Oath of Office

3

United States Air Force Captain Will Hyatt pulled his red VW Passat into the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour Walmart just west of Highway 95. People assigned to Creech Air Force Base tended to designate where they lived by the zip code alone rather than saying North Las Vegas. He’d just scored a house nearby in 89149. The kids were loving the new pool. The Walmart was just around the corner, so he’d offered to stop by “on his way into battle” to grab a few things for the twins’ birthday party.

Hyatt was sweating by the time he got out of the car, thinking he should have done a few laps himself just to cool off before work. It was early, not even seven in the morning, but heat already shimmered up from the asphalt.

He was in and out in a half-hour — mainly because he couldn’t buy anything that melted or went bad during his twelve-hour shift, which was pretty much everything on his wife’s list except paper plates and napkins. He’d grabbed a couple of bags of water balloons even if Shannon hadn’t told him to. All seven-year-olds liked water balloons, didn’t they? Will was only thirty, but it seemed like it was half a century since he’d been seven years old.

Flying drones aged you — and not for the reasons one might think. It wasn’t particularly physical. He wasn’t pulling any G’s. Hell, the MQ-9 would suffer catastrophic failure if it had to pull two G’s. He wasn’t sweating his ass off in some bunker in Kandahar, or trying in vain to keep his kids’ attention over an iffy Skype connection. He got to sit in a comfortable leather chair in a temperature-controlled trailer, and then go home at the end of his shift. He even had the day off tomorrow for the party.

It sounded like he was whining when he said it out loud, but therein was the problem.

Captain Hyatt was home, and yet he wasn’t. Not really. How could you loiter over some ISIS shithole for weeks, watching for signs of some high-value target — and then blow that same HVT to hell and then jump into the family Volkswagen and make the hour drive back to zip code 89149 to kiss your kids and try to screw your head on straight enough to keep the wife happy. He wondered if the guys downrange missed the endless list of honey-dos that seemed so mundane, if not downright pointless, next to hunting terrorist assholes.

Shannon didn’t understand. To be fair, she probably would have if he’d confided in her, but how do you tell your wife that not actually having to be eight thousand miles away from her makes you sad? “Honey, this coming home at night in between war fighting is about to make me crazy.” That was the lamest of all lames. He would suck it up, kill who needed to be killed, and then replace the water heater — or whatever stupid shit happened to break around the house — and he’d be happy about it.

He unlocked his car, feeling the blast of superheated air roll out when he opened the door. This Nevada heat was killing his new Passat. He’d bought it with the retention bonus the Air Force gave him to keep him from jumping ship. He knew guys that were making double his O-3 salary flying for private contractors in the same facilities at Creech.

He waited a few seconds so the car would cool down to what the twins called “subvolcanic,” and then threw the flimsy plastic bag onto the passenger-side floor. This shift was 0700 to 1900, the most volcanic part of the day. Hopefully the balloons wouldn’t melt into a ball of goo in the parking lot. Balloons. He started the car and backed out, shaking his head. Who gave a shit about balloons, anyway? Hyatt was suddenly sorry for the internal fit of anger. He’d schedule a meeting with the chaplain as soon as he arrived on base. One part minister and two parts listening ear, Captain Willis was a godsend when it came to negotiating the dynamic of war fighting and yardwork.

Traffic seemed lighter this morning — which was weird, because it was the same group that went into shift every day. No one lived on Creech — less affectionately known as Crotch — so the cars coming from North Las Vegas to Indian Springs formed a slow-moving line that stretched for two miles from the gate.

Hyatt parked, leaving his window cracked to protect the balloons, and then, having second thoughts, returned to get the bag and took them inside with him. He wrote himself a note on the palm of his hand so he wouldn’t forget to grab them at the end of shift.

His workspace, like those of the five hundred other drone pilots flying from Creech, was a desert-tan air-conditioned trailer tucked in with dozens of other air-conditioned trailers. A sign on the metal door said You Ain’t in Kansas Anymore, reminding all who entered that they were operating in a theater more than seven thousand miles away when they sat at their consoles.

