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Simone and Rand’s conversation was cut short by Raven 89 directing them to commence their attack and issuing release authority.

“Voodoo 11/12, Raven 89, push from your current position. You are cleared hot.”

“Raven 89, Voodoo 11/12, pushing.” Collins looked out from his canopy to see Simone in position. Good. Now he could really focus on triple checking his systems as well.

“Holy shit this is happening,” Rand said to Simone over the ICS.

“I know, I know. We’re good; everything looks good,” Simone said to Rand and to himself.

At CENTCOM, almost 8,000 miles away in Florida, everyone’s attention had shifted to the final moments of the strike. On the big screen they could see the position of the two Tomcats and the Predator. They could also see the live video feed from the Raven 89. This area in Afghanistan was desolate, so there should be little to no collateral damage. That made the big commanders very happy. Nothing worse than having the strike you authorized on CNN.

In the final moments before weapons release, one of the targeteers on the CENTCOM floor was doing his thing. Though new to the intelligence officer community, LT Reyes was head and shoulders above many of the targeteers with more experience. Adept at all of the digital processes and computer software used by targeteers, he still liked to plot missions against charts. While all of the others watched the big screen, Reyes precisely plotted the latitude and longitude. Accounting for magnetic variance and seasonal isogonic lines, he realized something was wrong. The GPS generated coordinates were in error. He didn’t know how and he didn’t know why, but those bombs were definitely not going to hit the target. With chart in hand, he stood up from his station and looked at the big screen. The small icons representing Voodoo flight were getting awfully close to the target. At that moment he heard Raven 89 relay Voodoo’s status to CENTCOM.

“Voodoo flight reports 30 seconds to weapons release.” Raven’s update was pumped out over the loudspeaker.

Reyes could see the battle watch captain from across the room. He was taking a pull of coffee as he eyeballed the screen. He was the man who had the final say for a mission to be a “go” or a “no-go”. He was a necessary check and balance in the kill chain, and in times like these, a voice of reason. Reyes knew he had only a few precious seconds to convince him to call off the strike. As he started running across the room with his chart in hand, he knew his choice of words needed to be specific. Short of breath, he threw the chart down on the desk in front of the captain.

“If you don’t call off the strike, you’re going to kill a village,” Reyes said, pointing his finger at the target’s location on the map. The battle watch captain stared at Reyes and took a moment to process the information. Without asking a question, he keyed the PA system on the floor and issued the order.

“Abort, abort, abort! I repeat abort the mission!” All eyes on the floor looked at him for a moment. The room erupted in a wave of noise. In the chaos, the battle watch captain looked down at LT Reyes and said, “Ok, let’s talk.”

High above Northern Afghanistan, the order to abort had not yet reached Voodoo 11/12. CDR Collins and LT Simone had already armed their aircraft and were only a few seconds away from release when Raven 89 called.

“Voodoo 11/12, Raven 89, abort, abort, abort! How copy?” Raven’s voice was hurried.

“Raven 89, Voodoo 11, copy abort,” Collins responded with his trademark, business as usual demeanor.

“Raven 89, Voodoo 12, copy abort.” Simone’s disappointment was not as well hidden.

On the ground, the boy looked up at the sky. He could see the light of the jet engines flickering as they passed overhead, going back the way they had come. They must have realized that his family were believers.

Over the ICS, Rand and Simone speculated for the next two hours while making their way back to the ship.
What the hell happened?
It wasn’t until the debrief and a discussion about a problem with the GPS constellation that Simone realized just how close he had come to killing thirty people.

Sergeant Mike Murphy was the JTAC in a nine-man special ops team that was about to parachute out of a plane moving over the foothills of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. Once on the ground and assembled, his responsibility was to establish communications with the local command network and guide U.S. pilots overhead for a bombing mission. A group of 50 Taliban had been spotted creeping back into the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Murphy was the last one out of the plane. He was pumped. In his head blared the U2 song “Elevation.” The words didn’t make a whole lot of sense to him, but the melody made his adrenaline course. The cold air hit Murphy in the face. He could see shoots beginning to open beneath him now. In a moment, his would open, too. In the meantime, he relished the peace.

