Unmanned

CHAPTER THREE

STEVE MERRITT WATCHED the door shut, then checked his phone for a signal. Three bars, even way out here. Barb Holtzman was a late sleeper, but back in Baltimore it would be almost eleven, and she’d want to know. He punched in the number.

“Hi. We made it.”

“You found him?”

“Keira’s in the house as we speak.”

“He has a house?”

“A dump. Trailer in the middle of fucking nowhere. Broken windows, bottles in the yard. If you can call the desert a yard.”

“Charming. Is he lucid?”

Lucid. Another of Barb’s words that worked better in print than in conversation.

“Hard to say. He looks like a horror show.”

Steve glanced at Keira’s newspaper clipping on the front seat, with its old photo of a young Darwin Cole. He’d been a fighter pilot then. Flew F-16s, hottest bird in the sky. Switching to drones must have been like going from a Maserati on the Autostrada to a stationary bike in a mildewed basement. The picture showed a clean-shaven young man in a flight suit, clear-eyed and handsome, a soldier who wasn’t too macho to smile. Maybe Keira had been the reason. She still tended to have that effect on men of a certain age. Steve wasn’t immune, but he kept it under wraps for the sake of teamwork. Most of the time, anyway.

The story itself was a blow job, the kind of piece he would’ve written only if he wanted something in return. Keira said she’d been angling for better access to Air Force intelligence sources, but it hadn’t worked out. Today maybe she’d finally collect on her investment. He hoped so. Come up empty on Cole and they might soon reach a dead end.

“Isn’t that how we expected him to look?” Barb said. “His antisocial tendencies are well documented.”

The stuff from Cole’s court-martial, she meant. A source had sent them a transcript, and the details were ugly. Not long after blowing up a house in the middle of nowhere, Cole and his wingman had nearly botched a recon mission, endangering an American platoon. A day after that, Cole went AWOL in a stolen Cessna Skylane, flying his kids out to Death Valley, where he made camp and proceeded to drink himself into a stupor. A park ranger found them early the next morning, the kids huddled in a tent with Cole outside, passed out in a circle of vomit, flies everywhere. The next night he was caught breaking into his CO’s office at Creech Air Force Base at three in the morning, which landed him in the stockade. He was damn lucky to have made it out after six months with a dishonorable discharge and credit for time served. He’d been released nearly eight months ago, and by that time his wife had hired a lawyer and skipped town, taking the children to her parents’ place in Saginaw, Michigan.

“It doesn’t even look like he’s got electricity,” Steve said. “He greeted us with a shotgun.”

“And you let Keira go in alone?”

“Relax, he left the gun outside. I’m here if anything happens.”

“That’s not what I meant. What if he opens up, tells her everything? You really think she’ll share?”

“We’ve been over this, Barb. Trust. Remember?”

“Trust but verify. Like those treaties with the Russians.”

“You’re comparing Keira to the Soviet Union?”

“No, but you’re too nice.”

“And you’re too mean.”

“Just saying. Ask Nick Garmon’s wife if you don’t believe me.”

“Love’s different.”

“Love had nothing to do with it.”

“Whatever. We’re in this together, and we all agreed.”

“I’m fully aboard. I just wonder sometimes if Keira is.”

“Says the woman who hid her General Dynamics source for a month.”

“That’s how he wanted it.”

Steve smiled and lightened his tone. Teamwork had its limits for all three of them.

“Whatever you say, Barb.”

They moved to safer topics, discussing what the Ravens had done the day before, the shitty weather in Baltimore, the beauty of the high desert, the weirdness of Vegas. Although maybe they should’ve stuck to love and trust. Steve would be the first to admit they were a pretty needful bunch when it came to such things. Barb and he were both divorced, and from the way they sometimes argued you might have thought it was from each other. Keira’s most recent boyfriend, the aforementioned Nick Garmon, was a married wire service photographer who’d been killed in a plane crash the year before while flying to see Keira in Paris. All three of them were reasonably fit and attractive, but their once powerful newspapers had crumbled around them just as they’d entered that range of ages—thirty-six to thirty-nine—that seemed especially calibrated for loneliness among the unattached. It hardly helped that they were consumed by their work, and by this story in particular, each for his or her own reason.

