Midnight Empire Read online

  Daniel didn’t know how to respond to this. Thankfully, Gray didn’t seem to be looking for a conversation.

  ‘Now, my ex-wife,’ he continued, ‘she lives with a retired literature professor on a ranch in Colorado, long span country, base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. So much space, she tells me; she’s never felt so alive. I say I know space. I’m a man with a blood respect for dimension, a person who believes in panorama.

  The contemplative calm of distance unyielding, she says. I say enjoy it. I tell her I’m becoming more and more nostalgic about space, about distance. These days I look at a landscape and I feel like it’s going missing. I feel affected by a tremendous awe and a need for consolation. I’d say I was getting older, but it’s not that. I know it’s not that for sure.’

  That night at the loft, home after a meal by himself, Daniel felt somehow a little desperate to talk to Hannah. Her mobile phone was off. He called the house but she did not pick up.

  The city lights were so bright he didn’t need to turn on the lights in the loft. From the window he saw a police car turn down his street, coasting, almost gliding, lamps on flash but slow as a ghost.

  She returned his call just before 9 p.m.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Alright,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At the loft.’

  A pause. Her voice felt already, what? Consoling?

  ‘Where are you?’ he ventured.

  ‘Home. I’ve just got home.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Thinking . . . I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking we need to spend some time apart,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a good time to do that with you in America and me here.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  She said, ‘Well, I’ve felt . . . I’ve been feeling a little down, a little depressed. I’m unhappy. I need something to change. That’s all. I’ve loved you for a long time.’

  Time. She’d said something like this to him once: that when you do not change you invite crisis, you tempt the world, and because you are meek, because you do not follow your dreams or your heart, the world has no cause for mercy—it has given fair warning.

  ‘If you love me,’ he said, ‘it’s not a matter of time.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ she replied. ‘I think of some couples, my parents for example. They’re together because they have been in love. Because they were once in love. And that’s fine. That’s their choice. But actually I wonder how happy my father might be if he was not with my mother, if he had ended his time with her some time ago.’

  ‘We aren’t your parents,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want this,’ he said.

  ‘I know it’s bad for you,’ she said. ‘But I want you to give the situation some thought. I want you to think about this and after thinking, if it’s possible, I’d like for this to be your decision too.’

  ‘It won’t be.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid that it is my choice, Daniel. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t see how I can be what is making you sad.’

  ‘Daniel.’ She sighed. ‘I feel like there is something I’m missing. Time is coming on and I’m realising that I haven’t got close to what I wanted life to be. I don’t think it’s too cruel now to say that I can’t find it with you. I’ve been thinking about this, and I don’t want to wait. I’ve stalled here. I’ve been waiting to go somewhere, to live something. You were the one who held us in this place and now you’ve gone away alone. Worse, you’re doing it out of some stupid sense of duty. Sorry, I’m getting angry now. It’s just . . .’ She paused. ‘Go on your adventure. Only don’t expect me to hang around.’

  ‘Hannah.’

  He thought about proclaiming that he loved her, insisting that she shouldn’t do this, asking her to use his time away to take a break without taking one. They’d just continue lockstep when he returned.

  But rather than say these things, he said something that wasn’t anything. He couldn’t remember later what it even was. She said she was going to go. He wanted to say something more but she’d hung up. The disconnect tone hummed. He sat on the bed looking quietly at the streets.

  The following afternoon he stood in a crowded briefing hut and was introduced to the team: four pilots and four operators from the 17th Reconnaissance; another man from the CIA, whose name was Wolfe. At the beginning of the briefing, Gray had Daniel stand at the front to explain the LinkLock system, how it would work and what it would do. Wolfe showed the most interest, asking whether it would affect their recording capabilities and how obvious its presence would be to anyone listening in the field. The pilots only wanted to know whether it could be turned off when it broke down, or, in other words, was there any danger it would lose them a plane.

  Afterwards, there was a quick outline of the sorties that would occur that night. Daniel gathered that sunrise in-theatre occurred about 6 p.m. Las Vegas time.

  Wolfe sat with Daniel to talk. He was Gray’s age or older, a soft-faced man, obviously unfit but with great, wide shoulders. He shook Daniel’s hand firmly. He wanted to be sure that Daniel was settling in. ‘You tell Gray if there’s anything you need,’ he said.

  ‘I will,’ Daniel replied.

  ‘Have you met Arthur Bradley?’

  ‘I know of him.’

  ‘I’m told it’s important, what your company has invented.’ He touched Daniel on the shoulder, friendly. ‘I’m told there are men at DARPA who would have killed just to have had the thought.’

  ‘It was a small team,’ said Daniel. ‘Two university professors who’d been thinking about it a long time.’

  ‘Always the best ideas,’ said Wolfe. ‘A man by himself in a room. Two people by themselves in a room. This is true, isn’t it? A steadfast relationship between good ideas and disconnection.’

  They stood outside. A slight wind swelled the heat of the day like the breath of a slow oven; no relief. The hills were gathering shadows. Wolfe’s phone rang in his pocket. He answered without speaking—simply held the handset to his ear.

