Evil had not spent time studying the specific products for the snatch of Objective Mickey, the detailed maps identifying the code for each structure, the sources and methods used to track him, the names of the dead Americans notched in his belt. But because of his previous mIRC chat with TYRANT 33, he did have the video feed code for the Predator and the JTAC’s radio net. A picture and a voice will have to do for now, he thought.
“TYRANT 33, FREEDOM 64, it’s Evil, what’s going on?”
In reply, Evil heard a barrage of noise. The pop and thump of small arms and heavy machine-gun fire. The crack of frag grenades. A flood of words. If Evil’s human ear were a digital signal demodulator, if it could have parsed out each background voice from the layers of confusion, he would have heard this: “Contact front!” and “Moving!” and “Covering” and “Man down—medic!” and “Fuck, PK in the tower” and “Contact right!” and “Where are the fucking gunships?” and “Grenade!”
Yet somehow, through the din, Evil managed to also hear TYRANT calmly say this: “Hey, what are you seeing up there?”
Buried in the cacophony and ignorance was a request for the one thing Evil could provide. Vision. He studied the Predator feed closely.
“You’ve got shooters above you. Heavy fire from southeast tower, heavy machine gun. Two additional vehicles in-bound to the compound. No, three vehicles. Movement in the 50 and 60 series. Where are the gunships we sent you guys?”
“Apaches had to RTB. Mechanical. You and the Pred are it.”
So with a radio and another aircraft’s camera, Evil began to provide the patient reassuring over-watch to talk the task force through their ambush. They had hit the LZ on time, completed their overland patrol to the objective undetected, blown a hole in the flimsy plywood outer wall, and entered the courtyard in a perfect stack of hedgehogging rifles. Then was the trap sprung, as gunmen from other nearby modern fortresses, alerted by the telltale crack of a breaching charge, arrived and began to shoot down and into the courtyard from the adjacent walls. The task force was hit from all three axes. Evil saw the good guys take cover behind donkey carts and engine blocks, return fire sporadically, pinned down and unable to identify and target the greatest threats: the heavy PK machine gun, the line of barricaded insurgents who had high ground and cover and space to reload their AKs.
Evil provided real-time updates to the JTAC as best he could from a video feed that never showed him quite the picture he needed. It drifted, uncontrolled and haphazard, as if on autopilot. How long did Evil have his arms tied behind his back before a new window popped open on his computer? The whisper mIRC had sprung back to life.
DISCO 11: Freedom 64, you looking for me?
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: Yeah, I’ve sent 10 things. Been trying to get a hold of you. Can’t you see your boys are getting shot at?
DISCO 11: Yeah.
Pause.
DISCO 11: I can’t get them on the radio.
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: Is your radio working?
DISCO 11: I think so.
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: Have you heard the last 20 min? Your guys yelling for you to move?
DISCO 11: No, I didn’t hear any of that.
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: Ok, do not leave mIRC and do not shut this window. I need you to move the sensor when I tell you to.
DISCO 11: ???
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: I’ve got the JTAC on the radio. I’ll relay.
DISCO 11: We take our tasking from the CAOC and JOC. We don’t work for
FREEDOM 64: STOP FUCKING AROUND. THESE GUYS ARE GETTING SHOT AT. DO WHAT I FUCKING SAY!
Evil had started typing before reading the rest of Disco’s opinion of the chain of command, and felt only a little better when he hit Enter and took off the Caps Lock. He took the silence from Disco as acquiescence.
With aplomb, Evil returned to the general mIRC chat room, for the benefit of those watching from the Salerno TOC.
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: Disco 11 - Move the sensor half a frame to the right and zoom out
The video feed shifted and expanded and a blaze of light erupted from a high guard tower now in view. The gunmen were spread about the roofs and eaves and windows of the various buildings in Mickey’s compound and beyond, above the task force on outhouses and stable shades and the rooftop open-air patios where sleeping families retreat to escape the summer heat. Now all awash in light through the Predator’s infrared camera.
