Drone Warrior Read online

  It wasn’t until about 4 A.M. that the loud thumping of the Black Hawk blades broke the peace of the Box, shaking the makeshift building as it landed outside.

  On their return, teams usually went straight to unloading their weapons and gear, and then to bed, before doing it all over again the very next night. Tonight, an operator named Eric came in to see me.

  “Who did I just kill?” he asked, pushing open the door, drenched in blood.

  He was the one who shot the target at point blank.

  “Who did I just kill?” he asked again.

  I didn’t know how to respond at first. The question threw me off.

  Eric was still kitted up in full body armor, radios hanging off his gear, an automatic assault rifle in his right hand pointed down and almost dragging the muzzle along the floor. He reeked of sweat and dust and something humid—blood, dark red and splattered across his vest, as if he had tried to wipe it off. It was still wet in places, soaked into parts of his camouflage and stained across the big American flag patch Velcro’d above his heart.

  A veteran operator who had been doing this for years, Eric had a shaggy beard and bushy hair, and sort of looked like a caveman. He always wore a navy blue FDNY shirt under his gear, as if it was his good luck charm. He’d been shot more than any other person I knew. A teammate once Photoshopped an Army photo of Eric dressed up in his nice Class A uniform, superimposing about twenty Purple Hearts over the medals running down his chest to make light of this fact. Whether he was lucky or just simply the best at his craft, either way I knew there was no one else I’d want to save my ass in a firefight.

  He took off his helmet, which was beat up and scratched, and placed it on my desk as he sat down in the wobbly chair next to me. He leaned over.

  “Well, man?” he said in a calm voice.

  I thought, What do you mean? The guy he’d taken out was one of the most prominent smugglers along the border, funneling men, money, and materials to feed the insurgency. How could he not remember that?

  I started to go through this, getting a bit defensive, but then I stopped.

  It hit me.

  Eric wasn’t really asking who he had just shot and killed. He knew that already from when I’d briefed all the operators on the mission. What he was really getting at was something different: was this guy worth it?

  He was making a point that this had been a real life, and that he had taken it. In the Box I only saw his death from a distance. But right up next to me, with the wet stink of human blood on his vest, Eric was saying: this is what death looks like.

  Eric had put the target down with two shots at close range before the man even had the chance to pull the trigger on the AK-47 he was holding when the team rushed in.

  “Don’t worry, Eric. He was bad,” I said.

  That was all he wanted. That I knew. That I got this. That I didn’t take any of this lightly. That this was my death as much as his.

  We both had blood on our hands.

  He looked at me, shook his head. “Good night.” He didn’t say another word.

  As a reminder about the gravity of our actions, Eric would wear that bloodstained American flag across his vest for the rest of that deployment.

  We would never discuss this again. In general, silence was the agreement that we all made when we signed up for this. We didn’t talk about what happened, we didn’t dissect it. We lived with it inside.

  STILL, WE COULDN’T HAVE SURVIVED IF THE HUNTS DIDN’T ALSO PROVIDE THEIR own brand of perverse humor to give us all some distractions.

  For us, the best was the utter paranoia we bred in the terror cells. We’d been following a particular target for hours on a hazy, hot-as-hell day as he weaved through the streets of Mosul traffic jams like he was trying to lose someone, then followed him out into the desert, where he eventually climbed out of his car. He walked a few feet away and then looked up. He did the same thing at the front of his car and then at the back, as if the different locations might give him a better angle into the sky.

  That happened a lot. Our targets drove to the desert to listen and look for us, or just stopped along an empty stretch of road. Over the months, I could see the paranoia growing in our enemy—the worry about the unblinking eye. By now drone surveillance was becoming commonplace, and it wasn’t a secret anymore that the Iraqi skies were full of them. ISI started to issue guidance down the terrorist chain about how to counter drones. It was funny to hear the methods: tin foil on roofs, removing batteries from their own cars at night because we could somehow lock on to them. Another day a guy spent thirty minutes standing next to his car, head arched back, looking up into the clear, sunny blue sky as if it were some terrible TV show he couldn’t take his eyes off.

  But as they adapted, so did we; we flew our drones at different elevations to keep out of earshot and flew other standard military aircraft low, loud, and in separate parts of the city to trick them into thinking we were preoccupied with someone else.

  You’d think the bad guys were always up to something shady, but the truth was different when you watched them all day long from a drone. On the surface, the people we hunted were trained to appear normal, and for the most part they were. You saw some funny things people would never tell anyone about—just think about all the stuff people do when they think nobody is looking.

  A lot of people sleep on their rooftops during the summer because they don’t have air-conditioning, so we saw a lot of sex. We saw men taking craps in their backyards at night and spraying their shit everywhere. One time we were watching a guy on a roof in downtown Baghdad who we thought was sneaking up on our ground team, but when we zoomed in, he was masturbating. Another time, we caught a guy having sex with a cow on a remote farm. We laughed about that one inside the Box for days.

  I heard from a source we’d captured that the fear of our drones had begun to cause some of them to start trading in their hard-top bongo trucks for cars with sunroofs. The dumb-asses thought that they’d be able to see us when they were driving.

