Unmanned

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THEY FINALLY MADE IT back to Barb’s at one in the morning. Every light was on. Steve recounted their adventures, with Cole chiming in here and there. But mostly he watched Barb, intrigued by her still and watchful silence, lips compressed. She reminded him of a card player careful to conceal a winning hand, and he wondered what she was holding in reserve.

“Nice work,” Keira said after Steve finished. “Between that and Bickell, we’ve got plenty to keep us busy.”

“First we need to find out who’s holding Mansur, and why,” Steve said. “Maybe property records will help.”

Barb played her hand.

“My guy at DMV ran the tags. That SUV is registered to IntelPro. Your guy’s been lying to you, Steve. They’re involved in this way deeper than we thought.”

“My guy? I’m not the only one with an IntelPro source.”

“Okay, then. All our guys. But yours is supposedly the most plugged in, the closest to the top.”

Steve kept a game face, but his earlobes reddened. Cole sensed that something more than a professional disagreement was at stake. Up to now, Steve had been the closest thing to a chief executive in their tenuous little democracy. Barb was challenging the pecking order.

“Maybe Steve’s guy is also in the dark,” Keira said, trying to mediate. “We don’t really know how high up the ladder he is.”

“Steve knows, he just won’t tell us. Maybe his guy is just covering his ass.”

Steve frowned and shook his head, but his earlobes had faded to pink. Then he sighed deeply and gave in. Sort of.

“Entirely possible,” he said. “I guess he could be using me for just about anything. I’ll certainly ask him about this. But none of it explains why Castle’s missing, or where he’s gone, or whether he’s working for himself or for the Agency.”

The concession blunted the force of Barb’s attack, and for the next few minutes they kicked around other possible motives and scenarios. Most involved names Cole hadn’t yet heard of. It was obvious he had a lot to learn about IntelPro, the role of the Agency, and the state of their reporting if he was going to stay abreast of them. He wondered how much they would be willing to educate him.

“Your corneas are glazing over, Captain Cole,” Barb observed. “Are we boring you, or are you just craving a drink?”

Baiting him, so he held his tongue. Intemperate remarks would become part of the record against him, just as on Predator missions.

“You guys are talking about a lot of people I know nothing about. Maybe you could bring me up to speed.”

“How ’bout tomorrow?” Keira said, drawing sharp looks from the other two. “After we’ve all had some sleep.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“We could all use some shut-eye,” Steve said.

Barb seemed about to object. Then, as if thinking better of it, she nodded, and soon afterward the three reporters were heading upstairs to bed. Keira, leading the way, paused halfway up.

“I’ll check the deeds for the Pickard Street house first thing tomorrow,” she said.

“You’re the morning person,” Barb answered.

“Just be careful,” Steve said. “Keep it as quiet as you can.”

Alone downstairs, Cole took stock of his new billet. Barb had made up the couch with fresh linens and a spare duvet. The cat was gone, presumably out on a prowl. His only company was the pair of boys on the photos, facing him from the shadows of the dining room. He thought back to his trailer in the desert, wondering whether the coyotes were still visiting nightly. That monastic existence felt like the distant past. His only connection now was a mild urge for a drink. He turned out the lights before it had a chance to sharpen, not even bothering to brush his teeth. Then he settled beneath the sheets and drifted off to the pinging of halyards against masts on the sailboats docked across Stansbury Creek.