“FREEDOM 64, where is the worst of it coming from?” the JTAC asked on the radio in Evil’s ear.
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: Pan down and zoom in on that main tower next to the gate
“Heaviest fire from the guard tower to your south,” Evil radioed back.
“Can you sparkle him?” It was not desperation in TYRANT’s voice, but a first twinge of hope. The sight of an ice-cold glass of water on a hot day.
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: sparkle the guy in the crosshairs
DISCO 11: which one?
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: doesn’t matter—they are both shooting
On the road to Damascus, only Saul could see the light. An infrared beam from on high touched the forehead of the Taliban with the PKM.
“Good sparkle!” Two Time called, watching through the opera glasses.
“Now we see ’em, Evil,” the JTAC said.
But the gunman never saw, not the sparkle or the 7.62 mm round that entered his eye and exited in a mess from the back of his head.
Everyone heard the sound, though. Plywood and bone and a wet splatter across the mud, laid down over hundreds of years, applied in the wet season and baked in the rest of the year. The top of the qalat wall exploded like the back of the head, and ancient mud rained down.
“Sparkle the next target,” the JTAC radioed back. Now his voice was nearly drowned out by the close unleashed dam of American FN SCARs and M4s and H&K 416s.
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: half a frame to the left, roof top, sparkle
“Good sparkle,” confirmed Two Time.
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: quarter frame down, pickup truck, sparkle
“Good sparkle.”
If you were in the task force, crouching in the dust behind a splintered wagon, body armor and pocketed vest and magazines and spare sidearm and flash-bangs about your chest, rifle to your shoulder, through your four-tube night-vision optics you saw a computer-green world of rooflines and mud walls and gunfire flashes, and from a night sky blanketed with enhanced stars, this: an impossibly bright pulsing tunnel of light. A sign from above directing you to your next target, to the stable roof, to the main compound. Beam after beam after beam, until the flash ran out of targets, and you stood among a ruin.
Evil’s aircraft-net radio crackled back to life in his ear.
“TYRANT 33, this is DISCO 11.”
“Yeah, this is 33,” the JTAC called back. “Where have you been?”
“Oh, we were having radio problems,” the Predator pilot said, and then, as calmly as if he were calling the control tower of the Jackson, Mississippi, airport on a clear day, he continued, “I just want to confirm that we have three more hours of loiter time, that the timeline remains as fragged. Just a reminder we’re using products V3.1 for this Objective, and our primary sensor tasking will continue to be in the 10 series before moving to LZ Hornet. And one other thing, I’m not sure who this other guy was, but he was telling us to move the camera. As a reminder, we take taskings from the JOC so other requests need to be worked through that ATO system.”
“Stop talking,” the JTAC said. “Never use the radio again. Do whatever Evil tells you.” Gunfire continued behind his words.
“Uh, confirm Evil is on FREEDOM 64?”
“Shut the fuck up! I don’t want to hear the Predator ever talk again. Do whatever Evil fucking says!”
FREEDOM 64_MC12_MC_EVIL: Hey Disco, see the name. Im Evil, BTW, on the MC-12
DISCO 11: What’s he so pissed off about?
FREEDOM 64: Ill tell ya later
THE
ENGINEER AND his wife and her brother drove up to the checkpoint in his white pickup truck. He handed over three fake passports and was quickly waved through. There was nothing to find in his vehicle; he had left the laptop with his mujahideen brother for safekeeping, and all the designs remained in his head. Tonight he had been a squirter, though he would not know to use that name. They had left through the back door of his host’s compound once they heard the detonations two doors away.
Inshallah, the kuffar did not seem to be watching tonight.
Pakistan, his adopted home, a long visit with his other wives and children. He missed them so. The Sheikh and his confidants could always keep their families close, but not him. His jihad demanded travel. But now, a break, many days of rest with his sons and daughters. And then, where? The Maghreb? Nubia? Or, perhaps, the Levant and al-Sham?
Yes, Syria. His mujahideen brothers in Syria needed his help.
