The Network

by Jason Elliot

  For legal and constitutional reasons, the CIA cannot sponsor or assist the assassination of an individual. They can, however, capture him. But bin Laden is both elusive and careful. His closest guards are not Afghans but Arabs, hard-core fighters from jihadist campaigns around the world. He is frequently on the move. At his compound in Tarnak near Kandahar, every inch of which has been scrutinised by Grace’s team, there are women and children, another reason to rule out further cruise missile strikes. Earlier hopes of enlisting Massoud’s men to kill bin Laden are dwindling, and the director of the CIA, the DCI, won’t approve American intervention on the ground. It’s been tried and failed. The White House and State Department, who between themselves are too dumb, says Grace, to tell a skunk from a house cat, are so tied up in legal knots they can’t formulate a coherent policy towards Afghanistan.

  ‘But there is a plan,’ she says. ‘We’re going to fire up the intelligence collection on bin Laden all around the country, and with the help of Massoud’s informers and agents the net will surely close. Doesn’t too much matter if it’s Massoud’s boys, SF, the Paks or the Uzbeks who bring him in,’ she says. ‘Doubt if it’ll be special forces who’ll get it done,’ she adds with a scoff. ‘You could put bin Laden in a room with a Seal and a Delta and they’d kill each other before they even noticed him.’ But it’s clear what she’s hoping. The successful capture of bin Laden will convince the White House to supply Massoud with greater levels of military supplies and put political pressure on the Taliban leadership. Only then might they give up on their designs to control the entire country.

  ‘It’s a tough row to hoe,’ says Grace, ‘but it’s the only hope there is to roll back the Taliban and all the hotheads fixing to spread jihad across the universe. Sure would make a world of difference if we had one good asset inside Obi-Wan’s camp.’

  At the mention of this I look away, lest anything in my expression betray my thoughts. She can have no idea that my best friend has been assigned to this very task – nor that I have no idea whether he is alive or dead.

  We turn left off Dolley Madison into a quiet road lined with trees. About a hundred yards along there’s a security post and a chevroned barrier. The windows come down and our IDs are entered into an electronic log by a guard, who peers inside the car and acknowledges Grace with a nod and a smile. The barrier lifts and the road curves to the left. There are trees on one side and an enormous car park on the other, beyond which the main complex of buildings rises like a giant cake with layers of cream and chocolate. Footpaths lit by miniature lamp posts snake between the buildings and lend a faint suggestion of amusement park. Grace sees me looking.

  ‘Somebody up there loves you, Tony.’ I’m not at all sure what she means.

  ‘On the seventh floor, I mean. That’s where the clearance comes from. These boys don’t let too many people see the toys they’re playing with.’

  We loop around another vast parking lot and drive past smaller clusters of buildings until we come to a halt by a building surrounded by thick woods. As we get out of the car, Grace shifts her belt and adjusts what is probably a holster under her blazer. She’s tall and lean and walks like a man.

  ‘Come and meet the Manson family,’ she says, and we enter the building, press our IDs against a reader and enter a second door marked authorized personnel only.

  About a dozen men and three women are in the briefing room, clustered around tables and overlooked by a giant blank screen. Grace shepherds me around with a series of first-name introductions. The majority are guarded in their manner, a few look puzzled to see a foreigner, and one or two fail to conceal their suspicion. I have the distinct feeling they are not accustomed to outsiders.

  The exception is a portly middle-aged man wearing thick glasses, who I meet more or less by accident as I help myself, at Grace’s suggestion, to a cup of coffee. He’s ahead of me and nearly bumps into me as he turns around, and as if by reflex introduces himself. His face seems to be frozen in a perpetual grin. He mentions only his name and the acronym of the organisation to which he’s attached before launching into his job description. It pours out in a low drawl with infrequent pauses. He looks at me only occasionally, preferring to rest his eyes on a point somewhere near my left shoulder. His field is ‘fixed and dynamic target source analysis’, a subject on which I now feel obliged to appear knowledgeable.

