Читать книгу Face-Off - Chris Karsten - Страница 9

4.

On his way back from the strat session, cyber-warrior Danny Hatt remarked: “It’s going to be a long shift.”

“What does Jill say – are you coming over for the Steelers game on Sunday?” asked Frank. “It’s going to be a bloodbath.”

“Steelers? I thought it was the Giants.”

“Giants is the week after.”

“I’ll ask her – I don’t think she has anything planned, she didn’t mention going to her mother. Did you see yesterday’s Post?”

“Yes,” said Frank. “Called us cowards again.”

“Anonymous cowards,” said Danny.

“Fuck those liberals.”

“Coward” was becoming a popular handle. Danny Hatt had read about it in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and listened to the talking heads on TV: liberals and Muslim activists calling the UAV attacks on Taliban, al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia cowardly. Human rights activists calling the drone strikes illegal, calling it murder authorised by the White House – the president in the role of prosecutor, judge and executioner.

Danny, techno-savant in the CIA’s S&T directorate, with degrees in computer science and information technology, had been a student at the CIA’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, along with Frank. They’d completed a course in terrorism analysis at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and had graduated together from the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program (PISAP), focusing on “movements and organisations that use religion for political purposes and use religious ideology to attempt to change the existing political, social, or economic order”.

On paper, Danny’s qualifications were good, though he’d never trained as a soldier or a fighter pilot. He’d never been deployed in battle. He’d been at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib for PISAP orientation, in Building 59 at Bagram, at Camps Delta, Echo, Iguana and X-ray at Guantánamo. He’d gone to them all, and come face to face with the enemy and his ideology.

Danny was thirty-five. He and Frank now manned an office at the George H.W. Bush Center for Central Intelligence, an enormous complex on 258 acres of land on the riverbank in McLean, a suburb of Langley, Virginia. On the opposite side of the Potomac lay Washington DC, seat of American power.

At just after six in the morning, Danny and Frank were in the lift on their way down, having been on night shift for the past ten hours. They knew the end was nowhere in sight, that it would be at least another ten hours, but the adrenaline was pumping, as always when an operation had been given the green light.

The final strat session had begun at five and lasted an hour – topographical maps and satellite images against the walls, real-time video streaming from an unarmed RQ-170 Sentinel spotter drone five thousand metres above the target area.

It was early morning in Washington, three o’clock in the afternoon in South Waziristan, one of the lawless tribal areas in Pakistan. Just after midnight the go-ahead had been given by the director of the National Clandestine Service, or NCS, and finally by the new CIA director himself.

Morale was high, though it had been some time since the spectacularly successful CIA operations of 2011, beginning with the big one, Operation Neptune Spear in Abbottabad, and followed some months later by other high-profile targets. But Danny and Frank had not been at the helm of those Predators. They wished they had, especially the one that had finally silenced the big mouths of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, defectors from the American bosom that had nurtured them at Khashef in Yemen. The worst kind of treachery, Danny thought.