I Saw a Man (15 page)

Daniel and Maria had had their Predator in the air for more than an hour when the mission order came down the line. The Karachi station had received intelligence on the movements of Hafiz Mehsud, number three in the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Daniel was familiar with the name, and with the face of the man who owned it. His photograph was also on the walls in Creech, just three portraits along from the crossed-out face of Ahmed al Saeed. According to a human source, and supporting chatter surveillance, a rendezvous had been arranged at a location in the mountains northwest of Miranshah. A ground team had already identified his convoy leaving a compound on the edge of town, a white twin cab followed by a blue pickup.

Within minutes the other members of the kill chain introduced themselves, either by voice in Daniel’s headphones or by chat messages on his screen. The safety observer at Creech, an intelligence coordinator in Langley, a pair of screeners at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Others would be watching the mission, too. Maybe even some White House staff. Daniel never knew how many, or where they were, but these others were always there, even on a last-minute mission like this. Watching his flight, listening in, recording the results.

“No ground unit?” Daniel asked.

“Negative,” the coordinator replied. “This is cross-border.”

―

It was in the hours following the al Saeed mission, after he’d watched Ahmed’s body cool into blue in that dust, that Daniel first established his post-strike routine, one he’d kept to ever since. After the debrief he and Maria had driven out of the base and into the parking lot of the casino next door. While Maria went to the bathroom, Daniel ordered a couple beers from Kim, the barmaid at Flying Aces. Kim, a motherly blonde in her forties, gave Daniel a nod in acknowledgement but didn’t break her stream of conversation with another customer.

“I love those Italian ones,” she’d said as she’d drawn Daniel’s beers. “With the tomato and the mozzarella?”

“Caprese,” an older guy said from across the bar. He wore a
Vietnam Vet
baseball cap and spoke without looking up from his drink. “They’re called caprese.”

“That’s the one,” Kim said. “Yeah, caprese. I love those.”

Above her, four large TV screens, each hung at an angle, faced every side of the bar. They all played the same video-clip show: animals slipping on ice, bike tricks going wrong. There were screens in the bar itself, too, for gaming, with slits beside them for feeding in bills from one to a hundred dollars. A woman next to the Vietnam vet was knitting a blue baby’s sweater, while across from Daniel four young guys he recognised from Creech tapped at their phones.

As he’d waited for Maria, Daniel looked around the rest of Flying Aces. Its walls were decorated with black-and-white photographs of 1940s bombers, their noses painted with their logos and names—
Puss in Boots, Wishful Thinking, The Uninvited.
Below these, snapshot montages of nights in the bar were propped on each of the side tables.

When Maria returned they’d taken their beers to one of these tables. With the sound of the clip show behind them and a photo of a stag party in fancy dress at their elbows, she’d raised her glass in a toast. “To Ahmed.” She’d meant it as a joke, but as they’d touched the rims of their glasses, neither of them had smiled. It was the first time they’d watched someone bleed out, and something about that spreading pool of orange had altered the air of their success. For a while they’d spoken about other things. The colonel at the base, Maria’s son’s upcoming basketball trials, improvements to their respective houses. Eventually, draining their beers, they’d left, walking through the lobby’s dusk chorus of fruit machines and dime games out to Daniel’s car in the parking lot. Pulling onto the highway, they’d driven it east together in silence, back towards their families, their homes.

Except Daniel hadn’t gone home, not right away. Instead, after dropping Maria, he’d turned the car around and driven the highway back into the desert, turning off at a side road a few miles beyond the city. The road soon became a track, the Camry trembling and shaking over its stones, then nothing at all. Daniel texted Cathy, telling her he’d been ordered to an unscheduled briefing, then turned off his phone and got out of the car. For the next hour he’d remained there, sitting on the hood of the Camry until the sun dipped below the Charleston range. As he’d watched the view darken he’d tried to fill his eyes with the disappearing desert before him: its low shrubs, its sand and rocks burnishing towards evening. Its unblemished sky. He’d wanted to unsee the al Saeed mission. Delete it from his memory. He’d wanted to extinguish the image of Ahmed lifting a boy onto his shoulders in celebration, diving the wrong way in goal, rolling from side to side, side to side, screaming. But he could not. And he still couldn’t. There had been many other missions since then, and many other strikes. But through all of them Ahmed the motorcyclist had remained, a stubborn residue bleeding out under Daniel’s eyelids. Victory through knowledge.

