The Caliban Program

by Richard Fox

the target area. Ritter saw the minaret peaking behind apartment complexes and lengthened his stride.

  “Target reacquired!” Tony yelled loud enough to make Ritter wince.

  Behind Ritter, the police whistles started to shrill. Ritter turned and saw both police officers running right for him. Ritter cursed as he tried to run, his sandals doing their damndest to trip him up.

  “Laze it! Ritter, your extraction is waiting for you, can you make it?” Shannon said.

  The cops were closing behind Ritter as he raced onto the wide street, the mosque visible in the distance. The street was packed with vendors and pedestrians, who took a keen interest in the approaching police whistles. Ritter reached into his pocket and pulled out the roll of rupees and removed the rubber band. He tossed the bills into the air as the police rounded the corner.

  Pandemonium erupted as people lunged for the bills wafting through the air, and one of the police officers went down in a heap of avarice. The other officer cursed as he shoved past the frenzy.

  Ritter kept running towards the mosque, which seemed farther than ever. Carlos and Mike were supposed to be in the same white car that had picked him up from the airport. The fact that the road was full of white cars didn’t help Ritter in the slightest.

  The police whistle started again, as Ritter raced past a small truck overflowing with goats. “Um, I’ve got some company!” Ritter said.

  A leg shot out of the wall of onlookers and sent Ritter sprawling. He tumbled straight into a parked car. His forehead cracked the rear lights and sent stars across his vision. He tried to stand and wipe blood from his eyes.

  “Roku! Roku!” yelled the cop in-between blasts of his whistle. Ritter ducked around the car and crouched. The cop rounded the car as Ritter swung the briefcase up. The briefcase, coupled with the cop’s forward momentum, slammed into the cop’s face with enough force to knock him parallel. The cop fell to the ground and lay still.

  A white car screeched to a halt and the rear passenger door flew open. Mike was in the back seat, waving frantically at Ritter. Ritter ran and leaped into the car, Carlos didn’t wait for the door to close before driving off.

  Ritter lay in the back seat, exhausted and bleeding. He pushed himself upright and closed the door. “What took you so long, kid?” asked Carlos.

  “Rifle!” yelled his earpiece.

  “What does that mean?” asked Ritter.

  “It means Shannon isn’t screwing around with your old buddy.” Carlos growled as he swerved into oncoming traffic. He pulled the earpiece off his head and tossed it onto the empty passenger seat.

  A shriek screamed over their car followed by a tremendous explosion. The concussion shattered the rear windows into a million pieces, spraying Mike and Ritter with bits of glass. Ritter saw a black pillar of smoke rise several blocks away.

  “What the hell was that?” demanded Ritter.

  “A special delivery from the drone we have overhead.” Carlos stopped driving left-of-center and turned down a street with less traffic. Most of the cars had pulled over as their occupants ogled the rising smoke.

  Ritter turned away from the carnage. His old friend was dead, he must be. “What have I done?” he asked no one.

  “You did good, kid.” Carlos said.

  Ritter flipped down his sunshade and examined his bruised face in the mirror. His right eye and forehead had turned shades of purple and yellow in the hours since he hit the car bumper. Carlos had patched up the cut with liquid stitches and assured him it wouldn’t scar over. His head kept up a low throb of pain, muffled by 800mg Motrin tablets. Bruises aside, Ritter wasn’t sure he knew who he saw in the mirror.

  “The bruises are an asset.” Shannon said from the back seat. She’d tried goading him into conversation since they arrived at the hospital, but Ritter kept quiet, brooding over the disaster that was the last twenty-four hours of his life. He kept ignoring her, looking out the tinted windows at the flashing lights of coming and going ambulances. How many people in those ambulances was he responsible for?

  A strong kick hit his seat. Ritter turned towards Shannon, his face a mask of fury. “What the hell is your problem?” he asked.

  Shannon smiled at him. “You’re in a bad mental state, and I had to shake you out of it. Now that you’re angry enough, we can talk. So, what’s bothering you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know” his voice dripped with derision, “could I be a tad upset because I shot a man to death in the middle of the street. Maybe it’s all the civilians that died when you dropped a bomb on Haider’s car. Do you know how many innocent people died in the explosion?”

