Midnight Empire (6 page)

He couldn't figure it out. He didn't know enough about video for one, and he couldn't make the leap, couldn't see any reason for the video system and the communication feed to interact.

He stood outside, went back in, worked, came back out. He saw Gray and Wolfe leave Station 3 and cross the field towards the main buildings.

Hours later, he sat on the chair in the hut, exhausted, unable to make a breakthrough.

He knew it wasn't what he should be doing—that there were likely rules against it. But he didn't back himself to figure it out, not in time for the next flight. He took a USB stick from his pocket.

The central server contained a storage system for the logs as well as a buffer to record the data from tests: the feeds that had passed through the server during flight. He copied these files to the USB, ready to send to LinkLock from his laptop at the Nexus.

It was a bad look, blank screens. For the company, also for him. Taking the data was the right thing to do, Wolfe's demand to get rid of the glitch ringing in his ears. Back in Canbrerra, the company would pull everyone in. Find the bug and issue him a fix in no time.

It seemed that she was not going to answer his calls. He'd rung five, maybe six times in the last two days. Why wouldn't she answer? He thought the only word for it was cruel—and he couldn't believe that she'd do it.

He'd been trying not to think about her. The fact that she'd sounded so foreign, so
other
during that call—was this something he was adding in hindsight, or had it been there at the time?

He found it a little shocking, still, that she had ended them. It felt as if that shouldn't be how it worked, that you just had to say it was done and it was done. He wondered if his coming here was, at heart, irrelevant. Only a catalyst. Had it merely hastened their conclusion, and that was all? He lay still and thought about this. Or he didn't think about it but only felt it, looking out at the night.

Eventually, he sat up. His personal phone and the BlackBerry they'd given him were both on the bedside table. The silence of the building seemed to goad him. There was some core to it, the sound of clear sound.

He took out his phone's SIM card and battery. Then he marched across the room and locked the objects in the safe.

He was here now and, with what Hannah had chosen, he was forthwith unencumbered—adhering to the rule that you weren't supposed to have girlfriends in war. And so be it, he thought. Rather than dwell on Hannah and what she'd decided, he'd instead put his shoulder to the wheel.

3

T
he inevitable secrets. He learned that the CIA controlled an irregular army in Afghanistan, a paramilitary force of three thousand men, mercenaries hand-picked by special recruiters and paid three hundred dollars a month. Some had once been fighters for the warlords, some were the relatives of the fighters and some, apparently, were just sixteen years old.

He learned that this army was used to hunt members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, to mount the kind of surveillance that was impossible for Westerners, to hide beneath mountain peaks and along river beds carrying night scopes and laser designators.

Some of the drone flights, he learned, were in support of these squads, hitting the targets they stalked with missiles out of the blue, exploding houses and trucks and sometimes lone men on the lips of ravines.

There was a list known as JPEL, the Joint Prioritized Effects List, a kill-or-capture inventory of al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders two thousand names long.

When Afghanistan had been at war with the Soviets, the CIA had provided more than three thousand Stinger missiles to the mujahideen and the Afghan resistance, the deadliest anti-aircraft system ever created, used to blow up Russian helicopters and military planes. After the war, the agency realised that these missiles were the perfect terrorist weapon, a deadly stock of suitcase-sized 747-destructors in a country without a government ruled by warlords and opium producers and the dispossessed warriors of Islam.

The US military had divided the world into kill boxes. These were gridded units of terrain that allowed for the rapid, organised deployment of multiple aircraft over enemy zones. The boxes over Afghanistan began with the call-sign Charlie Golf, and above them flew what Gray referred to as the vortex of death: aircraft circling at staggered altitudes—drones flying the first layer; F-18 strike fighters the second; a Nimrod for kill-box coordination and administration the third; then one or more stratotankers plying wide orbits at fifty thousand feet.

There was a safe-flight corridor above Pakistan, a one-thousand-foot tube where coalition aeroplanes could fly freely into and out of theatre, busy as an LA freeway.