  His main task is prioritising and occasionally deconflicting ISR input from assets on the ground, he says, so that the sequence F2T2EA – find, fix, track, target, engage – commonly known as the kill chain, can run more smoothly. I nod sagely. He advises on kinetic collateral damage assessment and target restrictions based on operation-specific ROE, LOAC, the RTL and the NSL.

  ‘I don’t remember all those,’ I say. ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Rules of Engagement, Law of Armed Conflict, Restricted Target List and No-Strike List.’ He takes a sip from his coffee. He’s proud, he says, to be pushing the envelope on new protocols for mensuration software algorithms and datum management. But he’s lost me now. I’m relieved when Grace comes to my rescue and guides me over to some of the others. One is a tall man called Rich, who greets me briefly with formal authority before turning back to the conversation he’s in.

  ‘You just met the biggest toad in the pond,’ whispers Grace approvingly.

  A few minutes pass before the assembly is complete, and there’s a resonant tapping on the PA system, which prompts us all to sit. The room darkens.

  A young technician explains, for the benefit of those of us who aren’t familiar with tonight’s technology, how it is that we’re able to watch a live feed of imagery from Afghanistan. The screen above him flickers into life and displays a description of a Special Access Program called Afghan Eyes and the unmanned aircraft system that makes it possible: the Predator RQ-1.

  A picture appears of a military-looking trailer with a satellite dish on its roof, called a ground control station, currently at an airfield in Uzbekistan, north of the Afghan border across the Amu Darya river. It’s from here, it now dawns on me, that the images we are about to watch are being beamed. Inside it are a pilot and a payload operator, who direct and control the unmanned aircraft by what is called knob control.

  I can’t resist a sideways glance at Grace on hearing this expression, and am glad to see she’s got the joke too, and signals the fact with the faintest of smiles.

  While the technician reels off the equipment’s characteristics, more pictures appear on the screen. The Predator itself is a long thin aircraft with weird-looking, downward-pointing tail fins that give the impression that it’s flying upside down like an injured fish. It has retractable landing gear, which enables it to take off and land like an ordinary plane. It has a camera in its nose, a sensor turret and a multi-spectral targeting system. It also has an infrared camera for use at night, synthetic aperture radar to see through smoke or cloud and listening devices for picking up radio signals in its vicinity. It’s a technological marvel, invisible and inaudible from the ground, and to judge from the hypnotised expressions on the audience, it impresses them as much as it impresses me. A newer version, we’re told, is under development, which will enable multi-role operations. Instead of just looking at things, in other words, it will be able to shoot at them with laser-guided missiles.

  Then comes the near-miraculous moment when the small square at the bottom of the screen is suddenly expanded, and we’re looking at live video from a Predator’s nose. Spinning numbers at the edge of the screen give the aircraft’s position, heading and the time. I imagine the images will be still ones, but the video is as good as television and the impression is almost supernatural.

  We are in the south-east of the country, near the border of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and what the British used to call the North-West Frontier. To the Pakistanis, it’s Waziristan; to the Pashtuns, for whom the border has never really existed since the British imposed it a hundred years earlier, it’s still Afghanistan.


  The Predator is circling silently above a potential target designated by a tracking team on the ground. It’s a mud-walled compound typical of the region, and the feed shows several parked vehicles in a courtyard and a single man emerging from a doorway. The angle of view is not from directly overhead so unlike an aerial photograph we can see the place in two dimensions. The man is wearing Afghan clothes and, by the looks of it, a waistcoat, but no turban. For a few moments all our eyes are on him. Then he stoops down and reaches for something on the ground. The camera is almost still. It’s surreal. From 7,000 miles away, we’re watching a Pashtun housekeeper sweep the dust from the doorway of his house.

