by Owen Sheers
“Okay,” he said. “It finishes at five, right?”
“Can you take Macy home, too? Emily just called to say she’ll be working late.”
He slowed at a stoplight. A truck drew up beside him, the sun flashing off its chrome fender. The sky above the road was a cyan blue. It was going to be a beautiful day. “Sure,” Daniel said. “Just text me their address.”
“Thanks,” Cathy said.
Daniel heard a muffled wail in the background. The clatter of a spoon falling. “Is she still not eating that?” he asked. But Cathy had already hung up.
Daniel’s operator, Maria, lived farther west, fifteen minutes closer to Creech. She shared a car with her husband, so on most shifts Daniel picked her up on the way in. At the end of their day he’d often drive her home, too. As she got into the Camry that morning, she was already talking, but not to Daniel.
“Waddya mean?” she said, her phone cradled under her neck as she pulled the door closed and reached for her seat belt. Daniel drove away from the kerb as she buckled up. “You tellin’ me that?” she continued, her Hispanic pitch nailing whoever was on the other end of the line. “You really tellin’ me that? Well, lemme tell you something, lady. That ain’t good enough. You hear me? I work, you know that? I work. Eight a.m. to six p.m.? What kinda window do you call that? D’mio! That ain’t no window, that is one mutha of a hole. Uh-uh. No way. So waddya goin’ do about it, eh?”
Daniel turned on the radio to try and tune out Maria’s conversation. Slim Whitman’s “My Heart Is Broken in Three” filled the car as they rose on the slip road to join 95 West. As they picked up the highway’s speed, Las Vegas fell away from them, reducing block by block from strip malls to suburbs, to half-built streets, to open desert, until all that was left were a few exploratory SUVs and a group of surveyors, their hard hats bright in the sun. When Maria eventually hung up she offered Daniel no more than an exasperated shake of her head in explanation. Turning to her window, she watched the desert scroll past, the cacti and shrubs, the tan hues of its sands. When they drove out here on earlier shifts, Daniel found this landscape beautiful, amber under a low sun, the smallest of stones bestowed with long shadows. But now, with the sun higher, the desert’s light was already flat and strong, its warmth matured into a threatening heat.
Daniel didn’t ask Maria about her phone call. He was grateful for her silence and he knew she’d feel the same—that she, too, needed this stretch of road uninterrupted by conversation. Driving westward on Highway 95, they had a chance to prepare; to begin their daily transition between the compartments of their lives. Later that day, when they’d drive the same road back east, it would be different. Then the car and the highway would become their decompression chamber. They’d talk, ask about each other’s families, tell jokes. But now Highway 95 was their road to war, and as such it demanded silence more than speech.
Daniel knew that people like Barbara saw this daily commute as the epitome of American cowardliness, the leading edge of a new era of asymmetrical warfare. Fighter pilots going to battle without having to fight, without risking anything more than a speeding ticket or a traffic accident. But it wasn’t that simple. War, as Daniel had learnt, was never simple.
It was true there were still days when he wished he was back in the cockpit 8,000 miles away, risking his life with the patrols on the ground rather than just watching them work. And it was also true he missed the flying itself. Not just the valour of it—the thread that unwound back to the code of medieval knights—but also the pure experience. The victory over gravity, the surge and press of an F-16’s afterburners, the delicate touch of such power, whole countries rushing under his wing. The smell of the plane’s metal, and the sound of it, straining at 60,000 feet. On his very first training flight Daniel had fallen in love with the sky up there, a treasure to be owned only by those anointed to fly at such height, such speed. The blue of glazed porcelain, their contrails like fine paint strokes across its finish.
It was a romance, he knew, but a powerful one. And it had, after all, been this romance that made him want to be a pilot in the first place. His grandfather had flown F-86s on the Yalu River in Korea. His stories of those days, illustrated by a handful of black-and-white photographs, had caught the imagination of the young Daniel. Tales of single combat against MiG pilots they never met or knew, but with whom they shared those skies like brothers. The silver flashes of a sortie returning, the roar of their accelerating engines each morning. The beautiful routine of hunting, together and alone, in foreign cloudless skies.