  The network’s leadership, meanwhile, sought refuge deeper in the shadows as we pounded them from the skies. The more drones that we brought into our army, the worse it got for them, the less time the big guys could spend out in the open. More and more, they deployed couriers to ferry instructions between the group’s various layers. Phones were constantly dumped, email mostly abandoned; Internet cafés started to lose regular business. One guy we captured had a duffel bag jammed with twenty-five different burner phones.

  IRAQ WAS STILL A TERRIBLE HELL, BUT OUR DRONE WAR WAS SHOWING SOME SIGNS of change. We saw attacks against U.S. troops fall in September and October 2009. There were fewer IEDs on the roads, not as many suicide bombers exploding, less contraband traffic coming over the borders.

  In total at this point, I ran forty missions in just under two months. Dozens of targets dead. Hundreds captured. Bill’s, Jack’s, and Mark’s teams were moving just as fast. Our interconnected missions had blanketed the northern part of Iraq, making it difficult for the enemy to sleep at night or feel comfortable meeting in large groups anymore.

  All of this was good, but we knew that it could slide the other way at any time. If we let up, things could go south fast.

  We worried about the Iraqi government and their struggle to maintain power. That summer they passed a law requiring us to go to judges for warrants to carry out operations.

  We all got a little freaked out. What did this mean?

  It didn’t make any sense. The work we did was highly classified. Few people were in on it—and for good reason. Giving out operational details to anyone outside our small circle risked leaks to the enemy.

  We couldn’t have that. We ignored the law, worked on our own terms to get the job done. The moment the law came to fruition, we slipped deeper into the shadows, right where our enemy was now digging in.

  TO OPERATE IN THE SHADOWS THE WAY WE DID, IT’S CRUCIAL TO UNDERSTAND THE extent that we worked with and relied on some extraordinarily
courageous local intelligence officers. Members of the team trained small groups of local citizens, men and women, in surveillance tactics and gave them gadgets to use for spying, like a camera in a box of cigarettes or a camera in a key chain. We codenamed this group the “Cobras.” Many of them gathered intel for us for years in places we simply couldn’t get to ourselves.

  Since we couldn’t just walk into the middle of a city without being noticed, we’d communicate with our Cobras in real time through the birds flying far overhead. Often they would direct our drone’s eyes right on a target for strike. These locals worked with us because in one way or another the terrorists we hunted had turned their world upside down. The locals wanted better lives for their families, community, and country.

  One day, we had a ground pursuit going for a target we needed a photo of for a visual confirmation. He’d been holed up for months in a housing complex where we had precious few opportunities for any kind of visual confirmation from the drone. So on a lucky day when he left his hideout, we sent in our Iraqi to follow him by car. But things got a little hairy.

  There was too much separation between the cars, and then a traffic jam, which was a stroke of luck, because at least the target was fixed for a moment. Our guy was ten cars back, and all of a sudden he jumped out of his car and started moving in the direction of the target.

  What’s he doing?

  The Iraqi just strolled through traffic, cursing and yelling at everything and everyone, pretending to be pissed off at traffic. He ranted for a good fifteen car lengths, doing this crazy act, and on the walk back to his car he snapped a picture of our target. Perfect photo.

  “YOU HAVE A SECOND TO TALK?”

  It was Bill on the phone. Something was up.

  “Only a second,” I said. “We’re following a target through the city. He’s dynamic. What’s going on?”

  I had the phone pressed to my ear, held between my shoulder and head as I kept my eyes glued to the drone feed as my target rushed through a crowded market in a white truck, making turns, stopping at lights. He had a truckload of bombs that could explode at any time. I couldn’t lose focus.

  “We got an emergency message in from the HQ back home,” Bill said, referring to our home base in North Carolina.

  I half-heard him the first time. “What happened?”

  “We got an emergency message. Your family is trying to get a hold of you but they don’t know where you are in the world.”

  His voice suddenly came into clear focus.

  “What’s going on?”

  I hadn’t spoken to my mother or anyone in my family since I’d arrived in Iraq more than two months before. This was when I realized for the first time that I had for the most part forgotten all about them. My family had been replaced by the team members around me and the drones had swallowed me up.

  “It’s your cousin,” he said. “He died in a car accident. Sounds like it was really bad.”

  For a second I didn’t say anything. I tried to take it in, grasp it. I grew up with AJ in Texas. The news suddenly snapped my mind back to my hometown and what I had left behind. He was twenty-two—three years younger than me. We used to be close, almost like brothers. I spent my summers at his house in Odessa because he had a big pool and a huge backyard that led out into the arid land stretching for miles nearby. I remember us trying to drown each other in his pool and camping out overnight in his backyard far away from the house. One night a massive storm came through and I woke suddenly to a lightning strike. I found him holding the tent corners down with all his strength, the wind swirling, heavy rain, and the crackle of thunder all around us. The tent felt like it was about to lift off, like we were going to be swept up by the same tornado as in Twister. When we got our courage up, we popped our heads out through the opening, counted down from three, and made a frantic dash to the house through the dark, slashing night. We were young, but it felt like we’d just escaped death.

