Unmanned (9780385351263) (5 page)

“Al Udeid in
Qatar
?” Steve asked.

Cole nodded. Keira had started taking notes, but the pilot didn’t seem to mind.

“The Combined Air and Space Ops Center,” Cole said. “Went there once for a dog and pony show. Big-ass warehouse. Industrial strength air conditioners going full blast. Hundreds of people at monitors, with headsets on. When both wars were going, everything that was airborne was displayed up on wall-sized maps of Iraq and Afghanistan, like movie screens. The Preds showed up as little blue dots, barely moving. Slowest damn dots on the board.”

“So, at least four people are looking over your shoulder?” Keira asked.

“And all of them think they know better than you what to do next. You have to just sit and take it, when what you really want is to say, ‘Hey, I know this is neat and new to you, but I’m not just driving a bus to take pictures for you guys on the ground.’ ”

“What a cluster fuck,” Steve said.

“Sometimes.”

“How much can you see from that high up?” Keira asked. “Somebody told me once you can even recognize faces.”

That stopped him for a second. He turned away toward the window.

“Not really. But if it’s some village you’ve been to before, you do start to recognize people. From the way they move, the clothes they wear, the things they carry. You end up feeling almost … like you know them.”

“That’s kind of horrible.”

“It can be. Especially when you start to like it. Not really
like
it, I mean, but, I dunno, it gets into your head. You hate it one minute, get off on it the next. It’s their little world, but in some ways you know more about it than they do. If bogeys are over the next hill coming for ’em, you know about it hours before they do.”

Keira, who couldn’t see his expression, seemed eager for more, but Steve was troubled by Cole’s fixed stare. He could easily picture Cole the way he must have looked the day of the disaster at Sandar Khosh, surveying the wreckage on video screens while everyone told him what to do next. Drone pilots were often burnouts, he knew that as well, from a Pentagon study he’d sourced on the Internet. Thirty percent
or something, with almost a fifth suffering from clinical depression. And now, after just a few minutes of pointed conversation, Cole looked like he was at the end of his rope, cornered and hopeless. They were opening up this poor guy like a lab animal. When Keira started to ask another question, Steve cut her off.

“Hey, he must be getting hungry. I know I am. Why don’t we go?”

“I’m fine with room service,” Cole said. His voice was drained of energy.

“No, Keira’s right. Let’s get some air. Take in the freak show out on the Strip.”

“One other thing,” Cole said, turning back toward Keira. “You said you had news of my family.”

She smiled uncomfortably. “What is it you want to know?”

“Anything, really. I haven’t exactly been in touch. Not for a while.”

“Well, let’s see. There’s your boy.”

“Danny.”

“Yeah, Danny. He’s eight now, going to a private school in Saginaw. Third grade. Seems to be doing great.”

“Private school? Carol’s dad must be paying. How’s Karen? She’d be twelve. Probably boy crazy by now. Did you see them?”

“No. But I, uh, went up there. Asked around. At first we thought that, well …”

“That
I
might be up there?”

“Yeah.”

Cole snorted.

“Carol would call the cops if I ever showed my face. Besides. The Air Force, well …”

“What?” Steve asked.

“I’m supposed to stay close to home, meaning right around Creech. Keep them apprised of my whereabouts.” He nodded toward a sheaf of folded printouts on the bedside table, page after page, with lots of lines of print blacked out. “Part of my plea agreement. It’s all in there. I see you’ve got the transcript from my court-martial. They told me it was going to be sealed.”

“It was,” Steve said. Then he shrugged, as if to apologize. “Sources. Don’t worry, we won’t spread it around.”

“Most of it’s bullshit. The Cessna wasn’t stolen. The owner’s another pilot, a friend of mine. We had an understanding. I could use it on weekends and pay him later. And the whole Death Valley thing.” He shook his head. “They made it sound like I kidnapped my kids and dumped them in the wild. It was a trip we’d made before, the whole family. They were all for it. There’s a landing strip there, a Park Service campground with picnic tables and everything. They were loving it. I just had a little too much to drink after they went to bed. Carol overreacted.”

Steve and Keira said nothing.

