Drone Warrior Read online

  I worried that the mission was going to be a disaster. I had the birds coming on station soon and the operators would be banging at the doors to get out. I suddenly needed a mission like a junkie needed a fix.

  That’s when we got our first tip about the bomber.

  THE BOMBER WAS A MASTER OF ROADSIDE KILLINGS, A KIND OF ASSASSIN OF THE highways. If you needed someone to die in a car, if you wanted to knock out a U.S. military convoy, he was the guy ISI called.

  Intel came in that the bomber was shacked up at a falling-down concrete house not too far from the Green Zone. At first, I wasn’t sure if we should bother. Typically we’d leave a low-level guy like him to the regular military forces or the locals. We got flooded with intel reports on these lower-level fighters and most times we didn’t pay much attention. That would just turn our job into Whac-A-Mole. But this guy was different.

  Deep in one of the files, I found a report connecting him to a commander named Manaf al-Rawi. Rawi was big-time. He was the leader of ISI for the entire city—the Baghdad Wali, the commander of the district commanders. We even had a name for him, Objective Dark Horse. Dark Horse was one of the few who likely spoke to Brooklyn and Manhattan. It was a long shot, but maybe picking up this low-level fighter could lead us up the chain.

  It didn’t take long to figure out where the bomber was hiding out and Jason made the call to grab him that night. He was bunked down at a house in the Mansour district, an area of the city known for terrorist hideouts. Jason and the operators did what they did best. They crashed the place, grabbed him, and got out without a problem.

  It was early morning when they got him back to the Box—the bomber almost immediately cracked. He claimed that he hadn’t seen Dark Horse in years. But then he gave us something else—a real gift. “You know the Baghdad Sniper? I can tell you where he is.”

  THE BAGHDAD SNIPER WAS INFAMOUS. PEOPLE CONSIDERED HIM ONE OF THE MOST ruthless killers in the war, with hundreds of deaths on his hands. Locals across the country called him “Juba the Sniper.” A higher power must have decided it was his turn, because now he had found himself on my radar. It was time to end his terror. We’re coming for you, I thought.

  No one really knew who he was. Some believed that he was a marketing and recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and ISI. He filmed some of his brutal kills and posted them online, set to jihadi soundtracks. I forced myself to watch them over and over again for clues, anything that might tell us about his network. It was hard to stomach, but I kept them on: him stalking a U.S. soldier on patrol before gunning him down and watching him slowly die. Another of him murdering an Iraqi soldier at a local checkpoint by putting a bullet right between his eyes. It was sickening and each viewing only worsened my hatred for him.

  Some even wondered if Juba was one man or many—a media creation. The enemy’s production skills had become as good as Hollywood’s. The foot soldier we captured, however, claimed that Juba was in fact just one man. He said he knew that because he’d helped hide him from the authorities, shuttling him from one safe house to another. And tonight, the man said, Juba was at an abandoned house in the city. But he wouldn’t be there for long. “He sleeps with his sniper rifle at his side,” he warned.

  THE PROBLEM WAS THAT I DIDN’T FULLY TRUST THE PRISONER YET. I HAD LEARNED that lesson once already with the agency’s source, Silencer. “Let’s get a Pred up over his hideout,” I said.

  The drone was our way to vet intelligence when we were dealing with shady guys.

  In minutes, we had eyes circling the target.

  “Pretty quiet,” I said. Dim streets of row houses.

  “Not many people,” Jason came back.

  It was a small one-story home, surrounded by a crush of crumbling and leaning one-and two-story places. I didn’t see any guards or lookouts on the roof or the street. There didn’t even seem to be any movement inside the house. It was completely dark, like much of the neighborhood.

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “It could be a trap.”

  During my training, we spent days looking at videos about situations where things went wrong. In one video, we watched an assault team just barely escape a house packed top to bottom with explosives.

  I turned to Jason. “Maybe we should watch it for another day with the Pred before the guys go out.” Jason radioed for the others to be ready.

  “Let’s watch the house for a bit more to see if anything happens,” he said. “And then we go.”

  By 12 P.M., nothing much had changed. Little traffic passed the house. The one thing that nagged at me was that we still couldn’t confirm whether anyone was inside—a factor that had caused us to cancel or postpone earlier missions. You never knew what you were walking into—a bomb or an innocent. These missions were all about precision and knowing the situation on the ground. But in the end, none of that mattered. This target was important enough to take a chance. Juba had a lot of blood on his hands.

  Just before midnight, we gave the green light and the operators headed out. They took the bomber with them to ID Juba, altering his appearance completely. We fattened him with pillows stuffed under his shirt, and gave him a scarf to cover his hair and eyes, just in case locals took notice.

  I WATCHED AS THE GUYS MADE THEIR WAY THROUGH THE DARK STREETS, NIGHT-VISION goggles snapped to their helmets. I could see the outlines of their bodies, about a dozen of them moving silently to the target house, just shadows.

  Some of the operators with us this time around were legends in the covert world. One was part of a team responsible for the death of Zarqawi. Another had been on the mission that ended with the capture of Saddam Hussein—the first one to put eyes on the dictator when the team found Saddam hiding in the spider hole. He liked to tell me the story about how he punched him square in the face and said, “Greetings from President Bush.”

