Drone Warrior Read online

  The neighborhood block was a jam of worn-down concrete houses in various stages of falling apart. Some were barely standing, tilting left and right into one another, and others had no roofs at all.

  It was daytime, clear and sunny, the streets full of activity, with people walking around, kids playing, and guys doing nothing much at all but smoking. Everything was covered in dust from the dirt streets.

  The target house was tiny, probably just a few rooms inside. The yard out front doubled as a parking lot, with a couple of cars and a van pulled up right to the door—a sign that someone was home.

  We waited out the day and watched from above. A couple of men came and went. One was a smoker. But there was no sign of the woman.

  Jason and I talked it over in the Box and came to the conclusion that if there was even a slight chance she was there, we needed to go before it was too late, since her captives might move her.

  We decided to strike that night. Jason and his assault force came into the Box and talked out the hostage rescue. It wasn’t a typical planning session. If the woman was inside, they needed to be extra careful. When they crashed a house, everything moved lightning fast. They only had a split second to decide if the person in their crosshairs was a friend or foe. It was easy for things to go wrong. If they didn’t carry out the raid just right, the doctor’s wife would die.

  An hour later, we were spinning up and the operators were breaking down the door. They found three men from the kidnapping cell and dragged them out to the street. The woman was locked in the back bedroom. “Got her,” the radio erupted.

  The barbarians had handcuffed her to an air-conditioning unit and it was clear that the men had been assaulting her. Her face was bruised and her clothes were ripped up.

  The men deserved to die.

  Throughout that deployment, I kept the woman’s photo with me in my notebook as a reminder: in a world of all this evil, we had the power to make a difference. Saving someone good was just as important as killing and capturing our enemy.

  That woman won’t ever know who I am, but it felt good knowing she was safe. Despite what people said about our team and the drones we operated, despite all the bad stuff people said, we were the good guys.

  18

  THE BOMBING

  When I picked up the phone, I knew immediately that something was up. “You hearing about these bombings in the city?” the voice said.

  It was an analyst upstairs at headquarters. HQ rarely called unless there was a major situation that needed fixing fast. “We’re hearing that there were just multiple coordinated blasts,” he said. “You have anything for us?”

  We actually didn’t have much yet. Before the call, intel had only started to dribble in from our local sources. “Coordinates of one of the attack sites just came in,” I said. “Let me get back to you.”

  I leaned over to Kate. For the last few hours, we’d been circling another target’s house. But the place was looking like a dry hole. “Don’t shift the Pred’s orbit yet,” I said. “But zoom out.”

  We were a few miles out from the bombings, but we could maintain orbit and still get a sense of what was going on. The camera quickly zipped away from the house and looked into the distance. Within seconds we confirmed the call. Clouds of smoke were billowing up in the horizon.

  “Okay, we need to go there. Center the Pred up over that location,” I said.

  In minutes we were over top of what looked like a bombed-out storefront. The images were in stark black and white on two of the monitors. Smoke was still pouring out and crumpled cars littered the streets like they’d been picked up, crushed, and then thrown. Crowds surrounded it and we could see Iraqi firefighters and police climbing around the rubble.

  We kept the Pred there as we sifted through the heavy chatter of intel coming in by email and phone. One report claimed multiple buildings had been completely destroyed; another report stated at least twenty-five dead, dozens more wounded. Some first responders were scared to go provide medical support at the site out of fear of a second attack, so accounts were disparate.

  Most of the reports were from sources on the ground, local agents, or our Iraqi friends in the military. In a situation like this, the expanded Box in Baghdad became frenzied, like a trading floor, with people yelling back and forth as new information came in.

  As the hours passed, the picture on the ground shook out. The bombers had rented out nine apartments in heavily populated markets across the city, packed them for weeks with hundreds of pounds of fertilizer bags rigged up to create bombs, and then used cell phones to detonate them all at once.

  It was grim. More than eighty local Iraqi citizens had been killed, more than one hundred injured—it was one of the most lethal bombings in years. The images were devastating.

  The markets were in neighborhoods dominated by Shias, meaning that there was likely only one group who could have been responsible: ISI. This attack had been professionally coordinated and meticulously planned out. Al Jazeera’s news channel displayed multiple buildings burning across other parts of the city. No one had claimed responsibility yet, but one man clearly stood out to me: Dark Horse. Staring down at the smoldering death pits from the Pred’s monitors, I wondered if he was sending a message—that the network was still capable of doing something at this scale, even with the heavy losses. That he wasn’t hiding anymore.

  The attack was a jolt to all of us, coming amid a series of calm months. Calm was relative in Iraq, of course, since it was a condition that would still be considered chaos in America. The bombings got leadership nervous that Iraq was starting to fall apart, and politically, they couldn’t have that.

  That night we got another call from HQ. The military higher-ups and suits at the State Department had been meeting with Iraqi politicians and generals all day. The Iraqis needed help on the attack. They didn’t know where to even begin hunting the perpetrators and there was some fear that this was just the beginning. “We need you on this,” HQ said.

