The UAVs were the tool that had broken the back of the incipient rebellion in these two states. On an hour-by-hour basis, the drones were much more expensive to keep aloft than patrolling with police cars. But while police cars and military vehicles were subject to the constant risk of ambush by snipers and roadside bombs, the silent, invisible UAVs were virtually invulnerable to ground attack. Just as important, they were not hindered by the downed bridges and impassable roads resulting from the earthquakes.
Each drone was controlled by a two-man crew, sitting side by side behind their screens and consoles. The pilots and flight technicians monitored their screens in the main room of UAV flight operations, aligned in rows like a low-budget version of NASA’s Mission Control. Bullard walked quickly through the area, the gym of a converted Army physical fitness center. He passed through several interior rooms and halls and finally approached an unmarked locked door. The door was covered with a plate of thick steel and was scanned by several video cameras. The cover name for this office was Surveillance Oversight, but not even that innocuous name was written anywhere near the entrance. Bullard punched in a number code, the door buzzed open, and he went inside. Two of his black-clad bodyguards remained just outside, while two others, who also performed staff duty, entered with him.
Inside this smaller room (formerly a coaching office) were four senior UAV crew sitting at flight monitors and two managers at desks, behind their own computers. These six men, as well as those on the other shifts, had all been picked by Bullard, chosen because of their personal loyalty and their understanding of the difficult but crucial nature of their mission.
“Good morning, Director Bullard,” the bearded senior technician greeted him. He was wearing a blue plaid flannel shirt and jeans. The men in this room were all dressed casually, in slacks or jeans and long-sleeve shirts, without ties or jackets. Each wore a laminated security badge pinned to his shirt.
“Good morning, Harry. Anything interesting since yesterday?”
“Oh, we had a few good shoots. Popped an A.I. and nailed a few curfew violators.”
A.I.s were armed insurgents, curfew violators and boundary jumpers observed carrying weapons. “Let’s see the video,” said Bullard as he was handed a cup of coffee by one of his entourage, whose duty it was to fetch a cup immediately upon entering any office with a coffee maker. Offices with genuine coffee were rare, but the inner sanctum of UAV flight operations was one such place.
Bullard sat in the senior technician’s padded swivel seat as the video was cued up on the monitor. He sipped his coffee and watched. In the first video clip, the infrared image of a man was clearly seen flitting in and out of the brush along a tree line. The man, hotter than his surroundings, was seen as a white figure walking against a dark background of trees and bushes. The scene appeared to have been filmed from only a hundred yards away, even though the slant range from the UAV was several miles.
This night creeper was clearly a curfew violator, with no legitimate reason to be out after midnight. The image of a crosshair appeared on him, and a few moments later the crosshair was surrounded by a flashing box. The flashing box meant that the target was being painted by coded pulses of invisible laser energy. Within a few seconds there was a silent explosion of white light. When the picture was reacquired, the man was gone, replaced by scattered white hotspots on the ground.
The senior tech said, “Night shift dropped one of the new thirty millimeters on him.”
He had seen the prototype 30mm rockets. They were not much thicker than a rake handle, and only a yard long. Smaller even than the baseball bat–sized Viper missiles, with their four-pound charges. Being dropped from altitude, they didn’t need much propellant. Once a target was designated, GPS guidance would send the missiles into the correct area, usually to within twenty meters. The UAV operator kept the crosshair on the target, painting it with the laser target designator. When a missile was coming down its seeker head locked on that reflected laser energy, and its fins steered it to the exact impact point. Now the 30mm rockets were entering active service, saving the government money by conserving the larger and much more expensive missiles. “They follow the laser just like the old model Hellfires, right?” asked Bullard.
“Every damn time. Only a pound of explosive. Cuts ’em in half. Much better than the Hellfires or Vipers on exposed insurgents. We can use the thirties a lot closer to structures and friendlies. We used a thirty millimeter on this guy because he was over the line.”
