Unmanned (9780385351263) (6 page)

“I’ve seen enough,” Cole said.

Lodge didn’t answer. The camera followed Karen to the curb. She looked up the street in both directions while other kids jostled past her on their way to cars with moms positioned by the doors. Hadn’t
any
of them noticed a lurking observer, or the buzz of a funny-looking plane high overhead? Look at them, oblivious.

A few more agonizing minutes passed until Cole’s car weaved into view. To his shock, you could easily sense the signs of disapproval in the body language of the remaining moms. They folded their arms as he walked past after parking crookedly up the street. He must have smelled like a distillery, and he was still carrying the paper bag by the neck of the bottle. Lodge froze the shot just as his mouth opened to call out to Karen.

“There’s more if you want to keep skipping ahead. Of course when the day got on toward dusk we switched to infrared. If I was you, I’d think about closing those curtains on the sliding glass doors next time you’re feeling frisky.”

Cole actually blushed, even as he told himself that what he was thinking wasn’t possible. Carol had been angry with him when he got home, smelling the bourbon and laying into him about driving drunk. They’d sent Karen and Danny out to play with the neighbor’s kids, and proceeded to have a full-blown shouting match, which ended with hugs, a few awkward laughs and a vigorous round of makeup sex, so spontaneous that they had done it right there on the family room couch, which faced out toward the sliding glass doors. The wooden back fence was enough to prevent any curious neighbors from watching. But from a vantage point high in the sky, well …

Lodge was grinning, hand poised on the remote. If they’d been in
a bar, Cole would have busted him up, a fist to the chin—jock tactics, officially frowned upon but unofficially tolerated, at least in some places he’d served. But this was a different Air Force out here at Creech, so he swallowed hard and kept his seat. As he mastered his anger another emotion rose up to replace it—a grudging respect. Not for this smug asshole Lodge, but for that damned thing up in the sky, trained to his every move, spotting things that even a nosy neighbor would miss. He would never view the sky the same way again.

Much later, after his hitch in the stockade, he’d moved to the trailer, taking it mostly because the price was right and he didn’t want neighbors. Under the terms of his release he was supposed to keep the Air Force posted on his movements, and for three weeks running an official car had driven out to check on him. The first time the car came all the way up to his front door. An MP with a sidearm hopped out for a quick look without saying a word. A power play. By the second week the MP was stopping a half mile out, rolling down a window to check with a pair of binoculars, the lenses gleaming in the sun. Then the visits stopped.

Cole first noticed a Predator a few days later, first from the faint buzzing which never would have been audible over the background hubbub of a city or even a suburb. He learned to look for the telltale glint as the Predator circled, and from then on he noticed at least one every week—or thought he did. With all the drinking, Cole would be the first to admit that his powers of observation hadn’t exactly been razor sharp.

Annoyed, he made it a point to stay inside the trailer whenever he heard one, although once he snapped and pulled his trousers down to his knees, bending over to moon the bastards while shouting curses at the sky. Then, like pretty much everything in life once it’s repeated enough, he got used to the damn things and went about his business as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Although he never stopped looking.

So, yes, go ahead and laugh, he thought, watching the two reporters as they waded through the noise and jumble of the casino on the hotel’s ground floor. They were clueless about what was possible, or about how the so-called rules no longer applied. But they would learn soon enough.

“
SO TELL ME SOMETHING
,” Cole said.

He ate as he spoke, wiping the plate clean with the last shred of pancake from their moo shu pork. They’d picked a Chinese place, not a takeout but a real restaurant with a hostess, a wine list, and white tablecloths. A little touch of civilization that Steve hoped would continue Cole’s process of normalization. Judging by the man’s appetite, it seemed to be working.

“Tell you what?” Keira asked.

“Why Baltimore? I mean, I know that’s where your friend lives. Steve, too. But is there some other reason you guys decided to bunk there, maybe even having to do with the story?”

Steve was impressed, although he was still a little worried about the double shot of Jack Daniels that Cole had downed with his meal.

“Go ahead,” he said to Keira. “You tell him.”

