IN A REMOTE PORTION OF Afghanistan north of Kabul, where the mountains ease to hills and the hills to lush irrigated fields covering a broad valley, in a tiny village set among the silty channels of the Kunduz River, a pair of Blackhawk helicopters landed near a walled compound and, against odds, a tall thin young woman from West Virginia named Sarah Soliman got out.
A helmet and body armor hung loosely about her, but beneath she wore a stylish button-down and smart business slacks. She claimed no uniform, carried no gun, lacked all the tactical accoutrements the modern soldier found fashionable, and her distinctive long red hair, so bright and authentic one startled upon first glimpse, was sensibly tied back against the rotor wash. With the confidence of a frequent flier she hopped from the side of the bird, one chunky heel on the ground at a time, and with long steps crossed the LZ of dried mud to where a man from the local ODA team was waiting for her.
He was all contrast: unwashed, M4, baggy camo pants, boots, beard. In a spotter’s scope they would make quite a matched pair. They greeted each other with comfortable familiarity and hand gestures, few words being possible under the buffet of the blades. At his feet sat six small clear bags filled with blackened junk. He pointed at the bags, hefted one, indicated a white paper report inside each, helped her carry the parcels back to the helicopter, and loaded them on the center jump seat where they would not be lost. The woman reboarded. The man turned his back and returned to his rack in the compound.
The helos never turned off their engines. In a minute they were off, six bags of IED evidence, six bags of hard-core forensics, six bags of pressure plates and fingerprints and distinctive wire snips and hairs, permanently sequestered from the conventional reporting channels and hand-delivered to the central depths of one of the fiercest black holes in Afghanistan.
WHEN SOLIMAN ARRIVED back at Bagram, she delivered the six bags to Zac Crush at SOCOM’s IED exploitation fusion cell. Though they worked for the main SOCOM (Special Operations Command) task force in Afghanistan—in the J2, the intelligence hub for activities as varied as hunter-killer takedowns and local police training—Soliman and Crush were not EOD technicians or spooks or Special Forces. They weren’t even in the military. They were contractors. Soliman is a biometrics engineer. Crush is an intel analyst in Identity Operations, SOCOM’s term for figuring out who people are.
Biometrics is the science of measuring and cataloguing unique human signatures, and it is not a new idea. In the late nineteenth century, French police began tabulating the lengths of forearms and feet and jawlines. At the same time, the US Army, in an effort to catch scam artists who enlisted in multiple recruiting stations to receive multiple bonus checks, began recording the distance from the top of the shoulder to the tip of the finger of each new soldier. Scotland Yard adopted fingerprinting in 1901, the New York City police department five years later.
As a system and theory, biometrics is unchanged. To be “enrolled,” a citizen simply has their unique characteristics measured. Then, when they want something (a job, to cross a border, access to a military base or classified information) or when the state wants something of them (evidence connected to a crime), those unique characteristics are measured again and checked against a database. Maybe the criminal had applied for a job; maybe the person applying for a job is an ex-con. In the twenty-first century we turn iris patterns into bar codes, use face recognition software, and flip through fingerprints digitally, but the process is fundamentally the same. Only the scope is different; millions of electronic records can be scoured in minutes versus thousands of paper records in days or weeks.
As a biometrics engineer, it was Sarah Soliman’s job to implement that scope. She helped develop the technology, tested it, taught it, and, in a pinch, used it herself. In 2011 and 2012, she traveled across Afghanistan in order to teach Special Forces units to gather the biometrics data—fingerprints, three photos, iris scans—of every Afghan they met. On the side, she was a courier, carrying forensic IED evidence back to the main SOCOM intel cell, but her prime job was that of the evangelist, selling and teaching a new way to fight the war.
Conducting a census of the population is a classic counterinsurgency strategy. It is also classic counterterrorism, a way to positively identify who needs killing.
Iraq was always a conventional war: large traditional Army divisions and brigades, firm AOs and lines of demarcation. In contrast, the war in Afghanistan was, from the beginning, a task force war. The Rangers went here, SOF went there, SEALs on this mission, 10th Mountain Division in a thrust to Tora Bora. That culture persisted as the years went on, and task forces were set up for everything: Paladin did the IEDs, ODIN did the aerial surveillance. Each NATO partner had their own designation. The task forces known only by a number often did the killing. SOCOM set up a tongue twister known as CJSOTF-A: Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan. CJSOTF (pronounced “See-Jah-SO-Tiff”) broke the country up into districts that did not match the larger Army regional command system and allowed each ODA team within this proprietary framework to act as a mini–task force itself.
No wonder, then, that biometrics, a system that functions properly only if built on a monolithic foundation, would find a foothold in Iraq long before Afghanistan. In 2007, two systems were fielded: the Biometric Automated Toolset and the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, known to soldiers in Iraq as BATs and HIIDEs. The BATs used a laptop and heavy scanner and sat at the front gate of every FOB to check any local who wanted access. The HIIDE looked like an old-fashioned bulky digital camera, and could be taken on patrol. This allowed two important developments. First, the entire country could be enrolled if soldiers would serve as door-to-door census takers. Second, when a unit detained someone suspicious, instead of just dousing them in Expray (which would make their hands turn black if they had touched explosives or fertilizer or both), one could immediately scan their eyeballs to find out if they were wanted men.
Afghanistan did not fully adopt biometrics until the next generation of mobile device was fielded. It was called the SEEK, proof that nerds have a sense of humor. It took iris scans and photos and, unlike the HIIDE, FBI standard nail-to-nail rolled fingerprints. “Ten rolled is gold,” Soliman would say in her classes. SEEKs were fielded to both Special Forces teams and average Army patrols during the Afghanistan Surge; the surge in manpower was also a surge in data, to move Left of Boom.
The biometrics database was one of the few that was truly DoD-wide, and if searched correctly, it could reveal a map of the IED supply chain. The same fingerprints were always found on blasting caps or on the tape inside pressure plates; repeat offenders were the norm. Who applies for a job after emplacing IEDs? Soliman met them all the time. The unemployed, the desperate, the poor, the cuckolded, the cajoled, the ignorant. Computers are magic here, she thought. How can the average Afghan even conceive of a searchable database system of fingerprints and iris scans?
