Drone Warrior Read online

  I could tell the vehicle’s engine was hot because it was black, pulsating slowly against the white body. It was likely still turned on. When the drone orbited around, we could see someone was inside.

  This was our best lead yet, though it still wasn’t much. None of our files indicated what kind of car he drove.

  “What do you want to do?” Jake asked.

  “If the vehicle moves, follow it.”

  I began to pore over the old files on Usamah again, thinking maybe I’d missed a key piece of intelligence, anything.

  A concentrated silence, except for the server fans and the occasional keyboard tapping, descended and lasted until the phone rang.

  It was an analyst from another one of our drone teams sitting just outside of Tikrit.

  “I know that station wagon,” he said.

  He’d been watching my team’s drone feed from his location, in between chasing other targets.

  “Three months back we got pictures of that car,” he went on. “The event in Bayji was a large ISI meeting of top leaders in the area.” I perked up.

  “We found out later that Usamah was driving it,” he said. But it had been too late. By the time they’d confirmed it, the car was gone.

  I wanted to see the evidence myself. “Can you send me those photos?” I asked.

  They came by email and I noticed the time stamp on the photo: just three months before. And the white four-door station wagon in our current drone view was the same one in the old picture.

  I looked back up at the screen. This was Usamah. We got you.

  Just then the white station wagon started to move. “Going dynamic.”

  “Follow it,” I said.

  The drone broke orbit around the house to maneuver into a follow pattern at 15,000 feet up, a ghost in the sky.

  We watched the car leave the neighborhood and begin to make its way to the main road. There the driver turned left, heading back north toward Mosul, exactly where I thought he’d go after completing his errands for the week.

  He’d be on this road for two hours. So the clock to get him had started. That was all the time we had to nail him before he reached Mosul, where he’d be difficult, if not impossible, to track in the narrow streets and crowds.

  I called in Max, the commander who ran the assault team. Seconds later he was alongside me, staring at the screens.

  A newbie to the unit like me, Max was looking to make a name for himself among the other legendary officers who came before him. I called him Superman because he was good-looking like Clark Kent, and tall. He was from the South, married, mid-thirties, always a dip packed into his lip, and stood out because he was clean-shaven. Like he took a knife edge to his face every morning.

  “Did you get a look at the driver?” he asked, pointing at the station wagon on the screen.

  “No, but my gut tells me it’s Usamah. All the signs are pointing to that.”

  That was my assessment, but he had to make the ultimate decision about what to do.

  “Let’s go,” he said—and the rush began. He radioed his team of operators. Time to get kitted up—guns, optics, vests, radios. He paged the Black Hawk and Little Bird pilots.

  But just before leaving the Box, he picked up the phone and called the overall commander back at headquarters. What the hell? He didn’t need any authorization, but he must have wanted a second opinion.

  The overall commander had been around forever and was known to be a hard-ass. But he was smart and exacting. He didn’t like what he heard.

  “That intel guy is new,” he said, referring to me. “He hasn’t been tested yet. It’s too risky to go on his gut.”

  Max hung up and I thought about what my mentor Bill had said months before: “You can say and do whatever you want, but you had better be right.”

  I felt like I had to take a stand.

  “Max, that’s Usamah in that vehicle right there,” I said. “The signs are there. No one’s had a lead on this guy for months. You’re going to fucking lose him.”

  I went over the intel again, the connections we’d made, the photos of the car at the meeting months before. What did that other commander even know? He was at a separate site, not closely following what we were doing.

  “We’re running out of time,” I said, as we watched the station wagon speeding toward Mosul.

  Whatever I said worked. Max called the commander back and told him that we’d just received additional intelligence from another source that Usamah was confirmed inside the vehicle. It was a lie, he disobeyed a direct order, and it meant that the weight of what was about to happen was all on me.

  “We’re going!” Max yelled out to the team.