  Gray gave Daniel the keys to a ‘blank’ Toyota sedan that had travelled only six hundred miles. He went to the base car park to collect it. He’d be driving on the wrong side of the road, so he spent time adjusting the mirrors, getting himself right. Then he drove slowly to the gate, slowed down further and wound down his window for the man who controlled the boom. ‘Thought you were going to hit that pole,’ said the man as the boom went up.

  Daniel hadn’t seen any pole. He couldn’t figure out whether or not the man was joking.

  On the fourth day, they brought him the communications system from a Reaper. They sat it at a workbench in the deep shadows of a hangar and showed him possible spaces where he could fit the LinkLock unit, where it could be connected. They gave him manuals and a terminal and said that a programmer would visit the next day.

  This was the kind of work Daniel enjoyed—order in the electronics, order in the cursor flash, the commands of the terminal, shared logics, shared literature, communal thought.

  Most of the drone’s inner parts were branded General Atomics of San Diego, California, the same name as on the pages of the manuals. There was a company history under Background Reading Part I. GA, it said, had been founded in 1955 in order to harness the power of nuclear technologies for the benefit of mankind. The first of its projects had been called Orion, spacecraft propelled by nuclear explosions. Then came various mergers, one with Gulf Oil, another with Royal Dutch Shell. Precisely how the company transitioned from nuclear power to unmanned aerial drones was not explained, except to say that General Atomics was now the world’s biggest manufacturer of unmanned aircraft, delivering the Predator (MQ-1), Predator B Reaper (MQ-9), the Gray Eagle (MQ-1C) and soon the Predator C Avenger.

  It took him all morning to learn what he wanted from the manuals. He decided to install the unit in a space called Ancillary 3, which, with the corr
ect selection of plastic runner, was of a suitable size. GA, it seemed, had foresight; as he’d hoped, he discovered in the literature the existence of a generic driver for encryption devices that adhered to the correct standard, albeit with certain exceptions and unsupported functions. He read the driver’s specifications, compared it to LinkLock’s own interface. It seemed as if it should work. He booted the system, first without the device and then with. He assigned the driver to Ancillary 3 and found, to his satisfaction, that the component’s feedback status read ‘[OK]’.

  Three hours later, he had the link up and was communicating with his system on the far side of the hangar. He’d run diagnostic tests, passed a series of simulated feeds across the link, and located one small problem, which didn’t seem to be a bug but an incorrectly set flag in GA’s code.

  The next day, he showed the flag to the GA programmer, a man with a lazy eye and some kind of disorder that prevented the hair on his head from growing in places. The man agreed to fix the error in the next general software update. In the interim, he would build an installable fix for the particular drones in which the LinkLock equipment would be inserted.

  Together, Daniel and the programmer created Standard Operating Procedure number 925A for loading LinkLock’s equipment into an MQ-9. This would be used by the air crews in the east.

  They ate lunch in the mess, food trays and the clamour of voices. The programmer said almost nothing; ate staring quietly into space. Daniel tried to imagine the life this man led outside the company, outside of systems and computers. Likely, he lived alone, not even a pet. Probably, he ate nothing but heavily processed foods, or, if and when he did cook, it would be the staples familiar from American television—meatloaf; macaroni and cheese. Daniel imagined that when he took his trash out, his bag was tiny in comparison to those of his neighbours, the families of San Diego. So he took it out under cover of darkness, or he stockpiled his rubbish until he had a bag the right size, or he disposed of old computing equipment, old modems, monitors and cases, put them in the trash when he knew that he shouldn’t, that it was environmentally bad. And then he worked all night on his hobbies, open-source development or the painting of Warhammer figurines, and after ten minutes’ masturbation he went to bed, hating either himself or the world, if not one then always the other, a man of scientific mind, alone and despairing.

  ‘Where do you live?’ Daniel asked.

  The programmer did not look up. ‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘Hotels or bases. This volume of work. The company has put my wife and me up the last three years straight.’

  Five days later the first LinkLock unit was installed by an air force technician into an MQ-9 at Bagram, Afghanistan. Wolfe and Gray came to watch the test flight. Daniel had placed a control unit in each ground station and wired them back to the central connector in the communications hut. Before the system was engaged, they watched the flight take off, fields and roads below, lieutenants Peach and Moore sitting ready to take the controls and, when the drone reached altitude, they switched it.

  ‘Ready,’ said Moore.

  Peach looked at Daniel. ‘Don’t lose this plane.’

  Daniel ran the procedure he’d worked out to check the status of Ancillary 3. Then he booted the encryption sub-system. When that worked and the drone’s feed was passing through it clear, he turned on the encryption itself. Every screen went blank but for only a moment, flashing back on with a kind of jerk, as if something had gone wrong in the video driver.

  The drone was still flying. Moore checked its status and tilted its attack with his controls.

  ‘So?’ asked Gray.

  ‘Working,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Get rid of whatever that was,’ said Wolfe. ‘That glitch.’

  Peach and Moore ran the drone for an hour, performed different manoeuvres, used the drone’s different eyes, starlight, infra-red, Daniel watching the link for errors, traffic below them and livestock and human forms.

