The Last Good Man

by Linda Nagata

  He listens eagerly as his digital assistant reads the content of the message: “I’ve got a short-term contract I want you to fill. Starts immediately. Stealth manhunt. We’re looking for a bad guy. Call me when you can.”

  “Shit,” Khalid whispers, disappointed and a little angry to learn this is just another small job. He’s been talking with Chris about a permanent position, so he was hoping for more.

  Still, it’s an opportunity.

  He looks at the lecture hall. The door is still closed. It’ll probably be a few more minutes before the meeting ends. Time enough to talk to Chris, get more details on the assignment. He gets inside the cab, windows up for privacy, and puts a call through.

  Chris picks up right away.

  “Hey,” Khalid says, “you know I want to come home.”

  “I know it, but we’ve got a task that we need to jump on right away. You ready to hear it?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “We want to hire you on a contract basis for a minimum of five days. You run your fares between towns and villages in the ungoverned territories just like normal, but on the way I want you to listen for rumors and gossip about the movements of warlords: who they are, where they are, how long they’ve been in residence. I’ll get you some stealthed data collection equipment. If you locate a potential target, you deploy it. No worries about picking it up again. It’s just gone.”

  “Data goes direct to you?” Khalid asks.

  “Correct. It’ll verify identities, let us know if we’ve found our target.”

  Khalid will be one of three contractors searching the region. Chris will oversee their movements and do what he can to keep their paths from crossing.

  He considers this and ponders the assignment’s potential danger. “You don’t want to tell me who you’re after?” he asks, bothered that Chris hasn’t entrusted him with a name.

  “I can’t tell you. Not yet. But if we find him, I’m going to need your organizational skills for phase two.”

  “Three of us are going to be out there looking. What if I’m not the one who finds him?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ve got the skills and the contacts we need.”

  Still, Khalid hesitates. Something feels off. He reviews in his mind the bounties presently on offer. He is sure none are large enough to tempt a thriving company like Requisite Operations to risk a mission in the volatile TEZ. There is more to this.

  “You’re not just going after a bounty, are you?” he asks. “Have you been hired to do a hostage rescue?”

  Chris grunts. Not exactly a confirmation. “You in?” he asks.

  Khalid is sure his performance on this assignment will have a direct impact on his employment prospects. He looks out at his fellow taxi drivers standing about, faces lit by phone screens or the embers of cigarettes. He’s spent two years in their company and he’s learned a hell of a lot, but it’s time to move on.

  He tells Chris: “I’m in.”

  A Matter of Time

  Miles Dushane sits on a dusty floor rough with grit, his back to the outside wall of a little second-floor room walled and floored and roofed in concrete. The place must have been meant as a storeroom, but for the past few days it’s served as his prison cell. The closed door is locked with a deadbolt and there is no real window, just a horizontal opening to the outside, tucked under the roofline. It’s screened with a heavy mesh cemented in place to keep the rats out, and it’s too narrow to squeeze through anyway. The mesh admits just enough dusty air to keep the room’s four inhabitants alive.

  His three companions might still make it home if ransoms can be arranged, but Americans don’t ransom hostages, so Miles knows he won’t be getting out that way. His value is as propaganda, and only then if his captor, Hussam El-Hashem, devises a particularly spectacular death for him, one aimed at enforcing the bloody reputation of his Al-Furat Coalition. It’s been many years since a simple execution could command any media attention. So while no one’s been crucified yet, Miles Dushane considers it only a matter of time.

  Gray light seeps through the mesh along with a muezzin’s amplified call to prayer. It’s the start of another day in the TEZ—the Tigris-Euphrates Zone. Though ostensibly Syrian or Iraqi, large regions within the TEZ are looked on as ungoverned territories. In these areas, warlords and gangsters rule, along with their appointed local councils.

  Miles flinches at the rip-roar of an ancient gasoline-powered engine as a scooter shoots past on the street below. He is always on edge, always in a constant state of fear. Closing his eyes, he tells himself to go to sleep again. Sleep is his only respite, but sleep doesn’t come.

