Читать книгу Reaper Force - Inside Britain's Drone Wars - Peter Lee M. - Страница 14

I exit the building through the crew room door with an empty bladder and a full bottle of water. By the time I return in a few hours the water will have swapped locations. I don’t know why I am preoccupied with bodily functions. My mind is on overload, trying to take in everything I have seen and heard in less than one hour. Open cups or mugs are forbidden because accidental spillage in an electronically dense environment could cost huge sums of money in damages and vital lost hours of operational capability.

The desert heat hits me and I almost laugh at the extreme sensation. Such a temperature has never been experienced in my native Scotland. I am wearing a short-sleeved shirt and after a few seconds my pale forearms feel like they are being assaulted by the sun’s rays.

It is only a few yards to the entrance to the first of four sand-coloured GCSs. They are lined up and spaced out with military precision, all under a canopy that tries to protect them from the direct heat of the sun. An air-conditioning unit hums gently next to the first container, where I will spend most of the next ten hours. Black arteries snake into the GCS carrying electricity, audio and video signals, telephone lines and millions of digital 1s and 0s per second that make up the complex, secret computer coding that makes it all work. For the most part.

Over the years I have seen many, many pilots and other aircrew walk out of their squadron buildings to their aircraft. From Norway in the Arctic Circle to Scotland, England, Gibraltar, Cyprus and the Falkland Islands the pattern is largely the same. Some similarities stand out as I watch the Reaper crew walk to the GCS. The Reaper guys are wearing standard flying suits with 39 Squadron patches and relevant rank slides. They carry themselves with the kind of confident nonchalance that has been the mark of aircrew for more than a century. The same confident nonchalance that bugs the crap out of non-aircrew the world over. Some differences stand out: they do not have flying helmets; nobody is wearing the G-suits that help fast jet crews resist the effects of gravity; and there is no waterproof layer. This Reaper crew will not be crash landing or ditching in the sea if there is an in-flight emergency.

But something about them is off, doesn’t make sense. Something does not quite fit as the three of them file in to the metal container ahead of me. As I follow behind my subconscious dredges the answer from somewhere. Two of the crew are actually carrying cold weather flying jackets with them, in 100 degree desert heat that is quickly turning my pale blue shirt into a damp, dark blue dishcloth.

As I step inside, the temperature drops 40 degrees to around a steady 17°C (620F). For me this is pleasant; for the acclimatised Reaper crew it feels like winter and a jacket is an essential requirement. The temperature drop is accompanied by a sudden gloom as I enter what I first imagine to be the inside of a giant computer from a 1980s sci-fi film. A wall of computer equipment faces me in the narrow corridor that runs about 15ft from the pilot and SO who are taking their seats to my right, to the MIC who is sitting in front of his own screens to my left at the back of the cabin.

The SO beckons me to a seat in between, and just behind, him and the pilot. I close the door, shutting out the Nevada desert. Another desert landscape will soon occupy our attention. In the meantime I am fascinated by the fact that the walls, floor and ceiling are all carpeted. Not high quality woollen Axminster carpet, more the kind of hardwearing industrial weave. I make a mental note to ask someone what the carpet is for. I make a second mental note that there are more important things going on.

I am handed a set of headphones with a chord that looks long enough to reach right back to the MIC station. As I adjust them for comfort I can hear that the pilot and SO are already running through their pre-flight checklist. I look up to see a bank of around a dozen small television-size screens in front of them, with four smaller screens. In between them are two old-fashioned telephones.

Then the pre-flight checks grind to a halt. There is a problem with one of the live information feeds. The Auth in the Operations Room next door will not approve the start of the mission until it is sorted out, which could take a couple of hours. There is so much information flowing into the GCS from different sources that I am intrigued that this one problem is a show-stopper. During a lull in the conversation the SO – who also happens to be the Squadron Commander or Boss – explains the situation in terms he thinks I will understand. ‘Basically, we have lost something like the equivalent of a car satnav. The alternative is to have a map plus verbal updates from elsewhere, as required.’ He has seen this problem before and is confident it will be resolved quickly.

