Scorched Earth

by George Galdorisi

As they scanned their MPCDs for more missiles and steadied out on their attack course again, Wallace and his wingman armed their weapons systems and saw the word “JDAM” displayed on their HUDs—the Super Hornet’s heads-up display. On their flank, the two Growlers continued to jam. The Super Hornet pilots monitored the moving maps on their MPCDs as the target came into range.

  As they screamed north toward their target, the two pilots simultaneously launched their four one-thousand-pound GBU-32 JDAMs. They felt the weight of the bombs leave their jets with a jump, and then the section jinked right and began a tight turn.

  The GBU-32 JDAM, or joint direct attack munition, is one of the most sophisticated air-to-ground weapons in the U.S. military inventory. Simply put, the JDAM is a guidance kit that converts “dumb bombs” into all-weather “smart munitions.” JDAM-equipped bombs are guided by an integrated inertial guidance system coupled to a GPS receiver, giving them a range of up to fifteen nautical miles. When installed on a bomb, the JDAM kit is given a guided bomb unit—GBU for short—nomenclature.

  Wallace understood all the technical attributes of the GBU-32 JDAM and knew how to use it operationally. But what mattered to him most was the fact that he could put the JDAM precisely where he wanted it—when he wanted it there. As his flight jinked right, he checked the time-of-flight indicator in his cockpit to see how long it would take the JDAMs to fall from sixteen thousand feet and hit their targets. As the section continued to turn to the south, both pilots looked over their shoulders and saw the flash from the explosions. Then they looked at their FLIR displays and saw those screens had “gained out” as the white-hot heat of the explosions overwhelmed the FLIR with energy.

  * * *

  The ISIS leader and his men were about five hundred yards from the eastern edge of the Az Zanjili neighborhood when the JDAMs hit. They saw the first flash, and then, seconds later, heard the deafening booms as the four bombs hit their compound. Instinctively, they dropped to the ground until the shock wave passed, then got up and looked at their leader.

  “Faster, faster!” al-Dosari shouted as the group of men broke into a sprint and headed directly for their compound.

  * * *

  The report from Wallace to CAG Michaels was like most conversations between naval aviators—brief and to the point. “Tango-Golf, Dealer One-One, four away. Enemy anti-air observed in the vicinity of target. Tron 11 and 21 flights employed HARM, assess ADA to be neutralized,” Wallace said, using the general terms for the Growlers and for air-defense artillery respectively. “Two strikers egressing along planned route.”

  Michaels relayed the message to Bruner and the admiral allowed himself a small smile. They had completed their mission, and just as importantly, all his aircraft were returning.

  “I’ll have Beale bring in the Global Hawk for BDA, Admiral,” Michaels said as his ops officer typed instructions into a chat window he had opened with the Air Force controllers over nine thousand miles away. The controllers, in turn, steered their bird, which had been doing lazy circles at 58,000 feet northeast of Mosul, directly to the coordinates of the target.

  * * *

  As al-Dosari and his men approached the rubble of what was once their compound, they saw smoke everywhere and small fires here and there around the skeleton of the large building they’d left a short while ago.

  A man in tattered clothes with a soot-stained face was crawling out of the rubble. They heard groans and cries for help coming from the pile.

  “No!” al-Dosari cried as he made straight for the still-smoldering pile. One of his lieutenants tried to grab his arm and restrain him, but he yanked it away.

  Soon, all the men were pushing through the rubble and making their way into what remained of their building. Al-Dosari was out ahead of the group, and he was singularly focused on getting into one section of the smoking ruins.

  Several minutes later, while his men made their way into various areas of what was once their compound, Mabad al-Dosari emerged.

  * * *

  Once on top of the target, the Global Hawk began streaming video back to Beale via a secure satellite connection. Air Force photo-imagery analysts who had been brought in especially for this mission poured over the BDA video. There was no need for much analysis. The targeted buildings were little more than skeletons and piles of rubble.

