All those metrics are irrelevant, Hayes thought. In this war, only one stat mattered, the number of dead Americans. All that capture and kill stuff would make a good story someday, but is the security in Afghanistan any better? Are we winning?
It is so hard to separate an insurgent from the local population, to get them to give up the Engineer’s name. Meanwhile, we never break down our big units into small enough bands to infiltrate every town. Could you even do it? We’re not going to move the US Army into each village and have them stay there for years. We don’t even stay for hours. We go home every night, even to a regional fire base, and the Taliban runs every cluster of mud huts once the sun goes down. They have the initiative. Just another way the Engineer goes first in that chess match.
Units that thought outside the box, that spent days in villages, invested in their security, shared hardships with the locals, they did better. That’s the only time they open up enough to talk. But it is hard for commanders do that. Tours are just not long enough. Everyone rotates, the analysts, the collectors, the commanders. When the ODA teams paired up and started to flip-flop tours, so they always went back to the same district, that made sense. It is so draining on each team. But are we trying to win or not? Our enemy is there all the time. They never leave. We leave. We’ve prioritized each individual soldier’s comfort and family over winning the war. The Taliban haven’t. They want it more. They have all the advantages.
So what to do?
Sometimes SOCOM caught people by blind luck. Their greatest successes, in fact. They hit a target and just happened to get someone else. Caught them on the one day they were sloppy and made a mistake. The SEALs say that it’s not that they’re so good, it’s that everyone else sucks.
But don’t great sports teams make their own luck? You can’t just sit around and wait for the key piece of intel to magically arrive. Maybe you can’t wait for luck. Sometimes you’ve just got to try something.
Hayes and his team had compiled the interviews of the Mohammeds from Kunduz and integrated the forensic reports and were building their recommendations for the JPEL when the TIC lights strobed again and the casualty SITREPs poured in and the commander was done with peons.
“I want this motherfucker found tomorrow!”
Data, data everywhere, and not a drop of what he needed. The detainees only talked in generalities and rumor, a whisper that the Engineer was in town. Killing him would be the easy part, it was finding him that was hard.
Hayes thought through the problem. We have a guy working with the Taliban. The Taliban are Pashtun, which makes this guy either Pashtun himself, or an Arab ally from the days of the Soviets. He is in the land of Uzbeks and Tajiks, the historic enemies of the Pashtuns, so there are only a few villages where he would find a warm reception. He probably travels alone, or with one or two very close associates, probably family members. He needs the cover of a Pashtun village in otherwise hostile territory. The IEDs were getting deadlier because he had to choose the most vulnerable targets; so far away from his traditional base of support, he would have fewer resources, he couldn’t be wasteful like us. Every shot had to have strategic or symbolic value, every shot had to count. A mayor, a police chief, a commander, an SF guy, a bomb tech.
Anybody can compile data, make a list of everything we know about a person. A really good analyst puts themselves in the shoes of another. Everyone thinks the J2 or their intel headquarters is a black hole, but the real black hole is the analyst’s mind. No computer system or organizational overhaul is going to put it together. The analyst does the fusion. You can’t rely on anyone else to do it for you. Of course, the lack of knowledge about the Engineer is its own black hole that can suck you in. It’s up to the analyst, a black hole searching for the black hole within itself? Maybe the Engineer is the center of that nesting doll after all.
Too metaphysical. Hayes snapped out of his wandering introspection and got back to the problem at hand.
They had identified about 80 percent of the IED process, he figured. They knew the facilitation routes, the rat lines over the mountains, and now they had just discovered where the devices were being made. Since politically they never seemed to be able to stop the supply, maybe they could finally grab the trainer. Maybe he would be with other targets on the JPEL.
We are too reliant on technology, Hayes thought. We don’t know enough about these villages. And every time we go very high tech to compensate, he goes even lower tech. But if the villagers wouldn’t say where the Engineer was, what else could they do?
