The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (38 page)

“Yeah, we’ve got about two blocks on him. Take the next left.”

Cervantes slowed just enough to make the turn and after another block the ATM came into view. It was a drive-through machine set back from the street, with a plexiglas canopy spanning the driveway to shelter it from the rain. A heavily weatherbeaten brown Toyota Allegra was idling next to the ATM.

“Fuck,” Cervantes said. He slowed the van and moved it into the driveway behind the other car. “How much time do we have?”

Bishop looked down at the drone feed and then over his shoulder. “Couple minutes—he hit another red light.”

Cervantes worked his wad of ghat around in his mouth, rolled down his window and spat it out onto the sidewalk. “This is it,” he said.

“We could do it next Saturday,” Bishop said, but Cervantes was already out the door. Bishop saw him draw his pistol as he neared the other car, keeping it low and just hidden behind his right hip, and then swing it in a smooth arc so that it was inside the Allegra’s passenger-side window before the people in that car could do anything. He heard shouting from inside the car, and Cervantes shouting, and then saw on the drone feed that Pratt’s car was crossing 15th Street, a block away. He reached over to the steering wheel, his hand hovering over the horn; before he could honk it the Allegra sped away, bumping over the sidewalk and then peeling away down the road. Cervantes tracked the departing car with his pistol until it was out of sight and then froze, his arm pointed the way it had gone.

Bishop saw the back end of the van come into view in the Kestrel’s feed and realized that Pratt’s car was nearly there. He blew a sharp honk on the horn: Cervantes dropped his arm to his side and ran back to the van’s driver-side door. Pratt, apparently unnerved by the other car’s sudden move, drove on instead of pulling into the ATM’s driveway.

After Pratt’s car had gone by, Cervantes got back into the van. Bishop kept his eyes on his tablet, guiding the Kestrel to rest on the roof, then got out and stowed it in the back. Before he could close the rear door the van was moving, and he had to crabwalk to the front and squeeze between the seats to sit down.

“That guy,” Cervantes said. He was staring out the windshield, his foot heavy on the accelerator as they sped down Pacific Avenue. “That fucking guy.”

Bishop shook his head. “I know. If he hadn’t been there —”

“No,
that guy
,” Cervantes said. “That was the terp. That guy was the terp who set us up.”

Though there was no outward sign that Cervantes and Hollis could now fire their weapons, everyone in the room knew it. Bishop has described that moment, when the rules of engagement allow them to defend themselves, as a feeling of release: “You can breathe again, like you just took off a belt that’s too small for you,” he told me. “The locals can see it, too, ‘cause now you fucking feel like you’re Superman. That’s when you really know if they really are Shabaab or not, ’cause if they are, this is when they shit themselves.”

Hollis backed into the corner nearest the door, bringing his rifle up to cover both the people in the room and anyone who might come in; at the same time his quadrotors buzzed through the lower floors, trying to find the source of the AK-47 fire, and he put the Raptor into a tight spiral over the building’s roof. Cervantes took a step back and pointed his rifle at both Sharar and the terp, waving them over to the corner where the others were huddled. Both men raised their hands and started talking quickly, one in English and the other in Arabic. Cervantes ignored the garbled translation feed running down his retinal display and sent a message to Bishop:
Where are you?

I’m in the kitchen
, the reply came a few moments later.
What’s going on?

Hoping you could tell me,
Cervantes sent.
Shots didn’t come from up here.

“Movement on the roof,” Hollis said. “Trap door—missed it, sorry.”

Cervantes shook his head. “Don’t sweat it. You got a visual?”

“Six Shabaab—man, they were packed like sardines in there.”

“Guleed?”

“I’m just seeing the backs of their heads right now. They’re climbing onto the roof and running for the next building.”

“Ping the other teams with our status, then send one of your quads up there to get me an identification. For now, paint them all—” Cervantes’ voice caught as he was hit by the buzz from his implant. Guleed was a high-value target, which meant that he was to be captured alive unless he was certain to escape or about to harm military personnel. “Paint them green for now.”

“Got it.”

A message from staff sergeant Hamm popped up on Cervantes’ display:
Detain hostiles until further orders. Fire teams Aleut and Bella Bella will pursue target.
Cervantes started to compose a reply, then wiped it. “Keep an eye on them,” he said to Hollis, then sent a message to Bishop:
Meet me at the front door
. He sent his quadrotor out the window and started down the stairs.

