The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (37 page)

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 the 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.

Cervantes and Bishop went back to The Swiss on the Saturday after the fight, but they did not go inside: instead they sat in the back of a white van parked up the street, waiting for John Pratt to do his last bank run. They spent the evening playing shooter games on their retinal displays, drinking cans of beer and chewing ghat, aiming for the point where they’d be able to pull a gun on Pratt despite the buzz. Bishop was surprised, though, at how little resistance he had felt so far. “The fact is,” he later told me, “when we did that op was the first time since coming home that I
didn’t
feel the buzz.”

Shortly before 1:30 Pratt came out the back door of The Swiss, wearing a heavy coat over a ballistic vest and carrying a locked suitcase full of the night’s receipts. Once Pratt had driven out of the parking lot, Bishop launched the Kestrel Hi-Fli quadrotor they had bought the day before. Unlike the drones they had used in the army, which can fly mostly independently of their operators—military drones only transmit their feed, and implants only accept transmission, during algorithmically-determined microsecond windows, to prevent either from being compromised—FAA regulations require civilian drones to be under constant operator control, so Bishop had to close one eye to focus on the video feed it was sending him. The guns they were carrying were Shouqiang T-5s, a model which doesn’t have the implant-linked trigger locks their service weapons had. Both Cervantes and Bishop, though, assumed that their implants alone would prevent them from firing. (When I asked Roy Healy, Bishop’s court-appointed lawyer, why this point had not been raised at his trial, he said he hadn’t thought it would make a difference: if anything, he said, Bishop’s ability to overcome the implant might be taken as an aggravating factor.)

Cervantes waited a few minutes, until Pratt’s car was out of sight, and then started the van moving. Bishop told him that Pratt was headed down Pacific Avenue, then called up a map that showed all of the ATMs in the area.

“Where’s he going?” Cervantes asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Bishop said. “Either to Sound Credit Union or Umpqua Bank.”

Cervantes turned onto Market Street and sped up. “Well?”

Bishop watched Pratt turn onto Commerce Street. “Sound Credit.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” Bishop looked down at the Kestrel’s feed on his tablet, then back to Cervantes. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

Cervantes sped up, rushing towards a yellow light on 17th Street. It turned red when he was a car-length away from the stop line; he rushed through the intersection without slowing, his eyes closed. After a few seconds he opened them again and glanced at the feed on Bishop’s tablet. “Are we ahead?”