James Spiro had not enjoyed his job with the CIA since he had been moved to Head of Clandestine, Europe. It was a promotion, and should have been rewarding, a few comfortable years in London before he returned to Virginia for greater things. But he hadn’t counted on Salim Dhar proving so elusive. Ever since he had slipped through the net in India, Dhar had been Spiro’s biggest headache. He would wake at night, sheets drenched in sweat, seeing his President take the bullet that had somehow missed him in Delhi. His in-tray was full of daily requests from the Pentagon, the White House, the media, all wanting to know where Dhar was and why he hadn’t been eliminated. And in his darkest moments, he couldn’t stop thinking of Leila, the woman who had died instead of the President, the woman he had slept with only hours before.
Spiro knew his career hung in the balance, which was why he was now back on home soil, coordinating the Agency’s biggest manhunt since the search for Osama bin Laden after 9/11. There had been dozens of credible sightings of Dhar around the world, each one proving false, each one ratcheting up the pressure on Spiro to find him. The collateral damage from drone strikes hadn’t helped his cause. The last one, in Pakistan, based on an ISI tip-off, had killed thirty civilians, mostly women and children.
And what were America’s greatest allies doing to help? Diddly shit. London’s relationship with Dhar was ‘delicate’, according to Marcus Fielding. Dubious, more like. Daniel Marchant, the one person who might be able to find Dhar, was on vacation in North Africa, if such a thing was possible, eating too much couscous in Marrakech. If it had been up to Spiro, Marchant would have been strapped back onto the waterboard, telling them all he knew about Dhar, rather than being allowed to wander around Morocco’s souks as if nothing had happened.
Now, though, the end seemed finally in sight. It was always going to be only a matter of time until Dhar made a mistake.
‘Run me those coordinates again,’ he said to the operator next to him. He was standing in the ‘cockpit’, a hot and crowded trailer, also known as a mobile Ground Control Station, in a quiet corner of Creech US Air Force Base, Nevada. In front of him, two operatives were seated in high-backed chairs, each monitoring a bank of screens. One was a pilot with 42 Attack Squadron, a seasoned officer in his forties who used to fly F-16 fighter jets but was now directing MQ-9 Reapers, the most advanced hunter/killer drones in the world. The other was his sensor operator, a woman no older than twenty-five who controlled the Reaper’s multi-spectral targeting suite.
Spiro had spent a lot of his time at Creech in recent weeks, too much for his liking. And he had eaten too many Taco Bells in Las Vegas, thirty-five miles south-east. Creech used to be a bare-bones facility, a rocky outpost in the desert, but now it resembled a building site. New hangars were going up all the time around the main airstrip, which had once been used for landing practice by pilots from the nearby Nellis Air Force Base. Spiro found it hard to believe that such a bleak, uninhabited place represented the future of aerial combat. But he guessed that was the point: the USAF’s first squadron of Reapers was unmanned.
The pilot in front of him read out the coordinates. Dhar’s voice had been traced to a remote location in North Waziristan, on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Fort Meade had done a good job for once. Someone had been listening in real time, and not just to Pakistani generals having sex. This was the big one, and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the cockpit, even from the base commander. He had stepped into the trailer when news spread across the base that Salim Dhar might be about to be taken down. It would be a big moment for the commander. His unit, 432 Air Expeditionary Wing, had stood up at Creech in 2007 to spearhead the global war on terror, and he needed a result. Spiro knew the commander blamed the CIA for the recent spate of bad publicity. The last strike in Pakistan had brought relations between the Agency and the USAF to a new low.
‘I think we have our man,’ Spiro said, turning to the commander.
‘We need to do this by the book,’ he replied. ‘You know that.’
‘Of course. And the book says we take Dhar out. We have an 80 per cent confidence threshold.’
‘Are there any legals?’ the commander asked, turning to an officer next to him.
‘Negative, sir. Potential for civilian collateral is zero. The building is remote, nearest population cluster five miles south. And this is a Level Five.’
‘Colonel, we’re locked onto the target,’ the pilot said, turning to the sensor operator. ‘Can you put thermal up on screen one?’
Spiro watched as blotches of bright colour appeared on the screen between the two seated operators. The surrounding screens were relaying live video streams from electro-optical and image-intensified night cameras mounted under the nose of the Reaper, and stills from a synthetic aperture radar. Spiro still hadn’t quite got his head round the fact that these images were streaming live, give or take a one-to-two-second delay, from 30,000 feet above Afghanistan, 7,500 miles away.
‘Fuse thermal with intensified,’ the pilot said. The image on the main screen sharpened a little, but it was still no more than a series of yellow, red and purple shapes.
It was at this point that the young female analyst first began to worry about their target. She wasn’t meant to be on duty now. The 24/7 rota they worked to had lost its shape in the previous few hours, and she should have been back in her room, getting some sleep and reading the bible before her next shift. (A lot of the analysts headed off to Vegas after work, but she found the contrast too great: one moment looking at magnified images of a destroyed Taleban target, the next shooting craps.) But the next analyst on duty had phoned in sick, and she had agreed to work on until cover showed up. That was two hours ago. She didn’t like bending the rules. She tried to lead a quiet, disciplined life. All she could hope for was that the base commander didn’t glance at the rota sheet on the wall behind them.
‘Sir, we have multiple personnel in the target zone,’ she said, looking closely at the screen. ‘And what looks like a pack of wild dogs forty yards to the east.’
Night-time image analysis was a skill that not everyone on the base appreciated. The pilots did, but she resented the disdain with which the CIA officers appeared to view her profession. Spiro was the worst, but that was also because he kept trying to look down her blouse. He hadn’t the first idea about the subtleties of either women or her job.
During the day, with clear visibility, it was easy enough to distinguish man from woman, cat from dog, even from 30,000 feet. The images were pin sharp. But at night you had to rely on the digitally enhanced imagery of the infra-red spectrum. Interpreting the ghostly monochrome of the mid-IR wavelengths required intuition and training to flesh out the shapes. You had to impose upon them known patterns of human behaviour. Two years earlier, she had averted a friendly-fire attack when she realised that the four targets on an Afghanistan hillside, thought to be insurgents, were doing press-ups. She had never seen the Taleban working out, and assumed, rightly, that they were US soldiers.
The shapes in front of her now, clustered together inside a hut on a mountainside in North Waziristan, were not normal, even allowing for the local atmospheric conditions, which were making the images less clear than she would have liked. She isolated the feed from the thermal infra-red camera, which detected heat emitted from objects, and then fused it again with the image-intensified images. She had seen Taleban leaders talking many times before, and they never stood so close. When they sat, they formed circles. These people had created something else: a glowing crucifix to warn off the Reaper.
Marchant pulled off the dusty track and parked the BMW behind a cluster of coarse bushes, out of sight. It was almost dark and he could see the headlights of a lorry coming down over the Tizi’n’Test pass in the far distance. He wished he had been able to steal a scrambler rather than a tourer, as the BMW had struggled with the rough terrain. They had left the main road, and followed an increasingly