“Keep your shit together,” Cervantes told him.
Bishop tucked a wad of ghat between his teeth and lower lip and started working it around his mouth. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m just buzzing.”
I first met Kevin Bishop in the visiting room at Washington State Penitentiary, where he is currently serving a death sentence and awaiting execution. His trial received some attention in the media, but the local papers had covered it as a straightforward crime story: I only became interested when I learned, through a friend in the military, about Bishop’s experiences in Yemen, and found out just how remarkable it was that he was in prison at all.
A decade ago, servicemen were not an unusual sight in the Penitentiary. Since the introduction of the Hybrid Warrior implant progam, though, violent crime by military personnel in Tacoma—as well as everywhere else that the 2-23 IN has been posted—has dropped to almost nothing. When I asked Bishop why he thought it had failed in his case, he explained that there were three ways around the negative reinforcement the implant uses to control behaviour, which soldiers call “the buzz.”
“The easiest way is to drown out the buzz with drugs, booze, or both at once,” he told me. Though he says he no longer chews ghat, his gums and teeth are permanently stained green. His fingers twitch constantly, seeking out any object—a pen, my notebook, a cigarette—that they can use to beat out their rhythm. “That’s why so many guys started chewing ghat, so if you have to violate the rules of engagement—like maybe shooting somebody you know is a Shabaab, but they haven’t shot at you yet—you can ignore the buzz long enough to do it.” The other method was to trick your implant: “If you can make yourself believe, I mean really believe, that the Shabaab had fired on you even though you hadn’t heard it, or that a girl wasn’t a whore even though you were paying her for sex, sometimes your implant will let it go.” The problem with that method was that to trick the implant you had to trick yourself, and you might wind up married to a Ukrainian bar girl, as Tom Hollis had.
And then there was Dirty.
“Dirty” Dunn, known as Daniel to his mother if no one else, was a legend in the 2-23 IN as the man who had, supposedly, hacked the buzz. “Hacked” is something of a misleading word, because he had done nothing to modify his implant’s hardware or software. Dirty’s method, instead, was to start the week leading up to a leave with a series of small but increasingly frequent violations of the Code of Conduct. “He’d stop polishing his boots, stop making his bed, even stop showering, just put up with the shit his CO gave him—and the buzz, which would get worse and worse,” Bishop explained. “As soon as his leave started he’d go to a drinky bar and get pissed, do whatever drugs he could find, get in a fight, and have a whore do things to him ‘til it hurt—and when he got that far he didn’t just feel the buzz, it hurt like hell. Then, when he’d broken every rule that he could without being put in stockade, he’d go back to base, shower, make his bed, shine his shoes, and then he’d have the greatest fucking orgasm of his life.”
Kevin Bishop never tried Dirty’s method, but he told me he had no doubt that it worked: like every soldier, he knew how much of a relief it was after he had heard an AK-47 fire, or an EFG go off, when the implant allowed him to fire his weapon. Being in a situation where he was anticipating something like that—such as riding in a Stryker on the way to a block party—could bring on the buzz even if he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
The mud-brick skyscrapers in a traditional Yemeni city are built without any space between them, making literal “blocks”: as the Stryker neared its target the streets between became too narrow for driving, so it slowed and turned ninety degrees to bar the way in and out. While one of its drones turned in a tight circle overhead, watching for an ambush, the others set up a perimeter around the area that was to be searched that day.
“Bella Bella will stay by the Stryker and handle any PUCs,” Staff-Sergeant Brenda Hamm said to Cervantes and the leaders of the other two fire teams. “Aleut takes the left side and Chinook the right.” So long as the Stryker was rolling, Hamm, the squad leader, was in command of all three fire teams: once they were on the ground Cervantes was expected to lead his team on his own unless he got direct orders from Hamm. “Have fun.”
Cervantes saluted and then turned to Hollis and Bishop. “Bishop, keep your drone heeled and stay on me. Hollis, get your Raptor up—I want a map of that building before we set foot inside.”
Hollis nodded and shut one eye, making mental room for the feed from his drones. Each fire team in 2-23 IN is made up of two regular infantry and one drone operator, who has an upgraded implant that lets him multitask between multiple drones as well as what they’re doing on the ground. “Vehicle’s clear,” he said a few moments later.
“All right,” Cervantes said. “Let’s see what Brooklyn has to throw at us today.”
Even after he had left Yemen, Bishop had little trouble maintaining his ghat habit. Both Tacoma, the nearest city to Fort Lewis, and Seattle, which is not much farther, have large Somali communities, and while ghat is technically illegal it is not a high priority for the DEA. After he and Cervantes were moved out of the 2-23 IN and reassigned to the Warrior Transition Battalion, Bishop began to chew ghat nearly all the time. “I was always buzzing,” he told me. “Every day we’d get our tests and our scans and wait, just kill time all day, and every day it got worse.”
