Dan Fesperman - Unmanned

THIRTY SECONDS TO IMPACT.

On the video display, Captain Darwin Cole watches black crosshairs quiver on a mud rooftop. He doesn’t budge the stick and rudder. No piloting needed now. All that matters is the missile, which Airman Zach Lewis guides by laser from a seat to Cole’s immediate right.

Ten seconds pass while Cole wiggles his toes, numb from the air-conditioning. No one speaks into their headsets. Even the chatter screen is calm, as if everyone in their viewing audience was holding his breath. It is 3:50 a.m., and Cole’s sense of detachment is so profound that he has to remind himself this is not a game, not a drill. It is death in motion, as real as it gets, and for the moment he is reality’s instrument of choice, the one whose name will go on the dotted line now and forevermore. His kill.

A sobering thought anytime, but especially when you’re sitting in a trailer on the floor of the Nevada desert, drowsy from breathing air that smells like warm electronics. Cole is a grounded fighter jock, as wingless as a plucked housefly, yet here he is about to zap a roomful of bad guys on the other side of the world. The upholstery creaks as he shifts in his seat. Nearly four hours in the saddle. Numb butt, numb toes, numb brain. Zach begins the countdown in a voice edgy with youthful eagerness.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four…”

On the screen, sudden movement.

The door of the house opens and a girl appears at the threshold. On Cole’s eighteen-inch monitor she is only three inches high, but the afternoon sunlight paints her vividly—red shawl, white pants, blue scarf. She looks young, ten or eleven, and for a disastrous second she gazes straight at the lens before she darts left, disappearing from the screen just as two small boys run out the door behind her, sandals flopping.

“What the fuck!” Cole says. “Can you—?”

“Too late.”

Zach shoves the joystick anyway, but it will take two seconds for his command to reach the missile across seven thousand miles of space and wiring, and by then the whole thing will be over.

Cole is wide awake now, and in the panic flash of this final moment before the explosion he is reminded that all his commands tonight have passed above the schools, rivers, farms, houses, malls, and highways of a sleeping America. Each twitch of his hand flings a signal of war across the nation’s night owls as they make love, make a sandwich, make a mess of things, or click the remote. The signal then hurdles the Atlantic, Europe, and the Middle East before finally reaching the bright blue afternoon of eastern Afghanistan, nine hours into the future, where at this moment his MQ-1 Predator drone gazes down from ten thousand feet upon the stony valley and mud homes of Sandar Khosh, a remote village of farmers and herdsmen.

Cole hopes the girl is running fast. The boys, too.

“Zero,” Zach announces.

The main screen erupts silently in a boiling cloud of fire and dust.

Cole gawks. The job does not allow him to turn away. No one says a word.

Already he feels the moment taking root in a fallow corner of his imagination—a seed of torment, a nascent preoccupation. From experience he knows that during the next few hours, word of this event will filter from the trailer like a noxious gas. By the end of his shift the chaplain will be waiting, along with the shrink who insists on calling himself a medic, as if they were right there on the battlefield with the dead and wounded. As always, Cole will politely decline their offers of counsel, although doom seems to follow him everywhere lately, closing in like a posse that rides only by night.

For the moment there is pressing business to attend to. He speaks into his headset.

“Zoom out, Zach. Where’d those kids go?”

Cole’s mind wants to shriek, but his voice remains calm, a cool Virginia baritone in the reassuring timbre of pilots the world over. It is an intelligent voice of great utility, patient and searching. Only seven hours earlier it was reading a bedtime story to Danny, his youngest, employing the soft cadences needed to make a restless five-year-old fall asleep. Somewhere toward the back of Cole’s brain the book’s rhythmic words still tumble as gently as socks in a dryer:

The lens draws back. The wider view reveals three small bodies just to the left of the ruined house. The worst part is that Cole believes he knows these children. Not personally, but in the way of all watchers who grow familiar with their subjects. He has seen them playing cricket in the rocky field by the old shepherd’s house, digging onions with their mother, hauling firewood from the grove of poplars by the stream. He knows these homes and this village, although it is little more than a smudge on their tactical map. How can this be possible? Then he remembers. Zach and he snooped around here only a month ago with their Predator, first by day and then after dark, switching the camera to infrared so they could lurk like an owl in a high pine while, far below, cook fires burned, animals lay down in their stables, and children —these children, he is sure of it now—played in the open air of an October evening. And with that memory comes the realization that those three kids should not have been in that house, not the one that Zach and he have been watching so intently for four hours. He is not sure how he knows this. Something he noticed earlier, perhaps, or during tonight’s stream of chatter, the ongoing cyber-conversation between all the usual interested parties.

Cole sometimes has to remind himself of what part of the world he’s watching. It might be any dry and rocky valley here in Nevada. It could be the vacant lot behind his daughter’s school. The picture is unaccompanied by smell or soundtrack. When characters move their mouths, it seems almost possible that they’re speaking his language, and when he departs at the end of the day their images accompany him home, a silent movie unspooling in his head during the long drive to the ’burbs of Vegas—shot after shot of hobbled lives in their slow progress, with Cole as the omnipotent eye above; a kindly uncle with a camera, perhaps, making home movies for the world at large. Until you fired a missile.

“We’ve got activity,” Zach says.

On the screen, two adults emerge from a neighboring house, where the door has been blown off its hinges. They stagger as if dazed or wounded, Chaplinesque in their movements.

A fresh line of dialogue pops up on Cole’s chat’s screen, gold letters on a black background:

(FORT1) Nice shooting. Check the truck.

The truck, a white Toyota, is a key piece of the scene. Its arrival moments earlier was their cue for action, the agreed-upon signal that the targeted bad guys had moved into place and were now present and accounted for.

Fort1 is the mission’s J-TAC, or joint terminal attack controller. He has directed much of the action tonight, the stage manager of this drama. Cole knows him only from his call sign, assuming Fort1 is even a he. Cole’s CO, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Sturdivant, mentioned Fort1 only cursorily during the pre-mission briefing, a tipoff that Fort1 is from the intelligence side. He could be in Washington—the Pentagon, the CIA, even the White House—or he could be on the ground at the scene, posted on a nearby hill. Theoretically he could even be here at Creech Air Force Base, a bustling little place tucked against barren mountains, a mere forty miles from Vegas. He could be anywhere his laptop will travel, as long as he has the correct passwords and encryptions.