It was his grandfather’s stories, as much as his family or the troops on the ground, that Daniel was increasingly trying to protect when he piloted a Reaper or a Predator from his screens in Creech. The inheritance of his grandfather and every other pilot who’d taken to the skies in combat. Because as well as being one of the country’s first Unmanned Aerial Vehicle pilots, Daniel would also be, he was sure, one of the last to have ever flown missions in a manned craft. Already the military was training young marines, eighteen, nineteen years old, who’d go into missions with no prior experience of aerial combat. The joystick he now handled through each shift had recently been remodelled on that of the Sony PlayStation. Daniel didn’t like it, but he knew it made sense. Without knowing it, under the eyes of their parents and siblings, America would train her future pilots in bedrooms and living rooms across the country. They would fight as if the world was a free-fire zone, cocooned within the hum of servers and computers, but never the sounds of the sky, of an engine’s torque, the wing’s strain, the purity of its thinning air.
For Daniel, who’d felt the tipping of a wing, who’d known the adrenaline of fear, it had become part of his duty to translate the essence of those manned decades into the control stations of Creech. The knowledge of being both the harbinger of death and its prey, of hearing the sound of your speed, of feeling, at one and the same time, vulnerable and invincible. A respect for the threat of the earth. A memory of air.
―
Thirty minutes after he’d reversed out of his drive in Centennial Hills, Daniel and Maria were pulling up outside the gates of Creech Air Force Base. As they waited for the guard to wave them forward, Daniel looked along the perimeter fence. Creech, it had to be said, still didn’t look like much of a base. Indian Springs, the town it edged, was small, only 1,500 people at most, but its outer streets drifted up to within touching distance of the highway at Creech’s border. Trailers and caravans, even an old Slipstream, all listed within sight of the huts and hangars inside the fence. When Daniel had first started there, over a year before the 432nd was officially reactivated, they’d had problems with local cats getting in, giving birth to litters of kittens in the garages. The only building next to the base was the Indian Springs Casino, a faded two-storey structure with a café, a handful of slot machines, and the Flying Aces Bar. After that, as far as Daniel knew it was just more desert, dotted by a few nature reserves, all the way to California and Yosemite National Park.
The guard called them forward, took the briefest of glances at their passes, then waved them through with a curt salute. He was one of the older guys, maybe stationed there since before the renaming. A veteran of the Gulf, perhaps. As Daniel drove through he wondered what he must think of them, arriving like this. Creech might not look like much of a base, but then he and Maria, in their sneakers, T-shirts, and shorts, well, they didn’t look much like a flying crew, either.
But they were. And this is what Barbara and their other detractors always forgot. They weren’t risking their lives when they flew. They weren’t exposed, physically, to the war. But that didn’t mean they weren’t exposed. There were still pressures, other risks, ones Daniel was only just coming to understand, the contours of his combat experience altering as fast as the technology he flew.
For Daniel, and although they never discussed it, he suspected for many of his colleagues too, the greatest pressure of flying UAVs was one of witness. They were paid to watch. This was
their job. To record hundreds of thousands of hours of footage that was then watched again, processed by soldiers and analysts in Afghanistan and back at the CIA in Langley. When necessary, they were expected to strike, too. And then watch again. Which is something Daniel had never done before. In Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, by the time his bombs detonated, his missiles hit, he was already miles away, flying faster than the speed of sound, outrunning even the faint thuds of his own ordnance. At Creech he still didn’t hear his munitions detonate, but despite being even farther from the battlefield, he saw everything. He saw them explode and he saw what they did, sometimes to people he’d followed for weeks. To people he knew. Like the motorcyclist.
―
Daniel had always known the motorcyclist would have to die. His photograph, along with the head shots of others, had been up on the wall in Creech for months. His misdemeanours listed below it dated back to the very start of the invasion in 2003. Daniel had wanted him to die. Even more, he’d wanted to be the pilot on the mission that killed him. The motorcyclist’s name was Ahmed al Saeed, and he had the blood of American soldiers on his hands. Should he get the chance, Daniel, with Maria beside him focusing the cameras, guiding the lasers, wanted to be the pilot to avenge them.
