Sentinel Blues
by Pat Black
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A few mild ones.
Description: In times of war, technology evolves. The same is not true for those squeezing the triggers.
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Airman Bobcat pushed the bird through the hills and valleys in a thrilling burst of speed. Although the sense of acceleration was an illusion, his stomach begged to differ; as the butterflies beat their wings within, he tightened his grip on the stick and focused on the red crosshairs in the centre of the screen.
Sergeant Major Wraith sat beside him, a big man with his very flesh draped over the arms of the instructor’s chair like a wet towel. “Okay, kid,” he drawled, “now you’ll see what the bird can do.”
Bobcat blinked as the landscape scrolled past. It was projected all around them on a horseshoe-shaped screen that ran from floor to ceiling, a perfect facsimile of light, sound and space. The sense of immersion in the environment as it closed around them like a fist took a while to get used to. Lots of Eaglets dropped out at this stage because they had to ralph.
As the target got closer, Bobcat eased up on the stick and dropped to cruising speed. A flock of birds burst out of cloud cover to port, white-feathered arrows banking away from the drone. Bobcat gripped the gun dials and zeroed the target in on them.
“Whoa there!” Wraith chuckled. “The doves are non-hostiles, usually.”
Bobcat relaxed. “Just testing the old reflexes, sir.”
“I think you’d have got a couple, too, you sly little bastard.”
I’d have got them all, Bobcat thought. But he said: “Do you ever get birdstrike out on missions?”
“Sometimes. It’s never a problem, though. Drones are different from jets – no propellers, no compressed air inside to worry about... Just pure death in a tin.” Wraith made a fist like a lump of processed ham and struck Bobcat on the shoulder with it. “Yeah?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Damn right.”
They banked through the valley and soon the target approached – a white Spanish-style villa, red tiling, bougainvilleas in the courtyard, utterly incongruous to the hills-and-lakes setting.
“You have your orders, lieutenant.”
Bobcat put a lock on the villa, outlining the entire structure in yellow. He was about to make an aside about Spanish villas failing to master the art of camouflage when a puff of smoke flared up on a nearby hillside.
“Incoming,” he yelled, and triggered the chaff. On-screen, white sparks flew out to meet the incoming twister like death rays in an ancient sci-fi movie. The plume of smoke twisted to meet these stroboscopic flickers; Bobcat triggered a burst and detonated the missile in a gaudy yellow blast.
Bobcat’s motion-simulator chair shuddered at this eruption. Banking to starboard, he zoomed in on heat-traces showing on the mountainside – one of which was packing hardware. “Engaging hostiles.”
Once he’d locked onto the struggling figure with the RPG, he obliterated it with two rounds.
“Nice work. Proceed with primary target, lieutenant.”
Bobcat centred the crosshairs on the villa and fired. The image monochromed for a second as both hi-ex cannons exploded into life, and the chair gave a satisfying shudder in time to the recoil. In one moment of fire, smoke and ruin, the villa went from an ordered shape, a fixed entity on the ground, to chaos.
“Cease fire,” Wraith said.
Flames surged over the wreckage of the house. “Target destroyed,” Bobcat said, trying to control his breathing.
“Negative, airman. Two more hostiles on the ground.”
Bobcat frowned; he’d seen no-one as yet, and certainly no real person would have had time to escape the strafing. But sure enough, on the thermoscope, two survivors crawled out - tell-tale heat-trace blotches spattering the ground in gaudy teardrops.
“Switching to photo-real.”
On screen, picked out in pixel-perfect clarity, were a man and a child. They were both on their knees and waving up at the drone as it banked, the targeting cursor resting between them. Even from this distance, Bobcat could make out the shape of the child’s mouth, the framing of the sounds: “No. Stop.” Part of her hair and clothes had been burned off and her back and shoulders were charred.
Bobcat raised an eyebrow. “Potential prisoners?”
“No. You have your orders, airman.”
Bobcat lit them both up. They turned from people to red and black puffs on the valley floor.
“All targets destroyed.”
Wraith’s face relaxed, multiple chins sagging. “Good shootin’, lieutenant. We’ll take the bird home now.”
Bobcat smiled as he spun the image on the simulator around, leaving the flaming ruin behind them. In a test situation, he’d expected a little surprise somewhere along the way. As missile strikes were a drone pilot’s most feared outcome, it had been obvious what the problem would be. He’d taken it on and toppled it, though. He’d read his notes.
Wraith grinned and tossed the report card onto the table top. “Failed,” he said.
Bobcat felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, sir?”
“Failed. You failed.” His commanding officer gritted his yellowed teeth.
It was no joke; the report bore a rude, red, circled F. “Permission to ask for your reasoning, sir?”
“Granted. You’re shit.” Wraith examined his nails. “Actually, no, I’m joking. You did alright. Better than anyone else who ever came through drone school. But you made a couple of classic goofs. First of all, you failed to carry out an initial scan of the valley.”
“I would assume the onboard scanners would pick up any traces of hostiles loading rocket launchers in the open.”
“Oh, you ‘assumed’? Well, that explains everything. You ‘assume’ nothing in a combat situation; you always run a scan or get the intel before you start shootin’. What happens when you’re out on a mission and the fire comes from close quarters, and you’ve wrecked a forty million dollar bird?” – here Wraith’s voice went high and girlish – “‘Oh, sir, sir, what can I say? What shall I do? We haven’t carried out a scan!’”
“Understood, sir.”
“But the second goof... now, that one got me interested, boy. Oh yeah.” He began to chuckle. “You hesitated. Your orders were quite clear; engage and destroy the target, and any hostiles you encounter on the premises.”
“I thought it prudent to cross-check with my commanding officer, sir.”
“Why? Because it was a widdle girly-poo? Were you all concerned for humanity?” Wraith knuckled mock tears away from his eyes.
Bobcat waited, tense. An F could be disastrous; his practicals had been superb but his theory work was patchy. Anyone who didn’t get at least a B grade overall had to resit – and an F would pull him below that threshold.
“I was distracted by the little girl, sir.”
“Humanitarian, huh?” Wraith’s voice grew to a roar. “Well, let me tell you about little girls in the field. The enemy are even now training little girls to shoot at us – to shoot at our men – in combat. Children are recruited from when they’re old enough to walk and talk, and their purpose in life is to kill us. They hide weapons, they plant IEDs and they even blow themselves up. So, even if it’s little girls, cute doggies or old ladies, if your instructions are to wipe everyone out, you wipe everyone out. Is that clear?”
“Crystal clear, sir.”
“Okay.” Wraith’s demeanour softened. “Now for the good news. You didn’t fail it as hard as some I could mention. Some kids just don’t want to take the shot, when they see the little girl. Some bastards even got the nerve to argue with me. They refuse point blank to shoot the kid. But you didn’t. You turned her into sushi when I asked you to. And that, amigo, I like very much.” He took up the report, scored out the F and replaced it with a C.
Bobcat’s heart thudded.
“So that’s why I’m changing my mind. I’m going to pass you. And believe me, hardly anybody passes my school their first time. Congratulations, son. You’ve got your wings. You’re an Eagle. Welcome to the top one percent.” He extended a warm, sweaty hand across the table.
“Sir!” Bobcat pumped it hard, feeling tears prick his eyes.
Wraith winked. “And the pay isn’t too bad, either.”
“Not to mention the pass to the mess, sir.”
“The mess! What a splendid idea!” Wraith grinned and slapped Bobcat on the back. On his skin, he knew, a red hand was burning.
The Eagles had their own roped-off section at the back of the mess hall. By the time Bobcat manoeuvred a couple of drinks back from the bar, the girls were already waiting for him. Kittyhawkes, they were called, organised into their own web presence and networking tools, boasting their pecking orders and high scores.
A skinny Japanese girl with severely shorn hair perched on Wraith’s lap. She had long limbs and small breasts, with everything in proportion. The girl twirled her fingers through Wraith’s beard, ploughing slow furrows along the matted curls.
