The force of his lunge sent him sprawling across the landing as Lucy’s torso, legs, and feet slipped out of sight below the top of the stairs. He saw nothing else, but he heard everything. The terrible thudding and knocking of her body and head, sudden and loud in the stilled house. And then, just as suddenly, nothing again.
Clutching at the carpet and calling her name, Michael dragged himself forward. But it was pointless. He looked over the top of the stairway and saw Lucy lying below him, head down in the crook of its turn. Her right arm was behind her back and her left leg was twisted awkwardly under her. Her eyes were closed. The striped pyjama top had ridden up in the fall, furling the boat’s sail and exposing her pale belly. From his prone position at the top of the stairs Michael stared down at that strip of plump flesh, the dimpled belly button, willing it to rise and fall with a breath. But it remained motionless, and so did Lucy.
CHAPTER TWELVE
FOR THE FIRST three days after he left Las Vegas, Daniel drove the Sonoma coastline, sleeping in his car and eating at roadside diners or crab shacks on the cliffs. Cathy hadn’t asked him to leave. But she hadn’t tried to stop him, either. Even if she had, Daniel would still have gone. He knew he had to.
As he’d driven 95 north and then west, past Creech and on towards Reno and Sacramento, Daniel had told himself this was no more than what he’d done when he used to go on tour: to Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan. Back then he’d left his family to keep them safe, and it was the same now. He hadn’t been sleeping, or when he did he dreamt in infrared, or night-vision black and green. He was becoming more erratic. He’d been drinking during the day. Twice in the last month the girls had found him crying on the decking out back. The dreams were getting worse. More frequent, but more varied, too. The motorcyclist had been joined by the two boys on the bicycle, by an old man walking along the other side of a wall, by a young marine straying from his patrol onto a mine. And now by her, too. No more than a blur of white in the back of the van, a brushstroke of silk. But enough.
They’d told him and Maria the following day. When they’d arrived at Creech for their evening shift, instead of going straight to the briefing room as usual, they’d been requested to go to another part of the base. The hut they were directed towards was on the far side of Creech from the ground control stations. Daniel had never been there before, and as a guard escorted them across the airfield, its yellow guidelines curving towards the runways, he knew something wasn’t right. Maria, too, looked uncomfortable. Neither of them spoke.
As they neared a long hut with no windows, Daniel looked through one of the hangars to their right. It was open at either end, silhouetting the domed heads and rotor blades of three Predators parked up at their stands. It was in one of those hangars Daniel had seen his first UAV, a Reaper Mark II. It had been on his first day at Creech, when he was still training. Their civilian instructor, an ex — fighter pilot called Riley, had stood before them, patting the Reaper’s flank. Daniel had been surprised at how large it was, twenty-seven feet from nose to tail. And how blind. No windows, no cockpit. Just a grey ball slung beneath its head, housing a Multi-Spectral Targeting System of cameras, sensors, lenses, and lasers. “Think of it as a giant bee, gentlemen,” Riley told them, pointing to the missile mounts under each wing. “A giant bee with one hell of a sting.”
The wing commander, Colonel Ellis, was waiting for them inside the hut. A civilian in a suit sat beside him. “This is Agent Munroe, CIA,” the colonel said. Agent Munroe nodded to them as Ellis, dismissing the guard, gestured for Daniel and Maria to sit down. Both men had open manila files before them. The colonel looked down at his sheaf of pages, lifting their corners to read.
The reports, Agent Munroe told them, were still coming in. But from what they knew so far, when the Intel patrol went in last night they’d found evidence of foreign nationals killed in the strike. “We also know,” he said with a small sigh, “that a British film crew, with a Swedish cameraman, have been missing from their accommodation in Islamabad for over twenty-four hours.” He spoke slowly, clearly, like a tired teacher.
He leant forward on the table between them. “Now, fuck knows how they got there, how the Pakistanis missed them, or what they were doing there. And fuck knows how we didn’t know about ’em either, but as you can see, Major McCullen, Senior Airman Rodriguez, from where we’re sitting, it doesn’t look too good. Not good at all.”
Agent Munroe questioned them for twenty minutes about the mission, flight conditions, the kill chain procedure, the weapons confirmations. Daniel knew he’d have already heard the mission tapes, and, no doubt, seen the chat-room conversations, too. As they’d answered his questions the colonel had looked on with a half-hidden expression of disgust. Not for them or for Agent Munroe, Daniel felt, but for the process as a whole.
At the end of his questions, Agent Munroe closed his file and reminded them both of mission confidentiality. He leant back in his chair. “I should tell you now,” he said, in a less formal tone. “That if this is what it seems, it’s going to get out there, at some point. We can exercise damage limitation to a degree, but only so far.” He looked at them both, one at a time. “So my advice,” he said, slipping the file into his briefcase, “is get ready for some turbulence.”
The colonel, taking his cue, gave them a curt nod. “That’ll be all for now,” he said. “Thank you, Major, Senior Airman.”
Maria and Daniel stood, saluted, and turned for the door. Before they reached it, Ellis spoke again. “Congratulations,” he said from behind them. “You did a good job yesterday.”
They turned to face him. He was standing, his shoulders square. “This is unfortunate,” he said, gesturing to Munroe. The colonel had close-cropped grey hair, the traces of a strong jaw beneath his jowls. “But you took out an important terrorist,” he continued, looking at them hard. “You upheld the American Airman’s Creed, and you should be damn proud of that. Don’t forget it.”
“Yessir,” they said in unison. “Thank you, sir.”
There was no guard outside the hut, so they walked back to the ground control stations alone. Daniel’s head was light. Maria was silent beside him. Eventually she spoke.
“There was no way to tell,” she said.
“I saw her,” Daniel replied. “In the van.”
“You saw something,” Maria corrected him. “You don’t know what it was.”
Daniel didn’t reply. The sun was setting, casting a pink light across the bare ranges of the surrounding hills.
“The screeners confirmed everything,” Maria said, as they approached the control station trailers. Her voice was hardening, as if in response to a silent accuser. “And the OB-4, too,” she added. “One of Munroe’s, I bet.”
―
Daniel told Cathy that night. He hadn’t wanted to, but he knew this time he had no choice. Agent Munroe was right. The story would break, and Daniel wanted Cathy to hear it from him before she saw it on CNN.
“A woman?” She’d looked away from him immediately, shaking her head, her mouth open. “A woman?” she’d asked again, as if willing his answer to change.
Daniel waited for her to say something else, or to look back at him, but she did neither. “Yes,” he said.
He wanted to say more. A woman, a child, a man. What difference did it make? They were innocent and they died, that was the horror of it. But it was a war. She knew it happened.