Unmanned

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

SHARPE WAS CORRECT. From almost the moment the images of the first mission began unspooling, Cole felt he had gone right back into active duty. The video from the Predator played on three quarters of the screen. The simultaneous chat scrolled on a narrow margin to the right. Radio traffic played on the speaker, everything happening just as it had happened on that day. Eerie. And the first transcript wasn’t even from one of his own missions. It was from Rod and Billy’s attack on Tangora, from the day when Barb had been present, visiting the local warlord Engineer Haider, the very day she’d snapped the photos of those frightened boys.

By clicking on the bottom of the screen Cole was able to make a timeline pop up, the same way it did on some YouTube videos, or on streaming replays of televised sports events. It showed him where he could find the attack and other key moments. But for the moment he was content to let things play out chronologically, if only to give himself time to grow accustomed to the whole idea.

Captain Rodney Newell spoke up.

“There’s our target compound, gentlemen. All hands receiving a clear image?”

“Clear as she goes,” a voice replied. It was Lieutenant Colonel Sturdivant, their CO.

Four other replies popped up on the chat screen in quick succession. The first two were from Langley AFB and the combined air ops center at Al Udeid. The next was from Wade Castle, under his chat handle of Fort1:

The next one was a revelation.

So there they were, peas in a pod. Fort1 had presumably been in Afghanistan or Pakistan, since he wound up flying to the site later by helicopter, with Barb seeing him land. But where had Lancer been? More to the point, who was he, and who had he been working for?

Sharpe settled onto the couch beside Cole. He smelled like the outdoors.

“My God,” he said. “Such a clear picture. It’s almost like being in the ground control station.”

“Pretty much exactly. I’ve already had a Lancer sighting. Him and Castle, chiming in one after the other on the chat.”

“I can save us some time, if you want.”

“How so?”

“I know how to search for their later exchanges. A way to bookmark all of them, if you want.”

“How the hell do you know how to do that?”

“Who do you think designed half this shit? The things that work well, anyway, none of the cumbersome fucked-up stuff.”

“Have at it.”

Cole slid the laptop toward Sharpe on the coffee table so he could enter the necessary clicks and commands.

“There. Fort1’s on here dozens of times, maybe forty or fifty in all.”

“Figures, he was the J-TAC.”

“Lancer’s pretty quiet. Only four more showings.”

“Let’s watch ’em all in order, for both of them. And we’ll check in on Barb’s appearance. I think it’s indexed on the timeline. See where it mentions the arrival of a Nissan truck?”

“Got it. Okay, Captain Cole. Strap in.”

An hour passed before the first notable event: the arrival at the scene of Mansur Amir Khan, the keeper of Castle’s homing beacons, or magic dimes. He rolled up to the compound in his white Toyota truck with orange stripes across the hood. It gave Cole an odd feeling to see it again, knowing what would become of it at Sandar Khosh a month and a half later.

“Funny little fucker, isn’t he?” Sharpe said. “Moves like a jockey.”

The truck rolled through the gate into the main compound, and you could see Mansur helping two other men unload boxes from the back.

“He’s a smuggler,” Cole said. “That’s how he got all his contacts. I’m guessing the beacon is in one of the boxes.”

A large man in a turban walked out to hug Mansur.

“I’m guessing that’s Engineer Haider, the warlord killed in the strike.”

Not long after Mansur drove away, Lancer popped up for his second appearance. This time he chatted back and forth with Castle.

“Why the fuck did they even need a beacon?” Sharpe asked. “Hell, Haider’s right there, plain as day.”

“Maybe they sent Mansur to verify Haider’s presence. Activating the beacon would’ve been his signal of a positive ID. Still testing out their system, maybe.”

“Still seems like overkill.”

The battered brown Nissan pickup carrying Barb and her fixer arrived an hour later in a cloud of dust. Two people got out of the truck and were escorted to a building outside the compound. Cole recognized Barb from her posture, her walk, without having to see her face. Then two boys scampered across the grounds toward the same building. It sent a shiver up his back.