The purpose of the Warrior Transition Battalion, or WTB, is to provide specialized medical care for soldiers well enough to be out of the hospital but not currently able to return to active duty, as well as education and training for those granted medical discharges. Some critics, however, say that the main focus of the Battalion’s staff is looking for reasons for soldiers to be “chaptered out,” or discharged without benefits. The more common name for the Battalion within the Army, the “shitbag brigade,” suggests that little sympathy is felt for the soldiers there.
Bishop and Cervantes were constant companions during their time in the WTB, amusing themselves as best they could with ping-pong and video games at the base’s rec center during the day and drinking at The Swiss in the evenings. In the first few weeks, when it seemed like they would soon be returning to active duty, their conversation was focused mostly on stories and events from their time in Yemen. Later, when that prospect became less likely, they would discuss what they would do when they were discharged. Bishop’s plans grew more grandiose as the time passed, from joining the police force to robbing drug smugglers near the Canadian border. Finally, when even being chaptered out began to seem impossibly remote, Bishop became focused on finding more immediate sources of both action and income.
This, it emerged, was the real reason behind the fight at The Swiss. Hollis often joined Bishop and Cervantes there on Friday evenings, when his wife Bohdanna took English classes at the Tacoma Community House. Earlier that afternoon, Bishop had tried to enlist Hollis and Cervantes into a plan to rob John Pratt when he made the last bank run of the night. Neither of the others took him seriously, by now used to Bishop’s grandiose plans, but on this night he refused to let it drop: finally Hollis had called for the bill—at which point Bishop revealed that he was out of money, and the fight began.
Later, once Hollis had gone and Bishop had recovered from the buzz, he said to Cervantes, “I guess we’ll have to do it next Friday. We’ll need to get someone else, too.”
Cervantes shook his head. “Let it go,” he said. “And why would we need three people, anyway? How heavy do you think a bag of money is?”
“No, listen,” Bishop said, leaning in close. “It’ll be just like when we’d PUC a Shabaab in Brooklyn.” (PUC—“person under control”—is Army slang for detaining a captive.) “First we rent a white van with plenty of room in the back. We need one guy with a quad to keep a tail on Pratt—all that money in a bag, he probably takes a different route each time, just like the top Shabaab guys. So when we know which way he’s going, we get the van in front of him to make him stop, pull him in th
e back and bag him, keep him a few hours. When we let him go he’ll be so glad to be alive he won’t care about the money.”
Cervantes brought his glass to his lips and took a long swallow. “That,” he said, “is the stupidest plan I have ever heard. What if he calls 911? What if the van gets too banged up to drive when he hits it?”
“What if, what fucking if?” Bishop said. “When did you get to be such a bitch, sir?”
Ignoring him, Cervantes took another drink. “Here’s how you do it,” he said after a few moments. He tipped the napkin dispenser on its side on the table and put the salt and pepper shakers on either side of it. “Send the quad, like you said, but use it to figure out which bank he’s going to. Keep the van the next street over, then once you know where he’s going you get ahead of him, take out the ATM camera with a spray can or something. Then we just wait for him to roll down the window to deposit the money and we get a gun on him.”
“Fuck, man, that’s awesome,” Bishop said. “Let’s do it tonight!”
“I’m just saying,” Cervantes said. He raised his glass and drained it.
The soldiers began to come out of the Stryker once the drones were done sweeping the street. The air was full of the yeasty smell of canjeero, the Somali flatbread that is a staple breakfast food in Yemen. “I’m going to watch out for a kitchen, okay?” Bishop asked Cervantes. “Somebody around here has to be cooking something.”
The terp was the last to emerge, his keffiyeh pulled down almost over his eyes. Life can be very dangerous for terps: some will only work wearing masks, to protect themselves and their families.
“You’re sure Guleed is here?” Hamm asked.
“In one of the houses in this block, I hear,” the terp said. “I don’t know which one. Maybe the owner, even, doesn’t know.”
Hamm nodded. “Cervantes, take him up with you. We’ll watch the road.”
Cervantes led Bishop, Hollis and the terp to the furthest doorway. “Hollis, find us something to shoot.”
Bishop chewed his wad of ghat, spat green goo onto the doorframe as they went in. A map of the building, made during the last block party, appeared on his retinal display along with a list of the known occupants: his Earworm, reading his mood, was playing “Blood and Snow” by the Icelandic death metal band Galdramenn. He and Cervantes heeled their quadrotor drones, trying to maintain a 360-degree field of vision while Hollis kept his Raptor circling the block and sent his two quadrotors ahead, mapping the inside of the building.