14 ♦ LONG AND MESSY AND GRAY
MATT SCHWARTZ’S MILITARY CAREER BEGAN in Clovis, New Mexico, an overgrown railroad stop on the empty high plains border with Texas. Matt got on the train and hit Qatar, Kuwait, two Iraq pumps, and two Afghan. There he died.
I tried to follow. I found the amputees, the evidence, the intel, the interrogators, the analysts, the Pred, Evil. There is one last step to nab the Engineer. I took the train to the last station. This is what I found.
The contractor shooter world is a first-name-only world. His first name was M——.
It’s a tale told countless times. Airborne to Ranger School to EOD to Special Forces selection to the Special Mission Unit to private practice. One of ten thousand, then one of a thousand, then one of hundreds, then dozens, until, in the end, only six people in the world did his job. It is an ever-narrowing pipeline. You self-select and are selected. Until, finally, you punch and work for yourself. Army of One.
Ranger school ain’t bad, but battalion sucks. If Big Army wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one. Honeymoon was an 1,800-mile cross-country drive to North Carolina.
The bullshit eased when he hit EOD. It got even better once he made it through SF selection. Once you’re on the team, once you’re inside the fence, no more bullshit. Finally. No bullshit.
When he was in the Ranger Bat, he was on a training patrol at Fort Bragg and their dumb-ass lieutenant walked them right into the middle of the live range. Private First Class M——almost stepped on a set of tail fins and discovered they were in a field of impacted mortars as thick as potatoes on an Irish farm. They had to sit and wait all night, until first light, and then, what do you know, at the butt-crack of dawn, here comes a pickup, driving, where they didn’t think they could walk. Two dudes in T-shirts and shorts and sandals got out. “Hey, guys, come with us!” PFC M——jumped in the back of the truck. It was the first time the Army didn’t make him walk somewhere. The guys in no uniforms pulled out explosives, set up a demolition shot on a cluster of live 81s, and then walked back to the truck, kicking over tail booms as they went.
“Who wants to blow something up?” one yelled.
“Hell, yeah, I’ll do it,” PFC M——said.
He cranked the shot, and the guy in sandals didn’t skip a beat.
“You owe us a case of beer,” he said.
Who the fuck are these guys? M——thought.
“Classic EOD move right there,” I said.
“I know, right?” M——said.
“Did you buy them the beer?”
“Damn right I did. I wanted to join up.”
On his first EOD tour in Iraq in 2003 they had one robot for the entire company. They walked up to every IED and placed a charge and made it go away. Their security was the Puerto Rican National Guard. The gunners rarely let their máquinas speak.
In those days, when you did get a robot, sometimes the wireless signals would cross, and you’d see the Predator feed on your robot screen. You’d see yourself working, from above, Pred porn for some curious general, rubberneckers looking over your shoulder.
M——was pinned down and calling for backup. He called on the radio in English, and the quick reaction force called back in Spanish. They waited and waited, their convoy trapped between the IED and the incoming. How long did it take to find a bunch of soldiers and throw them in vehicles and leave the FOB?
Suddenly, three Ford Excursions pulled up to the back of their convoy, put their up-armored civilian trucks between the gunfire and the thin-skinned EOD Humvees. Bearded men in polo shirts and light plate carriers poured from the trucks, firing as they went. M——knew they must be Blackwater guys, but how did they know to come? They didn’t work for the Army, they couldn’t hear his radio calls for help. They must have just showed up.
The men set up fields of fire, assaulted a strong point, shot and moved and called for covering fire as they reloaded. A company’s worth of bullets poured from the rifles of twelve men.
They shot until no more rounds came in. It was quiet on the street.
“Deuces, bro! We’re out!” they called, two fingers in the air in a V, and then they drove away.
Later in the tour an ODA guy in khakis and a baseball cap showed up at their shop and looked over the crisp and conventional uniforms of the men in his company.
“Hey you, Ranger tab and jump wings,” the man said, pointing at M——.
“Me?” said M——.
“Yeah, you, Airborne Ranger. We need an EOD guy. You’re working with us now.”
