Drone Strike: A Joe Matthews Thriller

by David Austin

  “Anything else?” Sloan asked.

  Joe thought a moment before speaking. “Last one, sir. How soon will I be put back on operational status?”

  The question brought a slight smile to Sloan’s face. He looked around the room and everyone agreed. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t make your reinstatement effective as soon as we adjourn this hearing.”

  “Thank you, sir. The time away was nice, but I’m ready to get back to work.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Ten minutes after the meeting had ended, Joe strode into the gym on the basement level of the headquarters building. Greeted by the familiar smell of sweat and workout equipment, he felt out of place in his suit. He saw the guys huddled around Mike, cheering him on as he bench-pressed what looked to be upwards of two hundred and fifty pounds with relative ease.

  Finishing his last rep, Mike set the barbell on the rack, then sat up to catch his breath and stretch out his chest and shoulders. Sweat soaked the front of his t-shirt and shorts. John Roberts, Mike’s closest friend on the team, stepped aside to grab him a towel. It was then that Joe got his first look at Mike’s leg. A soft, sock-like material covered the stump and was stained with blood in a few spots. He figured there was some drainage or seepage from the wound still occurring but would not have been surprised to find out Mike had popped a couple of stitches while throwing the weights around. The sight sent a wave of guilt churning through Joe’s body. He was about to approach the team when he heard an explosion of laughter from the group. Instead, he hung back and ducked behind a pillar, not wanting to interrupt the guys’ moment.

  “Did you get some new boots?” John asked, noticing his friend’s fresh out-of-the-box Salomons.

  Looking down at ehis foot, Mike said, “Yeah. No thanks to you.”

  “Me? What the hell have I got to do with you getting a new pair of boots?”

  Without missing a beat, Mike deadpanned, “Because you lost one of my old ones.”

  Having no idea what Mike was talking about, John pressed forward. “Really? I lost one of your boots?”

  “Yep,” Mike said, trying to keep a straight face. “You left it on that hilltop in Syria.”

  “I left your boot on that hilltop in Syria?” John repeated, more confused than ever.

  “That you did, my friend,” Mike agreed, as Kevin Chang and Chris Ryan could barely contain their laughter. “When you threw me over your shoulders, a little roughly I might add, given the circumstances and nature of my injuries, and ran though that hail of bullets to carry me to safety, you left my leg with the boot on it behind.”

  The guys were laughing so hard that Kevin was doubled over, and Chris had tears streaming down his face.

  Incredulous, John said, “So let me get this straight. I risk my life to come to your aid, put a tourniquet on your leg to keep you from bleeding out, destroy the technical and kill the gunner who shot you, then carry your muscle-bound ass through a wall of lead to cover, and you’re upset because I didn’t grab the remains of your leg before we left?

  “Pretty much,” Mike said, pointing to his prosthetic leg. “I can’t very well run around with a bare foot, can I? And the last time I checked companies only sell boots in pairs. You can’t buy just one.”

  Stepping out into full view of the guys, Joe said, “He does have a point, John. I’ve never seen single boots for sale. Not even in the discount bin at Walmart.”

  The four men turned in unison toward the familiar voice of their team leader. Joe’s best friend Chris was the first to speak. “Well, I’ll be. Look who’s back from the beach. You realize I’m the surfer, right? How is it you get sent on vacation to Mexico while I have to stay here and babysit our two wounded warriors?”

  With as straight a face as he could manage, Joe said, “You should know by now that rank has its privileges. Otherwise they wouldn’t get anyone to take the job.”

  Chris moved in and threw an arm around Joe’s shoulders. “So, I guess things must have gone well upstairs since you’re not being escorted off the compound by a squad of SPS officers.”

  “Yeah,” Joe answered with an exhausted sigh, just now realizing how much the stress over this morning’s hearing had been weighing on him. “As of now, I’m back on operational status.”

  “Thank God,” Kevin said in his heavy New England accent. “It would have sucked if Sloan had ordered us to sneak up in the middle of the night and kill you.” That sent another round of laughter through the team.

