Dan Fesperman - Unmanned

Cole signed on to his Gmail account while the others watched.

“Shit. He replied yesterday, and there’s an attachment. Five of them. Video files, they’re huge. And they’re dated.”

“Transcripts?”

“Looks like it. Everything I asked for, plus one more. A Lancer reference, from the recon we fucked up. He must have remembered it, too.”

“So Tangora’s on there?” Barb asked with an edge to her voice, almost like she was afraid to hear the answer.

“Yeah. It is. You can watch it with me, if you want.”

She considered it a second, then shook her head.

“Maybe later, some other time. Or maybe never. But definitely not today. I need to stay on top of my game right now.”

“How ’bout I just send you a copy?”

“Thanks. I think.”

“Is all this mission stuff still relevant?” Steve asked.

“I think it is. Or might be. Even with Castle dead, Mansur’s still floating around somewhere. All those fuckups with Magic Dimes, plus everything Barb saw. There still has to be a reason for it.”

“A reason good enough to come down here to kill Wade Castle?”

“Maybe.”

“Leave him to it,” Barb said. “It could even explain why they sent this guy Riggleman. And for all we know your friend Zach could be in the stockade by now.”

Cole hadn’t thought of that, but she was probably right, and it pained him. He looked again at Zach’s message, with its reference to a “pencil pusher” out at Creech, asking about Cole and making everyone uneasy. Riggleman, maybe. He should have checked his emails earlier.

The house was in full motion now. Keira already had her car keys and was ready to go. Steve was on the phone, talking loudly and gesturing with his free hand as he walked toward the kitchen. Barb was off and running, having borrowed Keira’s laptop, apparently content to let Cole use hers to review his new trove of information. He needed a quiet place to work, so he picked up the laptop and headed for the living room. That’s when Sharpe came bursting through the front door.

“What’s got this beehive all stirred up?”

Cole told him about the arrest.

“Air Force? Doesn’t sound like their style.”

“I agree. But it is what it is. I’ve got news, too. My sensor sent me the video record of our missions at Sandar Khosh, both the recon and the attack, plus three others. So it looks like the flying’s going to have to wait while I go through everything.”

“Five missions? That could take hours. Days, even.”

“I can skip over most of it. I know when the relevant shit happened. But, yeah, today’s probably a washout.”

Sharpe looked put out, perhaps on the verge of an outburst. Then he sagged, as if the inevitability of it sank in. For once, he wasn’t in position to call the shots, and he knew it.

“Then I might as well watch with you. But let me put away the bird first, in case the cops come back.”

“I’ll get everything ready to roll. You bring the popcorn.”

Sharpe didn’t smile.

“You joke about it, but are you ready for this? I’ve watched these things before. They’re damn vivid. It’ll be like flying those missions all over again.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing for more than a year now, up in my head? This’ll just fill in some blanks.”

“Fair enough. Give me fifteen minutes.”

SHARPE WAS CORRECT. From almost the moment the images of the first mission began unspooling, Cole felt he had gone right back into active duty. The video from the Predator played on three quarters of the screen. The simultaneous chat scrolled on a narrow margin to the right. Radio traffic played on the speaker, everything happening just as it had happened on that day. Eerie. And the first transcript wasn’t even from one of his own missions. It was from Rod and Billy’s attack on Tangora, from the day when Barb had been present, visiting the local warlord Engineer Haider, the very day she’d snapped the photos of those frightened boys.

By clicking on the bottom of the screen Cole was able to make a timeline pop up, the same way it did on some YouTube videos, or on streaming replays of televised sports events. It showed him where he could find the attack and other key moments. But for the moment he was content to let things play out chronologically, if only to give himself time to grow accustomed to the whole idea.

Captain Rodney Newell spoke up.

“There’s our target compound, gentlemen. All hands receiving a clear image?”

“Clear as she goes,” a voice replied. It was Lieutenant Colonel Sturdivant, their CO.

Four other replies popped up on the chat screen in quick succession. The first two were from Langley AFB and the combined air ops center at Al Udeid. The next was from Wade Castle, under his chat handle of Fort1:

(FORT1) All clear.

The next one was a revelation.

(LANCER) All clear.

So there they were, peas in a pod. Fort1 had presumably been in Afghanistan or Pakistan, since he wound up flying to the site later by helicopter, with Barb seeing him land. But where had Lancer been? More to the point, who was he, and who had he been working for?

Sharpe settled onto the couch beside Cole. He smelled like the outdoors.

“My God,” he said. “Such a clear picture. It’s almost like being in the ground control station.”

“Pretty much exactly. I’ve already had a Lancer sighting. Him and Castle, chiming in one after the other on the chat.”

“I can save us some time, if you want.”

“How so?”

“I know how to search for their later exchanges. A way to bookmark all of them, if you want.”

“How the hell do you know how to do that?”

“Who do you think designed half this shit? The things that work well, anyway, none of the cumbersome fucked-up stuff.”

“Have at it.”

Cole slid the laptop toward Sharpe on the coffee table so he could enter the necessary clicks and commands.

“There. Fort1’s on here dozens of times, maybe forty or fifty in all.”

“Figures, he was the J-TAC.”

“Lancer’s pretty quiet. Only four more showings.”

“Let’s watch ’em all in order, for both of them. And we’ll check in on Barb’s appearance. I think it’s indexed on the timeline. See where it mentions the arrival of a Nissan truck?”

“Got it. Okay, Captain Cole. Strap in.”

An hour passed before the first notable event: the arrival at the scene of Mansur Amir Khan, the keeper of Castle’s homing beacons, or magic dimes. He rolled up to the compound in his white Toyota truck with orange stripes across the hood. It gave Cole an odd feeling to see it again, knowing what would become of it at Sandar Khosh a month and a half later.

“Funny little fucker, isn’t he?” Sharpe said. “Moves like a jockey.”

The truck rolled through the gate into the main compound, and you could see Mansur helping two other men unload boxes from the back.

“He’s a smuggler,” Cole said. “That’s how he got all his contacts. I’m guessing the beacon is in one of the boxes.”

A large man in a turban walked out to hug Mansur.

“I’m guessing that’s Engineer Haider, the warlord killed in the strike.”

Not long after Mansur drove away, Lancer popped up for his second appearance. This time he chatted back and forth with Castle.

(LANCER) Beacon placed.

(FORT1) You still vouch for status and ID of HVT?

(LANCER) Affirmative.

(FORT1) Onward gentlemen.

“Why the fuck did they even need a beacon?” Sharpe asked. “Hell, Haider’s right there, plain as day.”

“Maybe they sent Mansur to verify Haider’s presence. Activating the beacon would’ve been his signal of a positive ID. Still testing out their system, maybe.”