For the first time in months he dreamed of his wife, Carol. She was smiling. They were here, the whole family, seated on their couch four abreast in the house on Wilson Point Road, alone downstairs with the TV on. All the furniture and photos were from their old place in Summerlin. Or, no, now the room looked like the vacation home they’d rented at Lake Tahoe a few months before they split up, with the kids asleep in a loft upstairs and Carol and he in bed, no television. A half-empty bottle of wine stood on the bedside table. Cole raised a glass to his lips, swallowed greedily, then tasted it on Carol’s lips as they kissed, a wonderfully familiar sensation, although the touch of her hands on his arm, his back, his face, was somehow Keira’s—feathery and thrilling, her short fingernails brushing like a caress. When he looked up into Carol’s face he was shocked to see she had red hair, uncombed, like Barb’s. Now they were half undressed, unbuttoning and unzipping, everything moving fast, their clothes shedding as easily as bath towels. Carol lay back against the bed, eyes closed, but it was still Barb’s hair fanned against the pillow. She smiled slyly as Cole entered her, as if harboring a secret, which only thrilled him more. The body beneath him was warm and sinuous, but indeterminate now, belonging to no woman he had ever made love to before. It left him feeling strange but no less passionate as he rocked and bucked with abandon, then release.

Cole jolted awake in a silent room. The air outside was still, the masts no longer pinging. His surroundings were barely visible in the pale glow of a streetlamp seeping through the blinds. His boxers were wet with semen.

“Shit!” he whispered.

He threw back the top sheet. The air smelled like baked mushrooms, a simmer of sex.

“Shit!”

The bottom sheet was damp. He groped his way into the kitchen, where he tore off a paper towel and ran it under the tap before dabbing it to the wet spot, hoping the couch wouldn’t be stained in the morning. His first night as a houseguest and he was ruining the furniture, exactly the sort of animalistic influence they probably feared most. And now he truly craved a drink, preferably two fingers of bourbon in a glass tumbler.

He returned to the kitchen to throw away the paper towel, taking pains to stuff it out of sight beneath the garbage on top. Then he opened the fridge. Maybe a beer would tide him over. He grabbed a cold bottle, unscrewed the cap, and drank half of it while standing in the light of the open door. He carried the rest into the dining room, where the reporters’ laptops were all open, like place settings for a party of three. He touched a key on one and the screen lit up, a phalanx of icons on a field of blue. They weren’t exactly security conscious among themselves, which he supposed was a good sign. With his left hand he pressed the beaded bottle to his forehead. With his right he moved the cursor to the icon for Internet Explorer and clicked. The Google homepage came up.

Might as well begin his education.

He eased into a chair and typed in a search for IntelPro. The company website was the first hit. A sober home page, even dignified, with the company slogan—“Protection Is Our Watchword”—splashed atop an impressive slide show depicting IntelPro employees in action around the world. Things loosened up a bit once you started clicking on the links.

A page headlined “A Company of Global Reach” displayed an interactive map of the world with IntelPro logos marking every country where they were doing business. Cole clicked on Kabul. Up popped a summary of local manpower and a brief description of duties. An IntelPro security detail guarded the presidential palace. There was a reference to support units based in various provinces, but no mention of any work in the tribal borderlands out where Mansur had lived and worked. No mention of either Mandi Bahar or Sandar Khosh.

Cole clicked on another page and activated a video. It opened with a shot of a dozen or so muscular, heavily armed fellows in skintight T-shirts advancing across a swampy field at the company’s two-thousand-acre training facility on the Maryland Eastern Shore. Gunfire erupted, loud enough to awaken half the household. Cole quickly shut it down.

He returned to the map and clicked on the logo just north of Baltimore. A photo of corporate headquarters popped up, a gleaming three-story building in Hunt Valley. Close enough to Washington to keep a hand in, but not so close as to appear to be breathing down the neck of the Pentagon, or the CIA. And it was certainly convenient for keeping tabs on Mansur.

He searched the site for any reference to “Lancer,” just in case, but came up empty.

The deeper he explored, the wackier things got. Embedded in the section for prospective employees was a page offering company logo products like T-shirts and caps, so you could dress like a mercenary in your own backyard. At the bottom, in a deft bit of cross-marketing, you could click a link to join the National Rifle Association, a paid advertiser.

He navigated to the description of IntelPro’s corporate structure.