But biometrics could only take you so far. Zac Crush tried to fuse various streams of forensic data and saw the limits every day. He was an analyst in an IED deconstruction office, an intel cell somewhat analogous to Chris Frost’s Weapons Intelligence Team. Frost didn’t trust his headquarters in Baghdad and so did his own analysis in Samarra. CJSOTF found the national system set up by Task Force Paladin, the main counter-IED organization in Afghanistan, too slow and cumbersome, and so it hired contractors like Crush to do IED exploitation locally. Special Forces needed forensic answers faster than the conventional military could give them, and so it created its own feedback loop in its own black hole, fed by IEDs recovered by their teams. Compared to the experts working in the big evidence labs in Bagram, analysts like Crush sometimes had less specific training and had to do multiple jobs, but he produced reports quickly that could be used immediately. This is what he found:
So you have a fingerprint. So what? A fingerprint by itself is useless unless you have records to check it against, and the biometrics database for Afghanistan was always incomplete. And even if you found a match and discovered that a print on a battery in Kandahar in 2012 matched one collected from an individual who applied for a job in Mazer-e-Sharif in 2009, there is very little that can be done at that moment. You know that guy’s name, but you don’t know where he is now. So you flag his profile in case he randomly pops again. And anyway, all you really know is that he touched a battery. You don’t know exactly how he fits into the process. The complete IED network map does not instantly spring into focus once a match is made; it was always fragmented, a concentration of data here, large holes there.
Tracking individual data points is not enough. Soliman’s databases sorted through millions of head/tail penny combinations and set priority lists for the analysts. Crush tied that biometrics info to actual devices. But to move beyond grabbing trigger pullers and tape touchers, to break into an IED network Gallieni oil spot’s second and third rings, an additional level of analysis and ingenuity is required.
In the J2 black hole, such profile-building was the job of contractors like Hayes.
Hayes goes by his first name. He is physically forgettable, and his Southern accent is often well concealed. Part psychologist, part anthropologist, part straight-from-a-police-procedural detective, Hayes was trained in multiple types of intelligence collection. He did biometrics and sensors and detainees as well as traditional targeting and analysis, and like an MBA who speaks multiple languages fluently, international business opportunities opened to him.
When he deployed to Afghanistan, Hayes found himself reading as many histories as current reports, and it was the academic texts concerning Genghis Khan and the empire building of the Ghilzais that made the most sense to him. The Ghilzais were the predecessors of the modern Pashtuns that form the bulk of the Taliban, and they had not changed greatly in centuries. Insular, tribal, stubborn. They outlast empires and don’t tolerate foreigners in their valleys. Eventually Hayes realized his whole intelligence process was built on so many false assumptions, he thought it was amazing they found anyone at all.
Take, for example, the simple idea of names.
In America and the West, everyone has a unique name. It is generally permanent, and we organize and search for people based on their names. The Western tradition assumes that strangers will interact, and so it privileges the easy building of a large social network, using fixed names as reference. The biometrics intelligence databases are built on this system. The fingerprints and iris scans and photos must be attached to a record, and that record is identified by the individual’s name. Iraq’s naming system was generally stable, secular, and Western. Iraqis occasionally used a kunya, deriving a nickname from one’s child, but it was saved for the notable or infamous. Biometrics fit fairly well.
Afghanistan’s naming convention, on the other hand, privileges tribal integrity, isolationism, and long-term relationships with a few close family members in one’s clan. Why do you need a system to meet a stranger? Strangers stay in their valley, and you stay in yours. Given that, Hayes found that names were fluid and repeated often. The same individual might have multiple public names, depending on his relationship to the person asking. The name might change throughout a life as the person changes. These weren’t criminal or hadith-directed aliases, but rather natural shades on a theme. The same name could be spelled many ways, often by the same individual. Afghans know the personal history of those in their village—sometimes also assigning traditional Arabic and Islamic titles of hafiz, qari, and mullah if the person memorized the Koran as a child, speaks it well, or works at the local mosque—and everyone’s current name is easily and intuitively understood. Even if the infantry grunt entering the name in the SEEK spelled it right, it was a temporary name alone.
Hayes saw that he was checking fingerprints against a database as impermanent as last winter’s snow. But there were so few other means to collect intelligence. No individual American military unit stayed in place long enough to truly earn the kind of trust required to get people to talk willingly. No one watched state-run television, and most villagers got their news at their local marketplace and mosque. It was very difficult for Americans to listen in on that conversation, to even know what the average Afghan was hearing about current events. Analysts used to be able to rely on signals intelligence, intercepted radio communications. They called it SIGINT crack, because it was so addicting and easy to use and exploit, but it was a crutch, covering up for a lot of bad methodology and lesser analysis. The enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan had learned to guard their communications, and the good old crack days were now long gone.
Often, Hayes knew, the biometrics was the best they had, the only objective link between individual and bomb.
ON ONE TOUR, while Hayes was an analyst in the J2, Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan exploded like a pressure cooker heated on the stove too long. Every measurable toll spiked: deaths, injuries, gunfights, IEDs. The lethality of each IED suddenly leapt as well, and new designs were seen throughout the district.
There’s a new guy here, Hayes thought. There’s a new trainer in town.
Hayes didn’t call him the Engineer. He wasn’t the Smart Guy either. In the J2, the analysts called him the So-Called Expert. But despite the name, an expert he was, and respected. Hayes knew that bad bomb makers didn’t live long enough to have the kind of impact he was seeing.
In his databases, Hayes’s profile for the Engineer was thin. He didn’t have fingerprints or an iris scan or a photo or even a name. Of course, the Engineer’s Afghan name might be evolving as well.
Hayes only had one firm hit. A series of fingerprints in the hot glue used to attach carbon rods to wooden pressure plate boards. Mohammed from Kunduz. Not Mohamed or Muhammad. Three M’s and an E. Good luck finding just one Mohammed in Kunduz, Hayes thought, here’s the phone book. But this one had previously applied for a job down south, so they had a name and a face to match to the glue on fifteen IEDs. Thank God for the photos. Without those it was almost impossible to pick up the right guy.
Hayes took the reports to his commander. This was a place to start, Hayes said. We start with Mohammed, and we work our way up. They should do a targeted data collection, Hayes said. Verify or enroll everyone living within a few klicks of every IED bearing Mohammed’s hot glue.
In a case like this, it would be Soliman’s job to get on a helicopter and link up with the local ODA team. She would deliver new SEEKs and software and repair equipment and train them to cast the wide net, enroll every villager and dirt farmer throughout the valley.
That’s the funny thing about using biometrics. The only way to find one person is to find everyone.
WE’VE ALREADY ESTABLISHED that all these stories seem to begin on September 11, and Sarah Soliman’s trip to that helicopter is no exception.
