Drone Warrior Read online

  Days passed and the Box started to feel more like the reality show Big Brother—only the guy had no idea he was being filmed. At first his days didn’t appear to be unusual at all. He didn’t leave the house except to go to the pharmacy and back. We followed him in both directions and loitered above the pharmacy and the house all day long.

  There was one odd thing about the house. He kept the lights on all night every night, as if he was expecting someone or hoping to keep someone away.

  The kids were key to the picture. They were young, probably under five years old, from what we could see. That confirmed our intel. The Saudi’s kids were the same age.

  During the daytime, we watched them play with toys in the front yard, chasing each other, running in circles while a woman in a veil looked on. They seemed like any kids you’d see in a suburban neighborhood in the United States. Which made me wonder if they even knew who their father really was. Probably not.

  But with the children there, I knew one thing—a drone strike was out of the question.

  INSIDE A WAR ZONE LIKE IRAQ, WE COULD LAUNCH A HELLFIRE WITH THE APPROVAL of our higher headquarters commander. I’d submit a justification for why we were targeting a guy, and once the target was in the Pred’s crosshair and cleared for hot—to shoot—the pilots and sensor operator would fire away.

  When Barack Obama came into office in 2009, the rules about killing began to change. Inside a war zone, there was a lot more time spent looking at the potential blast radius of a Hellfire and who exactly was on the ground, that is, the collateral-damage estimates, the precise point of impact, and who unintentionally could get hurt. When the Iraq War started in 2003, the threshold for collateral damage was huge. Because we were taking over a country, there was little regard for outside casualties. You could have twenty or thirty bystanders near a big enemy target and military commanders would still order a strike. As the years went on, an intolerance for collateral-damage grew. If even one or two innocents were in the line of fire, we called the strike off. The change was brought about in part by the fact that there were a lot more drones going online in 2010 and people understood there needed to be more oversight. It was also because tactical mistakes in our world had strategic consequences, as killing even one innocent would play out on the world stage.

  Much of the change in the world of drone fighting, however, happened outside officially designated combat areas, where more targets were popping up. Obama seemed to feel personally compelled to approve each strike because he knew the strategic consequences that came with mistakenly killing women and children.

  The president started asking his staff to implement specific criteria before each strike outside a war zone. While it constrained targeting a lot, it was necessary to ensure that only the guys posing an imminent threat were taken out.

  These strikes began with guys like me at the tactical level, determining whether a target was worth going after.

  Since Iraq was still officially considered a war zone, things were a lot easier for us; we already had the authority we needed to do the job.

  If it was outside the officially designated war zones, those same slides would then make their way up the chain of command—and through a lot of lawyers looking for reasons to reject the request along the way.

  These decisions were never made lightly.

  First it went to the overall commander in the region. That might be the general in charge of all U.S. troops in the Middle East, who then passed it along to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. There much discussion happened with suits in the intelligence agencies, Army reps lobbying to get buy-in.

  At that point, there were always snags. One side didn’t agree or another side wanted to add in more information about the target’s worthiness for a strike. Out of that scrum, it finally went to the secretary of defense, who would then take the file to the president. Obama made the ultimate decision.

  From our place at the bottom, we could see that the president made it a priority to understand everything about the targets on the list—something that Bush had delegated to others. We could tell that he took personal responsibility in ensuring he understood the targets.

  Sometimes it took days to get a nomination approved, other times months, and still other times years. It depended on who tried to block it, or if, say, the target was an American citizen, along with many other factors.

  We ended up calling this huge bureaucratic process death by PowerPoint. Drone strikes outside of war zones were literally being decided at the executive level based on the efficacy of our PowerPoint presentations, how well we essentially “sold” the idea that a guy was evil enough to obliterate.

  Once the president approved the targets that our teams had presented up the chain, each target was added to the kill or capture list. We called this the authorization for use of military force, or AUMF. The AUMF was signed into law by President Bush after 9/11, allowing the military to go after Al Qaeda and its affiliates around the world. The strike authority was then passed to the overall commander.

  In the end, even after the president’s approval, the commander had to bless the strike. But before he did, there were final considerations: Was the target at the location? Were there any women and children? Was capture impossible?

  That a guy was impossible to capture was one of the most common arguments for a strike. I never bought the argument. We could capture someone just about anywhere in the world. Killing was optional.

  AS WE WATCHED THE SAUDI GO ABOUT HIS BUSINESS ONE MORNING, HE SUDDENLY switched up his routine. We were following him as he drove to work one day when he made a right turn instead of the usual left. What was he doing?

  He drove a few miles until he stopped at a crowded open market two or three blocks wide. He parked his vehicle along the street, packed with twenty or so other cars, and then proceeded to walk quickly through the maze of corridors into the shops.

  “You getting this?” I said to Megan.

  “I see it. Something’s up with him.”

  He kept looking back for some reason.

  “Who’s he looking for?”

  Eventually he made his way to an area that was secluded, covered in part by awnings. Soon after, another man in a white dishdasha approached him and they talked for a few minutes.

