The Raptors weren’t the only planes the Air Force had sent to Lebanon. As Ayoub left his compound and headed for the warehouse, an Avenger drone followed. The Avenger was the newest drone in the American fleet, a major advance over the Predator and Reaper. Unlike its predecessors, the Avenger was powered with a jet engine. It could fly eighteen hundred miles at twice the speed of the propeller drones, without producing the distinctive mosquito-like buzz that jihadis all over the world now recognized — and ran from.
The Avenger didn’t carry bombs or missiles. But its payload was arguably even more lethaclass="underline" the newest radar, cameras, and electronics intercept systems in the American arsenal. Now it was flying at four thousand feet, inside a thick cloud layer, so its optical cameras were no use. But it didn’t need them. Nestled in its wings were two infrared cameras sensitive enough to track the heat signature of a groundhog in a burrow, much less a man in a basement. In its tail was a radar system whose software could monitor two hundred different targets simultaneously.
But the Avenger’s most important tracking device was the three-foot dimpled sphere that hung below its composite belly. The ball was an electromagnetic sniffer as powerful as sixty-five cell phone towers. It could be used only when the Avenger was airborne. On the ground it emitted enough radiation to cause permanent damage. It was so precise that it could distinguish the signature of an iPhone from a Samsung Galaxy at a mile away. The Air Force techs who serviced the Avenger called it the Great Ball of Death.
Ayoub thought he’d taken adequate precautions. He thought he was safe.
He had all the protection of an ant under a magnifying glass.
The brave new world of drone warfare had pushed tricky technical issues on the Air Force. Foremost among them was the fact that drones were controlled through encrypted satellite links, while fighter pilots mostly radioed to local bases or E-3 Sentries that were effectively airborne command posts. Called AWACS — Airborne Warning and Control System — the E-3s were modified Boeing 707s instantly recognizable by the thirty-foot radar domes attached to their fuselages. The satellite and radio networks didn’t overlap. As the Air Force integrated drones into its fleet, the need for real-time links between drone controllers and fighter jocks became more obvious by the day. The service was now installing drone workstations in the cabins of five E-3 Sentries, a tricky and expensive proposition. The first retrofit had been finished only a few weeks before to a Sentry that was flying a slow loop one hundred kilometers off the coast of Beirut.
For the first time ever, a drone pilot was actually airborne.
The Avenger had arrived at Ayoub’s house a few minutes before the NSA spoofed the phones belonging to Ayoub and Habibi. The Hezbollah commanders had made one crucial mistake. They’d believed that they could risk leaving the phones on as long as they didn’t use them. They were wrong. Twelve months before, an analyst at Fort Meade had noticed an odd coincidence, a series of phones with sequential numbers that were rarely used but popped up only in houses and offices belonging to Hezbollah’s most senior leaders.
Ayoub and the other Hezbollah commanders used the phones to set up only a handful of meetings in the year that followed. But the connection was obvious once the NSA looked, the code even more so. The Quranic verses were not encrypted, merely correlated with meeting sites.
The broken coms system neatly solved the issue of how to kill Ayoub and Habibi without civilian casualties — a problem acute in the case of Habibi, who lived in a fifteen-story apartment building filled with families and who surrounded himself with women and children in his rare public appearances. As a bonus, the operation would grab the attention of Hezbollah and Quds Force in a way that a simpler bombing would not. At its best, the NSA’s technical wizardry came off as nearly God-like, and not every commander in Baalbek or Tehran contemplated his own mortality with as much detachment as Ayoub. This mission would send the message clearly: Worry less about Allah and more about America, habibis.
Meanwhile, if Ayoub and Habibi no longer used the phones or had switched to a more sophisticated code, they simply wouldn’t leave their houses. No harm.
But the messages did the trick. Eight minutes after Ayoub received his, the Avenger’s sensors spotted a man leaving his house. Seven minutes after that, it picked up two cars leaving the compound. The Avenger then took the only real chance of the operation, dropping below the cloud layer for eleven seconds, long enough to get its optics on the convoy. At Langley and the Pentagon, analysts agreed they were looking at Ayoub. A few seconds later, the Sentry’s coms officer radioed the Raptors.
“Tiger 1, Tiger 2, this is Sorcerer. We have confirmation on Alpha.” Ayoub. “Repeat, Alpha has left his nest.”
“Copy. ETA to our station?”
“Fifteen to eighteen minutes. Two vehicles. Small arms only, no SAMs.”
“Copy. Fifteen to eighteen. We are at eleven thousand, all quiet. Anything to the east?”
A few seconds of silence, then: “Nothing unusual.” The radar dome atop the E-3 could see all the way across Syria. If it wasn’t picking up Syrian jets, the Syrians didn’t have any jets in the air to pick up.
“Good to hear. Any word on Beta?” Habibi.
“Tiger 1, you read my mind. We have just received visual confirm that Beta has left his nest. Four vehicles, approximately fifteen men. ETA thirty-five minutes. Small arms only.” The report came not from the Avenger but from a CIA spotter in Beirut, the only American on the ground in the whole operation. Unlike Baalbek, Beirut was big and dense and easy for watchers.
“Copy. Beta arrival at zero-two-four-five local. Breaking off.”
“Roger that, Tiger 1.”
Then the pilots had nothing to do but wait. Tad Easterman, Tiger 1’s pilot, had eight years’ experience in the Raptor. As a technical challenge for him, this mission was right up there with a stadium overflight. In fact, stadium overflights were trickier. He was flying in circles waiting to drop satellite-guided bombs on a target that he would never see firsthand. Part of him wanted to break the cloud layer so that he’d at least have eyes on the men below. Instead, he focused on his displays and made himself stay as patient as a hunter in a blind.
Fifteen minutes later, right on schedule, Easterman picked up Ayoub’s convoy on his air-to-ground radar and infrared sensors. The F-22A’s downward-facing systems were less advanced than the Avenger’s, but the road was empty. Easterman had no problem spotting the two cars speeding east on the road that led past the warehouse. He watched as the vehicles parked behind the building and men stepped out.
“Sorcerer, Tiger 1 here. I have Alpha at the target. That your read?”
“Roger that, Tiger 1. Avenger agrees Alpha has reached your location.”
“Copy. We’ll stand by for Beta and your green. Breaking off.”
Nineteen minutes later, Easterman’s radar picked up four blips speeding toward the warehouse, this time coming from Beirut.
“Sorcerer, this is Tiger 1. I have four more vehicles on Route Chicago—” The name the Air Force had assigned to the road that passed the warehouse.
“Roger that, Tiger 1. Avenger agrees. ETA is sixty seconds. Tiger 1 and Tiger 2, you are green as soon as Beta reaches Tango United.”
Back at Incirlik, the briefers had explained that Ayoub and Habibi would recognize what had happened within a few seconds after they met. Thus the Raptors needed to be ready to drop their bombs as soon as the second convoy reached the lot behind the warehouse.