He wore a flight suit — a bag, they called it — and a green David Clark headset, and sat in the left of two beige leatherette seats in front of six screens and video monitors that displayed the specifics of his MQ-9 Reaper UAV, located over Helmand Province in Afghanistan at that precise moment. The cameras offered Hyatt a remarkably clear view of the target from twelve thousand feet.

Sensor Operator Staff Sergeant Ray Deatherage sat in the right seat. The workstations were remarkably similar, but where Hyatt flew the aircraft and fired the missiles, Deatherage’s job was to operate the onboard cameras and fix the laser on target to provide the missiles with an aiming point. The irony of his name was not lost, but the CO expressly ordered that no one was to refer to him as Death Rage, or Death Ray Deatherage, his skill with the laser targeting system notwithstanding.

The new guy was there, too, sitting in the back of the cramped trailer with his embossed leather notebook that said Oreo on the front — like the damned cookie. It was a weird cover for a CIA drone guy, but whatever. Hyatt got paid to fly the Reaper, not second-guess the intel weenies. The movies always made the spooks out to be more sinister somehow than the military, but they were just people. Weird bastards to be sure, but still just people. Brian, if that was even his real name, had been with them ever since Hyatt had sent up a report on Faisal al-Zamil’s location. Brian seemed like a nice enough guy, even with his Connecticut accent. But Hyatt knew he was there for only one reason.

A cell-phone number belonging to one of Zamil’s wives had been pinging off a tower near Nad Ali for the past month. Hyatt and another MQ-9 had taken turns loitering for days above the compound believed to be her residence. At twelve thousand feet, the woman never even knew they were there. Hyatt thought it weird that he, Deatherage, Brian, and the other Reaper crew were probably six of maybe eight or nine men in the world who saw her without her veil. They watched her hang out her laundry, shake her fist at the kids, or hustle out to the car to go to the market, always escorted by three dudes who were not Zamil, damn it. Sometimes, though, she went to another house some six klicks away. It was thin, but higher thought it worth the time and effort. Zamil was a known supplier of weapons to ISIS, and as such, the high-value target du jour. And this was their only real lead.

Hyatt watched the missus for six days, logging visitors, building patterns of life, noting how often she made the six-kilometer journey to the other compound, and, more important to him, where the kids were at specific times during the day. Most of his shift was during the nighttime in Afghanistan, so the bulk of his images were ghostly infrared images like something out of a video game. But a kid’s head poking out of a window helped him avoid collateral damage in the event Zamil did show up.

And then the wily bastard just walked out of the house. He didn’t go anywhere at first, he just took a stroll around the inner compound, and then ducked inside. Captain Hyatt had written a report, and Brian, the CIA drone guy, showed up in the middle of the next shift, less than twenty-four hours later. He wore a flight suit like everyone else, but with no nametag, unit patch, or rank insignia, there was no doubt to everyone on base who he worked for.

A good deal of Hyatt’s job could be a lot like watching paint dry — but life got a little more interesting once Zamil actually came into the picture. He was wanted directly in connection to an attack that cost the lives of three American soldiers and fifteen Afghans. This would be a preplanned operation. A targeted killing based on evidence. A team of lawyers checked the law, then policy, and then the boxes to say it was okay to pull the trigger. These suits made certain any proposed strike met the laws of armed conflict, the preordained rules of engagement, and the top-secret instructions known as “spins” put in place by theater command. No laser was aimed and no trigger got pulled until the lawyers at the Air Force head shed signed off on all three.

The CIA had lawyers, too, and their own checklist, but they operated under different ROEs and had a little freer hand to pull said trigger when the time came.

That’s where Brian came in.

“Movement,” Staff Sergeant Deatherage said, toggling the Reaper’s cameras to follow Zamil out of his house to a waiting Toyota pickup. The truck had arrived the day before, a green tarp covering a load of something that was stacked in the bed.

Captain Hyatt tapped his joystick slightly. At twelve thousand feet, it didn’t have to move far or fast to keep up with the pickup. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder, but Brian held up an open hand. “We have a ‘concur’ on the death warrant, but let’s see where he goes.”

“Roger that,” Hyatt said, inching along, unseen, the wrath of God more than two miles above this death-dealing asshole who was about to become one with the yellow dirt over which he now traveled.

