Drone Warrior Page 13

  Silencer said that he hadn’t seen them but knew how to get to their location. He had worked with ISI and was friends with others in northern Iraq who knew the leaders’ whereabouts. “They trust me like family,” he said. “I will have no problems getting to them.”

  He didn’t know all the guys in the network in the area he talked about, but we wanted to believe that he was a credible source. Mainly we trusted the agency to be right about him.

  By the end of our conversation, we decided to go with him and worked out a plan. Silencer said that he would go up north to meet a guy who would take him to people close to the leaders. He said they would blindfold him, make changes to what he was wearing, and move him around to different safe houses so that he wouldn’t know where he was for days. It was like entering a maze, he said. Then they would take him to a secret location for the meeting.

  “If you follow me for two or three days,” he said, “you will find your Jackpot.”

  THE WORRY IN THESE SITUATIONS WAS THAT THE SOURCE COULD VANISH: EITHER the network discovered him to be a rat and killed him or he got cold feet and decided to become a ghost on his own.

  Later, when he was with the two men, he’d pull a series of strings connected to sophisticated tracking devices our technical guys had sewn into a special book he was holding. One string would send us a signal that the meeting was taking place. And the second was for when he left them. That was also when our team would know to strike.

  The one thing I didn’t tell him that night was that we’d also be watching every move he made along the way from the sky—our birds would be on him, making sure he was doing what he said he was going to do. Our security.

  Three hours later, I said good luck to Silencer and the team there, climbed back on the helo, and headed back to the Box. We were on.

  BY 7 A.M. WE HAD THREE BIRDS UP IN THE SKY, BUT NO SIGN OF SILENCER ON THE ground.

  “Where’s your source at?” I said over the radio. “We’re overtop the location now.”

  The streets of downtown Baghdad were already jammed with cars and people and bikes.

  “Give him a few more minutes,” the officer said. “He’ll be there.”

  The night before, I’d gotten the commander to give us two more Predators along with ours for the mission. One came from Bill’s group, the other from Jack’s. We didn’t want to take any chances on this case.

  On the other side of the drone feed, a large audience had gathered to watch the show. The high commanders watched on their monitors from different parts of the country, same with people back in the United States. Bill’s and Jack’s teams were on the feed, too, in case we needed their operators. It was turning out to be like the Super Bowl.

  “Is that him?”

  A white Toyota Corolla suddenly approached the street we’d been watching and a man exited the vehicle to make a phone call.

  “Gray slacks, yellow polo shirt, white Toyota Corolla,” I said.

  “That’s him.”

  When he got back in his car and began to drive, we had no idea where he’d go—just north. From then on, there would be no direct contact. Going forward would be like a game of chess. He’d move and then we had to countermove, calling around to multiple agencies to clear out the airspace for our drone army to follow.

  “Looks like we’re in business,” I said.

  Silencer traveled a few hours north of the city, like he said, before stopping at a low-slung concrete house outside of Tikrit with a big dusty backyard and lawn furniture scattered about like they were expecting a party.

  He went inside but a few minutes later emerged with two other men. Instead of going anywhere, they plopped themselves down on three lawn chairs and began to smoke and drink, like they didn’t have a care in the world. I saw one of them had his feet kicked out and crossed as if he couldn’t be happier.

  What the hell was going on? Hours passed and no strings were pulled. As far as we could tell, the house was totally normal. No security guards, no unusual activity inside or out. The streets around were calm. No movement on any of the rooftops.

  The oddest thing was that Silencer still hadn’t pulled the first string—the one meant just as a test. Maybe we should have started to worry at this point, but we waited. I chomped on some granola bars and then a bowl of Frosted Flakes. Then I paced around the Box. It started to annoy me to look at the monitors and see him lounging around with smokes and drinks. Who did he think he was? Something seemed off. I started getting messages on our secure chat line from Bill and Jack telling me this guy was full of it. But all the time the agency officer continued to reassure me that Silencer was good to go, that this was how he worked.

  “Everyone needs to just calm down. I trained this guy myself. He knows what he’s doing,” he said.

  It was three hours before Silencer finally left. One of the men tagged along with him and they drove to an ice cream stand not far away at the side of the road, where they began to talk to either a worker or the owner.

  “Do we have any previous reporting from this location?” I asked Jake.

  A quick search of our files was done.

  “Looks like the spot was cited as a location for a date stand connected to Al Qaeda in Iraq.”

  This seemed potentially promising. At least there was some link.

  “Do we know the name of the guy who owns it?”

  “No name given.”

  I had the three drones stacked on top of each other, orbiting at different altitudes.

  Silencer still hadn’t pulled the first string.

  On our screens, the three men sat around the stand for an hour or so until the ice cream stand closed down for the day. By then it was getting close to sunset and I was starting to lose my patience.

  The men split up. Silencer got back into his Corolla, while the ice cream guy climbed into his car, along with the third man.

  “The priority is still the source but I want to know where these other guys are going,” I said, preparing to divide up the drones.