  The operators were armed to the teeth—mostly H&K automatic assault rifles, with night scopes and silencers. Two kinds of grenades in their bags—the more concussive thermobaric grenades, designed to confuse more than kill, and the M67s, the ones you usually see in the movies, which just explode.

  There were many ways a raid could begin, all dependent on the commander’s decision and the situation on the ground. Usually you were either “landing on X,” where the Black Hawk pilot dropped the team down almost right on top of the target site and a kind of shock and awe ensued, with the soldiers crashing in, or you were “landing on the Y,” where the chopper dropped down far enough away so the operators could sneak up on the target. Tonight, we would awe them.

  As Max rushed to get out the door, I told him we needed Usamah alive for interrogation. “Try not to kill him if you don’t have to.”

  He nodded. “We’ll let the target make that ultimate decision.”

  Seconds later the helos went screaming off into the sky, the operators in full camo, hanging off the sides.

  WE COULD SEE IN VIVID COLOR THAT THE DRIVER OF THE VEHICLE HAD ROLLED DOWN his window and was now dangling his arm out as he drove at 50 to 60 miles per hour.

  Within minutes the helos were landing near an Iraqi security checkpoint, a few miles north from the oncoming car. The checkpoint was basically a hut on the side of the main road with three Iraqi guards who were randomly inspecting cars entering Mosul.

  As the helos raced away from view, the team headed for the hut on foot. A handheld monitor allowed them to see what the drone was seeing. We were also connected by radio so we could hear everything on the ground. In the hut, they told the Iraqi security forces to stay put—the forces must have been pretty surprised when they showed up—and they waited for Usamah.

  I always got nervous during the quiet moments that seemed to stretch on forever before a strike. Max and his team had put a lot of faith in me. I had told them that Usamah wouldn’t likely put up a fight, given that he was an admin emir and probably didn’t even carry a weapon. But what if I was wrong? What if he wasn’t Usamah? What if the driver was a foreign fighter who just wanted to kill Americans and we had given him an opportunity?

  I didn’t want civilian or a team member’s blood on my hands. I worried about being wrong. We were trained to be right, and second-guessing questions always swirled in my head—a kind of tape subconsciously and quickly replaying every key piece of information I had previously gathered on the target, looking for missing pieces.

  As the station wagon approached the remote checkpoint, my heart started banging. My throat felt dry. The operators were now within the drone’s field of view, waiting to pounce—waiting, waiting, waiting.

  They jumped out of the hut, more than a dozen of them, guns drawn and blocking the road.

  The car slammed to a complete stop as the team surrounded it. At first the driver wouldn’t get out. He must have been in shock. A few dozen guys coming out of nowhere, armed to the teeth, just waiting for him to choose the ending to his story. Seconds stretched on. What the hell is he doing?

  One of the operators inched closer to the driver’s-side window, gun trigger ready. The others followed, a circle closing in like a noose.

  Where are his hands? Does he have a bomb?

  Suddenly the
door popped open, the driver’s hands went up, and the operators, with lightning quickness, collapsed in.

  The radio came alive seconds after: “Jackpot.”

  My shoulders felt like I had been carrying a concrete block for miles. Chills ran down my spine. I hurt all over.

  I looked around at the rest of the intel team. I took a deep breath. For a split second, I expected that there might be a celebration. High-fives, even. Claps on the back and people saying great job.

  But there was nothing. They had all been through this before. Just another day at the office.

  I LEARNED A FEW LESSONS THAT DAY. I REALIZED THAT WE FEW HAD THE POWER TO shape the course of the war, and that for the first time, I had an opportunity to make a direct difference. My actions could change the world; this was the purpose I had been longing for. But the decision to go after Usamah had been agonizing. Bill and Jack at their sites, though, seemed to do this work effortlessly. I wasn’t sure what it would take to get to that level.

  A couple of people from the assault team stayed behind to drive Usamah’s station wagon from the checkpoint back to the Box. We needed it for forensics. As the helicopters transported most of the team and our new detainee back, I had the drone pull security overhead for the guys returning in the station wagon.

