Authors: Margaret Vandenburg
She discovered it accidentally driving to the farmers’ market downtown. The feeder highway was even more jammed than usual, bumper-to-bumper all the way from Sunrise Manor. All the locavores this side of Red Rock Canyon must have been converging on the same few bushels of fresh fruit and vegetables. On second thought, they looked more like tourists en route to some casino matinee, probably David Copperfield’s magic show, judging from the preponderance of comb-overs and blue hair. The assholes in the left lane wouldn’t let her merge, and she ended up getting squeezed onto the freeway exit. Once she curved out of the on-ramp, she stepped on the gas. If she didn’t hurry, there wouldn’t be any raspberries left. She jockeyed into the left lane, leaving several semis and a Cadillac in the dust. The feel of the wheel and the grip of rubber on the road triggered a sense memory. She instinctively rolled down all the windows. Blasts of desert air sent her hair flying in the wind. By the time the exit back to Las Vegas appeared in the rearview mirror, she was pushing eighty. Speed alone precluded returning to Sin City, let alone the fact that there was nothing there for her. Her Taurus kicked into overdrive. It wasn’t a Jaguar, but it held its own on the open road. Everything fell into place.
Real driving means driving without a destination. In the desert there is nowhere to go and nothing to see except more of the same. Sagebrush and sagebrush. Mile markers ticked by with incantatory regularity, serving no real function. Distances were too vast to be measured mathematically, an exercise as futile as counting grains of sand to determine the size of a dune, much less the entire Mojave, stretching from Nevada to California with a shaft of road shot from one end to the other, long and straight and true. She measured her momentum against a lone bluff in the distance, what was left of a volcanic cone that lent the landscape a prehistoric improbability. The scale of it all provided a kind of corrective, a way of distancing herself from the narcissistic notion that she was the center of the universe, the source of anything, let alone everything. It had been all about her for too long, as though her pretty little head could change anything, the location of a single sagebrush or the bluff itself, immense, yet barely a blip in the big sky.
Once she reached the open road she never pulled off except to eat and gas up, all at the same lone truck stop at the junction of Interstate 15 and Clark County 215. The first few times she ventured out, she brought a picnic lunch from home, things like hummus and pita and slices of fruit that were easy to eat in transit. But health food on the road felt incongruous, even a little ridiculous, like caviar at a baseball game. Jack’s Truck Stop was famous for its double cheese-burgers and super-sized sides of fries. The fact that she hadn’t eaten red meat for so long gave her pause. She ordered a Sprite to wash it all down, drawing the line at caffeine. Eventually she caved in completely, abandoning herself to the unadulterated rush of classic Coke. Mustard. Catsup. Extra pickles and minced onions. No wonder they called it relish. The drive-thru girls got to know Rose so well they recognized her Ford at the pump. By the time she finished gassing up, her order was ready and she was back on the road in no time.
Buzzards wheeled overhead, which meant something managed to live in that godforsaken country. Predators had to eat something, after all, nocturnal animals hiding in holes by day and scuttling over the desert floor by night to lick dew drops from parched pebbles. Once in a while Rose spotted one of them, not running for its life but splayed and baking on the pavement. For long stretches of time, roadkill was the only evidence of other drivers. Truckers avoided this stretch of the county highway, which was so far off the beaten track even advertisers had abandoned all hope. Roadside signs were completely effaced by sandstorms, all but one which read, “o opping.” This sign took on a strange significance. Its capacity to communicate without fully articulating its message seemed emblematic of something important.
O opping
became a kind of mantra for Rose. They were syllables, not words, signs without sound not unlike Max’s hieroglyphic shapes. The more she drove the more she understood that less was more out there. The desert itself was all the more expressive by virtue of its mute minimalism. What was true there might be true everywhere.
One day she thought she might take Todd driving again. She might even show him her sign, though it wouldn’t necessarily mean much to him.
O opping
. Any attempt to explain its significance would be futile, at best, a reduction of its meaning to mere words. Let him draw his own conclusions. They would probably stop at one of the motels along the way, just for old times’ sake. They would probably laugh at how lame the Taurus was compared to the Jaguar. But speed and wind and the open road were the same, no matter what the trappings. The ineffable allure of driving for the sake of driving was something her husband had always understood implicitly. He was a pilot, after all. Flying was its own raison d’être, too, which is why Rose ultimately accepted Todd’s decision to redeploy.
