Sting of the Drone

9

“And dawn breaks over the FATA,” Colonel Erik Parsons said as he walked onto the Operations Room floor, still carrying his coffee mug from the Camaro. “How’s the night been so far?” Night in Vegas was day in the FATA, Pakistan’s tribal border area. On the large video screen on the Big Board was the color image from a drone’s camera, orange light coming up into the purple sky, the sun rising behind a mountain.

“Was routine until a few minutes ago, boss,” Major Bruce Dougherty replied. “Remember this compound up in the Swat Valley we got tentative approval to hit next time we saw bad guys using it?” Bruce switched the image on the Big Board’s main screen to a close-up of two small houses and a barn, isolated, surrounded by a wall.

“Yeah, Agency says it’s associated with the Qazzanis. Kill Committee approved a strike if we see hostile activity in it and no one else nearby. We got that?” Erik asked.

“We do, boss. Been looking at it for twelve hours with a Pred. Then four guys show up in that Mitsubishi, all armed. No one greets them. They open the place up. Then, this is the kicker, one of the guys just called a number in Karachi that NSA says is associated with a senior Qazzani deputy. I say we met all the conditions.”

Erik nodded and sat down at the empty pilot’s chair in the cubicle next to Dougherty’s. “Yeah, I can approve this shot, given what the Kill Committee authorized. Go for it, two Hellfires simultaneously. Then, we’ll wait and see if anything is still moving or anyone comes to dig them out.”

Bruce Dougherty pulled right on the joystick, causing the Predator twelve thousand miles away to bank to the right and begin an arc that would line it up for a firing position on the compound. One camera on the Predator stayed locked on the compound, even as the aircraft pulled around. Erik looked at the four men who were about to die. One had his head inside the hood of the SUV, working on the engine. Two were tending to a fire pit and the fourth leaned against the back of the Mitsubishi talking on a mobile phone. “Some guys never learn,” Erik thought aloud.

Sergeant Rod Miller was sitting next to Dougherty, listening on a headset to an audio feed from NSA in Maryland. “Colonel, Maryland’s finally got a Pashtu speaker on this. She’s gisting what they’re saying in real time. You may want to listen in, sir, it’s on channel six.”

Erik picked up a headset and dialed in. He heard someone speaking a foreign language in the background, hurried, excited, then in the foreground and louder the voice of a woman summarizing the conversation. “So, Karachi guy is saying around the end of Safar,” she summarized and then paused. “Just before the Americans’ Prophet’s Birthday, the Americans will have Shock and Awe. He said that phrase in English, Shock and Awe. The guy in Swat is now saying he wished he could be part of the operation, he hopes they kill a lot of Americans.…”

Erik caught a flash on the Big Board in his peripheral vision and looked up in time to see the smoke from the two Hellfires’ rocket engines filling the image on the screen, as the two missiles dropped from the Predator and ignited their propellant. They were instantly soaring toward the target. “Shit!” Erik almost yelled, as his fist came down on the thin four-foot-high wall between the cubicles. As he hit the divider, the screen showed the missiles impacting on the compound, creating a flash and then two columns of smoke rising above the dust storm where the buildings had been.

“Something wrong, Colonel?” Bruce Dougherty asked.

“Not with you, Bruce, with me,” Erik Parsons said quietly, taking off his headset. “I should have listened to that call before I authorized the kill. We should have kept that guy alive so we could hear more, or better yet capture him and interrogate him.”

“Good luck with that. CIA can’t capture anybody in Pakistan and even the Pak Army won’t go up into the Swat,” Bruce shot back. “Killing them is all we can do. Hell, we didn’t even interrogate bin Laden.”

Erik Parsons put his headset back on and punched in a number on the keypad to connect with the CIA analyst who had been watching the shoot and listening to the audio back in Virginia. “What was that guy saying before he got hit, about Shock and Awe? When was that supposed to happen?”

“That’s what we were just trying to figure out here, Colonel. The Prophet’s Birthday isn’t in the month of Safar. Safar would be our December this year.” Erik could hear the young man on the other end talking with others. “He said our prophet’s birthday, America’s. That would work because the religious birthday we celebrate is Christmas, which is in December, obviously.”

Erik scowled, “I know when Christmas is. I was hoping that you bright CIA guys could tell me what you took from that conversation.”

Another voice answered, maybe the first guy’s supervisor. “Colonel, what we will be writing up in a report is that the Karachi guy, who is a senior in the Qazzani network, seemed aware of a large-scale plot to kill Americans around Christmastime. He didn’t say where, over there, here, could be anywhere. He also didn’t say who would be doing it, AQ, AQIM, AQAP. Could be any of the groups in the network.

“We’ll probably go through Station Islamabad to ask the ISI to find the guy on the Karachi end of the call, the guy you didn’t kill, thankfully.”

“What are the chances they’ll find him?” Erik asked.

“Not real good. NSA says that phone went off the grid after that call,” the voice from Virginia replied.

Erik Parsons could see Sandra Vittonelli entering her office, separated from the Operations Room floor by a glass wall. His boss showed up at all times, day and night. He never knew when she would appear, but he knew her drop-ins would be frequent. He walked off the floor to brief her.

“Hey, what’s up?” she said, apparently in a chipper, happy mood.

“I think you may want to give your friend in Washington a call so he hears it first from you,” Erik began.

“Shit, what’s wrong?”

“We just killed a guy who was talking to another guy about what your home office boys think is a plot to do a major terrorist attack on Americans around Christmas,” Erik explained.

“Well, fuck, why did you kill him? We should have milked that source for more details,” she said, sitting down behind her desk.

“We only killed the guy at one end of the call,” Erik answered. “The guy who was being told about it, not the guy that knew about it. But we should have held off. We figured it out too late.”

They sat looking at each other. Then she asked, “Where, how, who?”

“No idea.”

“Great,” she said.

“Just when.”

“’Round Christmas?” she asked.

Erik nodded his head.

“Just enough to get the big boys agitated, but not enough to do anything with it. Lovely.”