“There’s a security company based out in Baltimore County. IntelPro. One of those Blackwater-type outfits. Steve and I were both working stories related to them, independent of each other, when we started picking up traces of Fort1’s misadventures. He’s blown some of their ops, too.”

“Burned a few of their field men,” Steve added.

“Or so they say.”

“I’ve pretty much verified it.”

“Barb was working another angle, but she ended up on some of the same trails, and we all kind of bumped into each other through IntelPro. And, well, since they’re right in Steve and Barb’s backyard,
it seemed like the best place to hole up, at least for a while. Not that we’ve been able to take the IntelPro connection much further.”

“Okay.” Cole nodded. “IntelPro. That makes sense. What about the ground rules?”

“That’s Barb’s department,” Steve said. “Her house, her rules.”

“Not sleeping arrangements. Rules of the road, expenses, that kind of thing. I’m done with charge cards, too easy to track. Cash only. And before I travel I’ll need a fake ID, something to keep the Air Force off my trail. You can buy ’em in the pawn district out by Nellis for about a hundred fifty. You guys are probably flying, but I’ll go by bus. Airports are just about the worst possible places for showing up on security cams.”

Already setting down rules before he even knew Barb’s address. The man certainly had his nerve. And, frankly, some of the rules were pretty wacky. A bus? To Baltimore? More evidence of paranoia.

“You sound like you’ve been reading too many spy novels,” Steve said.

“This is stuff from training.”

“The Air Force teaches countersurveillance techniques?”

“Sort of. Infowar training, part of some war gaming we did at Nellis.”

“I thought war games were for fake combat,” Keira said.

“That’s the fun part. We’d go up against ‘aggressor’ units that flew MiGs, or other foreign birds. But they do a lot of situational stuff on the ground. Testing your security awareness, seeing how leaky everybody was.”

“And?”

“We were like a beer can with a hole in the bottom.”

“Loose lips sink
air
ships?”

“Loose lips weren’t the problem. A lot of it was paper stuff—credit card receipts, postcards home, or dumb shit people did online. Turned out there was a special unit dogging us the whole time, hacking our PC accounts, even dumpster diving outside our barracks, the PX, everywhere we went. On our last day they ambushed us with the results. Some obnoxious techie laid out everything they’d learned, all our fuckups. Pretty mind-blowing. Then he tipped us on how to avoid it next
time, stuff we could use in the field to disguise our movements, our intentions. So those are my conditions: cash only, fake ID, a bus ticket to Baltimore.”

“You seem to be forgetting the price of admission. Keira said you got a look at a file?”

“I did. But if I tell you now what I saw, what’s to stop you from ditching me?”

Steve looked to Keira for help.

“Our word of honor?” she said.

Cole snorted. Steve tried again.

“Give us nothing and we’ll ditch you for sure. Right now all we have is
your
word of honor that you’ve got anything we can use.”

“Fine. Then leave without me. I’ll hitch back to the trailer.”

Steve looked again at Keira, who touched Cole’s hand so quickly that he almost missed it.

“Look,” she said, “this isn’t easy for us, either. We’re all in favor of making you feel safe and secure, and we’ll buy you an ID if you’re strapped for cash. But you have to give us some kind of an idea of whether you’re worth the investment. We’ve got sources to protect, proprietary information. Things that took us months to find out. And we’re not used to letting just anybody into the club, especially people we don’t know.”

“Okay. I get that. Where would you like me to start?”

“How about the op at Sandar Khosh?” Steve said. “Who were you really looking for that day? What was your objective?”

Cole took the request like a blow, then stared down at his empty plate.

Keira threw Steve a look, like he’d moved in the wrong direction. She again touched Cole’s hand, more noticeably this time.

“Only if you don’t mind talking about it,” she said.

Steve held his tongue and watched them. This was Keira’s strength, getting people to talk when they didn’t want to, drawing information out of them like poison. Afterward you could almost see the relief in their faces, as if she’d done them a favor. And maybe she had.

“It was a hit job, plain and simple,” Cole said. “One HVT and his entourage.”

“High-value target?”

“Yeah. But I don’t have a name. They never tell us, and we didn’t hear it later.”

