by Owen Sheers
―
“Creech?” The screener’s voice sounded unsure, a degree off the usual protocol. “We have two times vehicles approaching south-southwest. Approximately eight pax total.”
“Can we get a feed?” Maria asked.
Within seconds a visual appeared from a Global Hawk, a surveillance drone watching the watchers.
“Guess that’s the rendezvous?” The coordinator’s chat message popped up on another monitor.
“Intel on their source?” Daniel typed back, keeping one hand on the Predator’s controls.
“Negative,” the coordinator replied. “Langley picked up the trail in deep country.”
“Double-tap,” Maria said quietly from her seat. “Double-tap, baby.”
Within another thirty minutes Mehsud’s convoy had reached a small compound high up one of the eastern valleys, half in shadow, half in light. In another ten minutes the second convoy, tracked by the Global Hawk, also came within their visual range. A minivan trailed by another pickup. Daniel watched as the two vehicles revved and stalled up the steep track towards the eastern valley. At one point they both stopped and a door of the minivan opened. A man got out, walked to the side of the track, and took a leak.
Higher in the valley, in the mud-walled compound, a single figure, a man, from what Daniel could tell, came out into one of the three interconnected courtyards. There was a tree in the corner, and for a moment he disappeared under its shadow. When he emerged back into the light he was throwing his arm before him, again and again. A scattering of dark dots gathered at his feet, moving erratically. They were chickens, Daniel realised. He was feeding chickens. As Mehsud’s convoy approached he paused in his feeding and looked up. The lead vehicle, the twin cab, came to a halt at the compound’s walls and two men got out. Both carried rifles.
“That’s a weapon confirmation, Major,” one of the screeners said in Daniel’s ear. “Two times rifles.”
“Do we have ID?” Daniel asked.
“Negative,” the coordinator replied. He had a West Coast accent, like a surfer. “If Mehsud’s there,” he continued. “He’s still in one of those vehicles.”
Daniel eased the joystick to the right and circled the Predator. Maria adjusted the sensors in response, keeping them focused on the compound. Their screens were always silent, but there were times when Daniel thought he could tell if there was real silence on the ground too. Like now. He could have been wrong, but the scene looked strangely peaceful. The tree—a fig tree, he’d have guessed—the two guards resting their weapons and waiting in the shade of the compound wall. The pickup and twin cab, also waiting. Everyone was waiting. He, Maria, the screeners, the coordinator, the observer. Somewhere, the pilot of the Global Hawk. And, they all hoped, in the back of one of those vehicles, Hafiz Mehsud was waiting too.
“Okay, people, eyes front.” It was the coordinator again, marking the arrival of the second convoy. The minivan pulled up first, and then the pickup. The van’s door slid open again, a growing dark on Daniel’s monochrome screen; from slit, to square, to rectangle.
“We have two, three, four, five. Five, repeat, five, pax confirmed. All male.”
The last man to exit was carrying something, hoisted on his shoulder. The third to get out now also reached back into the van to lift out an object. It looked heavy, and slightly shorter than whatever his colleague was carrying.
“Is that a weapon?” Daniel asked.
“RPG?” the coordinator guessed down the line.
“Too short,” one of the screeners said.
“Mortar, then,” the coordinator countered.
“Do we have confirmation?” Maria asked them both.
“Possible weapon confirmation,” the coordinator replied.
“Okay, here we go,” Maria said, as another man got out of what they hoped was Mehsud’s pickup. He, too, had a rifle slung over his shoulder.
“That’s three times weapon confirmation,” one of the screeners logged.
“Possible four times,” the coordinator reminded them.
Another man followed. He was slower, older, leaning on a stick.
Maria zoomed in on this last figure. He wore a combat jacket over his tribal clothes and carried what looked like a briefcase, holding it close to his side.
“That’s him,” the coordinator said. “That’s our guy.”
Daniel felt his pulse quicken. There were now nine men out of their vehicles on the ground. They were moving towards one another, bunching.
“Sweet target,” Maria said in confirmation.
Daniel breathed deeply, trying to control his adrenaline. He remembered the list of alleged offences below Hafiz Mehsud’s photograph on the wall. Not the detail, just the length. And now here he was, the same man, joining these two meeting groups. In a few minutes they’d move inside, or some of them might begin to leave. He scanned the territory of his screen for any others. Which is when he saw a movement in the minivan, a light patch in the dark of its opened door.
“Minivan door,” he said.
“Check, sensor,” Maria replied, tightening focus on the van.
“What’s the problem, Major?” the coordinator asked. For the first time he sounded urgent, pressed.
“Was that a woman in there?” Daniel asked.
“A woman?” the coordinator replied. “No way. Not at a meet like this.”
“Screeners?” Daniel asked. The van’s open door was filling half his screen now, but all of it was dark.
“No way to tell,” one of the Florida voices said.
“I saw something…,” said the other.
“I saw a man,” the coordinator said, cutting in. “Possible tenth pax.”
“Eyes front,” Maria said. The two groups had come even closer together. They were talking, the armed guards hanging back a few feet. The man from the courtyard had also come round to the front of the compound now, to watch.
“What you got, Creech?” the coordinator asked.