Cole couldn’t blame them. Even if he was right, what more was there to say? Besides, Carol
hadn’t
overreacted. Cole had shut her out during those final weeks together. He’d never even asked for help as he drifted beyond reach. And she had tried. Tried hard. It was like he was locked inside a cockpit, with Carol banging on the glass. Strapped in for the duration, mute and unreachable, while telling himself the isolation was for security reasons.
Can’t talk about our missions, it’s classified. You wouldn’t understand anyway.

And maybe she wouldn’t have, but he’d never given her the chance, and now he missed her, the kids too. During his desert exile the idea of his family had seemed as remote as the moon. A blank landscape in a blank mind. Now, stirred to life by this conversation, Carol and the kids were a ready presence, their voices alive in his mind. Danny with his picture books, Karen with her soccer ball, Cole slicing a banana onto their Cheerios at the breakfast table while Carol cooked him an egg. A household at peace.

He looked up to see Steve and Keira staring at him. He blushed and took a deep breath.

“Okay, then.” he said. “Let’s go eat.”

Keira headed for the door.

Cole took a last glance out the window, craning his neck to look higher into the empty sky. When he turned he saw Steve watching closely.
The nutty pilot, seeing things in the sky
—that’s what they were probably thinking. Fine. Let them. Three years ago he probably would’ve felt the same. But he’d learned. They would, too.

They filed out of the room without a word.

THREE YEARS AGO
, before Cole knew the truth of things, he was living in the ’burbs of Vegas, out in Summerlin, believing that all was well, all was secure. Freshly arrived from overseas, he had just begun learning to fly Predators out at Creech. Karen was in grade school, Danny in diapers. Compared to a deployment it was a soft life, although he’d never tried to hide his disappointment. He sulked through the first weeks of classroom work, and in the mock-up trailers where they piloted simulators he was listless, robotic. He never joined the others afterward for a beer.

After a month of this behavior the captain running the show took Cole aside for a chat. His name was Lodge, a relaxed fellow who grinned in dopey gratitude whenever a student contributed. Cole thought of him as Mister Rogers in a flight suit.

“Hey, Captain Cole. Got a second?”

Cole shrugged gloomily.

“Great. Come on back.”

They walked to a green cubicle where Lodge shut the door and pulled up a chair.

“Well, Captain Cole, I’ve tried my damnedest. But you’re just not a happy camper.”

“I guess.” He folded his arms.

“What do you suggest we do about that?”

“You offering an exit strategy?”

“Oh, goodness no!” Lodge’s grin widened. “And frankly the reason why is that you are
exactly
the kind of soldier we need most in this program.
Top pilot. High marks all around.” Lodge moved his hands as if checking items off a list. “Smart. Attentive. Good attitude. Well, until you got here, anyway. Most important of all, you’re a natural leader. Your colleagues take cues from you, Cole. Always have, I’ll bet. You just never had a chance to show it up there alone in your Viper. And, well, it doesn’t exactly hurt that you’re a family man, someone who might value the virtues of settling down for a while. The beauty of this program is that you can be in the thick of the action without the hassles of a deployment.”

“I’m not sure I’d call this ‘action.’ ”

“That’s because you aren’t yet sold on the value, the
power
even, of what a UAV can accomplish with the right man at the controls. That’s why you need to see this.” He picked up a remote control for a DVD player, which sat atop a television in the corner. The recording must have been ready to roll, because a picture appeared instantly.

Great, Cole thought. Yet another orientation session. He’d rather suffer through an Amway presentation—Carol and he had already attended two, both hosted by cash-strapped neighbors facing foreclosure—than endure another stilted Air Force video, leaden with acronyms and fake team spirit.

But he could already see that this was something else. It was an aerial shot with a time signature from the day before. Cole recognized the main gate at Creech.

“We shot this around fourteen hundred hours yesterday, just as you guys were getting out of class. The cam is on a Predator, of course. Flew it myself. Your other instructor, Captain Gravely, was the sensor. I guess it occurred to both of us as we watched you frown and shake your head these last three weeks—and let me tell you, that kind of behavior is contagious—that maybe we’d short-changed you guys in conveying, well, exactly how
effective
these things can be. And in ways you’d never imagine.”

