Sons of Valor Read online

  “Yeah, but you didn’t just serve—you chose to be a SEAL, which is pretty much, like, the hardest pipeline in the military.”

  He nodded. “Only about ten percent of the guys who pursue it actually pin on a trident, with most washing out from BUD/S. But I knew I wasn’t joining a peacetime military. We were a nation at war. I guess I figured if I was going to fight the war on terror, I wanted to do it with the best warriors in the world. If I was gonna do my part, it had to be in a way that really moved the needle, and to me, that meant being at the pointy tip of the spear.” He stopped, having answered her question, but to his surprise the next words came out anyway. “And then there’s that other part of me.”

  “What other part?” she asked.

  He hesitated, not sure why Watts was the one he’d finally chosen to open up to. Maybe it was the pull of reciprocity, her having shared her inner self with him. Or maybe this was a necessary step for her joining a brotherhood in which she would otherwise always float at the fringe. He leaned in, resting his elbows against his thighs, and met her eyes. “I love this community. It’s how I define myself . . . it’s become my entire identity. And I want it that way. I love these men. I love operating. I can’t think of anything in the world that would give me more personal satisfaction, sense of purpose, and pride of accomplishment than being a SEAL. In this job, I get to make a difference in the world every day. It’s not just words on a T-shirt. And the people you see here tonight—not just the SEALs, but also the spouses, the kids, and the significant others—they are my family. And now . . . so are you.”

  Watts stared at him for a long moment, then said, almost in a whisper, “Wow.”

  “Wow what?” he asked, suddenly feeling like he’d shared too much, that he’d come off as corny.

  “I didn’t know you felt that way. Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For sharing,” she said, and with a wry smile added, “and for admitting you’re an actual deeply feeling and introspective human being.”

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he said with a grin and got to his feet. “And now, I should probably help Saw get the burgers and dogs on the grill. I hope you’re not a vegetarian.”

  She laughed and stood. “Don’t worry. I can carnivore with the best of them.”

  “In that case, I think you’re gonna fit in around here just fine,” he said. Happy, as he headed off to join the others, to find her walking beside him.

  Part II

  “With our silence, we sanctify their war crimes. With our inaction, we legitimize their tyranny.”

  —Eshan Dawar

  CHAPTER 10

  wing loong pterodactyl ucav ground control unit (gcu)

  kanju, pakistan

  twelve days later

  0312 local time

  Qasim sat in the pilot’s seat, while Hamza and several other al Qadar members crowded behind him, watching his every move. A bird’s-eye view of a valley flanked by towering jagged peaks filled the primary monitor as live imagery from the Pterodactyl’s chin-mounted optical array streamed over the data link. Despite the pressure of the situation, Qasim was having the time of his life. He was piloting a combat drone, something British Aero would never let him do, no matter how high he rose in the Valkyrie program. And in that moment, he realized that Hamza al-Saud had given him two things that Oliver Payne never would: opportunity and respect.

  “Commencing test maneuver,” Qasim said, speaking into the boom mike of his headset.

  “We are ready,” a gruff voice replied in his ear.

  Qasim shifted his gaze to the drone’s avionics display, which was located directly below the primary monitor. Digital instrument gauges—depicting airspeed, pitch angle, altitude, turn rate, vertical speed, roll angle, and heading—provided real-time flight dynamics for the unmanned aircraft. Gripping the throttle in his left hand and the control stick in his right, he eased the Pterodactyl into a sweeping turn. A surreal feeling washed over him as he made adjustments to maintain airspeed and altitude as he executed the maneuver.

  “We’re tracking your turn,” the remote pilot said from his mountaintop position in Afghanistan. He rattled off avionics data from his laptop, which Qasim compared to what he was seeing on his screen.

  He had no idea who the pilots were, but they sounded far more educated and professional than the brutish fighters he’d been exposed to. He assumed they’d been handpicked and trained by Hamza, just as he had been. Training them on controlling the aircraft would be no more difficult than teaching someone to fly a plane in a video game, though clearly the stakes were insanely higher.

