Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

What they had planned for the 432nd at Creech seemed like the perfect answer to Kayce’s request: a chance for Daniel to have it all. To still be flying missions, to be doing his duty, but to be with his family too. To see his daughters grow, not across periods of months but over days, hours. To have this waking with Cathy, and know it wouldn’t be taken from them.

“Be careful what you ask for.” That’s what his mother used to say to him as a boy. When he’d wanted to play with his older brother’s football team. When he’d wanted a more powerful dirt bike. When he’d been picked for the college boxing squad. Maybe, if she’d been in Langley with him when he’d filed his transfer request to the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron, she’d have said the same again. And just as she had when he was a boy, she’d have been right to as well.

He and Cathy had tried talking about it a few nights before. They were sharing a drink on the deck while the girls did their homework, a bottle of Sonoma fumé blanc sweating crisply in the last of the sun.

“Not if you’re flying missions at the same time, Dan,” Cathy had said to him, looking down and shaking her head.

Daniel laughed, exasperated. He knew she was right, but he wasn’t going to admit it. Not after all they’d done to be here. Moving across the country, taking Kayce out of school. This was the best it could be, that’s what he wanted to say to her. She should be grateful, not resentful.

“C’mon,” he said. “Has it really been so bad?” He tried to keep his voice light. She looked up, as if she didn’t recognise him.

“Yes,” she said. “And it’s getting worse.”

He felt his chest tighten. He took a sip of his wine.

“You’re not sleeping,” she said. “And when you do, you talk, shout. And with the girls—”

“That was once,” Daniel snapped. He hadn’t meant to sound so sharp. “Once,” he said again, more softly.

―

There’d been a reason why he’d yelled at the girls like that. Why he’d done what he had to Kayce. There’d been a cause for his actions, but he hadn’t been able to tell Cathy what it was. He would never be able to tell her.

He’d just finished a shift at Creech. There’d been an engagement, one they’d been planning for weeks. The target was achieved, the missile had connected, but other aspects of the operation hadn’t gone well. At the last moment, with six seconds to impact, two boys riding a bicycle had come round the corner, one of them sitting on the handlebars, the other pedalling behind him.

Maria, his sensor operator, was sitting beside him. “Shit,” she’d said, when they’d come into view.

“Are those kids?” He’d heard his own question echo in his headphones. Elsewhere, in other darkened rooms in America, and 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan, other uniformed and suited men heard him, too.

“It’s too late,” Maria said.

Up to six seconds to impact, and she could still steer the targeting laser on to their abort location. Daniel glanced at the counter in the corner of his screen as it descended through four, three, two. He and Maria watched as the visuals across the monitors wiped white.

When the smoke and dust had cleared, Daniel circled the Predator while Maria zoomed in. The target’s car was a twisted and blackened wreck, flames licking at its frame. Twenty feet away the boys’ bicycle was also screwed out of shape, its front wheel still spinning. A severed leg, wearing a sandal, was trapped under it.

Daniel had typed a chat message to the intelligence coordinator: Possible child fatalities?

The reply had come back at the speed of speech: Two possible teenagers confirmed. Male.

An hour after that reply, Daniel was back home, sitting on the decking, watching Kayce and Sarah play in the garden. The coordinator’s possible teenagers had both been about Kayce’s height. She was nine years old. As he watched the girls they’d begun arguing, each of them pulling at the handlebars of a red bicycle. Daniel hadn’t meant to scare them. He hadn’t meant to scare himself. But it had been too much, too soon. The spinning wheel. That sandal.

―

Cathy leant forward, her glass of wine catching the light. A peach-white star flexed on the decking between them. She took a deep breath and exhaled it as a sigh.

“Is this about Barbara?” Daniel asked her.

“No,” she replied, shaking her head again and biting her lip. “You know it isn’t about her. I told you. We agree to disagree. That’s it.”

Barbara was another teacher at Cathy’s school, a high-end primary school in the west of the city. A couple of months ago, along with other members of the Nevada Desert Experience, she’d been arrested outside Creech. Daniel had seen the demonstration when he’d arrived for his morning shift. A small crowd strung out along the perimeter fence, their homemade banners breathing in the breeze: Not in Our Name! Say No to Drones! U.S. Air Force — Killing by Remote!

If Daniel had known Barbra was among them he’d have got out and tried to speak with her. Not to give her hell, but just to set her straight. He understood the origins of the group. Subterranean nuclear tests cracking the earth upwind of your homes, your kids’ schools. He’d have probably joined those demonstrations himself. But this was different. This was a different kind of war, and what they were pioneering at Creech wasn’t threatening anyone who lived nearby. It was, though, saving hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives elsewhere. Daniel was convinced of that. They had the figures, the projections, to prove it. And every month they received emails from grateful troops on the ground, thanking them for their work.

By the time Daniel drove home at the end of his shift, the demonstration had gone. Apparently it had only been there for a couple of hours before the police had arrived and made their arrests. But it had still got more attention than Daniel liked. He believed in what he was doing at Creech and he wanted Cathy to as well. So it made him uncomfortable to think of her going to work every day alongside Barbara and her talk.

―

Daniel leant back in his chair. The shadow of their garden fence was inching up the lawn towards them. “Good,” he said to Cathy. “Because Barbara doesn’t have the facts. She doesn’t understand.”

“Yeah, I know,” Cathy said. She sounded tired.

He let out a long sigh of his own. “So what do you want to do?” He looked out at the roofs of other houses beyond their garden, the sky towering above them, its blue darkening to indigo. “What do you think we should do?”

Cathy shrugged, watching the star of light thrown by her wine. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

Daniel looked at her, trying to read her expression. A frown was creasing the skin between her eyebrows. He didn’t understand when their conversations had become like this. So stilted, guarded. There’d been a time when they’d told each other everything, however difficult the truth. He waited for her to look back at him, but she didn’t. He wanted to say so much. About how much he loved her. About the terrors of the world. About how he wanted to protect her and the girls from them. About how, without her, he couldn’t do any of it. And he wanted to say sorry, too. They’d come to Las Vegas to remove the wars from their lives. But now Cathy came home to it every day. Not because he was away on tour, but because he wasn’t. Because in staying away from the war, he’d become it. But Daniel said none of this. It was as if his throat was blocked. As if to speak those words would shake their foundations and bring everything down. This was as good as it could be. That’s what he’d told himself. If he questioned it, where would they go? What would they do?