  Victor, one of the guys, decided to ride on the hood of the car—stretched out on his back like he was lying on the beach.

  He was one of the wild ones—stocky and bearded. He must have known I was watching because when I zoomed in with the Pred, he was giving me a big thumbs-up as the vehicle sped along at least 50 miles per hour down the road, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  Cowboys. He seemed to be saying, “You’re good with us, kid.”

  It was a big step in gaining their trust. Trust I needed for what was to come.

  10

  THE HUNTERS

  “What up, Intel?” Victor said, swooping into the Box one afternoon a few days later. “You got someone for us to take down today?”

  That thumbs-up he gave me from the hood of the car following the Usamah mission was already a distant memory. He was ready for another target. Like a kid with attention deficit disorder. “You sleeping, Intel?” he said, walking up to our monitors. “What do you got for us?”

  Victor wasn’t the only one. All the operators were antsy, always angling to jump on a chopper and head out for a target. They came into the Box every day, wondering what was up, when they could go out, if we had someone on deck. Who was after Usamah?

  I told him nothing yet. But he stood there for a few minutes watching our monitors—hefty bear of a guy, salt and pepper hair. You could tell just by looking at him that he’d been places, seen a lot of people die. He had a nose that looked like it had been broken a dozen times. He’d been shot at least twice and had scars to show for it.

  “How about him, can we strike this one?” he said. I had one of our drone cameras on a guy on the ground wearing a white dishdasha and smoking a cigarette next to a beat-up blue car.

  We’d been following him for a couple of days. “He’s small fish,” I said. “Not important enough.”

  “What the fuck are we waiting for?”

  It was easy to get sucked into the operators’ mindset, especially because I wanted them to like me. With them it was always go, go, go. The adrenaline rush from the danger surrounding these missions fed their addiction for constant action. They craved the feeling of blowing down the door to a roomful of insurgents, the exhilaration of firefights; it kept them sane. Civilians tend to think that soldiers would rather not be at war if they could help it. Maybe that was true for the conventional military, but most special operators wanted to be out there. They trained their whole lives. It was what they were bred for. The more time I spent with them, the more I realized that most would have chosen to die fighting for America any day of the week over playing it safe and living a normal life back home.

  I was starting to feel a bit of that now. I was out for blood, too, for my fellow soldiers back in the 82nd who suffered regular strikes from the enemy and had their hands tied to do anything about it, for my family and friends back home, for America. I wanted to kill as many of them as possible.

  My game was a slow burn with the big fish. I was meant to solve mysteries and see the larger connections, while the operators were about action. Sometimes I threw targets their way on nights when they were getting antsy. I always had options out there to feed the beast. There were tens of thousands of fighters running around the countryside.

  But for the larger targets, sometimes I had to stalk them for months before it made sense to strike or go in. If we just captured a bunch of the low-level terrorists, it wouldn’t matter to the broader terror network. Those small-time killers didn’t talk much. They’d been in and out of jails and interrogation black sites. They knew the game already. But if we followed them, we could infiltrate their world—the connectors and the connections, the meetings and drop-off sites.

  It was always a balancing act, of course: when to go and when to stay. Every situation was different. I had to know if one target could lead to more senior-level figures or if he was a one-stop shop with little interaction with the people higher up the network chain.

  This was the distinction that operators like Victor didn’t see and didn’t really care much about. If you asked them who they’d captured or killed, they’d probably know only a few names, the big ones, if that. To them every animal was the same, just another terrorist waiting to be on the receiving end of a bullet.

  “He’s not a big enough fish,” I said.

  “He looks like a shark to me.”

  “He’s more like a minnow,” I said, pushing back. “But he could lead us to the shark.”