  That’s when I noticed that the Saudi had something in his hand—a small package or envelope. He handed it to the other guy and within seconds the meeting was over. They then departed in opposite directions.

  I kept the first drone on our target as he headed back to his truck, while the other drone followed the new guy. The new guy picked up the pace, as if he knew someone was following. I could see him look side to side as he speed-walked through the crowds. At one point, he looked up.

  But it was hard to follow him. There were people everywhere, going in all directions. Then the man broke into a run, like he was suddenly on a mission to get out of there, zigzagging around people in the marketplace.

  Soon we lost him. We spent a few minutes zooming in and out on people in the market who fit the man’s description, but he wasn’t anywhere. He was gone.

  It was time to grab the Saudi. We couldn’t wait any longer.

  IT WAS AROUND 1 A.M. WHEN I BRIEFED THE ASSAULT TEAM ON THE HOUSE: ITS entry and exit points, which way certain doors opened, the four people inside, the lights on the second floor that were never turned off, the flat roof for potential squirters, and the absence of any weapons. They needed to bring a ten-foot ladder to get over the wall in the back. “The Saudi is in his room now,” I said, pointing out where his room was on the monitor.

  The team listened very carefully. It was a moment when I saw how far I had come since the last deployment. I could anticipate their questions about what they could expect to find there.

  I handed them Brian’s maps of the neighborhood, the walls they might have to scale, interrogation questions for the Saudi, and photos of his associates.

  “See you guys soon,” I said.

 
Excitement and a little anxiety took over soon after, as I watched the operators sneaking down the street of the house late into the night, weapons at the ready.

  Radio noise erupted and fell off.

  “Zulu Three,” Jason called over the radio. That was me. “Can you sparkle?”

  “Roger, Echo One.”

  From the drone, we beamed an infrared laser on the Saudi’s house. It was like a giant flashlight—a sparkle—but only visible to people wearing night vision.

  Just as that happened, we got a surprise. I noticed the shadow of someone on a neighboring roof. My heart jumped a beat as I remembered Bill’s team getting ambushed. “Z in on that,” I said urgently, worried that the team was just about to take enemy fire.

  I was about to radio in to them when the roof guy came into clear view. Too clear, actually. The guy was completely naked—and masturbating furiously.

  “Oh man, dawg,” Brian said.

  “Awww!” Kate cried out.

  Megan made a sick face.

  “Only a threat to himself,” I said, directing the camera operator to return to the target’s house.

  THE ASSAULT CREW PAUSED A HALF BLOCK OUT AND THEN KEPT MOVING. I COULDN’T stop thinking about that one dangerous question: what was going on inside the house that we couldn’t see?

  There was no way to know until they crashed through the door. I didn’t have any idea how the Saudi would respond, either. Since he had been so smart at hiding all this time, it was difficult to predict what he’d do.

  The drone’s infrared sensor had been switched to black hot. On the monitors, I watched a bright flash as the operators breached the door with a charge and then raced inside.

  At first it seemed like things were going as planned. Then I noticed the guys pulling security outside suddenly moving fast to the back of the house. Something’s not right.

  “Squirter!” yelled Kate, pointing at the roof.

  “I got him.”

  Our guy had climbed out to the roof somehow and was now running from one side to the other, looking over the sides of the house, as if to see if someone was below. Then, in one quick movement, he leaped to the neighbor’s roof and began to flee.

  We could see him perfectly in the infrared camera, even though it was pitch-black. Our team huddled in front of the monitors. We sparkled him with the drone’s infrared beam as he moved so the guys could track him. He hopped from one roof to the next, making his way down the block like an alley cat, before finally arriving at one gap he couldn’t jump.

  But that didn’t stop him. He threw his body over the side of the house, hung there for a second, a swinging bit of pixelated blackness in the camera, and then dropped—two full stories to a stairwell. He crumbled to the ground.

  When he stood up, two of our guys who had given chase were right there. The rest happened in a matter of seconds.

  The Saudi lunged, reached for a rifle, got one of them, but was then shot twice point-blank by the other in the chest. I watched the Saudi fall backward and go completely still on the stairwell.

  The call came over the radio then. It was over. He was dead.

  The last thing to do was comb the house and the pharmacy for whatever intelligence he had lying around. We took documents, photographs, and computers. But there wasn’t much. He was very careful.

  When it was over, Megan responded like all of us that night: professional and indifferent that the Saudi had met his demise.

  “Good riddance,” she said, as we zoomed in on his lifeless body still lying bleeding on the stairs.

  Although the loss, of not being able to extract the intel we hoped the Saudi had to fill in more clues on Manhattan and Brooklyn’s whereabouts, stood in the back of all our minds, there was little time left for reflection. We moved on to the next target.

  17

  THE KIDNAPPING

  The photo of the kidnapped woman wouldn’t leave me alone.

  I lay on my lumpy single bed after forty-eight hours of juggling multiple missions and all I wanted was to sleep. My pillow was flat and hard like a big slice of Melba toast. I kept trying to toss some shape into it and close my eyes. But she was still there.