The explosion, once the attack came, was huge, destroying the main house inside the walls of the compound and leaving two bodies prone on the grounds outside—the old couple who had been standing near Barb. Sharpe clicked ahead to the next exchange between Lancer and Fort1, which came about eighty minutes after the attack.

Then, fifteen minutes later:

“He’s blaming Overton Security?” Cole asked.

“That’s what it sounds like to me.”

“But Barb said that’s who Haider worked for. He was one of Overton’s damn sources. Why would they want him rubbed out?”

“Maybe he burned them?”

“Maybe. Either way, somebody got duped.”

“Lancer?”

“Or both of them. Another fuckup, any way you look at it.”

“But Castle must not have thought Mansur was to blame, or why would he have kept working with him? You said they used one of his beacons at Sandar Khosh, right?”

“That’s what Bickell told me.”

“Shit. None of this adds up.”

“Maybe we still don’t know what we’re looking for.”

An hour later, Castle landed in the Pave Hawk helicopter. The screen showed him hopping out of the chopper and heading for the outbuilding where Barb must have still been waiting. That’s when the mission ended.

“Here’s a theory,” Sharpe said. “Lancer knew all along it was the wrong guy, because he was working for IntelPro, Overton’s rival.”

“So he duped Castle, and maybe Mansur as well, just to rub out some of his competition?”

“Exactly.”

“Could be. And Lancer uses this mission to establish contact with Mansur, then starts outbidding Castle on where to place the next beacons.”

“It fits.”

“But how could Castle have known so quickly it was a fuckup?”

“You’d have to ask him, I guess.”

“Fat chance of that now.”

They moved on to the second transcript, Cole and Zach’s recon mission of the town of Mandi Bahar, which he now knew was Mansur’s home village.

To his surprise, he recognized the village immediately, and was struck by the similarity of the setting to Sandar Khosh, even though the two places were miles apart and in different provinces. Each was a small huddle of less than a dozen houses clustered along a dirt road. Each sat next to a small rocky stream, bordering a small grove of gnarled, stunted trees. Shepherd boys took their flocks to and from nearby hills. A child walked out of the trees with a bundle of sticks on his back. A pastoral life, with few signs of warfare or weaponry. They were about to click forward by a few hours when the sight of a figure bursting from a doorway made Cole shout loudly and put a hand on Sharpe’s arm.

“Wait!”

It was the girl, the one in the red shawl, white pants, and blue scarf. She ran into sunlight, and then two small boys followed in quick succession. They disappeared from the frame.

“Back it up. Run that again.”

“Why. What did you see?”

“It’s them. The same three children we saw at Sandar Khosh. The ones we killed.”

Sharpe said nothing, and did as he was told. There they were again, bursting out the doorway.

“Freeze that, then see if you can enlarge it.”

The resolution wasn’t clear enough to see their faces, but it was unmistakably the same three children. No ghosts this time. The real thing, but in the wrong place. And then it hit him.

“Yes! That’s it!”

“What is?”

“I’ve had a feeling from the moment it happened that those kids weren’t supposed to be at that house, the one in Sandar Khosh. I could never say why, because I knew I’d seen them before, in our recon. But it wasn’t the Sandar Khosh recon. It was this one.”

“What does that mean?”

“Keep moving it forward.”

The children moved in and out of the frame several more times during the next five minutes. Then the camera seemed to follow them as they headed back toward the house—or that’s what he thought was happening until he saw the real reason for Zach’s camera work. The sensor’s attention had been drawn by the arrival of a white Toyota truck with orange stripes across the hood. The truck stopped, a door opened, and out stepped a little man who was unmistakably Mansur Amir Khan. So this was his house. And these were his children, the very ones he and Zach would kill with a missile strike five weeks later.

