Unmanned (9780385351263) (15 page)

A blow job. That’s what Steve would’ve said, and Cole found himself agreeing. He doubted he shared many political viewpoints with the journalists, but in some ways he was already seeing things from their point of view. Stockholm syndrome, which made him chuckle.

His laughter caught in his throat when he saw the next name in the IntelPro hierarchy:

Phil Bradsher, Chief of Operations.

Or, as the web bio helpfully pointed out, “Major General Phil Bradsher, recently retired from the U.S. Air Force.” He’d come aboard almost two years ago. A quote from CEO Mike Boardman summed up the rationale behind the hire: “With Phil in the cockpit, IntelPro
hopes to motivate its associates to ever bolder and more decisive action. While we believe we have already made an impressive mark on a brave new frontier of private endeavor, with Phil’s guidance and counsel the value of our mission will become ever more apparent, perhaps even to those who tend to question our raison d’être.”

A bullshit way of saying it was time to take no prisoners, or so it sounded to Cole. The same boilerplate the brass used to imply that they were men of action in a passive world. On paper, anyway.

The most intriguing thing about Bradsher was his former spot in the Air Force chain of command. He had led the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center at Nellis, a plum posting reporting directly to Combat Command. Just below Bradsher at Nellis—and presumably still just below Bradsher’s successor—was Brigadier General Mitchell Hagan, commander of the 57th Wing, with jurisdiction over Colonel Archer Milroy, head of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Creech, with all its Predator crews, including the ones commanded by Cole’s CO, Lieutenant Colonel Scott “Sturdy” Sturdivant.

He studied the photo and thought about the timing. By the time the shit hit the fan for Cole, Bradsher had been out of the Air Force several months. But Cole was guessing he stayed in close touch with all his old buddies, and he probably knew exactly what was going on inside the Predator program—its successes, its fuckups, its booming budget appropriations, and the growing chatter about pilot burnout. Cole recalled Bickell’s complaints about green badgers and blue badgers and all the incestuous relationships out in the field. If IntelPro’s people ever needed help from a Predator crew, they certainly had the right man to ensure their request would be heard at the highest levels. He was pondering the implications of that when a voice made him jump.

“Next time, ask first.”

Barb stood in the kitchen doorway, hands on hips. Cole exed out the page and sat up straight.

“Sorry. Couldn’t sleep, figured I’d look some stuff up.”

“Like my emails, maybe?”

“No. Web stuff. Didn’t even know this was your machine.”

She crossed her arms, the same pose his mom had used whenever
Cole missed curfew. She wore a white flannel nightgown, decidedly unsexy, although her hair looked disturbingly the way it had in his dream. He shifted self-consciously.

“Maybe you should have a password for your log-on,” he said.

“Up to now I’ve never needed one. We’re a team here. Or were. We trust each other not to go snooping around on each other’s laptops.”

“Even team members need to keep some stuff to themselves.”

“Tell me about it. I’m having a drink. Want one? And no, this isn’t a test of your sobriety.”

She turned back into the kitchen. He heard the clink of bottles, the gurgle of a pour.

“Maybe just a touch.”

She emerged with two glasses, no ice. He could already smell the bourbon.

“What were you perusing so intently?” She handed him the glass.

“IntelPro website. Trying to get up to speed.”

“Learn anything?”

He told her about Bradsher. She raised an eyebrow and swallowed without a shudder, an old pro. Then she leaned over his shoulder and tapped the keyboard until the general’s bio popped back up. Her flannel sleeve brushed Cole’s cheek. It smelled like her skin, like the warmed sheets of a slept-in bed.

She nodded, reading.

“Good stuff.” She sounded pleased. “That chain of command you mentioned, write it down. You said the line goes straight to your unit?”

“Like an arrow.”

“And you think Bradsher would be able to exploit those connections?”

“Absolutely.”

“At what price?”

“He wouldn’t need a price. It’s an old boy network.”

She smiled and lowered her head, as if embarrassed for him.

“There’s always a price,
especially
in old boy networks. But that’s a good thing. Gives me more trails to follow. Deeds, stock transactions, any sign that your old chain of command is living beyond its means.” She sipped more bourbon. “You always keep these hours?”