The buzz was deafening by the time he reached Bishop. He held out a hand: “Give me some.”

Bishop frowned as he followed Cervantes out onto the street. Cervantes rarely chewed ghat, and never on missions. “Sir?”

“Fucking give me some.”

Keeping a one-handed grip on his rifle, Bishop reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a baggie full of glossy, red-brown leaves. He opened it, releasing a pungent smell like mint mixed with sumac, then held it out to Cervantes, who took out a large handful of the leaves and put them in his mouth. Cervantes’ cheeks bulged as he broke into a run, dodging the garbage being thrown from windows above while trying to catch up with the green dots going from rooftop to rooftop on his GPS map.

A message from Hollis flashed on Cervantes’ display:
Got a visual. Guleed confirmed
. All but one of the dots changed from green to red, and a moment later two winked out as the muffled roar of the Raptor’s 8-ball missiles filled the air.

Bishop laughed. “Looks like Hollis got another couple heads for his wall.”

A visual from his quadrotor showed that Guleed and the other remaining Shabaab had reached the edge of the roof they were on, past which the next roof was more than ten feet away.

“Think he’ll try to jump?” Bishop asked.

Cervantes spat thick green liquid onto the ground, his mouth too full of leaves to talk.
Get your quad in front of him,
he sent.
We’ll box him in.
He took direct control of his quadrotor and made it hover a few feet behind Guleed and the others, broadcasting in Arabic, Somali and then English: “THIS IS THE UNITED STATES ARMY. YOU ARE BEING DETAINED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF YEMEN. LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND SURRENDER AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.”

Through the now-constant feed Cervantes saw a green-tinted Guleed turn back to see Bishop’s quadrotor rising up in front of him. The whine of the Raptor’s engine showed that it was turning and targeting the three flashing-red Shabaab around him. They held up their hands and clustered around Guleed, obscuring him: Cervantes could just see him reaching into the pocket of his shalwar kameez and taking out something shiny.

Cell phone?
Bishop sent. Cervantes moved his quadrotor to get a better look and started composing a warning for it to broadcast. Guleed jabbed at the phone with his thumb, three quick jabs. The feed from the quadrotors went dark, and a moment later the world went dark as well.

“How could it be the same guy?” Bishop asked. “What would he be doing here?”

“Good question,” Cervantes said. He was quiet as he drove north on Pacific Avenue, looking for the Toyota that had sped away. “I think I lost him.”

Bishop chewed his wad of ghat for a minute, then rolled down the window and spat onto the street. “You sure it was the same guy?”

“I saw his eyes.” Ahead of them a traffic light had turned red, and with a sigh Cervantes slowed the car as he approached it.

“Okay, so it was the guy. So what? Half of Seattle’s Somali now, and it makes sense he’d get out—they bring the terps over here after their tour so the Shabaab won’t kill them for helping us.”

“He
is
a Shabaab.” Cervantes was looking straight ahead, his eyes locked on the traffic light. “He lied to me. He knew what was happening and he helped Guleed get away. So what is he doing here?”

Bishop said nothing.

The light changed and Cervantes accelerated quickly. “Do you think you could find him with the quad?”

“Now? We’d have to stop to launch it, and we don’t even know where he went.”

Cervantes lifted his foot from the gas pedal, letting the car slow down before the merge with Schuster Parkway. He turned right on 8th and pulled over. “The Shabaab’s never touched us on American soil. Hitting a target here is their fucking wet dream.”

Bishop opened his mouth and then closed it another moment, unable to find the words for what he wanted to say. “So you want to PUC him?” he asked finally.

“He’s not here alone,” Cervantes said. “We need to track him—find out where he’s going, who he’s talking to.”

“But—” Bishop winced and rubbed his eyes. “We can’t do that with a quad we bought at Best Buy.”

Cervantes shrugged. “So we get Hollis to help.”

The Pentagon has not yet declassified whatever information it has on the device that disabled Cervantes, Bishop and their quadrotors, but that has not stopped people from speculating. Much of that speculation has focused on the fact that it wasn’t used until Bishop and Cervantes had assumed direct control of their drones, though it is also true that Guleed was essentially cornered as well. Hollis’ Raptor was not affected, but it’s not known whether it recorded any unusual electromagnetic activity at the time. While al-Shabaab has been surprisingly successful at downing drones, their methods, such as using kites to tangle a quad’s rotors, have always been low-tech. The most popular theory is that the device was provided, willingly or unwillingly, by Iran, which has a robust and long-running anti-drone program. Army personnel other than Raptor operators are now forbidden from taking direct control of their drones while in the field, and perhaps because of this no similar incidents have been reported.