For a period of months they’d tracked al Saeed through the streets of southern Baghdad. They’d watched him drink coffee on plastic garden chairs in the street, visit his grandmother, liaise with a team of insurgents laying IEDs. He’d led them, over those months, to others who were, in turn, followed by other drones, other pilots, and other operators who’d also watched their homes, their cars, their children on screens across America. But Daniel and Maria had stayed with al Saeed, as he’d weaved through the back streets of the city on his motorbike, as he’d collected his son from school. As he’d lived.
He became a familiar, like the regular colleague you see across the office, but to whom you never speak. Daniel started anticipating his weekly routine. His Wednesday game of chess, his coffee after Friday prayers. He was thirty-six years old, just a couple years younger than Daniel, and like him also had two children, a girl and a boy. Then, one day, the order came through. It was time to kill him. It was time for Ahmed to die. According to a source on the ground he would be setting up an ambush for a U.S. convoy. But before Ahmed could hit that convoy, Daniel and Maria, watching from above, would hit him.
On the day of the mission they’d followed him from early in the morning. He must have been in good spirits. Three times on his journeys through the city he’d stopped to kick down the stand of his bike and join in with a kids’ soccer game. It was something they’d seen him do before, sometimes even pulling a U-turn to double back for a kick-around he’d glimpsed down one of the alleys. It was around the time Kayce had got into soccer. Daniel had recently bought her her first pair of cleats. Just that week Cathy had allowed her to put up a set of David Beckham posters in her bedroom. At the first game Ahmed played that day Maria had zoomed in close as he’d dived the wrong way to let a kid score. At the third game, less than an hour before they’d killed him, Daniel had watched as another boy rode his shoulders in celebration of a goal.
The intelligence was good. After that final game, Ahmed had ridden on to an outer suburb, where he’d met with two other insurgents. One of the men was already known to them. The other was not. Listening to the weapon confirmations from the screeners in Okaloosa, Florida, Daniel and Maria continued their observations as the men unloaded two RPGs and three AK-47s from their van. The group was still getting into position when Maria achieved a lock and, confirming a clear blast area, Daniel fired a Hellfire from his Predator.
Perhaps Ahmed was more experienced than the others. Or maybe he just had better hearing, quicker reactions. Whatever the reason, with five seconds to impact, he’d recognised the missile’s sonic boom and begun running away from the van, as if he’d known what was about to happen.
When the smoke cleared the other two men were dead. Ahmed, however, lying farther off, was still alive, rolling from side to side, clutching at the stump of his left leg. His head was tipped back, his neck strained as he screamed. This, Daniel had told himself, as Maria tightened focus, is what he’d wanted. They’d saved American lives. The mission was a success.
Turning away from the real-time visuals, Daniel had looked across at the thermal imaging screen. The same scene, rainbowed by temperature, was in focus, a hallucinogenic abstract with a pool of bright orange spreading from its centre. As Daniel watched that puddle of human heat grow, like the slow bubble of a lava lamp, he’d also watched its source, in the shape of Ahmed, change colour like a chameleon. From orange, to yellow, to green, until, leaking from his limbs towards his core, his body cooled to blue, eventually melting into the colour of the ground, the dust.
―
“Tracking white twin cab and blue pickup.”
“Check, sensor.”
“Holding altitude.”
“Check, sensor.”
Maria’s voice came to Daniel twice, once muffled and distant from where she sat on the flight deck next to him, and again, intimate in his headphones. The ground control station was dark, lit only by the fourteen monitors and control panels in front of them. The servers’ hum was harmonised by the whir of the air-conditioning, making the desert’s heat no more than a memory on their skin. They both wore their flight suits, sleeves rolled to their insignia patches: a black owl clutching three thunderbolts with the wing’s motto beneath, Victoria Per Scientiam—Victory Through Knowledge. Their flasks of coffee, two hours cold, stood on a shelf behind them, above which a banner bore the wing’s unofficial, more commonly quoted, motto—If you can’t lower heaven, the banner told anyone entering the room, raise hell.
