“But the Groundhog can’t fly. Anyway, UAVs are where it’s at if we want good jobs when we get home.”
Will’s platoon had been training an incoming unit to take its place — first the training exercises of two days before and now the mission to find a downed helicopter — and then he’d be leaving Polly with Nate and going home. Not that going home was without its complications.
Nate hoisted the computer pack and strapped it on while Will flipped a switch to activate the camera, which he could toggle between wide-angle and high-resolution zoom. When Nate said he was ready, Will tossed the Parakeet into the air as Nate manipulated the joystick and nudged the throttle with his thumb. The bird took off and the two men watched until it was only a tiny, glittering speck.
“Let’s roll,” said Will, climbing into a Humvee with the rest of his team.
He patted his thigh pocket. Through the heavy canvas fabric he could feel the flat photographs he carried with him along with a small jumble of other things. He had given the magnifying glass and Transformers robots to some local children, but he still had the razor blade in its paper wrapping. He still had the twist of sturdy wire, the extra paracord, and a tiny pair of pliers he had won off another soldier in a poker game.
“The girlfriends?” asked Nate.
Will smiled and said, “Yeah, man. They’re my COG.” But now that he was going home, his center of gravity didn’t feel quite so centered. For one thing, his parents had moved to California, and for another, he was feeling a little guilty about leading both Dylan and Tula on.
“I can’t believe you have two,” said Nate. “Anyone with two should be required to share.”
“Very funny,” said Will. “But I’ll let you look at the pictures later if you’re good.”
As they drove, Nate told a story about a soldier whose girlfriend had dumped him and asked him to send her picture back. “He didn’t want her to know how badly his feelings were hurt, so he collected all the pictures of women he could get his hands on from his friends — pictures of their girlfriends, of their wives and aunts and sisters — over fifty in all — and he sent them to his ex with a note that said, ‘I can’t remember which one you are, so please take your picture out and send the rest back.’”
“Ha, ha,” said Will. And then he said, “You can see the pictures, but you can’t have them.”
“My girlfriend didn’t dump me,” said Nate.
“That’s because you don’t have one.”
“Technicality,” said Nate. “Anyway, I’ve got Polly now.”
Will focused his binoculars. “The wind’s coming up,” he said. “That’s one of the things you’ve got to be careful about.” As soon as he said it, the Parakeet was dive-bombed by a giant hawk. They watched helplessly for a few seconds, and then the hawk flew off. “Hawks are another thing,” said Will.
“That was a close call,” said Nate. He allowed the Parakeet to fly ahead while Will scanned the sky with his field glasses and took readings on the wind. Their search sector extended west to a series of low hills, and beyond the hills to a road. Early that morning a helicopter had gone down, and the mission was to find it. What looked like a stretch of flat terrain could be seen on the portable monitor to be riddled with rocks and fissures, making the going too tough for the Groundhog, which would drive around and enter the search area from the north. Twenty minutes in, the screen showed a one-lane track winding between some boulders, so they steered along that until Nate zoomed in on what appeared to be a vehicle that had fallen into a shallow fissure.
“Is it one of ours?” asked the leader of the new team, whose name was Robbins.
“I’m guessing it is,” replied Will. “Hey, Nate. Get Polly to circle back around so we can take a better look.”
Nate manipulated the controller, and ten seconds later the screen was filled with a close-up of the vehicle, which seemed to be abandoned. Except for a helmet lying on the ground and a second set of tire tracks, there was no evidence of the people who must have left it there.
“What do you think it means?” asked Nate.
“I’m guessing it was part of the training exercise,” said Robbins.
Will hadn’t thought of this. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe it was.”
Together the team came up with reasons why the vehicle might be abandoned: (a) it was part of the training exercise; (b) it had broken down in the last few hours and been temporarily abandoned; (c) it was bait for unsuspecting soldiers who would approach to find it booby-trapped; and (d) it was bait and being covered by hostile snipers who were hidden somewhere nearby. Will remembered the answer elimination techniques. He remembered that sometimes there was only one correct answer and sometimes there was more than one. He remembered there was always one answer that seemed right but wasn’t, and that was the one they called the sucker choice.
“If it’s D,” said Nate, “Polly should be able to see the snipers.”
“Keep circling,” said Will. “She should be able to see the bomb too, if there is one.”
Nate worked the directional button and adjusted the resolution of the output. “If there’s a bomb, it’s hidden pretty well.”
“Could someone be hunkered down in that gully? Or hiding in those hills?”
“The hills are covered with boulders — someone could be hiding anywhere. But I guess we can confirm or eliminate answer A by radioing back to base,” said Robbins.
The radio operator spoke into his handset, but the line was filled with static and he couldn’t get through.
“We’re missing something,” said Will, aware of an unfamiliar shimmy in his belly. “It’s the helmet that bothers me. What’s that helmet doing there?”
“I’m thinking it was part of the training exercise,” said Robbins. “That’s the only way the helmet makes sense.”
“Try the radio again.”
Will followed Nate out of the vehicle for a better look. The sky was the color of metal. For some reason, he could feel ghosts all around him, and he wondered if they were real ghosts or only figments of his imagination. It was probably just the wind, which was blowing in gusts and eddies. He took the controller from Nate and brought Polly in low, but a crosscurrent pushed her off course. “The wind is Polly’s biggest thing,” he said. He struggled with the controls and was relieved when he got a visual — a bright spot against the ragged aluminum sky. “Okay, I see her now,” he said, but the wind was scuffing up dust, making visibility difficult, and he immediately lost sight of her again. “Hey, Nate,” he called out, “do you have a visual on Polly?”
The two men scanned the sky. Then they bent their heads over the computer screen to see what Polly was seeing, which would give them a clue to where she was. The feedback video bucked and whirled as Polly hit a trough and then settled as the stabilizing rotor took hold.
“Freeze that!” said Will when the output showed something moving in the distance, but the camera had already lost whatever it was.
“I sure wish we had one of those Groundhogs,” said Nate.
“Shit! Switch back to the wide-angle view.”
“No, wait,” said Nate. “Look at this.”
Now they could see the ravine on the screen, and the helmet, and the vehicle.
“Check the coordinates,” said Will, and Nate said, “It’s about half a klick north of our current position.”
Will tried to circle the Parakeet back over the ravine, but the wind was blowing in circles and swirls of dust obscured the view. A minute passed and then another. “Nothing,” said Will. “I don’t see a fucking thing.”
“Should we go and check out the vehicle ourselves?” asked Nate.
There were only two possible answers to the question. After the Turn of the Screw quiz, Mr. Quick had said the best answer was both, but that clearly wasn’t an option here. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wish the radio was working.”