Friendly Fire

By Jeff Kohll

The War on Terror continues.
But not all the soldiers in it are entirely happy about it.
Meet Charlie. He sits every day in an air-conditioned box and pilots drones. Sometimes things get blown up, but it's not his problem. Or is it?
When he meets the Prophets of Loss, an edgy rock band opposed to Israeli aggression on moral grounds, Charlie's life takes a turn for the better. But the Prophets have enemies - powerful, dangerous enemies who don't mind some collateral damage of their own if it helps their cause.
The War on Terror might not be quite as far away as it seems after all...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Kohll
• Release date: Dec 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005639334

Jeff Kohll

Jeffrey Bruce Kohll is a British citizen living in Wales. He was born and grew up in South Africa, where he met his wife Myfanwy. The two of them moved to live in Britain shortly after, and settled in Wales. Jeff lives there still, in a fine two-storey house that he and Myfanwy built together. He has two sons, Oliver and Rowan, who live in Bristol and in China respectively. Jeff divides his time between making repairs to the house, spending time with friends, spending time with his cat Sophie, and writing. He is the author of four novels, which he hopes you enjoy!

Book preview

For Myf.

FRIENDLY FIRE

by

Jeff Kohll

This is a work of fiction. I have visited America only in my imagination. I have no idea whether the CIA operates a privatised drone outfit, but it suited the story and meant I didn't have to bone up on the real thing. My ignorance is infinite, but I've tried to keep my few facts accurate. Characters are made up. Don't be so egotistical my friends - it's not you they're based on.

FRIENDLY FIRE

1.

The war is lost, thought Charlie Culver. Most of the world's Muslims hate us. As a drone pilot I've seen some horrors. Last week there was this guy walking around near a Taliban hotspot with a rifle over his shoulder. I passed it up the line and got the OK within minutes. Standing orders say that armed personnel in a restricted zone are to be regarded as enemy combatants. I locked on and fired. He was literally blown to pieces. A bit of torso with one arm and a head attached cartwheeled through the dust. Among the debris thrown into the air was a lazily circling scythe… No-one came to his aid. The locals knew all about 'double tapping' of first responders. I circled above the scene until the army arrived and cordoned off the area. A small crowd had gathered at a safe distance and were silently yelling and shaking their fists. There was no sign of the rifle I knew I'd seen but someone would throw down a weapon to cover my ass (and, more importantly, the ass of my superior officer). An honest mistake. The resolution of the drone's camera is not all that it's cracked up to be and besides there was a lot of dust in the air. Another EKIA (Enemy Killed In Action) and a thousand more Taliban recruits created overnight. Another triumph for sigint. Surgical strike? Don't make me laugh.

Dr. Pepper is keen on compartmentalisation and detachment. We mustn't allow ourselves to get too involved. It's necessary to do our duty. Let's face it, these guys wouldn't hesitate to kill us if they could. A surgeon who allowed himself to feel the patient's pain couldn't operate and yet without the operation the patient would die. Meanwhile half the operators are off their heads on something or other. Urine samples are starting to cost.

'Othering' helps. How can you empathise with a superstitious peasant speaking some sort of gobbledygook and dressed in flapping rags? And when you are reliably informed that someone is the essence of evil and a terrorist dedicated to the downfall of the United States it's that much easier.

Unless it turns out that your informant has just been settling personal scores or taking your money for total fabrications. Remember 'Curveball' and the war in Iraq? How many innocent people wound up in Guantanamo for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time? The trouble with hating Afghans is that hours of surveillance give a feel for the country, for the slow rural rhythms, for the way the people meet and talk and walk.

It's more difficult if the dead and wounded are from our own side. When some kid who might've trained alongside side you at Fort Worth is lying there bleeding to death while you're completely useless seven thousand miles away, that's hard. Of course, there are pluses - if I find an IED buried in the road, say, or spot signs of an ambush or an armaments dump.

Once I had to take out a shed near an IED in case someone was hiding in there with a remote control for when an army patrol passed. Three casualties. EKIAs. Anyone in the area was assumed to be an enemy combatant unless posthumously exonerated.

I used to think I was tough until the day I swatted a fly and suddenly burst into tears. One minute it was a filthy, disease-ridden nuisance and the next I felt I'd destroyed a miracle of creation. From its multifaceted eyes to the veined transparency of its wings it was a beautiful and unbelievably intricate little life and I had crushed it.

