Drone Warrior Read online

  Brad was a stout guy, tall, black hair, and with a commanding presence. He threw a shadow. He sat down on a plastic chair across from me and looked me right in the eyes. “We’ve just been tasked with finding the girls,” he said. “We could use your help.”

  Boko Haram had been locked in a fight with the Nigerian government for years and security forces had largely ceded them the eastern part of the country. The United States saw them as terrorists—they were affiliated with Al Qaeda and would later pledge allegiance to ISIS. The United States had a $7 million reward for the head of the group’s leader, a lunatic named Abubakar Shekau.

  Shekau frequently posted videos online dressed in dark camouflage, like he was some military figure, waving an automatic weapon, threatening to attack the United States and preaching about his jihad against Christianity. There were stories of him reciting verses from the Koran that didn’t exist, to justify his atrocities. His men rampaged through Nigerian villages, hacking away with machetes at any man, woman, or child who refused to join them. With the kidnapped girls, he said he’d be converting them to Islam and marrying them off to his fighters. We worried some of them would also be used as suicide bombers, just as he had done previously with girls he had brainwashed.

  Brad must have seen the doubt written all over my face. “I know you’re out,” he said. “But this is a big deal.”

  My days working for Palantir had been mostly the same, just troubleshooting the new software and banging my head against the wall when new glitches turned up. It was an easy nine-to-five job, a cakewalk compared to what I was used to, and I was sleeping again.

  My first inclination was to say no. They could figure it out on their own. This wasn’t my fight and Joyce had asked me after Somalia to never go back to the person I was before. I knew that if I flipped that switch on again, she probably wouldn’t like the person I became and then I’d lose her.

  But when I got home that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about the girls. It didn’t help that it was all over CNN, which Joyce had turned on while we ate dinner.

  “You are giving me that same look you gave me right before you told me you were going to Somalia,” she said, putting her fork down. “What’s going on?”

  I waited a second before answering.

  “I can’t say right now, but these guys are asking for my help on a mission.”

  “Well you said no, of course, right?” she asked. “You’re done with that!”

  I thought about it more that night. But the other side of me won out. It would only be a month. I could help guide these guys, share with them some of my experience, and I’d be out when they had to give the Pred back. Maybe it was stupid. But I thought, What the hell? I was at a better place in my life. I couldn’t resist. I was in.

  NONE OF US SLEPT THE FIRST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. WE WERE A GROUP OF FEWER than ten, all of us bent over laptops, staring at TV screens, just like the days when I was running the Box in Iraq.

  Everyone supporting the mission was crammed into a small windowless room on the top floor of a secure military facility. It felt like a bank vault. The room was barely big enough, with the computers, screens, and desks nearly stacked on top of each other. A heavy steel door, locked with secure codes, separated us from the rest of the place.

  We’d gotten official clearance to fly into Nigerian airspace, something they’d been against until now, with all the media attention.

  We worked fast: combed through intelligence about the group, dug into national and international databases of maps and old files, and analyzed videos of the girls that had begun circulating on YouTube and other social media sites.

  The northeastern part of Nigeria, where Boko Haram had taken the girls, was about the size of New York State and bordered by the countries Chad and Cameroon. Boko Haram didn’t acknowledge the borders.

  From our sleuthing, we soon came up with about forty different startpoints—mainly places where the group had been seen or known to hide. My gut was that the girls had been broken up into three different groups—that’s how they’d operated before—with one group likely in the Sambisa Forest, just outside of Maidiguri, another near the Lake Chad Basin, across the border, and another perhaps in the southeast near the national parks on the Nigerian side near the Cameroon border.

  It was showtime now with the drone. In a sense, we were literally mapping the earth, where few Americans had even traveled. It was a lot to soak in at first. The ground was mostly sporadic trees with patches of wide-open grassland. Everything was so green below, except for the bright brown dirt roads that wound around everywhere like something undone. Many people lived under trees instead of houses because it was cooler than inside. Others lived in the open land, entire families set up in fields just off the roads.

  There were people everywhere. On foot and dirt bikes. And the Boko Haram foot soldiers didn’t even hide. It was clear that the group felt invincible there, not a care in the world.

  Within the first two days of hunting, one of the first startpoints we added to the list paid off—in the Sambisa Forest.

  At first it was hard to tell if it was the lost girls. The tree was taller than anything else around for miles, with a thick trunk and huge branches that extended over everything below it like one big umbrella. We called it the “Tree of Life.”

  There wasn’t much around for miles except a few small villages, some thick bush, and a dirt road that curved around the Tree of Life like a ribbon.

  It was early in the morning there, late night for us. There was a lot of confusion at first as the scene happened and the room erupted into an urgent conversation.

  “Wow, there’s a lot of people under there,” someone said.

  “Yeah, that tree is huge.”

  “Can we tell if those are females?”

  “The sensor operator thinks they might be.”