But there must be other members of Mansur’s family, too, ones that remained alive. Why else would he have still been so concerned about their welfare during their conversation at the row house on Pickard Street? What was it he’d said? “Away. My family is away.”

Away where? Did he mean “dead”? Possibly. But now he at least thought he knew why Mansur had moved his family to Sandar Khosh.

“He must’ve been scared Castle would come after him,” Cole said. “After the whole double-cross over the homing beacons. The fuckups and the confusion. So he moved, to get away either from Castle or from Lancer. Then a month later we go and blow up his new house.”

“Except Mansur wasn’t there.”

“But his children were. Most of his family, probably.”

“Then why was it a beacon job?”

“Maybe Bickell was wrong.”

“Let’s look at your recon of Sandar Khosh. It’s the next one in line, a week later.”

Sharpe got it rolling. There were children in this video, too—playing cricket, running errands, tending sheep. But none was the girl or her two brothers. The house, the one they would target a month later, was under construction, but nearly finished. Sharpe skipped around a little while they watched for anything significant.

“Castle never turned up in this one?”

“No. But Lancer did. I only remembered it when Bickell brought up his name.”

“I’ll search it.”

A pause, maybe ten seconds, before Sharpe got a hit.

“Here he is. One exchange only, in the chat transcript, right at the end.”

Cole’s reply was on the audio:

“Coming right up.”

Zach moved the camera onto the house and zoomed it while Cole slowly circled their Predator to allow for a prime view of all sides, a task that took about ten minutes.

“Got all you need?”

Not long afterward the screen went blank. Mission completed.

Cole knew what came next, but he said nothing while Sharpe tapped at the keyboard and made a few clicks.

“Your mission with the missile strike is next. Ready?”

“Let’s skip ahead to the other recon job, the one Zach and I almost fucked up. I’m pretty sure Lancer’s on it. Might as well get all we can on him first.”

“Or maybe you just want to avoid the attack as long as possible.”

Cole shrugged.

“That’s my business. What time is it?”

“Almost three o’clock. I’ve gotta pee. And we could both use some water. Unless you want to break for lunch.”

“Let’s keep going.”

“Think we’ll finish today?”

“Don’t see why not.”

“I have to say, it’s been fascinating watching you. During these missions, I mean. The way your face changes, the look in your eye. Almost like you’re back up there in the sky with it, even now.”

Cole shrugged again, uncomfortable with the drift of the conversation, but Sharpe didn’t take the hint.

“What does it do to you, flying these things, day after day? Up here, I mean.” He tapped a forefinger against his bony head. “I know you fell off the edge for a while. From all the deaths, I figured. But even before that, how were you handling it—the sense of power, of being God, choosing when to bless and when to damn? You’d watch all those lives up close for hours at a time, and then manage their fates for them. It has to fuck with your mind, even when things are going splendidly.”

“What about for you, designing the damn things?” Cole’s voice had an edge. “Making them better and better, a little more godlike every time they roll out of the hangar? Or down somebody’s chimney, six at a time?”

“You don’t have to get angry about it.”

“I’d just like to hear you take some ownership. You act like it’s all our doing, the damn pilots. Or the Agency, the Air Force, the so-called powers that be.”

“They’re the ones abusing the power.”

“And you’re the one who gave it to them.”

“Fair enough. But if I hadn’t—”

“Yeah, yeah. If you hadn’t, then someone else would’ve. I could’ve said the same thing after Sandar Khosh, but it wouldn’t have made me sleep one bit better. So who let you off the hook? Or do you just never think about it?”

“Why do you think I’m out here, ready to take action, fighting fire with fire?”

“Guilt?”

“Or just plain old foolhardiness.”

“For thinking you really can put it back in the bottle?”

“Or at least rub my own lamp. How ’bout if I go pee now.”

“No one’s stopping you.”

