyes on the men below. Instead, he focused on his displays and made himself stay as patient as a hunter in a blind.

  Fifteen minutes later, right on schedule, Easterman picked up Ayoub’s convoy on his air-to-ground radar and infrared sensors. The F-22A’s downward-facing systems were less advanced than the Avenger’s, but the road was empty. Easterman had no problem spotting the two cars speeding east on the road that led past the warehouse. He watched as the vehicles parked behind the building and men stepped out.

  “Sorcerer, Tiger 1 here. I have Alpha at the target. That your read?”

  “Roger that, Tiger 1. Avenger agrees Alpha has reached your location.”

  “Copy. We’ll stand by for Beta and your green. Breaking off.”

  Nineteen minutes later, Easterman’s radar picked up four blips speeding toward the warehouse, this time coming from Beirut.

  “Sorcerer, this is Tiger 1. I have four more vehicles on Route Chicago—” The name the Air Force had assigned to the road that passed the warehouse.

  “Roger that, Tiger 1. Avenger agrees. ETA is sixty seconds. Tiger 1 and Tiger 2, you are green as soon as Beta reaches Tango United.”

  Back at Incirlik, the briefers had explained that Ayoub and Habibi would recognize what had happened within a few seconds after they met. Thus the Raptors needed to be ready to drop their bombs as soon as the second convoy reached the lot behind the warehouse.

  “Copy. Tiger 2?”

  “Copy.”

  Easterman waited another fifteen seconds, then shoved the yoke forward, aiming to bring his Raptor down to five thousand feet in a decreasing-radius loop around the warehouse. The next few seconds were the only technically tricky part of the mission. He would be in a steep dive when he dropped the bombs in the Raptor’s bays, to minimize their forward momentum relative to the stationary target below.

  The bombs could and would guide themselves after release. But unlike missiles, they didn’t have their own engines, so Easterman had a narrow window for the drop. For this mission, the bombs had been preprogrammed with the location of the warehouse. Unless he retargeted them, the software that controlled them wouldn’t let him release them without what Air Force engineers called a “true path” to the target, a route that didn’t violate the laws of physics. Easterman couldn’t do that math, but his on-board computers could. At the same time, the Raptor couldn’t be fully vertical at release, or else the bombs wouldn’t clear their bays. Ideally, he would have the Raptor in a fifty- to fifty-five-degree dive as he dropped the bombs.

  Fortunately for Easterman, air-to-air combat required exactly these sorts of maneuvers, and the F-22A handled them as well as any jet that had ever been built. For the next few seconds, Easterman and the Raptor were in perfect harmony. The plane weighed twenty tons and had a forty-four-foot wingspan, yet it anticipated his moves as nimbly as his four-hundred-pound sportbike. Meanwhile, his ground-facing radar showed the convoy slowing, turning left around the warehouse. Another left and they were in the lot behind the building. Men poured out, glowing on his infrared monitor.

  “Sorcerer, we are green. Target acquired. Engaging.”

  —

  The two Raptors carried four bombs, four thousand pounds of high explosive in all. The two convoys on the ground below totaled six vehicles, all standard civilian, no armor or blast-resistant windows. They were parked in a lot about one hundred twenty feet long and fifty wide. The laws of physics were brutal and simple. The Pentagon planners who simulated the attack reported odds of 99.2 percent that everyone in the target zone would die, whether they were on the ground or still inside a vehicle. As for the 0.8 percent, you don’t want to be that guy, the lead planner said. Unless you like skin grafts.

  Easterman reached for a two-inch-high
joystick on the console above his right knee, pushed it up and right like he was switching gears on a manual transmission. The heads-up display inside his helmet flashed yellow. The bomb was armed. Then green. The software agreed that the bomb could hit its preprogrammed target. Easterman thumbed the red button on top of the joystick for two seconds. The Raptor tugged slightly as the right missile bay slid open and a thousand-pound bomb released. Easterman pulled the joystick down and left, pushed the button again. His left missile bay opened. The second bomb dropped out. The plane immediately felt lighter and more agile. He leveled out, swung the Raptor north. The hard part, such as it was, was over.

  “Sorcerer, this is Tiger 1. GBUs out.”

  “Tiger 2 here,” the second Raptor pilot chimed in. “GBUs out.”

  The letters stood for Guided Bomb Unit. Each bomb carried a Global Positioning System receiver and a package of software, gyroscopes, and motion sensors. The gyroscopes and sensors predicted the bomb’s direction in real time. The software controlled motorized fins on the bomb’s tail to guide the bomb to the coordinates preprogrammed into the GPS.

  The bombs were shockingly accurate. Ninety-six percent of the time, they landed within ten feet of their target coordinates. Even in crowded cities, they had sharply reduced civilian casualties. Tonight civilians weren’t an issue. No one lived within a quarter mile of the warehouse. A bomb dropped from an aircraft in level flight required eighteen seconds to fall five thousand feet. But these bombs had a head start, because the Raptor had released them in a dive. Easterman dropped them almost exactly as Ayoub and Habibi realized the trap. They had seven seconds of warning.

  —

  Theoretically, the men on the ground might have survived if they had reacted immediately. A fit man could sprint as far as fifty meters in seven seconds, enough under ideal circumstances to escape the worst of the blast wave. But in the real world almost no one had the situational awareness to take off at a full run with no warning. And the bigger the group, the more time required for the warning to spread and men to get out of each other’s way.