Drone Warrior Read online

  We followed Charlie as he traveled north up the main highway, farther into the desert, where goats and sheep were scattered about. A mission like this could go on for hours. Time tended to bend and you’d lose track of the hours. But at least for this leg of it, Charlie only drove for about thirty minutes before pulling over to the side of the road.

  We could see another vehicle arriving from the opposite direction.

  “Center up on that,” the message came over the chat lines.

  “Roger that.”

  This was another messy junction. Depending on who and how many people popped out, and where they went from there, the fact remained that we only had enough drones to follow three targets.

  A heavy quiet fell over the Box. I held my breath as the scene unfolded.

  The second vehicle arrived and a man exited the white truck to meet Charlie. They greeted each other, the new guy gave Charlie a tire, and Charlie in turn took the flowerpot from the back of his truck and handed it to the new guy.

  While this happened, we logged every action taken by every individual as well as details about location and time, both for review later and for the record should we come back on another op.

  Once they traded items, the new guy climbed back into his truck and headed north along the highway. We called this new courier Precious Cargo. On the radio, he was just PC.

  Charlie headed back south along the highway toward Uncle. As soon as he arrived back at the original meet-up site, he was detained by our Iraqi support element, who had begun frantically calling over the radio that they were being trailed by armed militants. That turned out not to be true—just paranoia.

  We had to keep everyone calm because news could travel fast, and any visible blowup could result in word—somehow—getting up the chain.

  With Charlie taken care of, the Pred trailing him peeled off and rejoined the operation following PC as he continued farther north.

  We were guessing—maybe also hoping—that PC was the last guy in the chain. The one who would lead us to two of the most wanted men in the world.

  PC DROVE AROUND FOR HOURS. HE STOPPED AT A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT LOCATIONS—various houses and stores. He traveled out to the middle of the desert, and then back into little villages.

  Each place he stopped, we took notes. These sites—especially any houses—would be targets of strikes later. All the while, the drone cameras were snapping hundreds of photos of each location, cataloging them, along with every GPS point—streets, neighborhoods, mosques. The sophistication of special operations had increased exponentially in part because we were literally mapping the earth.

  In the afternoon, PC took his white bongo to a car dealership that had thirty or forty identical white bongos. Turned out PC thought something was up and was trying to ditch his car for another. The dealer didn’t take it, though, lucky for us, and PC was stuck.

  This was a screwup. PC had been trained to abort the delivery if he thought he was being followed, and clearly he thought he was, since not more than an hour later we saw him throw a large object out of his window into the desert—the flowerpot with the message.

  “Something’s wrong,” I chatted up Jack on our internal chat system.

  “It doesn’t make sense what he’s doing. He keeps stopping in random places and now he just threw the plant out the window. Are the birds too low?”

  “They’re low. But any higher and we’ll be blocked by cloud cover.”

  “Damn, this is a good sign, though. It means he’s up to no good.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Jack replied.

  PC kept going. But soon the weather began to turn. I saw the clouds building in the sky on the monitors. A dark, rolling ocean. “This isn’t good,” I said to Jack as our birds headed straight into the storm.

  We all strained at the monitors, as if that might push back the clouds. But soon enough the clouds had blacked out the cameras and one of the bird’s wings began to ice up. That drone had to be brought back to base before a mishap occurred.

  Ten more minutes passed and then—PC was gone.

  Where the hell did he go? None of the drones had him.

  My gut dropped, as I stared at the now totally blackened TV screens. The cameras just streaming back clouds. No bongo. No PC.

  Everyone was freaking out.

  Some members of the team were cursing the screens, as if fate somehow was not on our side. The odds stacked against us. Why now?

  Our internal chat lines were overflowing with new orders and actions needed to reestablish visual.

  If PC was completely lost, there was a contingency. The operators were prepping from the safe house to take the first two original couriers, Uncle and Charlie, into the desert to see if they had any idea where PC was going.

  The mapping analyst located up north supporting the mission had an idea. Quickly he began to calculate a bunch of different predictions of where the bongo might be if and when the clouds cleared, based on the speed of the truck at its last known point coupled with the speed of the drone.

  Once the coordinates were received, the bird’s thermal camera sensor was directed there—and we hoped for the best. Five more minutes passed and it felt like hours.

  Where was he? Everything building to this moment could be lost. Now we could see small breaks in the fast-moving weather, like a fuzzy cable channel crashing between crystal clarity and black and gray lines. Each time a break appeared, nothing was showing between the desert floor and our bird thousands of feet up.

  The seconds that followed almost stood still.

  It was as if someone had heard our prayers, because suddenly the bongo appeared back on our screen. Brian nearly collapsed right in front of me in relief. The bet paid off. We were lucky.

  OUT AT THE MAIN COMMAND SITE, DEEP IN THE DESERT, MILES AWAY FROM THE BOX, the operators were ready to go. Jason and his men were suited up, armed to the teeth and closely monitoring the live drone feeds with their Black Hawks on standby.

