Unmanned (9780385351263) (11 page)

Alas, any chances for that brand of satisfaction had gone by the board years ago, when Riggleman washed out of flight school. Poor vision and vertigo. He remained in the Air Force, but forever after was marked as a penguin among eagles, a mortal among gods.

Yet even within the cumbersome workings of military bureaucracy, the oddest cogs sometimes tumble into exactly the right openings, snug fittings where they not only mesh but function at the highest possible efficiency. And that is what happened to Riggleman, mostly because his mind was as quick and agile as those sleek jets he had once hoped to pilot.

He first showed promise as an Infowar “aggressors” trainer, by thoroughly disrobing the operational secrets of visiting units in war game after war game. From there he worked his way into the good graces of self-interested brass, up-and-coming generals forever hoping to pry loose their rivals’ deeper secrets. Although his current title didn’t sound like much—special assistant for logistics to the commander, 57th Wing—his duties had evolved to the point that he was now a sort of informational sniper on call, an ace handler of assignments both
on and off the books. His particular specialty: Sniffing out any sort of trail—paper, telephonic, or virtual—that even a government auditor or trained investigator might not find.

Riggleman looked perfectly engineered for such duties. He was built low to the ground, a hard man to budge. Having wrestled in college, he was well versed in takedowns and escapes, the best ways to leverage bigger opponents to the mat. He knew never to loosen his grip until he was ready to employ the next move. He also knew to keep his mouth shut, especially when carrying out special assignments for his boss and wing commander, Brigadier General Mitchell Hagan.

That was the relationship that gave his talents their special potency. Hagan, a power in his own right, had a direct pipeline to Major General Salvador Shorter, whose command of the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center made him king of the mountain at Nellis Air Force Base.

Moments ago, Hagan had called Riggleman into his office. The general closed the door, shut the blinds, and instructed his secretary to hold all calls. Riggleman found it a bit theatrical, but also thrilling. Like some old scene out of film noir, he thought—Sam Spade preparing to deliver the goods to his top client. He sensed he was about to be asked to do something marginal, which meant something interesting. All that was missing was cigarette smoke, although Hagan reputedly kept a bottle of bourbon stashed in a drawer. Riggleman, wanting to maintain a military bearing, had to fight off an urge to lean forward in his chair.

“Captain,” Hagan began, “I want you to drop whatever you’re working on in order to give your full attention to a matter of the highest urgency.”

“Absolutely, sir.”

Hagan nodded, a barely perceptible gesture for a man whose head sat so low on his shoulders that it looked as if it had been mashed into place by a hydraulic press. Riggleman had always wondered what sort of opponent the general would have been on a wrestling mat. The kind who might bite in a clinch, perhaps, especially if he thought the referee wasn’t looking.

“We have a pilot who’s gone missing,” Hagan said. “We’d like you to locate him for us.”

“AWOL, sir?”

“Ex-pilot, actually. Ex–Air Force, when you get right down to it. So, not AWOL in the technical sense. But one of ours, all the same. A dishonorable discharge who was under orders, per his plea agreement, to keep us apprised of his movements. Given the sensitive nature of his previous duties, as well as his access to certain other information, we’d like to know his whereabouts as soon as possible.”

Hagan slapped onto the desk a glossy photo of a clean-shaven man in his mid-thirties with the hint of a smirk hiding just beneath a casual smile.

“Darwin Cole. You may have crossed paths when he did his Infowar training.”

“I don’t recall the name, sir.”

Hagan launched into a brief bio and slid forward a file folder. The moment Riggleman heard that Cole used to fly F-16s, his interest was piqued further. Cole was the very sort of fellow who had once lorded it over him on the flight line, back when Riggleman was a mere washout grunt. In those days, jocks ruled the clouds and everyone else got rained on. Especially the unfortunates who wore eyeglasses and carried clipboards. Yes, this was the sort of target Cole liked best. Or so he thought until he heard the rest.

“His final posting was right down the road at Creech.”

“Creech, sir?” Riggleman was stunned. “He made a combat kill in a Viper, and they assigned him to a Predator wing?”

