A photo popped up from the surveillance team. Visual recognition software gave it a 63 percent match on a member of Islah. Not who they were expecting, but a target.
The OpsO called the general. Minutes ticked by. The general called back. They’d send in ground forces. Colombians in cordon, local Yemeni forces making the arrests. They waited some more, watching the movement of the ground forces on the map.
“This is a better mission than I thought,” Jeffie said.
Juan Pablo shook his head. Jeffie was pleased they wouldn’t be bombing anyone. Instead, the ground forces would round up the funeralgoers and send them to secret prisons where they would be tortured. It was nice to know that all it took to calm Jeffie’s nerves was to introduce one minimal step from the actual ugliness of the job.
Minutes passed, the visuals remained the same. Juan Pablo saw Jeffie scratching out longhand division, estimating the remaining fuel on the drone. A convoy pulled up to the funeral. More weapons. The surveillance team radioed that they’d spotted an Iranian ATGM. Jeffie began typing on a keyboard, sending emails back and forth with a JTAC, who promised to reroute some F-15s. And then the Colombians came on the net, and the plan changed.
“Dos urgentes, dos rutinaria, nada muertos,” came a calm voice. They’d hit a mine, taken injuries, and identified more mines ahead. Juan Pablo briefed the OpsO and the OpsO called in to brief the general and they waited. The surveillance team called in and identified a building separate from the funeral hall where most of the men carrying weapons had gone.
Juan Pablo called over the OpsO.
“Alternatively,” Juan Pablo told him, “we wait for the funeral to end, and then hit the fighters’ building once the principals reunite with their security.”
The OpsO nodded and called back to the general for guidance. They waited.
Meanwhile, Jeffie circled the fighters’ building. It was a multilevel structure with a courtyard. The surveillance team claimed they’d observed only men and boys carrying weapons going in and out so maybe it was clear of civilians. It should be clear of civilians. In theory, the guidelines they operated under would demand better intelligence.
As he waited, Juan Pablo watched the image of the target. It was soothing. At first glance, it was a static image, but then you noticed that it was shifting, ever so slightly, as the drone circled and its sensor camera rotated to keep fixed on the building. He wondered what was going on inside. And what was happening in the nearby building, at the funeral? He didn’t know what a Muslim funeral was like. Were they all the same? Or did Yemenis have particular customs? In all his time watching Yemenis die on video screens, he had not once talked to a single Yemeni, or even seen one in person. They were a notional people to him, defined not by experience but by a few articles he’d read, by talk among his fellow mercenaries, and by a few opinion polls he’d sought out to learn about their retrograde beliefs.
Were they as motivated by primitivism as he thought? Was this war of attrition they were fighting grinding down their resistance, or would it spawn pockets of resistance, deep enmities, nonnegotiable hatred? What were they like? He didn’t know. It wasn’t necessary to know for a campaign like this, which was one half war and one half extermination.
Confirmation came from the general and Juan Pablo let out a breath. Hours of tension building up were soon to be released. Meanwhile, Jeffie was on the radio with the ground team.
“Can you sparkle the building? No, not now . . . but . . . yes . . . good.”
If the ground team could sparkle the target, they were set. A perfect mission. Normally, an Emirati pilot in a jet hooked up with a SniperPod would have to shoot a laser onto a target for another jet to fire on. And since the Emiratis tended to fly as high as possible to avoid ground fire, they weren’t the most reliable.
“Okay, movement,” Jeffie said. There was nothing on the screen for a moment and then figures emerged near the target building. “Yeah, now. Sparkle it now.” He switched to a different radio. “You should see it now.”
Juan Pablo closed his eyes, took in the hum of the operations center. He wondered if the men who were about to die were capable of appreciating everything that went into their deaths. An American mercenary was aiming a laser at the instruction of an American pilot operating a Chinese drone. They were communicating over an encrypted frequency routed through a Canadian aircraft mounted with Swedish surveillance technology, bounced from repeater hub to repeater hub to the main air-ground tower at their air base in the Empty Quarter. The drone pilot, in turn, was communicating with an Emirati fighter pilot in an American aircraft armed with a laser-guided bomb capable of being launched from nine miles away and forty thousand feet up and still detonating within ten feet of its target.
He heard someone clear the pilots hot. Was it Jeffie? It didn’t matter. He knew, as everyone in that operations center knew, that in another country miles and miles away from them men of another religion and another way of life breathed their last. They knew, and the ground team knew, and the pilots knew, but no one else.
Then, tens of thousands of feet above the target building, the pilot did nothing more complicated than push a little button. A series of small charges on a rack mounted underneath his plane ignited, blowing away the hooks holding his bomb in place. It wobbled out into the air. Awkward, ungainly, a baby bird the size of a car, detached from its parent and plummeting through space. Or almost detached. A thin wire trailed behind it, still connected to the jet, unspooling and unspooling until there was no more wire left and it tore itself from its mother. Only