  Day turned to night and soon PC was turning down a desert road, heading deeper into nowhere. Was this his ultimate destination? The top brass at our higher HQ were now tuned into the drone feeds from their main command center. The most senior commanders back in D.C. and in different combat zones were also tuned in to the feed. “Kill TV” was what we called the drone channel.

  Even though we didn’t know for sure where PC was headed, there was a thrill in the air because five years of hunting was about to come to an end. What was unfolding now could result in one of the most important discoveries in years.

  The road was straight as a razor and eventually led to a very small dirt compound with nothing in either direction for miles. On the screen, I could see a few animals mulling around outside. Goats.

  “Z in one,” Jack told the camera operator. He wanted to see the hut and there it was: body heat signatures, little black ghosts, leaked out of the north side of the dark building. No guards with weapons around or anything from what I could tell.

  “What do you think? Could this be it?” Jack chatted me up.

  “Well, if I was on the run, that’s where I would be—in the middle of fucking nowhere,” I replied.

  PC came to a stop and climbed out of the bongo. But then he did something that suddenly got everyone uneasy. Instead of entering immediately into the compound, he walked a few hundred feet out into the desert and looked upward. We could see him looking hard into the black night sky. Like he’d heard something. Was he looking for us?

  PC FINALLY ENTERED THE HUT AFTER HIS WALK OUT TO THE DESERT. AFTER ABOUT thirty minutes, it was clear he wasn’t going anywhere else for the rest of the night. Jason made the call to proceed, and he told the operators to get ready. “Kit up, we depart within the hour.”

  As the drone scanned the hut, we couldn’t be certain how many people were in there, but if this was Manhattan and Brooklyn’s location, then at least some of them were going to be heavily armed and would not be taken alive.

  Brian got to work rig
ht away at mapping out the hut and annotating the maps of the area. Everyone worked with absolute focus, as if our lives depended on this moment working out. Radio chatter interrupted long seconds of working silence.

  The commander controlling the operation had ultimately decided against bombing the site. It would have to be a raid. It was just impossible to know who exactly was in the hut and we didn’t want to kill a house full of women and children. We couldn’t confirm that Manhattan and Brooklyn were in there.

  But a raid involved a human risk on our side. Whenever the raid team was sent in, there was an understanding that the target was worth the risk.

  The operators always relied on my team, as much as I relied on them to finish the mission on the ground. We were all brothers in this.

  I remembered the operator who came back after a mission with blood all over him, asking me who he had just killed.

  As the team suited up with their weapons and planned the chopper routes, they also closely studied the layout of the hut through the drone feed: two or three rooms, a carport off to the side, where the bongo truck had parked, and the whole property surrounded by a six-foot mud wall.

  The usual target cards were passed out containing the photos of other bad guys that they might find at the various sites. I also got on the phone with Jason and reiterated to him the historical intel we had on Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  “These guys wear suicide vests like we wear socks,” I told him. “If they’re in there, odds are they won’t come out alive.”

  Along PC’s route, there were seven separate houses that he had stopped at on his drive through the desert. All would be raided almost simultaneously. The leaders could be in any of them.

  Given the number of locations and the distance between them, the operation was too big for our team to carry out alone, so Jason had decided to hit the main courier house and bring in Army Rangers to hit the other six locations.

  Jason’s initial entry plan was simple. They would take the choppers right to the top of the main target site, where the guys would fast-rope down and storm the place.

  “You’re set,” I said. “Good luck.”

  “See you when we get back.”

  THE WEATHER BEGAN TO TURN BAD AGAIN. MORE STORM CLOUDS ROLLING IN THE sky, sharp winds blowing around sand, making it hard for everyone to see.

  When the Hawks lifted off at 2 A.M., we had three Preds circling the compound, watching the empty desert for an ambush. The extreme high winds combined with the dust made the visibility for Jason’s team almost zero—dangerous conditions for flying choppers, even for the best pilots in the world. But the team was pushing through it either way. There was no turning back now. This was one opportunity we couldn’t afford to wait on.

  And then word of tragedy hit. As our choppers began their descent at the main site, an urgent call shot over the radio: “Eagle down, eagle down.” A chopper with a Ranger team had gone down on the way to one of the courier station sites. A wind gust knocked it off balance and its rotors went spinning into the desert.

  We didn’t have visibility on it so the call was immediately made to redirect one of the drones from the main house to the crash site.

  Soon the wreckage came into stark and terrible view in black and white on our TVs. The chopper was lying on its side and burning while half the Rangers scrambled to secure the area and recover the injured.

  More bad news immediately followed over the radio.

  “We have one friendly KIA.” One Ranger had died.

  “Roger that, stand by for medevac,” came the call back from the commander, who had also redirected another chopper to the crash site.

  Jason, now the commander on the ground, made the decision to press on. There was nothing more to be done about the fallen Ranger and there was no time to slow down. That’s a tough thing to admit, but the mission always came first, no matter what. From the moment we signed on to the unit, that message was burned into our heads—the target or the precious cargo over everything else, even when your own is dead. All of us learned how to compartmentalize, which is something that would haunt me later.

