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Sharpe held out his right hand, a gesture of either reconciliation or farewell. Cole stared at the hand but made no move to take it. He didn’t even want to look again at Sharpe’s face, although he supposed that at any moment now the man would be smiling, the joke on Cole, the rules having been changed yet again while he wasn’t paying attention.
Cole turned and headed for the nearest door and entered a long hallway, not even knowing where he was going. Halfway down it he stopped to collect himself, breathing quickly, feeling the blood rush to his fingertips. Too much damn stimulation for one day.
A door clicked open behind him. He wheeled quickly, angrily, ready to lash out with both fists, only to see that it was a girl—the girl—staring up at him with an expression of abiding curiosity. Her eyes gazed without blinking, huge and brown, exactly as he had pictured them in so many dreams and nightmares, in so many waking moments back at his trailer in the desert.
Two women in Afghan clothing stepped into the hallway behind her, with a police officer bringing up the rear. The women said something to the girl in a language Cole didn’t understand, but she did not turn to follow them toward the waiting room.
She just kept staring at the man who was staring at her.
“C’mon, sweetie,” the policeman said. “Time to go.”
The girl raised her arm, waved shyly—once only—and then turned. She broke into a trot to catch up with the two women, who were already heading out the door.
“Good-bye,” Cole said hoarsely.
The word seemed to hang in the air for seconds after she departed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to several people from the 432nd Wing “Hunters” at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, who assisted me during my research for this book by allowing me to see firsthand the way such missions operate. Thank you to Public Affairs Staff Sergeant Alice Moore for arranging access and showing me around the base; to Captain Gary Ford for a fascinating interview, to Lieutenant Colonel Lance “Sky” King for an interesting lecture, and, most of all, to the pilot-sensor team of Captain Nicholas “Hammer” Helms and Airman T. J. Masters, whose candid accounts and descriptions helped me gain a deeper understanding of the special pressures and demands of Predator missions. They also offered a valuable window onto the lifestyle of those soldiers who, for lack of better terminology, now serve their country as “commuter warriors” from locations based far from the field of combat.
For offering valuable updated advice on certain scenarios in Afghanistan, I thank journalists Nir Rosen and Dexter Filkins. I’d also like to thank the incomparable aircraft designer Pierre Sprey for his insights on the workings of the Pentagon with regard to the development of aircraft and weapons systems.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to thirty countries and three war zones. His previous novels include Lie in the Dark, which won the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel; The Small Boat of Great Sorrows, which won their Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller; and The Prisoner of Guantánamo, which won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the International Association of Crime Writers. He lives in Baltimore.