“You know a lot.”
“Not enough.”
He gets up and says, “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Sure,” she says.
CHAPTER 27
FIFTEEN MINUTES later they approach an isolated cement cube of a building, festooned with satellite dishes and antennas. Rosaria tries not to show it, but she feels overwhelmed at the soldiers and vehicles, armored and flying, that she sees during the brief walk. It’s times like these when the tiny discouraging voice inside of her says, Babe, this is the real Army. You’re nothing but a cop in a pretty uniform.
Aaron says, “Last month I finally got Molly to meet my foster parents, at a family reunion in South Dakota. It went better than I thought.”
“Good for you,” she says.
“You ever meet up with any of yours?”
“I had six sets of foster parents,” she says.
“Is that a no, then?”
“You’re pretty smart today, Aaron.”
At a plain gray metal door there’s a key-card lock. Aaron slides an identification card through the side, and the door clicks open. Inside is a glass-enclosed booth, and both have to show their identification to a female military police staff sergeant dressed in ACUs and wearing a holstered sidearm. There’s another loud buzz, and a door to the right is unlocked.
Aaron hesitates. “Remember four years back, that senator from Nevada was complaining about all the drones being controlled in her home state? How the state of Nevada and its citizens were complicit in extrajudicial killings overseas?”
Rosaria says, “Was it in the news?”
“All over the news.”
“I try to avoid the news,” she says.
Aaron just shakes his head. “Some days, Rosie, you need to look around and not just at your feet.”
“Aaron?”
“Yes?” he replies, hand still on the door.
“You called me Rosie two years ago. Don’t do it again.”
He pauses, and says, “The senator put pressure on the secretary of defense, the DoD put pressure on the Army, and as you know, crap rolls downhill. We couldn’t expand our drone ops at Nellis. The honorable senator was making too much fuss. And like the Marines, the Army overcame and adapted. Come on in.”
He opens the door and she follows him in, and they’re both standing on a narrow but wide terrace with handrailings, looking down at what seems to be a curved auditorium. There are rows of comfortable-looking chairs and overhead video screens, and Rosaria breathes in deeply as she takes it all in.
This is a control center for drone attacks, and in the video feeds coming in, Rosaria knows that she’s gaining overhead views of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other troubled places.
Aaron whispers, “So here we are.”
The rows of chairs are all filled with men and women, wearing headsets, holding joysticks. Some have bottled water at their elbows. A number of signs hang from the padded, dark ceiling. The near one says, YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU’LL ONLY DIE TIRED.
Rosaria whispers back, “What was Captain Cornwall doing here?”
“One of those touchy-feely programs that some idiot at the Pentagon comes up with when he or she is bored,” Aaron quietly explains. “Bringing in intelligence officers in an exchange program so they can see what their work can lead to in the field.”
“And Captain Cornwall was here?”
“She was.”
“What happened, then? What was the foul-up?”
Aaron seems to grip the railing tighter. “We still off-the-record, Rosaria?”
“At the moment.”
He shuffles over like he doesn’t want to be overheard by anyone in the pit below. “I didn’t see it, but I heard about it later…When the intelligence officers came in, they were paired with an experienced drone driver. Eventually, they would take over the flying if they had the feel for it, which Captain Cornwall did. Then, one day, she and her partner, they were tracking a target in southern Afghanistan.”
“What kind of target?”
Aaron lowers his voice even more, so Rosaria has to lean in to make out the words. “A white SUV, on some desert road north of Khost, with six Taliban soldiers inside, supposedly on their way to attack a camp operated by Doctors Without Borders. So it was a high-value, very significant target. Captain Cornwall and her Air National Guard partner were tracking it with a Predator drone. The word came down from above. Smoke it.”
Then it came to Rosaria, looking down into this cool, comfortable building, with malls and Burger Kings and Walmarts nearby, that the men and women in here were killing targets thousands of miles away, all the while sitting in a comfortable chair with a cold drink at their side.
“Was it smoked, then?”
“Yes,” Aaron says. “But that’s not what went wrong. In the last few minutes, her Nellis partner, he was fighting the flu, and he had to leave to hit the latrine, otherwise he would have shit his drawers. That meant Captain Cornwall was in charge. And she followed the orders. She pulled the trigger and destroyed the SUV.”
Rosaria says, “A foul-up then, was it?”
Aaron sighs. “Yeah. Bad intelligence. It seems there was a family in that SUV…going to a wedding. And there was some old feud between the father of that family and another tribe, and they used us…used us to do a contract killing. That’s what happened.”
“Crap,” Rosaria says.
“But that wasn’t the worst part.”
Rosaria says, “There was a worse part?”
Aaron turns, his skin looking pale in the artificial lights. “Oh, yeah. A couple of days later, it came out what really happened. Although there was never an official report, Captain Cornwall lost it, lost it bad.”
“How?”
Aaron says softly, “She said, ‘Damn you all, I killed an innocent family out there, and now they’ll be looking for revenge, and they’ll be coming after my family for it.’”
“Crap,” Rosaria says again.
“Yes,” Aaron says. “And she finished it up by saying, ‘And if they come after my family, I’ll be coming after all of you.’”
CHAPTER 28
TOM CORNWALL’S heart is pounding harder than it ever has in his life. In those tight times doing stories overseas, with explosions, with the thud-thud-thud of automatic rifle fire, and seeing black-clad armed figures come toward him, he has always kept a steady calm, doing his job.
Not today, not here.
His hand is on Denise’s shoulder as he peers again through the open door. He squats down and holds her thin shoulders tight. “Now,” he whispers. “Listen, and listen to me good, Denise. This isn’t a joke. This isn’t a game. This is serious. Do you understand?”
She nods her head, biting her lower lip, her eyes red-rimmed. But Denise seems to be listening.
“We’re going out now, all right? We’re going out together…but if something happens, if the bad men come, you run. All right? Run hard, run fast, and get out of here. Find a grown-up, a woman, and tell her what happened. Tell her to call the police and take you someplace safe.”
“Daddy, I’m so scared…” The tears are trickling down her cheeks.