Drone Warrior Read online

  MOST OF MY FAMILY AND OLD FRIENDS HAD NO IDEA WHAT I DID, EVEN THOSE WHO were close to me. People had their own lives to think about, jobs and families. The war on terror had gotten old after nearly a decade and in that time terrorist attacks around the world had become commonplace. America was becoming desensitized to the horrors of terrorism. In turn, the media cared less about reporting on military operations and the rising death tolls. At the beginning of the global war on terror you saw an attack that killed ten people reported on the front page of CNN. Now highly coordinated suicide bombings that killed fifty or more were lucky to make the bottom ticker. Everyone else had moved on, except for those of us who continued to live it, like my team.

  I wanted to get back in the action because that was all I knew now, back to where I could be surrounded by people who got what I was going through, what I’d seen, without having to explain. The same went for the rest of my team. Until we got back, we were all in a holding pattern, waiting for our war lives to start up again. We were hungry but didn’t know what would make the hunger go away.

  Days passed and the waiting turned to boredom. I flipped on the TV, but there was never anything I felt like watching. My mind kept wandering to the targets I had left behind. Evil people who were still out there. Manhattan and Brooklyn. Sometimes I walked outside the condo with a three-iron and drove balls off the thirteenth hole late into the night. One after the other. I wasn’t very skilled, but it felt good to strike the balls and watch them sail off into the darkness.

  I also took long drives. I had a Corvette and liked to speed down the long stretches outside of town just to feel something. But I grew agitated with traffic and the new speed bumps they had installed in our neighborhood. I wasn’t normally hot-tempered but the war had changed that. Sitting at a standstill on the highway got me anxious at times, even a little paranoid.

  “Come on, let’s go!” I shouted at a silver Camry stopped in front of me one afternoon on my way to the mall. I looked in my rearview and up at the sky, as if there might be someone watching me. The watcher becomes the watched. The sky was blue like Iraq. I had to remind myself I was in North Carolina.

  One afternoon I got into an argument with a woman from Time Warner about installing my Internet. It wasn’t working at home and I started freaking out about it. “Sir, I can help you,” she said. “No you can’t.” I hung up.

  I was used to the efficiency of the Box. Out there I had every resource and support personnel I needed to get the job done. If I needed highly encrypted Internet in the middle of a barren desert, it was done—and these guys couldn’t even install my Internet correctly in the suburbs?

  I SAW MY MOTHER AROUND THIS TIME. IT HAD BEEN OVER A YEAR SINCE I HAD SEEN her last. She came up for a visit and we went out for dinner at an Italian restaurant chain. I was happy to see her because it had been so long. But everything felt stifled. When we sat down and she asked what I had been doing overseas, there was nothing I could say.

  “Not much,” I said, chewing a piece of bread.

  “Something must have happened.”

  I couldn’t say, but at the same time I didn’t want to lie.

  Before drones, I had told her a little more about my assignments. There wasn’t anything particularly secret about them. She knew exactly where I was overseas most of the time. I never told her anymore about where or what and it was probably better that she was in the dark. Maybe she wouldn’t have agreed with my choices, some of the things I was in charge of doing.

  “Just another deployment,” I said.

  The dinner dragged on like this. It was hard not being able to tell my mom anything. I wanted to tell her that I was making her proud, explain that we were doing things to save lives and protect Americans like her. Because I’m sure she imagined the worst, that the military had corrupted me or that maybe I had seen so many bad things I would need some sort of medical help later in life. It probably didn’t help that PTSD was becoming a common term for soldiers returning from battle. None of that was the actual case. The secrets hurt sometimes.

  When our food came to the table, I didn’t look up much, but I could tell she was watching me stab my rigatoni, as if she might be able to understand something from it, as if she might pick up a signal that I was okay.

  “Why are you being so short?” she asked finally. “It’s like you don’t care to talk to me.”

  Once we’d shared a world together in that small house in Katy, Texas, and now she had her world and I had mine and the two were hard to bring together. She didn’t bring up my cousin who had died. And I was grateful for that.

  I asked her to tell me about her new job and she relented and didn’t ask any more questions about the war. She spent the rest of the night talking about her move from Texas to North Carolina and her work as a business analyst. She seemed happy about that. She did press me about my weight as we got up to leave. “You’re so skinny,” she said as we stood by our cars. “You need to eat more.” I told her that I would.

  AFTER THE FIRST WEEK BACK, I HEADED IN TO THE UNIT’S HEADQUARTERS, AS IF IT were an itch I needed to scratch. It was a fifteen-minute drive and the first thing I did was flip open my laptop and connect to the live drone feeds. I watched the birds look down over a stretch of desert in northern Iraq. I switched to another feed and watched a white van weave through traffic. Another camera was zoomed in on a mud hut out in Yemen as a target went about his day.

  Bill and Jack were there, too. They were as addicted to it as I was. I found being in the office more comfortable than being at the condo. We spent days going over old missions, watching our drone videos, looking at what decisions were made and how things might have been better, like a team combing through old game tapes.

  We also dug into old intelligence files for things we might have missed the first time around. We talked strategy for next time because each of us wanted in his own way to have another go at the guys we didn’t get.

