Parson did know the Predator launched from a classified location within the theater. Once airborne, a pilot and sensor operator sitting in a stateside ground control station took over. From the United States, the team flew the aircraft via a satellite link. The Predator had a four-cylinder Rotax engine that sounded like a go-cart, but the drone ranked among the most powerful surveillance tools ever invented.
“So what are we looking for?” Parson asked.
“Anything out of place,” the intelligence officer said. “Vehicles that stop for no apparent reason. People walking where there aren’t paths to villages.”
“Anything there at all is probably out of place,” Parson said. “I didn’t see any houses or anything when we crashed up there. Just an abandoned canal.”
The feed looked like a grainy movie of nothing. Rocks and hills. Trees and scrub. A knoll above some ruins, just like the mullah had said to Gold. But no trucks or cars. Not a single person.
Parson spread a pilotage chart across the table in front of the video screen, and he tried to relate what he saw on video to a position on the chart. But the chart’s scale of one to five hundred thousand gave a topographical view too wide to orient with the Predator’s lens. He folded the chart and just watched the feed.
In Afghanistan, they didn’t need to monitor the video constantly. The sensor operator would make a note if he picked up anything, and intel analysts from Mazar to Al Udeid to CENTCOM headquarters in Florida would examine the recordings.
“How long do we get to look for something?” Gold asked.
“They told me they’d give us twenty hours over the target,” Parson said. “If nothing shows up, I don’t know if we’ll get another chance at this.”
Parson would have liked more time, but he understood the limitations. The war continued all over the country, and every commander wanted drone coverage. What battle leader wouldn’t want an eye in the sky to warn his guys of an ambush? The Joint Relief Task Force used Predators to survey earthquake damage, too. Parson knew he was lucky to get a drone assigned even for one flight.
All day, the movie of nothing kept rolling. The Predator might as well have probed some arid planet with an environment too harsh for anything but brush and gnarled trees.
The only activity came near dusk when a bird—a hawk or a falcon, most likely—soared over the hills beneath the drone. The infrared camera displayed warm objects on the light end of the grayscale spectrum. The raptor’s wings, cooled by the air flowing over them, appeared black against the warmer ground, which had absorbed heat from the sun for many hours. The bird rode the final updrafts of the day, circled as it hunted. Parson never saw it flap once, though it must have when off the screen.
The bird’s showing off, Parson mused to himself. He wants us to see he manages kinetic energy so well, he never needs to add thrust.
After gliding for several minutes, the raptor struck. It rolled into a bank of almost ninety degrees, folded its wings, and dropped like a bolt of black lightning. Parson could not see the bird’s target, perhaps a mouse or a small snake. The bird did not pull up. It remained on the ground, probably eating its prey. Idly, Parson wondered if he’d been watching a falcon or a hawk. From some corner of his mind he remembered the difference: Falcons killed with their beaks, and other raptors killed mainly with their talons. A distinction by weapons system.
He wished he could see his own target and hit it like that right now. From a distance, he’d once watched an air strike in Iraq with a JDAM launched from a B-52. At the moment of impact, the ground rippled. An orange flash appeared for an instant, followed by the roil of smoke. A beat later came the sound, more thud than blast. And another high-value target answered to Allah.
But this flight was purely recon. These video images came from an unarmed drone. An armed version, the Reaper, carried Hellfire missiles, but a Reaper had not been available. CENTCOM probably assigned killer drones to missions with a greater chance of finding something to shoot.
After full nightfall, Parson and Gold took a break from watching the video and went to dinner in the chow tent. The place smelled like all deployed location dining facilities: the scent of gravy under heat lamps, whiffs of hand sanitizer, with an aftertaste of the morning’s bacon grease. At a clipboard just inside the doorway, Parson wrote his name on the sign-in sheet, and he put O-5 in the column for rank. He had no idea why they needed his name and rank to feed him, but he filled out the form just the same.
Third-country nationals from Bangladesh dished out food in the serving line. The TCNs looked out of place with their white uniforms and black bow ties. Gold said little; Parson knew she was probably disappointed not to have seen anything on the video. He sat with her at a long table draped in vinyl, took a few bites from a warmed-over veal patty, and sipped weak iced tea. The food was better than the group rations the chow tent had served earlier in the relief operation, but not by much.
“You said Durrani wasn’t even sure himself,” Parson said.
“He wasn’t,” Gold said. She picked at a salad of wilted lettuce. Ranch dressing covered it—her apparent effort to give it some taste.
Parson had seen Sophia a lot of different ways: engaged and in control; frightened and hypothermic; exhausted but still in command of her skills. However, he’d never seen her depressed. He tried to think of the right thing to say. Parson knew his own skills had never included a gift for just the right words.
“So the worst that happens is we waste some gas in the Predator,” he said. “Won’t be the only time we’ve acted on bad intel. Remember Saddam’s chemical weapons that weren’t there?”
Gold pushed away her salad. “I hate to think I got you into trouble with Task Force when I should have been the one on the carpet.”
“Not the first time a colonel’s chewed my ass,” Parson said. “Probably not the last, either.”
He tried to think of more words of comfort, but the growl of a C-130 takeoff overwhelmed his thoughts. Parson excused himself, went to the refrigerated dessert carousel. The trays stopped turning when he opened the door. He took out two pieces of chocolate meringue pie.
Back at the table, he stuck a plastic fork into one of the pie sections and shoved it toward Sophia.
“Eat something, Sergeant Major,” he said. “That’s an order.”
She gave that half smile of hers. He had rarely seen her grin broadly or laugh out loud. He knew she wasn’t down all the time; open mirth just wasn’t part of her nature. But she’d seemed different, a little sadder perhaps, during this entire deployment. Sometimes the best way to keep a crewmate in the game was the little things, small favors to remind them you had their back.
Sophia withdrew the fork, stabbed it into the tip of the pie wedge. She didn’t say anything, but she finished the dessert.
“You want to go back and check the video again?” Parson asked.
Gold sighed. “It’s like watching paint dry,” she said, “but we might as well.”
When they returned to the Air Operations Center, they found the intel officer still staring at the screen. But he didn’t look bored. He was on his feet. Without any word of greeting, without taking his eyes off the video, he motioned to Parson and said, “Come here and look at this.”
The sensor operator had zoomed in so far, it looked like the lens was at treetop level. At the center of the crosshairs was a pickup truck. Two more were parked near it. Men wandered around the trucks, stepped among stone ruins. Some of the men disappeared inside the mountain.
“How long ago did those vehicles show up?” Gold asked.
“Ten minutes,” the intel officer said.
“Did they take anything out of the trucks?” Parson asked.