Predator (36 page)

After hearing the report, Jumper wanted to get Air Force Secretary James Roche out of his fourth-floor E Ring office and down to the safer operations center. He found Roche, and as they headed to the operations center together, people began running down the halls, some screaming. American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 with sixty-four passengers and crew and five Al Qaeda hijackers aboard, had flown into the west side of the Pentagon even as Jumper was on his way to fetch Roche. In the world's largest office building, whose interior courtyard covers five acres, the distance from where the plane hit to the Air Force secretary's suite was so great that neither Jumper nor Roche had realized the building was struck—until they saw people running from the smoke and smelled the stench of aviation fuel now seeping through the corridors.

*   *   *

Big Safari Director Bill Grimes was at his desk in Building 557 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio, that morning when someone stuck their head in his door and said, “Hey, an airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center.” Grimes joined others around the television in the conference room next door. He remembered that a B-25 bomber had hit the Empire State Building by accident in 1945, so the initial reports that something similar had happened at the North Tower didn't seem implausible. But then the second plane hit the South Tower.

Within a few minutes, Grimes was called back to his office to take a phone call. Snake Clark's deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Johns, was calling from Air Force headquarters. He wanted to know what needed to be done to get the three Hellfire Predators and whatever else was needed to fly them in the airspace over Afghanistan ready to go. They had just started discussing the matter when Johns said he'd have to call back: the Pentagon was being evacuated. Grimes promised to have answers when they talked again.

His first call was to Major Spoon Mattoon, the Big Safari officer who had been running the Hellfire Predator testing at China Lake.

*   *   *

Captain Ginger Wallace, wearing jeans and a light sweater, was watching television in the Counterterrorist Center at CIA headquarters when the planes hit the World Trade Center. She and Captain Paul Welch had met Major Mark Cooter there early that morning to start organizing the planned new round of Predator reconnaissance flights over Afghanistan. Wallace was a specialist in intelligence collection; Welch, the son of a former Air Force chief of staff, was a communications specialist who had worked on the Summer Project at Ramstein. Welch had also helped Big Safari scientist Werner set up the communications structure for the new Predator operations base in the glade near the CIA's day care center. As with the Summer Project, Cooter was to serve as Air Force operations director for the Predator team, working with his counterpart Alec B. of the Counterterrorist Center in running the CIA reconnaissance missions. Cooter, Wallace, and Welch had expected to spend September 11 preparing for the arrival of the Air Force intelligence analysts selected to work in the double-wide trailer when Predator flights resumed. Now, with the World Trade Center in flames, Wallace wasn't sure what the Predator team would be told to do.

After the Pentagon was hit, Wallace and Welch left Cooter at the CTC and went out to the double-wide to watch news coverage on a television there and make preparations for the others who would work there. The picture quality on the TV in the trailer was poor, but at 9:59 they watched in rapt horror as the South Tower collapsed, and then, twenty-nine minutes later, the North Tower fell. They also saw reports that a fourth hijacked plane was in the air.

After a couple of hours in the trailer, Wallace and Welch walked back to the headquarters building and found it nearly empty. CIA Director George Tenet had ordered the headquarters complex evacuated in case it, too, was on Al Qaeda's target list. Nonessential personnel were sent home, while critical staff went to the CIA printing plant, a small building with a basement elsewhere on the campus. At Director Cofer Black's insistence, the CTC was still occupied and at work, and Cooter was among those there, talking almost constantly on a secure phone. Several of his calls were with Ed Boyle, who by midmorning Arizona time had made it back to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and found a secure phone.

Boyle's first call was to ACC commander Cook. The White House, Cook told him, wanted to know how soon the Air Force could get those three Hellfire Predators over Afghanistan—with missiles under their wings.

*   *   *

The telephone in his San Diego apartment woke Scott Swanson that morning just before 6:30 a.m., Pacific time. “They just hit the World Trade Center,” said Jeff Guay, the other half of Big Safari's sole Predator crew. “Turn on your TV.”

