Unmanned (9780385351263)

by Fesperman, Dan

  Annoyed, he made it a point to stay inside the trailer whenever he heard one, although once he snapped and pulled his trousers down to his knees, bending over to moon the bastards while shouting curses at the sky. Then, like pretty much everything in life once it’s repeated enough, he got used to the damn things and went about his business as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Although he never stopped looking.

  So, yes, go ahead and laugh, he thought, watching the two reporters as they waded through the noise and jumble of the casino on the hotel’s ground floor. They were clueless about what was possible, or about how the so-called rules no longer applied. But they would learn soon enough.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “SO TELL ME SOMETHING,” Cole said.

  He ate as he spoke, wiping the plate clean with the last shred of pancake from their moo shu pork. They’d picked a Chinese place, not a takeout but a real restaurant with a hostess, a wine list, and white tablecloths. A little touch of civilization that Steve hoped would continue Cole’s process of normalization. Judging by the man’s appetite, it seemed to be working.

  “Tell you what?” Keira asked.

  “Why Baltimore? I mean, I know that’s where your friend lives. Steve, too. But is there some other reason you guys decided to bunk there, maybe even having to do with the story?”

  Steve was impressed, although he was still a little worried about the double shot of Jack Daniels that Cole had downed with his meal.

  “Go ahead,” he said to Keira. “You tell him.”

  “There’s a security company based out in Baltimore County. IntelPro. One of those Blackwater-type outfits. Steve and I were both working stories related to them, independent of each other, when we started picking up traces of Fort1’s misadventures. He’s blown some of their ops, too.”

  “Burned a few of their field men,” Steve added.

  “Or so they say.”

  “I’ve pretty much verified it.”

  “Barb was working another angle, but she ended up on some of the same trails, and we all kind of bumped into each other through IntelPro. And, well, since they’re right in Steve and Barb’s backyard, it seemed like the best place to hole up, at least for a while. Not that we’ve been able to take the IntelPro connection much further.”

  “Okay.” Cole nodded. “IntelPro. That makes sense. What about the ground rules?”

  “That’s Barb’s department,” Steve said. “Her house, her rules.”

  “Not sleeping arrangements. Rules of the road, expenses, that kind of thing. I’m done with charge cards, too easy to track. Cash only. And before I travel I’ll need a fake ID, something to keep the Air Force off my trail. You can buy ’em in the pawn district out by Nellis for about a hundred fifty. You guys are probably flying, but I’ll go by bus. Airports are just about the worst possible places for showing up on security cams.”

  Already setting down rules before he even knew Barb’s address. The man certainly had his nerve. And, frankly, some of the rules were pretty wacky. A bus? To Baltimore? More evidence of paranoia.

  “You sound like you’ve been reading too many spy novels,” Steve said.

  “This is stuff from training.”

  “The Air Force teaches countersurveillance techniques?”

  “Sort of. Infowar training, part of some war gaming we did at Nellis.”

  “I thought war games were for fake combat,” Keira said.

  “That’s the fun part. We’d go up against ‘aggressor’ units that flew MiGs, or other foreign birds. But they do a lot of situational stuff on the ground. Testing your security awareness, seeing how leaky everybody was.”

  “And?”

  “We were like a beer can with a hole in the bottom.”

  “Loose lips sink airships?”

  “Loose lips weren’t the problem. A lot of it was paper stuff—credit card receipts, postcards home, or dumb shit people did online. Turned out there was a special unit dogging us the whole time, hacking our PC accounts, even dumpster diving outside our barracks, the PX, everywhere we went. On our last day they ambushed us with the results. Some obnoxious techie laid out everything they’d learned, all our fuckups. Pretty mind-blowing. Then he tipped us on how to avoid it next time, stuff we could use in the field to disguise our movements, our intentions. So those are my conditions: cash only, fake ID, a bus ticket to Baltimore.”

  “You seem to be forgetting the price of admission. Keira said you got a look at a file?”

