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IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE TO PUT A FACE ON A PREDATOR. From a distance and without scale, the aerial vehicle resembled a model airplane a child would want to fly, with straight wings, an upside-down swallow tail, spindly extended legs that did not retract, and a front end that resembled the head of a sightless dolphin. And like a model, it carried neither pilots nor passengers.
That morning, to find its human face required opening the doors to an encampment of air-conditioned trailers a thousand miles to the west and north and a time zone away from Takur Ghar at the Prince Sultan Air Base in al-Kharj, Saudi Arabia. No one in the command and control net at Masirah Island or at Bagram knew the name of the “pilot” who was “flying” this Predator over Takur Ghar at an altitude only a couple of thousand feet above the peak. He was paid by the CIA, which “owned” the Predators that were flying in Afghanistan.
But now, ninety minutes after Roberts had fallen off Mack's helo, a Predator was transmitting back to Saudi Arabia—and on near-simultaneous feeds retransmitting around the world—live images of Roberts and the enemy who wanted to kill him.
The drone's modest four-cylinder engine pushed the Predator through the skies at about 83 m.p.h. Two Hellfire antitank missiles hung under its wings. In its first wartime deployment in Afghanistan, the armed drone was being compared with the Wright brothers and Lindbergh for ushering in the newest era of aerial innovation. Indeed, over Takur Ghar that morning, Predator added a factor rarely, if ever, seen in the history of warfare. Its video feeds gave commanders in the rear a view of a live battle, delayed only by seconds, as they sat in the comfort of their operations centers at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa (7,750 miles and eight and a half time zones away), at Masirah Island, Oman (1,000 miles and one time zone away), at Bagram, and in the Pentagon. The Predator concept and its execution gave commanders what they had only dreamed of, total situational awareness—making them like gods, omniscient and all-seeing.
And yet the promise was not quite realized. Predator's vision was no better than Mr. Magoo's, at an acuity of 20/200. Watching the feeds, no matter how hard commanders stared and no matter what they wished for, they could not know for certain what they were seeing. The Predator circled over the mountain in a tight orbit. Its lenses, mounted under the aircraft's nose, looked down. At Masirah and in Tampa, commanders in front of plasma screens watched greenish gray blobs of fuzzy heat-read light from dizzying perspectives. The snowy peak of Takur Ghar offered few points of reference. Certainly nothing gave commanders enough information, second by second, to formulate decisions on which men relied for their lives. Without sound and with disembodied images flickering on screens, commanders were looking down “through a soda straw” at the peak. Actions that were taking place on the mountain at incredible speeds required viewers of the feeds to twist mental perspectives to maintain a consistent image. On several occasions, the Predator operator in Saudi Arabia shifted the orientation of the drone's lenses with no idea what commanders in the rear needed to see. Requested changes in lens orientation—shift there, look there—took valuable time, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes for each new view. Soon, with daylight, the clarity of the feeds would improve and perspectives would sharpen. But in the minutes after Roberts fell, a technology that could make day of night kept commanders very much in the dark of their own imaginations.
Despite the drawbacks, the Predator gave JSOC commanders at Masirah confidence. The feeds, however imperfect, empowered them in a new way. The effect of hovering over the action was transforming, and something else besides—something that could have been described as almost metaphysical. Another thing that no one would have anticipated was that the Predator's immediate, if imperfect sight collapsed the emotional distance that traditionally existed between commanders and their men in battle. Seeing their men shoot and run and die, seeing the enemy do the same, they gained another stake in the fight that showed in the strain of emotions. It was far too easy to portray commanders in the rear as insensitive and complacent. The Predator, as a new technology, gave and took away in equal measure.
General Trebon, who commanded Slab and his Task Force 11 team and therefore, overall, Roberts' rescue, occupied an area of the Bagram base where the Predator feeds were not easily available. The Predator feeds were available to Trebon a hundred yards or so down a frozen street in a building occupied by the Army's Joint Task Force Mountain, but the points of view in each building were light-years apart. That night every need was being weighed against every other need. The safety of Neil Roberts and MAKO 30 worried Trebon. Operation Anaconda overall, and its initial failings, equally concerned the commanders of Task Force Mountain, led by General Franklin L. “Buster” Hagenbeck, commander of the 10th Mountain Division. Conflicts arose, as they normally do. For instance, should Task Force Mountain's commanders delay or suspend bombing runs over the valley in support of the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne divisions, at the risk of their soldiers' lives, to clear airspace to help JSOC rescue Roberts? Or should Trebon defer to Task Force Mountain's commanders and wait until the bombers completed their runs? Tempers flared and nerves frayed at the highest levels.
No one commander had been given the authority to issue orders to everybody else; Hagenbeck had no authority to dictate terms to Trebon, who in turn had no authority over Task Force Mountain. JSOC was fighting on its battlefield, and TF Mountain on its own. CENTCOM and its commander, General Tommy Franks, had not authorized Hagenbeck to command the special operations forces working in Operation Anaconda. Liaison officers sat in each other's tactical operations center tents, but the arrangement served a limited practical purpose. With no Predator feeds available to Trebon, he maintained command over the rescue, but the control authority for MAKO 30 went to JSOC's battle staff base on Masirah Island, linking itself to events in Afghanistan through a fuzzy Predator feed.
Everybody was working to save Roberts. The immeasurable anguish created among commanders by a soldier alone and in peril spread anxiety that bordered on panic up and down the chain of command. Watching blobs of green Predator light move across plasma screens, commanders felt a powerful, irresistible urge to act.
Whether Roberts was dead or was sending them a signal with the strobe that he was still alive, either way commanders still had to take Takur Ghar, or men would die on the valley floor.