  I flipped on my light and sat up. The air-conditioning was on the fritz again, making rumbling sounds. I grabbed the photo off my side table and looked at it. The edges bent over, little wrinkles in the face.

  The woman was in her late twenties, with long black hair and light skin. She had these piercing blue eyes and looked Lebanese.

  A few nights before, a colleague had walked into the Box with her photo and handed it to me.

  “An Iraqi general came to us about her,” he said. She was the wife of a prominent Iraqi doctor. An ISI cell had grabbed her off the street a few weeks before and a man had begun to call the doctor’s phone daily, demanding ransom payment for her return. They said they were raping her and would continue to do it until he paid them millions of Iraqi dinar. But the doctor didn’t have that kind of money. He pleaded for the Iraqi general’s help in getting his wife back, and the general came straight to us.

  Sadly, this wasn’t an unusual situation in Iraq. ISI had employed kidnapping cells for years to target Iraqi government officials, women, and children—anyone with elevated status and money. They used the money to finance their activities. And most of the time it didn’t even matter if the ransom was paid. They killed their captives anyway.

  “He could really use our help if you have the time,” the colleague said.

  He handed me the phone number of the guy who’d been calling the doctor with the threats. It was the only clue they had to go on. This was yet another instance of a terrorist group that claimed to fight for their fellow Muslims but instead did harm to them—an everyday occurrence, it was clear from where I sat.

  It was mid-deployment, sometime in the summer. We had dozens of other targets that still needed to be taken out. Guys who had killed a lot more people and were plotting against Americans back home even. I remembered thinking, Why should I help this man I don’t even know, especially when we have bigger fish to find?

  “I wish we could,” I said.

  People were always asking us for our help. We had started making a name for ourselves as a force who could find ghosts, guys no one else could find, and pinpoint their location in a short amount of time. So it wasn’t uncommon for other military units to ask us to track down targets they had lost.

  But we had our own priorities. We knew the network better than anyone—we were living and breathing it every day. And even though we officially answered to headquarters, they rarely forced missions on us because they knew the importance of staying out of our way.

  “Can’t you just throw up a drone?” an FBI agent asked us one day over a video meeting about the search for some target he wanted tracked down. The suit was being beamed in from a comfortable conference room in Virginia.

  The question was ridiculous. Why don’t you try putting a fucking drone up and see where it gets you?

  “Drones don’t work alone,” I said diplomatically.

  The suits never got it. They thought a drone was like a remote control airplane—just hit a few buttons and it would go to work finding whomever we needed to find. What we did was very complicated and technical. We just made drones look easy to people on the outside.

  We just couldn’t help everyone. There were not enough of our teams to go around.

  But something in me changed that morning as I stared at the Iraqi doctor’s wife’s photo again. I couldn’t put it down. The organs inside my chest were all tightening as if something was telling me this time was different, a feeling that I hadn’t experienced in years of chasing these assholes. It hurt my head. For the first time I began to sense that I had been slowly losing what made me essentially human: the ability to care about people, about the lives around me.

  Long ago, I had come to terms with the fact that we were doing bad things to very bad people, because that’s the reality of what it takes to deal with fanat
ics who care only about killing.

  The thing was, in this world, emotions couldn’t apply. Emotions clouded judgment when it came to the decisions we had to make. On our drone feeds, I had to stare at families as they went about their lives, women and children, who had no idea their worlds were about to be upended forever.

  I had to look at the bigger picture of our strategy, which was larger than any one person. It was about trying to save hundreds, even thousands, of lives—not one or two here and there. Because this woman didn’t have anything to do with our higher-level goal, she didn’t fit into my calculus.

  Death happened every day. And sometimes I had to do things to remind myself that these were real human lives.

  I felt light-headed as these emotions swirled inside me. I remember suddenly thinking, What if this was a member of my family? What if this was my mother or somebody close to me?

  My inner voice wrestled with itself: If you saved this woman, it would be one of the few times that we could see the tangible results of our actions. Isn’t saving this one life the real reason you’re here anyway? It wouldn’t even take very long, and yet it would mean the world to her family.

  That’s when I got up. I threw on clothes and headed for the Box.

  The rest of the team was already at work. We’d been following another high-level target for the last few days, but not much had changed. We had built a solid pattern of life on the guy—he was going back and forth between work and home. Nothing unusual. I was certain we’d know where to find him again in a day or two if we redirected our drones.

  “We have a new mission,” I said to Kate. I held up the photo. “We are going to find this woman.”

  WE SPENT A COUPLE OF HOURS DIGGING INTO THE PHONE NUMBER OF THE GUY WHO had been calling the doctor’s mobile. It helped that our technology was probably the best in the world. We used a special tool to ping the mobile to give us a general location of where its signal was coming from. Soon we had our startpoint.

  I don’t know if we were lucky that we were dealing with relative amateurs or we were just that good, but in a matter of hours we were orbiting a house in a neighborhood slum in the southern part of the city, where I was sure the woman was being kept.