I also note how the personnel dynamics start to shift. When the Boss is in the GCS as an SO crew member, he is subject to the supervisory authority of the lower-ranked Auth in the Ops Room next door. In this instance, the Auth will not approve take-off as the lack of a ‘satnav’ could potentially reduce crew situational awareness. The Boss is confident that the problem will be sorted before the Reaper reaches its operating area in Iraq and that it is safe to send the aircraft there. However, it is the Station Commander back at RAF Waddington who legally ‘owns’ the risk involved and only he can allow the Boss’s plan to proceed. It will have to be the Boss who phones the Station Commander, wakes him up in the middle of the night in the UK and asks him to give permission to proceed with the flight. So, the Auth gives the Boss approval to leave the GCS to take charge of the situation temporarily; the Boss then phones the UK and gets agreement for the flight to transit with the limitation; the Auth then approves take off; and the Boss takes his seat again as the SO under the supervision of the Auth. Simple.

It all seemed quite convoluted but the underlying principle is that the person with supervisory authority over the aircraft is responsible to the legal owner of the risk; in this case the Station Commander. If the Auth had simply decided to launch the Reaper without getting authorisation from above – and if anything then went wrong – it would have been his neck and career on the block.

Flight preparations proceed an hour behind schedule. Everybody seems happy with the outcome except, perhaps, the Station Commander in the UK who is now probably trying to get back to sleep.

‘So, what happened to “kick the tyres and light the fires”?’ I ask. The old-school fighter pilot adage.

A crisp, ‘Very funny!’ from somewhere tells me to shut up.

The checks restart and they will mostly be familiar to anyone who has flown anything from a light aircraft to a jumbo jet: airframe checks; engine checks; area of operations and maps; comms (lots of different types in this case); clocks (important when working across several time zones); radio frequencies; and weather.

There are also numerous system checks that differ from conventional aircraft and indicate that this Reaper is to be piloted remotely. The ‘command link’ is one example. It connects the pilot’s and SO’s controls in Nevada to the aircraft via fibre optic cable and satellite.

Then there is the preparation to electronically take control of the aircraft. Somewhere at a runway within a reasonable transit time of the Reaper’s operating area in Iraq, a separate Launch and Recovery Element (LRE) will ensure that it takes off and lands safely. It looks like a vastly bigger version of a radio-controlled model aircraft take-off. Once the Reaper has safely climbed a few thousand feet into the air, the flick of a switch diverts the electronic control signals from the LRE crew in the Middle-East to the crew members in front of me, who are now actively controlling the Reaper.

As the Reaper continues to climb I can work out most of what I see on the pilot’s screen. To the left of his main screen the aircraft’s indicated airspeed is around 110 knots. Ominously, the number 88 is highlighted in red. This is the stall speed at which there is not enough lift from the air under the wings and the forces of gravity take over. Bad things happen after that. There are also a couple of unfamiliar hieroglyphics, so I ask.

‘These markings indicate the weapons I have available. Four Hellfire laser-guided missiles – two on the left and two on the right – and one GBU-12 guided bomb.’ The former weigh 100lb each and the latter 500lb. Either can be immensely damaging or immensely helpful, depending on who you are and what is happening at the time.

Meanwhile, the SO is checking the camera pod in its ‘normal’ and ‘infrared’ modes. Later he will check that the laser for guiding the weapons onto their targets is working. For now, however, he catches me out: ‘Do you want to jump in the seat and try the controls?’

‘Sure.’ As we swap seats I know that I am about to impress the hell out of him. I have flown light aircraft in the past and have also spent many hours on computer games.

The left-hand control allows me to zoom the picture in and out. He gets me to zoom in quite close to watch a car driving on a road that cuts diagonally across the screen in front of me. The right-hand control moves the crosshairs in the centre of the screen.

‘Now keep the crosshairs on that car,’ he tells me, pointing at the screen. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ he adds, reading my mind. I am sure I hear a chuckle from the pilot or MIC, but I am about to show them some moves. Some really bad moves, as it turns out – at least initially. The left and right movement is quite straightforward, but the up and down control seems to be the wrong way round. Worse, the joystick seems unusually big and clunky and not nearly as good as some on computer games. When I mention this later I am told that the manufacturers used old F-16 controls that were surplus to their requirements. And I believe it.