  At first the cars stayed together. Through heavy traffic, they traveled for a couple of miles before stopping at another house, where they stayed for an hour. Pretty uneventful there, too.

  The ice cream guy left first, along with the other guy. They all drove to another house, where they stayed for the night. The house was nicer than most, with a manicured yard, palm trees, and even a separate guesthouse out back. Chapter closed on them. Nothing to pursue.

  But not Silencer. Not long after the lights went out, he left the house and climbed back into his car. Within minutes of pulling into traffic, something alarming happened. He yanked the second signal string in his book.

  Was this for real?

  We all looked at each other in the Box. The second string meant that he was in the presence of the two leaders.

  I immediately got on the radio to confirm that the second beacon had indeed been activated. “Are you sure?” I said. It had. That’s when the chaos began and everything got turned upside down.

  Are the leaders in the house or did our source fuck up the signal? Should we launch an operation?

  IN OUR FILES, THE HOUSE THAT SILENCER HAD JUST LEFT DIDN’T HAVE ANY TERRORISM ties. It was in an upscale neighborhood of similarly trimmed gardens surrounded by garbage-free streets—an unusual thing for Iraq. There wasn’t any visible security or signs on the block that something was being hidden—not a lot of cars outside the house, no one standing guard on the roof, no weapons that we could see.

  High-level terrorists wouldn’t be at a house like this in the middle of a city. These guys were always on the go and they’d want to conduct a meeting with Silencer swiftly and covertly. They knew that we had sources and that anyone outside their circle would be a danger to them. Something didn’t add up.

  We watched Silencer drive, making turns from one street to the next. If this was real, we were losing time.

  “Jake,” I said, “can the sensor operator rewind our tapes to see if anyone else got in the
vehicle with him?” I wanted to make sure he was alone. The recorded drone video appeared on the screen and we played it back in slow motion. He was alone.

  I started to get angry—was this guy fucking with us? He’d been running us around all day. We looked like fools in front of all the commanders watching.

  “Do we know how many people were in the house?”

  “Just the three who’d gone in.”

  Other teams began to call into the Box, wondering what was up.

  “This guy’s not real,” said Bill. “He’s fucking with us.”

  I looked back at my meeting notes regarding the chain of events Silencer said would happen once he left that morning—he was supposed to go immediately to his source, who would take him to the leaders. None of that had happened. All he’d been doing was drinking and smoking with friends, and then the pit stop for ice cream.

  I had wanted to believe in Silencer. I had wanted to believe there was an easy way to find Manhattan and Brooklyn, that we could wrap up our deployment there with them in body bags. I had wanted to believe in this mission. I felt duped—and it had to end.

  My pride wanted me to keep pursuing the lead, but my gut told me differently. Silencer had wasted our time, money, and precious resources.

  I called the commander and said we were standing down the operators. The officer didn’t argue about it. Having watched the video, they’d also come around to the fact that their source was crap. A few months later they’d fire him and issue an official burn notice as a result—to the disappointment of the officer who’d spent months recruiting him. Silencer won in the end, though; he had come away with hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars through years of providing the agency with false leads and fabricated intelligence. Our only redemption was now the FBI could take their gloves off, because the agency wasn’t protecting him anymore.

  “WE’RE WORRIED ABOUT YOU,” MAX SAID ONE NIGHT AFTER COMING IN FROM CAPTURING a target across the border. “Seriously, man, you’re going to disappear if you lose any more weight. You need to rest.”

  It was late. I shrugged him off as usual. I went back to my room later and took a look at myself in the mirror. Oh shit.

  My skin hadn’t seen the sun in weeks, because I’d been staring at TV screens nonstop for months on end. My teeth were yellow. So were the whites of my eyes, the bags underneath starting to look permanent. I looked like a dying version of my old self.

  I walked over to the shower and pulled out a scale. I was down nearly forty pounds now. No wonder my cargo pants didn’t fit anymore. Everything was loose on me.

  The stress and pressure of finding targets had taken its toll. I’d been going for four months, but it felt like years. Long hours filled with energy drinks, candy bars, and nothing else. It had gotten harder and harder to wake up after a few hours of sleep. I was running on empty.

  If it weren’t for the fact that we were leaving in a few days, the beating my body took would have only continued to worsen. My physical and mental state was less important to me than not running out of time to pursue my targets.

  “Whatever it takes,” I told myself out loud while taking one last glimpse in the mirror before heading back to the Box.

  Luckily, my first deployment wound down after that, just a few more days, with a few more missions, and it was over.

  It was November 2009—the end of our assignment. There was no sendoff. Our replacement team arrived on helicopters and, once we’d gotten them up to speed on the missions we had in the works, those same choppers ferried us out.

  As I got on the plane home with Bill, Mark, and the rest of the team, my body was shot. It wouldn’t have let me continue much longer. I needed rest.

  We arrived back in the States on a C-17 cargo plane in the middle of the night. Other military units returned to a celebration—marching bands, families with signs waving, announcements of their return in the local papers. Not us.