Lodge was still grinning amiably, but his eyes gleamed with the promise of something harder.

“We’re at about 12,000 feet. Pretty normal resolution, as you can see. So I had Gravely zoom her down a bit. Here we go.”

There was Cole, walking toward his car.

“Nice trick.”

Hardly surprising, although he couldn’t deny it was a little unsettling, if only because he hadn’t heard the Predator or even known it was up there. Most of the training flights stayed at fairly low altitudes, buzzing like weed whackers. His recollection of the sky from the day before was of a clear and silent blue, empty and unthreatening.

The camera followed his car’s progress out the main gate and onto Highway 95. Cole was a little annoyed, wondering how long this object lesson would last.

“I can see you’re restless, so we’ll skip ahead.”

They jumped forward twenty minutes, toward the halfway mark of the drive home. In those first weeks at Creech the family had lived in an apartment complex only a few blocks from where they eventually bought a house. The camera showed Cole’s car parked on the shoulder of an empty Highway 95. The door was open and Cole was walking away from the road.

“Forgot to take a leak at the base, huh?”

The shot zoomed closer, and even though Cole had shielded himself from the road by standing behind a shoulder-high sagebrush, you could see his stream sparkle in the sunlight. This was stupid, juvenile. The Cole on the screen yawned. So did the one in the room.

“See what I mean?” Lodge said. “Contagious behavior.”

In watching himself he remembered exactly what he’d been thinking at the moment, and the memory worried him. He’d been running well ahead of schedule, with nearly half an hour to kill before picking up Karen from school. So he had decided then and there to drop by an old jock bar near Nellis AFB in Vegas, where he’d once been based long ago, a place where fighter pilots still ruled the flight line. Surely the Predator hadn’t followed him all the way there? Doing so would have violated all kinds of rules.

“We’ll skip ahead again.”

Lodge’s voice had an edge now. On the screen, there was his car parked outside the Kicking Mule, and there was Cole coming out the door of the bar. You could tell right away that his walk was different. Part swagger, part bourbon. For old time’s sake he had ordered a shot of Jeremiah Weed, the hundred-proof bourbon liqueur favored in pilot
hangouts the world over. He had intended to drink only one, but just as he sat down some drunken jocks from Nellis had begun singing “The Predator Eulogy,” a ditty about a drone that went haywire and had to be shot down. It was an anthem of derision, brutal but bearable—at least until the last verse, which had punched him in the gut:

After that he needed two more shots, and now Lodge and he were watching the predictable results. Lodge grinned in his dopy Mister Rogers way. Can you say “inebriated”? Cole wanted to punch him.

“Don’t worry, Captain. I’m not here to make a citation. That’s the Highway Patrol’s job. But by being there twenty-six minutes I figure you had time for, what, maybe three, four shots of the hard stuff? And that paper bag under your arm. Took the rest of the bottle home, didn’t you? Good old Weed.”

They watched him drive toward Karen’s school, not a pretty sight. He supposed next Lodge would try to make him feel like a bad dad. It was pissing him off.

“Isn’t this breaking about a thousand rules?” Cole said. “You must’ve been way out into civilian air space.”

“This show is strictly between you and me, soldier. Besides, we’re not even to the good part.”

Lodge skipped ahead six minutes, not nearly long enough for Cole to have reached Karen’s school. Yet, there was the school, flag flying out front. How had they known where he was heading? Cole was liking this less every second. No kids were yet emerging from the doors. The time signature told him it was a minute before the final bell, and he remembered having been a good seven or eight minutes late.

“How’d you know that I was—?”

“Keep watching, soldier!” Lodge’s tone was angry. “You’re seeing
this country’s newest and greatest weapon in the Global War on Terror, working hand in glove with good intelligence from an experienced forward operator, so you’d better pay attention.”

Forward operator? Had someone been posted at the school? Exactly how had they learned so much about his daily routines? Kids began streaming from the school. Cole spotted Karen right away from the clothes she wore and the distinctive red twisty in her hair, plus the little skip in her walk. Something cold gripped his stomach as the camera followed her progress. How had the sensor known who to look for?