―

“Creech?” The screener’s voice sounded unsure, a degree off the usual protocol. “We have two times vehicles approaching south-southwest. Approximately eight pax total.”

“Can we get a feed?” Maria asked.

Within seconds a visual appeared from a Global Hawk, a surveillance drone watching the watchers.

“Guess that’s the rendezvous?” The coordinator’s chat message popped up on another monitor.

“Intel on their source?” Daniel typed back, keeping one hand on the Predator’s controls.

“Negative,” the coordinator replied. “Langley picked up the trail in deep country.”

“Double-tap,” Maria said quietly from her seat. “Double-tap, baby.”

Within another thirty minutes Mehsud’s convoy had reached a small compound high up one of the eastern valleys, half in shadow, half in light. In another ten minutes the second convoy, tracked by the Global Hawk, also came within their visual range. A minivan trailed by another pickup. Daniel watched as the two vehicles revved and stalled up the steep track towards the eastern valley. At one point they both stopped and a door of the minivan opened. A man got out, walked to the side of the track, and took a leak.

Higher in the valley, in the mud-walled compound, a single figure, a man, from what Daniel could tell, came out into one of the three interconnected courtyards. There was a tree in the corner, and for a moment he disappeared under its shadow. When he emerged back into the light he was throwing his arm before him, again and again. A scattering of dark dots gathered at his feet, moving erratically. They were chickens, Daniel realised. He was feeding chickens. As Mehsud’s convoy approached he paused in his feeding and looked up. The lead vehicle, the twin cab, came to a halt at the compound’s walls and two men got out. Both carried rifles.

“That’s a weapon confirmation, Major,” one of the screeners said in Daniel’s ear. “Two times rifles.”

“Do we have ID?” Daniel asked.

“Negative,” the coordinator replied. He had a West Coast accent, like a surfer. “If Mehsud’s there,” he continued. “He’s still in one of those vehicles.”

Daniel eased the joystick to the right and circled the Predator. Maria adjusted the sensors in response, keeping them focused on the compound. Their screens were always silent, but there were times when Daniel thought he could tell if there was real silence on the ground too. Like now. He could have been wrong, but the scene looked strangely peaceful. The tree—a fig tree, he’d have guessed—the two guards resting their weapons and waiting in the shade of the compound wall. The pickup and twin cab, also waiting. Everyone was waiting. He, Maria, the screeners, the coordinator, the observer. Somewhere, the pilot of the Global Hawk. And, they all hoped, in the back of one of those vehicles, Hafiz Mehsud was waiting too.

“Okay, people, eyes front.” It was the coordinator again, marking the arrival of the second convoy. The minivan pulled up first, and then the pickup. The van’s door slid open again, a growing dark on Daniel’s monochrome screen; from slit, to square, to rectangle.

“We have two, three, four, five. Five, repeat, five, pax confirmed. All male.”

The last man to exit was carrying something, hoisted on his shoulder. The third to get out now also reached back into the van to lift out an object. It looked heavy, and slightly shorter than whatever his colleague was carrying.

“Is that a weapon?” Daniel asked.

“RPG?” the coordinator guessed down the line.

“Too short,” one of the screeners said.

“Mortar, then,” the coordinator countered.

“Do we have confirmation?” Maria asked them both.

“Possible weapon confirmation,” the coordinator replied.

“Okay, here we go,” Maria said, as another man got out of what they hoped was Mehsud’s pickup. He, too, had a rifle slung over his shoulder.

“That’s three times weapon confirmation,” one of the screeners logged.

“Possible four times,” the coordinator reminded them.

Another man followed. He was slower, older, leaning on a stick.

Maria zoomed in on this last figure. He wore a combat jacket over his tribal clothes and carried what looked like a briefcase, holding it close to his side.

“That’s him,” the coordinator said. “That’s our guy.”

