Unmanned (9780385351263) Read online

  Now he could hear the laboring engine, the ping of gravel in the wheel wells. Silver Chevy, practically brand-new. Meaning it was either a rental or government issue. The latter prospect made Cole reach inside the trailer for the loaded 12-gauge he always kept handy. He sat back down and laid the shotgun across his lap like a hunter in a blind, waiting. Then he squinted into the morning sky to check the position of the December sun. Almost nine. Early for company. Early for bourbon, too, but he took another warm swallow from his tumbler of Jeremiah Weed.

  The Chevy disappeared into a dip, then reemerged before stopping a hundred yards out, engine idling. The chrome grille smiled up at him like a salesman. Somebody wanted something, but Cole wasn’t in a giving mood. Nothing to give, anyway, except flies, scorpions, a few cans of stew. Plus all those memories, circling like buzzards.

  The engine stopped. Everything was silent as the last of the contrail silted to the ground. A door clicked open and a woman got out from the driver’s side. That surprised him. Roughly his age, but not his wife. White blouse, pressed black slacks, brown hair, windblown. She walked around to the passenger side, facing him. Sunglasses hid her eyes, although just as he was thinking that, she took them off.

  Her face was vaguely familiar, stirring a warmth that was only skin deep and faded within seconds. He opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. Let her go first. Besides, he was unsure of his voice. He’d stopped talking months ago, even to himself, which at the time he’d regarded as a sign of progress.

  “You’re not going to shoot me, I hope.” She smiled uncertainly. Cole cleared his throat and reached back for something extra, not wanting to croak.

  “Depends on who you are, what you’re here for.” The old baritone seemed fine. Nice to know some things were still in working order.

  “That would be easier to explain face-to-face. Then, if you still don’t like me, I’ll go, easy as I came, and nobody will be the wiser. The Air Force doesn’t seem to know you’re up here, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

  “Oh, they know where to find me.”

  Cole nodded at the sky, as if that explained everything. Instead of answering, she watched, hesitant, while the silence grew between them.

  “I’ve got news of your family,” she said. Her voice was a little timid. Cole got the impression she’d been hoping to hold that item in reserve but now had nothing left. “They don’t know where you are, either. I wasn’t planning on telling them unless you want me to.”

  Was there a threat in that statement? Or maybe in the one about the Air Force?

  “State your business. I’ll decide if it’s worth your while to come any closer.”

  “Fort1 is my business. Mine and two other people’s. It’s kind of a club—people who want to know all about Fort1 and everything he’s done. We heard about what happened to you, so we figured you were a prime candidate for membership.”

  Cole took a deep breath and stood slowly, still holding the shotgun. Then he remembered her face. A journalist. He’d met her during a deployment, years ago. Aviano Air Base, in Italy, a reporter from Boston back during the air war over Kosovo. She’d interviewed him in the canteen while a PAO hovered nearby, making sure Cole didn’t misbehave. She’d charmed him for an hour, then written a puff piece that made all the generals happy.

  “You’re the reporter, aren’t you? Keira something?”

  “Keira Lyttle, yeah. Thought you’d remember.” She sounded relieved, her shoulders relaxing. “So what do you say?”

  In the car, something moved behind the smoked glass, which reminded him why he didn’t trust reporters. They hid things—motives, opinions, the stuff they already knew. And, like the brass, they were always eager to either piggyback on your success or hang you for your mistakes.

  “Who’s in the car?”

  “A colleague. His name’s Steve.”

  “I don’t want him taking my picture. Does he have a camera?”

  She shook her head.

  “I want to see him.”

  Lyttle knocked on the passenger window. “Steve, roll it down.”

  The window hummed open. He was about the same age as Lyttle, hair clipped short. He nodded but didn’t speak. No sign of a lens, but that didn’t mean anything.

  “Steve Merritt,” the man offered. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “He’s part of the club,” Lyttle said. “He didn’t feel comfortable letting me come up here alone.”

  Cole looked down at the gun in his hands. Feeling a little foolish, he propped it against the trailer. The standoff was making him weary. His inclination was to send them away, tell them to forget it. But the mention of Fort1 had hooked him somewhere deep and painful, so he stepped forward, feeling older than his years and wondering if he was ready for this. Shifting his weight from his right foot to his left, he announced his decision.

  “Just you. He stays in the car. No cameras, no tape recorders, and no laptops.”

  “How ’bout this?”

  She held up a small notebook.

  “Fine. Long as you got your own pencil.”

  She held that up, too, then started climbing the rise toward the trailer. A shadow crossed between them and they flinched, but when Cole looked up he saw it was only a hawk hunting its breakfast. His memories began descending from their holding pattern, and in the vanguard as always was the girl in the red shawl, white pants, and blue scarf, with two boys edging forward from the shadows behind her. Just above them was the black vector of the crosshairs, emblazoned on the mud rooftop like the mark of Cain: Strike here and incur the wrath of God.

  “Ready?” Lyttle asked.

  She’d materialized in front of him, notebook in hand.

  “Not out here.” He nodded at the sky. “They’ll see us. Inside.”

  Lyttle turned and waved toward the car, as if to signal the all-clear, although to Cole her smile looked forced.

  “You first,” he said, nodding toward the door.

  Her lips tightened, but she did as he asked.

  They disappeared into the trailer.

  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 m
iddle 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.