Drone Warrior Page 26

Joyce laughed. “After all of what you’ve been through, this is what you shed tears over?”

  I hadn’t cried for my cousin. I hadn’t been able to cry at the funeral of the soldier who had died. I hadn’t been able to cry ever since I began my life in the Box. But this was a start.

  THE MORE TIME I SPENT OUT OF THE MILITARY, THE MORE I STARTED TO SEE THAT drones were a part of me now and could play a role in my life. I could still use them—just differently and to help humanity. I started a company to that end.

  I realized that the knowledge I had was unlike any others’ in the field of drones. I could use that knowledge for greater purposes than simply counterterrorism. I could use drones for good. As I looked around, I didn’t see anyone who was helping businesses and people understand how to effectively deploy them in the skies, what you could do with them if you used them right.

  The way that they could be used to monitor farm crops or to augment disaster recovery sites or even help search for missing children. Consumer drone technology was starting to take shape. Some of the same equipment I had used in the government world was trickling down into the private sector. Around the same time that I got the call about Kenya, I also got a call about using drones to monitor fisheries off the coast of Somalia. Drones could bring stability in a region plagued by poverty and piracy. The world was changing fast, and Jory and Reza showed me how business could be aligned with a deep sense of purpose. We shared the same conviction. Inspired by that philosophy, I started my own company: Dronepire Inc.

  The new company meant that I would sometimes have to get into a suit and go to an office. There were spreadsheets and other paperwork. Things I didn’t do or like to do in the Box. But this was my first step. I didn’t need the gambling. I didn’t need the fake adrenaline. Using drones to promote good—which is just as important as preventing evil—was what started to get me up in the morning.

  I DON’T HAVE ANY REGRETS ABOUT MY LIFE IN THE BOX AND HOW WE USED OUR drones to fight a brutal enemy. Very few people understand just how sick our enemies can be—we haven’t seen the worst of them yet. The stuff that shows up on CNN about ISIS every other day is only scratching the surface.

  Hunting terrorists was a rough existence. It was a stressful job and I had to give up a lot to do it right. It taught me patience and the importance of being persistent against the enemy. Stress these days, though, was nothing. I learned to trust in my gut, because it was backed up by years of experience combating terrorists in different settings.

  I saw how effective teams can be when they are devoted and love what they do, and are given the right tools and freedom to achieve their potential. Few have ever experienced what it’s like to have a full arsenal of drones backing you up and leaders giving you the leeway needed to truly fight the enemy.

  When Mr. White brought me into the unit, I had no idea what the life would be like. I wondered sometimes if Mr. White followed what I did over those years, if he ever checked in on me. There’s no way of telling.

  I’m amazed by the devotion to country my old friends from the unit still have. Jack and Bill taught me more life lessons than they will really ever know. When people ask me about the years of service, I still don’t talk about much of it. Most of the people around me today still have no idea. They don’t understand how the last few years truly shaped me into who I became. They are probably just as surprised as you reading this now. Some guys said that we did bad things to bad people, but that’s what it took to fight them. The one thing I know for sure without question: I’d do it all again.

  EPILOGUE

  “Where are all the animals?” I asked Kuki Gallmann, as we both stared off across the Great Rift Valley from a mountaintop on her property one late afternoon.

  Surrounding us were miles and miles of forests, mountains, and valleys spread across western Kenya in the Gallmann Wildlife Conservancy. The beauty of the landscape didn’t even seem real; it was like being in an IMAX. But there was little movement at all, very few signs of life, as if we were the last people alive.

  “What you’re seeing now is the greed of man,” said Kuki. “The work of poachers.”

  The Great Rift Valley was considered by many to be the cradle of civilization because so many ancient human remains had been found there.

  After flying into Kenya, we’d been jetting all over the country, meeting people and businesses to discuss poaching and explain how we could bring our idea of drones to the world.

  Kuki Gallmann is a world-renowned wildlife conservationist, a legend in the conservation world and the subject of the movie I Dreamed of Africa, which followed her family’s travels from Italy into Kenya in the early 1970s.

  Kuki was in her seventies now but didn’t look it. She had blond hair thrown around by the wind, and was fit. Colorful bracelets dangled off her wrists. She still had a bit of an Italian accent. Her daughter Sveva, who had brought us here, looked like a younger version of her.

  The nearly hundred thousand acres of conservancy had been a part of their family’s blood for decades—and it was one of the largest privately owned reserves in the world. But a lot had changed in that time.

  “It wasn’t many years ago when we had one of the largest populations of black rhinos,” she said.

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  It was late afternoon, the sun of January burning on our faces. She looked down at her feet, then back up at me.

  “I just recently flew our last rhino out by helicopter,” she said. “He wouldn’t have survived here much longer. They would have killed him.”

  The poacher gangs came for the animals with poison-tipped spears and darts, she said. It was the story of Kenya, what we’d heard all over on our travels. The gangs came across the borders in 4x4 trucks, hid in the hills, where they could see plenty of land, and waited for the elephant families to come. They left trailing rivers of blood.

  The cradle of civilization was now the cradle of death.