He shrugged. In the desert he’d never been conscious of time, apart from what the sun told him. Earlier, when he flew Preds, the shifts had changed so often that his inner clock had been constantly out of balance. She shook her head.

“Just what this crowded little house needs. Another insomniac.”

“You, too?”

“Only since that.” She nodded toward the photos.

“How long ago?”

“Year and a half. But at this time of night it always feels like about an hour ago.”

“I know the feeling.”

“I suppose you do.”

“Where’d it happen?”

“The back of beyond. Little tribal village, Tangora, in Nangahar Province.”

The name was vaguely familiar.

“Were you embedded?”

“No. Hated that shit. Went on my own. Stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but I was going stir crazy in the hotel. Pounding drinks every night at Bistro and L’Atmosphere. Telling war stories with other hacks like we knew what it was all about. Same sources, day after day.”

“Nangahar’s out in Indian country. How’d you get there?”

“There’s an old Swede, runs an NGO that trains midwives. Been there since the nineties, contacts out the wazoo, friends on all sides. He put me on to a fixer, Mohammed, supposedly connected to a midlevel Taliban, an old thug named Engineer Haider who sent word he’d talk to me. I paid Mohammed a hundred fifty a day, plus two hundred to set up the meet. We took a taxi for the first leg, out past Gardez. Stupid as hell, begging to be kidnapped. Later we switched to a Nissan pickup that couldn’t shift into fourth. I was covered head to toe like a local and sat in the back. Mohammed was pretending to be my husband and liking it a little too much. But he got us there.”

“Was Haider really Taliban?”

“When it suited his needs. He had other constituencies, too. Said he even ran a few errands for an American contractor, when they paid him enough.”

“IntelPro?”

“Overton Security, a competitor.”

“You believe him?”

“No reason not to. Guys like Haider are fucking gangsters. At the end of the day it’s only about the money. All that tribal bullshit about the enemy of my brother, the wisdom of the elders, it’s been completely crushed by the weight of greed.”

“Sounds like a line from a story.”

She smiled, tilted her glass as though making a toast.

“More or less.” She nodded toward the photos. “Haider had a walled compound, but because I was a woman he would only meet me outside, in a stable where the boys brought in the sheep every night. We’d been talking for about an hour when some older kid runs in, all excited, saying somebody had spotted a white swallow.”

“Swallow?”

“Like the bird. His name for Predators. Haider had posted two of his sons up on the walls with binoculars. Their only job was to look for drones. He
liked
having drones around. Said that meant they were hunting his rivals. Said his work for Overton meant he had an understanding with the Agency, protection. So he leaves Mohammed and me to cool our heels while he goes up to the roof for a look. His house was inside the compound, maybe forty yards off. I went outside to watch for him. That’s when those boys showed up.” She nodded at the photos. “They wanted cigarettes, but I don’t smoke. Then they wanted money, but Mohammed said not to encourage them. I took out my camera and they lit up, mugging and laughing. That was the first shot, the one where they’re smiling. I took two more before the missile hit.”

“Haider’s house?”

“Dead center. Blew him to pieces. There was a torso, other things I never want to see again. Inside the compound it was like a butcher shop, half his family. Blood and stuff flew clear over the wall, like somebody had tossed it in water balloons. Then those two old people, ten feet away. I guess shrapnel got them.”

She swallowed the last of the bourbon, then hugged herself. Cole studied the second photo—the wild eyes, the dark flecks on white garments.

“The official count was eight dead,” she said. “Somebody high up must have decided it was a fuckup, because they went into the books as civilians. Three men, three women, two children.”

The totals alighted in Cole’s memory in the same place where the name of the village, Tangora, had come to rest. Now he knew where he’d heard it.

“When was this again? Exactly.”

“August 2010. The fourteenth, a Saturday. I filed a piece in time for all the Sunday editions and they put it on page three. Got bumped off the front by a piece about a bear cub in Florida with its head stuck in a jar.”

But Cole was no longer listening. The date fit perfectly.

“I know the crew, the one that fired the dart.”

Barb uncrossed her arms. Outside, a heron squawked in the gloom.