“Hey, here he is. The new man,” Wraith said. “Airman Bobcat.”
“Pleased to meet you ma’am,” Bobcat said, taking a seat.
“Hello... Bobcat? Did you just say Bobcat?” She turned to Wraith. “That’s the best name you could find to give your new man? I don’t think he’s a Bobcat.” She checked him over, a frosty appraisal. A dominant, Bobcat decided. She would have to be, to target that bucket of lard.
“Ah. There’s a story behind that one, darlin’,” Wraith said, shifting her weight over to his other knee. “It’s to do with how his head moved on day one of training. He followed every manoeuvre like he was actually flying a plane. Bobbing up and down, darting around. So I christened him: Bobcat.”
“And the rest is history,” Bobcat said, passing a drink to his CO. “And, may I ask your name, ma’am?”
“I’m Kyrie,” she said, presenting Bobcat a dainty hand. “Mrs Wraith.”
“Honoured.”
“Yeah, emphasis on the ‘Mrs’ part,” Wraith growled. “But don’t worry, Airman. I think you’ll get to meet some of the talent that this regiment attracts.” Wraith’s arms seemed to bunch up as he squeezed his wife, jiggling hams sheathed in pure fat. Who in hell named you Wraith? he thought.
But Bobcat smiled pleasantly and raised his glass. “Here’s to the regiment.”
“The regiment.” They clinked glasses. Kyrie winked at him.
Before Bobcat laid the glass back down on the table, something small, well-built and blonde slid into the seat next to him. “Hi there,” she whispered. “I’m Serena. I’m so pleased to meet you.”
On his first morning taking a real bird in the air, Bobcat sweated freely. The mission was causing him more anxiety than he’d expected, and the babel of voices sounding in his helmet from around the command centre hardly helped. The crew were long established, with an easy, gruff banter that made Bobcat feel like exactly what he was; the new kid in class.
“Scan the bridge,” Wraith barked at him.
“The bridge, sir?” Bobcat blinked.
“Intel mentions a transit of arms, making its way over to the west side this morning. It has to come over that bridge.”
“Copy that.”
Bobcat’s bird hovered about half a mile above ground, surveying pedestrians as they made their way to work. It was morning over there, and men, women and children crowded over the walkway as the sun rose. Thanks to the morning light it made a lovely scene, despite the ingrained impression of dirty heat desert cities always gave off. There was no sign of anyone Bobcat would immediately have picked out as a target; lots of burqa-clad women, plenty of children on bicycles.
He flicked a switch on the stick and the bodies crossing the bridge pulsed all the colours of the rainbow as various checks were carried out; heat, metal detection, trace scans for explosives. People were broken down to their constituent parts in the cool glare of the sensors, stripped naked; water, skin, hair, fat and bone were separated out from the whole and sifted out, all components accounted for.
Two women in burqas triggered an alarm. One carried a laundry basket on her head. Outwardly, she was a flapping shape covered in black cloth from head to foot, save for her eyes. But according to the scanners, beneath a pile of laundry inside the basket and strapped to her body were enough plastic explosives to bring down the bridge and vaporise most of the people within a 20ft radius. Her companion, a slender girl of no more than sixteen to go by the shape of her body on the scanner, was similarly wired.
“Targets acquired,” Bobcat said, his voice husky.
“Engage,” Wraith said. “Low calibre cannons only. Avoid the fireworks if you can.”
“There is a risk of destroying the bridge.”
Wraith grunted. “Duly noted, Airman. Try not to do that, if you would.”
Bobcat flicked the set-up from heat-trace to photo-real, and the cursor bore down on the two women. Now it was just a simple matter of pulling the trigger.
He might have made this shot a million times before as a Gamer; this, then, would have made it a million and one. He fired, the stick shuddering once. After a brief delay, a round passed through the face of the woman carrying the basket. Her head disappeared and the basket fell, the laundry inside spooling out like a string of guts. The traffic on the rest of the bridge kept moving, but the pedestrians nearby froze, gaping at the sight of the woman’s body lying flat on its back, hands reposed almost serenely on a generous belly. Then they drew back, screamed silently and ran. The horror of some of their faces, turned towards the destroyer in the sky, was clear even from that distance.
A thrill ran through Bobcat’s very blood even as he targeted the second woman, the girl. She reached under her cloak and Bobcat understood what she meant to do, even as he triggered another round. The right arm was jerked away from the shoulder at high speed, like a speeded-up pratfall in a silent movie. The girl was blown back several feet by the shot; cars swerved out of the way and shuddered into each other as she rolled over and over. At last, the girl sat upright, dazed, blood erupting from the empty shoulder socket. Even with no distractions and a static target, it was a difficult shot to take off the second arm. But Bobcat made it.
“Damn,” someone said, breaking the silence.
“Targets down,” Bobcat said. “Request ground team to sweep up the survivor. She may have intel.”
Wraith tittered. “Target number two’s got about ten seconds left to enjoy being a survivor, Airman. But that’s good shooting.”
“Holy Jesus. Did you see that?” someone else said.
“Hard core, Bobcat. Hard core.”
Bobcat surveyed the kill zone, allowing the target to hover over the dead women like an insect drawn by the blood stink. There could be hostiles around who might attempt to trigger the explosives, and there was always a chance of remote detonation. But every pedestrian nearby had fled, leaving only the swirling dust and the buzzing horns of a few distant drivers. And the bodies, of course.
Bobcat’s hands filled with drinks for most of the night. He was still half-high, half-sick, after his first day’s play, but the other Eagles’ fraternal encouragement stopped him from thinking too hard about it. Even the ones who’d been most wary of the new boy now wanted to know who he was.
“This guy,” Wraith said, stabbing a finger at his protégé, “took a shot I’ve never seen done before out of a sim. Even then, it was never so clean. One shot, one bad guy down. Boom!” He tapped the same finger against his forehead.
A bad girl, Bobcat thought. Not a bad guy.
“The arms, though,” one of the tech guys said. “Is it true about the arms?”
“Course it’s true. Two shots, two arms off. It was surgical! All hail doctor Bobcat.”
Kyrie slid over beside Bobcat while her man mimed and raved, watching him with the cool detachment of a cat perched on a fence. She flicked the Airman’s ear at one point. If this bothered Wraith, he didn’t show it.
“How many heads are you going to take off tomorrow?” she asked him.
“Two or three. Just for you. How about that?”
Another girl slid in at his other side. “Hi, I’m Natasha,” she said. “Are you Airman Bobcat?”
A blood-red “2” nestled in the bottom left hand corner of his screen at the start of the next mission.
“Techs, that number’s bothering me,” Bobcat said. “Can we rub it out?”
“Roger, Bobcat.” The number faded away.
“There’s a bus taking several insurgents to a seminar meeting south-by-south-east,” Wraith said. “Co-ordinates to follow.”
Bobcat guided the bird low over a dune, enjoying the emptiness but kind of hoping for a patch of water to break up all that sand. He was very close to glimpsing a more detailed shadow of the war machine against the desert floor as it zoomed overhead, a flitting, jagged black thing soaring over the undulating yellow sea.
“I’m on it, sir.”
The minibus looked at least 15 years old. Its livery was some cartoon character Bobcat didn’t recognise, a very crude outline of a palomino horse striding on two legs beneath the windows. Everything about the composition of the figure was somehow wrong, from the size and shape of the eyes to the uneven nostrils and the strangely repellent cherry red tongue. There were a lot of people inside; several hands banged the windows, and faces pressed against the glass here and there, fingers mussing away the condensation. He could not be sure if they were children or not.
“We’re shooting,” Wraith barked in his earpiece. “Shoot. Go.”
So he shot; the goofy palomino frowned and imploded as he raked the side of the bus with explosive shells. It cracked open like potted pork and bits and pieces fell out, burning.
