All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  Fields and fields of ground control stations, human connected to machine, and they still hadn’t found the ODA team.

  You can see so little through the soda straw, Gene thought. In a jet, he could use his eyes and ears, vestibular sense of balance, the haptic feedback of vibration and pull. He could tell how fast he was going just by listening to the wind break over the canopy. But in a Pred, you lose everything but vision, and even that is constricted. The human eyeball sees in a 140-degree arc and swivels instantly. The Pred looks down a 20-degree view, fixed to the nose, and a separate sensor operator is required to slowly pan this way and that.

  The Predator solves a problem and creates a problem, Gene knew. It identifies objects but not events. It sees but does not interpret. It measures existence but not intent. It tells Dan Fye where some IEDs are, but not necessarily all of them. Gene had a video ball and a laser but no sensor for “suspicious.” No sensor for “lost.” They were developing an algorithm, he knew, to cull the terabytes of video data recorded every day, weed out the large chunks of innocuous nothing, and let the human brain spend time analyzing the right snippets.

  Gene punched in and checked in with the ops cell. No, they hadn’t located them, but he wasn’t searching today. He had to watch a safe house and track who came in and out.

  No, he needed to respond to a team caught in a TIC. Provide top cover. It’s “combat” for us, but combat for them, Gene thought. He did the math and flew two hours, and then they called him off before he even arrived. TIC was over.

  No, he needed to check in with another task force humping to an objective, watch it before they hit the target. Gene found the team at the lat/long, called them on the radio. Silence. “Check the freq,” Gene said to his sensor operator. “What freq are they supposed to be on?” “Ask their TOC on mIRC.” “No answer.” “Which window are you in?” “What window should I be in?” “Ops, can you call their TOC on the VOIP?” “They say they hear you and the team is trying to call you back.” “Do we have the audio up on the datalink?” I’m messing up I’m messing up I’m messing up I can’t even get the radio right. “I can’t hear the datalink over the UHF speaker.” “mIRC them to see if they have a Rover, we can do this without audio.” “Which mIRC room are they in?”

  No, now he needed to link up with a NATO element, watch the highway ahead of their convoy. Gene arrived and called the commander on the radio. “What are you?” the commander asked. “I’m a Predator,” responded Gene. “What can you do for us?” the commander said. “I can watch,” said Gene.

  No, now he needed to search for the ODA team that had been lost three days. Forgotten was that team’s original target; al-Muhandis would have to wait.

  If he was there, Gene thought, at least he would see the ground forces every day, in the flesh, eat with them at the chow hall, share a little of the risk. He’d know who he was searching for. He’d know when there was a rocket attack on the FOB before a mission. He’d know what time it was, by looking at the sun and not a clock.

  What time was it? His stomach rumbled. He had skipped breakfast. And lunch. Maybe dinner. Not enough coffee either.

  Gene orbited the search area until the factory whistle blew. He asked around at the end of the day. No, no one else had found that team yet either.

  Sometimes, it not about what you did, it’s what you failed to do.

  Gene stepped out of the secured room, picked up his phone, and walked out into the dark parking lot. He checked his messages. Marathon run at the blackjack table at TI’s, and if he skipped two nights in a row he was a fucking pussy.

  ON HIS WAY to Pakistan, the Engineer may have changed drivers and vehicles four times.

  In Baghlan he changed police trucks, and in a small village north of Kabul a young mujahid picked him up in a sedan. They traveled when the skies were gray and slept for two days at a safe house when the skies were too clear. It became more dangerous as you approached Kabul, the Engineer knew. Patience and perseverance. Then one morning he woke early and saw that the winter winds and rain had returned, and he whispered in the ear of his young, slumbering driver, “Prayer is better than sleep,” and the two men got back in the car and drove on.

  They drove around the edge of Kabul and continued south. The Engineer did not teach in Kabul, the takfir central government made it too dangerous, but he may have connected his laptop to the Internet briefly to conduct business.