  Eventually, Peach said, ‘Rock solid,’ and, a mile from Bagram, Daniel turned the encryption off, this time without any break in the feed.

  They passed control to the local crew and shut down the ground station, departing it together, the bright light and coloured ranges of Afghanistan contrasting with the darkness of the desert they were in.

  Multiple masters. That night, he worked in the communications hut, trying to understand what had caused the glitch in the feed. The air in the hut was still. He worked with the logs and the feed. He went outside now and again, stood in warm yellow light, dim at the borders of the base, black further out. Rubbed his eyes.

  He couldn’t figure it out. He didn’t know enough about video for one, and he couldn’t make the leap, couldn’t see any reason for the video system and the communication feed to interact.

  He stood outside, went back in, worked, came back out. He saw Gray and Wolfe leave Station 3 and cross the field towards the main buildings.

  Hours later, he sat on the chair in the hut, exhausted, unable to make a breakthrough.

  He knew it wasn’t what he should be doing—that there were likely rules against it. But he didn’t back himself to figure it out, not in time for the next flight. He took a USB stick from his pocket.

  The central server contained a storage system for the logs as well as a buffer to record the data from tests: the feeds that had passed through the server during flight. He copied these files to the USB, ready to send to LinkLock from his laptop at the Nexus.

  It was a bad look, blank screens. For the company, also for him. Taking the data was the right thing to do, Wolfe’s demand to get rid of the glitch ringing in his ears. Back in Canbrerra, the company would pull everyone in. Find the bug and issue him a fix in no time.

  It seemed that she was not going to answer his calls. He’d rung five, maybe six times in the last two days. Why wouldn’t she answer? He thought the only word for it was cruel—and he couldn’t believe that she’d do it.

  He’d been trying not to think about her. The fact that she’d sounded so foreign, so other during that call—was this something he was adding in hindsight, or had it been there at the time?

  He found it a little shocking, still, that she had ended them. It felt as if that shouldn’t be how it worked, that you just had to say it was done and it was done. He wondered if his coming here was, at heart, irrelevant. Only a catalyst. Had it merely hastened their conclusion, and that was all? He lay still and thought about this. Or he didn’t think about it but only felt it, looking out at the night.

  Eventually, he sat up. His personal phone and the BlackBerry they’d given him were both on the bedside table. The silence of the building seemed to goad him. There was some core to it, the sound of clear sound.

  He took out his phone’s SIM card and battery. Then he marched across the room and locked the objects in the safe.

  He was here now and, with what Hannah had chosen, he was forthwith unencumbered—adhering to the rule that you weren’t supposed to have girlfriends in war. And so be it, he thought. Rather than dwell on Hannah and what she’d decided, he’d instead put his shoulder to the wheel.

  3

  The inevitable secrets. He learned that the CIA controlled an irregular army in Afghanistan, a paramilitary force of three thousand men, mercenaries hand-picked by special recruiters and paid three hundred dollars a month. Some had once been fighters for the warlords, some were the relatives of the fighters and some, apparently, were just sixteen years old.

  He learned that this army was used to hunt members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, to mount the kind of surveillance that was impossible for Westerners, to hide beneath mountain peaks and along river beds carrying night scopes and laser designators.

  Some of the drone flights, he learned, were in support of these squads, hitting the targets they stalked with missiles out of the blue, exploding houses and trucks and sometimes lone men on the lips of ravines.

  There was a list known as JPEL, the Joint Prioritized Effects List, a kill-or-capture inventory
of al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders two thousand names long.

  When Afghanistan had been at war with the Soviets, the CIA had provided more than three thousand Stinger missiles to the mujahideen and the Afghan resistance, the deadliest anti-aircraft system ever created, used to blow up Russian helicopters and military planes. After the war, the agency realised that these missiles were the perfect terrorist weapon, a deadly stock of suitcase-sized 747-destructors in a country without a government ruled by warlords and opium producers and the dispossessed warriors of Islam.

  The US military had divided the world into kill boxes. These were gridded units of terrain that allowed for the rapid, organised deployment of multiple aircraft over enemy zones. The boxes over Afghanistan began with the call-sign Charlie Golf, and above them flew what Gray referred to as the vortex of death: aircraft circling at staggered altitudes—drones flying the first layer; F-18 strike fighters the second; a Nimrod for kill-box coordination and administration the third; then one or more stratotankers plying wide orbits at fifty thousand feet.

  There was a safe-flight corridor above Pakistan, a one-thousand-foot tube where coalition aeroplanes could fly freely into and out of theatre, busy as an LA freeway.

  The drones had cameras so accurate and GPS so precise that they could detect a beer bottle moved on a table while targeting the chair of its drinker.

  Around the clock, the drones of the 432nd flew over coalition supply roads, cataloguing disturbances in the dirt before offering the coordinates of the most suspicious shifts in desert soil to bomb disposal teams.

  Daniel learned that the act of bathing in a river, part of the martyrdom ritual of a suicide bomber, constituted legal evidence of hostile intent—do not wash if you don’t want to die.