  Back at the main site, I watched our team race out of the Hawks toward the mud hut. The drone was now sparkling the target house to ensure they saw its exact location through their night-vision goggles.

  I watched them enter the house. We all expected gunfire, explosions. But it was surprising because there was no pushback at all. They walked right in and did a full sweep.

  “We got PC, no sign of the leaders,” Jason radioed. They turned up two children and a woman. “Dry hole.”

  You gotta be fucking kidding me. Where the fuck were Manhattan and Brooklyn?

  The guys on the ground pressed PC, but he was defiant. He’d die before he’d tell them anything.

  After the initial sweep, Jason and some of his team climbed back onto the choppers and went to help secure the additional sites that were being raided by the Rangers.

  Now only four members of the team remained with PC, the two children, and the woman outside of the house.

  But there was something strange about the woman.

  She looked familiar to one of the operators on the ground, like he had seen her before. The team snapped her picture and sent it back to the Box. We plugged her into our database.

  All the different intel personnel involved tapped away at their computers and ran through family pictures we’d collected over the years of the two men. Dozens of snapshots taken from different target sites over the last decade instantaneously appeared on our TVs, drawing from our databases of thousands of raids and photos from various government agencies.

  She looked like Manhattan’s wife.

  JASON AND HIS TEAM RUSHED BACK TO THE MAIN COMPOUND. HE ORDERED THEM TO grab the courier Charlie and fly him over, too. He might have some answers.

  When the courier arrived, he clearly recognized the residence. As he stepped out of the chopper, he instantly became nervous, visibly shaking, while adjusting his kaffiyeh to hide his face.

  The five operators laid into him, and in short order Charlie coughed up that he thought there was a secret hole that Manhattan sometimes hid in, and that PC had told him once that he’d bought a particular kind of toilet for the bathroom, specifically for the purpose of creating a cover for the hole.

  Jason then went to the door and brought out the woman we suspected to be Manhattan’s wife. He asked Charlie if he recognized her. He did but couldn’t positively identify her or said he couldn’t.

  The operators began to pressure the woman. They asked about her husband and told her they believed he was hiding in a hole. “You know about that hole, don’t you?” they said. “If he doesn’t come out, he’s going to die.”

  She shrugged, like we were talking about the weather. She said her husband was in Baghdad and that if there was a hole, she wasn’t aware of it. The team pressed the issue more, at which point she replied, “If he’s in there, then you’ll have to kill him.”

  Jason radioed back to HQ. “Whisky Zero One, this is Bravo Zero Four.”

  “Roger that.”

  “She said he’ll never come out alive. We think he is here hiding.”

  He wasn’t going back into the house without more men. He needed guns on all four sides; otherwise they risked an escape and there was no telling how big that hole was and how many guys were in it. “Send the team back,” he radioed urgently. “Over.”

  The place was a ticking time bomb now. The operators stood around the house with their guns pointed at it, not knowing what to expect. I kept an eye on the house, which was motionless like the desert around it. Other insurgents could show up at any moment. Who knew if the people in the hole had set off some kind of alert.

  It was a long thirty minutes before the rest of the guys showed up. While the children and the mother were escorted far away, the operators walked the courier Charlie into the house.

  Inside it was dead silent, like the desert. But at the bathroom, Charlie became very ex
cited, as if the whole thing now made sense. He pointed at the toilet—the hideout. “That’s it,” he said.

  This was particularly funny because the toilet had been totally functional and one of our guys had taken a shit in it during the first sweep, hours earlier.

  Standing in the house now, the team discussed several courses of action, including placing a large charge on top of the toilet or tossing a thermobaric grenade in it. Eventually they settled on an M67 grenade to ensure that it would fit down the hole, causing the most possible damage to whoever was inside without collapsing the place.

  It didn’t take long.

  Tossing the grenade down the hatch, one of the operators yelled out: “Merry Christmas, motherfuckers!”

  Muffled gunshots came from the direction of the toilet after the detonation. Everyone took cover. They were in there.

  Pulling a slow retreat, the operators poured gunfire into the house and I kept an eye out for squirters.

  Just then, Manhattan’s wife broke free from the soldiers and tried to run toward the house—suicide by crossfire. But another soldier grabbed her in time and put her on the ground.

  From our birds, the gunfight looked like flashes of black, flocks of cicadas in the dark desert. Strange to say, but even after years of doing this, I still found it beautiful from 16,000 feet up—the snaps of light black against an even blacker desert night.

  As the smoke from the grenade cleared, the volume of fire only increased. Stepping back some more, the operators concentrated fire on the door, but at least one person from the hole had crawled out and was now trying to work his way to a room off the bathroom. Two more got out and began shooting at a high rate as they moved through the house.

  I was nervous for the operators on the ground, but another part of me was relieved it was happening—because a gunfight meant we were in the right place.

  It didn’t last long. One of our guys threw another grenade into the house, where the enemy had been hemmed in. About three seconds after that explosion, two other massive explosions went off. Suicide vests. From the drone I could see the whole hut collapse inward almost instantaneously.