Midnight Empire

by Andrew Croome

  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; thir
ty-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.

  ‘Canberra.’

  Dupont nodded—nodded as if this was the correct answer, as if he already knew. Daniel waited for a follow-up, a small interrogation. The man turned towards the screens.

  It took just ten minutes for someone to appear. Ellis zoomed in but there wasn’t much to see, only a man in white with a dark beard who started to load the Hilux.

  Nobody spoke. The man worked and the silence grew and Daniel realised he was listening to himself breathing. Then the courtyard gate was opened, and the man, presumably Dhaif, brought the Hilux onto the road.

  He drove east on the sealed road. They followed him through Ma’rib and then on past the dam, towards the hills. The sun came slowly into force, the long dawn shadows shortened into dark morning wells, sharp at the edges of the roadway against the rocks and the ledges.

  The man’s white elbow protruded from the car. He turned now onto a dirt track. Still nobody spoke. This seemed a basic instinct: remain quiet, communicate at a level beneath language, through gesture and shared thought, as if any verbal conference would break the spell, let slip the prey.

  Daniel looked at the weapons console, saw that the drone was fully armed with hellfires. There’d been no discussion of a strike in the briefing, but from the mood in this room it felt like if they found this guy, they’d go.

  The Hilux slowed, began to bounce about the track and its potholes. From thirty-eight thousand feet up, there seemed to be nothing out here, just this track and a kind of moonscape. They followed for another twenty minutes, the truck climbing unevenly, unsteadily. Ahead, they saw the faint outline that was the track as it went higher, contours around the cliff faces, small chasms.

  Eventually, the Hilux stopped. The man got out and they watched him stare into a rising hill, a series of rock faces and small plateaus. He retrieved something from the truck and soon he was climbing, hoisting himself into a crag. When he came to the first plateau, an area about twenty yards wide, he stopped and stood for a long time, looking up into the sky.

  The sun was bright. They waited for the man to move. In his white clothing he stood out from his surrounds like something religious. He kept staring at the sky.

  Dupont was the first to say it. ‘He knows.’

  Could that be true? They watched him. From his stance, from his orientation, it was possible to believe that he was looking at them, staring up.

  ‘How big are we?’ asked Gray.

  ‘Wingspan sixty-six feet,’ said Ellis. ‘Twice a Cessna, half a U2.’

  ‘At this altitude?’

  ‘We’re tiny. A speck in the high pale.’

  ‘But he sees us.’

  ‘He may not.’

  ‘He knows.’

  ‘We’re not in the sun?’

  ‘We’re next to it. Thirty or forty degrees.’

  ‘The feed,’ said Dupont. ‘It’s definitely encrypted?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Daniel.

  Ellis said, ‘The feed is scrambled but it’s still there.’

  ‘Meaning?’ asked Dupont.

  ‘If he’s smart, if he has the equipment in the car, the wouldn’t need to spot us, he can listen to the air and know we’re there. All he needs is line of sight. He can’t tell what we’re seeing but he can hear that we’re there.’

  They watched Dhaif for another minute. They looked at him in starlight and then in infra-red. Difficult to believe now that he wasn’t looking straight at them, straight up at the lens.

  Moore said, ‘Who is this guy?’

  Daniel examined Gray. The older man was intensely calm, looking occasionally at the screens but mostly at Raul. There was something in his gaze; it was the way you look at someone when there is a question hanging in the air, and Daniel realised something was happening here, some rift.

  The silence continued. It was finally broken by Dhaif pulling something from his robe, a handset, some kind of radio.

  ‘Get that,’ said Raul. Ellis looked at his console, searching for the signal. It was clear that Dhaif was speaking, the handset to his mouth.

  ‘UHF,’ said Ellis suddenly, and over the air came the last fragments of Dhaif ’s voice, soft but pristine, hardly a trace of static, a voice much younger than Daniel had expected, much bolder.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Arabic,’ said Gray. ‘Nonsense Arabic. A code.’

  They listened. Harsh sounds, occasionally urgent. A string that carried on for thirty seconds or more, another voice replying now and again in short phrases, calmer, almost soothing. Abu Yamin?

