As a kid, whenever Airman First Class Davenport got home from school, he’d throw his book bag on his bed and log into World Wide War. Sometimes to play, but often just to hang. He’d wander the war-torn streets of Berlin or Zombie Island till he found Jimmy or Frank or whoever was wasting Nazis or the undead or whatever and he’d join in as they chatted about girls or sports or whatever. His screen filled with a red splash when a head exploded: Good Shot! (swell of heroic music). Walking into a recruitment office after high school didn’t seem all that different from logging in, but if he’d known it would be like this, he never would have joined. The monitor before him now showed dark, cool forest. On the infrared monitor, the cabin it concealed appeared as a white stick-frame box with ghosts moving about inside. The joysticks he used to control the drone’s optics were a lot like the one he’d grown up playing with but instead of yakking with Jimmy and Frank, he sat beside his pilot, their station more like a flight simulator than game station with its industrial, 1990s’ computer-beige. At other stations in the darkened room sat other pairs of ‘airmen’—optic/sensor operators and pilots who never left the ground—controlling other drones flying in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bolivia, or Venezuela; or some, like him, in Paraguay. Entering for his shift, the rows of guys focused on computer screens always reminded him of a video arcade. Without the flashing colored lights. Without the music and game bells, whistles, or rumbles of video- game explosions. Silent. Stale stink of cigarettes. Mostly it was just dull, watching video screens that showed what the drone was looking at, and looking at, and looking at—hours of boredom—349 missions for his squadron alone—1,211 bad guys killed vs. 0 drone pilots. Who knew war could be so dull?
Weeks ago, they had identified one of the men inside the cabin as Ramon Urulio, a high-value target, with a bodyguard and chauffeur. They had kept him under surveillance, harvesting intel on his network. It was so odd to see him here away from civilians, though, that Davenport figured it must be the doing of cyber units in some other room, maybe here on base or on the other side of the planet. They’d hack into the databases of a bad guy to make his field units receive cases of tampons instead of ammunition; they’d impersonate a commander or mess with his GPS to send bad guys marching into a kill box where a drone team like his could take them out cleanly. Fish in a barrel. During training, a programmer had explained why the deadliest weapon in WWII had been the typewriter.
Now, out here away from civilians, it looked like this was the end of the road for Señor Urulio. Except just before they pulled the trigger, some fourth guy showed up. Back in that other room, analysts and their ‘typewriters’ would be going through the tetrabytes of algorithm output trying to sort out their best guesstimate as to who he was, applying filters to sift the metadata of the 20 million cellphones in use in Paraguay, trying to see if the phone carried by this guy matched patterns of terrorists or their couriers, or water-meter readers, tow-truck operators, or other ordinary joe-blows…. In the meantime, orders were to sit tight.
So Airman Davenport sat watching trees 5,600 miles away, the last of what was once a vast Paraguayan forest, he’d heard, switching between the visible and the infrared view. The four men inside the cabin appeared as white heat signatures: ghostly silhouettes moving around. Until they all decided to take a siesta.
Airman Davenport was afraid this would happen. Ramon Urulio always caught a few Zs, if he could, shuttling back and forth across the Bolivia–Paraguay border, smuggling intel to take back the Salar de Uyuni Salt Flat, which from the air looked like a vast sheet of ice—twice as large as Indiana, twice as flat, ten times as boring, its white, homogeneous glare hard on the eyes. At least he decided to take his siesta here—much better to be above the forest, or above the city, or any of the other places where Davenport had seen Urulio pound down beers with buddies; play soccer with his kids; get it on with his wife, their bodies writhing in ghost-like infrared as if they were already dead and having sex in the afterlife. Afterwards, she’d make them both a cup of maté—that tea-like stuff they all drank over there. Davenport knew, because the metal straws they used to drink it with glowed white hot in infrared.
In a way, he was going to miss the fucker….
But dang it, he had a lot to do today; and he knew he wouldn’t be allowed to leave until they got a Go or No Go. Five thousand six hundred miles away, as if they’d heard, the ghostly silhouettes began getting up. Putting on shoes. “Bad guys on the move!” he shouted, and his pilot began going through the ignition procedure to arm the missile. “Fire on my command,” came through their headphones: the voice of some CIA analyst or someone else taking control of the show just as the men emerged out into the yard of the house. “You got them?” the pilot asked, and Airman First Class Davenport answered “Affirmative,” zooming the camera onto the 4th man’s head. “Say, Cheese,” the pilot said, goosing the 1,000-horsepower engine of the drone, just to make a little noise that would sound to the men like a faint buzz high above, and Airman First Class Davenport caught the men perfectly, all looking up, their faces appearing as in a photo booth, searching.
Facial recognition would get a read if it could. He kept them in the cross hairs as the men began to run to their separate cars. Not fast enough to outrun the software that confirmed the ID of the fourth guy: grunt, i.e., no value.
“Count down: Three, two, one, fire.”
The pilot pressed the red button, and 5,600 miles away, the missile roared off its rails. Airman First Class Davenport kept the crosshairs on Ramon Urulio, the view from the eye in its nose a searingly fast zoom-in as it screeched at the men faster than the roar of its rocket—they’d never hear it—the two men grew larger on the video monitor at supersonic speed—bright as a nova, the infrared screen flared white. The visual monitor just showed roiling smoke. But as the smoke cleared, he could see a hole in the tree canopy, then the crater caused by the silent blast, still too hot to be anything but a white blur on the infrared. After a moment, they could see two bodies around a crater; they were also hot so glowed like the ghostly images they’d been a minute ago, only brighter. One was still alive, his legs missing, blood pumping out of the stumps, also white on the infrared monitor; white ink spilling everywhere.
“Splat,” said the safety observer from behind their chairs.
Airman First Class Davenport watched the white-hot blood go dark; he watched the bodies cool. Soon they were the same dull color as the jungle.
When his shift ended, he and his pilot turned over their seats to the next team. Then he emerged into the bright heat of the Nevada noon. Coming out of the control room in the middle of the day was always a little disorienting—like coming out of a darkened movie theater after a matinee into bright sunlight. He headed to pick up his daughter at her soccer practice. He was supposed to pick up some McDonald's on the way home, too.