Drone Warrior Read online

  In my head, I mapped out how we were going to work our way to Manhattan and Brooklyn. We were unraveling the Baghdad network, one target after another, night after night. Even though ISI had tried to shroud their organizational leadership in secrecy, I could tell you exactly who filled what leadership positions, even when others in the organization remained in the dark. My craft became more and more refined, because there was never a moment when I wasn’t thinking about the intel coming in and how to fill the missing gaps. I had been so connected to how their network functioned that I could have taken leadership over one of the ISI terrorist cells and never skipped a beat. And when our team killed or captured the new guys, we knew who their replacements would be—before they were even officially replaced.

  Every new piece of intelligence, every interrogation, every photo, every tip from our sources on the ground brought the cell into greater focus. Then they went up on my computer charts, like one big family tree diagram.

  I’d spent so much time with the drones now that I knew the technology to a T, how to use each capability to our advantage. I regularly had two or three birds stacked on top of each other as I played chess with the enemy, following one target and then peeling one off to follow another.

  I reacted faster. I made calculations without second thoughts. Tactical patience had seeped into me. All the missions had given me experience and knowledge. I could quickly determine if a guy we were staring at was an innocent civilian or the actual enemy hiding in the crowd. My team worked efficiently, knowing what each was going to do before doing it. We spoke in half sentences or a couple of words sometimes.

  Running missions felt like second nature now. I could spit out everything about these targets, their life stories and in which areas they were likely hiding. Before, we were spies in the sky. Now it felt like we were living with our enemies, getting into their heads as they moved through their days. In a lot of cases, it felt as if I knew more about my targets than their own families did.

  Our successes were briefed to the highest levels of leadership. Our higher-ups told us that some of the captures made it into the president’s daily brief. The requests for help on other targets only made things more frenzied. The CIA wanted us to hit a guy in the south. The FBI wanted us to look into someone moving IEDs with connections stretching back to people in the United States.

  At one point, I was sleeping three hours a night, the drone feed on my TV a kind of never-ending night-light keeping the dark away. It was the same story with my unit’s other teammates at their locations in the north and west. We all gelled together and fed off one another. We talked at night over video teleconferences and shared leads.

  “They’re on the run,” Jack said one night. “We’re hearing more and more guys packing up their operations and moving into Syria.”

  “They’re actually killing off members of their own cells because they’re so paranoid of rats,” said Andy.

  “A few less targets for us to worry about,” I said with a laugh.

  “We also just got a report that the leaders were telling their guys not to wear wristwatches into meetings anymore,” Jack went on.

  “What?”

  “They think we have those bugged, too.”

  “No more Swatches,” I said. “We’re in their heads.”

  “Let’s keep up the pressure,” said the overall commander. “We’re in their homes and they know they can’t live there anymore.”

  ONE NIGHT JACK CALLED FROM HIS SITE UP NORTH AND TOLD ME TO TAKE A LOOK AT his drone feed. “Hey, man, flip one of your screens to my channel.”

  I called out to get it on one of our big screens.

  “Check it out,” Jack said. “That’s the military emir of Mosul right there. He’s on the run.” He laughed, almost as if to say . . . this guy is about to meet his maker.

  “Hell yeah,” I responded.

  The target was hopping from roof to roof, with Iraqi security forces giving chase. Jack’s operators had brought in the Iraqis on this mission, and the target had escaped before they had a chance to grab him in his house.

  The Iraqis worked with us on a lot of missions. Worked with us—well, that was a bit of an overstatement. The Iraqis had to be a part of our operations more and more in Baghdad because a new government law required us to have at least one Iraqi on every U.S. mission—a kind of marketing campaign to put an “Iraqi face” on strikes, even when the Iraqis didn’t do much at all. We didn’t allow them into the Box, but they went out with the operators. Later, news stories would come out saying that the Iraqis were responsible for killing so-and-so. That was usually an exaggeration. It was our guys and we just dragged some of the Iraqi forces along for the ride. Which was the case now.

  Jack said, “Look, he’s about to run out of rope!”

  The roof hopper was still being pursued and managing to evade the Iraqi forces, who looked like they were losing wind.

  Every so often the target turned around and shot his gun, which slowed the Iraqis even more. The hopper might have gotten away if it weren’t for his own miscalculation. Eventually he arrived at a roof that was too low to get to another roof and too high to jump to the ground. So he crouched down behind a wall in one corner, as if to hide.

  The drone camera parked right over top of him. I put my headset on to listen in on the comms. Because they could see the same live drone feed from their location out in the field, the assault team on the ground was communicating over the radio his exact hiding location to the Iraqi security forces, who couldn’t tell where he was exactly. Now they slowly made their way to him.

  When the hopper noticed, he started firing his gun, popping up and down from his corner. The Iraqis then started lobbing grenades at him, one by one. I could see the grenades landing on the roof from the drone. The first one wounded him, but he was still alive. I could see him stumbling around, still trying to hide as he crouched in the corner. Another grenade came after, boom, followed by a big cloud of smoke. That one got him. We watched the hopper die slowly, his body bleeding while we orbited over top.