  Had the Global Hawk cameras had a bit more fidelity, they would have seen a man crawling out of the rubble holding the limp, broken body of a young boy. And if they had had facial recognition capabilities, they would have seen that the man was Mabad al-Dosari. And if they had known all they wanted to know about his family, they would have seen that the boy was al-Dosari’s only son.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CIA Open-Source Center: Reston, Virginia

  March 8, 0700 Eastern Standard Time

  In the wake of the strike against the ISIL compound in Mosul, American intelligence agencies anticipated a response from the Islamic State on social media. What they didn’t know was when and how it would come. While their central compound was destroyed, ISIL could launch its social media campaign from anywhere. One fighter with a cell phone and a Twitter account was all that was needed.

  The words “Central Intelligence Agency Open-Source Center” (commonly called the CIA OSC) sound counterintuitive. For the CIA, long known as the nation’s most secretive intelligence agency, and the one that dealt with information at the highest levels of classification, to mine open—meaning unclassified—sources of information seemed to be a waste of time and resources.

  Since the early 1990s, several congressional intelligence committees, as well as independent groups such as the 9/11 Commission, had recommended that the intelligence community—the IC—create an open-source intelligence entity. These external pressures were one thing, but most IC insiders attributed the ultimate creation of the CIA OSC to one factor. In spite of access to the most sophisticated technology and human intelligence analysis, the IC was completely surprised by the May 1998 Indian nuclear tests. Had the IC been more focused on open sources instead of the highly classified material they typically dealt with, they might not have missed the fact that one of the pledges of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in its 1998 election campaign was to add nuclear weapons to India’s arsenal.

  The charter of the CIA OSC was to collect information available from: “The Internet, databases, press, radio, television, video, geospatial data, photos and commercial imagery.” In addition to collecting openly available information, its mission was to train analysts to make better use of this material. Therefore, it was no surprise that after the attack on ISIL’s Mosul compound, the CIA OSC was on the forefront of the effort, not just to ingest whatever the Islamic State pumped out into social media, but to mine it and analyze whatever it could reveal on two fronts: how successful the U.S. strike had been and what, if anything, ISIL intended to do next.

  Melinda Patterson—MP to her friends and coworkers—was one of the youngest GS-15 analysts at the CIA OSC and was assigned to lead the team pulled together to answer these two questions. MP took the assignment on one condition: No one on her team could be older than thirty-five. She had her team keyed in on all the normal social media feeds, as well as some that were popular primarily in the Mideast. MP knew her team wouldn’t disappoint her or her bosses at the Open Source Center or higher up in the IC.

  * * *

  While the sixteen agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community leaned forward to analyze whatever ISIL threw into the social media mix, Mabad al-Dosari and his key lieutenants were finishing their message. Not only had the U.S. strike failed to take out al-Dosari or any of his top lieutenants, but by killing al-Dosari’s only son, as well as many family members of his closest comrades, they had driven ISIL to call for a new and more comprehensive global jihad against the United States and other Western interests. What they were about to pump out into social media would be the leading edge of that call.

  * * *

  ISIS’s use
of social media was sophisticated enough that it could be timed to hit Western countries—and in this case, specifically the United States—when its citizens were first awake and getting their initial news for the day. It was no surprise to MP and her team at the OSC—or to any of the other analysts elsewhere in the IC—when their Twitter feeds came alive shortly after 0700 Eastern Standard Time.

  “MP, over here, look what just popped up on Twitter!” one of her analysts yelled.

  She took the tablet he handed her.

  You think you have taken the fight to us but once again U are so wrong. Ha! U know where to look and see what will happen to U now, don’t U?

  “What do you make of it?” MP asked.

  “They use Twitter more than any other social media, so I think this is the first alert that they’ll be hitting us with a more comprehensive message.”

  “Looks like they used all one hundred forty characters by my count.”