Daniel and Maria had had their Predator in the air for more than an hour when the mission order came down the line. The Karachi station had received intelligence on the movements of Hafiz Mehsud, number three in the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Daniel was familiar with the name, and with the face of the man who owned it. His photograph was also on the walls in Creech, just three portraits along from the crossed-out face of Ahmed al Saeed. According to a human source, and supporting chatter surveillance, a rendezvous had been arranged at a location in the mountains northwest of Miranshah. A ground team had already identified his convoy leaving a compound on the edge of town, a white twin cab followed by a blue pickup.
Within minutes the other members of the kill chain introduced themselves, either by voice in Daniel’s headphones or by chat messages on his screen. The safety observer at Creech, an intelligence coordinator in Langley, a pair of screeners at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Others would be watching the mission, too. Maybe even some White House staff. Daniel never knew how many, or where they were, but these others were always there, even on a last-minute mission like this. Watching his flight, listening in, recording the results.
“No ground unit?” Daniel asked.
“Negative,” the coordinator replied. “This is cross-border.”
―
It was in the hours following the al Saeed mission, after he’d watched Ahmed’s body cool into blue in that dust, that Daniel first established his post-strike routine, one he’d kept to ever since. After the debrief he and Maria had driven out of the base and into the parking lot of the casino next door. While Maria went to the bathroom, Daniel ordered a couple beers from Kim, the barmaid at Flying Aces. Kim, a motherly blonde in her forties, gave Daniel a nod in acknowledgement but didn’t break her stream of conversation with another customer.
“I love those Italian ones,” she’d said as she’d drawn Daniel’s beers. “With the tomato and the mozzarella?”
“Caprese,” an older guy said from across the bar. He wore a Vietnam Vet baseball cap and spoke without looking up from his drink. “They’re called caprese.”
“That’s the one,” Kim said. “Yeah, caprese. I love those.”
Above her, four large TV screens, each hung at an angle, faced every side of th
e bar. They all played the same video-clip show: animals slipping on ice, bike tricks going wrong. There were screens in the bar itself, too, for gaming, with slits beside them for feeding in bills from one to a hundred dollars. A woman next to the Vietnam vet was knitting a blue baby’s sweater, while across from Daniel four young guys he recognised from Creech tapped at their phones.
As he’d waited for Maria, Daniel looked around the rest of Flying Aces. Its walls were decorated with black-and-white photographs of 1940s bombers, their noses painted with their logos and names—Puss in Boots, Wishful Thinking, The Uninvited. Below these, snapshot montages of nights in the bar were propped on each of the side tables.
When Maria returned they’d taken their beers to one of these tables. With the sound of the clip show behind them and a photo of a stag party in fancy dress at their elbows, she’d raised her glass in a toast. “To Ahmed.” She’d meant it as a joke, but as they’d touched the rims of their glasses, neither of them had smiled. It was the first time they’d watched someone bleed out, and something about that spreading pool of orange had altered the air of their success. For a while they’d spoken about other things. The colonel at the base, Maria’s son’s upcoming basketball trials, improvements to their respective houses. Eventually, draining their beers, they’d left, walking through the lobby’s dusk chorus of fruit machines and dime games out to Daniel’s car in the parking lot. Pulling onto the highway, they’d driven it east together in silence, back towards their families, their homes.
Except Daniel hadn’t gone home, not right away. Instead, after dropping Maria, he’d turned the car around and driven the highway back into the desert, turning off at a side road a few miles beyond the city. The road soon became a track, the Camry trembling and shaking over its stones, then nothing at all. Daniel texted Cathy, telling her he’d been ordered to an unscheduled briefing, then turned off his phone and got out of the car. For the next hour he’d remained there, sitting on the hood of the Camry until the sun dipped below the Charleston range. As he’d watched the view darken he’d tried to fill his eyes with the disappearing desert before him: its low shrubs, its sand and rocks burnishing towards evening. Its unblemished sky. He’d wanted to unsee the al Saeed mission. Delete it from his memory. He’d wanted to extinguish the image of Ahmed lifting a boy onto his shoulders in celebration, diving the wrong way in goal, rolling from side to side, side to side, screaming. But he could not. And he still couldn’t. There had been many other missions since then, and many other strikes. But through all of them Ahmed the motorcyclist had remained, a stubborn residue bleeding out under Daniel’s eyelids. Victory through knowledge.
