Zach eases the camera right. A white shape emerges from the smoke and dust.
“Here it comes,” Zach says, a slight tremor in his voice. “I’ll zoom it.”
Zach Lewis is only twenty-two. A year ago he was an image analyst, examining satellite photos in quiet rooms. After six months here he still seems to be acclimating to this life on a battlefront where the aftermath must always be studied, evaluated, autopsied.
The truck’s crumpled roof is visible beneath a collapsed wall. Little else of it is recognizable except some orange markings on the hood and a Toyota logo on the tailgate.
(FORT1) Now the house.
So far, not a peep from Colonel Sturdivant. Cole wonders if Sturdy and Fort1 have ever met, or spoken by phone. The ways of such relationships are a mystery to him. By design, of course. For his protection, they tell him.
Cole relays the request. Zach shifts the camera.
Sometimes Cole is overwhelmed by all there is to keep track of at his cramped workstation. He has two keyboards — one for typing flight commands, the other for chat. Occasionally he reaches for the wrong one. Apart from the screens for video and chat, four others display maps, flight telemetry, and masses of other information that change by the second — readouts for velocity, altitude, fuel levels, oil pressure, wind speed and direction, missile paths, air traffic, weather conditions, terrain. It is a neural nightmare, a bit like trying to conduct five trains at once as they careen toward the same station.
The ruins of the house swing into view.
“Holy shit,” Zach mutters.
“Easy as she goes,” Cole says, hoping to soothe him.
The damage is complete. Roof collapsed, everything in a heap. The floor plan, roughly thirty by forty feet, was big enough to hold a lot of people, and here and there Cole spots arms and legs, bright clothing, smears of blood, the fleshy blur of faces with fixed and open eyes. In the calamitous jumble it is impossible to say whether the bodies are male or female, adult or child.
From an operational point of view he supposes that the most important consideration, perhaps the only one, is that their HVT — high-value target — is now dead, along with whoever came to meet him. A nasty gathering, according to Colonel Sturdivant at the briefing. A worthy target. But that’s what they always said, or why bother to shoot?
(FORT1) Move closer.
What could Fort1 be searching for in this mess? Lewis zooms to the camera’s limit, but there is little more to see. Cole finds himself scanning for toys. Seeing none, he is relieved, until he recalls that these children almost never possess anything beyond a slingshot, a cricket bat, and the clothes on their backs. During their earlier reconnaissance of Sandar Khosh his overriding impression was that of a quiet hamlet of farmers, armed only with the occasional stray Kalashnikov, which are as common as pitchforks in these hills. No one even carried a grenade launcher. By local standards the village is as quaintly pacifist as an Amish homestead. Dirt farmers, in other words — their slang for the jetsam of the countryside. Sandar Khosh, the land that both time and terrorism forgot, no American soldiers within miles.
Yet here they were with their Predator for the second time in a month.
Why?
Not his job to ask, nor Sturdy’s to answer.
One of Cole’s occupational hazards is that he has begun to wonder what it would be like to lead a life in which every action was observed from on high for hours at a time. How would he function under those conditions? What must it be like to become an image lodged in the memory of some secret database, your digital signature retrievable by anyone with the proper clearance? More than ever before in his life, Cole now notices all the cameras that seem to be mounted almost everywhere he looks — at stoplights and in convenience stores, in school hallways and Walmarts, shopping malls and parking decks. At toll plazas, the ATM, the branch library. In elevators and hotel lobbies. There is even one installed in the top rim of the screen of his wife’s laptop, right there on the kitchen table, open to the world. Here at Creech, cameras are everywhere. No escape except the desert, and even there you’re an easy mark for the satellites, especially at night, when a man shows up as a throb of thermal brightness marooned on an empty cooling sea. Zach told him all about it.
The chat screen blips.
(FORT1) Any squirters?
Escapees, he means. So called because on infrared they display as squibs of light, streaming from the action like raindrops across a windshield. Before Cole can respond, the screen flashes again.
(FORT1) Check out back. Someone couldve gone out window.
Cole counts to three, then relays the order in his steadiest bedtime story voice.… And a quiet old lady who was whispering hush … Zach moves the camera. No one is behind the house, but a pair of legs in green pants protrudes from beneath the fallen rear wall.
(FORT1) Hold her there.
Why does this body interest him more than the others? Is this the HVT? Zach holds the close-up for several seconds, then, on his own initiative, pans back toward the front of the house. Cole braces himself as the three small bodies slide back into view. His eyes are drawn to the girl.
Incredibly, her body twitches.
She is alive.
(FORT1) Check the house again.
Fuck that. Did Cole say that or just think it? Zach stays on the girl. Her right arm is severed and lies a foot from her shoulder, with blood pooling in the gap. She struggles to rise, trying to prop herself on her left elbow. Cole watches but says nothing. Zach is also silent. The girl slowly raises her head.
(FORT1) I said the house.
The man is obsessed, either with death or with rubble. Cole opts for life and continues to ignore him, despite a growing sense that there will be consequences — for himself, for Zach, for everyone involved.
An old woman crosses onto the screen from the left. Reaching the girl she bends stiffly to the ground. Her mouth opens wide, and so does the girl’s. Cole’s imagination supplies the soundtrack — two voices in awful harmony, a cry that is keening and forlorn, as if someone had torn open a tender and damaged part of the earth and this is the unbearable sound that issues from within.
The time signature at the bottom of the screen flashes to 04:00, but his mind is still lodged at 3:50, the moment of impact.
Cole blinks. In four hours his shift will end. He will exit the trailer, dodge the chaplain, brush aside the shrink. Then he will drive home on an empty highway with only these images for company. After thirty miles or so he will ease into the dense weave of Vegas traffic and take the exit for his suburban refuge. He will click the remote to open the garage and enter the kitchen door with a smile for his wife. Then, while cartoons blare and the neighbor starts his mower, he will eat Saturday pancakes with his children.
No one but him will know what has happened.
(FORT1) Still need more from the house.
Don’t we all, thinks Cole, mesmerized.
CHAPTER TWO
A contrail of dust marked the car’s progress, undulating like a brown caterpillar across the wide expanse of the desert floor. The car was a mile away, maybe two, but there was no mistaking its destination. The only person up here was Darwin Cole, seated on a lawn chair at the door of a sagging trailer in the shade of a sandstone bluff.