  The first thing I did was walk over to the refrigerator in the back of the Box. I grabbed a Rip It and stood there for a moment, taking a breather and feeling the carbonated caffeine start to do its work in my head. The area around the refrigerator was muddy with boot marks. I started to think about all the dead that day, the bloody photos, how many lives gone. The unlucky Iraqis who were present that day for the attack, they were powerless to do much about it. I hated that. I craved retribution.

  I got to work right away. It was going to be a long night.

  “HEY, YOU KNOW THE CHAPLAIN IS ALWAYS HERE?” SAID JASON SOMETIME AFTER midnight. He was sitting next to me, watching the live screens of the war-beaten city below.

  There was always a military chaplain assigned to our team in case people needed help or just some consoling. A lot of the operators held their demons inside. Usually you wouldn’t hear about them until a long night of drinking, when some of the stories of things they had seen and done would suddenly come vividly back to life. The stories I’ve heard would surprise most.

  “I always ask the other operators to go, but no one goes,” he said.

  “All that Xbox,” I said.

  “It’s usually me and the chaplain. It’s surprising,” he said.

  “I don’t even know where to find the guy,” I said.

  We laughed.

  In addition to being Mr. Hollywood, Jason had this other side. He was a devout Christian even in the Box, but he wasn’t a Bible thumper or anything. He was just religious and went to church regularly when he was back home.

  I didn’t have much time for religion and I didn’t even think much about it other than how the enemy perverted their god and used him to make killing sound righteous, as if it were the only way to go to heaven.

  Still, I wondered about Jason. He was a stone-cold killer by night and then heavy on his faith when he was alone and back home. I always wondered how he separated himself from the killings and justified them internally. Did he believe he was doing God
’s work? I never asked. It wasn’t my business.

  There was a long silence after that, where we both just sat there and watched the TV glow. Finally he said, “You should join me one day, if there is anything you need to talk about.”

  Looking back on it later, Jason was probably the only one who really saw the emotions going on inside me or sensed their absence. What the sleeplessness was all about. The growing hatred for the enemy. How the chase had totally consumed me. Maybe he thought God could help, because God helped him.

  I always maintained my own faith. My mother raised me Christian. But I was never big on attending services in those days of deployment. It seemed somewhat of a distraction from the mission. There were always other things pulling me away. Or maybe it was because I would have learned something from the chaplain about myself that I didn’t want to hear, that my heart was becoming too cold to feel, my bloody hunts turning me into a ruthless version of myself that others around me no longer recognized.

  I told him that I’d think about it. “Thanks, man,” I said. “Maybe one day.” But I knew inside that I wouldn’t go. Because going meant less time hunting.

  A LOT OF OUR ENEMIES HAD HUGE BOUNTIES ON THEIR HEADS—PAID FOR BY THE U.S. government. One hundred thousand dollars for one guy, $50,000 for another, a few million for others. Brooklyn and Manhattan were each worth $5 million. Dark Horse was in the six-figure range.

  The State Department put out posters for them, just like the Wild West. I spent a lot of time looking at these online as they came across our screens. Some were sent internally; others were made more public. It also served as a source of pride for the terrorists, who were more than happy to see their names on the posters across the city. They were the same guys we were chasing. Wouldn’t it be nice if we got a cut of that money?

  The rewards would go up and down over the years depending on different things, like whether or not someone was still killing or was in hiding. I never understood who was responsible for maintaining the lists or how it worked. From what I could tell, it wasn’t anyone in our larger organization.

  The big money ransoms got me thinking more than once about how much money I actually made. In comparison to those rewards, what I made was practically peanuts. One late night, after a long mission, I sat in the Box and did some back-of-the-napkin math. The twenty-hour days. The 140-hour weeks. What that kind of work and pressure did to my body and my mind. I had been having trouble sleeping again.

  I scribbled some quick numbers down on a notepad. My pay equated to about $6.50 per hour—below the poverty level. I laughed at that. I had a lead role in America’s answer to its terrorism problem, at the tip of the spear, and doing this work for less than you can make working at McDonald’s.

  The math was just for kicks, to kill time when sleep didn’t come. It really didn’t matter to me because I loved what I was doing. Money obviously didn’t drive me. It didn’t drive any of us. The mission did. It had taken over my life and at that point I would have done it for free, despite the toll it had taken on my mind and body.

  We were different from the agency guys. The people doing similar work on the other side of the fence, who got hefty bonuses when they found someone. Their jobs made me think of paid assassins. My friends who worked there got paid thousands of dollars every time they killed someone higher on their lists with a drone. I always found that to be contradictory to the purpose of why we existed: to go after the right targets for the overall mission, not the ones that brought the best bonuses.

  THE INFORMATION COMING OUT OF THE BLAST SITES WAS LIMITED AT FIRST. LITTLE was left after the explosions and I started to worry that we might never get a lead.

  With a suicide bomber, we could at least examine body parts, and IEDs left trace residue—tiny hints about what happened and where to start a hunt. But these blasts had burned hot and it seemed that the flames had turned almost everything in the buildings to dust.

  The guy behind the attack appeared to know exactly what he was doing. When our Iraqi colleagues interviewed the real estate agents about who’d rented the apartments to the bombers, they were clueless. The renters used fake names and paid cash for the properties six months up front. No trace.