“Second truck coming in from the north,” Staff Sergeant Deatherage said, calling out what all of them were seeing.

“A transfer,” Hyatt said, zoned in now. The crosshairs on his console stayed on the Toyota.

The two trucks stopped nose-to-nose in the middle of the deserted road. It was late, a half an hour until sunset. The trucks, along with every rock and pebble, cast long shadows over the orange ground.

“The new guys are wearing shemaghs,” Deatherage said. “Impossible to ID them.”

Brian was standing now, hovering just off Hyatt’s left elbow, as if the extra eight feet of distance would help him see the images on the screen any better. All three men watched as Zamil and his second-in-command walked to the rear of the Toyota. The second man was Omar Khalid, who, though not quite to the level of Zamil, was adjudged bad enough by the head shed that he’d be worth qualifying for prosecution. That was the word they used. Prosecution.

The men in the air-conditioned trailer leaned forward slightly as the two Afghans they’d identified threw back the tarp.

Hyatt stood up without being told, and Brian slid into his seat. Agency rules of engagement were more permissive. Their lawyers said it was okay to fold unidentified third parties in with the death warrant, if those unidentified third parties were doing something illegal. Nobody wanted these guys running around with a dozen new French Mistral MANPADS. Like its American cousin the Stinger, the shoulder-fired Mistral could wreak havoc on coalition aircraft — especially the MQ-9s, which were sitting ducks if they ventured below ten thousand feet.

By the time Hyatt handed off the controls and Brian plugged in his own headset, Omar had climbed into the bed of the Toyota.

“Master Arm on,” Brian said. “Weapons hot.”

“Lasers hot,” Deatherage said.

“Three, two, one, rifle,” Brian said, pulling the trigger. “Missile away.”

Standing behind his chair, Hyatt looked at the instrumentation.

The hard work had been the endless hours of waiting, watching, logging patterns. It was largely academic from this point. A single AGM-114R Romeo Hellfire II missile locked on immediately, flying toward the lased target as if on a wire. Traveling at 995 miles per hour, it took just over seven seconds to make the trip.

Zamil and the others were in the process of unloading the Mistrals and pulled the tarp a little farther, displaying the rest of the Toyota’s contents the instant before the Romeo turned them to a flaming ball of fire and dust. A secondary explosion — really a series of them that happened almost too fast to distinguish — touched off just after the initial splash.

Hyatt watched the wind blow away smoke and dust.

“Master Arm off,” Brian said. “Weapons safe.”

“Laser safe,” Deatherage said.

Brian sat still for a moment.

“Did you see that?” Captain Hyatt said.

“The secondaries.” Brian gave a low whistle. “I know, right.”

“That, too,” Hyatt said. “I’m going to rewind the video feed a little. I think he had some MICAs.”

“French MICAs?” Brian stood now, unplugging his headset and making way for Hyatt.

“Pretty sure,” the captain said.

“I call that a well-armed enemy,” Brian said. “French Mistrals, French MICAs. I’d like to know where they’re gettin’ their shit.”

“That’s your battle space,” Hyatt said. He set a course for Kandahar. The guys on the ground there would land the bird, perform any needed maintenance, and then do a refuel so she could jump up on station for another ten to twelve hours.

A few clicks of his keyboard later, the report and relevant video were on their way to Hyatt’s commanding officer at Creech. She’d run it up the chain, where it would be reviewed and discussed every step of the way, before being sent to encrypted servers at Langley, the Pentagon, and the director of national intelligence’s staff at Liberty Crossing, just to make sure all bases were covered.

Brian put a friendly hand on Hyatt’s shoulder. “Not to be a sociopath, Captain, but we did a good thing here. It needed to be done.”

Deatherage still had the cameras focused on the carnage of the kill site.

“Yep,” Hyatt said. He could get over the splashes, but he didn’t get off on talking about them. “Done deal,” he said.

Brian took the hint. “What’s that written on your hand?”

Hyatt gave an embarrassed shrug. “A note to myself so I don’t forget something for my kids’ birthday.” He took a final look at the smoldering crater that had once been Faisal al-Zamil before he turned his palm upright.

Balloons.

Some terrible god of war he was…