Hayes took his idea to that afternoon’s brief. He showed his commander overlays of IED trends and types, the local tribal organization, loyalty maps and links, likely accomplices on the hit list. At the end of his sales pitch, he had a recommendation of where the commander should send his few resources, one long-range surveillance team and a Predator above them. Put the Pred here, Hayes said, that’s where we need to search.
SOCOM’s kill chain was euphemistic but simple: Detect, Identify, Locate, Monitor, Track, Exploit, Interdict.
Frost, Fye, Soliman, they all Detected. Hayes had moved the process forward to Identify. But to Locate and Monitor and Track? Where was the Engineer, so they could watch him and follow him, and, ultimately, Interdict him? Where to look? Where would he be? That’s the million-dollar question. Hayes had an idea, to make his own luck.
12 ♦ HELMET FIRE
THE FIRST MAN INTO AFGHANISTAN following the 9/11 attack on the United States was a career spook who started at the CIA when shredding typewriter ribbon was still a standard security measure. Gary Shroen had been professionally attached to Afghanistan since he landed the backwater assignment of junior case officer in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 1978. By the eighties he was funneling cash to the mujahideen to support their fight against the Soviets and was station chief in Kabul in ’89 when the last Red Army soldier retreated across the Friendship Bridge back into the motherland. Shroen was fifty-nine years old and well into planning his retirement when the towers fell. He was asked to stay on for one more mission. He accepted, and so, on September 26, 2001, he boarded a Russian-manufactured Mi-8 Hip helicopter in Uzbekistan for infil south, the Cold Warrior on a Cold War–era workhorse. He landed in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley to the cheers of Northern Alliance fighters, to meet face-to-face with the resistance leaders, to sleep in their tents, to share meals and cigarettes, to be a living and breathing representative of the people of the United States riding into battle on horseback with our sudden allies.
Shroen was the first man, and he’s long gone. The last of us, the last man in Afghanistan, will be a robot. He will fly in the air. He won’t consider retirement. He need never leave.
Between Shroen and the last robot, waves and waves have deployed, and whenever I sent a team to Afghanistan as the commander at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, that wave tracked similar tides each time.
The plane always seemed to fly early, and so some spent their last night with family, and some spent their last night celebrating. Maybe the casinos and then a house party afterward. Maybe the carousing went into overtime, and I had to take the bottle from their lips because, don’t you know, you’re already twenty minutes late and the chief is going to kill you and it’s a good thing you packed last night. Maybe they didn’t answer my phone calls, and I had to go searching, knocked on the bedroom door at four o’clock and said that she needed to go home and you needed to put your pants on, it was time to get to the airport. But wait, on second thought, better get in the shower because you reek of vodka and sex and I’m not going to send you off like this.
Others, like Dan Fye, avoided the party scene. Said good-bye to their families at home, while their wives were still in bed, the kids tucked and asleep. A kiss on the lips, a murmur of love, and then to the car.
Everyone met at the unit parking lot on the edge of the desert, only red taillights to see by in the predawn dark. The pickup trucks bound for the airport filled with green bags of clothes, black cases
of rifles and pistols, trunks of body armor and helmets and probably an Xbox carefully stowed, backpacks bursting with iPods and cartons of cigarettes and laptops full of porn.
The McCarran airport just south of the Las Vegas Strip is busy at all hours. Three unmarked white long bed trucks would pull up to the crowded departure drop-off point and men and bags would spill in all directions. A small war could be started with the guns and gear unloaded chain-style, $500 in extra baggage fees per for sure.
Next up, at least forty-eight hours of vibrating gloom, wretched in its unavoidability. Usually a commercial flight to Kyrgyzstan. Then a C-130 into country, stuffed with grunts and pilots and mechanics and snake eaters and everyone in between, a great equalizer in misery. Then a last hop helo trip to the FOB or COP or piece of shit outpost, the center cargo rack full of fresh-smelling wooden crates. New robots, direct from the factory. The old ones got blown up.