If I was laser-guiding a missile at this point, the safest place in the world would be in the car that was now dancing all over the screen. Everywhere except near the crosshairs. In my defence, the problem was made worse by the one to two second time delay between me moving the control in Creech and the satellite delivering the signal to the aircraft. It took a couple of minutes for me to start to coordinate the moving, time-delayed, three-dimensional challenge in front of me. It took roughly the same time for the others to stop laughing.

Before I know it my familiarisation exercise is over as the flex crew arrives to take over temporarily and give the duty crew a break. The delayed start of the mission means we are not yet into the designated operating area. The Reaper will get there by the time we have eaten and return.

The Squadron Commander reverts back from SO to Boss mode. He goes to confirm with the Auth that the ‘satnav’ capability has returned as anticipated, and to find out what caused the problem.

A short walk and a couple of security barriers away is the chow hall, or what the British call the mess or canteen. Hot and cold food is available twenty-four hours a day. It is a barn of a building that can feed hundreds of people at a sitting, at tables that are laid out in precise rows. Americans are often criticised for their diet and I am impressed to see some crisp salad in the fridges alongside the cheesecake, opposite the counter where burgers, steak, pizza and other local delicacies are churned out. Just as I am about to rewrite my prejudices about Americans and food, a young airman comes over and grabs a handful of salad to add some colour and texture to his massive double burger and cheese. Or perhaps to help his stomach process the pound of beef that is coming its way. From his physique I do not have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that this is his standard diet.

My two hosts from 39 Squadron regale me with tales about the merits of living and operating at Creech. It boils down to this: Creech is a base that is at war and everything is available twenty-four hours a day to support that effort. I will get to experience what happens at RAF Waddington in a few weeks’ time.

Re-entering the GCS, each of the crew gets a quiet update from their counterpart in the flex crew as they settle back in for the next few hours.

‘Eyes on!’ The change in the pilot’s tone is enough to tell me that the transit is over and we – or at least the Reaper that the crew is flying – are overhead today’s Named Area of Interest. For my benefit he adds, ‘This is a Daesh area.’ The use of the official UK term – Daesh – does not escape my notice. It feels out of place, forced, like middle-aged parents using text-speak to – LOL – get down with the kids.

From the rear of the GCS, the MIC outlines the latest intelligence picture as he absorbs the information from multiple inputs, from text chatrooms to visuals and direct audio instruction. These include the observation priorities from the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The CAOC provides command and control for all air assets – the different kinds of aircraft – operating in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.10

There are two immediate priorities, though if emergencies arise those priorities can change at any time. The first is to check the site of yesterday’s missile and bomb strike against IS to see if activity has resumed in the location. The second is to search for a couple of IS technicals that have been seen in the area. These mobile weapon-carriers can have anything from 0.50in-calibre machine guns whose rounds can penetrate concrete, to larger and more devastating anti-aircraft guns. I don’t need to spell out their primary job but they also make very effective and fast-moving artillery. Hit, run and hide is the maxim. They conduct the rapid, aggressive manoeuvre warfare that IS used so effectively to seize as much ground as it did in the early stages of its offensive. That was before Western air power joined the fray, especially the Reaper with its exceptionally long loiter times, surveillance capability and weapons.

The screens before me show slow-moving images of bleak, sandy countryside, punctuated with random houses, settlements and towns. When we arrive at the scene of yesterday’s strike, it seems clear to me that there is nothing going on. Maybe I just have a low boredom threshold but I would have been away from that area in two minutes flat. Rubble is rubble and the damaged building nearby looks uninhabitable. But then, perhaps, my idea of uninhabitable is different to those who are fighting a war for which they are ready to die.

The self-sacrificial element of what the IS fighters are doing is difficult to ignore and even more difficult to understand. Dying for one’s cause is the ultimate commitment. There’s also what they do to innocent civilians and to Muslims from different historical traditions. And this brings me to a curious corner of the public drone debate and a word that regularly crops up in discussions about drones: ‘fair’. As in, ‘Is it fair to use remotely piloted Reapers against jihadists who can’t strike back at them?’ Hilarious. The notion of war as a fair fight has emerged somewhere in recent arguments against the use of Reaper. Since the time of the Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu more than 2,000 years ago – and probably before – the idea has always been to make war as unfair on your enemy as possible. The advantages offered by RPA are not a violation of traditional military strategy – it is what militaries have been after for centuries. If activists want to use drones as a kind of lightning rod for anti-Western, anti-technology, anti-globalisation, anti-government criticism they should just say so. Instead, they can drown out the dedicated, informed scholars, activists and journalists who work to hold governments to account over their use of Reaper and other RPA.