“Meaning you missed him?”

“Probably. The trigger cue for the mission was a white Toyota truck with orange markings on the hood. It was supposed to be bringing the HVT to some kind of meeting. All the other bad dudes were supposedly already inside, waiting.”

“Why not just shoot the truck?”

“We discussed that. Vehicles are a more reliable kill as long as you can land the dart right on the roof. It’s laser-guided, so as long as you keep the crosshairs in the right place you’re golden. But it can get tricky. From ten thousand feet a Hellfire takes about a minute to reach the target. At the last second the vehicle might move behind a building, or into the trees. A flock of sheep might come along, or a bunch of kids. Then what? So we decided to stake out the house, wait for the truck, get ’em all.”

“What went wrong?”

“You tell me. Three seconds before impact, three kids come running out the front door. The first was a girl, same age as my daughter. I still dream about her.”

“Jesus,” Steve said.

Keira put her hand on Cole’s forearm and left it there. “How did Fort1 react?”

“Hard to say. We were only in contact by chat. But he kept asking to see the wreckage.”

“Looking for the HVT, maybe?” Steve asked. “For a positive ID?”

“Maybe. There was a body toward the back that he seemed interested in, but mostly he wanted to scan the rubble, the ruins. We must have spent half an hour going back and forth. Not a pretty sight, let me tell you.”

Then a long pause before Steve broke the silence.

“Well, that’s good stuff. But what can you give us from the file?”

“How ’bout a name? Fort1’s.”

Steve sat up straighter.

“You saw it? You saw his
name
?”

“Not just saw it. Recognized it. I can even describe him for you. I’d helped train him, earlier that year.”

Blood rushed to the end of Steve’s fingertips, the same way it did whenever he was about to do something momentous.

“Wade Castle,” Cole said. “An Agency guy.”

“And you
trained
him?”

“On Predator stuff. He came to Creech with two other CIA guys. They were setting up their own drone program out of some base across the Pak border, down in Baluchistan. I was supposed to show them the ropes, let them sit in on a few of our missions.”

“And they told you their names?” Steve asked.

“No. They didn’t even say they were CIA. OGA was all we knew—other government agency—not that everybody didn’t know what that meant. The names thing was a fuckup. The asshole in charge, a guy named Lodge, gave them a welcoming gift of Air Force flight suits. Somehow he’d gotten a look at the paperwork, which was a screwup right there, way above his clearance, and he had the suits personalized with their last names printed on the ID patch. I was there when he presented them. They took the things out of the box, laughed kind of nervous and folded everything back up as fast as they could, but everybody saw the names. All three of them. Castle, Bickell, Orlinksy. Later we went strictly by first names, and his was Wade. Then when I saw the file and the same name popped up, everything clicked. It was him.”

“Does the Air Force know you saw it?”

Cole shook his head, then glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping.

“I didn’t even tell my sensor, Zach. My attorney, either. Didn’t want to give them any excuse to stick me in some hole in the ground for the rest of my life. You’re the only ones I’ve told.”

“What else did you see?”

“Sorry. That was my admission ticket. The rest comes later.”

Steve looked at Keira, who nodded. Cole was in, at least for now.

“We better get over to the pawn district, start working on that fake ID,” Steve said. “Keira and I are flying back tomorrow. The sooner we get you on a bus, the better.”

But Keira had a question first.

“Those other two agency guys you trained, Bickell and Orlinsky—you remember their first names?”

“Sure. Owen Bickell, Wally Orlinsky.”

She wrote them down and looked at Steve.

“You’re thinking they might be sources?” he asked.

“If we can find ’em. It’s doubtful they’d talk.”

“Unless …” Cole said. “Bickell was near retirement age. He said something once about quitting to go fishing. He’d brought a fly rod and was hoping to get over to Utah, to fish the Sevier River. Said something about a summer place of his, out on some lake back east.”

“Where?” Keira asked.

“New Hampshire, I think.”

“Well, if he
is
retired …” Steve said.

“Barb’s ex-Agency source?”

“Yeah. I think he could find us an address.”