Drone

Pearce thought about her answer. He could put her in jail for twenty-five to life with that confession. The only problem was, Pearce hated drunk drivers, too.

“Did I pass your test, Mr. Pearce? Can we quit playing games now?”

“Still not interested.”

“Why? Because I hired a man to kill a drunk before he could kill somebody else’s husband and father? I’ve never talked about it because I didn’t want to go to jail. Calhoun’s been dead for years, so I don’t even know how you could have possibly found out. But if you’re asking me to apologize, I won’t.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m a businessman, not a therapist. I don’t do personal vendettas. It doesn’t fit the company mission statement.” Pearce stood to leave. “You need to find somebody else.”

“Sit down,” she said.

Pearce ignored her.

“Please.”

Pearce hesitated, his hand on the doorknob.

Baghdad, Iraq

August 21, 2005

“Dick holsters. All of ’em.”

Annie stood in front of Troy’s steel desk reading the airstrike request denial again. She gripped the paper so hard her hands trembled.

It was only the two of them in the spartan operations office that morning. Troy sat and listened to Annie rant, but he was focused on the ring in his pocket. He’d been carrying it for a week, waiting for just the right moment to ask her. Somehow that moment never seemed to arrive, today included.

IEDs had been cutting down American soldiers and Iraqi policemen for months now, and slaughtering innocent civilians, too. Instead of chasing the bombers, Annie decided it was smarter to find the source of the remote-controlled bombs.

Ba’athists and Iraqi insurgents—many of them former Revolutionary Guards—had enough technical know-how to set off crude timed charges. But the Iranians had been supplying IEDs with sophisticated timers and remote-control detonators, many of which, ironically, were manufactured in the United States and smuggled via Singapore into Iran. The Quds Force operators were also particularly adept at fashioning shaped-charge IEDs, the kind of munitions that could even punch holes through the thick steel hull of the mighty Abrams main battle tank.

Annie worked her sources hard for weeks even as she turned new ones, chasing leads on the IED suppliers. She favored the “aggressive” interrogation of captured insurgents and had been reprimanded twice for the physical harm she’d caused to those in her severe custody. She once even sifted bare-handed through the shredded remains of a dead insurgent after he accidentally detonated a device he was trying to set. But it was a piece of hard intel shared by a friend in Israel’s Mossad that finally pinpointed Baneh, Iran, as the target.

Annie’s request for a satellite redeploy over the city gave her superiors the visual confirmation they needed to order an airstrike. But the request for an airstrike was denied from higher up the chain of command. President Bush’s political opposition had drawn a line in the sand at the Iraq-Iran border. The Republicans were afraid they wouldn’t get the war they wanted so badly if they asked for a declaration of war; the Democrats were too afraid to oppose a war that had gained such widespread popularity among the public. A compromise was reached. The undeclared Iraq war could continue indefinitely, but Iran was strictly off-limits. Reelection was the driving reality of Washington politics.

The reality in Iraq, however, was that dozens of people were getting injured or killed by Iranian-built IEDs every day, and the severity and frequency of the attacks were increasing.

In Annie’s mind, the gutless politicians back home were just as guilty of the carnage as the Iraqi insurgents.

“They’re all dick holsters,” Annie grunted again. She crushed the paper into a hard little ball and threw it across the room.

“You’ve got to let it go, Annie,” Troy said.

“I can’t. You know that.”

“What else can we do?”

“We could go in ourselves.”

“We’d never get approval.”

“Who’s asking for permission?”

“No support? On a mission like this? Good chance of getting killed that way.”

“Maybe. But more of our people will get killed if we don’t. Guaranteed.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“Is that your head or your dick talking?”

“You mean my head or my heart?”

“Yeah, that, too.”

“Both,” Pearce said.

“Sorry. Pick one.”

“Okay. Heart.”

Annie dropped in Pearce’s lap. She pulled a handful of hair behind her ear. That was her tell. Pearce braced himself.

Annie’s bright eyes bore into his.

“Sorry, mister. Wrong answer. We didn’t come over here to go steady. We came here to win a war. Right?”

Pearce took a deep breath. Old ground.

“Right.”

She smiled. “Good boy.” She affirmed his answer by patting his broad chest with her hands. Felt something in one of his shirt pockets. It was the ring, of course. But this wasn’t the time.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

She started to say something but held her tongue.

Pearce thought about asking her what she was going to say, but he knew she wouldn’t answer. Her mind had already turned to the mission.