Swanson jumped out of bed and started watching the news. Like others on the Hellfire Predator team, he assumed that the burning towers were the work of Al Qaeda. Rubbing shoulders with CIA officers during the Hellfire Predator tests that summer, Swanson had gotten a sense of why the project seemed so urgent, at least to some at high levels. But like most people paying attention to Al Qaeda, Swanson had figured that if the terrorist group struck again, the target would be somewhere overseas.

The previous Friday night, Swanson had spent two hours in a ground control station at China Lake with a General Atomics crew assigned to the anticipated CIA missions. They put Predator 3038 into the air, bore-sighted its MTS ball, and launched Hellfires at target tanks. On Saturday, all the team members were sent home to get rested and ready to deploy. Some would be moving to the ad hoc base at Langley, some to Central Asia to man the launch-and-recovery element, which would take off and land the Predators from a scruffy little airfield in Uzbekistan. Some members of the LRE had flown to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on August 28, and then traveled to the airfield to erect a portable hangar.

After driving home to San Diego from China Lake, Swanson spent Sunday relaxing, the first real break he'd had in weeks. On Monday, he had taken his car to a garage for minor repairs and left it while the shop got in some parts. Now, after Guay's wakeup call and the horrific reports on TV, he decided he'd better stay near the phone. Swanson had known he would soon be heading to the white GCS and the double-wide trailer on the western edge of the CIA grounds to fly more Predator missions, but he wasn't due to fly east for a week or so.

Not long after the third hijacked plane hit the Pentagon, Swanson got another call, this time from Big Safari headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. “Pack your bags,” the caller said, “you're going to deploy early.”

*   *   *

Werner had arrived in Palmdale, California, on September 9 to conduct flight tests of his new remote split operations scheme from Big Safari's office in the Lockheed Martin facility there. On September 11 he was shaving in his hotel room with the television on when the second hijacked plane struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. He happened to see it live.

A few hours later, Grimes called.

“How are things going with your new toy out there?” Grimes asked.

“Well, pretty good so far,” Werner said. “I've got two more days of tests scheduled.”

“Well, you're done with your testing,” Grimes told him. “As of right now, your system's been declared operational.”

“But it's just a prototype,” Werner protested.

“We understand that, but we need it,” Grimes replied, telling Werner to get ready to travel because “you're going to have an airplane picking you up.”

*   *   *

No airplane would be picking up Ed Boyle and Rich Gibaldi, who were now desperate to get back from Arizona to their assignments at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. But the only military aircraft flying after Al Qaeda struck were fighter planes on patrol, tankers in the air to refuel them, and Airborne Warning and Control System—abbreviated AWACS and pronounced “A-wax”—radar and communications planes to detect threats and direct the fighters. Just after the South Tower was hit, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an unprecedented ban on all takeoffs of nonemergency aircraft.

That afternoon, Boyle and Gibaldi drove about 450 miles to Kirtland Air Force Base, near Albuquerque, New Mexico, hoping to find “space available” seats on a military flight. No transports were flying, so they caught a few hours of sleep in a motel, rose early on Wednesday, and went back to Kirtland to try again. Still no flights were available; after a while, they gave up and started driving east as fast as they could. Nearly two thousand miles of highway separated them from Langley Air Force Base.

Stopping as little as possible, they made about a thousand miles, then pulled into Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas to try once more to find a flight. Stymied again, they spent the night and then lit out Thursday morning for Virginia. They were making good time—Boyle was doing about ninety miles an hour on Interstate 40—when they passed a tractor trailer truck poking along at seventy or so just east of Forrest City, Arkansas. A white Chevrolet Camaro in front of the truck caught Gibaldi's eye.

“You know, Ed, I think that was a state trooper,” Gibaldi said. He was soon proved right by a flashing blue light.

Boyle and Gibaldi were glad to see the officer's military-style haircut as he got out of his car and put on his hat. They figured he might be a marine, and sympathetic. They were half right: Trooper Mike Kennedy, twenty-seven at the time, had never served in the armed forces, but he was on the Arkansas State Police Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT) and had military bearing. He was also happy to let the two colonels in uniform off the hook when they told him they were rushing to Virginia to get ready for war with Al Qaeda.

“I've already called you in, so I have to give you this warning ticket,” the trooper said apologetically, quickly filling out a pale green Arkansas State Police Warning of Violation citation and handing it to Boyle. “Sir, go kill the bastards,” Kennedy added. “Between you and me and the border, there's no more state troopers.”

