“Hey, he must be getting hungry. I know I am. Why don’t we go?”
“I’m fine with room service,” Cole said. His voice was drained of energy.
“No, Keira’s right. Let’s get some air. Take in the freak show out on the Strip.”
“One other thing,” Cole said, turning back toward Keira. “You said you had news of my family.”
She smiled uncomfortably. “What is it you want to know?”
“Anything, really. I haven’t exactly been in touch. Not for a while.”
“Well, let’s see. There’s your boy.”
“Danny.”
“Yeah, Danny. He’s eight now, going to a private school in Saginaw. Third grade. Seems to be doing great.”
“Private school? Carol’s dad must be paying. How’s Karen? She’d be twelve. Probably boy crazy by now. Did you see them?”
“No. But I, uh, went up there. Asked around. At first we thought that, well …”
“That I might be up there?”
“Yeah.”
Cole snorted.
“Carol would call the cops if I ever showed my face. Besides. The Air Force, well …”
“What?” Steve asked.
“I’m supposed to stay close to home, meaning right around Creech. Keep them apprised of my whereabouts.” He nodded toward a sheaf of folded printouts on the bedside table, page after page, with lots of lines of print blacked out. “Part of my plea agreement. It’s all in there. I see you’ve got the transcript from my court-martial. They told me it was going to be sealed.”
“It was,” Steve said. Then he shrugged, as if to apologize. “Sources. Don’t worry, we won’t spread it around.”
“Most of it’s bullshit. The Cessna wasn’t stolen. The owner’s another pilot, a friend of mine. We had an understanding. I could use it on weekends and pay him later. And the whole Death Valley thing.” He shook his head. “They made it sound like I kidnapped my kids and dumped them in the wild. It was a trip we’d made before, the whole family. They were all for it. There’s a landing strip there, a Park Service campground with picnic tables and everything. They were loving it. I just had a little too much to drink after they went to bed. Carol overreacted.”
Steve and Keira said nothing.
Cole couldn’t blame them. Even if he was right, what more was there to say? Besides, Carol hadn’t overreacted. Cole had shut her out during those final weeks together. He’d never even asked for help as he drifted beyond reach. And she had tried. Tried hard. It was like he was locked inside a cockpit, with Carol banging on the glass. Strapped in for the duration, mute and unreachable, while telling himself the isolation was for security reasons. Can’t talk about our missions, it’s classified. You wouldn’t understand anyway.
And maybe she wouldn’t have, but he’d never given her the chance, and now he missed her, the kids too. During his desert exile the idea of his family had seemed as remote as the moon. A blank landscape in a blank mind. Now, stirred to life by this conversation, Carol and the kids were a ready presence, their voices alive in his mind. Danny with his picture books, Karen with her soccer ball, Cole slicing a banana onto their Cheerios at the breakfast table while Carol cooked him an egg. A household at peace.
He looked up to see Steve and Keira staring at him. He blushed and took a deep breath.
“Okay, then.” he said. “Let’s go eat.”
Keira headed for the door.
Cole took a last glance out the window, craning his neck to look higher into the empty sky. When he turned he saw Steve watching closely. The nutty pilot, seeing things in the sky—that’s what they were probably thinking. Fine. Let them. Three years ago he probably would’ve felt the same. But he’d learned. They would, too.
They filed out of the room without a word.
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.”