  The landing strip in Virginia was empty and dark, except for the workers servicing the plane.

  When I stepped off the ramp of the cargo plane with my gear, the desolation of the moment overcame me for a minute. We had accomplished a lot in a short amount of time. Missions accomplished that would have taken conventional forces months, if not years, to carry out, if they could have handled them at all. Except there was no one there to share the successes with other than ourselves. It was the way our unit liked it, and I had to learn to get used to it. For us, it was like any other day.

  That night I drove to my condominium in North Carolina, squinting to keep awake behind the wheel, before finally falling into my bed. I don’t remember taking off my clothes. I don’t remember talking to my girlfriend Sarah at the time; we hadn’t spoken in months. My new life left very little time to talk with her and I couldn’t tell her anything about it. My life outside the office had begun to divide itself further, but I couldn’t think about it for now. I closed my eyes and pretty much slept for three days straight.

  14

  HOME?

  In North Carolina, I lived on the thirteenth hole of a community golf course, miles outside the main town. The secluded complex was surrounded by woods. I had to drive ten or fifteen minutes just to get to the nearest grocery store or restaurant. But HQ was close. Through some winding back roads, past farms and fields, was a secret entrance. It was located there to help prevent our being seen—and in case we were being followed.

  The first few days I woke up strung-out, like coming off an amphetamine bender. My head hurt as I plodded around the condo. I was thirsty and my stomach felt hollowed out. One of the first things I ate was a big American burger, everything on it. My girlfriend Sarah watched me devour it.

  “A little hungry?” she said, trying to edge into a conversation.

  “Starving,” I said, looking up for a second and then going back to it.

  We tried to talk that night. Anything resembling normalcy was no longer easy. There was so much death and destruction behind me, inside me, really. How do you have a conversation after seeing what I’d seen, doing what I’d done? The transition was harder than coming home from a war zone in the past. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t as if I had experienced some horrors and a PTSD-like event. I was behind a desk most of the time and didn’t see nearly the action the operators did. They were the real heroes. It was more the fact that my life had changed virtually overnight, the sensory overload of being brought into a world that I never knew existed and then having to perform almost around the clock. My mental capacity had been jolted, almost like waking up and discovering you had been taken to another planet, and nothing you knew before existed anymore.

  I couldn’t talk to anyone at home about anything. Everything I did was top secret. I’m not sure I wanted to talk about it anyway, fearing that people outside of it wouldn’t understand. It made any kind of interaction difficult. Normal sentences became censored, my mind reciting the lines in my head multiple times before they were spoken aloud. It forced me to become quieter and more introverted. I simply shut down when I wasn’t in the office.

  But still I just couldn’t get the war out of my head—the cameras looking down at our targets, following them wherever they went, watching other people’s families and lives unfold right in front of me. I was killing the worst terrorists in the world one day and the next day sitting at a cozy restaurant, chomping a burger with cheese and bacon and watching people around me talking and laughing, without a care in the world. Could normal life be this surreal? It was like I had been living inside a nonstop action movie and all of a sudden someone hit the stop button, ejecting me out of it. Now I didn’t recognize the place I had landed.

  When we got home from dinner that night, Sarah pressed me some more. “What happened over there?”

  It was late, but I wasn’t tired. We sat on the couch in the living room. I tried to look at her and she followed my gaze until I couldn’t look anymore and turned away.

  “Your eyes, they don’t look the same,” she said.
/>   “My eyes?”

  “They’re like stones. They just sit there.”

  The silence that rose up between us was unbearable. It made the night shrill. The crickets were out in the woods and golf course, whining and chirping louder than the whirl and beep of our computers in the Box after missions.

  I wanted to tell her about all of it, but I knew better.

  I shifted the conversation away from me to her that night and the rest of the nights going forward. I wasn’t a very good listener and didn’t hear a lot of it and I’m sure she knew. I had trouble looking her in the eyes.

  When you’re a soldier on deployment, you forget what life back home is like. The people you leave behind also forget about you while you’re gone. You change and they change. And you stick out like a sore thumb when you come home.

  Some soldiers see combat as a break from their families, their wives, the monotony of the day-to-day grind that is normal life. I liked that you didn’t have to deal with all the bullshit of life back home that takes up so much time, like random text messages, always being on your phone, driving in traffic just to get groceries.

  None of that was required overseas. Our teams were virtually self-sufficient because of the amazing infrastructure built to support all our operations.

  I wanted to look at the war and home as two separate lives, like a split screen. But sometimes creating that separation was impossible.

  That first week back was the hardest. The tension grew between Sarah and me. But it was impossible to avoid. We were together, sleeping in the same room, eating breakfast and dinner at the same table—but I might as well have been on Mars.

  “Are you even here?” she asked me another night.

  “Come on, Sarah.”

  “You come on. You need to talk to me. We need to talk.”

  “We’re talking,” I said.

  “Has someone kidnapped you?” She was joking, but she really wasn’t.