Boyle and Gibaldi pulled into Langley Air Force Base just after midnight and went straight to their two-story, redbrick houses there. Boyle's wife, Bev, met him at the door. She had some bags with fresh clothes already packed for him, in case he needed to leave again right away, but Boyle had to see Lieutenant General Cook in the morning. Then he would get in his car, drive three hours north to the other Langley—CIA headquarters—and take command of the special Air Force cadre now assembling to fly the Hellfire Predator over Afghanistan. This time, Boyle hoped the newly armed drone would let them do exactly what Arkansas State Trooper Mike Kennedy had urged: go kill the bastards.

*   *   *

Not long after Boyle arrived home that night, an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane roared out of the dark, empty skies over Washington, D.C., and landed with a screech of its tires at Andrews Air Force Base, roughly a dozen miles southeast of the capital. As the squat gray transport parked on a taxiway and its jet engines whined to a stop, a ground crew swarmed the aircraft. Soon a portly man in slacks and a polo shirt stepped from the shadows and walked to the C-17's side door.

Snake Clark, who until May 1 had worn the blue uniform and silver eagles of an Air Force colonel, was now a civilian, though he was still technical director, simulation and integration, Office of the Assistant Vice Chief of Staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force. He was also still the Predator's Wizard of Oz in the Pentagon, the man behind the curtain who pulled strings and twisted knobs, or in Clark's case twisted arms. And once again he had worked his magic: with no civilian and few military planes in the air, and even senior officers unable to hitch a ride on those flying, Clark—with a little help from the CIA—had arranged for this huge Air Force cargo jet to cross the United States on a trip begun barely twenty-four hours after the attacks of 9/11. Now, in the wee hours of Friday, September 14, he wanted to see for himself the C-17's unusual cargo.

Strapped to the deck of the transport's eighty-eight-foot-long hold were three tan, fiberglass-reinforced, polyester-plastic “coffins,” each twenty-seven feet long; four feet, five inches wide; and two feet tall. Each held a disassembled Hellfire Predator, tail numbers 3034, 3037, and 3038. Crates nearby held a stripped-down flight control console and a portable C-band radio antenna, which a small team of experts could use to get the three Hellfire Predators in and out of the air from almost any airfield on earth. Also in the hold was a pallet cradling about a dozen tarp-covered black-and-yellow AGM-114K Hellfire missiles.

All this equipment, plus the small team of experts needed to handle it, would remain aboard when the C-17 departed. The rest of the C-17's passengers, though, were getting off at Andrews. Barely more than a dozen in number, they were the initial cadre who would fly the Hellfire Predators from the white GCS parked next to the double-wide trailer on the CIA grounds in Langley, Virginia. They included Spoon Mattoon, Scott Swanson, Jeff Guay, and Werner; three Predator pilots (one a woman) and six sensor operators from the Air Force's 11th and 15th Reconnaissance Squadrons at Indian Springs; two General Atomics pilots, some avionics experts, and a handful of engineers from their company and L-3 Communications.

*   *   *

Mattoon had boarded the C-17 at China Lake on Wednesday, the day after the twin towers fell, bringing aboard—at the loadmaster's suggestion—a rented Jeep Cherokee he'd had no time to return. (Clark would cackle about that bit of chutzpah for years to come.) From China Lake, the cargo plane flew to Palmdale, where Werner, Swanson, Guay, the other Air Force drone operators, and the contractors were waiting in the Big Safari office at Lockheed Martin. The Globemaster took off again at 7:00 p.m., almost precisely sunset. Sitting in a cockpit jump seat so he could chat with the crew and get a view as they flew, Swanson found it the eeriest flight of his life. No other aircraft were visible in the sky, and the C-17 provided the only light between the ground and the stars. Their first stop, after a bit more than four hours, was the Army's Redstone Arsenal, in Huntsville, Alabama. The previous day, only hours after the attacks in New York and Washington, Mattoon had telephoned Hellfire engineer Terry McLean, who had flown home to Huntsville the previous weekend, exhausted after their summer of round-the-clock Predator tests in the desert.