  From what Qasim understood, a deal had been made for the Taliban to “host” the two-man remote pilot team in a secure cave complex in the Hindu Kush across the border. Supposedly, this cave was just below the tree line, had sleeping accommodations, and had generator power. The benefits of the arrangement were obvious—the remote team could prestage for the operation while under Taliban protection, recharge equipment batteries as needed, and quickly access a position with the unobstructed line of sight required for the mission.

  “Steady on new course, heading two-one-five,” Qasim said as he brought the UCAV out of the turn. “Ready for handoff.”

  “Copy,” the other pilot said. “We have a good signal, good LOS connection. Commencing handoff maneuver.”

  “Roger,” Qasim said, removing his hands from the controls. “Standing by.”

  “Coming to new heading two-seven-zero . . .”

  On-screen, the scenery below began to change, and the digital gauges indicated the other pilot was turning the drone north. The turn wasn’t as smooth as Qasim’s had been, with the pilot struggling to maintain altitude and overshooting the new heading, but eventually he got it sorted out. This was, after all, the other pilot’s first flight, and he was using an Xbox flight simulator controller. A comical image popped into Qasim’s mind: a terrorist dressed as a goatherd sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop, flying a combat drone with a joystick in his lap. He resisted the urge to chuckle at the ridiculousness of it all and, instead, gave himself an imaginary pat on the back for what he had accomplished over the past two weeks. Migrating the drone’s operating system and interface from the Chinese Ground Control Unit to a notebook computer was nothing short of a miracle, and it had already earned him accolades and respect from Hamza.

  “Steady on heading two-seven-zero,” the other pilot said, leveling the wings out of the turn.

  Qasim turned and looked over his shoulder at Hamza. “Ready for drone handoff . . .”

  “Are you confident that he has reliable control?” Hamza asked.

  “We can do a few more test maneuvers if you like,” Qasim said, then tilting his boom mike away from his mouth added, “but either way, I’m planning on staying in this chair until we lose our data link.”

  “All right. In that case,” Hamza said, “make the handoff.”

  “Understood.” Qasim repositioned his boom mike to the corner of his mouth and said, “Saladin, this is Mecca. Thunderbolt is your asset.”

  “Copy, Mecca,” the other pilot said. “I have control of Thunderbolt.”

  “Handoff complete,” Qasim said over his shoulder.

  “Very well,” Hamza said. “Now, we wait and we watch . . .”

  The next hour was extraordinarily stressful, with the portable Ground Control Unit losing connection with the drone multiple times, each time fraying Qasim’s nerves and requiring the drone to circle until the remote data link could be reestablished. Steadfast, Qasim remained in the pilot’s chair, even after the drone had flown well beyond his control range. With nothing left to see, the other al Qadar lieutenants retired for the night. Hamza dismissed his bodyguard—a sinewy, hollow-cheeked man who gave Qasim the creeps—leaving the two of them alone.

  “What’s wrong, Qasim?” Hamza asked, placing a hand on his shoulder. “You seem very agitated.”

  “I think we should bring the drone back,” he said. “The laptop GCU is too unreliable. What if the pilot loses connectivity during the strike? What if he can’t execute the mission? What if we can’t recover the asset? There are too many variables. We should bring it back. I can try to boost the signal strength on the portable antenna and write better code to manage loss-

  of-connectivity scenarios.”

  “Oh, Qasim,” Hamza said with a patronizing smile, “that’s the engineer in you talking. I appreciate that you want everything to be perfect and the operation to function with all the precision and reliability of an American military strike, but we are not the American military. We are a small operation, and we must exploit every opportunity afforded us to the maximum extent possible. Strategically, we risk as much, if not more, trying to recover the drone for you to upgrade the controls as we do trying to complete the mission. It could crash; it could be identified by the enemy and shot down, or traced back to us here. Also, who knows when another convoy movement will be scheduled. This was difficult intelligence for us to obtain. We can’t squander the opportunity. So don’t fret, my friend. The drone is airborne and en route to the target. I consider this a tremendous success already.”

