Predator (28 page)

It didn't—even after the
Cole
bombing two weeks later. The wheels of government grind slowly at any time, and as the end of Bill Clinton's second term in the White House approached, decisions were hard to come by. By October 17 the members of the Big Safari team working to arm the Predator had done all the work they could pending a resolution of the treaty issue. They were also waiting for Raytheon to deliver the new sensor ball combining a laser designator with a daylight camera. For the moment, the two most important Predator projects were in limbo.

That same month, Summer Project operations director Major Mark Cooter and Captain Scott Swanson happened to see the flag-draped caskets of some USS
Cole
sailors being removed from a cargo plane at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, a stopover on the way to the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Cooter and Swanson got out of their car, stood at attention, and saluted as the caskets were unloaded. The sight made them sad—and angry. Over the next few days, Cooter loudly and bitterly complained about the U.S. failure to strike back, living up to a fiery reputation that had led an Air Force security officer to call the burly intelligence officer a “cowboy” for bridling at computer restrictions Cooter thought were slowing operations. When Cooter turned thirty-seven on October 20, eight days after the
Cole
bombing, his team threw him a party and gave him a pair of cavalry spurs and a big white Stetson. Cooter laughed but resisted their demands that he try the gag gifts on for size. Instead, he put a magnetic clip on the brim of the Stetson and hung the cowboy hat and spurs from a metal equipment rack at the back of the Predator ground control station. He would wear them, Cooter told the team, when Washington worked up enough gumption to take some action against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

By the following month, Cooter's feelings were only stronger. On November 14, he sent a scathing letter to Boyle, Snake Clark and Cooter's opposite number at the CIA, arguing that if actionable intelligence produced by the Predator flights were going to lead to no action, the missions should be stopped and new options considered. Cooter was so angry, in fact, that he originally drafted his protest under the file name “resignationletter.” After talking it over with a lieutenant colonel he was close to, he deleted a sentence declaring that he was going to resign, but he didn't mince words when expressing his frustration with the failure of those in power to act against terrorists clearly determined to kill as many Americans as possible. The Air Force team had proven they could find bin Laden with the Predator, but such operations were high in risk and low in return, Cooter argued. In a dozen missions that fall, the Predator had spotted bin Laden twice for sure and possibly a third time. In Cooter's view, the Predator team should stop flying over Afghanistan until those with the power to decide figured out what they really wanted to do about Osama bin Laden.

Summer Project commander Boyle was angry, too. Boyle's gut told him that bin Laden and his lieutenants were finalizing their plans for the
Cole
bombing when the Predator's cameras saw the Al Qaeda chief at Tarnak Farms on September 27. He figured the sailors killed on the
Cole
might still be alive if a cruise missile had hit bin Laden's meeting that day. He fervently hoped the Predator would soon be armed; when it was, he also hoped the team he had led in the Summer Project could go hunting for bin Laden again. Boyle wanted to rain Hellfire on him.

 

9

HELLFIRE AND HESITATION

Now Predator 3034 resembled a prisoner more than it did a patient. On January 23, 2001, wings and nose restored but tires missing, 3034 was chained by its landing gear struts to a concrete pad atop a barren hilltop overlooking a shallow desert valley. The dry swale below the hill was on a test range at California's landlocked China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, whose 1.1 million acres make it 50 percent larger than Rhode Island, and whose 17,000 square miles of restricted airspace make it ideal for trying out military weapons. Here, on Pad J54 at Test Site G-6, Predator 3034 would be put through a “static ground launch” of a Hellfire to see, before trying it in the air, what a missile rocketing off the drone's wing would do to the aircraft. Under each of 3034's shiny new white wings—attached to the fuselage three weeks earlier after months of resting on metal stands—hung a sixty-four-inch-long Hellfire incapable of living up to its name. There was no explosive inside.

Only one of these “inert” Hellfires would be launched in this test, but each had white stripes along its menacing black skin, the better to help high-speed film and video cameras see the missile's aerodynamics in flight. The stresses on the drone from the heat and thrust of the Hellfire's rocket plume would be measured by thermal, strain, and pressure gauges, and by temperature-sensitive crayons applied to the laser ball, tails, and leading edge of the wings. The rocket's effects would also be visible in the flapping of strips of tape attached to 3034's composite skin, whose inverted-V tail now sported the Scotch plaid colors of the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron, plus Big Safari's black-and-gold African shield with crossed spears.