  I found out later in regard to his accident that he’d slammed his car into a railing on a bridge and died instantly. It should have been awful life-stopping news. But I just couldn’t think about it as I sat in the Box. It was so far away and I was living in the mission in front of me.

  “Okay, thanks for letting me know,” I said to Bill. “I have to go now. I don’t want to miss something significant with this target.”

  Bill tried to break through my fog and pull me out.

  “Listen, I’ve been doing this a long time and I know what you are thinking,” he said. “I have had a few close family members die over the years and I always chose the mission over seeing them. I wish I could take that back.”

  He stopped for a second and then said, “Hey, listen up. I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. None of this is worth more than your family. None of it. You should go home, go to the funeral. We’ll set up a flight to get you back right away.”

  But I didn’t want to go anywhere. “I can’t, Bill. This is more important right now.”

  Bill finally gave up. The last thing he said before hanging up the phone was “You’ll regret not going.” And that was it.

  The funeral would happen a few days later. Everyone in my family would be there. When people asked where I was, my mother would tell them that she couldn’t get a hold of me because I was somewhere overseas. I wouldn’t call.

  At the time, it seemed like the right decision. I couldn’t see anything outside the drones and my personal mission. I was fighting the great war and saving lives. Years later I’d wonder if all the killing and the destruction we did was worth it. Why didn’t I say goodbye?

  But that was still years away.

  The mission pushed all that out of the way for now. That night, we took out the bomber I had been pursuing. And then the phone rang again; another target popped up on my radar.

  It was the agency now. No time to think.

  THE AGENCY HAD A SOURCE WHO MIGHT KNOW THE LOCATION OF MANHATTAN AND Brooklyn, the top of the pyramid we were in the midst of dismantling.

  “Come to us,” they said. “You need to meet him.”

  I worked with the agency often. They were in weekly target meetings and we hunted together sometimes. They needed us because we controlled the drones in the war zones and had operators to go in and kick down doors.

  Still, there was bad blood between us at times. Our team had a strong distaste for them because we’d been burned by their bureaucracy, gotten tips that didn’t pan out. Their guys would take credit for our missions. We would get wind of reports they’d send back to their headquarters in Langley, Virginia, telling their superiors they were responsible for our latest kills. Some of our guys wouldn’t even talk to them. Many hung up when they called. The feeling was mutual. Some of the senior analysts at the agency didn’t like us because they thought we had too much power. But intelligence collection had changed drastically in the years after 9/11. The agency wasn’t the only game in town anymore and they didn’t like that.

  When Bill heard about the tip, he warned me. “You should think about it before going anywhere.” He had little faith in their sources, especially someone saying he could bring us to the top leaders. I understood that. But at the same time, I felt that no possible tip on Manhattan and Brooklyn could be ignored.

  13

  WILD GOOSE

  CHASES

  The next morning I jumped on a helo with one of our operators and headed to a secret outpost in Baghdad. I packed lightly, just a computer, my sidearm, and some body armor.

  We landed on a tiny airstrip in the north of Iraq where an agent picked us up in an armored car and shuttled us to their base. It was late morning, hot as usual. Sweat beaded on my forehead.

  The outpost was one of Saddam Hussein’s old palaces: sprawling and made from stone, with a pool and a bunch of smaller buildings sprinkled around the larger main house.

  Usually places like this were guarded by traditional military men in military gear. This was heavily protected by men in civilian clothes.

>   Inside one of the guesthouses, the agent who’d called us waited with a translator and the source. I’d never met the agency officer before. All I remembered about him was that he had a mustache, was a fast talker, and was a big believer in his source, whom I called Silencer.

  I DIDN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT SILENCER, BUT THAT WAS COMMON. FOR SECURITY we’re usually kept in the dark about the intelligence sources of others. We all used sources. Some were good; others were just doing it for the money. Silencer was definitely getting paid a lot. At the beginning of our meeting the agent had dropped a large stack of cash on the table in front of us just for him, tens of thousands of dollars at least.

  I didn’t like him right away. When we shook hands, he didn’t look me in the eye. He was tall and his mustache was unevenly shaved, the left side shorter than the other. Later, I’d find out that he’d been responsible for the deaths of some U.S. soldiers. The FBI actually had a standing warrant out for his arrest, even as the agency protected him. He was an evil human being, for sure, but we had to deal with a lot of questionable kinds to save other lives. It was a messy business.

  The room was filled with nice leather furniture, an oak table, polished hardwood floors—definitely a place that would make a visitor feel comfortable, compared to a traditional Iraqi room with hard, uninviting, dusty furniture that always looked like it had been dragged out of some bunker.

  We sat down at the table, had Cokes and Iraqi shawarma, and talked casually about the country and local politics to loosen things up and make him feel comfortable before we turned to business.

  “He can help us,” the officer said finally, making a hand gesture in Silencer’s direction.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  I was armed with enough information on the network to poke holes in anything that seemed far-fetched.

  “Why do they trust you?” I wanted to know. We’d been hunting Manhattan and Brooklyn for years. They’d been ghosts. “How would you be able to get close to them without them being suspicious?”