“Leave no survivors,” Wraith said. “Every single person on that bus intended harm. Leave none of them behind.”
There were no survivors. In the heat-trace setting the bus flared pure white with scarlet and yellow bordering. Some other red and yellow splodges littered the cracked paving all around the wreck, but they weren’t moving and if there was anything human in them, Bobcat couldn’t make it out.
The red counter reappeared, and racked up again. He was up to 26 now. Day two on the job.
Bobcat slammed the empty glass down on the tabletop. “What I don’t understand is – why can’t we see the drones? I really want to see what the birds look like.”
“Oh, I’d love to see what they look like, too,” said Deidre or Samantha.
“Good reason for that, numbnuts,” Wraith slurred. “The enemy would love to see what they look like, too.”
Bobcat frowned, and began to think he might vomit. “Surely the enemy has pictures anyway? Why the secrecy?”
Wraith growled: “Pictures, but not the fine details. Not how they work. Not how the working parts fit together.” He clapped a sweaty spade over his girlfriend’s hands. Kyrie’d been nursing a drink all night, hardly interacting with the usual crowd. “We never know who’s attached to the regiment, do we honey?”
“There’s all kinds attached to this regiment,” Kyrie said. She gave Bobcat a wicked smile.
“We can’t have the drones compromised,” Wraith said, suddenly morose. “We can’t. The thing you got to understand, Bobcat... We’re not invaders. We’re guardians, man. We’re the sentinels. We stay here and watch over everyone. Everyone free, anyway. We’re keeping the rest of the world safe by sweeping up that one little part of it.”
“You sound like cleaners, not warriors, honey,” Kyrie said.
“Oh. You should know better.” Wraith got up, casting shadows of different colours in the neon light, great pink and blue and yellow blobs blotched across the white surface of the tables. “I’m gonna get another drink.”
“Don’t drown,” Kyrie said.
“Do not step on my toes, woman. I’ll have you escorted out.”
He weaved out into the path of a soldier in full uniform. Wraith was a big guy, but the soldier had a good three or four inches on him in height. He was a boy, maybe 21 at most, with the wiry physique of a combat soldier. But he couldn’t quite dodge out of Wraith’s way, and he spilled some of the drinks on his tray as they collided.
“God... damn, boy!” Wraith bellowed, even though the drinks hadn’t touched him.
“I’m terribly sorry, sir,” the soldier said, jaw dropping open once he recognised the face quivering in front of him.
“Sorry, huh? I’ll give you sorry, bitch.” Wraith slapped the entire tray of drinks out of the soldier’s hands, scattering them in a coruscating shower. “You sorry now?”
The soldier gulped. “I am sorry, sir.”
“Not sorry enough. Pick that shit up.”
“Yes sir.”
“And while you’re at it, you can buy drinks for the people you disturbed at my table.”
“Of course, sir. Would be my pleasure.” The soldier’s buttocks bobbled as he clawed up the still-rolling glasses.
“Cleaner?” Wraith snorted over at Kyrie. “There’s your cleaner, honey. Right there.”
Her body surprised him; it was hard, honed, the product of long hours at the gym. Another surprise was that Kyrie’s breasts were bigger than he’d supposed, and her breath whistled through her nose in quick, startled gasps as he kissed the length of her neck from shoulder to ear.
“I’m in charge,” she whispered. “I give the orders. I’m in control. You need to remember this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You won’t have another woman like me.”
Bobcat did not doubt her.
On the morning he broke Wraith’s record, Bobcat began his sortie by pushing the bird through the mountains on the way to some suspicious activity in one of the northern cities. There was something hypnotic in the way the landscape rolled out; in the way the sun would sometimes flare up in the dead centre of the target, so bright – even through the filter – that Bobcat actually believed he was looking directly into it, instead of a weave of pixels.
“Naughty boys and girls, Bobcat. Two clicks away. Just south of a schoolyard.” Wraith snickered. “The school of the Holy Redeemer, would you believe.”
“Roger that.”
The usual nightmare of skank housing and festering refuse scrolled across the screen as Bobcat eased down into the town. Soon he zeroed in on a cluster of figures crouched behind a wall.
“These the targets, sir?”
“Affirmative. According to our intel, one of them’s a little bomb-maker. Do not engage until the order is given, Bobcat.”
Bobcat swallowed. “Copy that.”
It was clear from their size relative to the odd parked car and crazily-angled telephone poles that the figures swarming over the ground were just children. Their shadows were short in the midday sun; according to the dials it was almost ninety degrees down there, and getting warmer. Boys and girls; little Christians, going by the bare legs and faces of the girls. A crowd of them gathered round one child in particular.
“They’re on the move.”
“Keep an eye on ‘em, Bobcat. We’re very curious.”
The bird took a broad circle overhead, about a mile and a half away from the targets. The image on screen turned very, very slowly, the targeting cursor winking in the exact centre of them.
The children gathered around some street furniture, close to the gates of the school. One child – a boy no more than ten years old, with bare feet and a white vest and shorts on – cradled something in his arms. It might be a kitten, Bobcat thought.
“Scanning the area. I don’t like the look of the kid dead centre.”
It wasn’t a kitten. Though it was hard to tell exactly what it might be, the sensor showed he was definitely cradling explosives. Not a large amount; it might even be fireworks.
“Sir, requesting an update from intel,” Bobcat said.
“Copy that, Bobcat. Stand by.”
There was great excitement among the children on the dusty road. It was difficult to tell what they were gathered around - perhaps a power junction or a telecoms interchange.
The smallest boy knelt down and began to fix something to one of the smaller structures.
Wraith said: “Intel’s given us a positive on what the little fucker’s carrying. It’s an explosive, alright. Military hardware. Okay, let’s go.”
“Engage?”
“Engage, Bobcat.”
“They don’t appear to be setting up anywhere near the school, sir.”
“No, but they could be setting up for when the school bus leaves. It’s a Christian school, Bobcat, and you know how our friends like those. We can’t have that.”
“Yes, sir. Firing.”
The delay between the sharp click of the trigger and the bullets striking home was short, but dreadful. The signals pinged into outer space, bounced off a satellite and struck home in the drone. Then the guns made their dread revolutions and the bullets would streak out, one after the other, and then, if you were in the centre of the target, you had perhaps half a second to live. It was a miracle of technology and human ingenuity, culminating in this whirling, spitting death scene that played out for Bobcat as he sat forward in his padded seat.
The boy simply vanished in a hail of dust and blood; at least two others went down in the same moment as the bullets unearthed clumps of poorly-laid asphalt. The other children froze and instinctively looked up into the sky; they might even have seen a distant flicker in the air before they, too, were cut down.
A single strafe was enough to account for most of them, and Bobcat hoped that the dust might never clear. That there would be no bodies to show for such a gaudy display of pyrotechnics, no body parts, and above all no faces.
But the smoke did clear. One child had been almost completely disarticulated, like a straw man plucked apart up by a gale; her head had fallen in such a way that it looked as if she had been buried up to her neck in dust. Several still lived, one of them crawling away towards the pavement where the boy had been attempting to set up the explosive device. Bobcat made his head and shoulders disappear. Then he dropped a little girl who had stood up, awash with blood.
In the far corner, the counter flashed up: 114. The figure had a flashing yellow border around it.
Applause filtered through Bobcat’s headset from the crew, distorted and cacophonous. “I never thought I’d see the day when my high score was beaten,” Wraith chuckled. “But you’re somethin’ else, Airman. Outstanding.”
The Big Chief came on. “This is why we only hire the best, Bobcat. And you’re one of the very best, son. Incredible shootin’.”
“Thank you, sir.” Bobcat palmed a tear from his eye as he spun the bird around and took it away from that place.
At the mess, Wraith brayed laughter. Foamy beer decorated the carpeted strands of his beard. “Turned out they were trying to blow up a fire hydrant! They wanted to get at the water, with the heat and all. But that didn’t make no difference to the Bobster.”