Here’s a test. Look at wars throughout history. Start listing the ones where political or battlefield leaders deliberately surrendered a distinct advantage to give their enemy a fair chance of winning. It will not take you long. (And no, I am not talking about the occasional act of chivalry or compassion on the battlefield.)

Anyway, back to the screens. Yesterday’s reconnaissance of the area had been limited by strong winds and the sand it dispersed in the air. Today, in contrast, there are crystal clear skies and maximum visibility. The thorough examination of yesterday’s strike site yields no indication of life and activity. Everyone agrees that the job is completed. The MIC receives a new tasking, or task, and gives the pilot a bearing and destination. But the pilot does a curious thing. The direction indicator on the screen shows that the Reaper has responded to his joystick. Specifically, I can tell that he has gone into a left turn. In an aircraft cockpit in flight, gravity and centrifugal forces combine to cause the crew to lean into the turn. Despite this particular cockpit being a shipping container that is firmly anchored to a concrete base in the middle of the Nevada desert, the pilot still leans left into the turn. I don’t know if his brain is telling the rest of his body to move that way, or whether he is using his body as a means of understanding the movement of the distant aircraft. Either way, it looks weird.

Almost immediately the SO spots something and zooms in the camera on his pod. A technical fills the screen. It is a quad cab pick-up truck and the MIC identifies a 0.50in-calibre machine gun on the back. Nobody seems especially interested or excited about this development. The SO explains: ‘This is not a Daesh-held area so it is unlikely that this will be one of their vehicles out on its own. We are just working out who it does belong to.’

The three crew members each contribute description and analysis of the image on the screen. Even I can tell that the markings do not belong to IS. The MIC breaks away from the conversation to check on the several intelligence chatrooms he has running on his screen. He types in a description of what they are seeing and where it is. The MIC is not just a recipient of intelligence, he is also contributing to the overall intelligence picture of the area. Some quick cross-checking confirms that, in this rapidly changing environment, the technical belongs to a non-IS, non-government militia.

‘Does that make them the good guys?’ I ask. The question is intentionally mischievous. There is a long silence. The pilot is the first to respond. ‘Well, they are good-ish – at least for now.’ His hesitation is understandable. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are much-misused, malleable terms in this conflict. As are the names and allegiances of many of the militias involved in it.

They move on from the good-ish, bad-ish technical to get on with the systematic area search south of Mosul. After half an hour of ‘watching buildings go round’ as the camera moves from building to building and small settlement to small settlement, I find my attention drifting slightly. There has been no sign of life in the last three places we looked.

‘Where is everybody?’ I ask.

‘Were you watching BBC News last night?’ came a reply. ‘The luckiest ones have family in safe areas. The other lucky ones are in a refugee camp or trying to cross the Med. by boat to Europe.’ The images of refugees being rescued from their pathetic, barely seaworthy boats are harrowing. There is something similarly shocking about the empty places that the refugees have left behind. Homes, schools, businesses, mosques. The spaces that were once filled with life and vibrancy are now empty shells, many destroyed or damaged in the fighting.

While the discussion of the empty homes was going on, the MIC was receiving updated information from one of his chatrooms. He gives the pilot and SO an eight-figure grid reference – still some miles south of Mosul but further to the west – which the CAOC would like to investigate. Intelligence from the myriad of supported forces on the ground in Iraq has made its labyrinthine way to Nevada for visual confirmation from the air.

However, before the crew reaches the location the flex crew reappears. Dinner time. The MIC updates everyone on the latest intelligence picture. Each crew member then gives a detailed description of what they are doing, what they are looking for and why. Then one by one the members of the relief crew settle into their seats. One hundred years on from the rapid growth of air forces in the First World War, control is handed over with the words that aircrew – often instructors and trainee pilots – have used ever since.

‘You have control,’ says the exiting Reaper pilot.

‘I have control,’ responds the relief pilot.

The crew head off separately to make phone calls, answer emails, you name it. For those with children, it might be the only chance to speak to them between school and bedtime.