It was the United Way Day of Caring in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, and Soliman was with her high school senior class in a local park, picking up trash when the towers fell. She had already planned to attend her local West Virginia University on scholarship, but after 9/11 she decided to apply her interest in math and science to WVU’s biometrics engineering program, the only one of its kind in the nation. In her major, she fell in love with data. On a semester abroad in Morocco, she fell in love with travel and exotic cultures. During internships at the White House and the DoD’s Biometrics Management Office in DC, she secured her future in government. She spent a year getting her master’s degree in the UK, and then she traded idyllic green Cambridge for the Green Zone in Baghdad. It was 2008, and her first job out of college was working as a biometrics contractor.
That was her first tour, and she would come to think of them as tours. It wasn’t exactly the same as being in the military, she knew. She didn’t take the same risks certainly. But she went back and forth, deployed and home, for the next several years.
In the Green Zone, she worked in a glorified DMV, checking locals who wanted to work on base. She read Imperial Life in the Emerald City as preparation, and it was everything she expected: a college campus in the middle of a war she barely saw. She learned all of the cultural norms, kept her arms covered and her hair long. She learned to say, “Welcome,” and “Happy to meet you,” and “Please open your eyes,” in halting Arabic. She wore blouses and skirts and heels and earrings to “glam it up a bit” but avoided black because it showed the dust, swearing to herself that if she ever felt tempted to convert to the standard contractor uniform of polo shirts and 5.11 khakis, then it was time to get a new job. She met a handsome man in her office one day and fell in love with him during Tuesday night country line-dancing lessons under the crystal chandeliers and engraved ceilings of Saddam’s marble palace. She married that man when they returned to the United States, and then she did what we all did; she left him at home to go on another deployment.
She spent half of the next year on the flight line at Kandahar, helping to launch sorties for Task Force ODIN. Most military acronyms don’t make much sense when their component terms are written out, but the Norse god–inspired ODIN gets pretty close: Observe, Detect, Identify, Neutralize. ODIN was ostensibly an Army unit but really consisted of a mishmash of contractors. The only members in uniform were quality assurance representatives serving as “systems integrators,” making sure all of the companies worked together. It was a Go-Co program: the government owned the planes, the pilots and technicians were contractors. They flew a variety of platforms, from the Army’s version of the Predator to modified King Airs measled with antennas. The first commander of ODIN was Army Colonel A. T. Ball, and he said their mission was “sensor-to-shooter” fusion, “persistent stare capability,” and “dynamic re-tasking.” The policy wonks call this Network-Centric Warfare, using our network to take out theirs. More oil spots.
Soliman’s role in this process was minuscule. She ensured one small device on one aircraft was functioning. Meanwhile, the other airframes bubbled with sensor pods that listened to radio communications and smelled fertilizer-based homemade explosives and did a million other things she knew nothing about. Most of her tour she was isolated, on one far side of the flight line, killing time in her little parts shed. General McChrystal had recently determined that everyone was having too much fun in the war, and so had made life more Spartan, closing restaurants and coffee shops on base. She was lonely, but she was introduced to a world she barely knew existed. In Baghdad, she had only seen the tiniest sliver of these secret missions. Who flies these planes? She knew that, when she came back, she wanted the best of both worlds, the social and the surveillance, and to transition from building Gallieni oil spots to dismembering them.
And now here she was, assigned to CJSOTF and the J2, working with operators and analysts, on a helicopter flying to train a special operations team to use a technology that continued to fascinate her.
So much had changed since her first tour. Then, she had only one week at Fort Benning as preparation: marching and guns and shots and scary sucking-chest-wound PowerPoints and two green seabags for her gas mask and vest and helmet. The first time she flew on a helicopter out of Baghdad, she was so nervous. Her future husband calmed her fears then, but she didn’t know what to wear, what to do. She wore a ridiculous winter coat on that first flight and was somehow still cold. But the flight was a liberation from the Green Zone, and a beautiful ballet in the air, she thought.
Helo and Osprey flights were no big now. She flew constantly, all over the country, training special ops teams. She knew she would never really blend in so she didn’t even try. They don’t care anyway, these SOCOM guys, she thought. They don’t care if you are a man or woman, military or contractor, black or white. They only judge you on one thing. Do you contribute to the mission? Do you pull your own weight? She was determined to, and so while she still wasn’t tactical, she now had very tactical teammates.
She thought that working for SOCOM as a contractor with no military background was a little like studying abroad in Morocco. Do your research, be a good student, read books, learn the terminology. She read Dick Couch and Linda Robinson and discovered using jargon like “headshed” helped her fit in. She made it clear she wasn’t taking anyone’s job. There was no biometrics equivalent to her in the active-duty Army, and she wasn’t trying to beat anyone, lift more, outshoot anyone on the rifle range. CJSOTF eventually did offer her a gun, and though in predeployment prep she had shot expert on both M4 and M9, she declined.
Soliman also read War Torn, a series of first-person narratives of female reporters in Vietnam. Some things had changed—one woman had a baby in Vietnam and got a pass for her family to visit—but plenty about being a woman in a war had not. Not in the military but affected by it, shaped by it, in a tenuous relationship with it, she took inspiration from the reporter who carried a stick of Maybelline coral-colored lipstick everywhere she went, a silent safety blanket. Soliman could order an infinite variety of lipsticks at the Bagram PX now.
She had picked the right field at the right time, she could see. The technology was blossoming just as the war drove need. Senator Byrd—West Virginian of the Century, God rest his soul—had moved the FBI’s biometrics lab to Clarksburg and set up the program in Morgantown just as she came out of high school. The 9/11 Commission Report had recommended a national biometric-based entry and exit system based on the government’s experience with Mohammed al-Kahtani. He was a candidate to be the twentieth hijacker but was fingerprinted and denied entry by suspicious border agents in 2001. Later, he was captured at Tora Bora and re-identified when his fingerprints were run again at Guantanamo Bay. The DoD would adopt biometrics after a dining hall in Mosul was hit by a suicide bomber in December of 2004; he had snuck on base using a falsified ID card. While an intern in DC in 2005, she had seen the daily hit count, all of the times two biometrics records in Iraq connected for some reason. It was all rudimentary then, no IED forensics added yet, but it was still fascinating, and she had seen the development of the entire program. There were even opportunities with the UN now, in refugee camps around the world, helping people prove who they are so they qualify for benefits. She was on the front edge of a technological wave, she thought. The Iraq War had ended just as the system was finally getting established, but now she was part of an opportunity to demonstrate the full potential in Afghanistan.
This whole country is like a laboratory, like a giant beta-test, she realized. Can we prove the technology really works? And it’s a chance we might not get again; if we don’t occupy another country in our next war, we won’t be able to enroll the population the same way. We’ll have to rely on signatures like IP addresses and keystroke patterns. Everyone is obsessed with cyber-this and drones-that. Khyber Scones! Biometrics was advancing in ways those talking heads didn’t even realize.
