Authors: Ron Childress
“Daugherty.”
“He kind of drifts over to a wall, gets real close to it. His back's to me and I can't figure out what he's looking at. But then his partner helps him lie down on the floor. The man's face had turned blue.” Kelso shakes his head. “Paramedics when they came called in a cardiac.”
“Teddy,” Kelso's wife says. “Show him the note.”
Kelso studies her before reaching into his back pocket. “Found this under our door earlier. I'm going to burn it.”
“But suppose it's evidence?” asks Kelso's wife. “You could get in trouble.”
He hands Ethan the sheet. It's torn from a restaurant pad. The handwriting on it is cursive, precise.
Mr. and Mrs. Kelso,
I am afraid I have two pieces of bad news. One is about Skittles. She got hit by a car yesterday. It was my fault since I tied her up outside of a grocery store so I could shop. She got free somehow. You know she was a good dog. You don't know how much I'm going to miss her.
My second news is about betraying your trust. Though I did sign a lease I cannot uphold my end of our agreement. I must give up your nice apartment. Knowing your generosity I expect you will want to return my deposit. But please do not worry about the money. I am moving on to another phase in my life and will not need it.
Best wishes,
Jessica Aldridge
“So tell me. Who doesn't need money wherever they're going?” Kelso asks. “She must be in a lot of trouble.”
“I think her note sounds depressed,” says Mrs. Kelso. “Maybe we
should
tell the police.”
Kelso slips Jessica's note from Ethan's fingers. “I don't know,” he says, staring at it.
After a moment, “Burn it,” Ethan says. He is channeling Don Aldridge. “Let her stay free.”
Getting a nod from his wife Kelso takes the letter to the sink and strikes a match. Ethan watches as Jessica's words, the only thing of hers he's touched, become ash.
CHAPTER 58
Homestead Air Force Base, Reeger Air Force Base
There is no clock on the wall and an officer has taken Jessica's phone so she doesn't know how long she's been in here. The room has a conference table surrounded by plush high-backed chairs. On the walls hang framed photographs of aircraft. It's a windowless room, but Jessica is not exactly a prisoner. The door is unlocked and she is free to roam to the restroom, water fountain, and vending machines in the corridor. Whenever she does, a lieutenant, stationed at a pass desk farther up the hallway, looks up from his
Airman
magazine. But since Jessica keeps to her end of the building he's not too interested in her activities, perhaps because she's come in on her own volition.
Surprisingly, sirens did not go off when Jessica presented herself at the airbase's gatehouse. The airman on duty, after Jessica told him of being chased across the country by the FBI and of wanting to turn herself in to her own people, looked her up and down and figured her for a nutcase. Jessica told him how she had piloted the UAV on the botched al-Yarisi strike.
“Yeah,” he'd said. “Tell me about the aircraft.”
“A Reaper. A 950-horsepower turboprop. Flies like a hawk compared to the Predator. Goes twice as fast, twice as high, and almost twice as far.”
Her knowledge had little effect on the airman, even after she described the Reaper's Hellfire payloadâmissiles they'd called angels, as in angels of God and all the wrath that suggests. Finally, though, the guard made a call that brought a staff sergeant, Briggs, in a long blue pickup bearing the Air Force security forces logo. “Climb aboard, Sergeant,” he'd said.
Briggs drove her past a baseball diamond and a parking lot filled with RVs and small boats on trailers, amusements of off-duty airmen.
“There's my Whaler,” Briggs said, indicating a fifteen footer with a Merc outboard.
“Nice,” said Jessica.
A longing grabbed her, a homesickness for the life she had built in the Air Force and then lost. By the time she swallowed the ache, Briggs had pulled up to a building next to an airstrip. Here he handed Jessica off to the lieutenant, who has been her uncommunicative monitor for the past hours.
Clearly there have been orders to quarantine her. So Jessica waits patiently. She will not hurry whatever decisions are being made about her future. She will live quietly on vending machine foodâthree Milky Ways so farâfor as long as the powers that be want to keep her here. Her only problem is that she's crashing from the sugar and has an urge to rest her lolling head in her arms on the conference tableâwill it end up being her interrogator's interview table? she wonders. She lays her head down and shuts her eyes, planning to do so for only a few seconds.