One of the aspects of being a Reaper operator that is widely known is the disjuncture between home and work, particularly when work life involves observing often harrowing events and killing people who have been watched for long periods. What is not appreciated, and certainly did not cross my mind before I was confronted with it, is that the mental transition between war and peace does not happen at the beginning and end of every day. It happens at the beginning and end of every stint in the GCS during the course of single shift. That is a lot of mental readjustment on a daily basis.

I head off to conduct an interview, my first here. There is a false start when my interviewee, an off-duty pilot, realises that he has arranged for the interview to take place in the briefing room – a SECRET classified location – but my recording equipment is forbidden. So we find a quiet room. Moments like this away from the GCS remind me of the seriousness of what is going on and that this whole squadron is at war, not just the people who are doing the flying.

These first few interviews are crucial as I begin to engage with people who don’t know me and live in a continual ‘need to know’ mode. These opening interviews are particularly valuable in the practical information I glean and for understanding how the Reaper and 39 Squadron work. At this stage the interviewees are understandably cautious about how much personal information and experience they can risk sharing. That’s partly because of the politically and personally sensitive nature of what they do and how I might use it, and partly – as one pilot puts it over coffee – because of the Lee Rigby effect. Lee Rigby was the off-duty British soldier murdered in a London street in 2013 by two radical Islamists.

Importantly for me, however, another factor is working in my favour. A lot of the RAF Reaper personnel are fed up with how they see themselves and their work presented in different parts of the media. After the first couple of interviews a trickle turns into something of a flood. At this stage they are very keen to tell me what they do and how they do it. Some even make an early foray into telling me what they think about what they do. A crude, initial summary: professional and proud. It will be some time before some of them eventually open up to me about how they feel about what they do. As the events to follow will show, this is too complex for a crude summary.

Before I know it, I am called back to the GCS – dinner is over. I stand half way between the pilot and SO as they go through their handovers and retake their seats at the front of the box, as the GCS is known, and the MIC who is doing the same at his work station at the rear of the box. Do I detect a frisson of excitement? I have a random question. Why is the end of the box where the pilot sits seen as the ‘front’, while the MIC sits at the ‘back’? In an information-based war, maybe the intelligence coordinators are the ‘front’ end. I make a note to see if I can start an argument about this in the crew room some time. (The answer turned out to be yes, and very easily.)

Once the flex crew left, I saw at the centre of the main screens a building with some kind of lean-to or temporary shelter in a small, narrow backyard that led into an alley. The MIC had located a technical as it entered this residential area and watched as it drove to this place a couple of minutes ago. It bore the hallmarks of IS and they had been in the process of identifying the weapon on the back when the technical reversed under the tarpaulin.

We watched as four armed men emerged from where the vehicle was concealed.

‘Suspicious,’ observes the Boss, but suspicion without evidence does not take them to the point of asking for a strike. Also, the presence of children in the alleyway – never mind who might be in the house – ensures a positive collateral damage estimate (CDE) and therefore no strike. It is time to watch.

Having had around just four hours’ sleep in the previous thirty-six, and feeling the effects of jet lag, I worry that I might doze off. No way. The adrenaline kicks in. Potential strike locations are being sought by the MIC. Not easy in a built-up area with children and adults milling around. The Boss zooms out the camera view so that a wider surrounding area can be recce’d for potential strike locations. Then everything changes. Quickly.

The technical starts backing out of its hiding place, the camera zooms in and a sense of urgency permeates the GCS. A large gun on a tripod comes into view. Two different voices identify it as a 0.50in-calibre machine gun. The MIC starts to confirm the precise type of gun, as well as contacting his various intelligence sources to confirm ‘ownership’ of the vehicle.

The vehicle begins to track slowly through the back streets.

‘The driver is looking for something or somewhere but probably does not know the area well.’ The Boss interprets what we are seeing for my benefit.

Then it stops, reverses and moves backwards and forwards a couple of times as the driver tries to get closer to the adjacent building. He ends up further away than when he started.