  Shannon adjusted the black folds of her nebulous abayya and folded her hands over her lap. “Five, by the last press report,” she recited the number like they were yesterday’s sports scores.

  “Jesus, I thought you were worried about our cover. What are the Pakistani’s going to do when they figure out what we did?”

  Shannon nodded along as she listened to Ritter. “The bomb won’t leave any forensic clues; the DS&T geeks do good work. The Pakis are treating it as a terrorist car bombing, which aren’t unheard of in Peshawar. As for the air asset, the Paki air defense is a joke, and not even the Russians could have picked up that drone.” She cocked her head to the side. “Does the collateral damage bother you that much?”

  Ritter’s voice was low, “They were innocent.”

  Shannon leaned forward and rested her arms on the back of the driver’s seat. “After the Cole bombing, there was a serious discussion over whether we should have bombed bin Laden’s main camp at the Tarnak farms in Afghanistan. Hitting UBL shouldn’t have been much of a discussion, but there were women and children at the camp with him. After an…impassioned plea by a senior CIA analyst, the strike was called off. UBL took our anemic response as a sign of weakness, and he authorized the 9/11 attacks, sure that we wouldn’t go to the mattress over another terrorist attack.”

  Shannon’s eye unfocused and her voice became very far away. “Then we lost so many innocents. If we could have stomached a few dead women and children 9/11 might not have happened, and they’d still be with us…all of them.” She snapped back, her eyes and voice hard. “Now, we have purpose. That’s what we do, Ritter, we kill. We kill them where ever we find them, and if unconnected Pakis have to suffer to save American lives: So. Be. It.”

  Ritter took in what she said and even though a part of him objected to the suffering of innocents another part of him accepted the killing. Ritter knew that the indiscriminate use of power had unintended consequences but the memory of Jeremy lying at the bottom of a trash heap tempered him. If Haider had escaped, what would he have done next?

  “Guilt is not our burden.” She locked eyes with him, and Ritter saw a flicker deep inside her that told him she was lying. She reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. Ritter knew she meant to comfort him, but her touch was cold and stiff.

  Shannon’s cell phone beeped twice.

  “That’s us,” she said as she covered her face with a deep blue abaya and opened her door.

  Ritter got out and followed her across the hospital parking lot. They avoided the front entrance and went around to the back. They walked past an access door with no handle and Shannon tapped a rapid code against the door. The door popped open and Carlos waved them in.

  They followed Carlos down a dank access tunnel; the smell of stale shit and mildew made Ritter question if of any part of Pakistan was clean. Carlos passed Ritter a small jar with a screw top.

  “What’s this?” Ritter asked.

  “Never been in at third world morgue? Its menthol, blocks the smell.” Carlos said dryly as he rubbed his upper lip with a milky salve.

  Ritter unscrewed the jar and applied the strong smelling goop. He passed the jar to Shannon.

  They came to a set of double doors where Mike was waiting. A giant sign in Arabic script contained the word MORGUE slapped on with paint. Mike pushed the door open.

  A
dozen concrete and ceramic slabs lined either side of a long hallway that constituted the morgue. Most of the slabs were empty; bodies wrapped in white sheets populated either end of the hallway. White strips of cloth were tied around the knees and over the torso, the knots towards the ceiling. The smell of bleach and carbonized meat crept past Ritter’s salve.

  “Any problem with the staff?” Shannon asked

  “An appalling lack of professionalism,” Carlos said as he rubbed this thumb and forefinger together. “Our John Doe is at the end. Just follow your nose.”

  “What about Ritter’s kill? Is he still here?” Shannon asked.

  A ‘kill,’ Ritter rolled the word around his mind. I’m a killer, he thought. Not a hero. No, he could never label himself a hero after this day.

  Carlos held up a paper bag. “Somebody claimed the body a few hours ago. We have our next lead” he said. Shannon nodded her approval.

  Ritter followed them down the aisle, each step a growing labor. All he had to do was positively identify Haider, and this whole nightmare would end. The corpse near the end of the aisle was different, white sheets were draped over the body instead of wrapped; a large round object lay beneath the sheets.

  Mike grabbed the end of the sheet and looked back at Ritter, who had stopped several feet away. Mike looked at Ritter, and motioned towards the body with his head. Ritter forced himself to take three more steps closer.

  Mike lifted the