Wiping his palm on the sheet, Daniel reached out and laid a hand on Cathy’s shoulder. Her skin was smooth, warm under his touch. She didn’t stir. Judging from the light filtering through the shore pine outside their window it wasn’t even six o’clock yet. Daniel thought about waking her. Gently, with kisses, pressing himself against her from behind. Perhaps, after a night’s rest and with the girls still asleep, they’d be able to make love as they once had. He knew they needed it, to feel each other instinctively, without thought.
But he did nothing. The anxiety of his flashback was still active within him, its residue too unreliable, threatening like a faulty screen to flicker into life at any moment. So he just watched Cathy sleep instead, moving his hand up to stroke her hair where it flowed across the pillow.
Even with their recent troubles, this waking together still felt like a gift to Daniel. The knowledge that they’d be sharing the same bed that night, that they no longer had to worry about orders coming down the line, about watching the news with one eye on what it would mean for them in a couple months’ time. This was why they’d moved to Nevada. For this waking, this knowledge. To feel their future as firmly under their feet as their present. As soon as Daniel had learnt what they’d be doing at Creech, he’d put in for a transfer. He’d been on three tours since they’d got married. Two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. All three had been hard on Cathy and the girls. And, in a different way, on him, too. It was on those tours, in two-minute sat-phone conversations and jumpy Skype sessions, that Daniel had come to understand the value of his family. When he’d last returned from Afghanistan, Kayce, just six years old back then, had hugged him round the legs and asked him to promise he’d never leave like that again. Daniel told her he’d do what he could. Which, when he saw the email about Creech and the future reactivation of the 432nd, he did.
What they had planned for the 432nd at Creech seemed like the perfect answer to Kayce’s request: a chance for Daniel to have it all. To still be flying missions, to be doing his duty, but to be with his family too. To see his daughters grow, not across periods of months but over days, hours. To have this waking with Cathy, and know it wouldn’t be taken from them.
“Be careful what you ask for.” That’s what his mother used to say to him as a boy. When he’d wanted to play with his older brother’s football team. When he’d wanted a more powerful dirt bike. When he’d been picked for the college boxing squad. Maybe, if she’d been in Langley with him when he’d filed his transfer request to the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron, she’d have said the same again. And just as she had when he was a boy, she’d have been right to as well.
He and Cathy had tried talking about it a few nights before. They were sharing a drink on the deck while the girls did their homework, a bottle of Sonoma fumé blanc sweating crisply in the last of the sun.
“Not if you’re flying missions at the same time, Dan,” Cathy had said to him, looking down and shaking her head.
Daniel laughed, exasperated. He knew she was right, but he wasn’t going to admit it. Not after all they’d done to be here. Moving across the country, taking Kayce out of school. This was the best it could be, that’s what he wanted to say to her. She should be grateful, not resentful.
“C’mon,” he said. “Has it really been so bad?” He tried to keep his voice light. She looked up, as if she didn’t recognise him.
“Yes,” she said. “And it’s getting worse.”
He felt his chest tighten. He took a sip of his wine.
“You’re not sleeping,” she said. “And when you do, you talk, shout. And with the girls—”
“That was once,” Daniel snapped. He hadn’t meant to sound so sharp. “Once,” he said again, more softly.
―
There’d been a reason why he’d yelled at the girls like that. Why he’d done what he had to Kayce. There’d been a cause for his actions, but he hadn’t been able to tell Cathy what it was. He would never be able to tell her.
He’d just finished a shift at Creech. There’d been an engagement, one they’d been planning for weeks. The target was achieved, the missile had connected, but other aspects of the operation hadn’t gone well. At the last moment, with six seconds to impact, two boys riding a bicycle had come round the corner, one of them sitting on the handlebars, the other pedalling behind him.
Maria, his sensor operator, was sitting beside him. “Shit,” she’d said, when they’d come into view.
“Are those kids?” He’d heard his own question echo in his headphones. Elsewhere, in other darkened rooms in America, and 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan, other uniformed and suited men heard him, too.
“It’s too late,” Maria said.
Up to six seconds to impact, and she could still steer the targeting laser on to their abort location. Daniel glanced at the counter in the corner of his screen as it descended through four, three, two. He and Maria watched as the visuals across the monitors wiped white.
When the smoke and dust had cleared, Daniel circled the Predator while Maria zoomed in. The target’s car was a twisted and blackened wreck, flames licking at its frame. Twenty feet away the boys’ bicycle was also screwed out of shape, its front wheel still spinning. A severed leg, wearing a sandal, was trapped under it.
Daniel had typed a chat message to the intelligence coordinator: Possible child fatalities?
The reply had come back at the speed of speech: Two possible teenagers confirmed. Male.
An hour after that reply, Daniel was back home, sitting on the decking, watching Kayce and Sarah play in the garden. The coordinator’s possible teenagers had both been about Kayce’s height. She was nine years old. As he watched the girls they’d begun arguing, each of them pulling at the handlebars of a red bicycle. Daniel hadn’t meant to scare them. He hadn’t meant to scare himself. But it had been too much, too soon. The spinning wheel. That sandal.
―
Cathy leant forward, her glass of wine catching the light. A peach-white star flexed on the decking between them. She took a deep breath and exhaled it as a sigh.
“Is this about Barbara?” Daniel asked her.
“No,” she replied, shaking her head again and biting her lip. “You know it isn’t about her. I told you. We agree to disagree. That’s it.”
Barbara was another teacher at Cathy’s school, a high-end primary school in the west of the city. A couple of months ago, along with other members of the Nevada Desert Experience, she’d been arrested outside Creech. Daniel had seen the demonstration when he’d arrived for his morning shift. A small crowd strung out along the perimeter fence, their homemade banners breathing in the breeze: Not in Our Name! Say No to Drones! U.S. Air Force — Killing by Remote!
If Daniel had known Barbra was among them he’d have got out and tried to speak with her. Not to give her hell, but just to set her straight. He understood the origins of the group. Subterranean nuclear tests cracking the earth upwind of your homes, your kids’ schools. He’d have probably joined those demonstrations himself. But this was different. This was a different kind of war, and what they were pioneering at Creech wasn’t threatening anyone who lived nearby. It was, though, saving hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives elsewhere. Daniel was convinced of that. They had the figures, the projections, to prove it. And every month they received emails from grateful troops on the ground, thanking them for their work.