Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision

From eight thousand feet the rescue workers looked like agitated ants as they scurried around the wreckage of a car bomb. An MQ-1B Predator drone zoomed its cameras in for a close-up. Debris and body parts littered a marketplace. Scorched dirt slick with blood filled the frame. The dying and wounded groped silently for help.

The techs called it “Death TV”-the live video feed from America’s fleet of unmanned Predator, Global Hawk, and Reaper drones. The images poured in via satellite onto ten large HD screens suspended at intervals from the rafters of the U.S. Air Force’s dimly lit cubicle farm in Hampton, Virginia. Officially known as Distributed Common Ground System-1, it was half a world away from the daytime on most of those screens. The local time was two A.M.

Monitoring the feeds and clattering at keyboards in response to what they saw were scores of young airmen first class arrayed in groups of six before banks of flat-panel computer monitors, watched over by technical sergeants pacing behind them. And watched in turn by their officers, like pit bosses and floor managers in some macabre casino.

At his workstation in the semidarkness, twenty-six-year-old First Lieutenant Anthony Jordan glanced up occasionally to gauge the mood of the world. From the look of things it was shaping up to be a pretty typical day: scattered violence.

Between glances Jordan typed chat messages to an army civil affairs team at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone, just a few miles down the road from the car bomb blast on-screen. He simultaneously monitored chat threads from two other operations in theater and satellite radio chatter in his headset, all while his desk phone lit up at intervals. He sensed a presence behind him, and a sheet of paper slid into view from his left. He spoke without looking up. “Lazzo, goddammit, IM me. You’re messing with my work flow.”

Technical Sergeant Albert Lazzo leaned in from the right, his jowls hanging to the side like a plumb line. “Urgent, sir.”

“Well…” Jordan gestured up to the carnage on the big screen above them. “There’s your benchmark. Start talking.”

Lazzo smacked the sheet of paper. “AWACS is tracking a gopher south of Karbala. They want us to get eyes on.”

Jordan’s fingers clattered over his keyboard. “Send the bogey dope, and I’ll see what I can do.”

“It’s the Day of Ashura, Lieutenant.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Lazzo sighed the sigh of the knowledgeable underling. “A million Shiite pilgrims on foot commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala. The pilgrimage has been attacked by Sunni militants in the past, and we’ve got an unidentified aircraft inbound.”

“Ah… right…” Jordan frowned as he finished typing a reply to a military intelligence unit. “What are we looking at?”

“First showed up three clicks west of Al Hiyadha. Altitude two zero, speed two hundred knots. Heading three-five-zero.” Lazzo studied the printout. “A single-engine plane, maybe. Smugglers or local VIPs. But then again…”

The civil affairs folks had briefed Jordan on the sensitivities of his sector. He recalled that the shrines of Imam Husayn and Al Abbas at Karbala were among the holiest sites to the Shia Islamic faith-that is, to about a quarter billion people.

Lazzo offered the printed report again. “According to Geeks, you’ve got the closest tail, sir.”

“Okay, I got it. I got it.” Jordan grabbed the printout and clicked on one of the three LCD monitors on his desk. He brought up GCCS, the Global Command and Control System that tracked the real-time location of all friendly forces in the field.

He scrolled the map view of his sector and noted the tail number of his Predator drone nearest the radar contact. He then clicked through another screen to establish an encrypted satellite radio link to the drone operators in Nevada. “Kodar Tree, Kodar Tree. We are tracking a gopher, slow and in the weeds. I need tail one-zero-seven to come off current target and move south. Check your feed. MCR. Out.” He typed the AWACS info and destination MGRS coordinates into a chat window directed to the pilot’s handle. He waited several moments.

“Copy that, MCR. Proceeding to grid tree-eight, sierra, mike, bravo, one-two-tree-niner-zero-eight-zero-eight.”

Jordan and Lazzo looked up at the large screen above them as the image switched from the car bombing to another scene entirely-a tan, flat horizon. It was eight hours later in Iraq, midmorning, and the horizon leaned right as tail one-zero-seven yawed over the brown, ancient city of Karbala at an altitude of nine thousand feet. At that height the drone would be inaudible and all but invisible to casual observers on the ground.

Each Predator system consisted of a pilot, his sensor operator, and a set of four separate Predator drones that they controlled from inside an air-conditioned military shipping container-in this case at Creech Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, Nevada. They pulled twelve-hour shifts there in what were called “reachback” operations, and then went home for breakfast in the suburbs. Jordan sometimes suffered the same disorienting effects the Predator teams reported from remote operations. It made it hard to keep up a battle rhythm when you found yourself in a convenience store buying a Slurpee an hour after ordering the deaths of five insurgents half a world away. It was easy to forget this was all very real somewhere and not just a super-high-res game. There was counseling for that, but he didn’t think it was a good career move to take advantage of it.

Jordan continued to monitor the contents of several screens at once.

“SO, we’ve got forty degrees more of heading.”

“Sensor copies.”

A voice from higher up the command chain suddenly broke in on the radio. “Kodar Tree, this is Sentinel. Request weapons load-out.”

Others were listening in, then. It underscored to Jordan the sensitivities of operations above the masses of Shia pilgrims moving through Karbala. U.S. combat forces had officially left the country-a pronouncement that seriously pissed off the U.S. troops who were still there. These drone flights were overhead to look for trouble and pass intelligence to the Iraqi army. And Lazzo was right; the Ashura festivities had been attacked by militant Sunnis before.

“Sentinel, we are Winchester.”

Unarmed. This close to the shrines, he damned well better be Winchester.

“Kodar Tree, you may proceed. Sentinel out.”

“Copy that, Sentinel. MCR, we are on-station, heading one-seven-eight. Pilot out.”

They watched for several moments as the optics package zoomed in along Route 9, the wide, gritty boulevard stretching cracked, sun-blasted, and arrow-straight south through the city. Lined with run-down housing blocks, the road was packed with tens of thousands of pilgrims moving on foot. Jordan whistled. “That’s quite a crowd.” He keyed his mic. “Pilot, keep tracking south, and you should intercept that gopher momentarily.”

“Wilco.”

“There.” Sergeant Lazzo pointed up at the screen with a pocket laser pointer, but it was already obvious to them all.

“MCR, we’ve got a visual on that gopher. It is a cyclops-repeat, cyclops-heading tree-fife-eight. Probably has a bent parrot.”

Jordan saw the unmistakable outline of an American drone as it motored north at barely two thousand feet altitude. What the hell? “Kodar Tree, copy that cyclops. Designate cyclops Target One. Shadow Target One, and get me its tail number.”

Lazzo raised his eyebrows.