Daniel felt his pulse quicken. There were now nine men out of their vehicles on the ground. They were moving towards one another, bunching.

“Sweet target,” Maria said in confirmation.

Daniel breathed deeply, trying to control his adrenaline. He remembered the list of alleged offences below Hafiz Mehsud’s photograph on the wall. Not the detail, just the length. And now here he was, the same man, joining these two meeting groups. In a few minutes they’d move inside, or some of them might begin to leave. He scanned the territory of his screen for any others. Which is when he saw a movement in the minivan, a light patch in the dark of its opened door.

“Minivan door,” he said.

“Check, sensor,” Maria replied, tightening focus on the van.

“What’s the problem, Major?” the coordinator asked. For the first time he sounded urgent, pressed.

“Was that a woman in there?” Daniel asked.

“A woman?” the coordinator replied. “No way. Not at a meet like this.”

“Screeners?” Daniel asked. The van’s open door was filling half his screen now, but all of it was dark.

“No way to tell,” one of the Florida voices said.

“I saw something…,” said the other.

“I saw a man,” the coordinator said, cutting in. “Possible tenth pax.”

“Eyes front,” Maria said. The two groups had come even closer together. They were talking, the armed guards hanging back a few feet. The man from the courtyard had also come round to the front of the compound now, to watch.

“What you got, Creech?” the coordinator asked.

“Two times Hellfires confirmed,” Daniel replied.

“Okay, Major, you have Intel clearance.”

“Permission to engage?” Daniel asked, slipping into his kill protocol.

The observer’s voice was in his ear before he’d finished the question. “Good to go, Major. Permission to engage.”

There was no word from Florida, so, pulling the joystick hard left, Daniel brought the Predator tight around into an attack trajectory. Soon, somewhere in those hills, the faint hum of its blades would be heard.

“Missiles armed.”

“Check, sensor.”

“Paint target.”

“Check, sensor.”

“Target lock.”

“Check, sensor.”

“In three, two, one. Missiles deployed.”

The two Hellfires disappeared from their rails in a diagram of the Predator on Daniel’s monitor. As he watched the scene of their destination—the shadow of the tree, the stilled pickups—the low buzz of his headphones filled his ears, and beneath that, six sets of breaths held on the lines. The counter to his left descended. Through ten, through five. The man feeding the chickens had moved closer. A lighter patch appeared in the van’s door again. Four, three, two. It was a headscarf. One.

The visuals flashed white, blanking in the glare.

“Impact,” Maria said beside him.

Daniel watched as definition slowly returned to the screens. Maria zoomed in close. The vehicles were burning. The few bodies left were prone. The hum of the servers, the conditioned air of the control station, a surfer’s voice, close in his ear. “Good job, Major. Well done.”

CHAPTER NINE

AS MICHAEL REACHED
the turn in the stairway a floorboard flexed under him, its creaking making him pause. Without going any farther, his heart a tight fist in his chest, he leant forward and looked around the corner.

There was nothing. Just more stairs, then a landing carpeted in the same deep red as the runner descending behind him. No ghost. No intruder. No Caroline. Just a part of the Nelsons’ house he’d never seen before.

He thought about turning and going back down the stairs. But now that he was there, higher in the house, shouldn’t he at least check the rooms on this floor? For whoever might have come in through the back door, if not for whatever had conjured that sudden essence of Caroline. This is how Michael convinced himself to take the last few steps up to the landing. But in reality he knew the only intruder he was searching for now was her. The resonance of the sensation he’d felt was still fading in him, as if she’d only just vacated the air on the landing before him, leading him on an impossible game of hide-and-seek.

This, at least, was what Michael’s body was telling him. His mind, still trying to keep a rational purchase on what had happened, was already dismissing what he’d sensed as no more than grief, still having its way with him after all these months. Caroline was dead. All that remained of her was in his memories, and so this, his mind cautioned him, was all he was feeling. Memory, triggered by some unseen, unheard association. Michael wanted to believe the certainty of this rational voice. But he could not. It was a voice winnowed of mystery, and devoid of that most seductive of drugs, hope.