  “You’re right about that. How’s the shoulder?”

  “Still hurts like hell, and physical therapy is a bitch. But the docs say I’ll be good as new in a few months, so don’t even think about filling my spot on the team.”

  “Don’t worry, Kev. Your spot’s safe. Do you know how hard it is to find someone with an accent like yours? We’d have to keep you around just for sheer entertainment value.”

  “Fuck you, boss. And I mean that in the most respectful sense of the phrase.”

  Another round of laughter filled the gym, but when it died down, Joe asked the guys to give him a minute with Mike. When they had cleared out, Joe pulled a stool next to the bench and took a seat. He looked down at the sweat-stained floor before facing his friend. “Mike,” he began, trying to find the words to express his sorrow and guilt for what had happened. But the best he could manage was a heartfelt, “I’m so sorry.” As the team leader, it was Joe’s responsibility to take care of his men. It was an obligation he felt he had failed, since two of them had been seriously wounded in Syria.

  “It’s okay, Joe.” Mike interrupted, reaching out and putting a hand on his team leader’s arm. “It wasn’t your fault. Occasionally, shit happens, and that night, it happened to us. It’s no different from getting injured in a game. You can go through the entire season without so much as a sprained ankle, then blow out your knee on the next play and be done for the year. At least that’s how I’m looking at it. Don’t waste time beating yourself up over something that was totally out of your control. Besides, you brought us home that night. We could have died on that hill. But we didn’t, thanks to you. Yeah, Kevin and I were wounded, and it sucks. But you brought us home. And I’d rather be here, right now, having to deal with losing my leg than buried in a shallow grave in the desert or rotting away in a Syrian prison awaiting a grisly execution.”

  Seeing the break in the conversation, the rest of the guys wandered back over. Reaching up and giving Kevin a fist bump, Mike said, “Kev and I don’t need a pity party. What we need is to work our asses off to get healthy, so we can get back to runnin’ and gunnin’ with the team. So, get your head out of your ass, stop feeling sorry for us, and more importantly, yourself, and let’s get back in the game.”

  Joe looked up at the rest of the guys. He had come down to the gym to console his guys and cheer them up, but the opposite had happened. They had turned the tables and were taking care of him instead. The four men gathered around him were more than teammates or friends. He loved each one like a brother.

  Now that Joe was back, the team was whole once again, and all was right in their world.

  CHAPTER 13

  The northeast corner of Jordan, near its border with Iraq, is as desolate and unforgiving a place as there is on earth. The barren landscape, dotted with ruins from long abandoned villages, resembles the fictional planet Tatooine from the Star Wars movies. Crisscrossed by the occasional dirt track, the only noticeable sign of civilization is Highway 10, a solitary paved road that runs from the outskirts of Jordan’s capital, Amman, into the heart of Iraq.

  Uninhabited except for the occasional Bedouin, the Jordanian desert is a great place to hide something, which is why the CIA chose the location to build a clandestine UAV base. The United States, and the CIA, has had a longstanding relationship with the Hashemite kingdom’s royal family since the early 1950s when Hussein bin Talal became king after his father’s abdication. King Hussein ruled Jordan until his death in 1999 and that special relationship remai
ned in place when his son, Abdullah, ascended to the throne.

  Jordan’s proximity to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, all target-rich environments, made this base one of the CIA’s busiest. There was never a shortage of work for the pilots and the ground crews, given the sheer number of sites and individuals targeted for intelligence gathering or missile strikes. The workload required at least one Reaper to be in the air nearly twenty-four hours a day, and pilots often rotated through their shifts behind the controls, resuming their duties after mandatory rest periods without the Reaper ever returning to base.

