Читать книгу Face-Off - Chris Karsten - Страница 14

Danny and Frank entered their bunker under the massive concrete structure of the CIA complex, and shut the door. Deep underground, there were no windows. They were isolated from the ourside world, their training kicked in and side by side in two large revolving chairs, deeply and luxuriously upholstered for long periods of sitting, and covered in soft black leather, they zoomed in on their task. Four monitors were mounted in front of each chair.

Danny fiddled with the console desk in front of his monitors, the keyboards, joysticks and other controls for their deadly hi-tech video game. A cyber-warrior who’d never been on a battlefield: he and Frank were at the controls of a Predator armed with Hellfire missiles, though neither of them had ever set foot in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft.

On one of the screens he watched images of the unmanned Predator with its characteristic camel hump housing the satellite system. The robot plane, already loaded with two Hellfires, stood shimmering on the tarmac in Afghanistan’s afternoon heat: a big, menacing silver insect that couldn’t wait to hunt its prey.

Shamsi Airfield in Balochistan had been more convenient, thought Danny, his fingers busy with the pre-flight control list. But the Pakistanis had kicked them out. Damage control. They’d been mortifed, made fools of in the eyes of the world, after SEAL Team Six had gone in and shot Geronimo right under their noses in Abbottabad, and buried his body at sea. Live night-vision feed had allowed the president himself to watch the entire operation in the White House.

Through his earphones Danny could hear voices from an ops room elsewhere in the CIA building. There was also audio via satellite from the CIA’s Chapman Base at Khost, from where the drone strikes in Pakistan were coordinated, and video and sound clips from the secret air-force base outside Jalalabad, where the Predator stood shimmering and waiting.

H-hour was 09:00, Washington time.

Danny glanced at the digital countdown in the corner of another screen. The time was 06:19. Danny pictured an hourglass. Somewhere, twelve thousand kilometres away, in a wild, barren landscape, the sand was about to run out for a group of men in a peaceful rural graveyard on a mountainside. Perhaps they had special plans for later – an intimate meal with friends, or important plans for tomorrow, or the day after, or next week or next month, like a shopping trip to Peshawar or Islamabad or a family visit. Or a suicide bombing. Whatever the case, Danny thought, the men at the graveyard were ignorant of the fact that their plans would come to nothing, that a mere half-hour was left of their lives.

Through his earphones Danny heard the signal for the launch of the Predator. This wasn’t in his own or in Frank’s hands; the take-off was handled by the ground control station next to the runway outside Jalalabad. Ground control was in an old shipping container, unobtrusive, rusty, its paint peeling, no different from all the other shipping containers used for storing mechanical equipment, oil drums, grease and jet fuel. But this particular container had been equipped with sophisticated electronic equipment.

The Predator began to move.

“There it goes,” Frank muttered.

He and Danny were in audio contact with the three crew members at ground control: the pilot who was handling the first phase of the flight, the sensor operator who controlled the high-resolution nose camera, and the intel operator who monitored the coordinates of the targets as well as the physical movements of the men the minute they were picked up by the drone’s camera.

Danny’s eyes shifted between screens and he watched the Predator taking off, hanging like a wasp in the blue sky, almost motionless before it began to grow smaller, turned into a silver speck and vanished.

Images of a mountainous landscape began to appear from the onboard camera, and calm voices from the ground control station commented on the technical aspects of the flight: direction, weather conditions, cruising speed and height, estimated time of arrival in Pakistani air space across the mountains – the Predator’s four-cylinder turbo now at its flight speed of a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour.

Danny and Frank sat in their comfortable chairs. Danny took a deep breath, calm and ready when ground control announced that the Predator had disappeared over the horizon, that they were switching from ground data to satellite data, and that the Predator’s control was being transferred from Jalalabad to the CIA bunker on the banks of the Potomac on the other side of the world.

Danny’s hand was on the joystick as the deadly video game began.

When he and Frank went home later today, it would be to their waiting wives and children, warm food and a warm bed, a well-earned rest. Behind them would lie the Hellfires’ trail of death and destruction, the outcome of laser-guided precision projectiles, each with a nine-kilogram, high-explosive fragmenting head.

Al-Awlaki got one of those up his ass, Frank had remarked at the time.

Only when the Predator came back into view over the horizon at Jalalabad and ground control took over the landing could Danny and Frank begin to clear up, their day’s work done. They would have to wait until the feedback session to hear whether the mission had been successful.

07:00, H minus 2 hours.