General John Jumper's project to arm the Predator had been released at last from its bureaucratic limbo a month earlier, on December 21, when government treaty experts abruptly decided that a lethal drone was permissible under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The decision took months to reach, but the logic was simple—especially after NSC counterterrorism chief and armed Predator advocate Richard Clarke weighed in. Clarke, who had been deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence when the INF treaty was negotiated and served as assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs before going to work at the NSC, pointed out that, by definition, a cruise missile had a warhead and the Predator didn't. The Predator was merely a platform, an unmanned aerial vehicle that had landing gear and was designed to return to base after a mission.

On January 2, Predator 3034 got its wings back in the General Atomics hangar at El Mirage. The company's Hellfire project manager, Christopher Dusseault, thirty-three, a former Air Force engineer with three master's degrees to his credit, happily supervised as the brand-new beefed-up wings were fastened into their fuselage slots and all the right wires were connected. Each wing held a single gray launch rail, and each rail angled downward five degrees from its wing's leading edge. With the wings in place, a small group of engineers and technicians fitted 3034 with a Forty-Four ball, the same laser designator turret used on the WILD Predators flown over Kosovo in 1999. Then, after three weeks of ground and flight tests of various kinds, the team trucked 3034, a ground control station, and other equipment ninety miles north to the test range at China Lake to start shooting missiles.

Chained to its test pad four hundred feet above sea level, 3034 sat with its nose pointed northwest and upward nine degrees. Behind the drone and its Hellfires was a second hill forty feet higher, with two big antennas on its summit, one to stream the Predator's video, one to communicate with a ground-based laser designator sitting beside a control van a couple of miles downrange. A crew manning this second laser designator would shine a laser beam to guide the inert Hellfire to a mock target, a dusty, defunct green tank sitting in the desert three miles straight ahead of the Predator.

Shielded from the test pad by the hill holding the antennas was a concrete bunker full of test gear and engineers, including General Atomics project manager Dusseault and Major Spoon Mattoon, a weapons testing expert and Big Safari's project manager. Behind the bunker sat the Predator's ground control station, looming up from the desert floor like a lost freight container, its big, black tires powdered with desert sand, its dull metal skin painted black, tan, and beige desert camouflage.

At 10:39 a.m., with the Predator's engine running and its small pusher propeller gently turning, Mattoon decided it was time to launch a missile.

“Four … three … two … one … fire!” a China Lake test director ordered over an intercom piped into the GCS and other locations. After a split-second pause, a jet of flame as long as the missile spurted from the rear of the Hellfire under the Predator's right wing. As recorded by a high-speed camera sitting off to the side of 3034, the mock weapon's rocket plume reflected yellow on the underside of the white wing but vanished in milliseconds.

“Item away, item away,” the test director intoned as the missile zoomed off in a low parabola toward a distant mountain. A forward-facing camera recorded the Hellfire and its rocket plume disappearing from view.

“Plus five … plus ten … plus fifteen … plus twenty,” the test director reported as the missile flew. Reaching Mach 1.3 in the flight's first two and a half seconds—around a thousand miles an hour at this altitude and temperature—and slowing to about four hundred miles per hour as it traveled, the Hellfire slammed into the side of the target tank's turret, right where a nearby camera able to detect laser light showed the beam's sparkle flickering. The aluminum test missile burst into ragged black chunks.

“We have impact,” the test director reported unemotionally. “End of test.”

Mattoon, Dusseault, and their team reacted like the NASA engineers in Houston when astronaut Neil Armstrong set mankind's first foot on the moon: giving high fives all around, jumping up and down, patting one another on the back.

The Predator team spent the rest of the day analyzing video of the Hellfire launch and the missile smashing into the right side of the tank, studying the test from every angle at actual speed, in slow motion, and in super slow motion. They analyzed the data from thermal gauges on the wing and tail, the flapping of the tape strips attached to the drone, the flutter of the wings. Then they adjourned to a restaurant in nearby Ridgecrest, California, and after a nice dinner enjoyed a proud and rowdy night at the bar. Now the question was whether the Predator could repeat its new trick in flight.

