Predator (43 page)

After a considerable wait, Dewey got instructions to contact the lead aircraft in a two-ship F-15E flight flying under the radio call sign “Crockett.” When he radioed the lead plane, the F-15 pilot replied, “Dewey, is that you?” Both the Strike Eagle's pilot, call sign “Slokes,” and his WSO, call sign “Snitch,” had been squadron mates of Dewey's when he flew in F-15Es. Slokes and Snitch and the crew of the second F-15E (pilot “Spear” and WSO “Buzzer”) were with the Air Force's 391st Fighter Squadron and had taken off hours earlier from Al Jaber Air Base in Kuwait. When launched, each plane had carried nine laser-guided, five-hundred-pound GBU-12 bombs.

Their route had taken the Strike Eagles southeast over the Persian Gulf and then out to the Gulf of Oman, where they rendezvoused with an aerial refueling tanker. Next they turned north to cross Pakistan and took up station over Afghanistan, ready to bomb whatever targets an AWACS communications plane instructed. Over the next few hours, the two F-15Es were directed to bomb two houses in Kabul and a Taliban roadblock south of the city; they were then told to head home. On their way back to Kuwait—while flying over Pakistan and using “finger lights” on the tips of their gloves to eat cold cheeseburgers in their darkened cockpits—Slokes got a call from the AWACS asking if they had enough bombs left to turn back and hit an extremely high-priority target in Kabul. Slokes said they had the bombs and could go back, but they would “need a waiver on the crew duty day, because we're going to land past twelve hours.”

After a brief pause, the AWACS controller came back and said, “You're cleared north.”

“Call Mom and let her know we'll be home late,” replied Slokes. He and Spear then banked their F-15s back toward Afghanistan.

The order to return came from newly promoted Lieutenant General T. Michael “Buzz” Moseley, an F-15 pilot himself and former commander of the F-15 division of his service's elite Fighter Weapons School. Just five days earlier, Moseley had taken over as Combined Forces Air Component Commander from Lieutenant General Chuck Wald, a long-scheduled move that put Moseley in charge of the air war in Afghanistan. After two years running U.S. Central Command air forces, Wald was rising to deputy chief of staff of the Air Force for air and space operations.

Moseley, a Grand Prairie, Texas, native who learned to fly before he could legally drive a car, had earned two degrees from Texas A&M University before entering the Air Force. Beloved by subordinates, whom he called “my babies,” Buzz Moseley was serenely confident, even for a fighter pilot, and took pride in his Texas roots. He wore cowboy boots when out of uniform, rode horses when he could, and tended to speak his mind bluntly, in a natural twang. “It's a whole lot like listenin' to a cow pee on a flat rock,” he once told a Pentagon news briefing, providing his view of retired generals critiquing war plans on TV.

Moseley had been meeting with Wald in the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the building on 9/11, killing more than three hundred people, and he was eager to strike back at Al Qaeda. Before taking over the air war, he had met with combatant commander General Tommy Franks and Central Command's operations director, Air Force Major General Gene Renuart, to discuss how the CAOC and Centcom could be more agile in striking emerging targets. In Moseley's view, U.S. forces were missing opportunities because of what he saw as “dicked-up” rules of engagement modeled on peacetime enforcement of no-fly zones over Iraq. Getting approval for a strike shouldn't have to take hours, in Moseley's view, and before he assumed command at the CAOC he made a proposal to Franks. If the combatant commander gave authority for approving air strikes back to the air commander, Moseley would create strict new procedures at the CAOC to ensure careful review of potential collateral damage before targets were struck. After taking the issue to Rumsfeld, Franks agreed, and when the CIA Global Response Center passed word on November 12 that a Predator had followed some high-value targets to a three-story house in Kabul, a first test of the new procedure was at hand.

After learning about the convoy, Moseley immediately convened a meeting over a map table in a new part of the CAOC called the Battle Cab, a glass-enclosed balcony overlooking the operations center floor that had replaced the Crow's Nest. Below were U.S., British, French, and Saudi officers at long rows of tables, working amid a cacophony of ringing phones and conversations beneath the facility's theater-size imagery screens. Outside the Battle Cab—where CAOC commanders had moved after the first few days of the Afghan war—there were armed guards; inside was the CIA Predator screen that Wald had angrily moved to the Crow's Nest the first night of the war.

