Face-Off. Chris Karsten
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