Barb asked something about “the fauna on an arid landscape.” Steve made a crack about snakes and coyotes. Then he looked up in surprise.

“The door’s opening. I think she’s done.”

“That was fast.”

“Holy shit.”

“What?”

“He’s coming with her. And he’s got a suitcase.”

“I’m sure love has nothing to do with this, either.”

“Gotta go, Barb. We’ll keep you posted.”

Truth was, Keira’s appeal had barely registered on Cole. The mere presence of another human being was overwhelming enough, and the moment she entered the trailer he realized what a wreck he must look like. He hadn’t shaved or cut his hair in months. The only bathing he did was from a bucket beside the trailer. Water from the cistern, a wafer of soap. A white washcloth hung from a sagebrush like a flag of surrender, dried stiff by the desert sun.

The trailer’s linoleum floor was scuffed raw and creaked with every step. Dirty dishes filled the kitchen sink, where a leaky faucet dripped away the supply from the cistern, every drop precious, but still he let it go. At least he’d finally burned the pile of garbage out back. But the coyotes had kept coming, scavenging among the chicken bones and charred cans. Every night he heard their snuffling through the thin walls as he lay in bed beneath wool blankets, oddly comforted by the presence of his only visitors. He was like Romulus and Remus up here, suckled by the wild on a barren hill. Now that he actually had company he was uncertain how to proceed. God, look at this place.

“You want coffee? It’s instant, but…”

She was already shaking her head. Who could blame her? He lit the burner anyway, to show this was nothing out of the ordinary.

Cole hadn’t come here intending to drink his life away. Not at first. He came for privacy, seclusion, even introspection. Zach had found the trailer for him, through some dubious connection at his apartment complex. An easy agreement with a single key and no lease. Straight-up cash, good for a year. No utilities to connect, and no official address.

In the beginning Cole lived like a biblical ascetic. Lean and sober, reading paperbacks and basking in the sun. Long walks up into the hills without compass or canteen. Every meal from a can or a box. He drank only water, supplied by the cistern. Metallic on the tongue, but it never made him sick. He slept well, and for ten hours at a stretch.

After a few weeks he began jolting awake in the middle of the night with an eerie exactitude—always at or about 3:50 a.m., the very minute when Zach and he had fired their missile. He began checking his watch as soon as he would sit up in bed, and the news was always the same: 3:50, 3:50, 3:50, with the girl’s face flashing in his memory as she ran for her life, the boys right behind her. Three fifty. The hour of death, a wake-up call for the rest of his days. An unbearable prospect.

So one morning he walked out to the highway, hitchhiked to the nearest town, and bought his first case of Jeremiah Weed. Even on his worst days he was not a binge drinker. It was a matter of slow mood maintenance. Sips and occasional swallows, paced evenly throughout the day, an IV drip of erasure and negation designed solely to ease him past his personal witching hour for as many nights running as possible.

And this was where he had landed, less a drunk than an overmedicated hermit, a tipsy slob completely unmanned by his first visitor in ages. How long since anybody had come up here? Zach was the last, and that had been months ago, a courtesy call to make sure Cole hadn’t gone and done something tragically stupid.

Cole walked past the small window over the sink and couldn’t resist another glance at the morning sky. Bright blue. Empty. Then a distant glint, a fleeting pinprick of reflected sunlight—or maybe he’d imagined it. He popped open the window and tilted his head, listening for the faint lawnmower buzz of the four-stroke engine, the same as in a snowmobile. All he heard was the tinnitus whine that had lately set up shop between his ears.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. Fine.”

Fuck the coffee. He switched off the flame, watched it gutter. Then he turned to face her.

“Have a seat.”

At least there was a couch. Nothing fancy, but clean enough. She sat primly at one end in case he wanted to join her, but he pulled up a rickety barstool from the kitchen and sat astride it. He wondered how they’d found him. Through Zach, maybe, the kid talking out of school in one of those pilot bars near Nellis where he liked to pretend he was part of the brethren, just another jock.