But all of that was still to come. There at McCarran, we all just tried to avoid a long good-bye. Only a bear hug, with no restraint or self-consciousness in the busy public space, a squeeze, a back slap, a rub of sandpaper cheeks. The next time I see them, it may be with a nubbin. Or two. Or they may have died midsentence.
However it went, I always felt the same, whenever I dropped a team at the airport. It always felt unnatural. Like I should be going too, that I should be flying with them to war.
Across the street from the EOD unit at Nellis, across the unlit road and beyond the dark headquarters of the para-rescuemen and their silent helicopters, past the tarmac still and quiet at that early hour, past the rows of F-16 aircraft all in a line, at the end of the parking apron and across the street and in an unmarked building, brown block, ordinary in every way, a Predator pilot finished a cup of coffee and did just that.
Finding anyone in Afghanistan, including the Engineer, usually takes a Predator.
GENE RICH LEFT the desert heat and dropped his phone in a corral on his way through the air-conditioned control center. He skipped his admin desk, ignored his email and the pile of blue folders with routing slips, dropped off his coffee cup in the ops cell. His boss yelled after him, something about performance reports.
“No queep, man—I’m flying today,” he said.
Gene left the main building, stepped outside briefly into the open air, and crossed a tarmac filled with rows of forty-foot shipping containers. He entered one via a side door, got a hand-over brief from the previous crew, and then folded his lanky frame into the tan fake-leather armchair and let down the armrest. Nothing but a glorified airline seat creased with millions of vicarious miles, ratty and stained.
He checked his engine readings and fuel, tracker display and the current inky picture from the ball, glanced up briefly as his sensor operator eased into the seat next to him, put on a set of one-sided headphones, adjusted the microphone, stretched once more in the seat, and then settled in for another twelve-hour day.
“Pilot’s up in the seat,” he said through the intercom system, and his support team acknowledged. He checked his heading and airspeed again. Two hours north into the mountains until he linked up with the team on the ground. An afternoon rendezvous for him, a still-dark early morn for them; Kabul was eleven and a half hours ahead, the digital clocks on the wall reminded him. Gene sat in silence, seven thousand miles removed from the chopping prop, and flew.
Gene called the Predator an RPA, a Remotely Piloted Aircraft. Drone was a term used by those who don’t like them, he had long ago realized, and the Air Force was even dropping the term UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, because that sounded autonomous, as if no one was in control. Unfortunately, Gene thought, the Pred was no such thing. It was just an airplane with a displaced cockpit. No cyborg intelligence here; there was still a human very much in the loop.
That cockpit, a Ground Control Station (GCS) in the precise jargon, consisted of a surprising mix of next-gen and shabby DIY, a big metal box full of computers baking in the sun. Four flat screens dominated Gene’s forward view: sensor video, map, gauges of temperatures and voltages and various switches. His sensor operator, who sat next to him, had a similar setup, and in the center column between them were two more flat screens, for email and intel updates and mIRC, a secure Internet chat protocol originally written to support Microsoft Windows 95. Gene had two keyboards, one to run the Predator and one to mIRC chat with various operations centers and other aircraft, and to keep the two separate he built an apparatus out of plywood scrounged from a storage closest. Around the four main screens hung a variety of communications gear, radios, and datalinks to talk to aircraft and Joint Terminal Air Controllers (JTACs) on the ground. Some of the radios looked like they had been simply unscrewed from manned fighter jets and bolted to the wall. To his left was a dry-erase board. He used it for long division, to calculate when he would run out of fuel.
Gene had joined the Predator world even before September 11. He was a cross-trainee, an ex–fighter pilot who made the correct educated guess that the cutting-edge technology was moving away from manned aircraft and into the remote world. If Gene had joined the Air Force in 1947, he reasoned, he would have passed over the sexy P-51 Mustang for the unproven F-80. The P-51 is badass, but jets were the future then, not props. So too now, the robot over the jet. Gene had studied engineering in college, and he knew that was the right way to think about it, an evolution in technology. That an airplane was unmanned was simply a feature, not a thing unto itself. It was the natural extension of thousands of years of military development: knife to sword to pike to arrow to musket to machine gun to artillery to bomber to Tomahawk missile to Predator.