  He gives up and discovers that the gathering light has given shape to his companions.

  They are all men, all bearded and filthy like Miles, clothed in loose drawstring trousers and shapeless tunics, dirty white.

  Noël Poulin huddles closest to the door. He’s a French Catholic missionary, called by God to render aid to the suffering children of Syria.

  Dano Rodrigues sleeps on his side against the right-hand wall. A Brazilian doctor and avowed atheist, he came to the TEZ as part of a medical mission because he saw it as the right thing to do. He was taken hostage four months ago, along with another doctor, an American, Fatima Atwan. Miles has seen Dr. Atwan twice when they were ordered out to stand witness to executions. At least, Dano said it was her behind the veil.

  The last inhabitant of their cell is Ryan Rogers, an American engineer with the good fortune to be employed by a British petroleum company, one with an insurance agency that does pay ransoms—although his is still under negotiation. Ryan lies on his back, the moist sheen of his open eyes just visible in the half light as he stares at the ceiling. That’s how he spends most days.

  Miles came to the TEZ to report on the war—a self-perpetuating conflict, mostly conducted among the warlords but with occasional interference from foreign governments convinced they can set things right by bombing civilian towns and highways. He is a freelance journalist. His reporting, informed by his background as a US Army Ranger, earned him a large and lively audience over the nine months he posted from the TEZ. His website fed stories to news outlets around the world. The last time he checked, his video reports had two hundred fifty thousand subscribers.

  He suspects his subscriber count has ceased growing since he stopped posting updates.

  The dawn light brightens, illuminating dust hazing the air, and defining pockmarks in the walls, surely made by bullets. The stains on the floor might be oil or old paint… though he doesn’t believe that.

  He and his fellow captives have been in this cell two nights. Every five or six nights they’re moved to another house in another town. Some of the lockups have been better than this one. Most were worse. His captivity has gone on for weeks. Maybe a lifetime. It’s hard to remember. He has to school himself not to give up. To wait, to watch for an opportunity. Any opportunity to get the fuck out of here—or to at least cause some damage before Hussam El-Hashem orders him killed.

  He flinches as Ryan nudges his foot. The engineer, still lying on his back, is now pointing at the ceiling. Miles looks. Something moving up there. Tiny, glimmering wings that belong to a slowly flying insect with a glassy body the size of a rice grain. Miles watches it cruise toward the light leaking through the mesh. That light paints it with detail so that Miles gets a good look at it just before it escapes.

  Holy fuck.

  Ryan sits up. They stare at each other in the dim light, sharing the realization. Not an insect. A mechanical device, a mosquito drone, used to reconnoiter otherwise inaccessible targets.

  Miles explains it to himself this way: Someone is planning to launch a rescue mission.

  He fucking hopes he’s right.

  Status Report

  “We believe we’ve located Fatima,” True announces. “But we’ve got complications.”

  Forty-eight hours have passed since Yusri Atwan made his plea for help. In that time, a contracted investig
ator has monitored his activities as well as those of his wife. ReqOps has also purchased a report on the history and associations of the Atwan family. No red flags have turned up; nothing in Yusri’s background or behavior suggests he is anything but sincere. This is the result True expected, but thoroughly vetting a potential client is always an essential step before engaging in a contract.

  The news from the TEZ is equally encouraging. Khalid Naim, one of the independent contractors hired by Chris, followed up on a rumor that led him to a large foreign-owned home in the town of Tadmur. He was able to get surveillance devices undetected over a wall surrounding the home’s compound while sitting in his taxi cab, ostensibly waiting for a fare.

  Hour by hour, as the mission becomes closer to reality, True feels her emotional investment deepen.

  It’s been only a year since Requisite Operations moved into offensive operations, quietly establishing a QRF—a quick reaction force—a flexible, armed unit that could be activated on short notice to deal with acute situations. They ran an initial mission in Los Angeles, extracting a young boy from a hostage situation without a shot fired. They’ve run two operations since, one in Mexico and one in Turkey. Both succeeded in terms of the mission goal; neither showed a profit.