But at least Zach had held it together. Only twenty-two then, twenty-three by now, and he rode out the storm. Probably still pulling six-day shifts in the box, switching hours in that Predator rota that seemed especially designed to deprive you of sleep and sanity—midnight to eight a.m. for three weeks running, followed by eight a.m. to four p.m. for three more, and then four p.m. to midnight. Round and round until you’d awaken from some bad dream without knowing if it was night or day. He tried to picture Zach still seated before the godawful pileup of ten-inch screens, scanning for bogeys, squinting in concentration like a kid at a spelling bee.

“How’d you find me?”

“We asked around. Got a lead on an address.”

Sounded like she was protecting somebody, which was probably a good thing. Maybe she’d do the same for him. Although the way things were now, only a fool would believe in that brand of protection. Giving your word meant nothing when there were a hundred other ways to find out where you were, what you were doing, who you’d been talking to. Nothing was protected anymore. Nothing was unseen, even out here.

“Didn’t know this place had an address. So I guess you know about what happened at Sandar Khosh.”

She nodded. “Thirteen people, wasn’t it? Mostly women and children?”

The totals still made him wince. He saw the girl as clearly as if she were seated at the other end of the couch, still dressed in the colors of the flag, one arm missing. Today, at least, she was alone. Often she was accompanied by his own kids, Danny and Karen, plus the two boys who had probably been her brothers. A playgroup of the lost and the damned, frolicking in his head.

“That’s what the Red Cross said, anyway,” she continued. He snapped back to the present.

“I’m sorry. What was that?”

“The Red Cross. They said it was thirteen.”

“It was Fort1’s call. The mission, the target, all of it. Other than that I can’t tell you a hell of a lot.”

“You never met him?”

“Doesn’t work that way. We almost never see the J-TACs.”

“Jay whats?”

“Joint terminal attack controller. They run the show on Predator missions. Usually from a forward position, in theater. But not always. Standard procedure.” Listen to him, talking like a pilot again. The buzzwords returned so fast, like lyrics to a familiar old song.

“No one ever mentioned his name?”

“That kind of stuff was above my pay grade. But…” He paused, wondering whether to continue.

“But what?”

She slipped out her notebook. It reminded him of their earlier interview, years ago, and the memory almost overwhelmed him. He’d been gung-ho then, full of himself, ready for anything. Good husband, newly married to Carol, no kids yet to take their minds off each other. What was he now? Certainly none of those things. He looked away from the reporter and again glanced at the patch of sky in the kitchen window, seemingly benign. If people only knew.

“I saw something.”

“Just now?”

“Back then, in my CO’s office. A file.”

“About Fort1?”

He nodded.

“Was this during the break-in?”

He turned abruptly.

“You know about the fucking break-in?”

“It was mentioned in some documents. What did you see?”

He eyed her carefully, suspicious now.

“You sure you’re not with them?”

“Them?”

“The Air Force. The powers that be. Everybody who fucked me over. This could be a security check, an excuse to haul me in.”

“I’m a reporter, that’s all.”

“For the Boston paper, right?”

“The Globe, yes, but not anymore. They closed my bureau, so I took a buyout. I’m freelance now. We all are, so we’ve pooled our resources. We’ve got maybe three months before we start running out of money. We’re hoping this story will be our ticket.”

“Fort1? Is he really that big of a deal?”

“Maybe. We think he’s part of something larger. You said you saw a file?”

“That’s right.”

A pause, then nothing.

Cole was again lost in thought. Something had just occurred to him—a possible means of escape from the trailer, from these surroundings that suddenly felt so desolate. There was a huge, empty landscape waiting beyond the closed door, endlessly patient, one that was swallowing him whole, cell by cell. Unless he took action to stop it, he would soon disappear. A set of dry bones in the sand, left to be scattered by birds and coyotes, then covered forever. At that moment a notion flitted across his brain that startled him as much as the hawk had a few moments ago: If this woman hadn’t come here today, or at all, would he ever have seen another living soul? He wasn’t sure of the answer, which told him all he needed to know about what to do next.

