Gold didn’t care what aircraft watched that mountain; she was just glad something of value had resulted from what Parson called her temporary insanity. But he told her the MC-12 Liberty was a manned airplane—a heavily modified Beechcraft flown by a crew from the Mississippi Air National Guard. Like the Predator, the small twin-prop aircraft carried video cameras and other sensors. According to Parson, using little planes to gather intel was a fairly new mission for the Air Force, driven by a new kind of war. The military needed a lot of surveillance in a lot of places, and it made sense to take a relatively inexpensive civilian plane off the shelf and stuff it full of electronic gear. Gold spent the morning with Parson in the Air Operations Center, sipping coffee and watching the downlink. The trucks they’d seen the evening before were gone. But now the flight crews knew exactly where to look. The video mostly turned in a constant circle over the same spot, the lenses not so much searching as lying in wait.