  After prayer time ended, the people were quickly corralled back into the tent. It took us a full day of these prayer sessions to know for sure. Others in the room, including a bunch of the military officers, went back and forth about what they were seeing. Trying to make sense of it all, not knowing if their rank could handle telling their superiors what we had just discovered in the event someone got it wrong. But I knew better. I knew 100 percent. We had found them.

  WE NEEDED TO KNOW EVERY SQUARE INCH OF THE SAMBISA FOREST BEFORE ANYONE went in.

  One day we saw what we believed to be one of the girls running away from the group during prayer time, only to have two of the men in the group chase after her with AK-47s in hand and drag her back.

  When one of the targeting officers, who had personally traveled to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria, finally delivered images of the Tree of Life to the Nigerian security forces, they were surprised that we’d found them so fast. They said they would go in. The Nigerians were still trying to gather their own information on the girls’ whereabouts, at this point they had nothing really credible. They did a great job of pretending that they had it all covered, though, as we watched news outlets interviewing various senior Nigerian officials assuring the public that they knew way more than they actually did.

  But then an odd thing happened after a lot of back-and-forth with their forces. They didn’t act.

  Weeks passed and we waited for a rescue mission and watched the Tree of Life through the monitors. It wasn’t like the days of the Box when I could just send in the operators.

  The Nigerians never sent troops. It seemed that they were worried about going in, afraid of a firefight. Weeks later, instead, they sent one fighter jet to swoop low and over the Tree of Life, as a show of force to the Boko Haram fighters. It couldn’t have been a dumber decision. They showed the public that they knew one of the locations of the girls, as the cameras captured it, but they also alerted the abductors.

  A day or two after the flyby, it was over. Bad weather moved in and we had to bring the Pred down. When we got it back up and panned over the patch of forest, the girls were gone.

  As we orb
ited the Tree of Life, there was no sign of them below. It was just the tree now and nothing around it. They had likely been moved because of those jets.

  It killed us.

  It was a perfect example of why drones are nothing without a finishing capability. Whether that was a Hellfire or assault force, somebody on the ground had to be proficient enough to act on what the drones saw.

  As far as we could tell, the Nigerian leaders didn’t want to find the girls. For example, with the information we gave them they could have done something. The kidnapping was a political tool and they embraced it like a politician suddenly supporting an agenda to win votes and for the wrong reasons. All they wanted to do was figure out how other countries could give them money, how America could give them drones. The Nigerians used it as an opportunity to ask for Predators and Reapers from the U.S. government. Like they were somehow pros at using them and all they needed were the drones and not the infrastructure behind it. They wanted the expensive ones with the Hellfires, and they wanted the U.S. government to buy them.

  We only had the Pred for another two weeks before it went back in its box and was sent home. In that time, we found a bunch of other sites with a confirmed Boko Haram presence, but we never saw the missing girls again.

  A few months passed and news of the kidnappings in the mainstream media subsided, as did the interest in the U.S. government to commit any more aerial assets. That’s what happens when you’re not in headlines anymore: people forget.

  Boko Haram was and still is one of the biggest threats to the region. It was depressing to think about how we’d missed the girls, how the Nigerians had messed it up after we’d tracked them down—and how many of those girls are still missing today.

  I walked out of that room after weeks of not sleeping, beat up and tired, just like the days in the Box. But I could see clearer than I’d ever seen.

  I’d been fighting the pull of drones, trying to find another way forward in the world. Arguing with that feeling. Believing that to go on meant giving them up. But that changed for me as I left the ops center that night and took a break back home. It had taken a long time, with a lot of pain, to finally realize that drones didn’t only have to be about counterterrorism and killing bad guys. I had the power to use drones for more important things than war. Before I hadn’t even thought about that sort of thing. In the military, I’d been completely under its spell. I had blinders on to the rest of the world. Now I saw something else entirely.

  25

  A NEW BEGINNING

  As an elephant family grazed in the grassy plain of the Great Rift Valley in northern Kenya, I zoomed the drone camera back out to the perimeter of the wildlife conservancy—until I saw three men crawling slowly through the bush toward them in the darkness.

  We had received intel from the local wildlife service that a small campsite had been discovered in a cave nearby the day before. With the embers still cooling, I knew any wildlife in the proximity could be in danger.

  I switched on the drone’s thermal camera to get a better look. The men were carrying AK-47s and large machetes. They’d come for the elephant tusks, a prize that could bring them tens of thousands on the black market.

  “We’re tracking hostiles near the eastern fence line from above, push out the Rangers to the site immediately.”

  “Roger that,” a voice came back over the radio.

  It was early evening, the sun just down. In a glowing white, the drone feeds lit up the small ops center that we’d set up in the middle of the conservancy. It wasn’t the Box. It was different now.

  All around us were tens of thousands of acres: mountains, valleys, and lakes. Crazy wildlife that made you feel like we were in The Jungle Book: elephants, rhinos, leopards, and hyenas. Creatures from an earlier age before man.

  “We can’t wait any longer,” I called out. “If they make it through that perimeter those elephants are good as dead. I’m moving another drone to protect the family and will keep this one on the perimeter threat until you secure it.”