“Captain Rod Newell. Sensor Billy Flagg. Everybody was talking about Rod and Billy. It kinda blew ’em away, like what happened to Zach and me. But I never heard anything about Fort1, I would’ve remembered. You sure this was his doing?”

Barb nodded. She told him how Fort1 had arrived on the scene an hour later, hopping off a Pave Hawk chopper with a handheld radio and an armed escort of three green badgers with no official markings on their uniforms. She heard Fort1 speak his call name into the radio just after landing.

“A real asshole. They all were, but he was the worst. Shoved one of those boys right to the ground. ‘Get these little fuckers out of my hair!’ That kind of shit. When he saw me with my notebook I thought for a second he was going to kill Mohammed and me both.”

“Why was he pissed?”

“He wasn’t happy with the results. Maybe he’d been after somebody else. When he searched the compound he was cursing everything in sight.”

“How’d you get out of there?”

“One of his guys escorted us back. So I owe him for that, I guess.”

She stared off into space. Cole knew the look. But just as he’d concluded she was lost in her memories, she asked a question indicating that her brain was still fully engaged.

“What kind of records do they keep for those Predator raids?”

“There’s a full written transcript, with all the chatter and commands, plus the entire video record of whatever the camera shot.”

“With the view from the Predator?”

“Yeah. The whole op. They use ’em for training sometimes.”

“Where do they keep that stuff?”

“On base, digitally stored. There might be copies at Langley and Al Udeid, but that’s above my pay grade.”

“Could you get access?”

“Me? I can’t even get through the main gate. Besides, that shit’s classified.”

“But you’ve still got friends there, right?”

Cole shrugged. “My old wingman, my sensor, Zach.”

“Zach Lewis. Age twenty-three. Born McKeesport, P.A. Used to spend all day looking at satellite imagery until he volunteered for the Predator program. A bit of a drinker. A month or two behind on his rent.”

“Impressive.”

“It was in your court-martial papers. I’ve got a phone number for his apartment, a personal email address. You could phone him in the morning.”

Cole shook his head.

“They’d trace it. Or get a record for the call. They’d know where I was.”

“Then send him an email. I’ll set up a Gmail account, route it through another server so they won’t even know where it came from.”

“Everything can be traced.”

“Okay. So it won’t be
easy
to trace, and it might take a while. And he can erase it right after reading it.”

“I thought erasure was impossible, too?”

“Off his hard drive, I mean. I’ll send him instructions.”

“Even if he got access, how would he send us a copy?”

“With digital records there would be about a thousand ways.”

She pulled up a chair and set up an address. Even then Cole was reluctant to send a message, and wasn’t sure what to say. Barb offered to help him write it. She asked him which archives to request, and
he named the dates and places. Their wish list grew to include not only the video for Tangora but both missions that Zach and he flew over Sandar Khosh, plus any missions flown by any crew over Mansur’s home village of Mandi Bahar.

Barb composed the whole thing in a flash. He marveled at how quickly and clearly she marshaled their thoughts, and by the time she finished, even Cole believed that the request sounded earnest and innocent, like a well-intentioned man searching only for the truth. And that’s just what they were doing, wasn’t it?

“Anything else before I push the button?”

“
If
you push it.”

“Oh, I’m pushing it. Because you want me to.”

True enough.

“Ask him if he remembers any missions where a guy named Lancer popped up in the chat audience. And if he does, then send those, too.”

The keyboard clattered.

“Done.”

For all their precautions, it took his breath away when she clicked Send. He was already in trouble for disappearing. In the hands of a military prosecutor, his request to Zach might look like attempted espionage. The instructions telling Zach how to cover his tracks, while sensible, would look even worse.

He sipped the bourbon while his thoughts wandered farther afield. If he could risk a message to Zach, why not one to his kids, or to Carol? If only to let her know that he was sober, and as stable and safe as he’d been in ages.

The look on his face must have given him away.

“You miss them, don’t you.”

“My family?”

She nodded.

“I do now. Out in the desert it got to where the only kids I ever thought about were the ones we killed. I’d kind of blank out for days at a time. Then, almost the second Keira came into the trailer, I knew I had to get out, get away. She looked up at me and all I could think about was the total emptiness of everything out there.”