“Over which line?”
“Northern Mississippi, but inside the buffer zone. Practically on the state line, actually.”
“Aren’t you supposed to run that by my office? We don’t want to get General Mirabeau in an uproar. We need his cooperation down there.”
“There wasn’t time. It was take the shot or let him go. The UAV was almost out of fuel, and nothing else was close enough to pick up the coverage. He was in the buffer zone anyway.”
“Fine, just use your discretion. Look, let’s skip the rest of the review. Everybody else, why don’t you go out for a break? Smokes, whatever. Take ten, okay?” When the room was clear except for Bullard and the senior UAV tech, he said, “Harry, I’ve got a special mission for you today. Here are the coordinates.” Bullard handed him a scrap of paper with the GPS numbers recorded on his visit to Colonel Jibek’s estate a day earlier.
Harry sat at an adjoining monitor and entered the digits on his keyboard. “Clark County. Let’s see what we’ve got up that’s nearby. Okay, we’ve got an armed Predator. The easiest way would be to just drop a thirty on him.”
“Listen, I don’t want to drop a missile on this target, not even a thirty millimeter. Do you have a SniperHawk available?” Bullard already knew that one was available. He’d personally been down to the “bird farm” a mile away, where the UAVs were launched and recovered, and had ordered one sent up. The small and stealthy SniperHawk had to be used together with a Predator, using the bigger drone as its data link and main visual reference provider.
“Oh, going for plausible deniability, are we?” Harry raised a conspiratorial eyebrow and winked. Harry had worked with Bullard on special projects in the past.
“Something like that.” If the Kazaks blamed an insurgent firing a long-range sniper rifle for the death of their commander, their hatred for the locals would intensify, which was a good thing. On the other hand, a missile dropping down from the sky and taking out Colonel Jibek would lead their suspicions elsewhere.
“You’re in luck—we’ve got a SniperHawk just a few minutes away. Sounds like you’ve already got a target in mind, am I right?”
Bullard handed him a photograph of Colonel Yerzhan Jibek, a portrait from the chest up, wearing a Russian-style uniform tunic with medals. “This guy. He’s not working out quite as well as we’d like.”
“Oh, I see—we’re going to have a kinetic change-of-command ceremony. Got it. Any idea where we’re going to find him?” Jibek’s confiscated equestrian estate came into view on the flat-screen video monitor, in full color and rich detail, as the Predator UAV steered itself over to Bullard’s coordinates.
“He’s usually riding a horse this time of morning,” offered Bullard. “A white stallion.”
“Well then, let’s start over at the stables.” Harry steered the camera, and in a few minutes of searching he found a mounted party. He zoomed in the camera until the men were vaguely recognizable.
“That’s him, in the middle. With the mustache and the brown beret.”
“How do you want to do this?”
“Well, you can just shoot him, can’t you?”
“Right now?” asked the senior UAV tech.
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Kind of unusual, taking out one of our loyal allies from the People’s Republic of Kazakhstan.”
“I wouldn’t exactly say he was so loyal,” replied Bullard.
“Hey, it’s your call, chief. Okay, here’s how we’ll do it. I’ll line the S
niperHawk up for a straight glide-in, right at his back. As long as he doesn’t turn too much, this should work just fine.”
“They won’t hear the drone?”
“A SniperHawk? Hell no. No way. Silent but deadly—that’s our motto. I’ll bring her in low and just pop her up for the shot. They’ll never see it or hear it.” Harry cracked his knuckles and went back to his keyboard while staring at the screen. “Okay, watch a pro at work, see how it’s done. We’ll use both screens: this one is the Predator, this one is the SniperHawk. This’ll take a minute to sync up. Okay, I’m cutting the Hawk’s engine now, and arming the rifle.”
“What’s that thing shoot?” Bullard already knew; he was just testing Harry’s level of knowledge.