Cervantes and Bishop awoke several hours later, apparently unharmed, and after being held for observation and implant servicing at the Army hospital in Sana’a, they were given “three hots and a cot”—a one-day leave outside of the combat zone—and then returned to active duty. Though he had disobeyed orders by chasing after Guleed, Cervantes did not receive any reprimand. Staff Sergeant Hamm, who is still serving with the 2-23 IN in Yemen, declined to speak with me, sending this message instead: “Whatever they did, it had nothing to do with what happened in Ta’izz. All three soldiers went on to serve with distinction for the rest of their tours, and none of them showed any signs of anything being wrong.” When I asked if the failure to catch Guleed, and Cervantes’ belief that the interpreter had betrayed them, might have had an effect on him later, Hamm wrote back, “We caught Guleed two blocks away. So far as I know Tony put all that behind him.”

Tom Hollis agreed to meet with Bishop and Cervantes at the Sonic Drive-in two blocks from the two-bedroom bungalow he shared with his wife Bohdanna in Tacoma’s quiet North End neighborhood. He had stopped going to The Swiss since the fight with Bishop, and did not want either of the men coming to his home.

Before they had even sat down, Cervantes began telling Hollis who he thought he had seen in the brown Allegra—though he left out why he and Bishop had been at the Sound Credit ATM that night. Hollis listened silently, sucking his milkshake through a straw and occasionally turning his gaze from Cervantes to Bishop and back again, until Cervantes had finished his story.

Hollis put down his milkshake. “You’re sure it’s him?”

“Yeah,” Cervantes said. “We don’t have anything on him yet, not even a name. But you’ve got red-light cameras, drones flying all over town—all I have to do is give you his face and his license plate and we can figure out who he is and what he’s up to.”

Hollis raised his milkshake and took another sip. He turned to Bishop. “What do you think?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Bishop said. He had not wanted to come to the meeting, worried that Hollis would bear a grudge over their fight, and had kept his attention focused on his chili cheese fries, tapping his feet as Heaven Sent’s “Shalimar” played on the restaurant’s speakers. “I mean, yeah. I agree.”

“So you saw him?”

“Yeah. No. I mean, Tony did, but he
saw
him.”

Hollis was silent for a moment, then frowned. “It ain’t that I don’t believe you, but what you’re talking about could get me fired, or even arrested maybe,” he said. “I got a mortgage to pay, and if anything happens to me Bohdanna’s got nothing.”

“Are you kidding me?” Bishop asked. He pointed a fry at Cervantes, his hand trembling. “This guy is, he is not asking you, he is giving you an order.”

Hollis stood up, his posture stiffening. He turned back to Cervantes. “Is this an order, sir?” he asked.

Bishop smiled. “Hell yes it is.”

“I’m asking him.”

The speakers played the first bars of “Hipper Than Me” as Cervantes sat silently. Finally he shook his head. “We really could use you,” he said.

“Call the cops,” Hollis said as he turned to leave. “Or the FBI, whoever. Tell them what you know and keep out of it.”

“Yeah, go. Get out of here,” Bishop called after him. “Go back to your Russian whore.”

Hollis froze in his tracks, then craned his head around to look at Bishop. He closed one eye partway, as though he were looking down a gunsight. “She’s Ukrainian,” he said, then stepped out the door.

Bishop saw one of the restaurant’s employees walking over to their table and stood up, waving her away. “Don’t bother,” he said. “We’re going.”

By the time the 2-23 IN was rotated back to Fort Lewis all three soldiers had been given commendations for actions before and after the incident, with Hollis also earning Sharpshooter badges in both the Rifle and Raptor categories. There is no record of any of them being offered or seeking out counseling during that period, and they received no special attention or screening during the Post-Deployment Health Assessment meant to identify potential problems that might occur when soldiers return to civilian life. Hollis received an honorable discharge and, thanks to his implant and an Army employment program, quickly found a job with the city of Seattle, using drones to predict and shape traffic patterns. Cervantes and Bishop decided to accept the three-week vacation offered and then go back to active duty. After the three weeks were up, though, the two soldiers were transferred to the Warrior Transition Battalion, and the 2-23 IN went back to Yemen without them.