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point: the USAF’s first squadron of Reapers was unmanned.
    The pilot in front of him read out the coordinates. Dhar’s voice had been traced to a remote location in North Waziristan, on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Fort Meade had done a good job for once. Someone had been listening in real time, and not just to Pakistani generals having sex. This was the big one, and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the cockpit, even from the base commander. He had stepped into the trailer when news spread across the base that Salim Dhar might be about to be taken down. It would be a big moment for the commander. His unit, 432 Air Expeditionary Wing, had stood up at Creech in 2007 to spearhead the global war on terror, and he needed a result. Spiro knew the commander blamed the CIA for the recent spate of bad publicity. The last strike in Pakistan had brought relations between the Agency and the USAF to a new low.
    â€˜I think we have our man,’ Spiro said, turning to the commander.
    â€˜We need to do this by the book,’ he replied. ‘You know that.’
    â€˜Of course. And the book says we take Dhar out. We have an 80-per-cent confidence threshold.’
    â€˜Are there any legals?’ the commander asked, turning to an officer next to him.
    â€˜Negative, sir. Potential for civilian collateral is zero. The building is remote, nearest population cluster five miles south. And this is a Level Five.’
    â€˜Colonel, we’re locked onto the target,’ the pilot said, turning to the sensor operator. ‘Can you put thermal up on screen one?’
    Spiro watched as blotches of bright colour appeared on the screen between the two seated operators. The surrounding screens were relaying live video streams from electro-optical and image-intensified night cameras mounted under the nose of the Reaper, and stills from a synthetic aperture radar. Spiro still hadn’t quite got his head round the fact that these images were streaming live, give or take a one-to-two-second delay, from 30,000 feet above Afghanistan, 7,500 miles away.
    â€˜Fuse thermal with intensified,’ the pilot said. The image on the main screen sharpened a little, but it was still no more than a series of yellow, red and purple shapes.
    It was at this point that the young female analyst first began to worry about their target. She wasn’t meant to be on duty now. The 24/7 rota they worked to had lost its shape in the previous few hours, and she should have been back in her room, getting some sleep and reading the bible before her next shift. (A lot of the analysts headed off to Vegas after work, but she found the contrast too great: one moment looking at magnified images of a destroyed Taleban target, the next shooting craps.) But the next analyst on duty had phoned in sick, and she had agreed to work on until cover showed up. That was two hours ago. She didn’t like bending the rules. She tried to leave a quiet, disciplined life. All she could hope for was that the base commander didn’t glance at the rota sheet on the wall behind them.
    â€˜Sir, we have multiple personnel in the target zone,’ she said, looking closely at the screen. ‘And what looks like a pack of wild dogs forty yards to the east.’
    Night-time image analysis was a skill that not everyone on the base appreciated. The pilots did, but she resented the disdain with which the CIA officers appeared to view her profession. Spiro was the worst, but that was also because he kept trying to look down her blouse. He hadn’t the first idea about the subtleties of either women or her job.
    During the day, with clear visibility, it was easy enough to distinguish man from woman, cat from dog, even from 30,000 feet. The images were pin sharp. But at night you had to rely on the digitally enhanced imagery of the infra-red spectrum. Interpreting the ghostly monochrome of the mid-IR wavelengths required intuition and training to