The founder and chairman was Michael “Mike” Boardman. Former U.S. Army Ranger. West Point, class of ’87, meaning he’d be in his mid-forties. Decorated during the Persian Gulf War in ’91. Family man. Self-made millionaire. In his picture his hair was clipped as short as on the first day of basic. Not even a hint of a smile. Charcoal gray suit, white shirt, red tie. Just another uniform, in other words. Below the photo were links to profiles in the news media, plus a Wall Street Journal editorial that praised him as a “visionary entrepreneur” and concluded, “While some misguided souls inevitably label him a mercenary, Boardman has found a creative and muscular way to serve his country even as he serves his company’s impressive bottom line.”

A blow job. That’s what Steve would’ve said, and Cole found himself agreeing. He doubted he shared many political viewpoints with the journalists, but in some ways he was already seeing things from their point of view. Stockholm syndrome, which made him chuckle.

His laughter caught in his throat when he saw the next name in the IntelPro hierarchy:

Phil Bradsher, Chief of Operations.

Or, as the web bio helpfully pointed out, “Major General Phil Bradsher, recently retired from the U.S. Air Force.” He’d come aboard almost two years ago. A quote from CEO Mike Boardman summed up the rationale behind the hire: “With Phil in the cockpit, IntelPro hopes to motivate its associates to ever bolder and more decisive action. While we believe we have already made an impressive mark on a brave new frontier of private endeavor, with Phil’s guidance and counsel the value of our mission will become ever more apparent, perhaps even to those who tend to question our raison d’être.”

A bullshit way of saying it was time to take no prisoners, or so it sounded to Cole. The same boilerplate the brass used to imply that they were men of action in a passive world. On paper, anyway.

The most intriguing thing about Bradsher was his former spot in the Air Force chain of command. He had led the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center at Nellis, a plum posting reporting directly to Combat Command. Just below Bradsher at Nellis—and presumably still just below Bradsher’s successor—was Brigadier General Mitchell Hagan, commander of the 57th Wing, with jurisdiction over Colonel Archer Milroy, head of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Creech, with all its Predator crews, including the ones commanded by Cole’s CO, Lieutenant Colonel Scott “Sturdy” Sturdivant.

He studied the photo and thought about the timing. By the time the shit hit the fan for Cole, Bradsher had been out of the Air Force several months. But Cole was guessing he stayed in close touch with all his old buddies, and he probably knew exactly what was going on inside the Predator program—its successes, its fuckups, its booming budget appropriations, and the growing chatter about pilot burnout. Cole recalled Bickell’s complaints about green badgers and blue badgers and all the incestuous relationships out in the field. If IntelPro’s people ever needed help from a Predator crew, they certainly had the right man to ensure their request would be heard at the highest levels. He was pondering the implications of that when a voice made him jump.

“Next time, ask first.”

Barb stood in the kitchen doorway, hands on hips. Cole exed out the page and sat up straight.

“Sorry. Couldn’t sleep, figured I’d look some stuff up.”

“Like my emails, maybe?”

“No. Web stuff. Didn’t even know this was your machine.”

She crossed her arms, the same pose his mom had used whenever Cole missed curfew. She wore a white flannel nightgown, decidedly unsexy, although her hair looked disturbingly the way it had in his dream. He shifted self-consciously.

“Maybe you should have a password for your log-on,” he said.

“Up to now I’ve never needed one. We’re a team here. Or were. We trust each other not to go snooping around on each other’s laptops.”

“Even team members need to keep some stuff to themselves.”

“Tell me about it. I’m having a drink. Want one? And no, this isn’t a test of your sobriety.”

She turned back into the kitchen. He heard the clink of bottles, the gurgle of a pour.

“Maybe just a touch.”

She emerged with two glasses, no ice. He could already smell the bourbon.

“What were you perusing so intently?” She handed him the glass.

“IntelPro website. Trying to get up to speed.”

“Learn anything?”

He told her about Bradsher. She raised an eyebrow and swallowed without a shudder, an old pro. Then she leaned over his shoulder and tapped the keyboard until the general’s bio popped back up. Her flannel sleeve brushed Cole’s cheek. It smelled like her skin, like the warmed sheets of a slept-in bed.