“What caliber? It’s a special round, very fast. A 6.5 millimeter. Fully suppressed, so there’s nothing but sonic crack, and that doesn’t give a directional reference. Okay, here we go, just watch your man on the horse.” Harry used his track ball to put a white crosshair on Colonel Jibek’s back. “Fully stabilized. Once I designate the aim point, it’ll lock on and fly the bird. There, it’s done. You want the honors? Just push this button here when the crosshair is where you want it.”
“Sure thing. This is great.” Bullard leaned across and pushed a red button on its own small keyboard. A second later he was rewarded with the image of Jibek slumping forward and sliding from his horse to the ground. Around him, the other horsemen wheeled and reared their mounts.
“Okay, I’ll take her back around now. Nice shot, chief.”
The director of rural pacification chuckled. “Yeah, I’m a natural.”
****
Lieutenant Colonel Foley returned for another visit on Friday after lunch. Phil Carson met him outside the tent this time. Carson had been exercising, jogging around the dozen tents in his section of the quarantine center, trying to get into shape for a possible escape. Once again Foley was wearing his unpressed camouflage uniform, with his beret worn like a rag and his hair over his ears. Like many military doctors, he lacked any semblance of military bearing, and looked anything but sharp. Carson attributed this sloppiness to the doctor being drafted into the Army for a second hitch, only this time four decades later, at retirement age.
The weather was unseasonably warm, in the low seventies. Carson had rolled up the tent’s back wall. The doctor brought a promising-looking brown paper bag. They entered the tent together without exchanging greetings, and Foley sat down at the white plastic table. He removed his beret and dropped it on his lap, then ran his fingers through his gray hair. He gestured to the other chair, and Carson took a seat opposite him. Carson was wearing cutoff shorts, sneakers and a tan T-shirt with the logo of a bait company on the front. The three T-shirts Carson had packed from the catamaran were chosen to be disguises of one type or another, including a commercial fisherman with amnesia.
“Good afternoon, John Doe. I brought you some snacks.” Foley opened the bag and pushed a can of Coke across the table. “There’s some cookies in there too.”
“Thanks, doctor, I appreciate it.” It was the first can of pop Phil Carson had seen since the catamaran was halfway up the Caribbean, when their stock of sodas had run out. There should have been plenty for the entire voyage from Brazil, but Paulo had been sneaking extras on his watch. He imagined that soft drinks must be quite precious in Mississippi under the present conditions. In the quarantine camp, all he’d had to drink was tepid water that smelled of sulfur, and weak Kool-Aid. The Coke was a rarity, something that was not grown or produced locally.
“Are they treating you all right?” asked the doctor, removing his wire-rimmed glasses and wiping them off with a cloth from his pocket.
“I suppose. I hardly ever see anybody, except when they bring the food around.”
“You’re getting enough?”
“Peanut butter sandwiches? Yeah, great protein—I’m not complaining. So what brings you around today?”
“Well, I was hoping maybe there was some improvement in your condition. Your head injury looks fine. The wound is closing, and the swelling is gone. Definitely no infection. Any more headaches?”
“Some, but not as bad as before.”
“How’s the memory, any change?”
Carson had to measure his words carefully; a slip before a trained medical professional might betray his false amnesia. “Well, I’m getting some flashbacks now and then, but it’s mostly old stuff. I think it’s from when I was a young man. I’m fairly sure I was in the Army. Maybe I’m just mixed up—maybe I just saw too many war movies—but I think I was in Vietnam. Sometimes I think I was in the Special Forces. It’s all kind of floating around in my head. Maybe I’m just getting confused by being on this Army base. Maybe I’m just inventing false memories, I don’t know. Nowadays practically everybody around here is wearing a beret, but for some reason I think I used to wear one too, way back when. Most soldiers didn’t used to wear berets, did they?”
“No, only the elite units. Personally, I hate the things; we have to wear them in garrison. Off base, we can usually wear patrol caps, depending on what we’re doing. So, is anything more recent coming back? Any places where you might have been, any faces of family members?”