“Awesome,” Shirley said.
“Yeah. He Swiss-cheesed them. And you know what? He was right. You think that kid just found plastic explosives lying around in the street? Intel reckons he stole it off his daddy.” He clapped Bobcat on the shoulder. “It’s all good. There aren’t any collaterals in that shithole of a country, believe me. You’ve eliminated a couple of insurgents-in-waiting and saved us the bother of doing it later.”
Bobcat, eyes bloodshot, swayed in his seat. “How many more of them did I make today?”
“What? Hey, cheer up, son. You’re a killer. Always were, always will be. I’ll get you another. Come on, suck it up.” He lumbered off to the bar.
Kyrie said: “He’s right, you know. You should be proud of what you did today.”
She squeezed his thigh. “I’ll pin a medal on you tonight.”
Wraith sagged in his seat; maybe he had a slow puncture, Bobcat thought.
The Big Chief cleared his throat and tossed the newspaper onto the desktop. “Of course, we’re going to have to completely rethink our attitude to your, uh, female companions at the mess in future. They’re vetted, but it seems this one was particularly well covered.”
“It’s a mess,” Wraith sighed. “A total screw-up. I can’t believe...”
“It’s an unfortunate sign of these worrying times that the press aren’t onside.” The Big Chief sighed. “Those embed missions we give them just aren’t enough to keep them happy.”
“But we’ve got... work to do,” Wraith stammered. “We’ve barely scratched the surface over there. You’re not going to suspend us, sir, surely?”
“It won’t affect your operational status, sergeant. I understand, though, that she was more of a partner to you in particular. We’ll, uh, talk about this in private.”
“In particular?” Wraith frowned and looked around him, lumpen and puzzled as a felled heifer.
“Uh, Airman Bobcat? If you could leave us for a few moments?” The Big Chief nodded curtly.
Bobcat rose, saluted formally and strode out. He glanced at the newspaper on the Big Chief’s desk on the way to the door. There was the hideous headline that had gone viral online, the one that had optimised his name in search engines across the world; that had made him and his family a target for the enemy. “AIR FORCE IN SCHOOL MASSACRE OUTRAGE,” it said.
She’d even used “Kyrie Nakamoto” as the by-line.
Bobcat was aware he had a couple of tails; the service wasn’t very good at that sort of thing.
He didn’t mind. He wanted to get out of the uniform, head downtown and grab a cup of coffee. In his civvies, and with his growing paunch, no-one took him for one of the muscular soldiers who broke their pubs and nightclubs up every weekend.
He forced himself to read the newspaper at a coffee house, and was shocked to see his own picture inside – sat between two women, whose faces were blanked out, saluting the photographer with a full beer. One of them was clearly Kyrie, though.
Jolted by this, he paid up and left, heading down to the riverside.
The town had a financial centre, with one building covered in reflective glass that bulged and distorted the images of anyone who walked past. Bobcat was reflecting on how disturbing this sight was when he became aware of a strange buzzing, whining sound, increasing in pitch. A bulge seemed to grow at the top of the glass-fronted building, like a face glimpsed in a hall of mirrors.
Bobcat spun around. Hovering not forty feet above his head was a pale grey bird; its wings were spread out in a vague X-shape, mimicking the wingspan of an actual eagle. Bobcat wouldn’t have thought the designers would have been so literal, but there it was. Someone had even painted a face on the nosecone, where the cameras were probably situated; a great yellow beak and blazing eyes.
The loudspeaker burred out, shockingly loud: “You gonna run for me, Airman?”
Bobcat raised his hands, instinctively. “Wraith? Sir?”
The wings exploded and gunfire ripped across the windows of the building behind him. Glass erupted into the air, showering Bobcat and crashing against the road in massive sheets. Bobcat had fully intended to stand to attention in the hope that someone, somewhere, would pull the plug on this. But now his instincts kicked in, and he sprinted.
“That’s right,” Wraith bellowed. “You run along, now.”
He did run, aghast, legs pumping, lungs burning. Some of the other pedestrians screamed. One lady dropped two full bags of shopping and took off, comically slow in a pair of heels.
Gunfire ripped across the pavement as Bobcat weaved towards the town centre. Chunks of concrete and masonry erupted into the air and he jammed his eyes shut against a stinging dust cloud. His bowels loosened in one rude spasm, a nerve-quick response.
“No, not thataway,” Wraith blared.
Chest heaving, Bobcat turned to avoid the blistering torrent of fire and made for the bridge.
“That’s it,” Wraith said. “You keep going now. Almost there.”
What would I do? Bobcat thought. Get some lock-on, and sit back? Deploy a missile? If he dived into the river, Wraith would still get a fix on him. If he hid under the bridge, Wraith could bring it down in moments.
Cars swerved to avoid Bobcat as he ran blindly across the road. The gunfire had paused, and Bobcat considered pulling someone out of their car and using them as a shield. But the vehicles roared out of the way before he could get to one of the doors.
A spindly black shadow scuttled after him across the sidewalk.
He made for the footbridge. When he was halfway across, something seared into the walkway 60 yards ahead of him and detonated it in a cloud of flames, the heat blasting his face. The midsection of the bridge fell away into the water, and as Bobcat stopped in his tracks, he felt his segment of it dip alarmingly beneath his feet.
The bird banked easily, swerving to face him. As big as a fighter plane, bristling with gun turrets and rocketry, it distorted the air into a blur beneath its thrusters.
“Where you gonna go, Bobcat? Where you gonna run to now, little bitch?”
“For God’s sake! She was just a... she was just a woman! You know what it was like!” he gibbered.
“Pray. Pray, you little bastard.”
“Sir, this is crazy! Think, think what you’re doing!”
“On your knees.”
Bobcat didn’t hesitate. He sank, and raised his hands. “Stop! Think about this!”
The chain gun hanging from beneath the nose-cone began to turn; Bobcat knew right then that Wraith’s finger was jammed down hard on the trigger, and that lead would start spewing out presently. If any of it hit Bobcat around the centre of the body, he’d be ripped apart. All it took was a second to turn you from something into nothing, into a number flashing onscreen.
“Please! God, please no!”
The guns stopped turning. Then the whining thrusters cut out, and the bird simply dropped from the sky. The frowning nose cone clipped the lip of the wrecked bridge and flipped the drone over before it hit the water in a massive white gout. Then it was gone.
Bobcat sagged flat out, breathing hard. In the distance, people kept screaming.
The Big Chief had an Iron Eagle badge in the centre of his cap. Bobcat wondered if he could put a shot in the centre of it from a mile away, and decided he probably could.
“I’m sorry, son. Looks like we misread the situation.”
Bobcat nodded. “What happened to Wraith?”
“The Sergeant Major’s now in custody. Thank God we got to him in time. It seems, he, ah, had more of an attachment to the journalist than we thought.”
“He said they were married.”
“What? Oh. Well, we’re not sure that’s the case. You can’t get married without our permission.”
Bobcat snickered.
“So, in light of today’s events, we’re going to give you some fishing leave.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It looks like we may have to suspend the Eagle programme for now. Damned politicians are asking questions, now. The shitheels ones, backbenchers. They’re always the worst. Damned do-gooders.”
“But first you’re going to have to come with us,” the Military Policeman said.
Bobcat nodded. “Of course.”
“Just to answer a few questions,” the Big Chief said. “To talk about your operational decisions.”
“Nothing formal, just routine,” said the Military Policeman.
“Absolutely,” Bobcat said.
The Big Chief nodded, and the military policeman stood up. Bobcat stood up too, and saluted, before the Military Policeman led him away.
Swearwords: A few mild ones.
Description: In times of war, technology evolves. The same is not true for those squeezing the triggers.
_____________________________________________________________________
Airman Bobcat pushed the bird through the hills and valleys in a thrilling burst of speed. Although the sense of acceleration was an illusion, his stomach begged to differ; as the butterflies beat their wings within, he tightened his grip on the stick and focused on the red crosshairs in the centre of the screen.