  “I did. But if I tell you now what I saw, what’s to stop you from ditching me?”

  Steve looked to Keira for help.

  “Our word of honor?” she said.

  Cole snorted. Steve tried again.

  “Give us nothing and we’ll ditch you for sure. Right now all we have is your word of honor that you’ve got anything we can use.”

  “Fine. Then leave without me. I’ll hitch back to the trailer.”

  Steve looked again at Keira, who touched Cole’s hand so quickly that he almost missed it.

  “Look,” she said, “this isn’t easy for us, either. We’re all in favor of making you feel safe and secure, and we’ll buy you an ID if you’re strapped for cash. But you have to give us some kind of an idea of whether you’re worth the investment. We’ve got sources to protect, proprietary information. Things that took us months to find out. And we’re not used to letting just anybody into the club, especially people we don’t know.”

  “Okay. I get that. Where would you like me to start?”

  “How about the op at Sandar Khosh?” Steve said. “Who were you really looking for that day? What was your objective?”

  Cole took the request like a blow, then stared down at his empty plate.

  Keira threw Steve a look, like he’d moved in the wrong direction. She again touched Cole’s hand, more noticeably this time.

  “Only if you don’t mind talking about it,” she said.

  Steve held his tongue and watched them. This was Keira’s strength, getting people to talk when they didn’t want to, drawing information out of them like poison. Afterward you could almost see the relief in their faces, as if she’d done them a favor. And maybe she had.

  “It was a hit job, plain and simple,” Cole said. “One HVT and his entourage.”

  “High-value target?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t have a name. They never tell us, and we didn’t hear it later.”

  “Meaning you missed him?”

  “Probably. The trigger cue for the mission was a white Toyota truck with orange markings on the hood. It was supposed to be bringing the HVT to some kind of meeting. All the other bad dudes were supposedly already inside, waiting.”

  “Why not just shoot the truck?”

  “We discussed that. Vehicles are a more reliable kill as long as you can land the dart right on the roof. It’s laser-guided, so as long as you keep the crosshairs in the right place you’re golden. But it can get tricky. From ten thousand feet a Hellfire takes about a minute to reach the target. At the last second the vehicle might move behind a building, or into the trees. A flock of sheep might come along, or a bunch of kids. Then what? So we decided to stake out the house, wait for the truck, get ’em all.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “You tell me. Three seconds before impact, three kids come running out the front door. The first was a girl, same age as my daughter. I still dream about her.”

  “Jesus,” Steve said.

  Keira put her hand on Cole’s forearm and left it there. “How did Fort1 react?”

  “Hard to say. We were only in contact by chat. But he kept asking to see the wreckage.”

  “Looking for the HVT, maybe?” Steve asked. “For a positive ID?”

  “Maybe. There was a body toward the back that he seemed interested in, but mostly he wanted to scan the rubble, the ruins. We must have spent half an hour going back and forth. Not a pretty sight, let me tell you.”

  Then a long pause before Steve broke the silence.


  “Well, that’s good stuff. But what can you give us from the file?”

  “How ’bout a name? Fort1’s.”

  Steve sat up straighter.

  “You saw it? You saw his name?”

  “Not just saw it. Recognized it. I can even describe him for you. I’d helped train him, earlier that year.”

  Blood rushed to the end of Steve’s fingertips, the same way it did whenever he was about to do something momentous.

  “Wade Castle,” Cole said. “An Agency guy.”

  “And you trained him?”

  “On Predator stuff. He came to Creech with two other CIA guys. They were setting up their own drone program out of some base across the Pak border, down in Baluchistan. I was supposed to show them the ropes, let them sit in on a few of our missions.”

  “And they told you their names?” Steve asked.