‘This is an Austin Powers parking manoeuvre right now,’ says the pilot. It breaks the tension for a few seconds. I’m not sure if the others are laughing but I have to move my microphone away from my face. The people in that vehicle might only have minutes or hours to live and, frankly, I am fighting back laughter. Get a grip. I am the kid who laughed in school assembly and in church, then grew up to laugh in funerals (unfortunately, often when I was conducting them) and when I met Prince Charles. I am not a nervous or anxious person, I just like to laugh: and the darker the situation the funnier I find things. Firemen, doctors, nurses, undertakers and anyone else who deals with death and tragedy would get the humour. It is not trivialising what might be about to happen. It is a kind of pressure valve, a way to cope with things that nobody should ever have to cope with.

The armed passengers jump out and enter the building. New strike estimates are made and permission to strike – if a suitable kill zone can be found – is discussed. However, the current location still has too many unknowns for a strike to proceed.

The pilot keeps up multiple dialogues with the other two crew members, the JTAC and the Red Card Holder11 (the RCH authorises a weapon strike) in the CAOC. The JTAC is the link between the RCH and the pilot, and is the one who will say ‘cleared hot’ to the pilot. The RCH suddenly seems to be juggling plans A, B and C, depending on what happens next. None of those plans will have a happy ending for the vehicle and armed passengers if they end up in an open space devoid of civilians.

Several minutes later the fighters emerge from the building more rapidly than they entered it and jump into the vehicle. It quickly becomes clear that the group is retracing the route back to where they just came from. They re-enter the narrow alley and the driver angles the vehicle to reverse into the narrow hiding place. He recreates the Austin Powers driving scene again with several attempts to park. After the fourth or fifth attempt – by which time he was getting the rear half of the vehicle into the hide – the driver stops, gets out and walks round to the other side of the vehicle. The other armed men leave him to it. The driver bends down and picks something up. A quick review of the video shows that he has knocked off the passenger-side door mirror.

‘That might not be the worst thing to happen to your vehicle today,’ mutters the pilot.

If this was on YouTube it would get millions of hits. As I try to gauge the reactions of the others (are the pilot and MIC being more restrained because the Boss is in the SO’s seat?), another larger technical drives into view.

‘Twin barrels. Anti-aircraft gun,’ announces the MIC immediately. I can hear the increased interest in his voice. This second pickup is dwarfed by the huge gun on the back, a gun that will work just as effectively against ground forces as a piece of rapid-fire field artillery. It stops near the hide but nobody gets out. The MIC reckons he is waiting for instructions.

Sure enough, someone comes running out of the building next to the hide, speaks briefly to the driver and then disappears back where he came from. Technical 2 starts to move.

Decision time. Follow the new vehicle or wait and watch the hidden one? I struggle to follow the different conversations I can hear though my headphones. The discussions relate to available intelligence, the threat posed by the gun to both aircraft and friendly forces on the ground and the imminence of the threat posed by both technicals. I think everyone is missing the only salient point but it is not my place to join in: the driver of the second vehicle looks like he could actually get the gun into a position where it could do real damage. The driver of the hidden technical is actually a greater threat to his own side and might well destroy his own vehicle.

‘Follow the mover.’ Someone at the CAOC makes the decision. They will call in another air asset to observe the hide and wait for further movement.

It is the nature of the Reaper’s observation pod that makes the decision so urgent. When the camera is fully zoomed in, say for a missile strike on a target or for capturing details on the ground with the greatest clarity, it is compared by the operators to ‘looking through a straw’. There is an extremely narrow field of view. With the camera fully zoomed out to give the widest view, it would still soon lose sight of one of the two technicals. Plus, with the camera zoomed out, it would be easier for the crew to lose track of the second vehicle in this built-up area.

The pilot starts working with the CAOC and JTAC, getting the necessary conditional permissions and constraints for hitting the anti-aircraft gun with a Hellfire missile. Just starting the process gets my heart beating faster. Everyone I speak to in all of my subsequent interviews describes the same physical response, and more, to the build up to a strike.

No strike is approved yet – too many unknowns. However, the paperwork is in place and can be activated within seconds of the vehicle clearing the civilian area.

The vehicle was moving through the small roads of the town faster than any other passing car or truck. Perhaps the driver senses he is being watched. He will certainly know that he will become a target once he is spotted. I wonder if he is a hired hand or if he is a true-believing ideologue with martyrdom on his mind.

‘Do you sometimes think the IS guys are setting out to die?’ Things are temporarily quiet so I venture a question.