Not that he shot anything very often. Usually they observed, communicated, searched, found, coordinated, and targeted with an infrared laser attached to the sensor ball. That afternoon, he was meeting a Special Forces team on the ground and then serving as their top cover while they watched several villages near Kunduz for a target on their JPEL. Gene didn’t know much more than a coordinate and call sign and a time; the fragmented and fractured way these missions came in never allowed for much preparation. A unit requested a Pred, the Air Force’s main air operations center prioritized, the central planners kicked out his mission, he got it when he arrived for work. That day his tasking was to fly two hours, orbit at a specific lat/long, and meet up with the team.
Gene arrived on time and called down to the ODA team with his air-to-ground radio. An encrypted signal containing the sampled and encoded sounds of his voice was routed to a computer, copied to servers outside of Las Vegas, flowed via fiber optics to a trunk system, beamed to a satellite, bounced back to the main dish at Bagram, resampled and chopped into individual packets of data, broadcast via attached carrier wave from the main air-ground tower, and then hopped from repeater hub to repeater hub before it should have come out, several seconds later, in an earpiece of a radio strapped to the back of the ODA team’s JTAC.
Should have. Silence from the JTAC.
Gene tried again. Nothing. No way to know if the call was making it for sure.
“Hey, guys, can we double-check the freq?” Gene called back to his ops cell. They did, and the freq was right, so they mIRC’d CJSOTF, who confirmed where the team should be, and then, after an hour of radio calls and chat rooms and reconfirmations, a mission to search for the Engineer became a mission to find a lost ODA team.
There was no panic or distress; this was not the first team that was out of comms for a prolonged period, and Special Forces teams are trained to be self-sufficient and operate independently. They could be delayed by weather or terrain or have radio trouble or be stuck in a valley with bad reception. But as the hours dragged by, Gene’s no-big-deal explanations grew more hollow. Eventually, he had to turn the search over to another Predator. He had been passed his Pred with far less than a full tank, and so had to call bingo fuel, the point at which he had just enough gas to get home.
If Gene was physically in the air, turning for home would have meant a break from the search proces
s. But not so flying in a Pred squadron. The pilot who took over for him was seated in the next GCS over, and his ops cell only a few feet away in the office behind him continued to coordinate the mission. Gene was stuck drearily piloting his Pred back to base, but the hubbub of the search permeated the room. Then a new ad-hoc tasking was announced in his headphones.
“Hey, Gene, I know you’re bingo, but we just got a report on an MH-53 crash. Think you have time to work the rescue?”
In a fighter jet, bingo means returning on fumes. But a Pred allowed more flexibility. In reality, Gene had hours of reserves, in case of a strong headwind, weather delay on landing, or a lost signal, which would force the aircraft to take up an orbit and wait for a new command. Gene did the math on his dry-erase board. The MH-53 was about a hundred miles away. If he was smart about it, slowed down once he arrived, he would be able to squeeze out five hours on-scene before truly needing to return.
The MH-53 helicopter is a massive, bulbous insect, pods and fuel tanks and mini-gun spines, designed for long flights to retrieve shot-down pilots caught behind the borders of antagonist states. Gene easily saw the burning helicopter from miles away, a pillar of smoke stark against the white mountainside; in the IR camera it glowed. As he approached, he tried a couple of radio calls, to reach other aircraft that should have already arrived, but got only got static in return. He must be the first aircraft on the scene. He lowered the altitude setting and came in closer to the ground. Next to the wreckage, one of the survivors was carving the letters SOS in the snow. Gene came in even lower and the man paused, looked up, and then waved. Gene rocked his wings and tried to radio again, tried several air-to-ground channels, but no one answered. But at least the helicopter crew knew they had been found.
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 22