“Two times Hellfires confirmed,” Daniel replied.
“Okay, Major, you have Intel clearance.”
“Permission to engage?” Daniel asked, slipping into his kill protocol.
The observer’s voice was in his ear before he’d finished the question. “Good to go, Major. Permission to engage.”
There was no word from Florida, so, pulling the joystick hard left, Daniel brought the Predator tight around into an attack trajectory. Soon, somewhere in those hills, the faint hum of its blades would be heard.
“Missiles armed.”
“Check, sensor.”
“Paint target.”
“Check, sensor.”
“Target lock.”
“Check, sensor.”
“In three, two, one. Missiles deployed.”
The two Hellfires disappeared from their rails in a diagram of the Predator on Daniel’s monitor. As he watched the scene of their destination—the shadow of the tree, the stilled pickups—the low buzz of his headphones filled his ears, and beneath that, six sets of breaths held on the lines. The counter to his left descended. Through ten, through five. The man feeding the chickens had moved closer. A lighter patch appeared in the van’s door again. Four, three, two. It was a headscarf. One.
The visuals flashed white, blanking in the glare.
“Impact,” Maria said beside him.
Daniel watched as definition slowly returned to the screens. Maria zoomed in close. The vehicles were burning. The few bodies left were prone. The hum of the servers, the conditioned air of the control station, a surfer’s voice, close in his ear. “Good job, Major. Well done.”
CHAPTER NINE
AS MICHAEL REACHED the turn in the stairway a floorboard flexed under him, its creaking making him pause. Without going any farther, his heart a tight fist in his chest, he leant forward and looked around the corner.
There was nothing. Just more stairs, then a landing carpeted in the same deep red as the runner descending behind him. No ghost. No intruder. No
Caroline. Just a part of the Nelsons’ house he’d never seen before.
He thought about turning and going back down the stairs. But now that he was there, higher in the house, shouldn’t he at least check the rooms on this floor? For whoever might have come in through the back door, if not for whatever had conjured that sudden essence of Caroline. This is how Michael convinced himself to take the last few steps up to the landing. But in reality he knew the only intruder he was searching for now was her. The resonance of the sensation he’d felt was still fading in him, as if she’d only just vacated the air on the landing before him, leading him on an impossible game of hide-and-seek.
This, at least, was what Michael’s body was telling him. His mind, still trying to keep a rational purchase on what had happened, was already dismissing what he’d sensed as no more than grief, still having its way with him after all these months. Caroline was dead. All that remained of her was in his memories, and so this, his mind cautioned him, was all he was feeling. Memory, triggered by some unseen, unheard association. Michael wanted to believe the certainty of this rational voice. But he could not. It was a voice winnowed of mystery, and devoid of that most seductive of drugs, hope.
Stepping onto the landing, Michael found himself standing between three wooden doors, one on either side of him at the ends of a short corridor, and a third ahead of him, just off to his right. This last door was closed, as was the one to his left. The door on his right, though, was open. As he walked towards it Michael saw the foot of a bed in the room beyond, the corner of a rug, and, as he got closer, an armchair collapsed with clothes—a pair of trousers, some tights, a tangle of shirts and blouses, as if their wearers had evaporated mid-embrace. Entering the room, he stood before the bed, studying its heaped duvet for the shape of a body. But there was none. Just as there never had been. Just remains, that was all that had been left of her. And that’s all they’d buried too. Not Caroline as Michael had known and loved her, but just her remains.
―
Michael had never been a violent man. The tinder he’d witnessed fire up in others was an unfamiliar fuel to him. Over the years he’d spent with Nico and Raoul in Inwood he’d learnt the contours of violence, but as an observer only. The way it entered a room, or took possession of a man’s face, drawing the tendons in his neck, flushing his cheeks with blood. He’d seen the suddenness of its flaring, too—the staccato jerk of a punch, the sardine flash of a blade. And more than once he’d been in the presence of the weight of its threat, the heaviness of a pistol on a table, the tightly bedded bronze of an ammunition clip. But never, even when he’d been threatened himself, had he felt its compulsion to harm. Until they’d killed Caroline.
The desire had risen in him a few hours after he’d discovered Peter waiting for him by the porch of Coed y Bryn. It was evening, the woods across the valley already a swathe of darkness. The sky above them was showing its first stars. Peter was still in the house, cooking them both dinner. He’d said he thought it best if Michael wasn’t left alone. But for a few minutes, when Michael had gone upstairs to change, he had been.
On entering their bedroom he’d seen the chair on Caroline’s side of the bed, piled just like this chair in Samantha and Josh’s room with her discarded clothes. Dropping to the floor beside it, Michael had slowly pushed his hands under their weight, as if reaching for eggs under a sleeping hen. Drawing them to him with both arms, he’d pressed his face into Caroline’s dresses, T-shirts, and the jumper she’d worn on the first night they’d met, its neckline falling from her one bare shoulder.
He wanted to kill them. These faceless men who’d murdered his wife from the air. The planners and officers and spies who’d played with her fate like gods. He wanted to find them, expose them, turn their hidden warrens and nests inside out. He wanted to make them pay.
