ONE DAY LATER
SALAHUDDIN PROVINCE, IRAQ—DECEMBER 23, 2019—19:40 / 7:40 P.M. AST
The helicopter drone lifted off the ground with a muted buzz, and quiet cheers sounded among the dozen or so onlookers. Abbas scowled at the men. This was the wilderness, after all, and sound carried. Still, even his glare couldn’t silence a handful of whispered prayers.
“May God pilot you to your destination.”
“Bring your wrath down on the servants of Satan.”
“So shall it be for all the enemies of Allah.”
With great satisfaction, Abbas watched the machine rise. If this mission was successful, he would not only gain praise from his superiors but also notice from Tehran. The latter to him was what mattered most. No matter how much the leaders of his militia might sing his praises and celebrate his victories, still they would remain in their leadership positions and he would be forced to continue to serve their wishes. Those in Tehran, however, held the true strings of power. When they decided a change in leadership was needed, there would be a change in leadership. Abbas had been working for months now to provide them a reason for that change. It wasn’t that he disliked Falih Kazali or Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani; they were honorable men and led well. He just knew he, Seif Abdel Abbas, could do better.
The sky-bound unmanned aerial vehicle he piloted was called a Blowfish A2. This unusual name for the UAV came from the fact that the drone looked very much like a puffer fish at full puff that then had its belly removed. On the A2 Abbas controlled, in place of the blowfish’s stomach dangled four 60mm mortar rounds looking like they were nursing off of their mother.
The UAVs had been a gift from Iran, but Abbas was well aware that these weapons of war were manufactured by Ziyan UAV in the city of Zhuhai in China’s Guangdong Province. Despite heavy criticism from Western countries, including a scathing call-out by the U.S. Secretary of Defense, China had opened its UAV weapon vault to Iran. Both the Blowfish A2 and its machine-gun-carrying brother, the A3, were snatched up by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In response to their critics, China pleaded good old capitalism; their UAVs were for anyone who needed their capabilities and had the money to buy them. Hadn’t they also sold some of those same drones to Sunni Saudi Arabia, Shi’ite Iran’s mortal enemy? What could be more equitable and capitalistic than that?
Abbas knew those who cared about such things believed the instability caused by these unmanned weapons ultimately fed right into China’s global strategy. An unstable Middle East was good for the nation, they said. It drew the attention, resources, and press coverage of the United States and Russia, while keeping them distracted from China’s slow economic and political spread across the globe. But Abbas didn’t care about China. He cared about his mission.
The drone lifted higher and higher until it reached an altitude of 2,000 meters. Once there, it accelerated forward. Abbas held a computer tablet and watched its progress. While he was technically piloting the drone, all he was really doing now was observing. The target and flight path had already been programmed in. Eventually, the A2 reached a cruising speed of 80 km/h. That gave it a flight time of approximately 38 minutes before it reached its destination.
While he watched, he thought about the life events that brought him here. Born in Baghdad, he’d been five years old when the Gulf War hit his country in 1985. Looking back now, he could see what a fool Saddam Hussein had been for invading Kuwait. But he’d been too young to care about who had done what wrong against whom. He only knew his whole world had fallen apart. His father, who owned a fairly successful auto repair shop, was conscripted into the army and never came home. He’d died on the first day of the Western forces’ air assault without ever firing his weapon.
He could still remember the day the electricity went out. His family had huddled together in the dark, his mother singing quietly to calm them. It would be six months before the power would return. The water stopped five days after the electricity, and it was even longer before he and his brothers and sisters could stop making daily trips to the water trucks or the river.
His parents had money stashed in the house, and his mother had used that cash to feed him and his four siblings. But food was scarce, and prices soared. The life savings of these two hard-working Iraqis lasted only three weeks. Once that was gone, he and his older brother and sisters rummaged food among the dumpsters and garbage bags left uncollected on the streets. Soon, however, the competition grew too great for that resource as older children and adults forcibly stole whatever the younger children had gathered and were trying to take home. At that point, Abbas’s mother abandoned their house, and they moved in with her parents.
He’d once heard it said that someone in the Western alliance boasted about bombing Iraq back into the Stone Age. Abbas knew what living in the Stone Age meant. He’d resolved that one day he would return the favor.
When the Americans returned in 2003, he saw his chance for some payback. After joining Jamaat Ansar al-Sunna, a Sunni Islamic insurgent militia, he fought against the United States and the forces of the Iraq puppet regime, seeing action in Ramadi, Husaybah, and Mosul. That had been his life ever since—always looking for the next fight and for the militia that had the best chance of doing something meaningful.
His desire for vengeance is what had led him to Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, the Masters of the Martyrs Brigade. Too many militias refused to see the big picture, so they wasted their resources fighting small. Strapping on a vest full of explosives and walking into a market barely even made the news anymore. No one could bring down the world’s strongest superpowers with their unlimited resources just by thinking in that limited manner. But due to a lack of financial and military resources, neither could a militia think too big. The goal, then, was not to think big but to think smart. How does one leverage the few resources they have at their disposal in order to make the greatest impact?
That was the kind of big-picture mindset that would push him to the forefront in the eyes of the Tehran power-wielders. Kazali and Abu Mustafa were smart, but Abbas was smarter. So he would use the KSS as his platform to show those in Tehran’s power positions that Seif Abdel Abbas was the man they should be standing behind.
A flash on his screen told him the Blowfish was decreasing its speed. Pressing a viewing-square set the picture from the front camera to full screen. The distant lights were growing larger, and he switched back to control mode. Three minutes later, the helicopter drone slowed to a stop, then began its descent. Hundreds of meters of empty air passed until it halted at an altitude of 500 meters. From the camera on the drone’s underside, the Siniya refinery looked massive, even at this height. Smaller than the enormous Baiji refinery nearby, it still put out 20,000 barrels of oil daily. Abbas had studied the layout of the oil processing plant, and he knew if he hit it just right he could slow down or even completely halt production for a time. That ideal ground zero was precisely below where the drone hovered.
Pressing one button at a time, Abbas released each successive mortar round from the A2. The ten-second drop felt like an eternity. Then he saw the first explosion, then the second and third and fourth. Another button press sent the drone racing up in altitude to escape what should come next. A massive explosion sent a fire cloud mushrooming into the air and bulleted out debris he knew would strike for 300 meters all around.
The drone safely back at 2,000 meters, Abbas admired his handiwork through the lens of the UAV. Again, quiet cheers sounded behind him from his men, who had been watching the action on a separate monitor. This time Abbas joined them.
After the black smoke grew so thick that he could no longer see the ground, Abbas told the Blowfish to come swimming back home. While they waited, his team broke down their camp. They had a long, dark drive ahead of them. Drones of another sort would likely soon be out looking for who had carried out this attack. Those drones didn’t carry mere mortars; they carried Hellfire missiles. While he was confident he would never see the fires of hell because of his work in the service of Allah, that didn’t mean he was ready to see a Hellfire.
Abbas smiled at his little joke as he deposited the control tablet into a hard case. He would have to tell that one to his driver on the trip home.