  Scarface came up one afternoon in the underground office, files flung out around us, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. “Man, I wish we’d followed him longer,” I said.

  “We could have used him to map the network,” Bill came back.

  “The main thing is to spend more time following these guys around,” Jack said.

  That was the main mistake I had made over there—not following targets around long enough for them to lead us even higher up the terrorist chain. I had let the operators with more experience convince me that we should strike, to satisfy their own craving for action.

  Bill liked to tell the story of the famous hunt for the Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They’d watched Zarqawi’s spiritual advisor for a full month, just going about his business, doing nothing notable. It had been tempting to take him out, watching him twenty-four hours a day for weeks. Everyone was antsy and every day he and his team had argued with the operators about why it was important to stay put. They waited until that one day. “He packed up his family into a vehicle and traveled hours outside of the city,” Bill explained. “He drove straight to Zarqawi’s location. And we got them all.

  “Patience,” he added. “That’s when you get the big fish.”

  DURING THE MONTHS I WAS HOME, WE CARRIED PAGERS AND WERE ALWAYS ON call. The unit kept a tight leash in the event there was a global incident that needed our response.

  Pagers, outdated though they might seem, kept the enemy from tracking us. Cell phones were more easily hacked. At night I kept my pager on my bedside table, waiting for the call to go back to Iraq. My black duffel bag of gear was ready to go. Sometimes it went off in the middle of the night and I raced to the office in my car, running red lights, my blood flowing again. They were just drills mostly, but I loved it and you never knew when it would be real.

  I kept up to speed on the teams that replaced us and monitored the reports of their operations as they came in—I needed to know what we’d be climbing back into when we returned.

  There were rumors, of course, abou
t when we’d be going. It would likely be Iraq again. But no one would confirm it. Probably because we never really knew for sure until it happened. Things were constantly changing.

  Sources were telling us that the network was hurting for new recruits, people to keep the cells going, as we killed guys off. Some of the cells had begun to show significant gaps in leadership: one was missing a military emir (we killed Scarface); another was missing an administrative leader (we captured Usamah); and another cell only had a logistics emir left.

  The new leaders also seemed to be getting younger and younger, as experienced ISI guys continued to fall with every additional strike by our teams.

  We never forgot Manhattan and Brooklyn. We watched for clues but somehow they managed to stay out of sight. From what we could tell, they were getting better at hiding, using more couriers, adding more layers above them, sinking deeper into the desert.

  The days were also jammed with a lot of training—and that helped distract me. One week there were war games in a warehouse that had been retrofitted to look like a city block in Iraq, with dozens of actors playing insurgents. Later I was in Poland sharing counterterrorism tactics with the GROM special forces. Then I was back in North Carolina again, jumping out of airplanes.

  Then there were the suits. I hated the suits.

  It wasn’t unusual for us to go to D.C. to debrief the other intelligence agencies—FBI, DIA, NSA, and NGA—so they could learn from our experiences. We called these guys nine-to-five. A bunch of suits: the “Beltway Bandits.” They were always curious about how we were able to find targets so fast. They liked to pick our brains and talk about the bad guys they were following in their cable traffic while we were busy in the field taking them down.

  There had been a time before 9/11 when we didn’t mix or work well together at all, when everyone guarded their information. That only hurt the overall goal of saving American lives in the long run. Our efforts at closer collaboration and strengthening relationships enabled us to turn the war around.

  But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t ask stupid questions. They did.

  “Whatever happened to terrorist leader X?”

  “Well, our group killed him a few years ago.”

  “Oh, guess I’ll take him off my chart.”

  Or another guy had no idea the military controlled more drones in the sky than his own organization did. He thought they were only being used in Pakistan. At the same time, however, these meetings were important for us because maybe there was an analyst who didn’t know he could reach out to me and how he could call with time-sensitive information. Who knew when they might turn up something or someone we’d been hunting for months. Sometimes it was that one missing piece of information that brought down an entire empire.

  The girls there always seemed to perk up when we arrived. They were from Defense Intelligence Agency, which was a kind of connective tissue between all the military branches. There was something that got these girls hooked when they worked with us or the SEALs. I think they got a taste of what it was like to get out from behind their desks—we called it “touching the magic.” The upside for us was that the girls from DIA were always good-looking.

  We met the suits three weeks in a row and things went smoothly until week four, when the meetings started to wear on me. That’s when Jack called. It was February 2010.

  “I need you immediately,” he said. “We’re going back downrange.”

  Heading back to Iraq.

  “You ready?”

  I was ready weeks ago.

  15

  THE BOYS ARE

  BACK IN TOWN

  “What’s the plan?” Jason asked as the Black Hawk raced us to our headquarters in the center of Baghdad. It was February 2010. We were both eager to get started again.

  “I got the list,” I said. “That’s the plan.”

  Jason was the new assault commander—super smart, a West Pointer and Ranger before becoming a unit member. He replaced Max, who had been assigned to another part of the world.

  The kill list was the list the Beltway Bandits had sent me just before leaving North Carolina. Twenty of the most wanted men across Iraq. The worst of the worst, the cockroaches who survived the Surge.