Cole waited, staring at the blank screen. He heard the toilet flush down the hall, then the running of water from the tap. Sharpe brought him a full glass of water, which he downed in seconds. He felt depleted, wrung out, the same way he used to feel after about six hours in the saddle at Creech. It would be a relief to get this over with, but they were making progress, moving closer, even though he still couldn’t make sense of an end.

“The transcript says this was a recon of Charwala,” Sharpe said.

“That was the nearest village. The house with the bogeys was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and most of our recon was to secure the perimeter for an ops team setting up for a raid. Zach and I lost our focus and almost missed some other bogeys who came into the area. A firefight started before we could get our shit together. Then we put an IR beacon down on them and the whole thing was over pretty fast.”

“The God light?”

“Yeah.”

“Love that name.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Any particular place you want to begin?”

“Toward the end. End of the firefight, not the raid. I want to hear some of the audio. I was in touch with the unit by voice pretty much throughout. The ops CO seemed like regular Army, all the usual protocols and radio behavior. Very correct. His call sign was Gray Goose. Mine was Redbird. Then his second in command took over for a while, and I remember it feeling kind of skeevy. His handle was something like Duckhead, but it was more a matter of style. Like some dude who was used to things being a little more relaxed. I’m not a tight-ass so I let it go, but it was still odd. That’s also when Lancer chimed in, I think. I just can’t remember what he said.”

“Here we go, then.”

They sat through the tail end of the firefight like they were watching a movie. Shaky infrared images and bright green streams of gunfire. There was a cacophony of voices, picked up by the CO’s headset, and Cole called out a command from time to time.

“Redbird, I’m going to recon the area immediately forward of our position, up where my guys are securing the prisoners and collecting the wounded. So for the time being I’m shifting radio control to my second, Duckhead.”

“Affirmative, Gray Goose. Standing by for further contact from Duckhead.”

A few minutes later a new voice came onto the air.

“How we looking up there?”

“Still clear. Is this Duckhead?”

“You got it.”

“Quiet in all directions on your perimeter.”

“Cool. How’s the, uh, house looking? This place we’re hitting?”

“All quiet there as well, Duckhead. Lights remain on, no sign of movement.”

“In there watching Leno and Letterman, huh?”

“Sure thing.”

“Dude, it was a joke.”

“I figured as much, Duckhead.”

“Gotcha.”

Lancer then popped up on the chat screen.

“Uh, Duckhead, we have a chat correspondent Lancer who asks if you happen to be Chuck?”

“What’s Lancer’s real name?”

“Uh, Lancer says it’s all tight, Duckhead. No further ID forthcoming, though.”

That was the last transmission from either Duckhead or Lancer.

“I see what you mean,” Sharpe said, as the video played on in silence. “You get a decent look at any of the ops guys?”

“Nothing up close. Once they started their raid we were too busy watching for squirters, and threats on the perimeter. Why?”

“Those irregular units can look pretty unorthodox. Beards, nonregulation uniforms. Hats and bandanas when they’re supposed to wear helmets. Personal shit all over their flak vests.”

“Bickell said there were a lot of those types, half official or completely unofficial. Green badgers, sheep-dipped, he had all kinds of names for ’em.”

Sharpe shook his head.

“So who were the guys you helped them whack?”

“They were supposedly insurgency guys. Taliban types, I guess.”

“Because if Lancer was willing to rub out an Overton source, and this time Wade Castle wasn’t even involved, then it might have been just about anyone, don’t you think?”

“I suppose. Yeah.”

“And with you guys providing an eye in the sky for them, with the full backing of your unit CO.”

“And his CO.”

“All the way up to Hagan and beyond. Pretty good taxpayer-financed backup to have in your hip pocket, especially if this turns out to be some little episode of private enterprise.”

Silence, while they let that sink in.

“Okay, then,” Sharpe said. “Nothing left but the final act. Let’s finish it.”

Cole nodded, already bracing himself.

“Ready when you are.”