  The choppers were winding up just outside my tent, the rangers on the move to take them out. “We’re in route to intercept,” the voice said.

  I’D BEEN WORKING OUT THAT PLAY-BY-PLAY FOR MONTHS NOW—WHAT A DRONE operation would look like if it were put into action in Kenya, home to some of the world’s most famous wildlife parks and reserves.

  It all started when two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs got in touch with me and said they had an idea that would change my life. Before we met, I thought, What could live up to that?

  They flew me first-class out to Paris one weekend in the spring of 2014 and we met at an upscale, swanky hotel bar. Reza was in his forties, with an aura of mystery and excitement about him. His family was from Iran, but he had grown up mostly in America and France. He had built a fortune out of a handful of Internet companies in the United States. But over the past few years he had roamed the earth in search of a deeper calling.

  Jory, his partner, had roots in telecom. A slightly older man, he exuded cool and calmness. After a successful career working at multinational U.S. firms, he had crossed paths with Reza while on a similar quest to help Haiti after its earthquake. They’d bonded over the potential of doing humanitarian projects.

  “What these wildlife conservations are doing out there is not working,” Reza said to me that night, as techno music hummed in the background. “They need a game changer.”

  We connected right away.

  Their idea was straightforward. Animals were dying at alarming rates in parts of Africa and innovative new technology was needed to actually do something about it. They felt that drones could fight that war—and win.

  The goal was simple but ambitious. Start a program that would work with the government and wildlife conservations that oversaw much of the land, to patrol them with drones and use the rangers as the assault team. Basically, set up an operation like I had in Iraq.

  We talked for hours at that bar about the different technologies being developed by U.S. companies.

  “Do you think drones could help solve this issue?” Reza asked.

  “It’s possible,” I replied. “I just need to get on the ground and see the terrain to be sure.”

  “Well, that’s why you’re here. We want you to lead the expedition. Are you in?”

  I smiled, pausing for a few seconds to take it all in. The well-dressed people swanned around us with their drinks and I felt like an island with these guys and this new idea. Together they were poised, and yet in them burned an agitation that made me feel very much empowered, enthusiastic, and alive.

  “Of course I am,” I said.

  A week later, we were flying into Kenya.

  OUR TINY CESSNA LIFTED OFF FROM SMALL WILSON AIRPORT IN NAIROBI, KENYA, heading south toward the Kenya–Tanzania border.

  The seats were cramped, but it didn’t matter. I was heading into the Maasai Mara, one of Africa’s greatest wildlife reserves. The Mara cuts along the southwest Kenya border and spills over the Tanzania border, connecting with Serengeti National Park. The massive reserve was home to the legendary Maasai warriors, a group of people who lived off the land. There is a symbiotic relationship between the Maasai and the wildlife there, and it has been that way for centuries.

  Landing on a dirt airstrip a few hours after leaving Nairobi, the Cessna bumped to a stop. There, in the open grass plains around me, I got my first glimpse of the remote area. Wildlife was everywhere: antelopes, wildebeest, hyenas, hippo, elephants, zebras.

  It felt almost prehistoric when I set foot there—like an explorer experiencing a new world for the first time. The open grassland alternated with hills and the land reached for hundreds of miles around us.

  The terrain was perfect for drones to operate in, with hundreds of miles of open land and few trees. With the cameras it would be easy to distinguish between animal and man from three to four thousand feet up.

  That day, I got my first up-close view of an elephant in the wild. We climbed i
nto jeeps with a Kenyan ranger who was waiting for the three of us and began to drive. Soon an elephant family walked in front of us. Two big ones and three smaller ones. A couple hundred yards away, just grazing. They were some of the most peaceful, majestic animals I’d ever seen—except they were dying.

  I WAS STILL ADJUSTING TO LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE MILITARY, BUT IT WAS GETTING easier. I had done a lot of soul-searching.

  Joyce stuck with me. Even though I still didn’t know how everything would end up, I took out all the money I had in the bank and bought her a diamond ring. We got engaged and moved into an apartment in downtown D.C. It had started to feel a lot like home—something I hadn’t had in a long time.

  We talked about the past a lot. It was like getting things off my back. Sometimes Joyce said that when I talked about the terrorists I’d hunted, I still acted like they weren’t real people, like they didn’t have souls.

  I saw a kill or capture as business. It was my job and it was transactional. And because of the good I believed—and still believe—it did, it consumed me and made me cold.

  I tried for some time to explain this to her. But I got that it didn’t make much sense to someone normal. These days I did less explaining about that. I didn’t need to anymore. I was slowly losing the coldness day by day.

  And then I surprised myself—and Joyce. It was early one night and I was watching TV news when there was a story that came on about an old man and woman who had been married for more than fifty years. I don’t know what happened inside of me but watching them talk about their connection to one another over the long decades got to me. Joyce was trying to say something to me, but I didn’t hear her so she came over. “Brett, you’re crying,” she said.

  I put a hand on my cheek and it was wet. I hadn’t even noticed. “It’s nice,” I said.