“Yes, soldier, he was flying Predators. If that Xbox bullshit can really be called flying.”

Now the man had his pity.

When Riggleman had first heard about the drone program, he’d loved everything about it. Part of the appeal was plain old schadenfreude. It was deeply satisfying to see jocks stripped of their dreams just as abruptly as he had been stripped of his. He also appreciated the way drone technology represented the triumph of brains over reflexes, cunning over muscle. The very people who the frontline showboats had always derided as REMFs—rear echelon motherfuckers—were now the very people who were winning the war.

But the longer it went on, and the bigger it grew, the less he liked it.
The pilot talent pool was being drained into banks of windowless trailers. The very thing that had once attracted him to the United States Air Force—the dash, the glamour, the whole edgy idea that every time you went up you might not come back—was being bled from the skies, pilot by pilot, and it felt like each of them was a lesser man for it.

“Creech was where Cole crashed and burned,” Hagan continued. “Figuratively speaking, of course. Little more than a year ago.” The general skimmed the particulars of Cole’s court-martial. “The full transcript is available, but it’s under lock and key, so you’ll have to file an official request. All you need to know for the moment is that, following his discharge, Cole moved to a trailer in a uninhabited sector about halfway between here and Creech. Goddamn road isn’t even marked on a map.”

He slid a glossy photo across the desktop, a shot of Cole’s trailer taken from ground level with a long lens. It looked like something from an old black-and-white film about a down-and-outer who’d turned to crime.

“No car, as you can see. No electricity, no cell phone. Not much of anything out there but empty bottles of Jeremiah Weed. Maybe that explains why they took their eyes off him. In any case, sometime before last weekend, the former Captain Cole seems to have up and disappeared. At first there was speculation he might have just wandered off into the desert to die, but a thorough search of the area has dispelled those hopes.”

Hopes? They
wanted
that to happen?

“Then this image turned up from last Thursday.”

He tossed another photo Riggleman’s way. It was also a shot of the trailer, but taken from high above. A dark compact sedan was parked nearby.

“The tags aren’t legible, but we suspect it’s a rental, so I suppose that’s a sort of lead already.”

“Is this from satellite surveillance, sir?”

“No. We used our own hardware.”

“A Predator? But wouldn’t that site be outside of—?”

“Draw your own conclusions, soldier.”

Riggleman already had. Someone was flying a drone beyond the
proscribed limits, and they’d compounded the crime by taking photos. He knew better than to ask what sort of secrets Cole was harboring. Besides, he had his own ways of checking on such things. He would put in a few calls—discreetly, of course—then cover his tracks. That’s one thing people like General Hagan always failed to realize about people like Riggleman. Tell them to find out one thing and they were almost certainly going to find out other things as well, including stuff you didn’t want them to know. Given Cole’s key role in classified ops abroad, the possibilities seemed limitless, all the way up to espionage. A little spot on Riggleman’s spine began to tingle. He picked up the surveillance photo.

“May I keep this, sir?”

“You can keep the whole damn dossier once we’re done here, soldier.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“During his posting to Creech, Cole lived in Summerlin with his wife and two children.” Hagan tossed out yet another photo. Nice house in the ’burbs, nothing spectacular. The wife must have been a gardener, judging by all the flowers. “His wife is estranged. Two months before his release she took both their children to her parents’ house in Saginaw, Michigan.” Three more photos hit the desktop in succession, like cards in a hand of draw poker.

Cute children. Attractive woman. Riggleman’s hopes went into a nosedive. Maybe this was nothing but a domestic incident that had gotten out of hand, and Hagan was only worried about bad PR. There had been some recent stories in the media about burnout among Predator pilots. Low-key coverage, but it had stirred enough grumbling upstairs that Air Force shrinks and chaplains had been ordered to put a lid on the topic. Maybe that was their worry with Cole. If so, then Riggleman’s job would be easy but boring.

“However,” Hagan said, “we currently do not believe that Cole intends to go anywhere near Saginaw. His interests appear to be elsewhere, and we suspect they are directly related to his previous work as a Predator pilot.”

Riggleman pulled neatly out of his tailspin. Hagan’s next comments soon had him soaring.