She nodded, reading.

“Good stuff.” She sounded pleased. “That chain of command you mentioned, write it down. You said the line goes straight to your unit?”

“Like an arrow.”

“And you think Bradsher would be able to exploit those connections?”

“Absolutely.”

“At what price?”

“He wouldn’t need a price. It’s an old boy network.”

She smiled and lowered her head, as if embarrassed for him.

“There’s always a price, especially in old boy networks. But that’s a good thing. Gives me more trails to follow. Deeds, stock transactions, any sign that your old chain of command is living beyond its means.” She sipped more bourbon. “You always keep these hours?”

He shrugged. In the desert he’d never been conscious of time, apart from what the sun told him. Earlier, when he flew Preds, the shifts had changed so often that his inner clock had been constantly out of balance. She shook her head.

“Just what this crowded little house needs. Another insomniac.”

“You, too?”

“Only since that.” She nodded toward the photos.

“How long ago?”

“Year and a half. But at this time of night it always feels like about an hour ago.”

“I know the feeling.”

“I suppose you do.”

“Where’d it happen?”

“The back of beyond. Little tribal village, Tangora, in Nangahar Province.”

The name was vaguely familiar.

“Were you embedded?”

“No. Hated that shit. Went on my own. Stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but I was going stir crazy in the hotel. Pounding drinks every night at Bistro and L’Atmosphere. Telling war stories with other hacks like we knew what it was all about. Same sources, day after day.”

“Nangahar’s out in Indian country. How’d you get there?”

“There’s an old Swede, runs an NGO that trains midwives. Been there since the nineties, contacts out the wazoo, friends on all sides. He put me on to a fixer, Mohammed, supposedly connected to a midlevel Taliban, an old thug named Engineer Haider who sent word he’d talk to me. I paid Mohammed a hundred fifty a day, plus two hundred to set up the meet. We took a taxi for the first leg, out past Gardez. Stupid as hell, begging to be kidnapped. Later we switched to a Nissan pickup that couldn’t shift into fourth. I was covered head to toe like a local and sat in the back. Mohammed was pretending to be my husband and liking it a little too much. But he got us there.”

“Was Haider really Taliban?”

“When it suited his needs. He had other constituencies, too. Said he even ran a few errands for an American contractor, when they paid him enough.”

“IntelPro?”

“Overton Security, a competitor.”

“You believe him?”

“No reason not to. Guys like Haider are fucking gangsters. At the end of the day it’s only about the money. All that tribal bullshit about the enemy of my brother, the wisdom of the elders, it’s been completely crushed by the weight of greed.”

“Sounds like a line from a story.”

She smiled, tilted her glass as though making a toast.

“More or less.” She nodded toward the photos. “Haider had a walled compound, but because I was a woman he would only meet me outside, in a stable where the boys brought in the sheep every night. We’d been talking for about an hour when some older kid runs in, all excited, saying somebody had spotted a white swallow.”

“Swallow?”

“Like the bird. His name for Predators. Haider had posted two of his sons up on the walls with binoculars. Their only job was to look for drones. He liked having drones around. Said that meant they were hunting his rivals. Said his work for Overton meant he had an understanding with the Agency, protection. So he leaves Mohammed and me to cool our heels while he goes up to the roof for a look. His house was inside the compound, maybe forty yards off. I went outside to watch for him. That’s when those boys showed up.” She nodded at the photos. “They wanted cigarettes, but I don’t smoke. Then they wanted money, but Mohammed said not to encourage them. I took out my camera and they lit up, mugging and laughing. That was the first shot, the one where they’re smiling. I took two more before the missile hit.”

“Haider’s house?”

“Dead center. Blew him to pieces. There was a torso, other things I never want to see again. Inside the compound it was like a butcher shop, half his family. Blood and stuff flew clear over the wall, like somebody had tossed it in water balloons. Then those two old people, ten feet away. I guess shrapnel got them.”