Danny reached for a Red Bull. A clear head was what was needed now, with the Predator over the Pre Ghal mountains in Pakistani airspace, the soft buzz of the Rotax engine in his earphones. In Pashto the sound was known as “machay” – by the time a target heard the buzz of that wasp it was already too late.

Another great Predator triumph had taken place in August 2009. The high-value target, or HVT, had been identified through a brief code word an informant from the settlement of Zanghara, also in South Waziristan, had passed on to his CIA handler in Kanigoram. That Predator had been launched from Shamsi. Forty-five minutes after the informant’s text message had been received on a hot August night, the temperature at forty-one degrees Celsius, the drone had been over the Sulaiman mountains.

With the houses in the settlement visible to the infrared cameras in the drone’s nose, Danny and Frank’s predecessors in the CIA bunker had led the Predator to the mud house in Zanghara. The camera had zoomed in on Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, relaxing on the roof of his father-in-law’s house in the cool of the evening, in the company of his wife and his uncle, a doctor.

The images picked up by the infrared lens, three kilometres above them in the night sky, had been clearly visible on the screens in the CIA bunker: Meshud, suffering from diabetes and kidney disease, was on his back on a sleeping mat on the roof, an intravenous drip in his arm. In the CIA bunker the drone team had been in contact with both the Counterterrorism Center elsewhere in the CIA complex and the ground control station at Shamsi. The weapons operator at the time – Danny’s current position – had been given the command, and had zoomed in the lens, keyed the target into the sight.

A countdown of three, and his thumb had pressed the red button on his joystick. A voice had counted down another three seconds, and all eyes had been on the screen. There had been no sound effects.

In complete silence the nose camera’s images had appeared on the screens, ghostly and menacing: enormous fireballs, then clouds of smoke, without the sound of explosions, without the screams of the maimed and the dying.

On the screens the smoke had drifted away on the night breeze and the camera had zoomed in on the debris that had remained of the house, on the bodies among the rubble, a headless torso clearly visible.

With Meshud had died his wife, father-in-law and seventeen bodyguards. After nineteen previous failed attempts, Meshud’s hourglass had at last run out, almost soundlessly, with only the soft buzz of a wasp in the night sky of South Waziristan.

08:00, H minus 1 hour.

A stream of signals and images from the Predator was being analysed by intelligence operators in Jalalabad, Khost and Langley. These operators monitored the mission, and had to identify and verify the target before the command went out to Danny and Frank to key the target into the sight.

The bottom of Danny’s screen displayed the name and geographical coordinates: Kanigoram, FATA, South Waziristan, 32° 31’ 5” North, 69° 47’ 5” East.

Kanigoram, where the Uzbeks had been driven out of their tunnels in the Baddar Valley, and where Pakistani soldiers had found boxes full of Stingers, Russian PKMB 7.62 mm light machine guns, AK47s and ammunition. Also two hundred one-kilogram blocks of PETN plastic explosives – the nitrate kind, used for car bombs and suicide vests – and detonators, originally intended for commercial blasting in stone quarries and coal mines.

The Uzbeks had been driven out, but no sooner had the soldiers left than they’d returned to recruit new fedayeen for the Taliban’s war in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda’s war against the infidels of the West. And to carry out bloody ethnic and religious vendettas against their compatriots.

A trustworthy CIA informant had planted the microchip, patrai in Pashto, under one of the trees growing beside the graveyard. It was to the coordinates of these microchip signals, a ping every ten seconds, that the satellite system of the Predator was now responding. At three thousand metres in the late afternoon sky, the Predator circled above an ancient landscape, a landscape stained with the blood of anyone who had ever tried to conquer the tribal lands of the Pashtuns.

08:30, H minus 30 minutes.

On one of Danny’s screens images of people appeared where there had previously been just a landscape of mountains and cliffs and rivers and deep ravines, dotted with the grey settlements of brown mud houses. He could make out groups of men on the ground, waiting near the judas and plane trees on the mountainside, oblivious of the microchip just a few metres from the closest group.

“I count twenty-two,” said Danny. “Now show us the vehicles.”

Frank responded and the lens zoomed in on three Toyota Hilux pick-up trucks, ramshackle and dust-covered. “Twenty-three – there’s a man in one of the trucks. Is he talking on his cellphone?” He zoomed in on a wooden crate on the back of a truck. “The coffin with the body?”

“They don’t use coffins,” said Danny. “They wrap their dead in kaftans and place them on their side in the grave, facing Mecca.”