In her dreams, Skittles runs away from her into the ocean. When she goes in to rescue her, a lifeguard pushes her under the waves, where she discovers she can breathe. This bit of illogic makes Jessica aware that she is dreaming.
“Sergeant Aldridge,” a soft dream voice says. And then again, “Sergeant Aldridge.” The voice is real.
Groggy, Jessica blinks coming out of her nap and quickly stands and snaps a saluteâa reflex that's apparently still in place when she's addressed by a superior to her former rank. “Yes, ma'am,” Jessica says to a young blonde woman with pulled-back hair and a sun-reddened face. Her uniform carries captain's bars.
“At ease.”
Jessica relaxes, or tries to. But her salute has hiked her sleeve and now the scabbed tats on her wrist showâseven more laserings until they're gone. Even if she's no longer an airman, being on base with nonregulation ink feels wrong.
“Someone wants to speak with you,” the captain says. She has brought in a landline phone and finds a place to plug it in. “Sir,” she says to the receiver, “Sergeant Aldridge is available now. . . . Yes, sir.”
The captain gives Jessica the receiver. “Hello,” she speaks into the electronic void.
“Jessica,” a familiar voice comes back. Its owner, however, has never before called her by her first name.
“Colonel Voigt?”
“I've been thinking about you, Sergeant. Glad you're back with us.”
“Yes, sir. I . . . I'm sorry for any trouble I've caused you.”
“Trouble? Well, you did blow a hole in the noncom UAV pilot program. But you haven't caused
me
any trouble, not on a personal level.”
“Sir?”
“That's enough of the
sirs
.”
“Yesâ” Jessica says, though she continues to stand at attention.
“Are you alone yet?”
Jessica looks around and sees that the captain has slipped from the room. “I'm alone.”
“You're in a wing conference room with encrypted phone lines. Not even the NSA can unscramble what we're saying. We can talk freely, so let's. I hear you've been on the run.”
“Yes. From the FBI. At least that's who they said they were.”
“Fill me in.”
“That's all I know. I didn't wait around to ask what they wanted.”
“Did you ever think they just needed to know what
I'd
like to knowâwhat happened to you after that little hiking mishap of yours? You duck out of a VA hospital and then disappear. Why?”
“I . . .” Jessica hesitates.
“An expert on classified Air Force programs cannot go off the radar, not immediately after her discharge.”
“I didn't plan it, sir,” Jessica says. But how does she explain that when the Air Force discharged her it erased Jessica Aldridge? If she went off the radar, it was because that part of her didn't exist, not for all those months. This truth, though, is not a good answer to give a commanding officer like Voigt. “I left . . . ,” Jessica says, gazing at one of the photograph-decorated walls. A quartet of F-16s caught in tight formation takes her focus. “I left because I had no wingman to watch my six.”
Voigt stays silent for seconds. “You've done well flying solo. Eluding the FBI all this time.”
“Wasn't too hard.”
Voigt gives a short laugh. “You've got a talent,” he says. Then he gets serious. “I want you to know that I did not put those people after you.”
“I wouldn't think so.”
“But with all this business I
have
had the opportunity to think about your situation these months. I'm working on a proposition that might solve all this trouble for us, if you're up for it.”
Jessica responds like a recruit in boot camp. Raising her chin in the empty conference room, she states loudly and clearly, perhaps to convince herself, “I am one hundred percent, sir.”
“Glad to hear it. There's a C17 making a hop from Homestead to Reeger at zero six thirty. Can you be onboard?”
“I can.”
“Then I'll see you tomorrow, Ms. Aldridge.”
“Colonel,” Jessica says and leans forward as if she is standing before his desk back in Nevadaâit's the way she last saw him. “Before you go . . . can I ask you why?”
“Why?”
“Why, really, are you going to all this trouble for me?”
VOIGT, TURNING TO
the window behind his desk, watches a Reaperâan ugly buglike machine truth be toldâtouch down on the airstrip two hundred yards away. His jaw pops as he considers Jessica's “
Why?