  We worried that we’d have to forget it and move on—until we turned up a mistake. The call came into us late on the second night from our friends in the U.S. embassy. A bomb in one of the nine houses hadn’t actually detonated. Somehow the cell phone didn’t initiate the bomb and the site was mostly contained, with the stacked bags of fertilizer still intact. The Iraqi bomb squad had also pulled out the cell phone.

  “Call them now and get that phone,” I said. “Make sure they don’t mess with it.” Hours later, it was ours and the technicians were picking it apart. This was our first lead.

  IT WAS A BRAND-NEW BLACK FLIP PHONE. NO STORED NUMBERS. BUT THERE WERE four missed calls that had been made to it that coincided with the timing of the other bombs that went off. These missed calls were likely the ones meant to detonate the bomb. We had the triggerman’s number.

  A cell phone number wasn’t much to go off for most people, but it was gold to the experts around me, who began to run the numbers through their laptops. We could do a lot with them, much more than most people realized. But our tools and how we used them could never be revealed to the public.

  It appeared that the triggerman used his phone often, not just to detonate bombs. We couldn’t figure out who owned the phone, but the techs managed to trace the calls around the time of the bombing and map out a network of the triggerman’s associates. One thing stuck out. Most had links to the Wali of Baghdad—Dark Horse.

  Still, we didn’t have an address for anyone. None of the phones seemed to be on.

  Days of grueling intelligence hunting passed. While I carried out a few missions against other targets, the techs kept working on the blasts. One night I took a break from it all and went back to my bunk, lying there in my sweat-stinking clothes for a long time before I drifted off. My pager startled me around midnight and I ran back to the Box.

  “What’s up?” I asked Kate.

  “We got a location for the suspected triggerman,” she said, pointing to the house our drone was now orbiting. The phone had been switched on and whoever had it was in there right now.

  THE TRIGGERMAN’S PLACE WAS A NARROW BUILDING ALONG A QUIET STREET OF wood row houses. Few streetlights were on and most of the neighbors looked like they were already asleep, their houses dark.

  Our target’s place looked wide awake on the monitors. Lights on and activity. “We got movers,” I said to the team.

  “Have we seen this house before?” I asked Brian, as he flipped through historical satellite photos.

  “Yeah, another team killed the previous owner on a mission in 2006.”

  “Send me whatever they got from that mission.”

  “Stand by.”

  The info popped up on my screen, but not much had been recovered, just some dead-guy photos from the scene. The guy looked like he was part of Zarqawi’s old gang.

  The black silhouette of what looked like a man emerged from the front door and was greeted by two others who appeared out of nowhere.

  The sensor operator zoomed in. “Three MAMs,” he said, referring to military-aged men. “One looks like he might have a weapon.”

  “Smoker there, too,” said Brian.

  The black glow of a cigarette expanded in high definition on our monitors. Maybe a cigarette break. A few minutes later, the cigarette was tossed to the ground and the three men returned inside.

  By now, the group of Navy SEALs that worked with us on occasion had all piled into the Box. My assault crew was out on another strike so the Seals were with us tonight. And they were antsy to get out.

  There was a deep rivalry between us and the SEALs—it was mostly guys competing for who was the bigger badass. But our groups had grown a lot tighter since the war on terror began. We worked closer, sharing tactics and often personnel.

  The truth
was everyone secretly wanted the chance internally to say they were responsible for a successful mission or to be the first called on an important raid. The goal to take out enemies was the same, but everyone wanted trophies.

  The SEALs slugged coffee and munched protein bars. They started firing questions off at me. Who’s in the house? What’s outside? What are we missing?

  Brian pulled out the route maps and put them up on the screens. It was pretty straightforward. I gave them a rundown, as they geared up and loaded weapons. Since it wasn’t far to the house, they’d take the Hummers.

  Usually we didn’t chase a cell phone until we knew who was using it. We knew that Dark Horse’s group was sophisticated and I worried that we were getting pulled into a trap—that they turned it on knowing we would come and that the cell phone was connected to a bag of fertilizer rigged to explode. Going now was definitely a risk because we didn’t know what lay ahead. But we had no choice. Time was against us.

  OUR BIRD PULLED PATROL AROUND THE HOUSE, IN CASE ANYTHING CHANGED OR went wrong before the SEALs arrived. We scoured every nook and cranny of the shadows, every corner high and low, anything that seemed out of place. Nothing. The smokers never came back out. But the place was still awake. Something was up in there.

  “Zulu Three, checkpoint one, TOT thirty Mikes.”

  “Roger that.”

  It was about thirty minutes before the Hummers rumbled into our drone’s view. They were about a block from the target and thirty SEALs jumped out. There was little talk after that. Silence was necessary. Everyone knew what to do.

  Instead of charging through the door and moving in fast, they sent in a dog. I watched it stop immediately, signaling explosives on the other side. The team leader got on a bullhorn and told the people to come out. Nothing happened for a while after that. The house was motionless, as if the guys inside were trying to figure out what to do.