  “Good, another shithead off the list,” Jack said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “thanks for my daily dose of Kill TV,” before signing off.

  Meanwhile, Dark Horse wasn’t talking—and we needed that to change fast.

  “I got an idea,” the case officer Tom said one night. “Remember the twin brother?”

  After weeks of interrogation, we were tired of Dark Horse’s bullshit and his repeated lies about the current state of Manhattan and Brooklyn, where his other ISI commanders were hiding, and where the next attack would take place. I worried that we were losing time in our hunt to find Manhattan and Brooklyn. We knew he kept lying about not knowing anything and that he was buying days for the network to adapt to his capture.

  Tom decided it was time to bring his twin brother into the mix. He had been in custody for some time after the previous team captured him.

  Tom visited the twin at another prison and kept going back for days before he caved. Gradually, Tom convinced him that it was his brother’s actions over the years that had landed him in jail, and that Dark Horse was bringing shame on their family, which meant everything in this culture.

  The twin, Ahmed al-Rawi, stirred with anger. Now all we needed was to engineer the moment when he came face-to-face with his brother, neither expecting to see the other in our custody.

  We transported Dark Horse to the twin’s prison and watched the two talk on a video screen. They hugged each other as though they hadn’t seen each other in years, and might never again. They were already cracking, just in the initial encounter of seeing each other in this way, handcuffed, defeated mentally, and in orange jumpsuits. The initial loving embrace ended quickly as things sank in.

  The twin’s face turned to one of anger, as if disappointed in his brother and what he had done. All of his killing had finally caught up with him, Allah had brought him there for his sins, and the tension in the cell quickly boiled. He looked at Dark
Horse as if he had been contemplating for months what he would say if he ever got the chance.

  The long and the short of the twin’s message to Dark Horse: the Americans know everything, they are in complete control, and the only thing Dark Horse is doing now is screwing his family. The twin encouraged him to cooperate, in the hopes that there might be a small chance to save what was left of his broken family.

  Dark Horse began to cry. He put his hands up to his face and looked down at the ground. That’s when we knew we had him beat. The twin was a real-life version of Dark Horse’s conscience. Tom had broken him.

  I’ve seen enough of this stuff to know that no matter how hard someone is, putting a guy in a box for a couple of months and introducing the sight of his family does something to him.

  This was the turning point we’d been waiting on for years.

  20

  MANHATTAN

  AND BROOKLYN

  I visited Dark Horse a few days later.

  This time he was in an empty tiled room in our compound, behind the Box—a bit of change in scenery from the same ratty couch where we’d met before.

  “Hello,” he said. His voice was soft, barely audible. He looked smaller somehow, less confident. His clothes were looser on his body; he’d lost weight in his face. When I’d first met him, he was arrogant, still ruthless and loud like he was in control, even though he was in custody. Now he looked mostly at the cold floor, like he knew we owned him.

  I brought out some photos of targets from a file and placed them on the floor. As I stood over him, he squatted down to look. Two Iraqi officers looked on from each side of the room. He seemed scared, like an alley cat in a corner. But of course, he had no idea what was going to happen next—I would have been scared, too.

  We sat with him for hours and he began giving us information on everything and everyone that he knew about. There was no more bullshit this time. He even knew about attacks that were being planned to hit the World Cup in South Africa that year. We immediately passed the information to the CIA.

  One target he mentioned was on our kill list: ISI’s new military commander in the north. We sent the intel to Jack’s team, who took him out that night.

  Around the same time, Dark Horse gave us locations of weapons and explosives hidden across the city, and, most important, where his seven lieutenants were shacked up. These were the guys who carried out the bombings that he’d bragged about a few weeks before. That night, we sent out a team to take them down.

  The birds went up to each of the locations and Jason got started on strike plans—they’d hit all seven locations simultaneously, with support from the Iraqi special forces elements. If we didn’t do them all at once, the guys would figure out that their cells had been compromised and flee.

  It was past midnight in early April. I remember having been up nearly seventy-two hours. I’d probably gone through a case of Frosted Flakes.

  With the drones overhead, we began to scour each site for any sign of weapons, explosives, vehicles, slant counts, everything—all so that the various raid teams could be fully briefed before going in.

  My head worked through the dangers as the operators headed out with our new Iraqi partners. Part of me wondered if Dark Horse was setting us up. You never completely know if a detainee is leading you to a trap. The other possibility was that he was sending us to innocents.

  I watched now as each of our teams stormed into the seven homes, blowing off the doors with charges, seeing the quick flashes of light in the infrared camera, and then the men being led out minutes later.

  We captured a slew of ISI operatives that night, but one of them was particularly important—Dark Horse’s uncle.

  He was a senior courier in the Manhattan-Brooklyn chain and was due to make a special delivery the very next day.

  Uncle was a mother lode and changed everything. This was when our takedown mission of the top two leaders of ISI began in earnest.