The drones had cameras so accurate and GPS so precise that they could detect a beer bottle moved on a table while targeting the chair of its drinker.

Around the clock, the drones of the 432nd flew over coalition supply roads, cataloguing disturbances in the dirt before offering the coordinates of the most suspicious shifts in desert soil to bomb disposal teams.

Daniel learned that the act of bathing in a river, part of the martyrdom ritual of a suicide bomber, constituted legal evidence of hostile intent—do not wash if you don't want to die.

On the path to the 432nd's briefing rooms and control units was a wide red-painted line labelled ‘Afghanistan'. Upon crossing this line, one was supposed to forget the daily patterns of life in America—the errands and routine hassles of media, commerce and family—and imagine, in fact
believe
, that one had entered a war zone.

This, Daniel thought, was not as difficult nor as ridiculous a mental task as it seemed. The harried voices on radios of soldiers in contact, the firefights among the fir trees on mountainsides, the quick skirmishes over expanses of desert and road, the machine-gun fire, the hellfire missiles and the explosions that turned the earth to dust—these were not exercises of imagination, they were the heat of war, and their being seven thousand miles distant was a question only for theory.

He analysed each person's posture as they crossed the line. Some watched it go under foot, others stretched, shook their arms and hands out, exercised their necks. A few ignored it. One man gave the sign of the cross.

The more interesting thing to observe, however, were the tight and distracted stances, the hunched shoulders and the edgy looks, of those coming the other way.

Gray wanted to show Daniel and Moore something in the desert. A place he took all newcomers, he said, a mirror and an embodiment of Washington's desires. Out past Nellis, Gray said. They took a GPS, loaded themselves into a Humvee.

Gray had a way of driving that was front heavy. He slung the jeep this way and that, worked it against the track's less-worn stones. White light around them, high peaks like shots from the movies, a landscape and a century of cinematic thought. Moore rode shotgun, Daniel sat in the back. To ask where they were going would have contradicted the expedition's rules. After a time, they left the track to drive along a valley, plotting a course between rocks and creosote bushes, the Humvee shuddering now and again, bouncing over divots. The longer they drove, the faster Gray went, spraying rocks and gravel and making round-edged, listing turns.

Finally they crested a small rise, then tracked down the face of the slope below. There, set into the low point of a depression, were structures of a kind, a series of buildings fenced by an earthen wall.

Gray pulled up and they got out of the Humvee. The buildings were adobe constructions, flat roofed. The perimeter wall had collapsed in places. One of the structures had fallen in on its eastern corner and looked as if it had been burned.

Moore and Daniel followed Gray into the buildings, the cracking walls, the heat and cool. The buildings had floors of bare earth. A few had no roof. A few had roofs that were matted palm mixed with some form of cement. There was a toilet block, a latrine with holes dug into the ground. There was a single gravel path that led from the largest of the buildings to an open space. The paths that led from this space were simple ruts cleared of stone.

Gray took them to a patch where a children's swing set had tipped over, the point of its frame to the ground, rusted legs high, the swings missing.

‘The man in white,' Gray eventually said, and all three men looked skywards. They were at Tarnak Farms, Gray announced, bin Laden's one-time Afghan home. The year was 2000. A Predator drone would spot bin Laden many times on its many flights, a tall, ghosting figure dressed in a robe.

Now Daniel realised what was strange here: the feeling of never-inhabited, of proportions that were askew, of simulation. A theme in the desert.

‘The NSA had the satellite imagery, the CIA, the drone flights and the DGSE, the French, human intelligence, the reports of an agent who'd trained as mujahideen. But it was the bin Laden taskforce who built this, a unit called Alec Station, twenty or so minds, a small office without a view of the Potomac; at the time they were the only men in American intelligence for whom the word al-Qaeda didn't require a dictionary. They had a plan for snatching bin Laden here at Tarnak, a team known as FDTRODPINT, bearded tribal fighters, a CIA asset left over from the Soviet war. A slow night creep across the surrounding desert followed by a 2 a.m. raid, silenced weapons, a drainage ditch, grab the target out of bed, throw him in a truck. A ploy that was pure Hollywood, and they built this place to train, to hone the experiment.