  Hamza is right, Qasim thought. I’m thinking like a test engineer.

  “That being said,” Hamza continued, his voice contemplative, “as I stand here now, having watched you fly the drone from the pilot’s seat, the superiority of this control suite is obvious. For the next mission, I want to be able to stand in the GCU, watch the live imagery of the strike on the monitors, and make tactical decisions in real time. I don’t want to have to rely on mobile phones to talk to the pilot. Also, without a data link, we can’t watch
the strike on our monitors. I want to see it happen.”

  Qasim nodded. “What you’re talking about is satellite relay control. We would need a dedicated data link with a satellite in a geostationary orbit.”

  “Yes, I know,” Hamza said. “Can you do this?”

  “Doubtful,” Qasim said and felt all the blood drain from his face. “Highly doubtful.”

  “But is it possible?”

  “Yes, well, anything is possible given enough time, money, and resources, but I wouldn’t even know where to . . .” His voice trailed off as something occurred to him. He rubbed the two weeks’ beard growth on his chin. “I do have one idea, but I’m reluctant to mention it because it would . . . No, it’s preposterous. Never mind.”

  “Preposterous is the fuel that powers all great accomplishments. Just tell me, Qasim.”

  “All right,” he said through an exhale. “The Americans and the British operate their regional drone fleets out of Kandahar Air Base. They are flying sorties twenty-four seven, three hundred sixty-five days a year. They have multiple drones in the air at any given time with comms being relayed via dedicated satellites over the region. If we could somehow hack into one of those satellites and properly configure the data link to mimic that of an operating Predator, our drone could theoretically—”

  “Disappear in the traffic,” Hamza said, finishing his sentence.

  “Precisely.”

  “Oh, that’s very clever, Qasim,” the terrorist said, the wheels now clearly spinning in his head. “But how long before somebody noticed? Certainly, they would see this drone in their airspace and figure out it was not one of their own.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Remember, most of the drones are being controlled by pilots in Nevada. Each has its own tasking, and there are multiple groups involved, all operating different missions. The British RAF doesn’t care what US Army is doing with a Predator along the Iranian border, so long as it doesn’t impact whatever operation they’re supporting in the Hindu Kush. And I suspect that while someone is responsible for deconflicting satellite traffic, this is not the same person monitoring Kandahar airspace. My point is that the system is complex, and most of the players are myopically focused. They are only concerned about the reliability of their comms, clearance to operate in their sandbox, and whatever is necessary to complete their mission objective. If we configure our Pterodactyl to look, squawk, and operate like one of their drones, I think it could conceivably go unnoticed for hours—possibly even an entire day.”

  “It’s brilliant. What are the next steps? How do we make this happen?” Hamza said, his expression brimming with excitement.

  “Therein lies the problem,” Qasim said. “I’m an engineer, not a hacker. I don’t know the first thing about how to hack into the US DoD satellite network.”

  “That’s okay,” Hamza said, unfazed. “I have people who might be able to do this, but they will need your expertise with protocols and transmission configurations.”

  “Okay, I can help with that,” he said, then, stifling a yawn, checked his watch. The digital display read 04:42. He’d been up for nearly thirty-six hours, and with his adrenaline now fully depleted, exhaustion was weighing on him like a two-

  hundred-pound blanket.

  “When is the last time you slept?” Hamza asked.

  “I don’t know. The day before yesterday . . .”

  “Go get some sleep, Qasim. You deserve it.”

  “I’m going to stay up. I don’t want to miss the strike.”

  “There’s nothing to see, remember? We don’t have a data link,” Hamza said through a laugh. “When I get the call, I’ll have someone wake you with the news.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Take advantage of this lull, because if anything goes wrong you’ll be the first person I summon.”

