Face-Off. Chris Karsten

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      7.

      Danny and Frank entered their bunker under the massive concrete structure of the CIA complex, and shut the door. Deep underground, there were no windows. They were isolated from the ourside world, their training kicked in and side by side in two large revolving chairs, deeply and luxuriously upholstered for long periods of sitting, and covered in soft black leather, they zoomed in on their task. Four monitors were mounted in front of each chair.

      Danny fiddled with the console desk in front of his monitors, the keyboards, joysticks and other controls for their deadly hi-tech video game. A cyber-warrior who’d never been on a battlefield: he and Frank were at the controls of a Predator armed with Hellfire missiles, though neither of them had ever set foot in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft.

      On one of the screens he watched images of the unmanned Predator with its characteristic camel hump housing the satellite system. The robot plane, already loaded with two Hellfires, stood shimmering on the tarmac in Afghanistan’s afternoon heat: a big, menacing silver insect that couldn’t wait to hunt its prey.

      Shamsi Airfield in Balochistan had been more convenient, thought Danny, his fingers busy with the pre-flight control list. But the Pakistanis had kicked them out. Damage control. They’d been mortifed, made fools of in the eyes of the world, after SEAL Team Six had gone in and shot Geronimo right under their noses in Abbottabad, and buried his body at sea. Live night-vision feed had allowed the president himself to watch the entire operation in the White House.

      Through his earphones Danny could hear voices from an ops room elsewhere in the CIA building. There was also audio via satellite from the CIA’s Chapman Base at Khost, from where the drone strikes in Pakistan were coordinated, and video and sound clips from the secret air-force base outside Jalalabad, where the Predator stood shimmering and waiting.

      H-hour was 09:00, Washington time.

      Danny glanced at the digital countdown in the corner of another screen. The time was 06:19. Danny pictured an hourglass. Somewhere, twelve thousand kilometres away, in a wild, barren landscape, the sand was about to run out for a group of men in a peaceful rural graveyard on a mountainside. Perhaps they had special plans for later – an intimate meal with friends, or important plans for tomorrow, or the day after, or next week or next month, like a shopping trip to Peshawar or Islamabad or a family visit. Or a suicide bombing. Whatever the case, Danny thought, the men at the graveyard were ignorant of the fact that their plans would come to nothing, that a mere half-hour was left of their lives.

      Through his earphones Danny heard the signal for the launch of the Predator. This wasn’t in his own or in Frank’s hands; the take-off was handled by the ground control station next to the runway outside Jalalabad. Ground control was in an old shipping container, unobtrusive, rusty, its paint peeling, no different from all the other shipping containers used for storing mechanical equipment, oil drums, grease and jet fuel. But this particular container had been equipped with sophisticated electronic equipment.

      The Predator began to move.

      “There it goes,” Frank muttered.

      He and Danny were in audio contact with the three crew members at ground control: the pilot who was handling the first phase of the flight, the sensor operator who controlled the high-resolution nose camera, and the intel operator who monitored the coordinates of the targets as well as the physical movements of the men the minute they were picked up by the drone’s camera.

      Danny’s eyes shifted between screens and he watched the Predator taking off, hanging like a wasp in the blue sky, almost motionless before it began to grow smaller, turned into a silver speck and vanished.

      Images of a mountainous landscape began to appear from the onboard camera, and calm voices from the ground control station commented on the technical aspects of the flight: direction, weather conditions, cruising speed and height, estimated time of arrival in Pakistani air space across the mountains – the Predator’s four-cylinder turbo now at its flight speed of a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour.

      Danny and Frank sat in their comfortable chairs. Danny took a deep breath, calm and ready when ground control announced that the Predator had disappeared over the horizon, that they were switching from ground data to satellite data, and that the Predator’s control was being transferred from Jalalabad to the CIA bunker on the banks of the Potomac on the other side of the world.

      Danny’s hand was on the joystick as the deadly video game began.

      When he and Frank went home later today, it would be to their waiting wives and children, warm food and a warm bed, a well-earned rest. Behind them would lie the Hellfires’ trail of death and destruction, the outcome of laser-guided precision projectiles, each with a nine-kilogram, high-explosive fragmenting head.

      Al-Awlaki got one of those up his ass, Frank had remarked at the time.

      Only when the Predator came back into view over the horizon at Jalalabad and ground control took over the landing could Danny and Frank begin to clear up, their day’s work done. They would have to wait until the feedback session to hear whether the mission had been successful.

      07:00, H minus 2 hours.

      Danny reached for a Red Bull. A clear head was what was needed now, with the Predator over the Pre Ghal mountains 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 СКАЧАТЬ