  “No. They didn’t even say they were CIA. OGA was all we knew—other government agency—not that everybody didn’t know what that meant. The names thing was a fuckup. The asshole in charge, a guy named Lodge, gave them a welcoming gift of Air Force flight suits. Somehow he’d gotten a look at the paperwork, which was a screwup right there, way above his clearance, and he had the suits personalized with their last names printed on the ID patch. I was there when he presented them. They took the things out of the box, laughed kind of nervous and folded everything back up as fast as they could, but everybody saw the names. All three of them. Castle, Bickell, Orlinksy. Later we went strictly by first names, and his was Wade. Then when I saw the file and the same name popped up, everything clicked. It was him.”

  “Does the Air Force know you saw it?”

  Cole shook his head, then glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping.

  “I didn’t even tell my sensor, Zach. My attorney, either. Didn’t want to give them any excuse to stick me in some hole in the ground for the rest of my life. You’re the only ones I’ve told.”

  “What else did you see?”

  “Sorry. That was my admission ticket. The rest comes later.”

  Steve looked at Keira, who nodded. Cole was in, at least for now.

  “We better get over to the pawn district, start working on that fake ID,” Steve said. “Keira and I are flying back tomorrow. The sooner we get you on a bus, the better.”

  But Keira had a question first.

  “Those other two agency guys you trained, Bickell and Orlinsky—you remember their first names?”

  “Sure. Owen Bickell, Wally Orlinsky.”

  She wrote them down and looked at Steve.

  “You’re thinking they might be sources?” he asked.

  “If we can find ’em. It’s doubtful they’d talk.”

  “Unless …” Cole said. “Bickell was near retirement age. He said something once about quitting to go fishing. He’d brought a fly rod and was hoping to get over to Utah, to fish the Sevier River. Said something about a summer place of his, out on some lake back east.”

  “Where?” Keira asked.

  “New Hampshire, I think.”

  “Well, if he is retired …” Steve said.

  “Barb’s ex-Agency source?”

  “Yeah. I think he could find us an address.”

  Steve got out his cell phone and punched in a text.

  “I’m betting we’ll have an address quicker than that fake ID. And if that happens, maybe you and I can stop off to see him on the way to Baltimore.”

  “You want me to approach him?” Cole asked.

  “He knows you, maybe even trusts you. Better than having some scribbler show up on his doorstep. He’d tell us to fuck off. Don’t worry, I’ll draw up a list of questions. All you’ll have to do is ask ’em.”

  Cole nodded uncertainly, then looked at Keira, as if seeking verification.

  “Look at it this way,” Steve said. “You’re getting a week’s room and board, minimum, plus travel expenses. This way you can start earning your keep, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  Steve slapped a wad of cash atop the check, then pushed back his chair.

  “Time to get moving.”

  Everybody stood and turned to go.

  “Wait,” Keira said. “He never opened his fortune.”

  Steve rolled his eyes, but waited. When Cole hesitated, Keira went back to the table for the cookie. She tore open the plastic, snapped the cookie in half, and fished out the white slip of paper. Then she frowned and dropped it back onto the table.

  “Well?” Steve asked.

  “You were right. Stupid idea.”

  Cole went over and snatched up the sliver of paper. He scanned it and nodded grimly, as though he’d expected nothing less. Then he read the message aloud: “Important people follow your progress with interest.”

  Steve again rolled his eyes. They left without another word.

  Four hours later Cole boarded a bus with his fake Nevada driver’s license and a pocketful of cash. Keira and Steve waved like a mom and dad sending their son off to college, then watched until the bus disappeared around a turn.

  “Think we’ll see him again?” Keira asked.

  “Do we really want to?”

  “I do. I like his vibe.”

  “His vibe?”

  She nodded. “He’ll be good for Barb. For me, too, maybe. That house needs some balance.”

  Steve figured she was referring to gender until she elaborated further.

  “It’ll be good for all of us. He comes from a different narrative, a fresh point of view. He’s part of the system we’re always butting heads with, the whole warrior mentality.”

  “Yeah, and look what it did for him.”

  “So maybe we’ll convert him, turn him into an anarchist.” She smiled, then softly punched Steve on the shoulder to make him smile back.