On her first day in Baghdad, her first day in a war zone, her first day in her new job, her boss, a full colonel in the US Army, welcomed her to Baghdad with these words: “You’ll be working with the Army’s sexiest and most successful weapon.” But she had never seen it as a weapon. It made sense on some level, she thought, but I’m an engineer, solving problems. I don’t judge if anyone is a bad guy, I just provide the 1s and 0s and let someone else figure that out.
And it’s not all about bad guys. She helped people get jobs, let them move around freely, let trustworthy people prove they were so. Most of these people are just caught in unfortunate circumstances, she thought. Sometimes they make bad choices. But she wasn’t chasing people anyway. She was chasing data. Chasing the opportunity to have someone else put the pieces of the puzzle together. You would think looking at eyes and fingers all day it would be personal, but it’s not. There is so much data it can’t be.
It might be difficult to collect all the data now, but it’ll pay off in the long run. If not this tour, the next one. It’s an act of faith, paying it forward, she knew. You had to have faith in the trickle-down effect. You have to trust the system, to know it’s all going to work. Not always, but enough. The system wasn’t perfect, and she knew most never saw the fruits of their labor. They either put data into the black hole, or they took it out on the other side in some Einstein alternate universe, but they never saw both sides.
But now that she worked in the J2 and sat in the weekly SOCOM command briefs, she had seen both sides. She had seen the system work, and she was more sure of this big picture than ever. Biometrics was just one part of it, certainly, of what they called Identity Operations or, sometimes, Identity Dominance. Knowing for sure who someone is. But you could see it pay off when an old record would pop, full of biographical info that was really hard to re-create later, and she would always tell her colleagues, “That unit from 2006 just got you a great SITREP today.” In Iraq it was about fingerprints, but in Afghanistan now they had the funding and technology to focus on identity generally: iris scans and photos, sure, but also DNA and documents and media and all of the other little trails we leave. And it would only get better. SOCOM was collecting the biometrics data of every indigenous force they trained worldwide.
Sure, it can feel like spinning your wheels when you are collecting and collecting and not catching anyone. But when she was out in the field, working with an ODA team in a village, at least at the end of the day she could report she had enrolled twenty-three people that were unknown before. This wasn’t like Vietnam and body counts. This was an achievable goal, a census of Afghanistan.
The two Chinooks crossed high over the ODA compound, circled back over the river, and began to flare as they descended in tandem. They were landing at the compound, good. Once, they had dropped her alone in the middle of a village, and it was summer and she was wearing short sleeves. It still bothered her, that she could have been so culturally insensitive, bare arms and a woman alone.
She began to gather her go-bag and equipment. They had not been shot at on the flight. She had never been shot at while flying, not a single time she knew of, on any milk run or courier mission. After that first flight out of Baghdad, she had never feared flying again. She only feared being slow, being late with a profile or report, screwing up her data, her one little biometrics piece, and then hearing the next day something happened. A green-on-blue attack, an Afghan police recruit that she said was vetted turning out to be Taliban. She only feared that one of her SOCOM teams would get hurt because her system failed.
This was the biggest contribution she could make, be ready to go embed with any ODA or Marine unit or special operations team that needed her. Her little part to prevent more ramp ceremonies. She saw them, all the time, on the flight line at Bagram. The flag-covered coffins, every day it seemed. When she saw them, her gut twisted like a limb caught in a toothed coal shearer from back home. She would see them and then cry and turn away, but somehow there always seemed to be more the next day.
After so many years—9/11 was over a decade ago!—it had taken so long, but she was finally really doing her part. She wasn’t just reading about it anymore. It was a privilege and an opportunity and an honor. The tears from that day, out in the park with the United Way, they still came back readily enough too. And always more ramp ceremonies.
She looked out the back of the Chinook, and the ground drew close, and she saw two guys on four-wheelers waiting for her. They looked so thin. They get so little food out here, the air drops are so sparse, and she had so much at her big base.
She slung on her pack and jogged down and out of the back of the bird and into the dust cloud kicked up by the rotors.
No more ramp ceremonies.
THE POLICE CAPTAIN turned off his cell phone and discretely approached al-Muhandis.
Two helicoptera, malem, the captain may have said. Two of the big fat ones. My brother’s son, out on the ridge with his goats, he saw them and called right away. They will be here very soon.
The Engineer may have sat at the end of a long workbench, a string of students on each side, the tabletop covered in boards and wires and drying glue and black electrical tape.
We must move you, malem. Now, to my cousin’s house in Baghlan. We can take the police laarey.
Too late, the Engineer said. He gestured at the Tea Boy huddled in a corner of the long room. The boy was wary, two black eyes and a limp from the police captain’s … play with him the night before. But the boy had nothing to fear from him; that was an Afghan indulgence, not his.
Habibi, I need you to send a message, the Engineer called.
Yes, Haji, the boy replied. He had studied his Koranic Arabic well, unlike these other uncouth manglers of the tongue. How could they even understand the imam’s teaching on Friday at the mosque?
Take a motorbike and go to the talib camp just outside of town and tell them to radio the other katibat about attacking the kuffar when they arrive here, the Engineer said.
But malem, the police captain protested. The kuffar can hear the radio now.
I know, the Engineer may have replied, they must hear the radio. There is no time to clean the material, but we must all leave this room immediately. Get to your homes and your fields. None of the pieces must be with you. Take off your gloves and throw them in the fire.
No matter his instructions, they were not so disciplined when he was not around.
What do we do if they arrest us? one of his students asked. They will torture us. How can we resist?
Yes, they will torture you, the Engineer said. We have seen this. Everyone knows it. Remember the Throne verse of the Koran. Say the Ayatul Kursi to yourself, over and over again, and invoke the greatness of Allah who knows and sees and has supremacy over all.
They all got up and left the room quickly. When the Engineer stepped outside into the sunlight, he saw that the two helicopters had landed on the edge of the village and the Crusaders were already invading the sanctity of each home, gathering everyone outside. Twelve men, and a few women in their inappropriate men’s uniforms, and one more that he did not recognize. She was covered, but not in an abaya, and he could see her red hair falling from beneath her scarf. She is Nuristani, maybe, or one of Alexander’s Greeks?
She was holding a small black box that looked like his old-fashioned Polaroid camera from university. She was placing the box against the face of each Afghan, showing the uniformed kuffar which buttons to push, how to align a white dot on the side with each villager’s eyes.
She’s a traveling teacher, he may have thought. Just like me.