Sergeant Major Wraith sat beside him, a big man with his very flesh draped over the arms of the instructor’s chair like a wet towel. “Okay, kid,” he drawled, “now you’ll see what the bird can do.”
Bobcat blinked as the landscape scrolled past. It was projected all around them on a horseshoe-shaped screen that ran from floor to ceiling, a perfect facsimile of light, sound and space. The sense of immersion in the environment as it closed around them like a fist took a while to get used to. Lots of Eaglets dropped out at this stage because they had to ralph.
As the target got closer, Bobcat eased up on the stick and dropped to cruising speed. A flock of birds burst out of cloud cover to port, white-feathered arrows banking away from the drone. Bobcat gripped the gun dials and zeroed the target in on them.
“Whoa there!” Wraith chuckled. “The doves are non-hostiles, usually.”
Bobcat relaxed. “Just testing the old reflexes, sir.”
“I think you’d have got a couple, too, you sly little bastard.”
I’d have got them all, Bobcat thought. But he said: “Do you ever get birdstrike out on missions?”
“Sometimes. It’s never a problem, though. Drones are different from jets – no propellers, no compressed air inside to worry about... Just pure death in a tin.” Wraith made a fist like a lump of processed ham and struck Bobcat on the shoulder with it. “Yeah?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Damn right.”
They banked through the valley and soon the target approached – a white Spanish-style villa, red tiling, bougainvilleas in the courtyard, utterly incongruous to the hills-and-lakes setting.
“You have your orders, lieutenant.”
Bobcat put a lock on the villa, outlining the entire structure in yellow. He was about to make an aside about Spanish villas failing to master the art of camouflage when a puff of smoke flared up on a nearby hillside.
“Incoming,” he yelled, and triggered the chaff. On-screen, white sparks flew out to meet the incoming twister like death rays in an ancient sci-fi movie. The plume of smoke twisted to meet these stroboscopic flickers; Bobcat triggered a burst and detonated the missile in a gaudy yellow blast.
Bobcat’s motion-simulator chair shuddered at this eruption. Banking to starboard, he zoomed in on heat-traces showing on the mountainside – one of which was packing hardware. “Engaging hostiles.”
Once he’d locked onto the struggling figure with the RPG, he obliterated it with two rounds.
“Nice work. Proceed with primary target, lieutenant.”
Bobcat centred the crosshairs on the villa and fired. The image monochromed for a second as both hi-ex cannons exploded into life, and the chair gave a satisfying shudder in time to the recoil. In one moment of fire, smoke and ruin, the villa went from an ordered shape, a fixed entity on the ground, to chaos.
“Cease fire,” Wraith said.
Flames surged over the wreckage of the house. “Target destroyed,” Bobcat said, trying to control his breathing.
“Negative, airman. Two more hostiles on the ground.”
Bobcat frowned; he’d seen no-one as yet, and certainly no real person would have had time to escape the strafing. But sure enough, on the thermoscope, two survivors crawled out - tell-tale heat-trace blotches spattering the ground in gaudy teardrops.
“Switching to photo-real.”
On screen, picked out in pixel-perfect clarity, were a man and a child. They were both on their knees and waving up at the drone as it banked, the targeting cursor resting between them. Even from this distance, Bobcat could make out the shape of the child’s mouth, the framing of the sounds: “No. Stop.” Part of her hair and clothes had been burned off and her back and shoulders were charred.
Bobcat raised an eyebrow. “Potential prisoners?”
“No. You have your orders, airman.”
Bobcat lit them both up. They turned from people to red and black puffs on the valley floor.
“All targets destroyed.”
Wraith’s face relaxed, multiple chins sagging. “Good shootin’, lieutenant. We’ll take the bird home now.”
Bobcat smiled as he spun the image on the simulator around, leaving the flaming ruin behind them. In a test situation, he’d expected a little surprise somewhere along the way. As missile strikes were a drone pilot’s most feared outcome, it had been obvious what the problem would be. He’d taken it on and toppled it, though. He’d read his notes.
Wraith grinned and tossed the report card onto the table top. “Failed,” he said.
Bobcat felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, sir?”
“Failed. You failed.” His commanding officer gritted his yellowed teeth.
It was no joke; the report bore a rude, red, circled F. “Permission to ask for your reasoning, sir?”
“Granted. You’re shit.” Wraith examined his nails. “Actually, no, I’m joking. You did alright. Better than anyone else who ever came through drone school. But you made a couple of classic goofs. First of all, you failed to carry out an initial scan of the valley.”
“I would assume the onboard scanners would pick up any traces of hostiles loading rocket launchers in the open.”
“Oh, you ‘assumed’? Well, that explains everything. You ‘assume’ nothing in a combat situation; you always run a scan or get the intel before you start shootin’. What happens when you’re out on a mission and the fire comes from close quarters, and you’ve wrecked a forty million dollar bird?” – here Wraith’s voice went high and girlish – “‘Oh, sir, sir, what can I say? What shall I do? We haven’t carried out a scan!’”
“Understood, sir.”
“But the second goof... now, that one got me interested, boy. Oh yeah.” He began to chuckle. “You hesitated. Your orders were quite clear; engage and destroy the target, and any hostiles you encounter on the premises.”
“I thought it prudent to cross-check with my commanding officer, sir.”
“Why? Because it was a widdle girly-poo? Were you all concerned for humanity?” Wraith knuckled mock tears away from his eyes.
Bobcat waited, tense. An F could be disastrous; his practicals had been superb but his theory work was patchy. Anyone who didn’t get at least a B grade overall had to resit – and an F would pull him below that threshold.
“I was distracted by the little girl, sir.”
“Humanitarian, huh?” Wraith’s voice grew to a roar. “Well, let me tell you about little girls in the field. The enemy are even now training little girls to shoot at us – to shoot at our men – in combat. Children are recruited from when they’re old enough to walk and talk, and their purpose in life is to kill us. They hide weapons, they plant IEDs and they even blow themselves up. So, even if it’s little girls, cute doggies or old ladies, if your instructions are to wipe everyone out, you wipe everyone out. Is that clear?”
“Crystal clear, sir.”
“Okay.” Wraith’s demeanour softened. “Now for the good news. You didn’t fail it as hard as some I could mention. Some kids just don’t want to take the shot, when they see the little girl. Some bastards even got the nerve to argue with me. They refuse point blank to shoot the kid. But you didn’t. You turned her into sushi when I asked you to. And that, amigo, I like very much.” He took up the report, scored out the F and replaced it with a C.
Bobcat’s heart thudded.
“So that’s why I’m changing my mind. I’m going to pass you. And believe me, hardly anybody passes my school their first time. Congratulations, son. You’ve got your wings. You’re an Eagle. Welcome to the top one percent.” He extended a warm, sweaty hand across the table.
“Sir!” Bobcat pumped it hard, feeling tears prick his eyes.
Wraith winked. “And the pay isn’t too bad, either.”
“Not to mention the pass to the mess, sir.”
“The mess! What a splendid idea!” Wraith grinned and slapped Bobcat on the back. On his skin, he knew, a red hand was burning.
The Eagles had their own roped-off section at the back of the mess hall. By the time Bobcat manoeuvred a couple of drinks back from the bar, the girls were already waiting for him. Kittyhawkes, they were called, organised into their own web presence and networking tools, boasting their pecking orders and high scores.
A skinny Japanese girl with severely shorn hair perched on Wraith’s lap. She had long limbs and small breasts, with everything in proportion. The girl twirled her fingers through Wraith’s beard, ploughing slow furrows along the matted curls.
“Hey, here he is. The new man,” Wraith said. “Airman Bobcat.”
“Pleased to meet you ma’am,” Bobcat said, taking a seat.