“His last known whereabouts were in the vicinity of Moultonborough, New Hampshire, two days ago, at a waterfront home at Lake Winnipesaukee, where he attempted to establish an unauthorized contact with a recently retired employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. We’ll of course supply you with the operative’s name, address, and phone number. As of yet, we’re not certain what means of transportation Captain Cole is using. Of the two personal vehicles registered in his name, one is now in Saginaw and the other was sold more than a year ago. It is suspected but not confirmed that he traveled to Moultonborough by rental car, although it’s not known how he reached the Northeast. A cursory check of security footage from Las Vegas International produced no matches. Ditto for the cameras at the likeliest airports near Moultonborough, which would have been Boston Logan and the Portland Jetport, in Maine.”

Damn. They’d already done a lot of legwork. This was urgent. And how juicy was it that the CIA might be involved? Hagan dropped more papers onto the pile.

“Here are summaries of the most recent activity on his wife’s home and cell phones, and for all of her credit cards. As you’ll see, nothing suggests any contact with Cole. As you’ll also see here”—yet another sheet—“Cole hasn’t used any of his own credit cards for more than a year. Apparently he’s been living by cash only.”

“If I can take the liberty, sir …”

“Please do.”

“He would appear to be using classic espionage tradecraft.”

“Let’s not overstate things just yet, Captain Riggleman.”

“Yes, sir.”

But Riggleman could tell by the look in Hagan’s eyes that the general hadn’t dismissed the idea, and there was an edge to the general’s voice, an undertone of aggrievement and anger that usually didn’t accompany these sessions. He wondered whether, just maybe, this matter might have a personal dimension.

“Permission to ask a nosy question, sir.”

“Seeing as how that’s your specialty, permission granted.”

“Has Captain Cole ever been under your command?”

Hagan hesitated, and looked him over carefully before answering.

“The answer is in his dossier, but your suspicions are correct. What made you ask?”

“Just a hunch, sir. Something about your intensity, I guess.”

A look of grudging admiration gave way to one of mild concern. Hagan shook his head and smiled tightly.

“Captain Cole served under me in Afghanistan. A good man. In those days, anyway. Solid pilot, spectacular at times. Followed orders to the letter.” Hagan paused, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to word his next comments. “But he did show an occasional tendency toward … unwarranted independence. And I suppose that under the wrong influence, that might turn into a point of vulnerability.”

“Well, he
was
a Viper pilot, sir. Doesn’t that go with the territory?”

Riggleman realized by the look on Hagan’s face that his remark had crossed the line. The general, too, had once been a fighter jock. The same was true of most Air Force brass. It was part of the built-in bias of the Air Force pecking order—an automatic advantage for those who got to have all the fun.

“No disrespect intended, sir.”

“None taken, Captain. I flew Eagles, not Vipers. And your point is valid, although I do think at times you might be a little quick to find fault with skills you might also envy.”

“Yes, sir.” And there was no “might” about it. But that didn’t mean he was wrong.

“You’ll have every resource at your disposal, of course,” Hagan said. “And I say that with full awareness that those of us in the public sector don’t always have the best possible access to certain cutting-edge technology. Sometimes for budgetary reasons, sometimes due to, well, legal technicalities. So I’m authorizing you to be as, ah, flexible as you deem necessary. Understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

In other words, he was free to use better software than the official stuff, for things like data mining, facial recognition, or even outright hacking, if it came to that.

“One other item, which I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention outside these walls.”

Hagan produced a small key and proceeded to unlock a desk drawer.
He reached inside and pulled out a black business card and slid it across the desk, carefully, as if a chip of plutonium might be encased within. Riggleman picked it up and saw that it contained only a name in white lettering—Harry Walsh—along with a cell phone number with an area code Riggleman didn’t recognize. Nothing else.

“Take a good, long look, Captain. Commit the name and number to memory. When you’ve finished, hand it back. And don’t write anything down, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

Riggleman studied it. The name was easy enough to remember. So was the number. But he wanted to put on a convincing show, so he waited an extra beat or two before placing the card on the desk and sliding it back, just as carefully as the general had done.