She swallowed the last of the bourbon, then hugged herself. Cole studied the second photo—the wild eyes, the dark flecks on white garments.

“The official count was eight dead,” she said. “Somebody high up must have decided it was a fuckup, because they went into the books as civilians. Three men, three women, two children.”

The totals alighted in Cole’s memory in the same place where the name of the village, Tangora, had come to rest. Now he knew where he’d heard it.

“When was this again? Exactly.”

“August 2010. The fourteenth, a Saturday. I filed a piece in time for all the Sunday editions and they put it on page three. Got bumped off the front by a piece about a bear cub in Florida with its head stuck in a jar.”

But Cole was no longer listening. The date fit perfectly.

“I know the crew, the one that fired the dart.”

Barb uncrossed her arms. Outside, a heron squawked in the gloom.

“Captain Rod Newell. Sensor Billy Flagg. Everybody was talking about Rod and Billy. It kinda blew ’em away, like what happened to Zach and me. But I never heard anything about Fort1, I would’ve remembered. You sure this was his doing?”

Barb nodded. She told him how Fort1 had arrived on the scene an hour later, hopping off a Pave Hawk chopper with a handheld radio and an armed escort of three green badgers with no official markings on their uniforms. She heard Fort1 speak his call name into the radio just after landing.

“A real asshole. They all were, but he was the worst. Shoved one of those boys right to the ground. ‘Get these little fuckers out of my hair!’ That kind of shit. When he saw me with my notebook I thought for a second he was going to kill Mohammed and me both.”

“Why was he pissed?”

“He wasn’t happy with the results. Maybe he’d been after somebody else. When he searched the compound he was cursing everything in sight.”

“How’d you get out of there?”

“One of his guys escorted us back. So I owe him for that, I guess.”

She stared off into space. Cole knew the look. But just as he’d concluded she was lost in her memories, she asked a question indicating that her brain was still fully engaged.

“What kind of records do they keep for those Predator raids?”

“There’s a full written transcript, with all the chatter and commands, plus the entire video record of whatever the camera shot.”

“With the view from the Predator?”

“Yeah. The whole op. They use ’em for training sometimes.”

“Where do they keep that stuff?”

“On base, digitally stored. There might be copies at Langley and Al Udeid, but that’s above my pay grade.”

“Could you get access?”

“Me? I can’t even get through the main gate. Besides, that shit’s classified.”

“But you’ve still got friends there, right?”

Cole shrugged. “My old wingman, my sensor, Zach.”

“Zach Lewis. Age twenty-three. Born McKeesport, P.A. Used to spend all day looking at satellite imagery until he volunteered for the Predator program. A bit of a drinker. A month or two behind on his rent.”

“Impressive.”

“It was in your court-martial papers. I’ve got a phone number for his apartment, a personal email address. You could phone him in the morning.”

Cole shook his head.

“They’d trace it. Or get a record for the call. They’d know where I was.”

“Then send him an email. I’ll set up a Gmail account, route it through another server so they won’t even know where it came from.”

“Everything can be traced.”

“Okay. So it won’t be easy to trace, and it might take a while. And he can erase it right after reading it.”

“I thought erasure was impossible, too?”

“Off his hard drive, I mean. I’ll send him instructions.”

“Even if he got access, how would he send us a copy?”

“With digital records there would be about a thousand ways.”

She pulled up a chair and set up an address. Even then Cole was reluctant to send a message, and wasn’t sure what to say. Barb offered to help him write it. She asked him which archives to request, and he named the dates and places. Their wish list grew to include not only the video for Tangora but both missions that Zach and he flew over Sandar Khosh, plus any missions flown by any crew over Mansur’s home village of Mandi Bahar.

Barb composed the whole thing in a flash. He marveled at how quickly and clearly she marshaled their thoughts, and by the time she finished, even Cole believed that the request sounded earnest and innocent, like a well-intentioned man searching only for the truth. And that’s just what they were doing, wasn’t it?