‘Some, definitely yes. Others, I would say no. You see it in their behaviour. Mostly, though, you can’t tell.’ Apart from answering me the Boss is scanning the area for potential kill zones, depending on the route of the technical.

With the edge of town only a few hundred yards ahead – and therefore the open space a missile strike would need – radio calls get quicker and sharper. The conditional 9-line – the approval process that contains nine steps or pieces of information – only requires that there are no civilians in the blast zone. The pilot and the Boss discuss possible strike angles and missile settings. Apparently there is a choice. Who knew? I guess that is the point of military secrecy. They still don’t spell out exactly why they go for a particular choice.

Without warning, the technical brakes hard and swings left into a large compound, squeezes past a tree and under some kind of shelter built onto the side of a house. On a Scottish farm I would expect it to be where a tractor is parked overnight. Within seconds, a tarpaulin is draped over the front of the shelter. If the crew had not watched the technical being driven in there they could never have spotted it. A map grid reference is noted and the crew settles in to watch this building for the remaining time of the shift. Where have the hours gone?

I push my wheeled seat back to the MIC’s station. He is rewinding and replaying segments of the video from the drive through town. Screen shots are magnified and he is consulting with the Senior Mission Intelligence Coordinator (SMIC) sitting in the Ops Room next door.

‘We are looking at these tubes here,’ explains the MIC, pointing to some shapes on the back of the technical next to the anti-aircraft gun. From this view, the possible options include: mortar tubes, shoulder-held rocket launchers, something I can’t decipher from my notebook or plumbing supplies. Apparently the last option was not a joke. A plumber’s truck would make an ideal vehicle for a technical.

Through my headphones, I hear a series of checks being read out. When I return to the pilot’s and SO’s station they are preparing for a mid-air handover of the Reaper to XIII Squadron at RAF Waddington. Their shift is just starting and they will now watch the site where the technical is hidden, waiting to pounce if it ventures out to fight. I don’t know why, but I feel a sense of anti-climax as we traipse out of the box. I mention it to the Boss.

‘It’s unfinished business,’ he replies. ‘We have seen what those guns can do [against the Free Syrian Army and others] and it’s not a good feeling to go home knowing this one is still out there.’ I make a note to explore this further.

‘So what happens now?’

‘Now we go home, sleep for a few hours and come back and do it all again tomorrow.’ That was not strictly true. After a twelve-hour day he would do at least one or two more hours in his office. A day’s flying is almost a break from his main job as Squadron Commander.

My mind wanders with fatigue as the crew goes through the in-brief with the Auth and the pilot signs the aircraft back in. The Auth runs through a series of checks and his last question sticks with me: ‘Are you fit to drive home?’ (They are required to declare if they are not fit to do so.) It is now the middle of the night and I am wrecked. There is a whole series of rooms in a building nearby with clean, available beds for those who cannot face the drive home. I suspect that regular self-deception goes on at this desk when it comes to tiredness and fitness to drive. I have a list of questions but they will have to wait.

I learn over the coming weeks and months that life on a Reaper squadron revolves around sleep management. It also revolves around trying to switch off, knowing that dangerous people with dangerous weapons have been spared bomb or missile strikes because of the risk to nearby civilians.

As I make my way back to my car for the drive back to my hotel room on the Vegas strip I doubt my own fitness to drive. And I have not gone through the extreme adrenaline surges that the crew experienced in the build-ups to the shots that they were never able to carry out. This most fascinating of days has left me with a profound sense of unfinished business. There is no finality, no fulfilment of a job well done. No explosions, no killing of the ‘baddies’. The part of me that loves to see a task neatly finished would be driven mad doing this job.

When I get back on the highway, the darkness of the desert is oppressive in places. The headlights of other cars and trucks have a hypnotic effect. A distant glow on the horizon grows steadily until the bright city lights burst into view. It is an assault on my visual acuity after a day in a darkened box watching greyscale images of a distant desert land. I console myself with the possibility that it will all make more sense tomorrow…

10 Further details about the CAOC can be found at http://www.afcent.af.mil/About/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/217803/combined-air-operations-center-caoc/, accessed 30 July 2017.

11 In July 2018 the designation Red Card Holder was changed to Green Card Holder.