The men in front of him queued politely to have their fingers rubbed. Some rolled their own fingers on the device. They had done this before, he could tell. Some were confused by it. He had the soft hands of a dentist after years of wearing powdered latex gloves. He stayed in the back of the line, always drifting away if he could. The chance they already had his fingerprints was small, but why risk it?
The Crusaders had scanned over half the village when he heard yelling on their radios. They gathered, and talked, and held their rifles with renewed interest, and rushed back to their helicopters. The woman with red hair followed.
Habibi, always dependable. The Engineer got in a white Hilux pickup truck with the police captain and headed south.
MOHAMMED FROM KUNDUZ squatted against a mud wall.
Five more Mohamads and Mohameds and Muhammads waited in the wings, but this one was different. Hayes could see it on his report. The SEEK scan and check said this was the Mohammed who had been sticking his fingers inside pressure plates for the last month.
None of the others had popped on the scan, but they’d question them anyway, just to be sure. Never know what you might learn. They checked the dead too, the squirters the team guys had to shoot. They always squirt, it’s like they can’t help it. A few of them kicked out records. You can still run the fingerprints and the iris scan, if you prop open the eyelids.
Hayes and his linguist and a few detainee interrogators were there. None of them wore uniforms, unless you count the standard contractor polo shirt. Hayes knew them all by name and not organization. At the end of the tour he would eventually ask where they were all from. Only half were government agencies.
The commander of the local Afghan commando unit also stood near and watched. He was a major or lieutenant colonel, probably. Hayes swore he was high on hashish and mentally retarded. No, seriously, this wasn’t some offhanded insult. Like really, medically mentally retarded. His family would have bought him the job anyway. Get him out of the house.
So this was the game: Somebody had approached Mohammed from Kunduz and said, “You make ten Afghanis a day cutting poppy. How about fifty a night to wrap tape around wood?” Now, who was that? And who taught him to wrap tape around wood? That’s who they really wanted.
But getting these peons to talk their way up the food chain was tough. Not under the constraints they had now. You can’t hurt them, you can’t make them uncomfortable, you can’t threaten them, you can’t offend the local populace, you can’t offend NATO, you can’t offend our local partners. Yes, don’t offend the mentally handicapped commandoes or child rapists. Not that the locals had such constraints with each other; Dostum put the foot soldiers of his enemies in shipping containers and forgot about them. But he could only ask politely, and only for a short time.
So you try to understand them, figure out the right questions to ask, the one’s they will answer. First, do you even have the right Mohammed from Kunduz? So you ask his father’s name, his brother’s name, his tribe, who he works with. Ask about their valley, what is happening there. They only care what is happening in their valley anyway. Of course, if we weren’t in their valley, they wouldn’t care about us either.
But that usually breaks down too. Everyone knows they don’t value education, but everyone forgets they don’t have proper nutrition either, Hayes thought. They have poor eyesight, their bodies and minds don’t grow correctly. Some places, they think they’re still fighting the Russians, a bunch of big white guys in standard uniforms speaking a language they don’t understand.
So they got the man talking. This wasn’t like breaking some high-ranking Al Qaeda guy trained in counterintelligence. This is just another Mohammed from Kunduz we’re talking about. Hayes squatted with him, and the main interrogator and linguist too, and they made progress, until they finally asked him, There is a new trainer here, right? A new man that teaches you to make IEDs?
The linguist translated. The only word Hayes picked out was “mines.” Pashto had grabbed the English word.
Silence. Mohammed from Kunduz, who was happy to tell you about his father and brothers and cousins, got evasive. He shifted his feet, rocked back and forth in his squat, and looked away.
Tell him we found the room, Hayes whispered to the interrogator. That we found the piles of wires and circuit boards and timers and those screens you use for sifting the explosives you cook up. The hot glue guns were even still warm.
The interrogator tried this new tack, so then Mohammed from Kunduz gave up another guy, Mullah Abdullah maybe, and said he was the man for mines in this district.
But it was never that easy. You had to pay attention, make sure it was your man.
But Mullah Abdullah doesn’t teach you to make the mines, does he? Hayes asked.
No, then a long story, about where Abdullah kept the mines, in an old dry kariz maybe, near his qalat.
See, this isn’t right, Hayes thought. We don’t want the local man, we want the new one.
So they pressed him, and asked about the new man who had just arrived, and Mohammed from Kunduz got even more uncomfortable, and so Hayes and his linguist and the interrogator pressed harder, shouted maybe, their detainee sweated and rocked and looked far away, and Hayes asked again, What is the name of new emir who comes to Kunduz and teaches you to make the mines, and then Mohammed just put his head in his hands and went completely silent, and no more sound came from him except a quiet and quick mumbling over and over to himself. Arabic now. The Koran.
And that’s it, Hayes thought. There’s nothing more we can do, not anymore.
The Engineer is the one name they never give up. Never, in all his years working interrogations, had he scored it a single time. Hayes was convinced: they’re scared to death of this guy.
THE BLACK HOLE doesn’t have a name, photo, fingerprint, iris scan, or DNA sample of the Engineer. But his profile is not completely empty, because, as JIEDDO promised, we can learn a lot about him by the IEDs he creates.
Our composite image of the Engineer is the amalgamation of very few men. Explosive device circuit designs are remarkably consistent—one main power supply, a trigger that actuates a transistor, a current dump to the blasting caps, a safety light, an arming timer—and so we can be sure that a relatively small number of minds have been producing many bombs over many years.
One could argue that, like an invasive species, IEDs were introduced into the Levant and Mesopotamia by none other than T. E. Lawrence. His targets were the Turkish railroads that supplied Ottoman garrisons; no way for a train to find a new route to outflank such a mine. Al Qaeda itself began as a movement of intellectuals, an outgrowth of the Afghan Arab movement founded by Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who received his PhD at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, and the college-educated Osama Bin Laden. The CIA trained the Afghan Arabs in the 1980s in the use of remote firing devices—they weren’t called IEDs then, at least not generally—and they spread from there. In the 1990s, veterans of Afghanistan taught the skills to mujahideen fighting in Chechnya. Fewer IEDs were utilized in jihad in Bosnia and Kosovo, but that was purely practical. Yugoslavia was awash in conventional weapons, especially, and infamously, landmines.
By 2000, Al Qaeda remained an organization of the educated. The core leadership consisted of many former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Egyptian intellectual and physician Ayman al-Zawahiri. The principal planner of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, received a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina A&T State University in 1986. At least thirteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers attended college, four in engineering and law programs. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria now consist of poor farmers planting IEDs and half-literate ISIS videographers filming beheadings, but they didn’t start that way.