  Going after Fatima Atwan is in line with their past endeavors. It’s unarguably a white-hat operation, a “right action”—and given the bounty on Hussam El-Hashem, it could even boost ReqOps’ bottom line.

  But the mission could still be scrubbed.

  True keeps this in mind, her expression neutral as she looks around the crowded conference table—at Lincoln, Tamara, Chris, Renata, and at the seven soldiers who are part of ReqOps’ QRF.

  All watch attentively as True presents what is known. “Our regional contractor identified a suspect house. Neighborhood gossip indicated a secretive group had recently arrived at the property, owned by a suspected associate of Hussam El-Hashem. A beetle, modified to carry a flock of mosquito drones, was able to infiltrate the compound.”

  Beetles are one of ReqOps’ proprietary devices. Shaped like rectangles with rounded corners, they are an inch long—a little larger than True would like, but they’re only three millimeters high. That low profile plus an adaptive, color-shifting skin lets them blend with their surroundings. They’re most vulnerable to detection when in motion. They crawl and climb on four jointed legs equipped with tiny spikes, and they glide short distances on the stiff plastic fins that normally enclose their electronic core. A swiveling camera lens lets them monitor motion, and they are able to receive instructions and relay bursts of data over short distances, generally to a low-flying UAV.

  True continues: “The beetle recorded an image of a figure in the courtyard that facial analysis identifies with eighty-nine percent certainty as Mr. El-Hashem. But Fatima Atwan was not observed. So we authorized DNA collection—”

  “We got time to analyze that, Mama?” Marine Corps veteran Rohan Valeski wants to know. He’s thirty-five, a lanky, ginger-haired mischief-maker with a scruffy beard who delights in questioning everything. “DNA takes hours to collect and process.”

  True’s eyes narrow. When the desert wind subsided after midnight, Khalid signaled the modified beetle to set loose its cargo of off-the-shelf mosquito drones. The tiny devices went hunting for infrared heat signatures. Most were lost, but a few returned to the beetle with ghostly low-res images and, more importantly, with DNA samples collected from within the house.

  “Don’t worry, son,” True tells Rohan. “Our contractor has spent the local day running the chip tests. The analysis is done.”

  He gives her a wink and a grin. “Good to know.”

  “Even better,” True says, with satisfaction in her voice, “we’ve confirmed one of the collected samples belongs to Fatima Atwan. It’s a perfect match for the DNA record provided by her parents.”

  Another soldier, Juliet Holliday, sounds impressed: “So we’ve got her.” Juliet is sweet and neat, lean and dusky. Like True, she was an army warrant officer who flew for Special Forces. Also like True, she was pushed out of the army by the growing dominance of autonomous flight systems.

  In contrast with Juliet, Jameson Adams is skeptical. He’s a family man. Dark black skin, physically gifted. He was offered a football scholarship out of high school but became an Army Ranger instead. Like Lincoln and Chris, he’s a Rogue Lightning veteran. “You mentioned complications, Mama. Let’s hear them.”

  “That’s right,” True says. “Complication number one: We’ve got additional individuals in the residence known or suspected of having been kidnapped by Hussam El-Hashem.”

  “Ah, fuck,” Felice Farr says. Like Rohan, she’s a Marine, and intimidating as hell when she wants to be. She sums up the situation nicely when she says, “That makes it harder.”

  “It does,” Lincoln agrees, speaking for the first time.

  Both Lincoln and Chris have already seen the reports, and they’ve made their decision.

  Lincoln says, “The additionals complicate our task. They also make the mission more expensive. We are being hired to extract one individual. But given multiple prisoners at the location, we are morally obligated to go after all of them. If we leave them behind, it’s certain they’ll be executed quickly and dramatically to discourage future recovery missions.”

  “How many additionals?” Jameson asks.

  True tells him, “Four.”