“No, it’s all pretty vague, kind of swirling around.”
“Hmmm…okay. Well, I’ll leave you a pen and paper; a notepad. When you remember things, anything, write them down. That’ll help get your thoughts organized.”
“Thanks.”
“You mentioned ’Nam,” said the doctor. “You know, I did a tour over there, in ’69. As an enlisted man—college and medical school didn’t come until later. I wound up as a Huey door gunner. Not something I’ll ever forget, I can tell you that. We hauled Special Forces around sometimes…doing insertions and extractions, medevacs. You must have taken quite a whack to the noggin to knock those memories out of your head. Too bad I can’t send you out for an MRI or a CT scan.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Carson took another grateful sip of his tepid cola, eyeing the doctor. The flavor was off; it didn’t taste like a real Coke.
“Hey, there’s another reason I’m hoping you get your memory back.”
Now we’re getting to it, thought Carson.
“It’s no big deal, but…I was sort of hoping you’d remember where you came by the coffee. Maybe there’s more where that jar came from.” Doctor Foley locked his eyes on Carson, and the stare was reciprocated.
“Doc, I’m not sure of anything. I just remember stumbling around in wreckage that went on forever. It’s almost like I was born there, somehow. I couldn’t remember anything before it.”
The doctor paused, subtly casting doubt on Carson’s story. “Do you think the coffee was already there? On the land, I mean. Like you just happened to find it out there somewhere? Or if you were shipwrecked in the hurricane, maybe it was on your ship, or on your boat? You have a sailor’s hands, and better muscle tone than most men our age. Could you have been on a fishing boat?”
“I guess it’s possible. Maybe it’ll come back to me.”
“Well, if it did come back to you, that’d be a good thing. Let me tell you, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on some real coffee of my own. I only managed to snag a few cups from what my medics took from you. It’s already gone.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help you out.”
The doctor stared heavily at him across the white plastic table. Carson wondered if he believed the amnesia story at all.
“Well,” continued the doctor, “just FYI, real coffee is worth serious money these days. Coffee doesn’t grow anywhere in the emergency zone. It has to be imported, and, well—it’s not. At least not that I’ve seen. Not in Mississippi anyway.”
Carson smiled inwardly while maintaining a poker face. “The emergency zone? What’s that?”
“Most of the Southeast. Eastern Louisiana and Mississippi, over to Georgia and South Carolina, and the top part of Florida. We’re under martial law. That’s how I got drafted…a
gain.”
“Martial law? When did that happen?”
“After the hurricanes. A year and a half ago. Two in July, one after the other. Then a real monster hit in October—a category five. Matilda, the mother of all hurricanes. Hundred-and-ninety-mile-an-hour sustained winds. The whole country was already in a depression, and those hurricanes just broke our backs down here on the Gulf. Especially Matilda. She dumped twenty inches of rain on most of the South in one day. Floods like you would not believe. And practically nothing came from FEMA or the federal government. We were on our own.”
“What about the hurricane last week?” asked Carson.
“Ricardo? Oh, that one was just a baby. Hardly a hurricane at all, just a December freak. Anyway, October a year ago we got hit by Matilda. Hooked in across Louisiana and zigzagged right along the Gulf Coast. ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ they called her. Took out most of our reconstruction, what we’d managed to put back together after the two July hurricanes. Then six weeks after Matilda, that’s when the Memphis quake hit. You don’t remember hearing anything about the quake? Nothing?” The doctor was wide-eyed, incredulous at Carson’s flat affect.
“No, nothing, I can’t remember anything about a quake,” Carson lied. He’d heard about it on shortwave radio news broadcasts, and from individual ham radios he was occasionally in contact with. There was a high percentage of propaganda and rumor on the official and unofficial radio news, but he’d heard about the devastating quakes that followed the killer hurricanes.
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