* * *
Todd worried about Farley when orders came down to reassign his drone to the big mission. Surveilling the old couple’s hotel had been his sole responsibility for months. Their grandchildren had visited. Birthday and holiday celebrations had come and gone. Clients smoked untold numbers of cigarettes on the communal front porch, and the old man snuck his fair share behind the garden shed, eliciting stormy fights and steamy reconciliations with his wife. Farley was privy to everything, bearing witness to their most intimate interactions. But he showed no signs of missing the old couple. He showed no signs of anything at all, transferring his indefatigable attention to the compound in Abbottabad without skipping a beat. Todd finally realized there was no reason whatsoever to worry about Farley. His detachment wasn’t a symptom of some kind of personality disorder that might compromise the big mission. He was, if anything, a model drone pilot, impervious to emotional distractions. Man and machine were melded into a single unfeeling, unblinking eye. Farley was a true new millennial pilot, a human panopticon.
Todd was the one who missed the old couple. In spite of his ability to compartmentalize fear and even empathy, when necessary, he was still a quintessentially twentieth-century air force officer. Geographical distance had not yet fully effected indifference, the inevitable byproduct of drone warfare. He had watched over Farley’s shoulder, a kind of backseat driver insinuating himself into the private lives of potential targets who turned out to be people. Hundreds of man-hours and a million dollars of military resources had been expended to assess their threat level. Zero. The hotel was just a hotel. The intelligence Farley had gathered was filed away for future reference, most notably the fact that the old couple’s make-up sex was spicier than ever, even after half a century of married life. This intelligence had made a deep impression on Todd. He would never forget the old couple, who seemed emblematic of something important. This same intelligence had made no impression whatsoever on Farley, who saw the couple as nothing more than a potential threat. He was equally detached from the drama of the big mission, in spite of the fact that classified information suggested that the new compound under surveillance was far more than just a compound.
Landing the big mission was a feather in Colonel Trumble’s cap. If there had ever been any doubt as to whether he was the most respected commander of RPA combat patrols, this assignment dispelled them. Todd’s position in the chain of command was far less certain. He had no way of knowing how many other squads were surveilling Abbottabad, if any. Colonel Trumble wasn’t at liberty to discuss the overall tactical operations plan. It was entirely possible that Todd’s squad was flying solo, in which case he had been singled out as Colonel Trumble’s right-hand man. Evidently, the kerfuffle surrounding his redeployment request hadn’t hurt his prospects. All the more reason to expect he would have heard from Central Command by now, one way or the other. He was watching his e-mail almost as assiduously as the compound, still waiting for official word on the status of his application. The suspense was killing him.
He and Colonel Trumble talked several times a day now, but neither one of them ever mentioned Todd’s predicament. The task at hand precluded digressions of any kind, with the notable exception of the colonel’s irrepressible wisecracks. A special communications system had been installed in the trailer, a hotline connecting Todd with a network of undisclosed agencies under the jurisdiction of an undisclosed command. The big mission, or the BM as Colonel Trumble liked to call it, was so top secret even Todd wasn’t privy to the target’s identity. The level of surveillance suggested it was one of al Qaeda’s top brass, hiding in plain sight. A less likely safe house was inconceivable, given the compound’s central location. Hunters in the squad likened it to a duck blind.
“This is one big piece of shit, I can tell you that,” Colonel Trumble said.
“Yes, Sir,” Todd said.
“It’s time to pull the plug, if you ask me.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“The way I see it, we have two options. Flush first, or just wipe him out.”
“Sir?”
“Send in the SEALs, or just bomb the hell out of the place. What do you think?”
“Your call, Sir.”
“I wish.”