“Hello... Bobcat? Did you just say Bobcat?” She turned to Wraith. “That’s the best name you could find to give your new man? I don’t think he’s a Bobcat.” She checked him over, a frosty appraisal. A dominant, Bobcat decided. She would have to be, to target that bucket of lard.
“Ah. There’s a story behind that one, darlin’,” Wraith said, shifting her weight over to his other knee. “It’s to do with how his head moved on day one of training. He followed every manoeuvre like he was actually flying a plane. Bobbing up and down, darting around. So I christened him: Bobcat.”
“And the rest is history,” Bobcat said, passing a drink to his CO. “And, may I ask your name, ma’am?”
“I’m Kyrie,” she said, presenting Bobcat a dainty hand. “Mrs Wraith.”
“Honoured.”
“Yeah, emphasis on the ‘Mrs’ part,” Wraith growled. “But don’t worry, Airman. I think you’ll get to meet some of the talent that this regiment attracts.” Wraith’s arms seemed to bunch up as he squeezed his wife, jiggling hams sheathed in pure fat. Who in hell named you Wraith? he thought.
But Bobcat smiled pleasantly and raised his glass. “Here’s to the regiment.”
“The regiment.” They clinked glasses. Kyrie winked at him.
Before Bobcat laid the glass back down on the table, something small, well-built and blonde slid into the seat next to him. “Hi there,” she whispered. “I’m Serena. I’m so pleased to meet you.”
On his first morning taking a real bird in the air, Bobcat sweated freely. The mission was causing him more anxiety than he’d expected, and the babel of voices sounding in his helmet from around the command centre hardly helped. The crew were long established, with an easy, gruff banter that made Bobcat feel like exactly what he was; the new kid in class.
“Scan the bridge,” Wraith barked at him.
“The bridge, sir?” Bobcat blinked.
“Intel mentions a transit of arms, making its way over to the west side this morning. It has to come over that bridge.”
“Copy that.”
Bobcat’s bird hovered about half a mile above ground, surveying pedestrians as they made their way to work. It was morning over there, and men, women and children crowded over the walkway as the sun rose. Thanks to the morning light it made a lovely scene, despite the ingrained impression of dirty heat desert cities always gave off. There was no sign of anyone Bobcat would immediately have picked out as a target; lots of burqa-clad women, plenty of children on bicycles.
He flicked a switch on the stick and the bodies crossing the bridge pulsed all the colours of the rainbow as various checks were carried out; heat, metal detection, trace scans for explosives. People were broken down to their constituent parts in the cool glare of the sensors, stripped naked; water, skin, hair, fat and bone were separated out from the whole and sifted out, all components accounted for.
Two women in burqas triggered an alarm. One carried a laundry basket on her head. Outwardly, she was a flapping shape covered in black cloth from head to foot, save for her eyes. But according to the scanners, beneath a pile of laundry inside the basket and strapped to her body were enough plastic explosives to bring down the bridge and vaporise most of the people within a 20ft radius. Her companion, a slender girl of no more than sixteen to go by the shape of her body on the scanner, was similarly wired.
“Targets acquired,” Bobcat said, his voice husky.
“Engage,” Wraith said. “Low calibre cannons only. Avoid the fireworks if you can.”
“There is a risk of destroying the bridge.”
Wraith grunted. “Duly noted, Airman. Try not to do that, if you would.”
Bobcat flicked the set-up from heat-trace to photo-real, and the cursor bore down on the two women. Now it was just a simple matter of pulling the trigger.
He might have made this shot a million times before as a Gamer; this, then, would have made it a million and one. He fired, the stick shuddering once. After a brief delay, a round passed through the face of the woman carrying the basket. Her head disappeared and the basket fell, the laundry inside spooling out like a string of guts. The traffic on the rest of the bridge kept moving, but the pedestrians nearby froze, gaping at the sight of the woman’s body lying flat on its back, hands reposed almost serenely on a generous belly. Then they drew back, screamed silently and ran. The horror of some of their faces, turned towards the destroyer in the sky, was clear even from that distance.
A thrill ran through Bobcat’s very blood even as he targeted the second woman, the girl. She reached under her cloak and Bobcat understood what she meant to do, even as he triggered another round. The right arm was jerked away from the shoulder at high speed, like a speeded-up pratfall in a silent movie. The girl was blown back several feet by the shot; cars swerved out of the way and shuddered into each other as she rolled over and over. At last, the girl sat upright, dazed, blood erupting from the empty shoulder socket. Even with no distractions and a static target, it was a difficult shot to take off the second arm. But Bobcat made it.
“Damn,” someone said, breaking the silence.
“Targets down,” Bobcat said. “Request ground team to sweep up the survivor. She may have intel.”
Wraith tittered. “Target number two’s got about ten seconds left to enjoy being a survivor, Airman. But that’s good shooting.”
“Holy Jesus. Did you see that?” someone else said.
“Hard core, Bobcat. Hard core.”
Bobcat surveyed the kill zone, allowing the target to hover over the dead women like an insect drawn by the blood stink. There could be hostiles around who might attempt to trigger the explosives, and there was always a chance of remote detonation. But every pedestrian nearby had fled, leaving only the swirling dust and the buzzing horns of a few distant drivers. And the bodies, of course.
Bobcat’s hands filled with drinks for most of the night. He was still half-high, half-sick, after his first day’s play, but the other Eagles’ fraternal encouragement stopped him from thinking too hard about it. Even the ones who’d been most wary of the new boy now wanted to know who he was.
“This guy,” Wraith said, stabbing a finger at his protégé, “took a shot I’ve never seen done before out of a sim. Even then, it was never so clean. One shot, one bad guy down. Boom!” He tapped the same finger against his forehead.
A bad girl, Bobcat thought. Not a bad guy.
“The arms, though,” one of the tech guys said. “Is it true about the arms?”
“Course it’s true. Two shots, two arms off. It was surgical! All hail doctor Bobcat.”
Kyrie slid over beside Bobcat while her man mimed and raved, watching him with the cool detachment of a cat perched on a fence. She flicked the Airman’s ear at one point. If this bothered Wraith, he didn’t show it.
“How many heads are you going to take off tomorrow?” she asked him.
“Two or three. Just for you. How about that?”
Another girl slid in at his other side. “Hi, I’m Natasha,” she said. “Are you Airman Bobcat?”
A blood-red “2” nestled in the bottom left hand corner of his screen at the start of the next mission.
“Techs, that number’s bothering me,” Bobcat said. “Can we rub it out?”
“Roger, Bobcat.” The number faded away.
“There’s a bus taking several insurgents to a seminar meeting south-by-south-east,” Wraith said. “Co-ordinates to follow.”
Bobcat guided the bird low over a dune, enjoying the emptiness but kind of hoping for a patch of water to break up all that sand. He was very close to glimpsing a more detailed shadow of the war machine against the desert floor as it zoomed overhead, a flitting, jagged black thing soaring over the undulating yellow sea.
“I’m on it, sir.”
The minibus looked at least 15 years old. Its livery was some cartoon character Bobcat didn’t recognise, a very crude outline of a palomino horse striding on two legs beneath the windows. Everything about the composition of the figure was somehow wrong, from the size and shape of the eyes to the uneven nostrils and the strangely repellent cherry red tongue. There were a lot of people inside; several hands banged the windows, and faces pressed against the glass here and there, fingers mussing away the condensation. He could not be sure if they were children or not.
“We’re shooting,” Wraith barked in his earpiece. “Shoot. Go.”
So he shot; the goofy palomino frowned and imploded as he raked the side of the bus with explosive shells. It cracked open like potted pork and bits and pieces fell out, burning.
“Leave no survivors,” Wraith said. “Every single person on that bus intended harm. Leave none of them behind.”
There were no survivors. In the heat-trace setting the bus flared pure white with scarlet and yellow bordering. Some other red and yellow splodges littered the cracked paving all around the wreck, but they weren’t moving and if there was anything human in them, Bobcat couldn’t make it out.