  THE IRAQIS IMMEDIATELY GRABBED THE UNCLE AND BROUGHT HIM BACK TO ONE OF their holding cells and got to work shaking him down for information. A few members of our team went along.

  He sat slumped in a chair in a barren concrete room. Uncle was fat and bald, with a scrappy beard, and wore the traditional white robe. He said his job was to deliver a letter in a yellow envelope to another man, who would then deliver it to someone else, all the way up, hopefully, to Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Umar al-Baghdadi—Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  Uncle had never interacted before with the other couriers in the chain, except for a man he passed a letter to each week. The courier chain had been set up in a way that allowed for extreme compartmentalization in the event that any one link was discovered.

  If Uncle or any other courier in the chain didn’t show up at a juncture, the courier network would evaporate. All messages would be destroyed and a whole new system would rise up in its place.

  At first, Uncle was reluctant to work with us. But the threat of the Iraqis carting him off to some dank underground prison, where all bets were off, changed that.

  We learned that the courier chain, which was swapped out every three months, brought information weekly and always in person to the “Sheikhs”—Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  Uncle provided limited details about it, but enough to verify that a letter was about to go out. “They expect me tomorrow,” he said.

  He was expected to pass it off to the next courier in the chain by hiding it in a flowerpot. The letter was destined for Manhattan, but it was unclear how many other members in the courier chain would have to pass the message and the level of scrutiny it would receive before reaching the top.

  As much as we wanted to look at the letter, we didn’t. It was kept sealed in the yellowish envelope. Any signs of tampering might blow up the mission. Tom knew we had to act fast.

  “We got to go then,” Tom said to him.

  His eyes widened. “Where?” For a moment, he probably thought he’d done his part and it was over.

  “You’re going back in.”

  “No way, I’m not crazy.”

  “You’ll go,” he said. “You’ll carry the letter to the next guy as planned.” Uncle looked over at the Iraqi officer who was giving him a dead-man stare.

  This was our plan: we’d take Uncle to the drop off and have him hand off a flowerpot containing the letter for the sheiks, tagged with a tracking device. The flowerpot was how it was always delivered.

  The Iraqi element we were working with, however, had different plans for Uncle—they only wanted to capture the next courier, and were extremely reluctant to consider what we call an “IMINT [imagery intelligence] follow”—essentially using a drone to follow the entire chain of couriers up to the top. They didn’t get it.

  Negotiations were always delicate with the Iraqis. They were reluctant, but we were convincing. When we got them to come around, Uncle was sweating bullets. He kept shaking his head. If the man he was meeting sensed something out of place, he’d kill him, and his family. “We’re all dead,” he said, drawing his hand across his neck.

  “Better be Hollywood,” I said.

  He didn’t understand.

  “Just be a good actor.”

  We washed his clothing to get rid of any evidence that he’d been in custody and gave him muscle relaxers to ease his anxiety. That didn’t help. But it was time to go.

  We swept Uncle into a chopper with Tom and the operators and they raced off to another safe house, closer to the exchange spot in the city of Samarra.

  That afternoon, the team bought new flowers and a random pot from a local store and got a blue bongo truck, which was outfitted with our geo trackers. Uncle’s cover story was that he’d been in a car accident and was borrowing someone’s truck (the blue bongo).

  We worked all night. Because the initial courier meeting site was far away from my location and closer to Jack’s battlespace, he now had control of the drones, which were sent in from Boxes across Iraq. When Uncle headed out at 7 A.M., we had three dro
nes stacked in the sky.

  It took some time to find the meeting site. Uncle was unclear of which way to travel, since he was coming from the north. The meeting was supposed to occur soon and if we missed it the whole thing was shot.

  After a flurry of direction requests and instructions, we finally found the spot. Two support sedans containing the Iraqi special force staked out the drop by faking car trouble on the side of the road. Within minutes of Uncle arriving at the location, we watched from our eye in the sky as the next courier arrived.

  Jason’s team stood off while Uncle passed off the flowerpot to the new courier. We paid attention closely to every little movement—how the men embraced each other, the handoff. Our three drones stacked above them, feeding the images back to the wall of TVs. Other days we might have had a dozen different missions up on the screens. Today this was the main event on every monitor.

  I remembered being worried that Uncle might tip him off, and we watched closely for any sign of that, but the exchange was made without incident, and now we were in pursuit of the second courier, whom we nicknamed Charlie, with the drone.

  YOU’D THINK WE HAD THIS IN THE BAG NOW, BUT THIS WAS WHERE YOU COULD EASILY and suddenly lose control over an operation.

  We were following a guy who didn’t know he was being followed, but we had no eyes on him except for the birds. Sure, the tracking devices were worth something—up to a point. But our enemy could swap cars, flowerpots, and everything else with tags and they’d be nearly invisible.

  Preds were technological marvels, but they’re still technology, and I knew that at any second something could go wrong. The camera could malfunction for no reason or the Pred’s wings could start to ice because of cold temperatures, forcing it to return to base. A mission like this brought stress into high definition. One wrong move or technological mishap and we were back to zero.