“Okay,” he said. “It finishes at five, right?”
“Can you take Macy home, too? Emily just called to say she’ll be working late.”
He slowed at a stoplight. A truck drew up beside him, the sun flashing off its chrome fender. The sky above the road was a cyan blue. It was going to be a beautiful day. “Sure,” Daniel said. “Just text me their address.”
“Thanks,” Cathy said.
Daniel heard a muffled wail in the background. The clatter of a spoon falling. “Is she still not eating that?” he asked. But Cathy had already hung up.
Daniel’s operator, Maria, lived farther west, fifteen minutes closer to Creech. She shared a car with her husband, so on most shifts Daniel picked her up on the way in. At the end of their day he’d often drive her home, too. As she got into the Camry that morning, she was already talking, but not to Daniel.
“Waddya mean?” she said, her phone cradled under her neck as she pulled the door closed and reached for her seat belt. Daniel drove away from the kerb as she buckled up. “You tellin’ me that?” she continued, her Hispanic pitch nailing whoever was on the other end of the line. “You really tellin’ me that? Well, lemme tell you something, lady. That ain’t good enough. You hear me? I work, you know that? I work. Eight a.m. to six p.m.? What kinda window do you call that? D’mio! That ain’t no window, that is one mutha of a hole. Uh-uh. No way. So waddya goin’ do about it, eh?”
Daniel turned on the radio to try and tune out Maria’s conversation. Slim Whitman’s “My Heart Is Broken in Three” filled the car as they rose on the slip road to join 95 West. As they picked up the highway’s speed, Las Vegas fell away from them, reducing block by block from strip malls to suburbs, to half-built streets, to open desert, until all that was left were a few exploratory SUVs and a group of surveyors, their hard hats bright in the sun. When Maria eventually hung up she offered Daniel no more than an exasperated shake of her head in explanation. Turning to her window, she watched the desert scroll past, the cacti and shrubs, the tan hues of its sands. When they drove out here on earlier shifts, Daniel found this landscape beautiful, amber under a low sun, the smallest of stones bestowed with long shadows. But now, with the sun higher, the desert’s light was already flat and strong, its warmth matured into a threatening heat.
Daniel didn’t ask Maria about her phone call. He was grateful for her silence and he knew she’d feel the same — that she, too, needed this stretch of road uninterrupted by conversation. Driving westward on Highway 95, they had a chance to prepare; to begin their daily transition between the compartments of their lives. Later that day, when they’d drive the same road back east, it would be different. Then the car and the highway would become their decompression chamber. They’d talk, ask about each other’s families, tell jokes. But now Highway 95 was their road to war, and as such it demanded silence more than speech.
Daniel knew that people like Barbara saw this daily commute as the epitome of American cowardliness, the leading edge of a new era of asymmetrical warfare. Fighter pilots going to battle without having to fight, without risking anything more than a speeding ticket or a traffic accident. But it wasn’t that simple. War, as Daniel had learnt, was never simple.
It was true there were still days when he wished he was back in the cockpit 8,000 miles away, risking his life with the patrols on the ground rather than just watching them work. And it was also true he missed the flying itself. Not just the valour of it — the thread that unwound back to the code of medieval knights — but also the pure experience. The victory over gravity, the surge and press of an F-16’s afterburners, the delicate touch of such power, whole countries rushing under his wing. The smell of the plane’s metal, and the sound of it, straining at 60,000 feet. On his very first training flight Daniel had fallen in love with the sky up there, a treasure to be owned only by those anointed to fly at such height, such speed. The blue of glazed porcelain, their contrails like fine paint strokes across its finish.
It was a romance, he knew, but a powerful one. And it had, after all, been this romance that made him want to be a pilot in the first place. His grandfather had flown F-86s on the Yalu River in Korea. His stories of those days, illustrated by a handful of black-and-white photographs, had caught the imagination of the young Daniel. Tales of single combat against MiG pilots they never met or knew, but with whom they shared those skies like brothers. The silver flashes of a sortie returning, the roar of their accelerating engines each morning. The beautiful routine of hunting, together and alone, in foreign cloudless skies.
It was his grandfather’s stories, as much as his family or the troops on the ground, that Daniel was increasingly trying to protect when he piloted a Reaper or a Predator from his screens in Creech. The inheritance of his grandfather and every other pilot who’d taken to the skies in combat. Because as well as being one of the country’s first Unmanned Aerial Vehicle pilots, Daniel would also be, he was sure, one of the last to have ever flown missions in a manned craft. Already the military was training young marines, eighteen, nineteen years old, who’d go into missions with no prior experience of aerial combat. The joystick he now handled through each shift had recently been remodelled on that of the Sony PlayStation. Daniel didn’t like it, but he knew it made sense. Without knowing it, under the eyes of their parents and siblings, America would train her future pilots in bedrooms and living rooms across the country. They would fight as if the world was a free-fire zone, cocooned within the hum of servers and computers, but never the sounds of the sky, of an engine’s torque, the wing’s strain, the purity of its thinning air.
For Daniel, who’d felt the tipping of a wing, who’d known the adrenaline of fear, it had become part of his duty to translate the essence of those manned decades into the control stations of Creech. The knowledge of being both the harbinger of death and its prey, of hearing the sound of your speed, of feeling, at one and the same time, vulnerable and invincible. A respect for the threat of the earth. A memory of air.
―
Thirty minutes after he’d reversed out of his drive in Centennial Hills, Daniel and Maria were pulling up outside the gates of Creech Air Force Base. As they waited for the guard to wave them forward, Daniel looked along the perimeter fence. Creech, it had to be said, still didn’t look like much of a base. Indian Springs, the town it edged, was small, only 1,500 people at most, but its outer streets drifted up to within touching distance of the highway at Creech’s border. Trailers and caravans, even an old Slipstream, all listed within sight of the huts and hangars inside the fence. When Daniel had first started there, over a year before the 432nd was officially reactivated, they’d had problems with local cats getting in, giving birth to litters of kittens in the garages. The only building next to the base was the Indian Springs Casino, a faded two-storey structure with a café, a handful of slot machines, and the Flying Aces Bar. After that, as far as Daniel knew it was just more desert, dotted by a few nature reserves, all the way to California and Yosemite National Park.
The guard called them forward, took the briefest of glances at their passes, then waved them through with a curt salute. He was one of the older guys, maybe stationed there since before the renaming. A veteran of the Gulf, perhaps. As Daniel drove through he wondered what he must think of them, arriving like this. Creech might not look like much of a base, but then he and Maria, in their sneakers, T-shirts, and shorts, well, they didn’t look much like a flying crew, either.
But they were. And this is what Barbara and their other detractors always forgot. They weren’t risking their lives when they flew. They weren’t exposed, physically, to the war. But that didn’t mean they weren’t exposed. There were still pressures, other risks, ones Daniel was only just coming to understand, the contours of his combat experience altering as fast as the technology he flew.