‘But the directors wouldn't do it, wouldn't present to the President. Too risky, they thought. It was special forces stuff, too exacting a plan to be executed by hill-dwelling Afghans likely to shoot themselves in the dark. So nothing happened. Then the US embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. Whole buildings levelled, a new dimension of carnage, thousands wounded, hundreds dead. And now the White House wanted to know: who did this, how do we kill them?

‘What did the CIA have? The Predator reconnaissance tapes, the man in white, taller than those around him, and they played them in meetings with officials and representatives of the people and everyone's thought was the same: arm the camera. Kill bin Laden through the optics of the machine.'

Gray pointed in the direction of the building whose near corner had collapsed, scorched. ‘That was the first live test, a hellfire directed on bin Laden's bedroom, proof that the drone could place a missile through a window, kill him as he slept.'

They tracked back through the farm, between the buildings, the mud and the clay. The sun was warm. A slight wind blew.

The sound of the desert, its quiet howling. Daniel stopped to rest his hand on the cool wall of a hut and felt as if he could be checking that it was there.

•

Find and follow. The drone was up before dawn, launched from Oman, and control switched to Creech ten minutes before light. Daniel secured the link. They watched the instruments and waited for sunlight enough that the machine could see.

Present were Ellis and Moore, Daniel, Gray and two other CIA men, Raul and Dupont, who'd arrived yesterday and who were clearly on some kind of mission. They wore loose polo shirts and wanted to confirm that the encryption was up and running.

The silence of the drone had an intimacy in the dark. When the faintest light finally came, it was a rim of bronze in the rear shot, cusp-of-the-horizon stuff, curve of earth. The Yemeni desert began as one long shadow, transformed into a corrugated plain—line upon line of sand dune, mountains in the distance.

The drone was headed for Ma'rib. According to Raul and Dupont, they were going to watch a farmhouse in the irrigated area to the north of the Ma'rib dam. In particular, they were going to watch for a white Hilux, property of a man they called Dhaif, second or third cousin of another man, Abu Yamin, a senior al-Qaeda operative who'd escaped capture in Pakistan and had since been hiding in the Yemeni desert—in a cave, farmhouse, hut or camp, which, according to Raul and Dupont, would this morning be resupplied by Dhaif and his Hilux.

They banked left, following an ancient ridge line, all crag, boulder and escarpment, a ridge that rose crumbling from the sands. Dupont sipped coffee, the slick stuff from the briefing hut, except Dupont drank it from a larger container than the cups used there. He had it in the sort of cups they gave you at the big coffee chains; Daniel wanted to say grande.

Now a dry water course, a river bed but with less form. Now cliffwork and ditches. Now dunes—everything windswept, wind built, constructed over the centuries by epic tides.

Then green earth: green and sandy brown patchworks of grass, small plantations of trees. Ma'rib, Daniel presumed. Moore checked his map and they were banking again, turning until a black road emerged at the edge of their vision.

‘This way.' Raul pointed.

They arrived at a wide intersection, hundreds of yards long, a triangle of baseline and exponential curve, almost hieroglyphic.

They began to pass houses, buildings with stone walls and courtyards. They saw a figure in the dawn light carrying something heavy, a bucket or container—Daniel could make out the list of his body, the slant of the shoulders and the bend of the waist.

They flew on.

After a time, Raul said, ‘Just here.'

They were looking at a white Hilux parked in the courtyard of a house. They slowed and began to circle; thirty-eight thousand feet. It was half an hour after sunrise, drone time.

Dupont's phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket, checked the caller. He opened the door of the control station and went outside. The base lights were up, a yellow glow.

‘Remind me about fuel,' Raul said.

‘You have ten hours,' Ellis explained. ‘If he drives back towards Oman, maybe more.'

Dupont returned and leaned against a cabinet, his elbow above his head and his hand on the back of his neck. He took a cigarette out but didn't light it.

‘Where from?' he said suddenly to Daniel.