basis.
I head off to conduct an interview, my first here. There is a false start when my interviewee, an off-duty pilot, realises that he has arranged for the interview to take place in the briefing room – a SECRET classified location – but my recording equipment is forbidden. So we find a quiet room. Moments like this away from the GCS remind me of the seriousness of what is going on and that this whole squadron is at war, not just the people who are doing the flying.
These first few interviews are crucial as I begin to engage with people who don’t know me and live in a continual ‘need to know’ mode. These opening interviews are particularly valuable in the practical information I glean and for understanding how the Reaper and 39 Squadron work. At this stage the interviewees are understandably cautious about how much personal information and experience they can risk sharing. That’s partly because of the politically and personally sensitive nature of what they do and how I might use it, and partly – as one pilot puts it over coffee – because of the Lee Rigby effect. Lee Rigby was the off-duty British soldier murdered in a London street in 2013 by two radical Islamists.
Importantly for me, however, another factor is working in my favour. A lot of the RAF Reaper personnel are fed up with how they see themselves and their work presented in different parts of the media. After the first couple of interviews a trickle turns into something of a flood. At this stage they are very keen to tell me what they do and how they do it. Some even make an early foray into telling me what they think about what they do. A crude, initial summary: professional and proud. It will be some time before some of them eventually open up to me about how they feel about what they do. As the events to follow will show, this is too complex for a crude summary.
Before I know it, I am called back to the GCS – dinner is over. I stand half way between the pilot and SO as they go through their handovers and retake their seats at the front of the box, as the GCS is known, and the MIC who is doing the same at his work station at the rear of the box. Do I detect a frisson of excitement? I have a random question. Why is the end of the box where the pilot sits seen as the ‘front’, while the MIC sits at the ‘back’? In an information-based war, maybe the intelligence coordinators are the ‘front’ end. I make a note to see if I can start an argument about this in the crew room some time. (The answer turned out to be yes, and very easily.)
Once the flex crew left, I saw at the centre of the main screens a building with some kind of lean-to or temporary shelter in a small, narrow backyard that led into an alley. The MIC had located a technical as it entered this residential area and watched as it drove to this place a couple of minutes ago. It bore the hallmarks of IS and they had been in the process of identifying the weapon on the back when the technical reversed under the tarpaulin.
We watched as four armed men emerged from where the vehicle was concealed.
‘Suspicious,’ observes the Boss, but suspicion without evidence does not take them to the point of asking for a strike. Also, the presence of children in the alleyway – never mind who might be in the house – ensures a positive collateral damage estimate (CDE) and therefore no strike. It is time to watch.
Having had around just four hours’ sleep in the previous thirty-six, and feeling the effects of jet lag, I worry that I might doze off. No way. The adrenaline kicks in. Potential strike locations are being sought by the MIC. Not easy in a built-up area with children and adults milling around. The Boss zooms out the camera view so that a wider surrounding area can be recce’d for potential strike locations. Then everything changes. Quickly.
The technical starts backing out of its hiding place, the camera zooms in and a sense of urgency permeates the GCS. A large gun on a tripod comes into view. Two different voices identify it as a 0.50in-calibre machine gun. The MIC starts to confirm the precise type of gun, as well as contacting his various intelligence sources to confirm ‘ownership’ of the vehicle.
The vehicle begins to track slowly through the back streets.
‘The driver is looking for something or somewhere but probably does not know the area well.’ The Boss interprets what we are seeing for my benefit.
Then it stops, reverses and moves backwards and forwards a couple of times as the driver tries to get closer to the adjacent building. He ends up further away than when he started.
‘This is an Austin Powers parking manoeuvre right now,’ says the pilot. It breaks the tension for a few seconds. I’m not sure if the others are laughing but I have to move my microphone away from my face. The people in that vehicle might only have minutes or hours to live and, frankly, I am fighting back laughter. Get a grip. I am the kid who laughed in school assembly and in church, then grew up to laugh in funerals (unfortunately, often when I was conducting them) and when I met Prince Charles. I am not a nervous or anxious person, I just like to laugh: and the darker the situation the funnier I find things. Firemen, doctors, nurses, undertakers and anyone else who deals with death and tragedy would get the humour. It is not trivialising what might be about to happen. It is a kind of pressure valve, a way to cope with things that nobody should ever have to cope with.
The armed passengers jump out and enter the building. New strike estimates are made and permission to strike – if a suitable kill zone can be found – is discussed. However, the current location still has too many unknowns for a strike to proceed.
The pilot keeps up multiple dialogues with the other two crew members, the JTAC and the Red Card Holder11 (the RCH authorises a weapon strike) in the CAOC. The JTAC is the link between the RCH and the pilot, and is the one who will say ‘cleared hot’ to the pilot. The RCH suddenly seems to be juggling plans A, B and C, depending on what happens next. None of those plans will have a happy ending for the vehicle and armed passengers if they end up in an open space devoid of civilians.
Several minutes later the fighters emerge from the building more rapidly than they entered it and jump into the vehicle. It quickly becomes clear that the group is retracing the route back to where they just came from. They re-enter the narrow alley and the driver angles the vehicle to reverse into the narrow hiding place. He recreates the Austin Powers driving scene again with several attempts to park. After the fourth or fifth attempt – by which time he was getting the rear half of the vehicle into the hide – the driver stops, gets out and walks round to the other side of the vehicle. The other armed men leave him to it. The driver bends down and picks something up. A quick review of the video shows that he has knocked off the passenger-side door mirror.
‘That might not be the worst thing to happen to your vehicle today,’ mutters the pilot.
If this was on YouTube it would get millions of hits. As I try to gauge the reactions of the others (are the pilot and MIC being more restrained because the Boss is in the SO’s seat?), another larger technical drives into view.
‘Twin barrels. Anti-aircraft gun,’ announces the MIC immediately. I can hear the increased interest in his voice. This second pickup is dwarfed by the huge gun on the back, a gun that will work just as effectively against ground forces as a piece of rapid-fire field artillery. It stops near the hide but nobody gets out. The MIC reckons he is waiting for instructions.
Sure enough, someone comes running out of the building next to the hide, speaks briefly to the driver and then disappears back where he came from. Technical 2 starts to move.
Decision time. Follow the new vehicle or wait and watch the hidden one? I struggle to follow the different conversations I can hear though my headphones. The discussions relate to available intelligence, the threat posed by the gun to both aircraft and friendly forces on the ground and the imminence of the threat posed by both technicals. I think everyone is missing the only salient point but it