  The people on this list made up the ISI network’s core leadership. Even though I’d already done a tour in the Box, I was still the young guy. I was a lot more battle-ready, but I still had no idea what to expect. That’s what I loved about drone warfare.

  In camo, Jason was G.I. Joe: tall and ropey, with short blond hair. He was well-known among the guys for winning a few military fitness competitions and was looking to prove himself on the battlefield. At some point he’d actually been an extra in a movie about surfers in Hawaii and the guys liked to crack jokes about him being Mr. Hollywood.

  Most team commanders let us do our intel thing and worried only about the operators. Jason was different. He wanted to understand exactly how we gathered our intelligence and made the decisions about who to go after and kill.

  We landed in our own blocked-off area on the base, grabbed our bags, and headed for the Box to meet the team we were replacing. High fencing surrounded us, the city just outside. Our base was inside a couple of old Iraqi government buildings in the international Green Zone. Everything had been rebuilt with plywood—walls, chairs, desks, beds. I had a plywood bunk bed to myself that smelled of undried paint. Not much better than the last place I lived, but who was I kidding? I wouldn’t spend much time in bed anyway. We had a name for this place: the Plywood Palace.

  “The A team’s here,” I said, walking in. Nothing like a good joke to get things started. It was around 1 A.M. Marty, the intel lead, gave an eye roll. He was stiff and had been around for a while. “Things have been nonstop,” he said, getting down to business. He was ready to head home.

  The Box was just a few steps off the chopper landing, through multiple doors with cipher locks. It was double the size of the one at my last deployment months ago. The wood desks were tiered upward like a movie theater and the front wall was hung with a dozen sixty-inch TVs tuned into our birds flying in different parts of the country. The smell of it was familiar: bodies, sweat, and old coffee. Home sweet home. But this one was flashier and felt more like the center of the universe. It also came equipped with three drones.

  The first thing I did was pop open my laptop and flip it on. This was the brain of the operation now. We didn’t even really need the Box these days. I could set up a top-secret encrypted Internet network anywhere in the world with connections through satellites. I could control a fleet of drones from a hotel suite if necessary.

  I grabbed a Rip It out of the fridge at the back and Marty and I talked late into the night. He laid out everything they’d done: kills, captures, who was still out there.

  One thing about the Baghdad box was that it was the place all the top hunters wanted to hunt. The city had always been a key stomping ground for bad guys. Even with the heavy security checkpoints, Marty and his team had started seeing a rise in enemy leaders popping up across the city. They’d knocked off some of the network and the Surge was clearly working. Fewer American troops were getting killed each month and the country was settling down. President Obama was talking about armed forces leaving next year. But the network’s commanders were still in the wind and he confirmed the rumors we’d been hearing back home. “The network is getting a lot smarter,” he said. “They’re adapting to us.”

  I asked about the two leaders, Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  “Nothing.”

  After that, Marty and his team were out the door, gear bags on the choppers and heading home. “Good luck,” he said.

  When we officially took over, I remembered thinking, Fuck, where do I start?

  The world felt like it had suddenly fallen smack onto my back, and it was more than a bit unsettling. I truly believed that there was no other group capable of doing what we did. The larger military didn’t have a chance getting these guys. It was up to us, i
t was up to me.

  My team was around ten now. Kate was my new Jake, the tactical controller, who sat next to me, passing along my instructions through chat to the camera operator and Predator pilots. She was Air Force, young, thin, and pale like she didn’t get sun, with very long brown hair that she kept tied up in a ponytail. She was unassuming otherwise. She came to get the job done, she did it expertly, and she didn’t waste her breath on anything.

  The FBI, DIA, NSA, and NGA had all sent people. I had been hooked up with superstars from nearly every agency—a testament to how close we worked together after 9/11. It was good to have others experienced in our craft on the team because we didn’t have time to bring them up to speed.

  One of the superstars was the map genius, Brian. Straight out of college, he’d joined the NGA and worked his way up the chain to land here. It was like he was born with maps in his head. He could get me things that others couldn’t—the 3-D layout of a building in Baghdad, all kinds of military terrain maps. He could literally move top-secret satellites in order to give us crystal-clear images from space of neighborhoods from every imaginable angle. Like all of us, he was young and eager, and he was always in my ear, saying things like, “You seeing this, dawg?” “Check it out, bro.” He talked like kids on the street.

  Mark, my teammate and superior from back home, was also there. Being so close to Baghdad, we’d frequently meet up with various U.S. generals and senior Iraqi government officials, like Prime Minister Maliki, who wanted to be briefed regularly about our missions. Mark took on those high-level meetings and spent most of his time keeping the seniors out of my business. I ran the day-to-day targeting.

  I was tired from the ride in but spent the next day sucking down Rip Its and getting up to speed. I made one run to the chow hall in a building next door. Same cereal in the plastic bowls—plenty of Frosted Flakes to eat.

  We knew the top twenty guys we needed to go after but most of our leads had been run down by the group before us. They had killed or captured all of the smaller fish over the last four months, but these were the leads we could have used to find the big guys. The reality was that the other team simply hadn’t left us much to go on.