  “You’re right, but I think the ‘U’s are more than just abbreviations for a personal pronoun—”

  She stopped him in midsentence. “YouTube!

  “Who’s monitoring YouTube?” MP shouted across the room.

  Two of her analysts came on the run, both holding their tablets. As they huddled around MP, the ISIL video popped up. A large pile of rubble was in the foreground, and the video was silent—eerily silent.

  “This looks like the ISIL compound in Mosul,” one of her analysts said.

  “It is,” MP replied. “We’ve seen it from a number of angles with the Global Hawk video feed. I’ve looked at it more times than I care to remember.”

  As they continued to stare at the pile of rubble and fiddle with the volume control on their tablets to see if the sound was set too low for them to hear, one of her analysts noticed a tiny figure at the far end of the rubble. “Look MP, there’s a man, right there.”

  The solitary figure began to walk toward the camera and suddenly the sound came alive:

  Midkiff, are you disappointed to see me? You sent your puny planes to kill me and my fighters and look what you have done. You have not killed me. See, I am very much alive. I know you are angry that your assassins have failed in their mission to destroy me and eliminate the threat to you and to your people.

  But look around at what they have done. Look. You have destroyed the homes where our women and children live and killed many of them where they are still buried under this rubble. You accuse us of killing innocents? These are the innocents, and among those you massacred are my own flesh and blood. You and your cowardly pilots are responsible for this!

  As his diatribe continued, the all-black-clad figure continued moving forward and one of MP’s analysts said, “That looks like al-Dosari; I’m almost certain it’s him. I’m sending this over to our facial recognition people for confirmation.”

  “Good,” MP replied as they all continued to listen.

  So, Midkiff, you wonder what will happen? The jihad has just begun. Don’t try to protect your women and your children. They are no longer safe anywhere, even in your cursed nation. We are coming for them and we are coming for you!

  As he finished with a flourish, al-Dosari was now just a few feet from the camera. A hand thrust out and handed him the all-too-familiar black flag with white Arabic writing. Al-Dosari waved the flag violently from side to side and began chanting something in Arabic. Then the screen went black.

  “Have what he said interpreted and analyzed!” MP shouted, but her team was already rushing out to do just that.

  * * *

  Within minutes of the ISIS video appearing on YouTube, McCord and Bleich were in Williams’s office. The Op-Center director was just finishing his morning meeting with his deputy, Anne Sullivan. Williams beckoned the two men to join them at the small conference table.

  “Got something for me? ISIL finally pop its head up on social media?”

  “They sure have,” McCord replied. “Aaron, prop your tablet up here so the boss and Ms. Sullivan can see it.”

  Bleich did so and played the YouTube video. As the video finished playing, the four of them were silent for a few moments. Finally, Williams spoke.

  “Aaron, I think I know you well enough that you’re already ramping up our intelligence collecting and analysis of everything ISIL is putting out. This is pretty strong stuff—even for them.”

  Bleich just nodded and looked toward McCord.

  “Aaron and his team will stay on top of this,” McCord said.

  “I know you will,” Williams replied.

  “Do you want me to get Brian and Rich in here? Are you thinking of alerting either our JSOC team or the folks down at Quantico?” McCord asked.

  “I don’t think we’re ready for that step yet, Roger. Let’s let Aaron’s folks churn for a while. Once we have a bit more intel, then maybe we’ll be ready to move.”

  * * *

  Not far from the rubble of his former headquarters, Mabad al-Dosari met with his number two. They had driven out the residents of a six-story building in Mosul’s Al Mawsil al Jadidah neighborhood and were now moving their families into the structure.

  Al-Dosari used al-Hamdani as his primary conduit to the Saudi’s General Intelligence Directorate. He wanted the man to know precisely what he expected him to do. Yes, the Saudis had helped them before, but al-Dosari didn’t trust them as far as he could throw them.