  A few moments later he stands up and runs across the courtyard towards the entrance gates. Behind them, two squat Russian jeeps have pulled up, and I imagine the characteristic single-tone horn of the forward jeep that has interrupted the housekeeper’s task. I imagine the metallic clang of the gate as it sweeps open and the smell of dust and diesel as the jeeps enter the courtyard and park. Several men descend from the vehicles and are joined by two others from inside the house, one of whom is steadying his turban on his head as he comes out. They greet their visitors in turn. We can even see the fluttering of the untied ends of their turbans in the wind. Even at this distance the formalised solemnity of their gestures is somehow communicated, and I can almost hear the ritual exchange of blessings as they embrace, touching chests rather than shaking hands, in the timeless Afghan fashion. They carry no weapons. Who are these men? Traders? Government members? Brothers or friends? Terrorists? I will never ever know.

  We hear the distorted electronic voice of the Predator pilot over the loudspeakers as he receives instructions from two men wearing headsets sitting at the back of the room at computers. They are searching for a single man in a country the other side of the world, hoping to encounter the visual signature by which bin Laden has now become known: a convoy of Land Cruisers and armed bodyguards. I’m filled with a feeling akin to awe at the effort and technological genius that makes this spectacle possible. It is matched only by private concern at the fragility of the search, which will only ever be as reliable as the informers inside the country providing the likely targets. I imagine the temptation faced by an Afghan informer, seduced by bagfuls of hundred-dollar bills, to select targets merely to please his handlers because he knows this is what is expected of him and guarantees the next instalment. But I dare not express my cynicism.

  For several hours we stare at the images as they filter from the heavens onto our screen, following suspect cars and trucks along remote mountain roads and peering from afar into the private worlds of our unsuspecting quarries with angelic, or perhaps demonic, omnipotence. It’s 4 a.m. when Grace taps my arm and suggests we cut a trail back to my hotel. We shake hands in parting with a few of the remaining station members as we make for the door.

  ‘Really appreciate your input,’ says one of them, although I haven’t given any.

  Our driver is summoned on a walkie-talkie and we speed into the city along the Memorial Parkway with the Potomac on our left. Grace asks me for my thoughts.

  ‘Very impressive,’ I tell her, then feel I should say more. ‘It’s a dedicated team.’

  ‘Sure makes you feel all-overish looking at those images, doesn’t it? You don’t think we’re barking at a knot with all that technology?’ She sighs and speaks again before I can answer. ‘I can tell you do, and you’re right. I’ll admit there’s a few hotheads in the family who want the glory of nailing bin Laden in some Tom Clancy black op. They don’t give a damn what happens in Afghanistan. Way I see it, the Company’s a strategic entity not a tactical one. You can’t do strategy with a motorised buzzard, even if it can see in the goddamned dark.’ She peers from the window. ‘Same goes for the DIA’s data-mining programmes. We can analyse the conversations of every member of every jihad chat room across the world. We can listen to their phones 24/7. We could hear them talking in their sleep if we really wanted to. But it’ll never tell us what they’re really thinking. You gotta be there to know that.’

  We pull up outside the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue.

  ‘Here,’ she says, leans towards me and stretches out her arm. For just a second I’m not sure what her intentions are, until she unclips the ID from my jacket pocket. ‘I’d better take that. I’ll pick you up at 6 p.m. tomorrow and we’ll go through some details.’

  ‘I’m seeing my kids in the morning,’ I tell her.

  ‘How do you get along with their mother?’

  ‘I don’t. She doesn’t exactly make it easy for me.’

  ‘Give her hell,’ she says with a grin.

  * * *

  It’s a brilliantly clear and cold morning, and the sky is a luminously bright blue. I haven’t had much sleep but force myself to run a few miles, dropping into Rock Creek Park to get off the streets. When I run in England, I see no one. Here there’s a steady stream of joggers and bikers in the latest running gear, and I feel distinctly shabby by comparison. Everything they wear is new. In my crumpled T-shirt and three-year-old trainers with holes beginning to show at the toes, I’m definitely not up to local standards. There are men dressed head-to-toe in body-hugging Lycra, women in pink tracksuits with their dogs, and octogenarians with miniature dumb-bells, which they lift as they trot along. Husband-and-wife teams tow their babies behind their bicycles in prams with suspension systems and disc brakes. I feel as though I’ve strayed into the recreation area of an insane asylum.