The red counter reappeared, and racked up again. He was up to 26 now. Day two on the job.
Bobcat slammed the empty glass down on the tabletop. “What I don’t understand is – why can’t we see the drones? I really want to see what the birds look like.”
“Oh, I’d love to see what they look like, too,” said Deidre or Samantha.
“Good reason for that, numbnuts,” Wraith slurred. “The enemy would love to see what they look like, too.”
Bobcat frowned, and began to think he might vomit. “Surely the enemy has pictures anyway? Why the secrecy?”
Wraith growled: “Pictures, but not the fine details. Not how they work. Not how the working parts fit together.” He clapped a sweaty spade over his girlfriend’s hands. Kyrie’d been nursing a drink all night, hardly interacting with the usual crowd. “We never know who’s attached to the regiment, do we honey?”
“There’s all kinds attached to this regiment,” Kyrie said. She gave Bobcat a wicked smile.
“We can’t have the drones compromised,” Wraith said, suddenly morose. “We can’t. The thing you got to understand, Bobcat... We’re not invaders. We’re guardians, man. We’re the sentinels. We stay here and watch over everyone. Everyone free, anyway. We’re keeping the rest of the world safe by sweeping up that one little part of it.”
“You sound like cleaners, not warriors, honey,” Kyrie said.
“Oh. You should know better.” Wraith got up, casting shadows of different colours in the neon light, great pink and blue and yellow blobs blotched across the white surface of the tables. “I’m gonna get another drink.”
“Don’t drown,” Kyrie said.
“Do not step on my toes, woman. I’ll have you escorted out.”
He weaved out into the path of a soldier in full uniform. Wraith was a big guy, but the soldier had a good three or four inches on him in height. He was a boy, maybe 21 at most, with the wiry physique of a combat soldier. But he couldn’t quite dodge out of Wraith’s way, and he spilled some of the drinks on his tray as they collided.
“God... damn, boy!” Wraith bellowed, even though the drinks hadn’t touched him.
“I’m terribly sorry, sir,” the soldier said, jaw dropping open once he recognised the face quivering in front of him.
“Sorry, huh? I’ll give you sorry, bitch.” Wraith slapped the entire tray of drinks out of the soldier’s hands, scattering them in a coruscating shower. “You sorry now?”
The soldier gulped. “I am sorry, sir.”
“Not sorry enough. Pick that shit up.”
“Yes sir.”
“And while you’re at it, you can buy drinks for the people you disturbed at my table.”
“Of course, sir. Would be my pleasure.” The soldier’s buttocks bobbled as he clawed up the still-rolling glasses.
“Cleaner?” Wraith snorted over at Kyrie. “There’s your cleaner, honey. Right there.”
Her body surprised him; it was hard, honed, the product of long hours at the gym. Another surprise was that Kyrie’s breasts were bigger than he’d supposed, and her breath whistled through her nose in quick, startled gasps as he kissed the length of her neck from shoulder to ear.
“I’m in charge,” she whispered. “I give the orders. I’m in control. You need to remember this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You won’t have another woman like me.”
Bobcat did not doubt her.
On the morning he broke Wraith’s record, Bobcat began his sortie by pushing the bird through the mountains on the way to some suspicious activity in one of the northern cities. There was something hypnotic in the way the landscape rolled out; in the way the sun would sometimes flare up in the dead centre of the target, so bright – even through the filter – that Bobcat actually believed he was looking directly into it, instead of a weave of pixels.
“Naughty boys and girls, Bobcat. Two clicks away. Just south of a schoolyard.” Wraith snickered. “The school of the Holy Redeemer, would you believe.”
“Roger that.”
The usual nightmare of skank housing and festering refuse scrolled across the screen as Bobcat eased down into the town. Soon he zeroed in on a cluster of figures crouched behind a wall.
“These the targets, sir?”
“Affirmative. According to our intel, one of them’s a little bomb-maker. Do not engage until the order is given, Bobcat.”
Bobcat swallowed. “Copy that.”
It was clear from their size relative to the odd parked car and crazily-angled telephone poles that the figures swarming over the ground were just children. Their shadows were short in the midday sun; according to the dials it was almost ninety degrees down there, and getting warmer. Boys and girls; little Christians, going by the bare legs and faces of the girls. A crowd of them gathered round one child in particular.
“They’re on the move.”
“Keep an eye on ‘em, Bobcat. We’re very curious.”
The bird took a broad circle overhead, about a mile and a half away from the targets. The image on screen turned very, very slowly, the targeting cursor winking in the exact centre of them.
The children gathered around some street furniture, close to the gates of the school. One child – a boy no more than ten years old, with bare feet and a white vest and shorts on – cradled something in his arms. It might be a kitten, Bobcat thought.
“Scanning the area. I don’t like the look of the kid dead centre.”
It wasn’t a kitten. Though it was hard to tell exactly what it might be, the sensor showed he was definitely cradling explosives. Not a large amount; it might even be fireworks.
“Sir, requesting an update from intel,” Bobcat said.
“Copy that, Bobcat. Stand by.”
There was great excitement among the children on the dusty road. It was difficult to tell what they were gathered around - perhaps a power junction or a telecoms interchange.
The smallest boy knelt down and began to fix something to one of the smaller structures.
Wraith said: “Intel’s given us a positive on what the little fucker’s carrying. It’s an explosive, alright. Military hardware. Okay, let’s go.”
“Engage?”
“Engage, Bobcat.”
“They don’t appear to be setting up anywhere near the school, sir.”
“No, but they could be setting up for when the school bus leaves. It’s a Christian school, Bobcat, and you know how our friends like those. We can’t have that.”
“Yes, sir. Firing.”
The delay between the sharp click of the trigger and the bullets striking home was short, but dreadful. The signals pinged into outer space, bounced off a satellite and struck home in the drone. Then the guns made their dread revolutions and the bullets would streak out, one after the other, and then, if you were in the centre of the target, you had perhaps half a second to live. It was a miracle of technology and human ingenuity, culminating in this whirling, spitting death scene that played out for Bobcat as he sat forward in his padded seat.
The boy simply vanished in a hail of dust and blood; at least two others went down in the same moment as the bullets unearthed clumps of poorly-laid asphalt. The other children froze and instinctively looked up into the sky; they might even have seen a distant flicker in the air before they, too, were cut down.
A single strafe was enough to account for most of them, and Bobcat hoped that the dust might never clear. That there would be no bodies to show for such a gaudy display of pyrotechnics, no body parts, and above all no faces.
But the smoke did clear. One child had been almost completely disarticulated, like a straw man plucked apart up by a gale; her head had fallen in such a way that it looked as if she had been buried up to her neck in dust. Several still lived, one of them crawling away towards the pavement where the boy had been attempting to set up the explosive device. Bobcat made his head and shoulders disappear. Then he dropped a little girl who had stood up, awash with blood.
In the far corner, the counter flashed up: 114. The figure had a flashing yellow border around it.
Applause filtered through Bobcat’s headset from the crew, distorted and cacophonous. “I never thought I’d see the day when my high score was beaten,” Wraith chuckled. “But you’re somethin’ else, Airman. Outstanding.”
The Big Chief came on. “This is why we only hire the best, Bobcat. And you’re one of the very best, son. Incredible shootin’.”
“Thank you, sir.” Bobcat palmed a tear from his eye as he spun the bird around and took it away from that place.
At the mess, Wraith brayed laughter. Foamy beer decorated the carpeted strands of his beard. “Turned out they were trying to blow up a fire hydrant! They wanted to get at the water, with the heat and all. But that didn’t make no difference to the Bobster.”
“Awesome,” Shirley said.
“Yeah. He Swiss-cheesed them. And you know what? He was right. You think that kid just found plastic explosives lying around in the street? Intel reckons he stole it off his daddy.” He clapped Bobcat on the shoulder. “It’s all good. There aren’t any collaterals in that shithole of a country, believe me. You’ve eliminated a couple of insurgents-in-waiting and saved us the bother of doing it later.”