” And then he decides to be forthright. “It's because I'm wearing silver eagles on my shoulders. I got my promotion after we took out Yarisi.”
“Butâ” he hears Jessica distantly protest.
“I know. He turned up in Yemen two months ago. For a year, though, everybody was patting themselves on the back for the kill. The UAV program got A-plus marks. The CIA got expanded powers or God knows what. I got my eagles. And then . . . we fools discover our dead terrorist is breathing, plotting to take down airliners. Pardon my French, but what followed was a world-class shitstorm about how to inform the public. Some congressional security committee ordered an inquiry to cover their rears. And that's why we're talking now. Your actions that night cleared our strike team. And they cleared me as squadron commander.”
“I don't understand. We missed.”
“It's how we missed that counts. You delayed firing on the initial targets because you suspected something. That something turned out to be what central intel thought was Yarisi's convoy.”
“But it wasn't. And we blew it up.”
“True. But that isn't the bottom line. You're aware of the cameras in our operations centerâthat it's not just the terrorists who get monitored. The video that day shows you, and then me, reacting negatively to the Agency recommendation to fire on those vehicles. Anyone who watches it can see that we would have aborted the strike if given the choice.” Voigt's eyes are on the airfield. He's watching the bug taxi toward a ground crew. “Well, so far that
anyone
includes a congressman who's not too happy about the . . . collateral damage.”
“It was all collateral damage,” Jessica says quietly, giving Voigt pause.
“I owe you this one, Sergeant, though I doubt it'll put your mind to rest. The convoy we took out was bait. Yarisi was sending a look-alike on little trips around the countryside. The girls in the convoy weren't his wives. They were kids from a nearby village. Hell, goddammit, we'll always be at a disadvantage fighting people like Yarisi. Psychopaths. Men without morals.”
Voigt hears no response. He worries that he has revealed too much. It is his job never to waiver in his conviction to his duty. But deep down, he trusts Jessica. Is it that they are, at bottom, kindred? But this is getting too sentimental.
“Are you there, Sergeant?” Voigt asks.
“I'm here.”
“It was not my idea to separate you from the Air Force. There was pressure from some deputy in Homeland Security who'd got wind of those letters to your dad. You know, there's little Washington hates more than a leak. My recommendation had been a psych eval and then disciplinary action. That would have slowed your career but kept you with us. And I'd still have an ace UAV driver on the team. Believe me, we don't have a quarter of the personnel we need for the missions Washington wants.”
There is another pause in the conversation. Then Jessica speaks. “I wanted to be a good airman for you, sir.”
“You were. Remember that.” And then Voigt is ready to terminate this call, which has gone deeper into his emotions than he likes.
“Colonel,” Jessica says just as Voigt readies to take back control of the situation. “What were their names?”
He doesn't speak for a full five seconds. “Whose?”
“Those girls. The kids I killed.”
“That's war,” Voigt says. He hears his voice rising. “You didn't kill them. The war did! Yarisi did!”
“But you know their names?” Jessica says back to him quietly. “You know who died in the strike.”
“I don't keep that information in my head.” Voigt, though no longer shouting, feels offended.
“Can you get them for me, the names? I mean, the dead aren't classified, are they?”
“Damn it. As a matter of fact, they are.” Voigt considers pulling rank, but then he remembers that Jessica is not under his command. She is beyond that now and she is due respect. And knowledge. Some knowledge, anyway. “That's why the feds chased you across the country. Your dad threatened to go public about your letters.”
“What?”
“He thought he was helping you. But he didn't consider that you're the only person who could confirm his stories. Washington decided to make sure you never got the chance to talk to the press, not that you would.”
“I wouldn't.”
“Anyway, I'm glad the bastards didn't catch you. I'd hate to see one of my old team chemically lobotomized to keep her quiet.”
“I know how to keep quiet now.”
“No more letters to papa.”
“No.”
“No more questions about the dead and buried.”
Voigt waits for Jessica's reply and then takes silence as agreement.
“Good. And you'll be on that transport tomorrow?”
“Yes, sir. I'll be on board,” says Jessica.
“We're going to put you back to work at what you do best.”