  After a shower back at the hotel I pick up the phone with a familiar sense of dread and call my ex. The phone is answered by her new husband, to whom good luck. He’s civil and has the annoying habit of saying ‘Stand by’ when asking me to hold the line. I ask to speak to my older daughter.

  ‘Stand by,’ he says. He’s too stupid to realise I’ve been standing by for years. But it’s not my daughter who comes on the line.

  ‘Hello, Anthony,’ says my ex with scarcely disguised contempt. ‘You said you would call at ten.’

  ‘Sorry about that. I’m a bit jet-lagged, actually.’

  ‘Well that’s alright,’ she says. ‘We’re used to your excuses. But in future lateness is unacceptable. You may think you can swan in from England and expect everyone else to change their plans, but from now on you’re going to have to modify your behaviour.’

  ‘I just want to see the girls for a few hours,’ I say.

  ‘Well if you’re not here by eleven you won’t find us.’

  The line goes dead. As much as I try, every time, to prepare myself for this kind of treatment, it never fails to have the intended effect.

  Half an hour later I’m at the front door of their house in Chevy Chase, thanking God it’s Sunday and the traffic has allowed me to reach the house in time. I ask the taxi to wait because I don’t want to get into an argument, which I will inevitably lose. There’s a silver Mercedes SUV and a convertible BMW in the driveway beside the perfect lawn.

  I kneel as the girls run out and throw themselves at me, nearly knocking me over. They’ve both grown since I saw them in the summer and I can hardly believe how changed they are. The sight of them brings a lump to my throat but I daren’t let my feelings show. I’m being watched from the doorway by their mother, who glowers at me as if there’s a tramp in the driveway.

  ‘Jesus. You look like you’ve been in a bar brawl. That’s not an appropriate impression to give in public.’

  ‘Yes, it does hurt, actually. Thanks for asking.’

  ‘Make sure you’re back by three. We’ve given up a family afternoon for this. And no sugar. They’re not allowed candy, whatever you may think is alright in England.’

  There’s no response I can give to any of this, so we pile into the taxi.

  ‘Alright, girls, where to? We can go to China to see pandas, buffalo racing in India, or we can go to the North Pole and hunt reindeer. Or if you’re both very good, we can go and have waffles with maple syrup and loads of whipped cream.’

&nb
sp; There’s a chorus of approving giggles at the suggestion. We head for a diner and repeat the usual ritual of waffles and hot chocolate. I watch them eat, and the sight fills me with joy. But the thought that they’re growing up so far from their father is like a knife in me at the same time. We catch up on news about the pond which we built together the previous summer. There’s now a family of newts, the tadpoles have turned into frogs, the goldfish are fattening up and there’s a big duck with a red beak from the farm across the road who comes and has a morning wash, but the last time he came the pond was frozen over so he slipped and fell on his duck bottom and couldn’t figure out what was happening. The goldfish, all of whose names they both remember, will be too fat to fit in the pond by the time I next come to America to see them, I say.

  ‘Did you catch the mouse?’ asks the younger. I’d forgotten about the mouse.

  ‘I caught him and put him in the garden,’ I say. ‘But he came back. He prefers his home behind the kitchen cupboards. But maybe we can catch him again when you next come to England and train him. Think mice can learn the violin?’ She giggles.

  ‘Mummy says you only come to America on business,’ says the older one.

  This is crushing news because it’s so untrue. I’ve never been to America on business, with the exception of this trip, which is hardly business. I can’t bring myself to say their mother is lying to them.

  ‘Well, perhaps Mummy doesn’t know everything. I always come to America to see you both because I love you and I miss you. And, well … because you can’t get such amazing waffles in England.’