For Daniel, and although they never discussed it, he suspected for many of his colleagues too, the greatest pressure of flying UAVs was one of witness. They were paid to watch. This was their job. To record hundreds of thousands of hours of footage that was then watched again, processed by soldiers and analysts in Afghanistan and back at the CIA in Langley. When necessary, they were expected to strike, too. And then watch again. Which is something Daniel had never done before. In Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, by the time his bombs detonated, his missiles hit, he was already miles away, flying faster than the speed of sound, outrunning even the faint thuds of his own ordnance. At Creech he still didn’t hear his munitions detonate, but despite being even farther from the battlefield, he saw everything. He saw them explode and he saw what they did, sometimes to people he’d followed for weeks. To people he knew. Like the motorcyclist.
―
Daniel had always known the motorcyclist would have to die. His photograph, along with the head shots of others, had been up on the wall in Creech for months. His misdemeanours listed below it dated back to the very start of the invasion in 2003. Daniel had wanted him to die. Even more, he’d wanted to be the pilot on the mission that killed him. The motorcyclist’s name was Ahmed al Saeed, and he had the blood of American soldiers on his hands. Should he get the chance, Daniel, with Maria beside him focusing the cameras, guiding the lasers, wanted to be the pilot to avenge them.
For a period of months they’d tracked al Saeed through the streets of southern Baghdad. They’d watched him drink coffee on plastic garden chairs in the street, visit his grandmother, liaise with a team of insurgents laying IEDs. He’d led them, over those months, to others who were, in turn, followed by other drones, other pilots, and other operators who’d also watched their homes, their cars, their children on screens across America. But Daniel and Maria had stayed with al Saeed, as he’d weaved through the back streets of the city on his motorbike, as he’d collected his son from school. As he’d lived.
He became a familiar, like the regular colleague you see across the office, but to whom you never speak. Daniel started anticipating his weekly routine. His Wednesday game of chess, his coffee after Friday prayers. He was thirty-six years old, just a couple years younger than Daniel, and like him also had two children, a girl and a boy. Then, one day, the order came through. It was time to kill him. It was time for Ahmed to die. According to a source on the ground he would be setting up an ambush for a U.S. convoy. But before Ahmed could hit that convoy, Daniel and Maria, watching from above, would hit him.
On the day of the mission they’d followed him from early in the morning. He must have been in good spirits. Three times on his journeys through the city he’d stopped to kick down the stand of his bike and join in with a kids’ soccer game. It was something they’d seen him do before, sometimes even pulling a U-turn to double back for a kick-around he’d glimpsed down one of the alleys. It was around the time Kayce had got into soccer. Daniel had recently bought her her first pair of cleats. Just that week Cathy had allowed her to put up a set of David Beckham posters in her bedroom. At the first game Ahmed played that day Maria had zoomed in close as he’d dived the wrong way to let a kid score. At the third game, less than an hour before they’d killed him, Daniel had watched as another boy rode his shoulders in celebration of a goal.
The intelligence was good. After that final game, Ahmed had ridden on to an outer suburb, where he’d met with two other insurgents. One of the men was already known to them. The other was not. Listening to the weapon confirmations from the screeners in Okaloosa, Florida, Daniel and Maria continued their observations as the men unloaded two RPGs and three AK-47s from their van. The group was still getting into position when Maria achieved a lock and, confirming a clear blast area, Daniel fired a Hellfire from his Predator.
Perhaps Ahmed was more experienced than the others. Or maybe he just had better hearing, quicker reactions. Whatever the reason, with five seconds to impact, he’d recognised the missile’s sonic boom and begun running away from the van, as if he’d known what was about to happen.
When the smoke cleared the other two men were dead. Ahmed, however, lying farther off, was still alive, rolling from side to side, clutching at the stump of his left leg. His head was tipped back, his neck strained as he screamed. This, Daniel had told himself, as Maria tightened focus, is what he’d wanted. They’d saved American lives. The mission was a success.
Turning away from the real-time visuals, Daniel had looked across at the thermal imaging screen. The same scene, rainbowed by temperature, was in focus, a hallucinogenic abstract with a pool of bright orange spreading from its centre. As Daniel watched that puddle of human heat grow, like the slow bubble of a lava lamp, he’d also watched its source, in the shape of Ahmed, change colour like a chameleon. From orange, to yellow, to green, until, leaking from his limbs towards his core, his body cooled to blue, eventually melting into the colour of the ground, the dust.
―
“Tracking white twin cab and blue pickup.”
“Check, sensor.”
“Holding altitude.”
“Check, sensor.”
Maria’s voice came to Daniel twice, once muffled and distant from where she sat on the flight deck next to him, and again, intimate in his headphones. The ground control station was dark, lit only by the fourteen monitors and control panels in front of them. The servers’ hum was harmonised by the whir of the air-conditioning, making the desert’s heat no more than a memory on their skin. They both wore their flight suits, sleeves rolled to their insignia patches: a black owl clutching three thunderbolts with the wing’s motto beneath, Victoria Per Scientiam—Victory Through Knowledge. Their flasks of coffee, two hours cold, stood on a shelf behind them, above which a banner bore the wing’s unofficial, more commonly quoted, motto—If you can’t lower heaven, the banner told anyone entering the room, raise hell.
Daniel and Maria had had their Predator in the air for more than an hour when the mission order came down the line. The Karachi station had received intelligence on the movements of Hafiz Mehsud, number three in the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Daniel was familiar with the name, and with the face of the man who owned it. His photograph was also on the walls in Creech, just three portraits along from the crossed-out face of Ahmed al Saeed. According to a human source, and supporting chatter surveillance, a rendezvous had been arranged at a location in the mountains northwest of Miranshah. A ground team had already identified his convoy leaving a compound on the edge of town, a white twin cab followed by a blue pickup.
Within minutes the other members of the kill chain introduced themselves, either by voice in Daniel’s headphones or by chat messages on his screen. The safety observer at Creech, an intelligence coordinator in Langley, a pair of screeners at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Others would be watching the mission, too. Maybe even some White House staff. Daniel never knew how many, or where they were, but these others were always there, even on a last-minute mission like this. Watching his flight, listening in, recording the results.
“No ground unit?” Daniel asked.
“Negative,” the coordinator replied. “This is cross-border.”
―
It was in the hours following the al Saeed mission, after he’d watched Ahmed’s body cool into blue in that dust, that Daniel first established his post-strike routine, one he’d kept to ever since. After the debrief he and Maria had driven out of the base and into the parking lot of the casino next door. While Maria went to the bathroom, Daniel ordered a couple beers from Kim, the barmaid at Flying Aces. Kim, a motherly blonde in her forties, gave Daniel a nod in acknowledgement but didn’t break her stream of conversation with another customer.