As intelligence officers watching the Predator video plotted geographic coordinates for the target house in Kabul's diplomatic quarter and talked to Langley via secure computer chat rooms, Moseley prepared a strike. “Find out who's airborne,” he ordered. “Find out how much gas they've got. Find out where a tanker is.”

Moseley also wanted to know more about the target: in such a densely populated, internationally sensitive area, he wanted to take great care to make sure the fighters hit the right structure and avoided collateral damage. “Get a hold of Centcom and let's find out what they know, what they think they know and let's fill in any blanks,” Moseley told his subordinates.

After studying the house in Kabul, CAOC targeteers decided that the two F-15Es with their laser-guided bombs should make the attack.

*   *   *

“This is Wildfire. Ready to copy nine-line?” Dewey asked, talking over the Predator's radio from the GCS at the Trailer Park to the backseaters in the F-15Es now circling in the night sky about twenty thousand feet over Kabul. On their way to the Afghan capital, lead pilot Slokes had decided that his wingman plane, flown by Spear with backseater Buzzer, would strike first because they had more bombs left than he and Snitch did.

“Crockett Five Two, ready to copy,” Buzzer replied to Wildfire.

“Crockett Five One, ready to copy,” Snitch confirmed.

Using the Predator's video, Dewey studied the area around the target house and then began an abbreviated nine-line tailored to the situation. He skipped the first three steps—where to start the bombing approach, what heading to fly en route to the target, what distance that should be. The fighter crews could decide or figure out those elements of the strike for themselves.

“Line four,” he began, then read the target's elevation above sea level in feet. “Five niner zero six.”

Target description came next. “Line five. A building with a small square on the roof.” Then Dewey provided geographic coordinates. “Line six,” he said. “North thirty-four, thirty-two, zero one, decimal niner three. East sixty-nine, eleven, zero three, decimal thirty-four.”

Buzzer read the details back, concluding with “Copy all.” Then, after Snitch added his own confirmation, the two WSOs cued their laser targeting pods to the house and said in turn, “Captured. Ready for talk-on.”

“There's a baseball diamond southwest of the target,” Dewey began, directing their eyes to a playing field, which in the Predator's infrared imagery resembled a ballpark. “Call ‘captured,'” Dewey added, instructing them to tell him when they saw the field.

“Captured,” the backseaters reported in turn as their pilots “arced the target,” lining up for a bomb run that Crockett 52 would lead.

Dewey continued talking the backseaters onto the target by describing prominent features of the area around the target house, ending with “There's a building across the street shaped like Utah with the small end pointing across the street to your target.”

When Snitch saw the Utah-shaped building, he knew without a doubt they had the target. “Captured,” he said.

“Captured,” Buzzer echoed.

“You're cleared hot,” Dewey said, relaying approval from the CAOC to strike the house.

“Stand by,” Buzzer replied as he and Snitch put the crosshairs of their targeting pods onto the house.

The Predator crew waited, watching their silent infrared video until a voice over the radio reported that the bombs had been released. “Off hot,” the voice said. “T impact, twenty seconds.” A second or two passed; then Buzzer reported, “Laser on.” Then, as witnesses at Langley, in the CAOC, and other locations with a Predator screen watched, two five-hundred-pound bombs ripped across the infrared image and hit near the roof at the front of the house. “Impact,” Buzzer reported.

As black smoke rolled skyward from the house, cheers from the double-wide roared over the headsets of the Predator crew, who kept the drone circling the site. When the infrared bloom of the explosion cleared, though, only the back of the house was gone. The structure was still standing.

“Shit hot, it's over,” Moseley heard someone say over the CAOC's connection to the AWACS. “Whoever they are, we got 'em.”

A subordinate asked if the CAOC should tell the F-15Es to “safe up”—turn off their targeting pods and go home. Moseley shook his head. “No,” he said. “The structure's still intact.” With most of the building still standing, Moseley wasn't satisfied the strike had killed the high-value targets the CIA said were inside. He ordered a second strike.

“Sir, are you sure you want to do that?” asked one officer accustomed to Centcom's habit of erring on the side of caution when it came to collateral damage.

“Prosecute the target,” Moseley commanded.

