The GPS readout indicated that Cyclops 04 crossed the border into Afghanistan at 2:33 local time.
Reynolds plotted the current course. “Pilot. At present heading and speed, in fourteen minutes Cyclops 04 will arrive over a populated area. It will pass two klicks east of Qalat, Afghanistan.”
“MC copies.”
“Sensor copies.”
After a few more seconds: “MC. We are in contact with intelligence assets at Kandahar… They advise there is a forward operating base two kilometers east of Qalat. FOB Everett. U.S. and ANA forces on the ground there.”
“We’ll be passing directly overhead.”
It was quiet in the GCS for several seconds. Then Captain Pratt said, “Surely to God…” He paused, not even wanting to say the rest aloud. But he did say it. “Surely to God it can’t launch ordnance.”
“No,” answered back Reynolds, but he did not sound so sure. “Pilot, MC. Do we want to… uh… ascertain whether or not we have any air assets in the area that can, uh, shoot down the UAV?”
There was no response.
“Pilot, MC, did you copy my last? It is clearly in someone else’s hands and we do not know their intentions.”
“Copy, pilot. We are getting in contact with Bagram.”
Reynolds looked to Pratt. Shook his head. Bagram Air Force Base was too far away from Cyclops 04 to be of any use.
Within moments there was more activity in the GCS, the images on several displays changed, and the onboard cameras began switching through color mode to infrared/black-hot mode and then to infrared/white-hot mode. The display cycled through all settings multiple times but not at a constant speed. Finally it settled on infrared/white-hot.
Reynolds looked over at Pratt. “That’s a human hand making those inputs.”
“No doubt about it,” confirmed the sensor operator.
“MC, pilot. Bagram advises there is a flight of F-16s inbound. ETA thirty-six minutes.”
“Shit,” said Pratt, but he wasn’t transmitting. “We don’t have thirty-six minutes.”
“Not even close,” confirmed Reynolds.
The camera lens display on the primary control console began adjusting, finally zooming in on a distant hilltop, upon which several square structures lay in a circular pattern.
“MC. That’s going to be Everett.”
A green square appeared on the primary control console around the largest building on the hilltop.
“It’s locked up,” Pratt said. “Somebody has access to all capabilities of Cyclops.” He feverishly tried to break the target lock with keyboard controls, but there was no response from the vehicle.
Everyone in the GCS knew that their drone was targeting the American base. And everyone knew what would come next.
“Do we have somebody who can get in contact with this FOB? Warn them that they are about to receive fire?”
The MC came over their headsets. “Kandahar is on it, but there is going to be a lag.” He followed that with, “Anything that’s about to happen is going to happen before we can get a message to them.”
“Christ Almighty,” said Reynolds. “Fuck!” He jammed his joystick hard to the left and right, and then forward and back. There was no reaction on the screen. He was nothing more than a spectator to this looming disaster.
“Master arm is on,” reported Captain Pratt now.
And then he began reading off information as it appeared on his displays. There was nothing else he could do but provide narration for the disaster. “Midstore pylons, selected.”
“Pilot copies.”
“Sensor, pilot,” Pratt said, his voice quavering slightly now. “Hellfire is spinning up. Weapon power is on. Laser is armed. Weapon is hot. Where are those goddamned F-16s?”
“MC, sensor. Thirty minutes out.”
“Damn it! Warn the fucking FOB!”
“Laser fired!” This would give the exact range-to-target information to the UAV. It was the last step before launching a Hellfire.
Seconds later the Reaper let loose a missile. Its five-hundred-pound warhead raced away at the lower edge of the monitor, the flame behind it whiting out the camera for a moment before the screen cleared up and only a bright, fast-moving speck was visible.
“Rifle!” Reynolds shouted. Rifle was the term used to indicate the pilot had fired a missile, but there was no term to use for a phantom launch, so he said it anyway. He then read aloud the targeting data on his PCC. “Time of flight, thirteen seconds.”
His stomach tightened.
“Five, four, three, two, one.”
The impact of the Hellfire whited out the center of the monitor. It was a massive detonation, with several secondary explosions, indicating that munitions or fuel had been hit by the missile.
“Son of a bitch, Bryce,” muttered Pratt from his seat on Major Bryce Reynolds’s right.
“Yeah.”
“Shit!” Pratt said. “Another Hellfire is spinning up.”
Thirty seconds later Reynolds called “Rifle!” again. “Looks like the same target.”
A pause. “Roger that.”
Together they sat, watching the feed through the eyes of their aircraft as it attacked friendly forces.
All four Hellfires launched from the Air Force Reaper, striking three different prefabricated buildings in the FOB.
The two bombs then dropped, detonating on an unoccupied rocky hillside.
After the launching of all its weapons, Cyclops 04 made an abrupt turn, increased speed to two hundred knots, virtually the UAV’s top speed, and shot south toward the Pakistan border.
MC gave updates on the location of the F-16s; they were twenty minutes out, they were ten minutes out, they were just five minutes from having the drone in range of their AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles.
At this point it was not about saving lives. At this point it was about destroying the Reaper before it “escaped” into Pakistan, where it could end up in enemy hands.
The drone made it over the border before they could bring it down, however. The F-16s hopped the border themselves in a desperate attempt to destroy the sensitive equipment, but the drone dropped to five thousand feet and arrived over the outskirts of heavily populated Quetta, and the flight of F-16s were ordered to return to base.
Finally the men and women at Creech, along with the men and women in Afghanistan and at CIA and at the Pentagon who were now watching real-time feeds from the runaway Reaper, watched in dismay as Cyclops 04 circled a wheat field just a few hundred meters from the Quetta suburb of Samungli.
The pilots could tell that even the crash was a controlled setup. The descent had been nearly perfectly executed, the airspeed had decreased as the phantom pilot backed off on the throttle, and the Reaper had made a forward scan of the landing site with its cameras. Only at the last instant, as the UAV floated sixty feet above the ground alongside a well-trafficked four-lane road on final approach, did the phantom pull hard on the control stick, pitching the drone into a left down attitude and removing all lift. Then the aircraft dropped from the sky, hit the field, cartwheeled in the hard dirt a few times, and came to rest.
The men and women at Creech, at Langley, and in Arlington who possessed a front-row seat to this nightmare lurched back in unison at the violence of the surprise intentional crash at the end of a smooth flight.
At the GCS at Creech Air Force Base, Major Reynolds and Captain Pratt, both men stunned and furious, pulled off their headsets, walked outside into a warm, breezy afternoon, and waited to hear casualty reports from FOB Everett.