If you ask people who have known Tom Hollis to name one thing that defined him, they will tell you this: he is a hunter. He grew up in a semirural part of Bradfordsville, Kentucky, where he and his father had hunted rabbits, wild turkeys and deer at every opportunity. By the time he finished school, though, it was clear that the hard times that had hit the area since the Louisville Ford plant had closed were not going to go away any time soon, and Hollis enlisted in the Army. He excelled in marksmanship and drone operation and, after a successful first tour and promotion to Specialist, was fitted with an upgraded implant and assigned as fire team Chinook’s Raptor operator (the Army does not use the term “pilot.”) During block parties, his job was to map out the interior of a building with his quadrotors and compare what they found with the layout observed by the Raptor, as well as looking for anything that might seem suspicious, such as fresh plaster or recent infrared traces in empty rooms.
Because of the ease with which their mud brick walls can be taken down and rearranged, Yemeni houses are particularly challenging to search. Cervantes, Bishop and Hollis cleared each floor of the building methodically, starting with the animal pen at the ground floor and moving up through the bedrooms, kitchen and finally the mafraj on the top floor, where the man of the house would entertain guests in the evening.
“This room should be bigger,” Hollis said once his quadrotors had cleared the room. He pointed at one of the walls. “Last time that wall was about three feet south.”
Cervantes trained his quadrotor’s infrared sensors on the wall, but no heat traces appeared. “What do you think?”
“Don’t know,” Hollis said. “I’m not getting any heat traces, but it’s pretty hot already—might be body temp in there.”
“You see anything from the outside?”
Hollis shook his head. “Roof’s all covered with old car parts—mufflers and shit. Bounces the radar. Mud brick’s easy to take down and put up, though. Could just be the neighbors wanted a bigger living room.”
“Check out the wall from in here, then. Bishop, take a look around the room. Both of you, keep a quad watching your tail.” Cervantes turned to the terp. “You, come with me.”
More than a dozen people had clustered in the mafraj when they heard the soldiers entering: children, brothers, brothers-in-law, veiled women only distinguishable by the color of their chadors, and the head of the household, a man whom Cervantes’ implant identified as Murad Sharar. Cervantes asked him to name all of the adult men and women there, so he could check them against the census from the last block party, and to have the men present themselves to the drone camera for facial recognition and the women for voiceprints. In a normal block party anyone new to the household would be recorded or photographed, but today anyone who wasn’t already in the census was to be zip-tied and held at the Stryker. As the terp spoke to Sharar, a translation scrolled down Cervantes’ retinal display.
“We’re looking for Mohammed Guleed,” Cervantes said once the census had checked out. “We have money for anyone who helps us find him. He is a dangerous man.”
“I don’t know any Guleed,” Sharar said, looking sideways at the terp.
“Hey, hey—talk to me,” Cervantes said. “Have you heard the name?” Cervantes asked. “From a neighbor? On the street? We have money for anyone who helps us find him.”
Bishop spoke quietly to Cervantes while the terp was translating. “Look at this,” Bishop said, holding an AK-47 assault rifle. “Under the couch.”
“Okay, get it out of here,” Cervantes said.
“Get it out of here?” Bishop asked. “They were hiding a fucking gun from us.” He spat another wad of green goo onto the white plaster wall.
Sharar was talking more quickly now, making the terp struggle to keep up. “He says the rifle is just for protection. There have been many robberies in this neighborhood.”
“You know this is bullshit,” Bishop said. “They’ve got a secret room here. Guleed’s probably in there laughing at us.”
Cervantes looked over at Hollis, who shrugged. He held a hand up to Bishop. “Just get it out of here. Take it downstairs, okay?”
“Yes sir,” Bishop said. He took the AK-47 and headed for the stairway. “Is it all right if I get a goat grab? I saw some stuff cooking in the kitchen, it’ll probably just burn if we leave it.”
“Fine. Get me a falafel.” Cervantes turned back to Sharar. “Now, I want you to tell me. If you help lead us to Guleed, there will be money, and we can protect you —”
There was a hollow bang as Hollis hit the wall with the butt of his rifle. Sharar put up his hands and began to talk quickly; suddenly all the women, brothers and brothers-in-law in the room started talking as well, making it hard for Cervantes’ implant to isolate and translate what he was saying. “Tell him to slow down,” he told the terp. “Did he say Guleed?”
“He says he has heard Guleed is in another building in this block. He wants to know how much you will pay him to find out which one.”
“Why didn’t he say that before?” Cervantes asked. He paused as his implant’s translator caught up with the conversation, text scrolling up on his retinal display. He let his hand drop to his rifle. “Hold up. My feed says Is Guleed still there?”
The terp shook his head. “It is mixed up. Too many voices.”
Cervantes turned back to Sharar and pointed to the corner of the room. “Okay, everybody but this guy, get over there and shut up.” He took a pull from his camelbak and then turned to
the terp. “And you, I want you to think really carefully about exactly what —”
A burst of gunfire came from downstairs, one Cervantes and Hollis—and, more importantly, their implants—recognized as coming from an AK-47. An indicator on their retinal displays changed from red to green, and the triggers on their SR-11 rifles unlocked. According to the rules of engagement, anyone in the area was now considered hostile.
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Page 33