Unmanned

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Trip Riggleman drove slowly down the lonely dirt road leading to Darwin Cole’s abandoned trailer, raising a contrail of dust that must have been visible for miles. He glanced over his shoulder to behold the bleak beauty of it — sort of like a vapor trail from one of those muscular fighter-bombers, a thought that made him wistful.

He was in a hunting mood, airborne or not, and this was his initial sortie. Before he began his online pursuit in earnest he wanted to try to take the measure of the man with a firsthand inspection of his recent home ground.

Riggleman felt strangely vulnerable out here in the open, as if a missile might zoom in from above at any moment, slamming into the modest Ford sedan from the base motor pool and blowing it right off the road, a blackened smudge on the prairie. Those unauthorized Predator photos had spooked him even as they excited him. Someone had already strayed out of bounds in this case, and Riggleman figured that before long he would probably do the same.

But did the earlier interest mean that someone would be snooping over his shoulder as he proceeded? This was certainly the kind of countryside that made you wonder — empty from horizon to horizon, with every glint from above winking like a potential eye in the sky. The feeling of being watched grew so strong in him that at one point, just after Cole’s trailer came into view at the base of a distant bluff, Riggleman braked to a halt and cut the engine. Silence. Nothing moved except the dust in his wake, which settled to the ground like a long brown serpent coiling itself to sleep — or maybe to strike.

He reached down to restart the engine, then hesitated and got out of the car. He walked around to the front, where he sat on the warm hood and peered off toward Cole’s saggy trailer. From here it looked like an encampment for some kind of survivalist cult. Between him and the trailer, not a single sign of life. Looking back in the direction he’d come from, he saw the long line of tire tracks left by the Ford. Over to his left, his own footprints, preserved for anyone who came later. Now he was feeling eerier than ever, so he hopped down and got back under way. He turned on the radio for company but got only static on AM, and nothing at all on FM. Some sort of dead zone, maybe. Nothing to beam your signal to out here anyway.

The trailer sat deep in the shadow of the bluff. The damn door was wide open, swaying in a fresh breeze. An unpleasant smell wafted from the opening like bad breath. Just inside was a pile of animal shit, probably coyote, still fresh enough to have attracted a squadron of green flies, which buzzed in protest as Riggleman stepped across.

A shotgun was propped against the wall near the door. He picked it up. Well maintained. He levered it open. Still loaded. Now that was odd. He propped it carefully back against the wall, wondering how long it would stand there, loaded and ready, until someone else came along. Years, maybe.

The kitchen sink was full of dishes and more flies. Coyotes had torn apart much of the furniture and bedding, leaving claw marks on the upholstery and dusty paw prints across the floor. Unwashed clothes were piled by the bed. The scene emanated an air of a life suddenly interrupted, so much so that he wondered for a moment if Cole might have been abducted.

It was an alarming thought. For one thing, it would cast Cole’s visit to the ex-CIA man in New Hampshire in an entirely different light. Had he been accompanied by others? Was he a hostage to a foreign government, perhaps? A dupe doing someone else’s bidding? Maybe his kidnappers had threatened to harm his family unless he cooperated.

But apart from the coyote damage there was no sign of a fight or struggle. No bloodstains, or broken glass, or clumps of human hair. And there was also the loaded gun, unfired and neatly set aside.

He went back outside. He’d checked the recent meteorological data for the location, and it hadn’t rained out here since Cole’s disappearance. Yet there were no marks on the ground to suggest a scuffle, or the dragging of a body. Just footprints — two sets besides his own. One was man-sized, probably Cole’s. The other was almost dainty, probably a woman. Both led to a second set of tire tracks that presumably had been left by the sedan in the surveillance photo. Riggleman got out his smart phone and took shots of the tread pattern and the footprints. Then he went back inside for a more systematic search.

On a closet shelf, well beyond the reach of the coyotes, was a cardboard box stuffed with transcripts of depositions and courtroom proceedings from Cole’s court-martial. It felt providential, his first stroke of luck. Already, the long trip was worthwhile.

Earlier that morning, just before leaving Nellis in the Ford, Riggleman had fired off his first piece of paperwork, an official request to the USAF legal eagles who’d prosecuted Cole, asking for copies of everything they had on the case. But he knew from experience that even in high-priority investigations, these kinds of requests routinely took days, even weeks, to achieve a result. This trove in the trailer, provided it was complete, would save lots of time and bureaucratic aggravation.