  The men and women flying the UAVs out of Jordan were racking up flight time and kills at an unprecedented pace. The operational tempo, combined with the short flight to Amman for a little rest and relaxation, made the base one of the Agency’s most desired assignments. Even though the temperatures during the summer months felt like you were living on the face of the sun, Jordan still beat the hell out of the CIA’s other UAV bases in Pakistan and Djibouti or deployments to Niger or Mauritania targeting al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb across much of Mali and North Africa. The living conditions at those bases could only be described as primitive at best, and that was being kind.

  The centerpiece of the base in Jordan was the smooth, nine-thousand-foot east-to-west concrete runway. Although the drones needed less than a third of that distance to take off and land, the extra length came in handy when an Air Force C-17 Globemaster came in on a monthly supply run. It also provided coalition pilots with a friendly place to land if they had mechanical problems or were damaged by ground fire flying sorties over hostile territory in the region.

  At the easternmost end of the runway sat a square tarmac and three steel frame hangars. Each hangar was large enough to accommodate two MQ-9 Reapers apiece, although the third, slightly smaller building, was used for maintenance and storage of spare parts. To the left of the hangars was a fourth building, which served as the command center. The flat-roofed, cinderblock structure housed offices for the chief of air operations and his communications officer. Individual ground control stations, one for each of the Reapers, filled the remainder of the available space. The building also acted as the unofficial air traffic control center for the few aircraft with humans in the cockpit occasionally flying in and out of the base.

  Directly across the runway from the command center and the hangars was a heavily fortified magazine surrounded by an electrified fence topped with razor wire that stored the Reapers’ ordnance. Above-ground fuel tanks had been constructed at the west end of the runway, far away from the hangars and living quarters. Keeping the flammable liquids and things that go boom nine thousand feet apart seemed like a reasonable idea when the blueprints for the base were drawn up. It would have been more efficient to run underground fuel lines to the hangars, but that decision was scrapped in order to protect the personnel and UAVs in the event of a fire or explosion. Instead, the ground crew used an old Texaco truck, flown over in the cargo bay of a C-17 to fill the Reapers’ tanks prior to take off.

  The CIA’s drone program was lethally effective, but it was a barebones operation when compared to its counterparts run by the Air Force. On average, there were usually no more than thirty people on the base at any given time. Only fourteen or fifteen were directly involved with the operation of the UAVs. The remainder of the base’s inhabitants were contractors who provided perimeter security or logistical support.

  Everyone lived together in the housing complex a hundred meters from the command post. Earth-filled HESCO barriers surrounded the compound, which included individual trailers, the dining facility, or DFAC, a fully equipped gym, and an equally well-stocked bar. Each of the trailers was air conditioned and contained one of the biggest perks on base, a private bathroom. High-speed Internet made keeping in touch with family easy and convenient, and flat screen TVs with hundreds of satellite channels helped the crews pass the time by staying current on their favorite TV shows and movies. Meals at the DFAC were better than most, probably because the staff was relatively small, and the cooks didn’t have to prepare food in mass quantities like their counterparts on a typical military base.

  The crew preparing for their upcoming mission wouldn’t be having a cold one or binge-watching their favorite show anytime soon. The pilot had just settled into the cockpit of his ground control station and was going over the preflight checks for the mission. He glanced up at a monitor next to his heads-up display, which showed an overhead shot of a single MQ-9 Reaper, designated Romeo Three, on the tarmac. God, she was beautiful. He never tired of looking at the long, sleek lines of its wings or the V-shaped tail fins that extended upward from the fuselage on either side of the Honeywell turboprop engine. And he marveled at the capabilities of the technology encased in the Reaper’s bulbous nose. The combination of cameras, multimode radar systems, and the ability to intercept signals made it an incredible intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR, platform.

  But unlike its predecessors which were surveillance platforms that had been transformed to kill terrorists, the Reaper was just the opposite. With its seven under-wing pods capable of carrying a variety of laser guided bombs and Hellfire missiles, it had been built from the ground up to be a hunter that could perform a variety of ISR missions. In fact, when the Reapers were airborne on a kill mission, their designations were changed from Romeo to Grim. As in Grim Reaper.

