Unmanned

CHAPTER FIVE

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?

“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.