  He avoided email, and the camera above his screen was covered in black tape. But he ordered supplies, including a hundred units of a new device he had just designed. The ability to outsource construction, send the computer file to Alibaba.com for official manufacture, like one of those companies in the Great Satan’s California valley, that was one of his most important new developments. Other companies could do it, sure, but Alibaba.com was cheap and always the best quality.

  Not that he was an Ali Baba. He was no honorless thief. He relied on no takfir Persian state. The work was his.

  He finished his order and then checked on an online explosives course he was teaching. He never interacted with the chat rooms directly; he had an intermediary for that. He had placed several self-learning courses there, to assist in jihad around the globe, but interest was languishing. He just could not update it regularly enough, he was too often traveling and out of contact. It was more effective to teach in person anyway. He could teach them anything, and yet his brothers here in Afghanistan, what do they ask for? Only mines, simple albuyah nasiffah that he could make from the trash on the street.

  He left Kabul quickly and proceeded south. At an underpass he traded drivers and white sedans again. Sometimes he could just feel the kuffar drone watching above, he thought, or hear the motor buzz, a mosquito whir at the edge of his hearing that would send him searching the sky for a dot that never quite materialized.

  He changed cars again at a safe house in Gardez. A courier told him they had received word that his driver of the last car had been killed along the road, a flash from the sky as random as any of his albuyah nasiffah.

  Bury him immediately, the Engineer may have said. He is shaheed.

  The gray clouds settled low, and he drove his little white sedan across the plain. At each checkpoint they knew him when he said his name, and he drove out of the mountains and across the Khowst Bowl.

  13 ♦ KHOWST BOWL

  “ABDUL? WHERE IS ABDUL?” THE Afghan man called down the narrow streets, even at this late hour teeming with fruit stalls and goats and children running barefoot at play.

  “Have you seen my friend Abdul? Abdul!” He put his hand to the side of his mouth and called again. He was a middle-aged man, graying beard, long plain shalwar kameez. He swung his arms when he walked. He was just another man on another street in the sprawl of Kabul, average in every respect.

  So were the two men who followed him, within earshot, thirty feet away.

  “You are looking for Abdul?” a taxi driver called out to the man from his open window.

  “Yes, my friend Abdul. Where is he?”

  “He is at home, two doors past the market,” the driver said, and waved south in the general direction.

  “Yes, I see now. Many thanks to you,” the man said, and wandered through the vendors, past shop windows shut tight. The two other men followed at a discreet distance, lost in a crowd. One raised a long-sleeved arm up to his face, scratched his beard.

  “FREEDOM, ALPHA ROMEO, do you have visual on the Objective?” Evil heard the New Zealand accent over the radio.

  From twelve thousand feet above, silently circling the market, Evil compared the video off the sensor ball with the SEEK photo on the profile he pulled up. No one matched the face he saw on his screen, and the analysts watching the video back at Bagram had not called him with a positive ID.

  “ALPHA ROMEO, FREEDOM, negative, intel has no PID for Objective Castle. His pad is in the 10 series. He must be inside,” Evil responded. Lucas, his sensor operator, zoomed out to display the wide view of the market and
surrounding low homes.

  Evil watched the Afghan man walk up to the doorway of Abdul’s home, saw him knock, call inside. Evil took in the scene of the choked alleyways and mud-walled shacks, draped wagons and carts, sheets occasionally stretched as sunshades over the streets. He noted the rifles in the hands of most men in the market. But the Afghan man did not have one, and neither did his two shadows.

  A small boy appeared at the door.

  “Habibi, go get your father,” the Afghan man said.

  The boy disappeared. Evil watched the Afghan man wait at the door, watched the other two men stand back-to-back a short distance away, watched the busyness of the night-cool city around them, watched the few automobiles crawl through snarled traffic on the main streets just off the market square, watched one white panel van begin to inch toward Abdul’s home using a back alley.