  Al-Dosari wanted revenge, but he wasn’t blind with rage. He wanted to extract payback on those who did this, but he wanted to succeed in what he did, not expend resources on something that wouldn’t work. There had been too many revelations about foiled attempts to kill important Western leaders. He couldn’t fail this time.

  Nor did he think the Americans would make it easy for him, as they had when they sent their special presidential envoy to areas where his fighters roamed free. No, he wanted to take out his revenge on a high-profile figure who was directly responsible for the strike that killed his son and so many others. All he knew was that death had come from the sky. He told al-Hamdani precisely what he wanted him to find out from the Saudi’s General Intelligence Directorate. And now he waited.

  * * *

  Eight time zones from where al-Dosari was giving these instructions, five young Muslim men in Minneapolis, Minnesota, were walking home from evening prayers at the Masjid Omar Islamic Center. They were all second-generation Americans who lived in the same lower-middle class neighborhood. Each of them enjoyed a relatively comfortable life their parents had secured for them through hard work and trying to live the American dream.

  Each twenty-something man had a good—if not lucrative—job in one of the twin cities, owned a car or borrowed one from his parents, had a circle of friends, and two even had steady girlfriends. And they all shared one thing in common—they all wanted to leave the United States and join the fight with the Islamic State. But each had been denied a visa by American authorities. They knew they needed help if they were going to wage jihad—they just didn’t know where that help would come from.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  National Counterterrorism Center: McLean, Virginia

  June 11, 0930 Eastern Daylight Time

  At first, there had been twice-daily meetings, then once a day, then three times a week. Now the director of national intelligence—or the DNI as he was more commonly known—only called these meetings once a week. His staff had just finished subjecting him to death by PowerPoint, detailing how they were continuing to mine ISIL’s social media for some sign of a specific threat against the United States. But this week’s report was the same as the week before, and the week before that—there was no actionable intelligence on any specific threat.

  A similar scene was playing out at most of the sixteen agencies that comprised the IC, as well as in military commands with any stake in the fight against terrorism. Even the best analysts had been forced to eat crow. They had all predicted that Mabad al-Dosari would carry out his threats to take the fight to the American homeland and maybe even
to the president within days of posting his YouTube video. But nothing had happened, and while ISIL continued to pump venom into social media, no threat had materialized in the three months since al-Dosari had climbed atop that pile of rubble in Mosul.

  Even at Op-Center, in spite of the enormous brain power and all the technical wizardry Bleich and Geek Tank brought to bear on the problem, they knew as little as anyone else. And while Williams was cheered by the fact that no news was good news, every professional instinct he had told him ISIL would strike—and strike hard.

  * * *

  In Minneapolis, the five friends met in the basement of the home one of the men shared with his parents and two younger sisters in the Powderhorn neighborhood, hard by I-35W. His parents ran a local gas station and convenience store near Powderhorn Park and worked seventy hours a week. Unbeknownst to his parents or to the parents of the four other young men, they all were trying to obtain visas to leave the United States and join ISIS.

  One of the men suggested engaging a forger he knew to have him fabricate false credentials so they could leave the United States to take a “vacation” in Turkey and then slip across the border into Syria to join the fight. The peer leader of the men, Amer Deghayes, told his friends that the imam had explained—because they lived in Minneapolis and were Muslim—they had likely been identified by the Department of Homeland Security as possible ISIS sympathizers. He said the imam had also told him that they might even be under surveillance by U.S. immigration and other officials determined to staunch the flow of potential ISIS recruits from the United States. Amer told them that, even with forged papers, they would likely be stopped if they tried to leave the country. The imam wanted them to be patient—their time would come.

  * * *

  In Springfield, Virginia, in a scene 180 degrees out from the unhappy one playing out for the five young men in Minneapolis, Rear Admiral Jay Bruner was having breakfast with his wife and two teenage daughters. Bruner, now the Navy’s chief of legislative affairs, was enjoying his first shore duty in years after successive sea-duty tours, most recently as a carrier strike group commander.