Rick Campbell
Deep Strike
Dedication
You brought smiles and laughter to places
where there were none, and made everyone
you came in contact with a better person.
MAIN CHARACTERS
KEVIN HARDISON — chief of staff
TOM DRAPAC — secretary of defense
DAWN CABRAL — secretary of state
NOVA CONOVER — secretary of homeland security
CHRISTINE O’CONNOR — director (DCIA)
MONROE (MK) BRYANT — deputy director (DDCIA)
PATRICK (PJ) ROLOW — deputy director for operations (DDO)
TRACEY MCFARLAND — deputy director for analysis (DDA)
JAKE HARRISON — paramilitary operations officer (Special Operations Group)
MAXIM ANOSOV — paramilitary operations officer (Sochi, Russia)
PAT KENDALL — specialized skills officer (National Resources Division)
KHALILA DUFOUR — specialized skills officer (National Clandestine Service)
JOHN BUGLIONE (Commander) — Commanding Officer
RICK SCHWARTZ (Lieutenant Commander) — Executive Officer
ALEKSANDR PLECAS (Captain First Rank) — Commanding Officer
ERIK FEDOROV (Captain Third Rank) — First Officer
ANATOLY BOGDANOV — ordnance supervisor
VASILY MOROZOV — ordnance supervisor
MIKHAIL KORENEV — command center watchstander
ARKADY TIMOSHENKO — command center watchstander
MURRAY WILSON (Captain) — Commanding Officer, USS Michigan (BLUE) / USS North Carolina
LONNIE MIXELL — former Navy SEAL
ISSAD FUTTAIM — Syrian weapons dealer
AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI — leader of al-Qaeda and ISIL factions in Afghanistan and Pakistan
PROLOGUE
INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA
“High value target. That’s all you need to know.”
It was already ninety degrees at Creech Air Force Base, the morning sun burning down on several dozen trailers neatly arranged in four rows. Captain Mike Berger, seated inside one of the dimly lit, cramped, and chilly trailers, kept his right hand on the joystick and his left on the throttle as his eyes scanned one of the fourteen displays built into the two-person control station. Beside him and sharing a center console was First Lieutenant Dee Ardis, likewise studying her screens.
Berger and Ardis were seated inside an MQ-9 Ground Control Station controlling a Reaper drone, with Berger piloting the aircraft while Ardis operated its sensors. For the last twelve hours, the Reaper had been circling high above Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a Pakistani province bordering Afghanistan. This section of the province was mainly no-man’s-land, a disputed area sparsely populated with villages containing only a dozen or so families each, a region where the Pakistani government had ceded authority to tribal warlords. In the center of Berger’s visual display was a single dwelling at the end of a long dirt road, if you could call it that — more like a trail worn into the rugged terrain, snaking through the wilderness.
Most days, it’d be just the two of them in the control van during their six-hour shift, even during combat missions taking out the bad guys. But Berger had been surprised this morning when he arrived to relieve the off-going team, finding an entourage of four high-ranking Air Force officers — his supervisor and his boss, plus a colonel and brigadier general he hadn’t seen before — further cramping the small trailer as they monitored the mission. Berger sensed the tension the moment he stepped into the trailer. When he was briefed on the operation, he’d been told, “High value target. That’s all you need to know.”
Thus far, it had been a boring four hours, with Berger keeping the MQ-9 Reaper at ten thousand feet to keep it out of sight and earshot of anyone inside or approaching the isolated dwelling. It was clear that today’s mission was combat-related and not just surveillance, and the Reaper was well equipped for the task, carrying four Hellfire missiles and two Paveway II five-hundred-pound bombs, all laser-guided to their target by equipment in the sensor ball mounted beneath the Reaper’s nose.
Although Berger and Ardis flew the drone, operated its sensors, and released its weapons, the mission was coordinated by an attack controller, a special operations type who Berger figured was probably sitting in a windowless concrete bunker somewhere in the Middle East. In the past, different controllers had provided Berger and Ardis with varying degrees of freedom over their attacks. Some were micromanagers, directing the drone approach angle, weapon selection, and impact point.
Other attack controllers were more hands-off, simply saying, “Kill these two targets,” letting Berger and Ardis make the optimum selections. Berger still didn’t have a feeling for this attack controller, as they’d had few interactions thus far. Things began to pick up, however, when Berger noticed movement on his optical display.
A white bongo — similar to a pickup truck but with a wider body — appeared on the left edge of the display, dust billowing behind it as the vehicle traveled up the dirt road toward the dwelling. From ten thousand feet and a thirty-degree offset, he could tell there were two occupants inside the bongo, but nothing more.
The attack controller’s voice emanated from Berger’s headphones. “Request visual target confirmation.”
Berger acknowledged, then tilted his joystick, sending the Reaper closer to the ground so its camera had a low enough angle to get a good look at the faces of whoever was in the truck.
The drone leveled off at the new altitude as the bongo stopped beside the dwelling. When the two men, both wearing white dishdashas — long white robes traditionally worn by Middle Eastern men — stepped from the vehicle, they were greeted by two other men who emerged from the building. Ardis zoomed in, taking a picture of each man’s face.