Peace gave way to a slight twinge of fear. On the ground, Murphy and the team made a lengthy trek to a burned-out field where American aircraft had already destroyed an ammo depot. They had received intel that the Taliban planned to rendezvous there, and were now visualizing a group of them.

In this region of the country, the command network’s call sign was “Wild Cat;” Murphy’s was “Panther 12”. He reached for his radio. “Wild Cat, this is Panther 12, over.” He adjusted the volume to squelch simultaneously. It was second nature to him now.

“Panther 12, this is Wild Cat. Go ahead with your check-in.” Wild Cat’s voice was British and female. Murphy guessed she was an Eastender.

“Wild Cat, this is Panther 12. Established point Lima. Request immediate air support for a fire mission, over.”

“Panther 12, Wilco, ETA plus 10 minutes.”

Wild Cat’s voice was a calm reassurance to Murphy that a definitive force multiplier was on the way. Between now and then, the task at hand was to determine the specific coordinates of the target. Looking through his Lightweight Laser Designator Rangefinder (LLDR), Murphy could see the Taliban beginning to muster for an offensive. Firing the invisible beam of laser energy, his LLDR was instantly able to correlate its own GPS position to that of the enemy and derive the target coordinates. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the aircraft to check in.

High above, a section of Tomcats was getting word that their services were needed. The lead pilot was a guy named York. His call sign was Ajax 31.

Murphy got on the net. “Ajax 31, this is Panther 12. We have troops in contact located in kill box Romeo Sierra. Proceed immediately and contact Panther 12 for further instruction.”

“Copy all. Proceeding to Romeo Sierra,” York said from his cockpit. He plugged his after burners and put Romeo Sierra on the nose. He knew the terrain in the north very well. He had flown there many times. It was rugged and unforgiving for the soldiers on the ground, but from the air, the backdrop of the Hindu Kush was sublime. They were close to the target. ETA was eight minutes.

“Panther 12, this is Ajax 31,” York said. Silence. He listened intently for anything that sounded like a voice, but only heard static in his headset. He tried again, this time more abruptly. “Panther 12, Ajax 31.” Just as he was about to make another transmission, he heard the familiar crackle of someone keying a mic.

“Ajax 31, this is Panther 12.” It was Murphy. He was okay. “Proceed with your check-in.”

“
Panther 12. We’ve got you broken but readable. Ajax 31 is a section of Tomcats currently five minutes out, each carrying two by GBU-12, two by GBU-38 and 1,000 rounds of 20 mike-mike. Playtime one hour. How do you copy?”

Murphy sensed the Taliban guys were about to make their move. Murphy sensed the Taliban guys were about to make their move. line” meant Murphy wanted a bomb on the ground ten minutes ago.

York got on his mic. “Panther 12, this is Ajax 31. Ready to copy.”

Murphy started spewing out coordinates. “Ajax 31, this is Panther 12. Target location 36 degrees, 42 minutes, 31 decimal 7349 seconds North; 67 degrees, 6 minutes, 54 decimal 4265 seconds East, elevation 1,451. Troops in the open. Closest friendlies 2,000 meters south. How copy?”

York inputted the coordinates into the weapons system on his aircraft’s data entry pad. Everything looked good. Checked. Doublechecked. “Panther 12, this is Ajax 31. Ready for read back?”

“Ajax 31, go ahead.”

“Panther 12, Ajax 31. Target location 36 degrees, 42 minutes, 31 decimal 7349 seconds north; 67 degrees, 6 minutes, 54 decimal 4265 seconds east, elevation 1,451. Troops in the open. Closest friendlies 2,000 meters south.”

“Ajax 31, this is Panther 12, good read back. The enemy is hunkered down in an open position at the bend of a river oriented north to west. That river then extends into rising terrain. Friendlies are south of that position. You are cleared from present position to commence your attack. Make your attack axis east to west.”

“Ajax 31, copy all. East to west attack axis. Ajax 31 is pushing,” York said. His “pushing” call meant the game was on. After triple checking the coordinates, there was nothing left to do but wait for the final clearance from Murphy and then push the little red button for weapons release.

“Panther 12, this is Ajax 31. Two minutes out.”