Finding nothing more of value inside, Riggleman hauled the box out to the Ford and began scouting the perimeter for a radius of roughly two hundred yards. It was hot, dry work, and the only signs of life were more coyote prints, which seemed to be everywhere, plus some empty cans that they must have carried off from a charred garbage pit behind the trailer. What a way to live.

By the time Riggleman got back to Nellis there was a box sitting on his desk that looked a lot like the one from Cole’s closet. It was the complete record of the court-martial. And when he signed on to his desktop computer there was an email from the legal office, which, based on the time signature, indicated that they’d sent over the box by courier within two hours of receiving his request.

Well, that was certainly a pleasant surprise, enough so to make him slightly uncomfortable. Once again he wondered how many people above him knew what he was up to.

He took the two sets of documents out of their boxes and stacked them side by side, then methodically arranged each set in chronological order. Each stack contained the same number of documents. He then compared the two versions of every document. Everything matched up there as well until he got to the depositions. The official version of the one taken from Cole’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Sturdivant, was lighter and thinner than the copy from the trailer.

Riggleman counted the pages. Twenty-two were missing from the official copy. As if to hide this, whoever had made the duplicates for the legal office had placed the originals in the copying machine in a way that cut off the page numbers from the top. The gap was further disguised by the way one of Sturdivant’s answers ended at the bottom of the last page before the gap, and then a question from a lawyer led off the first page afterward. If he hadn’t known about the missing pages, the document would have appeared to be seamless.

But when he checked those twenty-two pages in Cole’s set, nothing leaped out at him as something the Air Force would want to keep secret. Part of it was a dry discussion of Cole and Sturdivant’s chain of command. Part was a section in which Sturdivant read into the record a chat exchange from one of Cole’s recent Predator missions, in which the only two participants apart from the ones you’d normally expect were two code-name handles — Fort1 and Lancer.

The names were meaningless to him, but he filed them away for possible further consideration. More disturbing was the way in which the missing pages reinforced his nascent sense that there was something eerily different about this case. Enough so that he began to view the subject — Captain Darwin Cole — in a different light.

On the surface Cole was a drunk, a loser, a hermited fuckup in the desert who, by all appearances, had lived in barely human conditions and had disappeared with little regard to the mess he was leaving behind, literally and figuratively. Yet his first moves once he was beyond the squalor of the trailer had left virtually no trace. None that Riggleman had yet found, anyway. That suggested a deceptively careful man, a challenging quarry.

It brought to mind one of Riggleman’s opponents from a wrestling match long ago, a big-eyed boy from the Corn Belt who’d stepped onto the mat looking decidedly flabby for his weight class. Ponderously slow in his movements, too, the kind of slack-jawed victim that Riggleman usually made short work of by employing a few deft moves. A feint, a pivot, and a leveraged throw, leading to a takedown and then a pin as he slapped the poor fellow onto his back like some bug for a specimen jar. Match over.

But from the moment the match commenced this boy had proven to be almost impossible to budge from any angle, no matter how easily Riggleman was able to outmanuever him. It was as if his feet were welded to the mat, and by late in the second round, Riggleman grew so exasperated that he let down his guard for the briefest of moments to rethink his position. The flabby boy responded in a flash, and within seconds had achieved a takedown. Riggleman avoided being pinned, but lost the match on points, and he still remembered the boy’s eyes as the final whistle blew — a fleeting flash of triumphant intelligence, a mild taunt that challenged anyone to ever underestimate him again.

Maybe Cole was that kind of adversary. Deceptively dangerous. A shrewd opportunist.

Riggleman picked up the shortchanged deposition from the pile on his desk. He picked up his phone and began punching in the number for the legal eagle who’d sent him the copy. Time to ask a few delicate questions.

Then he stopped and hung up. It was too soon to be setting off any alarms in high places.

He swiveled back toward his computer, interlocked the fingers of both hands, and stretched them until his knuckles cracked, making a noise like a string of firecrackers. Then he got down to business, already determined not to underestimate anyone from here on out.

He would work fast, work late, and leave no avenue unexplored.

He would get his man, come what may.