The camera showed an oblong shape covered with a piece of canvas on the back of a second pick-up. “Could be the body,” said Frank.

“Is there an open grave?” asked Danny.

The Predator’s nose camera moved across the graves, most without markings or headstones, just heaps of white sand and rock and tufts of grass in the arid landscape, and picked out a dark spot.

“Yes,” said Frank, “there’s the grave.”

“Is it even a funeral?” asked Danny. “Or is the open grave just for show?”

Their information was that a meeting was taking place under the pretext of an al-dafin, but that it wasn’t really a funeral. Or so the informant had assured his CIA handler.

“Where’s the imam?” asked Danny.

“On his way?” Frank zoomed back to the dusty bearded men in turbans, standing in groups, talking, bandoliers around their shoulders.

Danny was no soldier, but he knew rifles, recognised the old Kalashnikovs and .303s in their hands. A Mahsud was never without his weapon, not even as a young boy, he’d learnt. Some of the beards were dyed red with henna, as was the Mahsuds’ custom. They wore traditional clothing: kameez shalwars, some wearing boots, others Kabuli sandals or Peshawari chappals.

Now more voices began to join the headphone conversation.

“Perhaps it’s a bona fide funeral after all.”

“Or a meeting of the tribe’s jirga.”

“Perhaps a dispute about a chromite mine.”

“Is that really a grave?”

“Could be the entrance to a tunnel.”

“Yes, the Uzbeks have hollowed out the entire landscape around Kanigoram.”

“What’s in the box on the pick-up?”

“What’s under the cloth on the other pick-up?”

“A body?”

“Or Stinger missiles.”

“Zoom in on the faces,” came the command.

Danny looked at the grainy still photograph on one of his screens, the face of the young man they were looking for, thin and bearded, dressed in wide trousers gathered around the ankles, a tunic and turban.

“Everyone has a beard, everyone is wearing a turban, everyone is dressed the same,” he said.

A movement caught his eye: a man turning away from the group and walking towards the pick-up which had the crate on the back.

Danny glanced at the countdown: 08:50, H minus 10 minutes.

The informant had said that the funeral – the mock funeral – was taking place at six in the afternoon. By that time everyone would be there, the target as well: the thin man, Nasir Raza, new leader of Tehrik-i-Taliban in the FATA tribal areas.

On the CIA screens all eyes were on the man walking to the truck.

“That him?” someone asked.

“No, the target is younger, about thirty,” said Danny. “A scar on his cheek. Look for a stab wound.”

“Look for a stab wound under his beard?” Frank asked.

The thin one leant in at the open window of the truck, talking to a man behind the wheel. He straightened up and squatted in the shade of a tree, as if tired of standing.

“They’re waiting for someone. Perhaps the target is late?” said Danny.

“Two others are walking to another truck,” said Frank.

“They’re leaving,” said an agitated voice in Danny’s earphones.

“Frank, that guy squatting under the tree, stay on him, try to get his face,” said Danny.

“He’s looking down; his face is in shadow.”

“Stay with him!”

They leant closer to their screens, screwed up their eyes and scrutinised the features of the man in the shade. The man stood up, motioned to the others. Some of the men in the group looked up at him and the profiles of their faces were now lit up by the late-afternoon sun.

“That’s him!” said Danny. “Third from the left.”

“Does he have a scar?” asked Frank. “I don’t see anything.”

“He has a scar; it’s him.”

“Are you sure?” asked another voice.

“Take them out!” came the command.

Danny, right hand on the joystick, listened to the countdown. “Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

A slight tremor in his hand as muscles tensed, then his thumb pressed the red button on the lever.

He lifted his thumb and waited, listened to the second countdown by the same voice: “Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

No one in the graveyard looked up at the sky; no one heard death approach. On the screens hell hit them soundlessly in a swirl of flames, followed by dust and smoke and debris.

In Langley, Khost and Jalalabad the satellite voices were quiet. Waiting. Danny glanced at the time: H minus 1 minute – one minute to nine a.m. in Washington, one minute to six p.m. in Kanigoram.

Silence. The smoke drifted away and Frank zoomed in the nose camera, the Predator now barely a thousand metres above the scene.

Of the truck only wreckage remained. A gearbox here, an engine block there, wheels still attached to a piece of the rear axle. Scattered human remains.

“Bring it back,” said a voice.

Danny sat back and took the last sip of his Red Bull. I must remember to stop for milk and bread on my way home, he thought. And I mustn’t forget to ask Jill about the barbeque on Sunday to watch the game with Frank.