3

NAJRAN, SAUDI ARABIA

The room looked like a NASA control center. Dozens of drone pilots sat in rows before high-def digital monitors, eyes glued to the screens in front of them. At the front of the room was a large IMAX screen projecting feeds from multiple drones at once, all flying more than 15,000 feet over the action at Sana’a Central Prison. A CIA operative paced nervously behind the pilots at the joysticks.

Twenty-one-year-old Brandon Lawrence was one of the best pilots in the room. Skinny and pasty-skinned, Brandon had always been a bit of a computer geek. After high school, he’d taken a year off perfecting his favorite video games, then enlisted in the Air Force. He’d completed basic training and had been selected to fly the MQ-9 Reaper, the Air Force’s most sophisticated drone, a beefed-up version of the Predator. Working under the command of the CIA in countries outside formal war zones, Brandon had logged thousands of hours and more than thirty-two combat missions in the last two years. He was steady at the controls, clinical in his annihilation of enemy targets, and nonchalant afterward. He never showed how much it tore him up.

In daylight, at 15,000 feet, his drone’s light and radar sensors were so advanced that he could zoom in on an object only inches long. He could see what kind of weapon an enemy combatant carried, if not the brand of cigarettes he smoked. With the latest facial recognition software and his drone’s 1.8 gigapixel cameras, he could pick enemy leaders out of a crowded city street. But at night, with the infrared technology, the imagery from the ground was more muted, a blur of green hues, fuzzy outlines of buildings, and hazy images of targets.

His job was to take out the guard tower at the center of the prison facility and the half-dozen men who would otherwise open fire on the SEALs once the outer wall was breached. It had to be a precise strike. A few meters off-center, and he would take out part of the prison, killing dozens of inmates.

Brandon zoomed in tight on the tower and pushed a button on his controls that pulled up a computer-generated grid displaying precise coordinates—distance, direction, range. The CIA operative moved in behind Brandon and grunted his approval. Brandon locked on to the target.

The screen provided an overlay showing the anticipated blast radius for the Hellfire missile. Brandon and the other pilots confirmed that they were locked and loaded.

“Commence fire.”

On the screen at the front of the command center, the explosions were nearly simultaneous—ten flashes, silent and surreal against the eerie green backdrop of the infrared video. The six towers in the prison’s massive outer walls all took direct hits as the missiles incinerated the guards, demolished the towers, and created gaping holes in the walls. Other strikes knocked out the power lines and generators, blanketing the prison in darkness and silencing the siren. Brandon’s missile left a smoking crater where the interior guard tower had been, the bodies of six Houthi soldiers cremated in the blast.

“Nice work,” the man behind Brandon said.

“Thank you, sir.” Brandon stared at the screen in front of him, his hand trembling slightly on the joystick. Here he was, out of harm’s way, single-handedly executing men who had no idea what was coming. He was acutely aware that this was no video game. And he felt a little ashamed that he could take another human’s life without ever being in danger himself.

He had joined the Air Force because he wanted to serve his country. It seemed the perfect fit, blending his love of technology with his desire to serve.

But he never thought it would play out like this. Working at the direction of the CIA. Sitting at a computer terminal in Saudi Arabia. Killing six soldiers in Yemen, hundreds of miles away. Judge, jury, and executioner. Watching by video as the real warriors stormed the compound.

The wonders of modern warfare.