“Anything else before I push the button?”

“If you push it.”

“Oh, I’m pushing it. Because you want me to.”

True enough.

“Ask him if he remembers any missions where a guy named Lancer popped up in the chat audience. And if he does, then send those, too.”

The keyboard clattered.

“Done.”

For all their precautions, it took his breath away when she clicked Send. He was already in trouble for disappearing. In the hands of a military prosecutor, his request to Zach might look like attempted espionage. The instructions telling Zach how to cover his tracks, while sensible, would look even worse.

He sipped the bourbon while his thoughts wandered farther afield. If he could risk a message to Zach, why not one to his kids, or to Carol? If only to let her know that he was sober, and as stable and safe as he’d been in ages.

The look on his face must have given him away.

“You miss them, don’t you.”

“My family?”

She nodded.

“I do now. Out in the desert it got to where the only kids I ever thought about were the ones we killed. I’d kind of blank out for days at a time. Then, almost the second Keira came into the trailer, I knew I had to get out, get away. She looked up at me and all I could think about was the total emptiness of everything out there.”

“Keira has that gift, making people see themselves more clearly. People want to open up, tell her what they’ve just seen.”

“What about you, what’s your gift?”

“Wasting time and spinning my wheels, apparently. That’s how it feels lately. My specialty is supposedly public records and FOIAs. Freedom of Information Act requests. Paperwork safaris. But I’ve been stuck on zero for about a month now. We all have. That’s why we went looking for you after I dug up those court-martial papers. And maybe it’s working. You gave us Fort1’s name, for one thing. We need to spread that around. Being free and easy with a protected identity is always good for shaking the trees, seeing what falls out. Plus this stuff with Mansur, and now Tangora.” She shook her head, marveling. “Rod and Billy. Pretty amazing you know who did that.”

“Who’s this IntelPro source of Steve’s?”

“He won’t say. I wouldn’t either, if it was me. They meet at some bar out in Baltimore County. Usually on Fridays, so I guess he’s due. But I don’t trust the guy.”

“How can you not trust someone when you don’t even know who he is?”

“Because they’re all part of the same crowd. Castle, Bickell, Steve’s source. All of them are trained to lie when necessary, and to give only one version of the truth. Maybe he’s got good stuff, but we only get part of it, and without the context how do we know it’s leading us in the right direction? But Steve’s solid, Steve’s good. He’ll pin him down on Mansur. For better or worse he’ll come back with another piece of the puzzle. Maybe this will even convince him it’s time for us to move.”

“Move where?”

“Over to the Eastern Shore. Keira’s parents have a summer home near Easton. Rent free, utilities paid. She’s been offering it for weeks and I could rent out this place. We’d save a bundle, enough to buy an extra four months, minimum.”

“Sounds like the middle of nowhere.”

“We’re doing most of our reporting by phone and Internet anyway at this point. And IntelPro’s training facility is practically next door. Two of Castle’s old Agency buddies work there, and the only way we’ll ever have a chance of talking to them is in person. They’re Bickell’s old buddies, too, but I’ll bet he didn’t mention that, did he?”

“No.”

“Like I said. None of these guys ever gives you the whole story. It’s one big process of triangulation.”

There was a footfall above, then a heavy tread moving toward the stairs.

“Steve’s up,” Barb said. “My God, it’s six twenty.”

Seconds later Steve appeared in the dining room, surveying the scene.

“Big doings?” he asked.

“Pull up a chair,” Barb said. “I’ll fill you in.”

Then Keira came down. The cat rubbed against her leg. It was still more than an hour before sunrise. Cole marveled at the hours that this crew seemed to keep. Pilots were often nocturnal, on the job and in the barroom. But that was usually due to the demands of warfare, shift schedules, or orders from on high. The journalists took to it naturally, like vampires, coming alive in the darkness before the glow of their laptops.

“Looks like we have a quorum,” Barb said. “I better make coffee.”