  The Gallmann reserve was one of many private parks in Kenya, along with the famous government-run wildlife reserves like Nairobi National Park and Tsavo East and West. But the miles and miles of land were impossible to fully police. It was remote and rugged. Some villages had taken up to fighting the poachers like militarized neighborhood watches. In other places, loosely organized rangers mostly financed by Western donors hunted the gangs. Still, the body count kept climbing.

  More elephants were being killed every day in Africa than were being born. Hundreds of them were killed every year. More than 100,000 African elephants had been killed in the last three years alone. At the current rate, the species was on the brink of extinction. The ivory from their tusks was channeled to the black markets in Asia. An elephant tusk: $1,500 per kilogram. Rhinos were even worse because there were so few left. A rhino horn could command as much as $60,000 per kilogram on the streets of Beijing—each horn worth more than its weight in gold. Wealthy buyers drove up prices. The horns were added to expensive antiaging lotions. Some thought the shavings cured cancer. Millionaires in Asia sprinkled them in their martinis.

  This was what we were up against—a different kind of terror. But still terror.

  Illegal trafficking is big money—some say more than $20 billion a year. The profits spread around the world like a tangled bloodline—some go to corrupt government officials in on the action but more money ends up with international crime syndicates and terrorist groups like al-Shabaab in Somalia, just to the east. Wildlife trafficking is in the same camp as drugs, human trafficking, and weapons: it is a worldwide epidemic with all kinds of dangerous ripples. No wonder the United States recently called it out as a national security threat. Those dollars could end up funding attacks on our country.

  When I talked to Kuki that day, she described it all the same way a war would be described. With winners and losers. When the poachers got caught, they paid bribes to get out of jail. The government recently passed a law allowing people to shoot the bad guys if they had guns, but that didn’t slow t
hings down. The poachers still operated with impunity. The animals were losing. Kuki didn’t have helicopters or planes. Only a few reserves had even those resources. She just had rangers.

  The rangers fought by hiding in the bush and trying to spot poachers as they set up. As we bumped along the back roads of her conservancy that afternoon in an old Land Cruiser, her rangers would just appear out of nowhere. Their war wasn’t very coordinated. For the most part it relied on luck, being in the right place at the right time. They were no match for the poachers.

  “The elephants used to take no interest in anyone that traveled through my conservation,” Kuki told us as we traveled farther into the Rift Valley that day, as if to explain why we weren’t seeing many animals. They didn’t think much about humans then. “Now they keep their distance. They know that we’re going to bring them harm.”

  “The problem is bigger than just us now. It’s about saving the species.”

  “Your drones will change this?” she asked.

  THIS WAS THE FUTURE OF DRONES.

  Missions would work just like they did in the Box: gathering intelligence on poacher networks and grazing patterns, where and when an elephant family, say, had been killed before. We would be going on the offense this time, stopping poachers before they could get close enough to the animals.

  Drones would do the jobs of one hundred rangers, scouring the massive stretches of remote territory for the hunters. As they stalked the skies, they’d also map swaths of land and count herds.

  We’d identify hotspots with drones from our local intelligence on the ground and that’s where the targeting would begin. As long as you sighted the poachers a couple of miles out, there would be time for the choppers to swoop in and cut them off. Boom. They’d be toast.

  But there was one important point to all this. The drones had to be military grade. Not something you’d find under your Christmas tree.

  When we were in the Maasai Mara reserve earlier in the week, we met the head of the elephant project there, Marc Goss, who for years had been banging his head over how to innovate in his fight against the poachers.

  Marc’s group worked out of a small compound miles away from any of the tourist areas. He lived there with more than fifty wildlife security rangers who patrolled the place with old Toyota Land Cruisers and rifles. The compound they based their operation from was a series of huts hidden away in the bush. His own house was a large tent he shared with his wife, overlooking the Mara.

  Marc was a military guy, too. The BBC had done a story about him attempting to get support for drones a year or so ago. He’d bought a drone online to help his fifty rangers. But the experiment hadn’t worked, the drone technology available to the public wasn’t capable enough yet for his teams’ needs. He was excited that I was there. “Look at this,” he said as we walked out of his headquarters and into the reservation.

  It was midday. Marc wore an old camouflaged military uniform with the name of the reserve knitted on the front pocket. He was tall and his hair was starting to go gray in places. He was jumpy with enthusiasm and had the build and energy of a guy who could run up a mountain.

  From a storage area, he pulled out a Parrot AR drone—basically four tiny plastic propellers attached to a video camera controlled from your iPhone. You could get them at Brookstone for about two hundred dollars. Parrots could fly for only about twenty minutes and barely cleared some of the highest trees.

  Marc started it up and it sounded like a nest of bees that had been kicked. When he got the thing off the ground, it flew about fifty feet before a gust of wind grabbed it and threw it into a tree. He had to climb up and get it.

  “I GOT SOMETHING ELSE YOU SHOULD SEE,” MARC SAID.

  We walked around the compound to the backside in the shade of some trees. I stopped dead in my tracks before Marc could even say another word.

  Damn.

  It was a massacre. On the grass were dozens of leopard pelts, the skin of a python that was probably fifteen feet long, and a trove of elephant tusks. Over the last few months, Marc’s rangers had recovered all of it from poachers.