It is no stretch, then, to say that the Engineer is exactly that, college educated with a real engineering degree. Many IEDs that initially appear simple are not. They require a relatively advanced knowledge of the inner workings of electronic components—signal filtering and rectifying, microprocessor programming, the breakdown voltage of specific transistors, how to maximize the gain of an op-amp—that is beyond the scope of a household electrician or hobbyist.
Such complexities do more than imply education. They also reveal how the Engineer thinks, as we can decipher how he solved each engineering challenge. The choice to build a redundant system, multiple blasting caps and firing systems, ensures a device will function. Multiple countdown timers prevent an emplacer from accidentally detonating a device too early. Hand-drawn schematic diagrams of IED circuits have been discovered in weapons caches in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by analyzing them we can even infer where he got his degree: Western universities teach that the symbol for electrical ground should be placed on the bottom of a sketch, while many Asian universities reverse that convention.
In the early 2000s, just as the war was beginning, the cost of consumer electronics plummeted. Basic cell phones became so cheap as to be disposable. Many of these gadgets were perfect for IEDs, giving the Engineer a convenient foundation from which to work. His ability to modify the devices told us even more about him: when one foreign brand of cordless telephone changed the layout on its base station’s hugely complex internal circuit board, his wiring adaptation changed with it to a new physical location that was electrically the same point in the circuit he had used before. It was as if he had solved the Sunday crossword puzzle, and when someone else translated it to a new language and scrambled the verticals and horizontals, he re-solved it to discover that 5 Down was now 27 Across but, yes, “primer” still fits.
The engineers in CEXC and the J2 fusion labs would reverse-engineer these creative design decisions, but even at an aesthetic level, a lot can be learned by the way a device is constructed. If the splattery frenzy of Pollack or the layered continuous strokes of Van Gogh reveal something of their minds, so too sloppy IEDs versus perfect rows of wires. In every part of the process there is a piece of data left behind, and the circuit design and wiring combinations became a subset of forensic evidence all to themselves.
By virtue of his education, the Engineer’s job could not be easily transferred to someone else. Therefore, he would be protected, of the group but separate, an emir apart, traveling between theaters—Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Georgia, Chechnya, and back—lending his experience as jihad ebbed and flowed via the vastly different insurgencies fighting in each country. The original jihad that arose against the Soviets is now thirty-five years old, and as bad bombers don’t survive to influence the war, the Engineer’s teeth must grow long.
None of this is to say that the Engineer does not need a robust implementation network in each country. He taught others important and destructive skills, how to build a new trigger or mix homemade explosives, but he would be most effective by leaving the hands-on dangerous work to others. This allows him to, literally and figuratively, keep his hands from getting dirty. When he uploads a new circuit design to a Chinese specialty manufacturing company (not in the business of asking questions) and purchases thousands of mass-produced circuit boards online, he touches nothing. The fingerprints on the metallic green wafers are not the Engineer’s or even those of his students, but rather those of the man or woman or child who assembled the board in Shenzhen or Guangzhou.
The vast majority of IEDs recovered in Iraq and Afghanistan adhere to this al-Muhandis profile, and there are only a few examples of freelancers, upstarts like Frost’s crooked police captain, who think they can design and field their own bombs. These contraptions became the equivalent of Internet memes within the military’s classified computer system: the guy who tried to build a remote control go-kart IED, another who used spinning electric motors to strike matches. In every interview with media, an EOD tech at some point is going to say, using the shortcut, “The variety of potential IEDs is limited only by the imagination of the Bomber.” But this isn’t really true, and not just because, as we’ve seen, the term “Bomber” is overly simplistic. In practice, imagination is not enough. Designs are tested and consistent, the main product lines constantly refined and improved but not revolutionized, and the unique one-offs are simply that.
One final note on the Engineer’s profile. Al-Muhandis has a practical and analytical mind, but it would be a Western and secular mistake to presume this leads to decreased religious fervor. As an American soldier might value courage or loyalty above technical proficiency, so among jihadists piety trumps any skill in rifles or explosives. It is a litmus test, to differentiate between pretenders and the committed, those on an angst-filled jihad holiday and the hard-core ideologues. There is simply no known precedent for an individual central to the mujahideen effort being unreligious. In fact, the opposite is true.
In the mid-1990s, Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, was a boiling bath of blood and pain. A few thousand mujahideen held off the last vestige of the Red Army, block-by-block, utterly inhuman urban combat that would make the city the stuff of apocalyptic nightmares. To finally dislodge the muj, the Russians resorted to World War II carpet bombing and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians. Still, the Chechens recaptured the city twice, through the efforts of leaders whose names would be sung by Syrian insurgents two decades later. We know very few details of the horrors of Grozny, even less about the war stories jihadists tell each other, but we know this one:
On one day, in the midst of the worst Russian artillery bombardment, fighting trench to trench, among the shattered concrete apartment blocks and even as rockets scattered Dragons Tooth bomblets on their heads, when the muezzin sang the call to prayer from the minarets behind them, the mujahideen put down their rifles and faced Mecca and bowed in submission and then lay prostrate and prayed as they did five times every day, as if the war was the least trifle upon the earth.
Not a man was killed by enemy fire during their salat. A mighty fortress was their God.
AFTER MATT SCHWARTZ died, I had made it a habit of searching for the Engineer in my own black hole database: Google.
I tried many combinations of “bomb maker” and “traveling” and “Al Qaeda” and “Afghanistan” and “engineer.” I found what you would expect: Inspire magazine and the Anarchist’s Cookbook. I had no fear of the NSA or FBI; I was a military-trained bomb tech, and through teaching as a consultant I had access to the classified versions of everything I could find online. And I wasn’t looking for ammonium nitrate recipes anyway. I wanted a name and a photo.
Despite my failures, I kept at it periodically, often long after my wife and children were asleep. So I don’t remember what exact combination of search items finally worked, but one groggy night Hermes reached out and through kismet or providence or luck, showed me a pattern in the chaos: I stumbled upon an academic paper by Anne Stenersen, a researcher at the Norwegian think tank Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt. Her 2011 article, “Al Qaeda Foot Soldiers: A Study of the Biographies of Foreign Fighters Killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan Between 2002 and 2006,” contained one fascinating name. Ibrahim al-Muhajir al-Masri. Abraham the Foreign Egyptian. Killed in Pakistan in 2006, he was described as a “university-trained engineer and veteran of the Soviet-Afghan jihad. After 2001, he was based in the tribal areas, where he was ‘an engineer for suicide operations and made equipment for suicide bombers.’”