“Ajax 31 – cleared hot!”

Cleared hot meant bombs away. Murphy had called in the strike. Now less than five miles to the target, York could just make out the bend in the river that defined the enemy’s position. Check. One minute to release, but something seemed out of place. Attack axis was correct, coming in from east to west. Check. York scaled in on his situational awareness display to take a closer look at the target’s symbology. Now thirty seconds to release. The moving map and the target didn’t correlate. York thought to himself out loud,
there must be some display error here, that target looks…

Suddenly his headset erupted with what sounded like gunfire. On the ground Murphy and his team were now under attack from the enemy’s position. Yelling into his mic, Murphy called York. “Ajax 31, Panther 12, say your status!”

“Ajax 31, 15 seconds to release.” A swell of doubt started to build inside York. Something was not quite right. He needed more information. He needed more time.

“Ajax 31, this is Panther 12. Put that ordnance down range now!” Murphy yelled.

“This is Ajax 31, copy all!”
Shit, shit, shit
. After making a mental coin toss, York reasoned that it must be an error in the display. “This is Ajax 31, one away.” The knot in York’s gut just got bigger. The weapon he had released had a time of flight of approximately sixty seconds.

On the ground, Murphy yelled to his team that a bomb was on the way. Welcome news that would hopefully silence the enemies’ machine guns. “Everyone keep your head down; less than a minute until impact!”

From his crouched position, Murphy tried to hear the faint whistle of the bomb guiding to impact. At first, he could hear nothing except the clack-clack of intermittent gunfire. Then, he could just start to make it out. It was getting loud, too loud. The whistle became a deafening howl as the percussive thud of detonation rattled him. “My God,” he said, just as a blinding light, a shock wave and then a flood of heat snuffed out his life.

***

Hayden dangled in a basket, attached to a cable as he was being raised into a helicopter. He had walked right off the side of the ridge and fallen into a ravine. Luckily, another hiker below witnessed the fall and built a makeshift shelter for the two of them to ride out the storm until they could place a cell phone call to the mountain patrol. Hayden had a badly sprained ankle, two cracked ribs and a bruised ego. He was confused.
What the hell had, happened? How could the GPS have been so wrong?

High above, something had indeed happened. A GPS satellite was spitting out wrong information.

It was winter in Zurich. Otto Jagmetti loved this time of year – a time for reading and drinking warm drinks, a time for getting the skis out and lighting the fire.

These years following September 11 had been a time of schaedenfreudic satisfaction for Jagmetti. Finally, the Americans had gotten what was coming to them. All the years of duplicity and empire building in the name of freedom and liberty, all the self-interest cloaked in a Yankee noblesse oblige to defend the world from any of the nefarious ills that it had brought upon itself, all had come tumbling down.

Yes, a large number of people had died, and that was tragic. But for the first time in his entire life, Jagmetti felt that he was witnessing American vulnerability. It was his sincere hope that the attacks and the drumming the Americans were taking in Iraq would spell change – change in the way that America viewed the world and its place in it. To Jagmetti, it was as if an overconfident teenager used to getting his way had received his first, humbling playground beating.

Admittedly, Jagmetti was as startled as anyone by the magnitude of the destruction he had seen on the television screens, by the bodies raining down onto the concrete. But what was the whole event in the grand timeline of human history? Why did that event deserve more tears than the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, or the seven million Ukrainians starved by Stalin, or the one and a half million Armenians massacred by the Turks in 1915-16, or the young men and boys forced to watch their wives and mothers raped during the war in Yugoslavia, or the hundreds of thousands hacked to death with machetes in Rwanda?

To Jagmetti, what happened to America amounted to a loud knock on the door from the rest of the world, a knock that said, “Get over yourself.” But as a businessman, the war on terror meant something else to Jagmetti. In hockey, it was a “power play” – America was being penalized and was playing shorthanded.

Now was the time for Europe to capitalize. The window of opportunity would be short, but Jagmetti had every intention of rushing through it. To him, the historians would one day write about September 11, not as the defining moment when a new foe called terrorism replaced Communism and Fascism, but as the moment when America’s hegemonic halo began to fade, once again giving others a chance to play.