  Why would somebody do this? I just couldn’t understand. For some reason I had this feeling of disgust and disdain for the poachers. It reminded me of feelings I used to have in the Box for my targets.

  Marc walked over to the collection of tusks. They were covered in dirt and you could still see blood in places. “That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in tusks there,” he said.

  I picked up a few of the tusks and held them in my hands. I was surprised by their weight. They were heavy.

  “What do you do with them all now?” I asked.

  Marc shook his head.

  “Everything will be burned,” he said.

  These were guys in the bush who wouldn’t know what hit them if I was out there hunting them down.

  Just then, Marc got a call. He gets a lot of calls all day long from his rangers who are out in the field, hunting and working their own intel networks. In this case, a GPS collar on an elephant they’d been tracking had stopped moving, close to the Tanzania border.

  Marc put the phone back in his pocket and sighed. “It’s probably been killed,” he said. At this point, there wasn’t much they could do about it. It would take too long to get out there right now in trucks. They needed to wait for a plane to come back.

  “Want to go on a ride with us?” Marc asked. He was going with a few rangers to check out a rumor of poachers in the northern edge of the reserve—about sixty miles away.

  We got in 4x4s and bumped along the grassy plains deeper into the Mara for hours. Sometimes we’d encounter Maasai people walking between remote villages, but mostly it was us and the animals.

  When we came to the hills, we couldn’t travel by truck anymore, so we got out and walked. This was poacher territory. Far from people, hard to reach. As we climbed higher through the hills, the views of the land below began to open up. You could see for miles out. It took us about thirty minutes to get to the top and soon we spotted a cave.

  The cave was about ten yards deep, with a jagged ledge where you could watch miles of the massive, open land below. Nearby I saw the remnants of a recent fire. Some crushed-up charcoal and a plastic bag hanging on a tree, where the hunters had hung their things. Water bottles were scattered about.

  “They could have been here last night,” one of the rangers said to me. “At least this week.”

  It was amazing that they didn’t even hide. A fire on a high hill. It’s like a signal asking for someone to find out. Rangers wouldn’t have been able to see this at night very well, but I would.

  From my point of view, this was the perfect startpoint. If I had a drone in the air, these poachers would have been done before they even got the chance to stalk an elephant family. With the drone’s infrared camera, I could have seen that fire from miles away.

  We stood there in the poachers’ camp and stared out over the grasslands below. The Ranger pointed out to the distance.

  “When they find the elephants they want to kill, they come down from the hilltops and hide in the bush with poison-tipped spears and stab the elephants late at night,” he said.

  He explained how they watch the elephant die in agony over the course of twenty-four to forty-eight hours as it stumbles through the fields, eventually losing all strength to continue. After the elephant finally collapses, the poachers rip out the tusks one by one.

  “It is usually a very slow death.”

  The sun was going down now on the hilltop. No sign of anyone. The poachers were long gone. We’d never catch them now.

  THE ONE THING THAT BECAME CLEAR OVER THE MONTHS WE WORKED ON THE DRONE project: it wasn’t going to be easy. There were obstacles all over the place and getting around them was going to be a lot like going around IEDs.

  The biggest challenge was that government corruption was deep and some officials secretly benefited from the killing. Kenya was nervous about opening its airspace. To them, drones were forei
gn eyes in the sky. Few had even seen drones outside the news and movies. They didn’t get how they worked. When we walked into the offices of a few government officials, they wondered if we were CIA. “Are you going to use your drones to spy on us?” they asked at different times.

  “No, we are going to use drones to protect your livelihoods. Do you think tourists will come out here to stare at grass all day?” I said.

  African governments tend to be skeptical of foreigners coming in, even when one is legitimately trying to help them protect their country. It took time to build relationships with them and the American style of business typically didn’t fare well.

  The other issue was funding. At the start, the business was running off investments by Reza and Jory. Corporations were beginning to offer support. The military spec drones were perfect for the remote terrain we would be operating in. The wrinkle was that we needed the State Department to sign off on exporting them. The suits. And that sort of thing took time. You can’t just buy a bunch of military-grade drones with infrared cameras and throw them in your suitcase on the next flight to Africa.

  We had our eyes set on launching from the private Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in the country’s Laikipia district. It was famous for the celebrities who went there on safari; Prince William and Kate Middleton had visited when they got engaged. The owners were game when we spoke to them, as long as the government opened the airspace. They also began to introduce us to the right people to make that happen.

  The great thing about Lewa was that they already had an ops center, an army of rangers with military experience, some intelligence people who acted as spies inside the poaching world, and Little Bird choppers. These were key elements the foundation needed for the reserves to make this drone war work.

  All it took was one success story. We’d show the government and conservancies how a drone operation could work and hope that they would eventually put up the money to fund it with our people. It was a gamble. But even with some of the bigger obstacles out there, I liked our chances. In my eyes, drones were unequivocally the answer to this problem. I knew that with the right drones and the right people, who knew how to use them correctly, we would reduce virtually overnight the percentage of illegally killed elephants and rhinos. I had never been so sure of anything in my life.