Body of Lies Read Online Free PDF

characters, but these were the code designators of three Predators operating out of Balad. On a smaller screen were images from the three drones stationed in Afghanistan--" PACMAN ," " SKYBIRD " and " ROULETTE ." The pictures were riveting, even when you didn't know what you were looking at. Ferris gazed up at the Iraq screen and saw a dark car poking along a two-lane road and then slipping onto a side road heading toward the desert. The Predator puttered along behind it, a thousand feet above, silent and invisible. Ferris asked what they were looking at.
    "Western Iraq, near the Syrian border," answered the base chief. "We think the car is picking up a high-value target." They stood together watching the car for perhaps ten minutes and then the picture went dark. The base chief spoke to one of the operators and then advised Ferris, "Dry hole." Meaning that the target, of whatever value, wasn't in the car after all. That was the moment Ferris began to understand the problem.
    The base chief was summoned for a videoconference with Langley, and he left Ferris sitting in his chair in the command platform at the center of the ops room floor. There was a low buzz in room, with people peering at the banks of flat-screen monitors, doing the rote work of planning and targeting and assessing. The watch officer seated near Ferris was monitoring a half dozen separate online chat groups that carried the latest raw intelligence from all the birds and bugs around the world. It was the dull hum of intelligence work, until there was a sudden whirr of attention and everyone was looking at the Afghanistan screen.
    "Check out PACMAN ," murmured an Air Force NCO at the desk next to Ferris. That particular afternoon, PACMAN was lingering over Waziristan in northwestern Pakistan, looking for one of Al Qaeda's elusive chieftains. The drone was almost motionless, above a cave high in the trackless mountains--waiting for its prey to emerge, hovering, searching, lazily looping over the craggy slopes and the snowy summits. "I think something's moving in the cave!" said one of the watch officers, and nobody spoke in the big dark room.
    The people controlling PACMAN were back at Langley, in a building in the parking lot. They were studying the sensors, waiting to launch a Hellfire missile if they saw a tall, gaunt man in the shadows of the cave. Ferris could see more movement in the shadows, and then something broke into the light, and Ferris thought: This is it.
    But it turned out to be a yak that had broken out of the cave's deep shadows into sunlight. There were groans around the room. PACMAN had once again led them to a treasure trove of bats and vermin and animal dung. Still Ferris lingered, as PACMAN moved on toward another set of coordinates and the camera captured the slow effacement of the Hindu Kush, the ravines and escarpments and roaring rivers. He found himself transfixed by images that normally could be seen only by a hawk or a falcon. Here was the genius of American intelligence--that it could fly its mechanical bird of prey over the world's most hostile terrain. The folly was that most of the time it didn't know what it was looking for down below. A bird with perfect eyesight and no brain.
    Feed the machine. Now Ferris understood what Hoffman had been talking about when he made the assignment: Bring in real intelligence, so that the controllers will know where to send the drone; so they will know who is in the sedan meandering along the Syrian border, know which ramshackle bus is carrying the latest group of jihadis from the Damascus airport to the safe house in the Baghdad suburbs, know which battered GMC belongs to the operations planner. If Ferris could gather that information, then the Predator could watch each stop the target made, each accomplice who helped along the highway, every place they stopped to eat or sleep or take a shit. But someone had to feed the machine.
    "You're perfect for the job, you poor bastard," Hoffman had said,