  I moved the camera to the house and a few minutes of silence passed. There was a moment, right before the raid began, when I watched the house through the drone camera as it spun in circles like an astronaut spinning in space. The camera was fixated on the center of the flat roof, not looking at anything else around it, to make sure no one popped out right before the operators arrived. And then slowly, out of the darkness, the silhouettes of the men began to appear out of the corners of the drone camera, creeping closer and closer, setting their positions. My heart jumped. It was always the same. In those split seconds of stress, of not knowing the future, between total calm and total chaos—the sustained boom of grenades exploding and the violence of swift action—everything suddenly woke the fuck up.

  Soon the guys were outside the house, where they waited for a count. Still no movement that I could see from above. It was a spooky thing to see a densely populated part of Baghdad look so completely deserted.

  I could hear the operators on the radio, their chatter heating up. “Zulu Three, Zulu Three, setting position, over.”

  And then the raid began. It happened in seconds. The door came down, grenades exploded, and the men rushed in. What they found was anticlimactic. No bombs. No booby trap. Instead, a man lying on a barren concrete living room floor in a sleeping bag.

  The entire house had been completely emptied out. The only possession he had was a customized Russian Dragunov SVD Military Sniper Rifle. It was right next to him, as if he laid it down when he was finished for the day and planned to grab it when he woke and went back to work at his killing.

  The detainee was spot-on.

  Juba looked skinny, disheveled. This was definitely a man who had been on the run for a long time. The operators interrogated him heavily on the spot and then we whisked him away to a secret prison, where we spent days interrogating him some more. Another team typically took over the interrogation process. Their job was to extract as much information as possible from them within forty-eight hours, before the network reset. Almost immediately, he caved. He took credit for more than one hundred kills over the last few years—both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi security forces. His memory of them was
as if he’d stored each one away like a snapshot in the back of his mind for later. He went through every single assassination with the interrogator in explicit detail, outlining where he was positioned, how many shots he fired, where the body fell, and how he got away.

  When we turned him over to the Iraqi police force ten days later, they checked out all the details, talked to the families of those killed, and found out that he was accurate about all that he’d claimed.

  The Sniper had terrorized a lot of people over the years. Now there was closure for the city and the families of the deceased. A few months later, they’d hang him.

  It was good to be back.

  16

  THE SAUDI

  “You have to see this,” one of my intelligence analysts called out one morning. I hadn’t slept much that night and had just slogged over from my trailer.

  “I think I have something here,” she said. Megan had been digging into the files for hours already, hunting leads.

  She showed me a picture on her screen of a man who was tall and thin with bushy black hair.

  “You want me to guess?”

  “It’s the Saudi.”

  Our missions had started to pick up after Juba the Sniper. We began to kick loose intelligence, accumulating more leads, and soon it felt like I hadn’t been away. I was back to my old routine of Rip Its and riding out multiple days on adrenaline and no sleep. Two to three drones up in the sky at all times.

  A big part of why the missions started moving was Megan and two other girls, Jane and Lisa. They’d come from the DIA, and their job was to find things the rest of the team missed: gaps in our intelligence, stray photographs of guys who’d gone missing, bits of overlooked chatter, details lost in reports. We called them the Pink Mafia.

  But it wasn’t only because they were young and easy on the eyes. They were also extremely fierce. They were brilliant, with strong personalities and just as hell-bent on taking out ISI as all of us. They were in their late twenties or early thirties and never flinched at any of the horror that streamed across our monitors in vivid closeness day and night.

  It was likely just by chance, but there was a joke at the time that the DIA’s recruiting questions followed a particular order: Smart? Check. Hot? Check. Hired. There was a SEAL team that requested the same DIA girls every time they needed someone.

  Given that I was younger, I sensed it was hard for the Pink Mafia to take orders from me at first. I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. They never said anything, but I got the feeling from their body language that they were like, Who the hell is this? But it didn’t change the way they worked. Here everyone had to earn respect. And they kept me on my toes.

  Jane was an athletic girl with some Asian roots, short and thin, always in running shoes and a T-shirt. Her particular attention to detail was encouraging. With her, we knew it wasn’t likely we would miss something about our targets’ backgrounds. She had these eureka moments when we were at a loss for a key detail about a target. Out of nowhere she’d pop up and yell, “Found it!” If a guy was using a fake identity, she’d figure out who was behind the mask. One time she had nothing more to go on than the fact that our target was overweight and last seen wearing a black dishdasha. Somehow she found him in our historical records.

  Lisa was the biggest talker of the group. Her voice was fast and loud like a chain saw and she was constantly up in my grill, pumping me on new people to chase. She wasn’t always right, but she always thought she was and didn’t back down even when she was wrong. She was from Jersey, so sometimes her mouth pissed people off. When the operators returned to base without killing a target we told them to take out, she was the one who got the most fired up. “They should have killed that piece of shit,” she’d complain. It was kind of like being polite to your boss (the operators), but then talking shit about them when they left the room. She was the queen of that.