“Well?” she prompted again.

“I can help you. But I need to know more about what you’re doing, what you’re after.”

Now it was her turn to pause. Cole couldn’t blame her. He probably didn’t look very reliable.

“Hey,” he said, spreading his hands wide. “Who the hell would I tell, way out here? I don’t own a car, or even a cell phone. It’s a three-mile hike to the nearest pavement.”

“Well, for starters, Fort1 is CIA.”

“That much I figured.”

“We think he’s gone off the reservation. Some kind of rogue operation.”

“Over there, you mean?”

“We’re not sure where he is anymore. The working theory is that he built a private network of his own clients on the government’s dime. For his own benefit, of course.”

“Clients? Like who?”

“Warlords and tribal chiefs, private security firms wanting a piece of the action. Anybody who’d pay him, including black hats of all kinds. Meaning that every operation he was involved with—Sandar Khosh, for one—is now suspect.”

“Then why haven’t they shut him down? Brought him in?”

“Maybe they have. At this point all we know for sure is that everybody who’s ever been officially involved with him, public or private, at home or abroad, has gone into cleanup mode, trying to erase all his little messes from the record. Which is why we have to move fast. Pick up as many pieces as we can before everything gets swept away.”

“Like I said, I can help.”

“Great.” She flipped a page in her notebook, pencil poised. “No rush. Take all the time you need. If you want, we can take you into town for supplies afterward.”

“No. That’s not how it’s going to work.”

“Okay. You tell me, then.”

“Where are you based? You said there were three of you?”

“Baltimore for now. Barb’s house. She’s the third one. She and Steve both worked for The Sun.”

“Then I’m coming with you. I want to be a part of this.”

“Whoa now.” Keira held up the notebook like a stop sign. “I can understand why you’d want to get out of here. Maybe we can help you. But you can’t be part of this the way we are. The three of us have the same goals, the same way of doing things.”

“Fine. Then I’m out. Nice talking to you.” He slid off the stool and stepped toward the door.

“Wait.” He kept going, turning the doorknob while she talked. “Maybe there’s some kind of middle ground. But you can’t expect us to just take you on as a partner.”

He stopped and pivoted smartly, a parade ground move that, thanks to the bourbon, started to come apart toward the end. He steadied himself and wet his lips to speak.

“Why not? I know these ops firsthand. The procedures, the pecking order, the in-house politics. I’ve got names and contacts, and, like I said, stuff from the file.”

“Just tell me, then. New sources are what we need most right now. Believe me, we’ll know what to do with them. You won’t.”

He shook his head.

“Only if you take me with you. A trial period, one week. If it doesn’t work out, then I’m history. I won’t even ask for bus fare back.”

“You know, you’re acting kind of like I did when I wanted all that access at Aviano, just for writing that profile. Your people said no, and they were right. It was their business, their war. Well, this is ours, and you don’t know the first thing about the way we do our work.”

“It’s my war, too. You know that or you wouldn’t be here. Thirteen people. Ever make a mistake that big?”

She looked down at her feet.

“Well?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“One week. That’s all I’m asking.”

“It’s not my decision.”

“Then ask your friends. I know names, ops, other guys who got burned the same way. Just think of me as one of those embedded correspondents, tagging along with a combat unit. I play by your rules and do as I’m told.”

Cole was speaking with passion now, hands in motion. He felt more clear-headed than he had in ages, although he craved another sip of Jeremiah Weed.

She stood.

“I have to talk to Steve first. Give me five minutes.”

“Not till I’ve packed a bag. I’m not letting you guys ditch me that easy. You sit tight till I’m ready.”

He went to the bedroom and started throwing clothes into an Air Force duffel. The whole time he listened carefully for Keira’s footsteps, the slam of the door, the spin of car wheels in the dirt. But when he came out into the hall she was still on the couch, notebook in her lap, pencil in hand.

He looked around at the mess. It was time to leave. Time to go to war against somebody other than himself. He hefted the duffel, his stomach fluttering just the way it used to at the beginning of a deployment.

“Ready,” he said. “Lead the way.”