War is not all destruction. Sometimes war gives birth to a new man.
The ODA team hit the desert fedayeen compound, and when the Apache helicopters opened fire he thought he was dying. The rockets and missiles whooshed from behind like some tidal force, stole the air from his lungs as they passed, detonated in the houses before him, and cracked open his chest. The Apaches beat their way in, fifteen feet off the deck, turned the gun on the hotspots and squirters. One peeled back toward him, tipped the bird on its side, and, as it passed overhead, he could see the pilot through the glass give him the middle finger.
The ODA team hit the desert compound in the middle of the night, and the men and the women and the children were all snug in their beds. They dragged the men to the other room and began an interrogation without questions. The children screamed, and the women screamed, and the men could not scream because the blood caught in their throats, and something inside M——screamed and he walked outside the compound and paced and paced and paced.
The ODA team hit the compound, and the breacher hit the door, and the stack hit the room, and motherfuckers bit it. The booby traps on the cache were ready to go. The car bomb in the courtyard was ready to go. The birds were inbound, and the team leader called, “Blow through it,” and M——hit it all with a charge where it lay.
The ODA team hit, and M——blew through them all. He blew through every dead-dog bomb and dump-truck bomb and suicide bomb. He blew them all where they lay until he made it home.
He kissed his wife.
His dad met him at the airport when he got back from the first Iraq tour. His dad was a sniper in Vietnam and had never ever talked about it, but now he said, “Son, the first time sucks, but every one after that gets easier,” and he wasn’t talking about the tours.
People only know what gets reported. Taliban over here. Hajji’s over there. Ten times as many IEDs between 2003 and 2005? That’s only because there were ten times as many EOD operators, ten times as many reports getting written. If an operator hits a house and an IED detonates and no one has time to fill out a report, does it make a sound?
One day he got a phone call. “Hey, bro, I hear you’re thinking of getting out.” “Yeah,” said M——. So his buddy sent him a plane ticket and said, “Come out to meet me,” and the two went out for dinner, and his buddy passed over a sheet of paper and said, “Here’s what I can start you at,” and M——signed before he was even out of the Army.
Some contracts were ninety days. Some sixty. Some a hundred eighty. But who wants a hu
ndred eighty? One contract had no end date. He was allowed to go home and cash his bonus check when they got two specific guys on the hit list. Kill or capture, technically.
“I can’t talk about that contract,” M——told me even after I turned off the tape recorder.
He eventually worked for the big ones: Blackwater, Triple Canopy. But it was the smaller companies that did the interesting work, small and under the media radar, smart enough to keep their business as quiet as their names.
When M——was still in the Army and at the Special Mission Unit, his job was to save the world. That’s not bravado, it’s true. Think of the worst kind of IED you can. Condi Rice’s mushroom cloud, right? If that device gets found, somebody has to take it apart, step by careful step. What else do you call that, except saving the world? God created EOD techs so firefighters could have heroes too.
But M——always wondered. Who finds that device? How do we know where it is? Something major must go down to get the call in the middle of the night and get on a plane. In military training, the answer was always, “Intel.” The black hole finds it. Intel says where the device is. Now he knew better.
It turns out contractors find it. It turns out contractors track and seize it. It turns out contractors kill every motherfucker in the room and present the device to the military team like a shiny gift. Merry Christmas, bros! Why not? Better to keep the military out of that part. The job is long and messy and gray, as he learned when he was hired to do it himself.
But that device doesn’t get found very often. And he could only board so many cargo ships that came up empty, listen to so many breathless emergency video teleconferences with world ministers that amounted to nothing. So he got other contract jobs, ones with far fewer dry holes.
Contract it all out. FedEx is way more reliable than those yahoos at the military cargo terminal. The KBR pastry chef and seafood cooks at Camp Victory were amazing. And when he was a contractor attached to a Special Forces team, he could do things they couldn’t. Blow in walls. Ask questions second. Contractors don’t have to pay reparations or fix broken windows. Keep the green-suiters clean. Let him work.
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 26