  There was a flurry of activity around Romeo Three as the ground crew prepared it for takeoff. Even though the drones were flown remotely, it still took a considerable effort to get them mission capable for the long hours aloft. Each Reaper had its own mechanic to check the integrity of the airframe and maintain the engine. An electronic technician ensured the avionics, sensors, and communications equipment were online and running within limits. And three ordnance handlers were detailed over from the Marine Corps to care for and load the bombs and Hellfire missiles. The Marines, along with everyone else on base, often felt a tinge of sadness when a Reaper returned with its full complement of weapons. It was a visual reminder that an enemy combatant had not been taken off the battlefield that day.

  The pilots and sensor operators sat next to one another at the ground control station. The GCS was a technological achievement in and of itself. It was basically a self-contained, plug and play, piloting, targeting, and ISR control system. By using the satellite communication, or satcom data link, the UAV could be flown by the pilot in the forward deployed area or, with the flip of a switch, by a counterpart sitting in a similar station back on the headquarters compound in Langley, Virginia. If that were the case, the pilot in theater primarily functioned in a launch and recovery capacity but could take over control at any time if necessary. The entire system, the ground control station, satcom, and the UAV were packable in their own storage containers and capable of being transported in the cargo bay of a C-130 Hercules to any point on the globe at a moment’s notice.

  The pilot adjusted the boom mic attached to his headset and asked, “How’s it looking out there?”

  “Ordnance is loaded, and the fuel tanks are topped off. If systems are green on your end, we’re good to go for engine start and taxi,” the mechanic replied, his voice coming through the pilot’s headset and a speaker mounted on the wall of the command center.

  The pilot looked over to the chief of air ops who had been monitoring the conversation and received a thumbs up. “Roger that. Good for engine start and taxi.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Romeo Three’s turboprop engine sprang to life and the pilot let it idle for a few minutes to warm up while the sensor operator checked the readings on her instruments. Getting a quick nod, he released the brakes and applied just enough thrust to ease the Reaper forward and get it rolling across the tarmac. Walking to the right of Romeo Three, the mechanic performed one last visual inspection. One of the Marines did the same on the UAV’s left side. If either of them noticed anything out of the ordinary, they had the authority to abort the takeoff procedures until th
e issue could be sorted out.

  The pilot brought the UAV to a stop at the edge of the tarmac even though he knew that Romeo Three was the only aircraft queued for takeoff. He checked with the chief of air ops for permission to proceed. The mechanic and the Marine did a quick check of the runway and the airspace around it, looking to their left and right as if they were crossing the street at a busy intersection. The men always felt a little silly performing the routine. After all, their base was literally in the middle of nowhere, and any incoming flights were usually scheduled days, if not weeks, in advance. But protocols were protocols and the chief insisted they were followed.

  Seconds before he was going to clear the Reaper to proceed to the runway, the mechanic heard the faint thumps of helicopter rotors in the distance. He turned to the Marine. “You hear that?”

  The ordnance loader lifted the headset off his ear and tilted his head to listen. “Yeah. Choppers. Sounds like at least three or four.”

  The mechanic pressed the transmit button on his radio. “Stand by ground control. Hold what you’ve got.”

  With a questioning look on his face, the pilot took his eyes off the monitors and glanced over at the sensor operator. She double-checked the instruments before answering. “Nothing wrong on my end. All of my indicators are green.”

  Concerned with the delay, the chief of air ops grabbed a radio out of a nearby charger. “What’s the hold up, Al?”

  “We’re hearing rotors out here, boss. Probably multiple birds.”

  “Do you have a visual?

  “Negative. But it definitely sounds like they’re heading our way.”

  While the presence of unannounced aircraft was unusual, it was not unprecedented. The base was known to the Jordanians and a few of America’s closest partners in the coalition operating in Syria. There had been a couple of occasions where an allied aircraft had suffered a mechanical issue or taken fire over Syria and had made an emergency landing on the smooth runway.