  There was tension with the Pink Mafia in the Box. It was always there, like the coffee-drenched humidity. Some of it was emotional, but some of it was sexual, too. Not that anyone was getting any. It was just that there were so few women in the combat zone. And because of that the operators always found a reason to hang around when they didn’t have a mission.

  “Trying to understand the intel,” they’d say.

  Megan ended up on the drone team after leaving a career as a lawyer to fast-climb the ranks at DIA. She spoke Arabic, had long and dark curly hair, was skinny as a telephone wire, and became obsessed more than most with her targets.

  Now it was the Saudi. She flipped through his files on the big monitors. The Saudi was close to the top of the ISI food chain as the military commander in Baghdad. Guys we’d captured over the years had helped us piece together his inner workings. He ran hundreds of soldiers, helped organize the large-scale bombings, and managed in detail the illicit trafficking of arms and bombs through the city’s maze of security checkpoints.

  For a long time, we’d been trying to figure out where he was, if he was even in Baghdad or somewhere else. From what we could tell, he hid behind layers of messengers, front companies, and dumped phones. He also had very close ties to Dark Horse, his boss.

  “He’s been living as a doctor,” Megan said, laying things out.

  Being a doctor was how he hid and at the same time blended in with every other normal citizen. He owned a pharmacy and had a family. He drove a black Suburban. This was exactly what made some of these targets very hard to find. They looked like everyone else and neighbors didn’t even know what they really did. They probably saw the Saudi as someone who went to work every day and came home to his family. Nothing unusual. Boring for a city at war.

  We got to work fast after that, mapped out a few startpoints, and then called the drones into action, directing them first to the pharmacy.

  The parking lot was crammed full of mostly white cars like Toyota Corollas and bongos, but one vehicle stuck out like a sore thumb, a dark and dirt-covered Suburban.

  “Is that it?” I asked Megan.

  She quickly flipped through her files on her computer. “Same one.”

  “Z in one,” I told the drone operator, wanting to keep the camera closed in right on top of the Suburban.

  There was no one in it.

  AROUND THE PHARMACY WAS THE SPRAWL OF BAGHDAD. THERE WERE BUILDINGS, twenty-story apartment complexes, traffic jams, and people all over the place, which was a lot more crowded than the cities I hunted in during my first deployment.

  All the activity required our targeting to be even more precise. In the desert, we could lose a car or a person for a few seconds with the drone and then pick them up shortly after because of the speed or direction we knew they were traveling. Here one wrong jerk of the camera by the sensor operator or a malfunction of the telemetry equipment and the target would be lost forever in the maze of streets and shops.

  There was one benefit to working in the city. Unlike anywhere else, we could fly the birds a lot lower. Because people were so accustomed to the sounds of aircraft coming and going from Baghdad International Airport, they didn’t think twice about a drone overhead. We used this heavily to our advantage.

  We could fly the birds at a low 4,000 feet in the city, compared to around 12,000 feet in the desert. Everything was clearer, colors richer. It made our work easier. I could almost make out a guy’s face in the street and distinctly see that, say, his shirt was yellow with a pocket or that he was holding a pack of cigarettes.

  We orbited the pharmacy’s parking lot for hours and hours, just watching the parked truck until a man finally showed up and got in.

  “That our guy?” I said to Megan.

  “Got to be.”

  He wore khaki pants and a tucked-in brown polo shirt. Athletic build. Same as the photos we had.

  “Looks like he’s alone,” I said.

  We watched as the Suburban pulled out into traffic and drove for a few miles before it came to a house and pulled into a driveway.

  “Where we at?�
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  “Adamiyah.”

  It was a nice, middle-class part of the city, dominated by Sunnis, which meant that it could have sympathies for ISI.

  “Do we have anything on the house?”

  It was two floors, with a balcony on the second floor overlooking the main street.

  “Nothing,” said Megan. “But there was a mission about a block away that an earlier team conducted in 2007.” That one ended in the killing of one of the network’s military heads.

  “Let’s get closer,” I said.

  We saw him disappear under the awning, then head up a stairwell toward the back of the house and from there onto the balcony. He walked along the balcony to the end of it on the right and used his keys to unlock a door. We sat there and watched for hours, taking notes about the house and the neighbors around it.

  Three days straight we stuck to him—I remember thinking about Bill telling me to be more patient when we had the bigger fish in our sights. Make sure first that this was the Saudi.

  I asked Brian to take some new satellite snapshots of the neighborhood. We needed to know routes in and out of the house and the surrounding streets for the assault team if we decided to go in. Were there larger roofs for a chopper to land on? Security checkpoints nearby? There was an eight-foot wall in back of the house that would need good measurements for a ladder.

  Bill called one night to remind me that his guys had carried out a raid in the neighborhood a few years back. “It was bad,” he said. “The guys got hit.”

  As the assault team had driven to the target house then, heavily armed men loyal to ISI had popped up on multiple rooftops and started shooting down into the vehicles. It was a huge ambush. Some of the crew had sustained heavy injuries. “Just watch out for that,” he said.