  It would definitely be interesting, Steve supposed, the four of them holed up together in a house built for two. Like an experiment in social dynamics, or, if things went wrong, one of those reality TV shows where it was every man for himself.

  “C’mon,” he said. “We’ve got planes to catch.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  OWEN BICKELL PULLED BACK the curtain and watched the visitor approach through the trees. Even if he hadn’t recognized the face, the walk would have told him it was a pilot. More swagger than stroll, like they were God’s gift to the heavens. Bickell had seen them strut their stuff on landing strips from Vietnam to Iraq, a high priesthood of arrogance and physicality. And now the defrocked Captain Cole of Nevada was heading up his gravel driveway as assertively as a cop serving a warrant.

  Bickell’s security alarm had signaled the arrival. Cole must have tripped the motion sensor at the head of the drive. If he’d parked a car out there, Bickell would be able to get a tag number from the digitally archived images captured by the surveillance camera that he’d installed in a tall pine. Maybe Cole was smarter than that, but Bickell had his doubts. He’d given a great deal of thought to the various approaches an intruder might take to reach his house, and he’d concluded that the best one involved beaching a boat at the end of the peninsula and working your way down the shoreline on foot. But only someone with good tradecraft would try that. Cole looked like an amateur.

  Whatever the case, score one for Bickell’s former employers, who had predicted this event only two days earlier. Expect a possible visitation from out of the blue, they said, by that pilot who trained you at Creech. He’ll have lots of questions. Stall him, stonewall him, feed him a line if you want. But follow our instructions to the letter.

  The glitch was that Bickell didn’t know what to make of his old employers anymore. They were barely on speaking terms. Not at all like the mutual trust that prevailed when he joined the Agency, way back in ’68. Arriving in Saigon for his first posting only a month after the Tet offensive, Bickell believed everything the old hands told him down at the Duc Hotel, and the wartime routines suited him. Poker and bourbon after dark, maybe a hooker and a toke at bedtime, then a Blo
ody Mary with your scrambled eggs. Everyone talked a good game, same as now, but it turned out that none of them knew shit, and he had never forgotten the lesson.

  In those days management had been a cabal of aging Ivy Leaguers. Tweeds and weekend duck hunts. Pack-a-day smokers who drank themselves silly at each other’s town houses in Georgetown—not that Bickell was ever invited. Card-carrying liberals, to hear the way they trashed the ghost of Joe McCarthy. Yet whenever they cast their eyes abroad, they, too, saw a commie behind every bush. And why not? Back then, the enemy was everywhere.

  Later Bickell was posted to other wars, other countries. His operations often stalled, throttled by Agency lawyers or, later, by congressional busybodies, nobody wanting another Vietnam, or another leak in the press. The bureaucratic death spiral continued right up to 9/11, when suddenly it was back to bags of cash and anything goes, except by then the ideology of the crowd upstairs had shifted rightward. No longer so big on tweeds or Ivies, but the same preponderance as ever of blowhards and careerist know-it-alls.

  These were the people Bickell had eventually run afoul of in a far corner of Pakistan, his final posting. He went to help run the Agency’s new Predator program, three of its very own birds parked at the Shamsi airstrip, deep in the desert of Baluchistan, the dark side of a lost planet. At first he enjoyed it. The novelty was appealing. So was the spic-and-span way of killing bogeys without bloodying your hands. Ops that the Soviets would once have called “wet jobs” had turned into something dry and tidy, at least for those watching on a video screen. Gradually he grew uneasy, disillusioned by doubt before he could even say why. Make your living from a technological shortcut and pretty soon other shortcuts looked equally tempting, no matter how reckless. Bickell had spotted their mistakes coming from a mile away. Unfortunately he said so, meaning that once things began to go wrong he was automatically part of the problem, another messy element that needed sweeping aside. So they rewarded him with a medal for distinguished service—pinned in secret, of course, in some windowless room at Langley. Then they cut him loose a year ahead of his scheduled retirement.