*   *   *

Chona Hawes feared her husband might be having a seizure. She came upstairs at dusk one evening at their north Las Vegas house to find Air Force Captain Curt Hawes flat on his back in bed. The lights were off, the curtains closed, and her husband was clad only in underwear and a tee-shirt. Eyes shut, knees bent, his bare feet moved up and down in a dance with no rhythm. Hands flitting back and forth in the air, his index fingers poked and pressed while his thumbs turned and twitched.

“Curt?”

No answer.

“Curt!” his wife demanded, turning on a light. Curt stopped gyrating and sat up with a start. He looked at Chona wide-eyed, then reached to his ears with both hands and removed yellow foam plugs.

“What's happening?” she asked worriedly.

Sorry, Curt replied with a sheepish smile, but it was hard to get to sleep this early, even wearing earplugs, when you knew you had to get to the park-and-ride by 3:45 a.m. to catch the bus to Indian Springs airfield for a 4:30 a.m. briefing. As a Predator pilot, the possibility of missing or arriving late for a preflight briefing was one of Curt's worst fears, and the briefing he would help conduct the morning of Friday, February 16, 2001, was one of the most exciting and important in his twenty-year career. That day, Hawes, thirty-eight, a Minnesota farm boy who dreamt of being a military pilot but missed the minimum five-foot-four height requirement by a quarter inch, was to make aviation history. He would become the first person ever to launch a Hellfire missile from a Predator in flight, a privilege Hawes felt blessed by God to have been granted.

By regulation, a pilot was supposed to get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep before reporting for a flight. Whatever the rules, Hawes wanted to be rested and ready to make history, so he had plugged his ears to help get to sleep. Then, worried the plugs might make him miss his wakeup alarm, he set three clocks to go off simultaneously. Still too nervous to sleep, he began visualizing and practicing the moves he would make at the console in the ground control station when he flew the Predator the next day. His feet were moving the rudder pedals; his hands were manipulating the keyboard, the mouse, the throttle, and joystick on the Predator control console. Military pilots often do a “chair fly” before a mission; Curt just happened to be doing a “bed fly” when Chona interrupted him.

Hawes wanted to do everything precisely right the next day, especially the most important move he would make. At the end of a countdown, with a ground-based laser designator shining its beam at a target tank on a test range at nearby Nellis Air Force Base, Hawes would depress and hold down a black thumb button on his throttle, activating the trigger on his joystick, then squeeze the trigger to launch an inert Hellfire at that tank from an altitude of two thousand feet. Whatever he did, Hawes had to make sure he put his left thumb on the correct button. The missile launch button on the throttle, whose original purpose was to deploy an emergency parachute, was positioned on the joystick just a quarter inch from another button that, if pressed and held, would kill the Predator's engine, yet another emergency mechanism.

There were other reasons to be cautious, for the Predator's controls—its human-machine interface, in the language of engineers—were complex and at times confusing. The previous September, another pilot at Indian Springs who thought he had the complicated drop-down menus of the ground control station computer memorized got into the wrong menu, commanded the equivalent of a system shutdown, and crashed Predator 3023 at Nellis. The purpose of that flight was to test the laser designator carried in one of the three remaining Forty-Four balls; as a result of the crash, the Air Force now had only two Forty-Four balls left.

Hawes wasn't likely to make that kind of mistake. He had learned to fly the Predator in 1996 as a Naval Reserve officer on loan to the Air Force, and had flown multiple missions over Bosnia and Iraq. During a break in his military service, he'd flown the Predator for General Atomics. Now, having severed his Navy ties and joined the Air Force, Hawes was an Air Combat Command UAV test pilot, a “plank holder” in a new unit of the 53rd Test and Evaluation Group that was less than a month old. ACC commander Jumper, intent on standardizing how the Air Force handled the Predator, had ordered the test unit created. Thus far, the detachment was just three men strong. Hawes was its pilot; Major Kenneth “2K” Kilmurray, the detachment commander, and Master Sergeant Leo Glovka, a veteran of Predator operations since 1995, were the unit's sensor operators. Test-launching the Hellfire from Predator 3034 was the detachment's first major assignment.