The fact that Colonel Trumble could get away with this kind of gutter talk was a testament to his stature. He was like General Grant, boozing his way through the war with impunity as long as he kicked Lee’s ass. The colonel’s scatological humor put Todd in an awkward position. He couldn’t really respond in kind the way he did when they were hobnobbing in person. Every word they uttered was being recorded and monitored by a network of military and intelligence agencies, including the Pentagon, the CIA, possibly even the White House. Once in a while Todd thought he heard muffled laughter on the line, presumably one of the masterminds of the BM. Apparently, you could laugh all you liked at the top of the pecking order. No doubt Colonel Trumble consulted with them, but only after Todd signed off. He called them Roto-Rooter Men, the counterterrorism strategists responsible for flushing out the al Qaeda pipeline.
“A shit this big can plug up the works, if you’re not careful.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Anything new on your end, Barron?”
“A suspicious number of early morning deliveries. I’m not convinced the baker is just a baker.”
“Awfully damn skinny for a baker, that’s for sure.”
“This is the second time this week he’s delivered a big cake box, along with the usual order of naan. When I say big I mean really big. Nobody eats that much cake.”
“Unless there’s more people in that compound than meets the eye.”
“Unless there’s more in those boxes than meets the eye.”
“How big is big?”
“Big enough to disguise several cartridges of ammunition. Maybe even grenades.”
“Any corroborating evidence? Or are you boys just making shit up because you’re bored?”
“This particular bakery seems to have an awful lot of employees, especially since it’s basically a mom and pop shop. We’re monitoring it 24/7.”
Todd’s drone squad was responsible for providing realtime video feeds documenting traffic in and out of the compound. The hotline was reserved for reporting anomalies in the daily routine of its inhabitants. There was one main house, a bland two-story box with balconies, and two outbuildings, which could have accommodated up to twenty people, if need be. A lot of space was being wasted, or not, depending on whether anyone was hiding behind closed doors. Not that it was an inordinately large compound. It basically looked like the homes of other wealthy people living nearby. The grounds were surrounded by a twelve-foot concrete wall laced with barbed wire, neither more nor less heavily fortified than neighboring properties. These were standard precautions in Abbottabad, no more out of the way than locking your door in Las Vegas. The primary and quite possibly only residents appeared to be a couple in their late fifties, along with a battery of domestic servants. The husband, who had an office downtown, made his money trading credit derivatives. The wife was either an invalid, agoraphobic, or just too devout to venture into public. Four out of their five grown children lived locally and visited regularly. The fifth and eldest flew in from Karachi for religious holidays. Three were married and one was pregnant, praise Allah. Late fifties was a decidedly advanced age to become grandparents in Abbottabad.
The couple was either fronting a terrorist cell or they were the object of an egregious invasion of privacy. There was very little in their background indicating that they were more apt to harbor al Qaeda operatives than their neighbors, which begged the question of whether Pakistan was crawling with collaborators. Homeland Security advisers were divided on the subject. One camp felt that the escalation in surveillance, let alone drone strikes, had alienated the general public, fanning the fire of terrorism. The other, including most of the Joint Chiefs, insisted that Pakistanis had been dubious allies all along, well before drones invaded their airspace. Whether this kind of surveillance was ever really justified was another question entirely, one the intelligence community was singularly ill-equipped to answer. You might as well ask a watchdog why it barks. The more immediate problem—deciding whether this particular couple’s compound was a viable target—far exceeded the question of whether they were guilty as charged. What was really on trial was American foreign policy, which was completely irrelevant to Todd’s squad. They were trained to follow orders, not ask questions.
Each of Todd’s pilots had been assigned to monitor very specific areas and activities. Brown and Farley’s sensors kept their eyes on the prize, never venturing beyond the confines of the compound. Once a visitor was buzzed through the electronic gate, they were added to a CIA list of suspected terrorists. Franklin and Kucher were responsible for surveilling their movements once they left the premises. Counter-terrorism agents, preferably turncoat Pakistanis, were recruited to follow them into places drone sensors couldn’t penetrate without recourse to X-ray technology, which was still in early stages of development. Double agents were particularly valuable, one of whom managed to land a job as the receptionist for the couple’s internist, whose frequent house calls corroborated the theory that the wife was, in fact, an invalid. A nurse practitioner by trade, the hope was that this agent would eventually be promoted, thereby gaining access to the compound in the event that the wife suffered a medical crisis requiring overnight surveillance. In the meantime, the doctor himself had dropped hints that he might be willing to leak information, provided the price was right. The noose was tightening around the compound.