  There was a quick burst of static then the radio was turned off, Dhaif descending in his white robes towards the truck, the truck pulling away again, continuing in the same direction, higher up the path. They watched him drive. The terrain became more hilly, the truck hugging the sides of high gorges and ravines. Moore sipped from a drink bottle, his hand not leaving the controls. The screens were bright now, the wash of the sun on the faces of the stone peaks, a landscape of firm exposure but there were presumably hidden places, refuges in secret recesses of rock, deep wells. The Hilux ambling hot white, all gleam and bounce.

  Finally, there was a single pellet of voice on the UHF, a word or code word that, from its tone, was unmistakably a command of some kind, and the Hilux stopped again. It was on a straight section of road, a section exposed to a great valley, a hillside that seemed particularly rocky, with heavy boulders and stones in clusters.

  Dhaif got out of the truck. He walked. Not uphill or down, but along the road, its valley-side edge, a sudden pedestrian in the mountains. There seemed to be no reason to do this. Path, vehicle, destination: nothing had changed. Why walk? Was he about to escape them, perform some kind of thin-air desert vanishing?

  He came to a halt a hundred yards from the truck, and then he sat down, a squat white figure looking into the valley. Daniel guessed that the drone was above this valley, flying perhaps a little lower than it had been, the earth having risen to meet it.

  For a short while nothing happened. Dhaif sat, the drone kept course. They all waited. But then Daniel saw an almost thing, somewhere in the monitors, pale and streaming, and then everything went blank.

  In that moment Daniel’s heart leapt and a wash of warmth flooded his arms. The bug. The glitch. He typed stat into his console and saw nothing. He typed ping but no reply came. Christ. He turned from his screen to the room, expecting to find everyone’s sick gaze upon him. But they weren’t looking his way. Ellis and Moore weren’t pushing buttons, frantically attempting to regain control. They were leaning back, arms folded. Raul and Dupont stood motionless, Raul with the tip of his finger to his mouth. They stared at the blank screens.

  Gray looked at Daniel, saw his confusion.

  ‘Stinger,’ he explained, too loudly. ‘It appears we’ve been shot dead.’

  After that, they were flying missions around the clock. Their entire drone complement was moved to Oman. More men came from Langley, quieter men, silence a form of rank.

  Pictures of Abu Yamin were posted in the briefing hut, a man with a beard, a man who was gaunt but fiercely so. There were images of a figure wearing shalwar kameez taken from a Predator over somewhere. There were photographs of him front on, posing as if for a driver’s licence—in each his eyes had the same glint, an empathy and a kindness, you might say a charisma.

  Abu Yamin’s background wasn’t openly discussed. There was no b
iography or charge sheet of involvement in bombings or other crimes. However, his importance was clear—you felt it in the air of determination in those who came from Langley, the urgency of their conversations, the number of phone calls they traded, the very stances of their bodies. A terrorist with Stinger missiles was one of the worst possible scenarios and they wanted Abu Yamin dead. They were flying over the mountains near Ma’rib night and day, and when he was dead they would kill Dhaif too.

  For two weeks, Daniel did almost nothing but sit with the flights. The Langley men hovered over his shoulder, checking and double-checking the encryption.

  They thought they would find Abu Yamin in the mountains. They scoured the ranges using infra-red capable of spotting a two-day-old cigarette butt from its latent heat. They kept watch over the drone’s wreckage, a slew of metal on the valley floor, waiting for anyone to come to it—Abu Yamin or a minion who’d lead them his way. When nothing happened they blew it up with hellfires after deciding that it wasn’t a good problem to leave the Yemeni government with, not when the citizenry hated America and they weren’t even supposed to be there.

  Daniel learned that the reason the CIA had originally known who Dhaif was and who he would be resupplying was that they had a man on the inside, an agent within al-Qaeda. It seemed that the agent was very well placed. His codename was Protonic and Raul was the supervisor on the case.

  The missions continued, clocking two hundred and fifty hours of flight time; hours in which Daniel became pretty much invisible, just the encryption operator, a benign presence, a regular face. Gray showed him where he could sleep on the base should he need to, a ‘hot bed’ dorm for the air crews, where earphones attached to the beds played music, the soothing sounds of the ocean or white noise.

  It remained unsaid, but he knew this situation was far from ordinary. The men from Langley, their pressing intensity. Daniel began to imagine mid-air explosions, attacks on 747s, on Dreamliners and A380s; aircraft falling from the sky. The more stunning the forms of death he imagined, the more he wanted to be present when they found Abu Yamin and killed him, the drone leaping silver and haunting and straight up from behind a ridge line, erasing him from the face of the earth.