Bobcat, eyes bloodshot, swayed in his seat. “How many more of them did I make today?”
“What? Hey, cheer up, son. You’re a killer. Always were, always will be. I’ll get you another. Come on, suck it up.” He lumbered off to the bar.
Kyrie said: “He’s right, you know. You should be proud of what you did today.”
She squeezed his thigh. “I’ll pin a medal on you tonight.”
Wraith sagged in his seat; maybe he had a slow puncture, Bobcat thought.
The Big Chief cleared his throat and tossed the newspaper onto the desktop. “Of course, we’re going to have to completely rethink our attitude to your, uh, female companions at the mess in future. They’re vetted, but it seems this one was particularly well covered.”
“It’s a mess,” Wraith sighed. “A total screw-up. I can’t believe...”
“It’s an unfortunate sign of these worrying times that the press aren’t onside.” The Big Chief sighed. “Those embed missions we give them just aren’t enough to keep them happy.”
“But we’ve got... work to do,” Wraith stammered. “We’ve barely scratched the surface over there. You’re not going to suspend us, sir, surely?”
“It won’t affect your operational status, sergeant. I understand, though, that she was more of a partner to you in particular. We’ll, uh, talk about this in private.”
“In particular?” Wraith frowned and looked around him, lumpen and puzzled as a felled heifer.
“Uh, Airman Bobcat? If you could leave us for a few moments?” The Big Chief nodded curtly.
Bobcat rose, saluted formally and strode out. He glanced at the newspaper on the Big Chief’s desk on the way to the door. There was the hideous headline that had gone viral online, the one that had optimised his name in search engines across the world; that had made him and his family a target for the enemy. “AIR FORCE IN SCHOOL MASSACRE OUTRAGE,” it said.
She’d even used “Kyrie Nakamoto” as the by-line.
Bobcat was aware he had a couple of tails; the service wasn’t very good at that sort of thing.
He didn’t mind. He wanted to get out of the uniform, head downtown and grab a cup of coffee. In his civvies, and with his growing paunch, no-one took him for one of the muscular soldiers who broke their pubs and nightclubs up every weekend.
He forced himself to read the newspaper at a coffee house, and was shocked to see his own picture inside – sat between two women, whose faces were blanked out, saluting the photographer with a full beer. One of them was clearly Kyrie, though.
Jolted by this, he paid up and left, heading down to the riverside.
The town had a financial centre, with one building covered in reflective glass that bulged and distorted the images of anyone who walked past. Bobcat was reflecting on how disturbing this sight was when he became aware of a strange buzzing, whining sound, increasing in pitch. A bulge seemed to grow at the top of the glass-fronted building, like a face glimpsed in a hall of mirrors.
Bobcat spun around. Hovering not forty feet above his head was a pale grey bird; its wings were spread out in a vague X-shape, mimicking the wingspan of an actual eagle. Bobcat wouldn’t have thought the designers would have been so literal, but there it was. Someone had even painted a face on the nosecone, where the cameras were probably situated; a great yellow beak and blazing eyes.
The loudspeaker burred out, shockingly loud: “You gonna run for me, Airman?”
Bobcat raised his hands, instinctively. “Wraith? Sir?”
The wings exploded and gunfire ripped across the windows of the building behind him. Glass erupted into the air, showering Bobcat and crashing against the road in massive sheets. Bobcat had fully intended to stand to attention in the hope that someone, somewhere, would pull the plug on this. But now his instincts kicked in, and he sprinted.
“That’s right,” Wraith bellowed. “You run along, now.”
He did run, aghast, legs pumping, lungs burning. Some of the other pedestrians screamed. One lady dropped two full bags of shopping and took off, comically slow in a pair of heels.
Gunfire ripped across the pavement as Bobcat weaved towards the town centre. Chunks of concrete and masonry erupted into the air and he jammed his eyes shut against a stinging dust cloud. His bowels loosened in one rude spasm, a nerve-quick response.
“No, not thataway,” Wraith blared.
Chest heaving, Bobcat turned to avoid the blistering torrent of fire and made for the bridge.
“That’s it,” Wraith said. “You keep going now. Almost there.”
What would I do? Bobcat thought. Get some lock-on, and sit back? Deploy a missile? If he dived into the river, Wraith would still get a fix on him. If he hid under the bridge, Wraith could bring it down in moments.
Cars swerved to avoid Bobcat as he ran blindly across the road. The gunfire had paused, and Bobcat considered pulling someone out of their car and using them as a shield. But the vehicles roared out of the way before he could get to one of the doors.
A spindly black shadow scuttled after him across the sidewalk.
He made for the footbridge. When he was halfway across, something seared into the walkway 60 yards ahead of him and detonated it in a cloud of flames, the heat blasting his face. The midsection of the bridge fell away into the water, and as Bobcat stopped in his tracks, he felt his segment of it dip alarmingly beneath his feet.
The bird banked easily, swerving to face him. As big as a fighter plane, bristling with gun turrets and rocketry, it distorted the air into a blur beneath its thrusters.
“Where you gonna go, Bobcat? Where you gonna run to now, little bitch?”
“For God’s sake! She was just a... she was just a woman! You know what it was like!” he gibbered.
“Pray. Pray, you little bastard.”
“Sir, this is crazy! Think, think what you’re doing!”
“On your knees.”
Bobcat didn’t hesitate. He sank, and raised his hands. “Stop! Think about this!”
The chain gun hanging from beneath the nose-cone began to turn; Bobcat knew right then that Wraith’s finger was jammed down hard on the trigger, and that lead would start spewing out presently. If any of it hit Bobcat around the centre of the body, he’d be ripped apart. All it took was a second to turn you from something into nothing, into a number flashing onscreen.
“Please! God, please no!”
The guns stopped turning. Then the whining thrusters cut out, and the bird simply dropped from the sky. The frowning nose cone clipped the lip of the wrecked bridge and flipped the drone over before it hit the water in a massive white gout. Then it was gone.
Bobcat sagged flat out, breathing hard. In the distance, people kept screaming.
The Big Chief had an Iron Eagle badge in the centre of his cap. Bobcat wondered if he could put a shot in the centre of it from a mile away, and decided he probably could.
“I’m sorry, son. Looks like we misread the situation.”
Bobcat nodded. “What happened to Wraith?”
“The Sergeant Major’s now in custody. Thank God we got to him in time. It seems, he, ah, had more of an attachment to the journalist than we thought.”
“He said they were married.”
“What? Oh. Well, we’re not sure that’s the case. You can’t get married without our permission.”
Bobcat snickered.
“So, in light of today’s events, we’re going to give you some fishing leave.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It looks like we may have to suspend the Eagle programme for now. Damned politicians are asking questions, now. The shitheels ones, backbenchers. They’re always the worst. Damned do-gooders.”
“But first you’re going to have to come with us,” the Military Policeman said.
Bobcat nodded. “Of course.”
“Just to answer a few questions,” the Big Chief said. “To talk about your operational decisions.”
“Nothing formal, just routine,” said the Military Policeman.
“Absolutely,” Bobcat said.
The Big Chief nodded, and the military policeman stood up. Bobcat stood up too, and saluted, before the Military Policeman led him away.
About the Author
Pat Black is a thirtysomething writer, journalist and bletherer, born and raised in Glasgow. He says he has made that difficult transition from aspiring novelist to failed novelist, although he has had a couple of short stories published. He’s the author of Snarl, a completed novel about a monster that tries to mount the Houses of Parliament. Holyrood emerges unscathed, for now.
If you enjoy Pat’s short stories, you’ll find a whole compendium of them – three dozen, in fact – in his Kindle collection, Suckerpunch, which can be downloaded at these links on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
If you enjoy Pat’s short stories, you’ll find a whole compendium of them – three dozen, in fact – in his Kindle collection, Suckerpunch, which can be downloaded at these links on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.