  “Okay,” Qasim said. Ducking his head, he stepped out of the GCU and made his way to the folding cot he’d been using as a bed. Without even bothering to empty his bladder first, he collapsed on his stomach and fell asleep.

  In his dream, he was piloting the Pterodactyl drone from the GCU, but instead of being hidden in the outskirts of Mingora, the CONEX-box-sized control unit was in the living room of his apartment in England. Hamza was there, standing behind him, and Eshan sat in the sensor operator’s chair next to him. They looked at him with wide, preternatural smiles. Police sirens wailed in the distance, but they didn’t seem bothered. His palms were sweating, and the throttle and control stick felt slick in his hands.

  “There ’tis,” Hamza said, his accent distinctly more British in his dream. “Our target . . .”

  Qasim looked at the primary monitor and saw a three-

  vehicle convoy—one truck flanked front and back by armored Humvees—kicking up dust as it traveled on Highway A1. The live-streaming video of the vehicles was overlaid with targeting data as the drone’s fire-control system automatically tracked the convoy.

  “Which vehicle should I target?” Eshan asked.

  “The middle one,” Qasim answered.

  In his dream, he used a trackball controller to select the middle truck as the primary target for one of the Pterodactyl’s two HJ-10 missiles. The AR-1B variant loaded onto the UCAV was specifically designed to be carried by drones and attack ground-based targets using lock-on-before-launch and semi-active laser guidance technology.

  “Target acquired,” Eshan reported.

  “Fire,” Hamza said.

  Qasim squeezed the trigger on his control stick, and a brilliant streak of flames momentarily washed out the drone’s video display. The missile streaked away at Mach 1, closing the distance between the drone and the convoy in seconds. He watched it silently impact the American transport vehicle, which exploded in a fireball. A black cloud of smoke and dust engulfed the convoy. Once it cleared, he scanned the carnage. Some of the bodies were moving, some were not.

  Some of the bodies were whole.

  Some were not.

  The camera feed began to zoom.

  “What are you doing?” Qasim said to Eshan, his gaze glued to the monitor.

  Eshan didn’t answer immediately and instead just kept zooming in and in and in until a dismembered limb—a hunk of leg from knee to boot—filled the screen. “Eye for an eye, leg for a leg,” he said and began to laugh.

  Qasim sat bolt upright, gasping for breath. For several seconds, he was disoriented and wasn’t sure where he was. Then, it all came back to him. He’d been so sleep deprived for the past ten days that everything blurred together. Had he ever been truly awake, or had this all been one vivid sleepwalking event? Is this what it felt like to be brainwashed? Had he really joined al Qadar and helped plan and prepare a drone strike against the Americans?

  He felt nauseated.

  “I have to stop it,” he murmured, checking his watch. “There might still be time . . .”

  CHAPTER 11

  joint forces convoy jackal one-five

  thirty-three miles west of jalalabad

  nangarhar province

  afghanistan

  0945 local time

  When it came to convoys, anywhere was better than the middle.

  Staff Sergeant Mirin Taylor had learned that the hard way on her two tours in Iraq, when she’d seen more carnage than she cared to contemplate. Her unit had supported both conventional and SOF units with convoy operations—moving fighters and materials all over Anbar Province. The Wild West, they had called it back then, and the euphemism had been accurate. Lawless, dangerous, and dusty . . . yeah, the Wild fucking West indeed.

  Over the years, she’d developed a fatalistic view of life. If it was your time, then it was your time. Plain and simple. As one of two combat medics on this convoy, traveling from ISAF headquarters in Kabul to Forward Operating Base Fenty beside Jalalabad Airport, it was Mirin’s job to provide first responder medical support in the event the convoy encountered an IED or was attacked by insurgents. She’d lived through both scenarios multiple times, and she was good at her job. She’d do whatever it took to keep an injured soldier alive, but in her heart, she felt it was fate or God or the universe that made the final call. And yet, despite feeling entirely secure outsourcing her destiny to a higher power, as her Humvee rumbled along the dusty A1, one thought played a loop in her mind . . .