For the following weeks these thoughts spread through Michael like a virus, an anger masking his pain. As the story broke across the world, as the comment pieces mounted, as Caroline’s name was spoken again and again on radio and TV shows, he learnt all he could about the U.S. drone programme. Long into the night and the early morning, ignoring advice to sleep, to rest, Michael trawled blogs, forums, and chat rooms for information. About the bases from which the Predator might have been operated. About the innocents killed or unmentioned in mission reports. About the missiles that blew apart his wife.
The more Michael learnt, the more the injustices continued to deepen. Caroline and her team had been in Pakistan, a country with whom America was not at war. This was why their vehicle had been unmarked, why Sightline or their fixer hadn’t contacted the U.S. military. Why warzone protocol had not been followed. Although the strike had been a covert operation, under pressure the Pentagon had issued a statement acknowledging the incident. It was, the statement read, a tragic accident. There would be an internal investigation. As well as Caroline, her British director, a Swedish cameraman, and their Pakistani interpreter and driver had also been killed. Among the dead was a fourteen-year-old boy. The British, Australian, and Swedish governments demanded answers. There would be a review of operating procedures, they were told, of lines of command. There would be answers. But the Pentagon statement also made mention of the journalists “working undercover,” of “entering a high-risk area.” They had known, it was implied, the dangers of their actions. And, the same statement reminded the world, an influential terrorist had been successfully targeted. The weight of blame, Michael knew, from the moment it happened, was being dissipated, thinned.
At night, when he couldn’t sleep, he thought of the interviews he’d give when he was able to face a camera or a microphone. How he would broadcast his anger. How he would make sure the story was never allowed to slip from the public conversation. How he’d demand those responsible should face justice, a glaring light, not an obscuring darkness, and how in its illumination Caroline’s death might yet prevent the future deaths of others. He would find a way, somehow, to visit pain upon those who had killed her.
Then, just as quickly as it had first washed through him, so the swell of Michael’s vengeance ebbed. It left him overnight. On waking in the small hours one morning, he’d simply known he wanted none of it. That rather than broadcast anything, he wanted to curl up from the world, to hibernate with his loss. This was, he realised later, perhaps the true moment of Caroline’s death for him. A quieter, more complete acknowledgement of what Peter had told him as he’d knelt on the gravel beside him and laid his hands on his shoulders. A lonely and terrible reckoning with the facts.
In the following months Michael refused all interview requests. He made no statements, he pursued no more enquiries. Caroline’s remains were repatriated in a Royal Air Force transport plane. A week later he and her family buried them in the chapel he’d first seen with Caroline through Coed y Bryn’s kitchen window. The coffin, Michael had known, was mostly empty. He watched it lowered into the ground, threw a handful of soil across its wood, then turned his back on it. He would let the world clamour over her death. He would let others discover the details, the reasons. Because for Michael there was only the one truth to learn, and he’d already discovered it that night when he’d sat on the floor of their bedroom pressing Caroline’s clothes to his face: in her scent, fading by the hour, and in the sheets of their bed, still creased by her body, which was no longer whole, and no longer here.
―
A tall window rose above the armchair in Samantha and Josh’s bedroom, its frame filled with the leaves of the sycamore outside their house. Opposite was a king-size bed, above which hung an abstract landscape: the suggestion of hills, sky, perhaps a river. On either side the bedside tables marked out the room’s territory. On the right a pile of novels, women’s magazines, a ceramic bowl filled with earrings. On the left a book on the American Civil War, a glasses case, the lead of a phone charger. On the wooden floor, copies of the Financial Times and Herald Tribune. The bed itself was unmade, the duvet a cumulus at its centre. At the other end two pillo
ws were stacked against its head, their shape still holding the depression of a back.
Michael looked over the bed, the clothes on the armchair. So often, over the last seven months, being in the Nelsons’ house had been like reliving echoes of a past life. As he’d helped Lucy build a LEGO car, when he’d watched Samantha and Josh fill the dishwasher or, once, each carry a sleeping daughter up the stairs to bed.
But such moments were visions, not echoes, glimpses of a future life that had been taken from him along with Caroline. A life of children, family. Even this bed before him was such a vision. The bed he and Caroline had shared had always been new. A bed of promise, not years. And it was the years Michael wanted, the accumulation of sharing. A lifetime, not just a marriage.
He turned from the bed. Whatever trace of Caroline had led him up the stairs wasn’t to be found in here. And this wasn’t for him to see, anyway. He felt as if he’d strayed from the corridors of a cruise liner to find himself, unexpectedly, in its engine room, the mechanisms unprepared for public eyes, the working parts worn with keeping an even keel, whatever the seas. He glanced out the window at the quiet street, the sycamore leaves filtering the afternoon sunlight. As he did, he seemed to surface back into the day, into the facts of its ordinariness, the city subdued under the heat. What if Josh were to come home now to find him in their bedroom? How would he explain? What had he been thinking, in coming up the stairs at all? He hadn’t heard a sound since he’d entered the house. Would an intruder really have remained so quiet for so long? The open door was just a mistake, that was all. He should leave now, while he still could. Write a note for Samantha and Josh, close the back door and leave.
