Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

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 the 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.