Slokes and Snitch, flying about five hundred miles an hour, had been trailing well behind Spear and Buzzer. Perhaps four minutes after the first strike, just in time to release their bombs on that run, they heard Dewey say, “Cleared hot.”

“Off hot,” Slokes reported over the radio, then banked the F-15 while Snitch kept his laser crosshairs on the roof of the target house to guide the bombs to their mark.

Moments later, Moseley and others in the Battle Cab watched their silent Predator screen as the bombs streaked down straight through the top of the house in Kabul. The fuses of the bombs, set by ground crews in Kuwait before takeoff, must have been timed to explode ten milliseconds or so later than the first bombs dropped, Moseley figured, taking them deep enough into the house to hit some propane tanks in the basement. What remained of the house disappeared in black clouds of smoke that mushroomed upward while a bright white flame flashed a good thirty yards or more out of the front of the house. The huge heat bloom lingered for some time.

Despite the direct hit, six or seven “squirters” emerged within seconds and began rapidly walking away from the structure whose destruction they had somehow survived. “Clearly there was a lot of adrenaline pumping,” one senior official who saw the Predator video recalled years later. “They walked and walked and walked.”

The Predator followed, its camera watching as those fleeing entered a small one-story house in a compound well away from the building the long-gone F-15Es had hit. Four or five of the survivors went inside the little house, but a couple of them remained on a porch. As they stood there, the CIA Global Response Center told mission commander Jergensen to have the Predator crew put a Hellfire into the house, which was small enough to make a suitable target for the missile.

Years later, memories were clouded on which pilot and sensor operator took the shot. But Swanson, who was in the GCS at the time, was struck by how much the target resembled, if only in size and shape, the sturdy adobe “Taco Bell” the Big Safari team had perforated with Hellfires at China Lake the previous summer. Though at China Lake, no human beings stood in the missile's path.

When the infrared blossom of the Hellfire's explosion cleared from the Predator screen, the men who had been on the porch were gone. And this time no one saw any squirters.

The F-15Es landed back in Kuwait fifteen and a half hours after takeoff, the longest mission on record for a Strike Eagle. They called it the “Kabul-ki Dance.”

*   *   *

Earlier that same evening, BBC correspondent William Reeve was being interviewed live from Kabul by fellow correspondent Lyse Doucet of BBC News 24 in London when he got the fright of his life. Dressed in casual slacks and a blue shirt under an Afghan-style vest and seated at his desk at BBC House, a two-story stone villa in Kabul's diplomatic quarter where he and another correspondent lived and worked, Reeve was telling Doucet about the war's effect on average Afghans. “There's not much people can do,” he said, looking into a camera that was on a tripod to the right side of his desk, his back to a large, dark BBC banner hung over a big window a few feet behind him. “Where can they go?” Reeve said of the Afghans. “All they can do is stay at home and hope for the best.”

As Reeve paused for the next question, viewers heard a whoosh grow into a roar followed by a muffled blast and the sound of crashing glass. As the BBC banner fell, Reeve flinched, fear on his face, and rolled out of his chair and to the floor. Then, from his knees, he looked back at the dust pouring into the room over the laptop and microphone on his desk.

“Jesus Christ!” his cameraman cried out.

“Go to the basement!” Reeve shouted. “Go to the basement!”

A few minutes later, shaken but uninjured, Reeve and his colleagues grabbed what equipment and possessions they could carry, jumped into two SUVs, and sped off into the darkened streets of Kabul, fearing more bombs might drop on their neighborhood. They decided to drive west, to the other side of the city and the presumed safety of the Intercontinental Hotel, which they believed U.S. and allied forces would spare for future use. At the hotel, Reeve called London to let his office know that he and the others were safe. Reeve then asked a Turkish cameraman he knew to call the bureau of Al Jazeera, an Arabic-language television network whose correspondent and about a dozen staff worked from a villa a few blocks from BBC House in Wazir Akbar Khan. Owned by the government of Qatar, Al Jazeera was famous for its access to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban; in fact, the network's Kabul correspondent Tayseer Allouni had interviewed bin Laden on October 11, just four days after the war began. But the BBC and other news organizations particularly valued Al Jazeera for its bureau's satellite uplink, which they and others often paid to use.