  “Lucas, watch that mover,” Evil called back to his sensor operator. The video on the screen in front of him shifted as the sensor camera panned. Lucas cropped the view, put the panel van under the crosshairs. It was driving in reverse and picking up speed.

  Evil turned to his copilot in the seat next to him. “Check out what’s about to happen,” he said.

  Evil flew an MC-12. It had no weapons. It had no side-mounted mini-gun like an AC-130, or Hellfire missiles like a Pred. It had only a sensor with a video camera and an IR laser, to sparkle targets. But their Objective was inside the house, so nothing to do but watch as the van and the two men began to converge on the door.

  A larger figure appeared in the door frame.

  “Salaam, Abdul, I have found you,” said the Afghan man.

  “Salaam. Do I know you?” Abdul replied, and he gripped a rifle in his hand.

  The two men moved more quickly now. Evil could see one scratch his beard again.

  “FREEDOM, ALPHA ROMEO, here we go, van is with us.”

  The vehicle burst from the narrow alleyway and screeched to a halt in front of Abdul’s door. Pedestrians on the street scattered, the Afghan man stepped aside, the two men moved with sudden purpose. Abdul fell back in surprise as the two figures leapt toward him, closing the gap in an eye blink. A truncheon flashed from its hiding place, caught Abdul on the side of the head with a hollow thud. Abdul dropped but never hit the ground; the two men clamped him about the shoulders and stuffed him in the open back door of the van. The driver threw the stick into first, spun the tires on the slick gravel as it tore back up the alley from which it had come.

  A woman and child appeared in the doorway and looked out on the empty street. The Afghan man had disappeared.

  Evil turned again to his copilot.

  “Kiwis are fucking crazy, dude.”

  WHEN THE BLACK hole is looking for their target, they’ll send a Predator. And if that Predator eventually corners him, if the black hole is sure—they know not just who but also where—they’ll plan a raid, and flying top cover will be a pilot like Evil.

  Major Ben “Evil” Cook does not say the word “um.” Upon careful reflection, I have decided that if you met him for the first time, this is the only discernable clue of what lies inside his otherwise average exterior. Nothing in Evil’s gait or posture would alert you to his profession. When not wearing his green Nomex flight suit, harnessed and wrapped chute hanging about his ass, helmet under his arm, you would not guess Evil was a fighter pilot. Formerly dark hair has faded gray with time and sun. The faint residual smell of a hangover, last night’s rum leaking from his pores, drifts about him less and less; Evil has a wife and two dogs and a mortgage, and the nights are ending earlier and earlier. Never thin, the stresses of so many flight hours have thickened Evil all over. When he turns the jet at 9G, the helmet by itself weighs over forty pounds; Evil’s neck and body are now designed to compensate for such forces.

  He doesn’t wear aviator sunglasses, the simple Eagle-profile tattoo on his back is well hidden, and he has learned not to talk about the jet all day to civilians who didn’t care.

  “When you go to the bar, you don’t tell people you’re a fighter pilot,” Evil often said. “No one likes fighter pilots except little kids and other fighter pilots. We tell people we’re plumbers. They usually believe us.”

  Away from the flight line, Evil is just another middle-aged guy in flip-flops with a short haircut and a little too much around the middle.

  But if you know what to listen for, his speech does give him away. The faint Tennessee twang is rapid and precise. Evil never says “um,” and not a word is out of place. Ever.

  First Lieutenant Ben Cook became Evil at a private naming ceremony in the bar at the squadron headquarters, with the alcohol flowing. One fellow conspirator told a particularly nefarious story involving the general’s daughter and her unceremonious curbside drop-off at her home at dawn. “Evil” seemed appropriate. Pilots don’t choose their own call sign. Evil’s peers bestowed the honor, the best fighter pilot name around.