This was it. He fit the profile exactly. This was as close as I had come yet to naming the Engineer. I Googled “Ibrahim al-Muhajir al-Masri” and got six total hits, none of them helpful. I Googled his name without the quotes and got the wrong man, Abu Hamza al-Masri, the captured mujahideen London cleric who lost an eye and both hands trying to disarm a Soviet landmine in Afghanistan in the 1980s. I Googled shorter combinations of Ibrahim al-Muhajir, found him, but was immediately disappointed. After all that searching, Ibrahim al-Muhajir was just another name for Abu Abdul Raham al-Muhajir, the builder of the truck bombs that hit the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. He had avoided Gitmo, survived the initial cull of central Al Qaeda members in 2001 and 2002. Was he a smart and savvy operator, to have lived so long, or not a priority for the US? Either way, I had seen his name and face before. In his Wikipedia profile, he looks like the caricature of a Western engineer, a middle-aged wage slave dork in a bad short-sleeve dress shirt who has just taken off his tie for the day.
But maybe Anne Stenersen knew more about these men? I began reading her other papers, published in English in relatively obscure journals. I eventually found Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, another Egyptian-trained engineer and chemist, a bomb expert, writer of an explosives manual, and a “freelance trainer.”
The only references I found to Abu Khabab outside of Stenersen’s work were death notices posted by the world’s major news organizations, some misreported, some correct. We tried to kill him with a drone strike in 2006 and missed. We succeeded in a similar attempt in 2008. NBC said the FBI had used the wrong photo and the wrong name for Abu Khabab al-Masri for years in their databases; ironically enough, they put the one-eyed London cleric on the official wanted poster.
The black hole really didn’t have a photo of the Engineer.
But now I did. All of the correct international obituaries used the same one, endlessly repeated, grainy and two-tone. A square-headed man with a massive beard and intense eyes.
And yet, this still wasn’t the Engineer who killed Matt Schwartz. Abu Khabab al-Masri died in 2008, and significant IED development, some of the most lethal IED developments, occurred after he died. But it was the right profile.
THE CJSOTF J2 at Bagram didn’t look like much from the outside. Bland and monotonous sheet metal and block, it blended into the rest of the air base, a semipermanent squattersville of plywood huts and temporary trailers and dry-rotted tents that felt overly lived-in, like a hotel room that has changed occupants but never had a visit from the maid. Still, Soliman felt at home in the J2 because it was named in honor of Sergeant Gene Vance, a fellow West Virginian and Special Forces soldier out of 19th Group, who was killed in an ambush in May of 2002. Montani Semper Liberi. Mountaineers everywhere.
On the inside, the J2 was likewise deceptively plain. Row upon row of tables and flip-up laptops for the various representatives. There was the Predator guy, the MC-12 guy, the JTAC, the analysts of the different disciplines. And projected on the wall, always, a Predator feed. “Predator porn,” everyone called it, a staple of operations centers since generals discovered how to get mobile access over a decade ago.
She had a seat in the J2, as the biometrics girl. When she watched the Pred feed, she dreamed that someday there would be a fusion of their two disciplines, a gait recognition algorithm so people could be identified from the air just by their unique walk. In the meantime, she was content knowing her data was being used at that moment, on a mission watched by that Predator. If a report came in that a match had been made or a team needed more info, she would call the FBI or DoD biometrics centers back home in West Virginia for help. Often, she was talking to an old classmate, a friend. There were only eight biometrics engineering graduates her year at WVU. It was exciting knowing they were all working the same cases together.
She sat with the intel analysts and watched as they put together the big picture, also using data she collected, photos and prints that she took with a SEEK. They were both military and contractors, and she could feel like an outlier. She wasn’t a triple tabber, she didn’t have the Triple Canopy—referring to Airborne, Ranger, and Special Forces scrolls worn on the left sleeve, as well as the security company of the same name that provided contractors for the DoD—but it was more than that. They obsessed over individuals. They worked the same names every day. It was insular, and exhausting, and she was glad it wasn’t her job.
All day the analysts pumped as much data as they could into each profile. Intercepted communications. Biometrics. Geospatial trends; a fancy term for Frost’s penny-flipping. Handwriting samples from night letters, the messages of intimidation left on the doorsteps of those thought loyal to the Afghan government. Link analytics that diagrammed the inner connections of each terrorist oil spot. The information from the various exploitation cells: explosives, bullet ballistics, ripped cell phones, computers. It all goes in the portal, because when the commander comes by, the analyst transforms into a salesman.
Sometimes the commanders needed to turn the red metrics green on the weekly PowerPoint slides. Sometimes they just got bored and wanted someone to smack, to feel like they had the initiative. No matter the reason, the commander needed a trigger, an excuse to spend energy on one target over another.
If an analyst wanted to get the object of their infatuation on the Joint Priority Effects List—the JPEL, the hit list of high-value targets—they needed two things: a profile jam-packed with data, and a photo. It was easier to sell the story with photos. It made it personal, more than a list of aliases. It wasn’t always the SEEK photo that put the pitch over the top, but Soliman saw it happen often enough to know she was making a difference.
She didn’t realize how isolated she really was in Baghdad and Kandahar until she got here. In the J2, she could feel the battle rhythm of the war, especially when the TIC lights came on. Troops in Contact, new military speak for a gun battle, firefight, engagement. The first time the lights came on, she didn’t know what they meant, but she sensed the air change in the room. Everyone’s body language tightened. Eventually, over watercooler chat, she learned more.
When the TIC lights came on, it meant somewhere, out across the country, maybe with the team she had just trained, maybe in that village where so many had popped in their biometrics screening, someone at that very moment was being shot at. Someone’s truck was tumbling. Someone was hoping the jug of homemade bang was unstirred. Someone was burning from QuikClot. Someone was getting some. Someone was letting the machine gun touch hearts and minds. Someone was calling, “Good sparkle.” Someone was all business, and someone was quiet. Someone would be carried in a ramp ceremony the next day.
IT WAS THE TIC lights that did it. As Sarah Soliman spoke, I looked at my notes and checked her deployment dates again. Yes, they did line up.
“So, Matt Schwartz and Seidler and Bell died on January 5, 2012, when you were there. Do you have any memory of that at all?”
She gave me a small frown. “Unfortunately not,” she hedged. “Not that particular event. You hate to say it, but … the TIC lights happen so often.”
“No, right, I’m sure,” I started. She gave me another look, more pained if that was possible.
“I didn’t want to assume that you would,” I said. “I thought I would ask, just in case, if …”
Yeah, I know there is a lot of data, I get it, but these are my brothers we’re talking about now. I pushed on. Maybe I could jog her memory.