  I SPENT MOST OF MY DAYS JUST WATCHING—WATCHING ROADS, SCANNING NEIGHBORHOODS and borders, zooming in on mud houses, cataloging any suspicious activity, building patterns of life—how one bad guy goes to one café every day until the one day he brings a package to a white building in a market; how another target goes to bed every night for months at 9 P.M. until the one night he heads out for a midnight meeting in the desert; and another who takes the same route to work every day but one day goes in the opposite direction to a house owned by a target we killed two years before.

  We watched everything. Like a darker Truman Show.

  We looked for anomalies, and pieced together pathways to people that led to the eventual strikes. These were the problems of detectives, where seeing a small, seemingly random piece of information—like someone stopping in the desert to look up at the sky—was often the difference between life and death, and solving them required extraordinary patience for the ultimate payoff—in one hunt we conducted more than twenty separate operations before finally getting a lead to our target.

  The Box became my world. The double-wide trailer was mostly dark, except for the glowing computers and video screens. The six of us on the team sat at a long, knotty plywood table that had been built to fit the length of the room. Computers were scattered about, open, with chats always blinking with a stream of messages and mapping software that turned complicated landscapes of the nearby desert and mountains into 3-D. In front of us, a double row of screens lined the wall, streaming back images from the drones we had up.

  Even with the air-conditioning and the table fans going on high, the air smelled of burned coffee and sweat from people who didn’t shower enough. There often wasn’t enough time in the day. You got used to it.

  I was the youngest J2—intelligence chief—in my organization by a few years. That meant I had to work hard to get respect and prove myself. Surrounding me I had a young team from different backgrounds—mostly in their late twenties, early thirties. All of them were tech wizards, partly nerdish though a little hipster, too, in a War Games kind of way. Everyone spoke in techie slang: “Z in” (zoom in), “IR” (go infrared), “RTB” (return to base), “SP” (give me a starting point), “Put up a Roz” (“restricted operations zone”). We could
hold a full conversation right in front of you in our language and it would sound like a bunch of garble.

  Uniforms weren’t worn much in the Box. It was mostly cargo pants and T-shirts, headphones dangling around their necks when they weren’t in use. One guy always wore an NYPD ball hat, another the Yankees.

  They were the new generation of warfighters, equipped with the newest technology. It’s like they were born with chips in their heads. They’d logged more time behind computer screens than at shooting ranges. So had I.

  Laura was the only female on the team. She was big-boned, with long brown hair and a loud voice. She was probably one of the smartest signal intel analysts around and she talked a mile a minute when she had something on her mind. Oscar, our radio guy, hardly said a word to anyone. The mute. Jake was probably the only one younger than I was. He was Air Force from birth basically—joined after high school. He wore polo shirts and had a beard that never quite grew in, like a teenager’s, and we were always giving him shit for one thing or another.

  Day and night, hours on end, for months, we hardly left the Box. There were too many targets to go after. I spent hours analyzing their patterns of life, as the drones did their work around the clock. To keep going, I cranked up the music on my headphones—Linkin Park or Green Day in one ear and the mission and my team going on in the other.

  The operators were the opposite. They had a lot more downtime, waiting for us to find the next target. When they weren’t out in the field or at a shooting range, they hung around the trailers killing time, bullshitting, smoking cigarettes, lounging on shitty couches, doing whatever it took to fight off the boredom. Mostly that meant Guitar Hero on Xbox or drinking that stretched late into the night and morning.

  Max was their commander and spent most of his time in the Box with me or on a Little Bird or Black Hawk headed for a bad guy.

  WE WORKED TWO OR THREE MISSIONS AT A TIME, DOZENS A MONTH. THERE WAS always a drone up, sometimes three or four at a time, depending on who we were following. We could be conducting a mission against one target while at the same time refining the location of another with a separate drone in another part of the city. This new way of warfare came with the mental burden of never being able to shut down; having so much information at my fingertips meant I had to put that information to use. My mind never stopped thinking about which target to set my sights on next.