  And yet when the fighter pilot with the best fighter pilot name first flew in combat, finally flew in combat, it wasn’t in the single-seat, high-performance, enemy-aircraft-killer F-15C Eagle that had dominated his professional life. It wasn’t in the airframe he had spent thirteen hundred hours of flight time training in, teaching in, specializing in, aching and puking and sweating in. It wasn’t in the great white shark of fighter aircraft, the crowning achievement of one hundred years of military evolution, the peak predator species that defied further improvement.

  By the time Evil left for Afghanistan in 2011, the American people had spent nearly twenty million dollars on jet fuel alone to make him one of the best air-to-air killers in the world. But that’s not the job he went to war to do. No, when one of America’s last true fighter pilots finally went to war, it was for the same reason the rest of us seemed to go to war in the years after 9/11: Evil went to hunt IEDs and the Engineer who made them.

  To get the chance to log his first combat hour, Evil took a temporary assignment to fly the MC-12 Liberty, a twin-engine modified Beechcraft King Air, used the world over by freight companies and business executives to hop between stateside corporate headquarters and sales meetings. Its mission was to provide “manned tactical ISR,” the highly sought-after buzzword of special operations support. The term “ISR”—Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance—could refer to many types of platforms, from satellites to U2s to Preds to drones the size of model airplanes. The MC-12 was “tactical” as opposed to “strategic” because it supported small units in real time during their missions. It loitered for only four or six hours, much shorter than a Pred, but a local commander could ask for an MC-12 and there was a fair chance he could get one. “Strategic” assets, such as the unmanned Global Hawk, worked for bosses in Washington and Qatar and the CIA. And the MC-12 was “manned” because four human beings were in a tin can in the air above the battlefield.

  How quaint, to put people in the plane. The MC-12 was a relic flown by a dinosaur.

  A sense of amazement surrounded the MC-12, an awe that it existed at all, not because of the breakthrough state-of-the-art electronics that it contained but because it broke every rule of the military’s acquisition process. Evil claimed it went from “bar napkin to combat in ten months,” a blink of the eye compared to the typical decades of aircraft development. This timeline so impressed the wider aviation community that the MC-12 was the runner-up for the Collier Trophy, the Pulitzer of flying given by the US National Aeronautic Association. Past winners include Howard Hughes and the crew of Apollo 11. In 2010, the MC-12 design team lost only to the Sikorsky X2, the fastest helicopter ever built, clocking in at over two hundred miles per hour.

  This plane that should not exist would not look so special to the untrained eye, and that was the point. It used an airframe designed in the early 1960s. It was painted two-tone gray, dull on deep. Antennas and pods were stuck on the fuselage at various unobtrusive places. Every bit of spy hardware was a commercial-off-the-shelf purchase, stolen from other military programs or o
bscure supply catalogs. The video from its targeting pod could be broadcast to soldiers on the ground using a system called Rover, originally designed to slake the Pred porn appetite of deskbound generals, now distributed to the masses. Once airborne and absorbed in the mission, Evil would place a standard touch screen tablet in a rack over his aircraft instrument displays, pull out a keyboard and track-ball mouse ordered online, and, like Gene, chat via mIRC for the majority of the flight.

  The Army bought a fleet of MC-12s and immediately loaned them to the contractors of Task Force ODIN. The Air Force retained a military crew, recruiting a slate of almost over-the-hill fighter pilots who were facing job losses, base closures, and a war passing them by. There was a period of cultural adjustment that, from the outside, might appear shallow. The MC-12 was a prop-job puddle jumper and not a jet, a buzz and not a roar, a minivan that cruised at 145 knots, not 450. Flying it required little “real” skill except in cases of extreme weather. And most jarring, rather than fly solo, pilots like Evil were suddenly the Aircraft Commander for a crew of four: a copilot in the left seat, boss in the right, and two enlisted technicians in the back, one to operate the sensor and the other to work the cryptological programs around which the aircraft was truly designed.