“You know, it was actually the single biggest loss of life for EOD guys in Afghanistan ever,” I said.
That wasn’t true, but I didn’t remember that at the time. I’ve looked it up since. In 2002, three Army EOD techs—Craig, Galewski, Maugans—and a Special Forces soldier—Romero—died when a Taliban weapons cache they were investigating exploded. Their remains were so intermingled they now share a plot at Arlington. But I had forgotten that somehow.
Soliman was still giving me the look, but I kept going anyway.
“You know, so it might have come up?” I said. “Or maybe if any of the evidence had passed your way? Serendipity, if you crossed paths?”
She paused. “Sorry.” And that was that.
I had no right to be disappointed, but I was.
“Right, right,” I said. “No, that’s okay.”
FOR A DECADE, Hayes had worked with SOCOM all over the world, and it taught him, perhaps counterintuitively, powerlessness and humility. He put out sensors, electronic and metaphoric, and pulled in data, and still could not predict when, where, or how any terrorist cell would attack. It was at their whim, and all he and SOCOM could do was react.
The J2 was flooded with data—MC-12 and Predator feeds and forensic reports and the biometrics database, of course—but Hayes felt like he knew nothing. Or, at least, none of the things that really mattered.
All of the best evidence, the truly dangerous and important stuff, gets blown up, he thought. The EOD guys detonate the bomb because it’s so deadly. Or the IED is so well constructed and reliable, it functions every time. There could be an entire class of IEDs out there no one knows about. The best way for the Engineer to hide his signature is to make sure the device detonates. Then no fingerprints, no DNA, a guess at the forensics only.
American leaders are obsessed with metrics: body counts, biometric records collected, IEDs found, men detained and questioned. Biometrics was its own worst enemy. The same guy could be enrolled in the system five times with five names and we think we did a good job because the stats look good. Worse, biometrics gave the illusion of success, helped us the find the easy guys, the pipe swingers, those that place and initiate the IEDs. But those guys are targetable anyway. You could find them all day long, and we do. But the hardest guys?
All those metrics are irrelevant, Hayes thought. In this war, only one stat mattered, the number of dead Americans. All that capture and kill stuff would make a good story someday, but is the security in Afghanistan any better? Are we winning?
It is so hard to separate an insurgent from the local population, to get them to give up the Engineer’s name. Meanwhile, we never break down our big units into small enough bands to infiltrate every town. Could you even do it? We’re not going to move the US Army into each village and have them stay there for years. We don’t even stay for hours. We go home every night, even to a regional fire base, and the Taliban runs every cluster of mud huts once the sun goes down. They have the initiative. Just another way the Engineer goes first in that chess match.
Units that thought outside the box, that spent days in villages, invested in their security, shared hardships with the locals, they did better. That’s the only time they open up enough to talk. But it is hard for commanders do that. Tours are just not long enough. Everyone rotates, the analysts, the collectors, the commanders. When the ODA teams paired up and started to flip-flop tours, so they always went back to the same district, that made sense. It is so draining on each team. But are we trying to win or not? Our enemy is there all the time. They never leave. We leave. We’ve prioritized each individual soldier’s comfort and family over winning the war. The Taliban haven’t. They want it more. They have all the advantages.
So what to do?
Sometimes SOCOM caught people by blind luck. Their greatest successes, in fact. They hit a target and just happened to get someone else. Caught them on the one day they were sloppy and made a mistake. The SEALs say that it’s not that they’re so good, it’s that everyone else sucks.
But don’t great sports teams make their own luck? You can’t just sit around and wait for the key piece of intel to magically arrive. Maybe you can’t wait for luck. Sometimes you’ve just got to try something.
Hayes and his team had compiled the interviews of the Mohammeds from Kunduz and integrated the forensic reports and were building their recommendations for the JPEL when the TIC lights strobed again and the casualty SITREPs poured in and the commander was done with peons.
“I want this motherfucker found tomorrow!”
Data, data everywhere, and not a drop of what he needed. The detainees only talked in generalities and rumor, a whisper that the Engineer was in town. Killing him would be the easy part, it was finding him that was hard.
Hayes thought through the problem. We have a guy working with the Taliban. The Taliban are Pashtun, which makes this guy either Pashtun himself, or an Arab ally from the days of the Soviets. He is in the land of Uzbeks and Tajiks, the historic enemies of the Pashtuns, so there are only a few villages where he would find a warm reception. He probably travels alone, or with one or two very close associates, probably family members. He needs the cover of a Pashtun village in otherwise hostile territory. The IEDs were getting deadlier because he had to choose the most vulnerable targets; so far away from his traditional base of support, he would have fewer resources, he couldn’t be wasteful like us. Every shot had to have strategic or symbolic value, every shot had to count. A mayor, a police chief, a commander, an SF guy, a bomb tech.
Anybody can compile data, make a list of everything we know about a person. A really good analyst puts themselves in the shoes of another. Everyone thinks the J2 or their intel headquarters is a black hole, but the real black hole is the analyst’s mind. No computer system or organizational overhaul is going to put it together. The analyst does the fusion. You can’t rely on anyone else to do it for you. Of course, the lack of knowledge about the Engineer is its own black hole that can suck you in. It’s up to the analyst, a black hole searching for the black hole within itself? Maybe the Engineer is the center of that nesting doll after all.
Too metaphysical. Hayes snapped out of his wandering introspection and got back to the problem at hand.
They had identified about 80 percent of the IED process, he figured. They knew the facilitation routes, the rat lines over the mountains, and now they had just discovered where the devices were being made. Since politically they never seemed to be able to stop the supply, maybe they could finally grab the trainer. Maybe he would be with other targets on the JPEL.
We are too reliant on technology, Hayes thought. We don’t know enough about these villages. And every time we go very high tech to compensate, he goes even lower tech. But if the villagers wouldn’t say where the Engineer was, what else could they do?
Hayes took his idea to that afternoon’s brief. He showed his commander overlays of IED trends and types, the local tribal organization, loyalty maps and links, likely accomplices on the hit list. At the end of his sales pitch, he had a recommendation of where the commander should send his few resources, one long-range surveillance team and a Predator above them. Put the Pred here, Hayes said, that’s where we need to search.
SOCOM’s kill chain was euphemistic but simple: Detect, Identify, Locate, Monitor, Track, Exploit, Interdict.
Frost, Fye, Soliman, they all Detected. Hayes had moved the process forward to Identify. But to Locate and Monitor and Track? Where was the Engineer, so they could watch him and follow him, and, ultimately, Interdict him? Where to look? Where would he be? That’s the million-dollar question. Hayes had an idea, to make his own luck.