  “Damn,” Rohan says. “That’s a lot of bodies to move.”

  “It is,” True agrees. “And it brings us to the next complication—timing. It’s night now in the TEZ. This is the fifth night Hussam will have been in residence. We’ve seen various reports speculating that his usual pattern is to remain in a given place for five or six nights, because that makes it more difficult to do what we want to do: stage a mission against him. Our target could be gone before we get there—and the cost of the mission will escalate if we have to track him down again. So from a financial perspective, we need to move quickly. We have to decide if we like the setup, if we can work with the current situation. If so, we deploy in the next few hours and finalize mission planning in transit. One point in our favor, since this is not a permanent residence: the security system is likely to be ad hoc and easy to penetrate.”

  Renata raises a hand, a gesture that instantly captures the attention of everyone at the table. True smiles to see it. Renata knows how to turn a knack for getting noticed to good advantage. “Aerial assets are in line,” she reports, “for now. We’ve juggled schedules so the Hai-Lins will be available to provide air cover—but only during a narrow window. We’ve got contractual obligations coming up that have to take precedence.”

  “Our obligations don’t end with the war birds,” Chris says. “We’ve got a round of classes starting, students due in. That gives us a hard deadline to get the job done and get home. If we’re not here when classes are scheduled to start, it’s going to be a hit to our reputation, and we’ll be digging ourselves a financial hole with the cancellation fees.”

  Lincoln nods. “Agreed. We need a quick go/no-go decision.” He turns to True, a white reflection from the ceiling lights catching in his artificial eye. “You’ve heard from the State Department?”

  “That’s complication number three,” she admits. “I’m in communication, but I haven’t received confirmation one way or another.”

  Though it’s a policy that will never be codified in law, the State Department generally responds with a hands-off attitude whenever a US-licensed PMC engages in a white-hat mission within any region lacking a functional or recognized political authority—an ungoverned territory—assuming the mission doesn’t interfere with any official activity. By that standard, large regions of the Tigris-Euphrates Zone are wide open for engagement.

  Lincoln turns to the assembled soldiers. “If State has an imminent mission into the same area, our operation is no-go. Competing missions would endanger both teams and endanger our license to operate as a US government contractor. S
o be ready, but know that we are not going to move until we hear from State.”

  This draws a soft chorus of acknowledgments.

  “In the meantime,” True says, “I’m emailing a detailed intelligence report to each of you. Read it. Consider it. We’ll meet again in two hours.”

  The Vicissitudes of War

  Another night:

  Sitting in darkness, Miles feels the concrete wall at his back tremble as fighter jets thunder overhead.

  Dano mutters profanities in Portuguese.

  Noël starts praying. Maybe his prayers work, because no bombs fall.

  Twenty-two days ago they were locked up in an empty office in an abandoned cigarette factory when precision-guided bombs took out two adjacent buildings. But for some unfathomable reason to do with the vicissitudes of war, their location wasn’t on the target list. Following the concussion of the bombs and the avalanche roar of collapsing buildings, there came screams and shouts and wails of grief, rage, and pain that went on and on in a slowly diminishing chorus until evening. Darkness brought silence. Only then did Hussam feel safe enough to move his entourage to a new hiding place.

  Tonight maybe, the jets came only as a show of force… as if anyone on the ground still needed convincing of the deadly threat of aerial bombardment.

  The retreat of the roaring engines reveals another, more ominous, sound: voices from beyond the door. They are male and oddly gentle, discussing soccer scores. Miles tenses as a key slides into the lock. The deadbolt retracts with a grinding click. The steel door opens, admitting a clean white electric light.

  A fellow named Abu Khamani looks in. He’s a skinny guy who has worn the same stained brown cargo cammies and loose muslin shirt every fucking day since Miles was placed under his custody. Abu Khamani smiles his usual friendly smile. “Aloha!” he exclaims. It’s his standard greeting.

  “Aloha, asshole,” Miles mutters.

  Noël whispers, “Salaam,” and Dano replies with, “Ciao.”