Marteen's been great but it's been hard on her too. I can't get it up these days. When she opens her legs I just see a huge wound. Got her a vibrator, but that really pissed her off.

There's talk of a totally automated drone that could zap evildoers without human intervention. Most of the targeting's already done by algorithms. Would people need to watch? Or want to watch? What if the computer decided that the world's number one terrorist was our own president? If terrorism is the demoralisation of people for a political end, then simply flying weaponised drones over a country must qualify. I've seen people scatter in panic when they hear my Predator approach. Even when they don't run you can sense the fear and hatred. The way they look up and then slink into shelter. How'd you like these babies flying above you 24/7 able to kill or maim you at the touch of a button? Sweet dreams.

Course we do very little actual killing but we see plenty. And when we do fire there's that six-second pause while the signal travels from Nevada to Afghanistan. A lot can happen in those few seconds. The target might pass behind a rock, a carful of wedding guests might speed round the corner, an old man could wobble by on a bicycle. I once killed three camels and their driver who'd unexpectedly popped up out of a gully.

The War on Terror. As endless and futile as the War on Drugs. More heroin than ever is flooding out of Afghanistan. I know some of the guys are using – they're the sane ones. Most of the rest are spaced out on prescription drugs but not me, not yet. Everyone drinks much too much. In the old days a bunch of us used to drive out into the desert and party hard till dawn. Gang-bangs in the back of SUVs were not unheard of. We'd light a big fire and crank up the sound. Chuck had a quadrophonic setup which could shake the fillings out of your teeth. Marteen and I used to walk out into the desert to look at the stars. That circle of cars around the fire looked quite touching in the vast blackness – the doof doof doof of the bass was a puny defiance in the face of the universe.

God, I miss flying. The thrill of banking into a tight turn or shooting canyons or skimming mountaintops. Or that shove in the back that catapults you into the stratosphere. I've never seen combat. I was all set to ship out to Iraq when I pulled out of a steep dive and bumped my head. I thought the black veils in the corner of my eye were a migraine. By the time my detached retina had been welded back on, my sight was permanently impaired. My flying days were over.

Now I watch screens. I never saw action but at least I knew the excitement and fear of preparing to put your life on the line. And the group bonding – you could rely on your buddies to get your back. There you are in a little Coke can bristling with armaments at 600mph. All it takes is one rocket or a spray of machine-gun fire and you could be dead. Even a lucky rifle-shot or an unlucky goose could bring you down. Or friendly fire. 70% of US casualties in Iraq were due to friendly fire. I believed in the war. Saddam was the antichrist, the friend of terrorists, the brains behind 9/11. But even had I seen this as the crock of shit it turned out to be, I was a soldier. Ours not to question why… In fact the war was a pushover. Far from putting up a fierce resistance the enemy ran away. Even so lots of people died and are still dying. We destabilised the whole Middle East.

At least I was willing to kill or be killed. That is what being a man is. To sit in a box in the desert and kill someone on the other side of the world on your line-manager's sayso is not. Our targets are supposedly carefully chosen. We rely on informants and intercepts and translators. When I say 'we' I mean the CIA although strictly speaking our group is a hush-hush experiment in subcontracting some of the more problematic work out to the private sector. It's all about deniability in case something escapes the double censorship of National Security and Commercial Confidentiality. Oh, and the money.

The airforce taught me to fly and to handle drones then handed me over to Harpy Solutions. Obviously much cheaper to hire people trained at public expense. I'm part of an initial tranche, a pilot scheme as it were. Of course I have security clearance, but that means nothing. Turned out that our entire cohort of Cuban spies was loyal to Castro all along. No wonder none of our ninety-something assassination plots worked.

Trust no-one. That Indian guy, Ved, says he's a Hindu but maybe he's really a Muslim fanatic working on hacking into our software to destroy us with our own weapons.

These are the sort of fantasies I spin to keep awake because the truth is that 99% of surveillance work is unbelievably boring. Shut in a windowless box with three other guys' farts, staring at screens for hour after hour. We're not allowed to read but everyone does. Mostly trash. Thrillers, magazines. The aircon recycles the cold, stale air and there's a loose vane that rattles all the time. It's always a relief to get out into light, air, distant horizons. The desert has its own beauty. Dawn and dusk are the best times. Noonday heat is a killer. Not to mention those duststorms where you can't see or breathe.

We live in the rat-infested underbelly of glamorous Vegas. I've never been one for the bright lights and the idea of blowing a month's pay in one evening fails to thrill me. Besides, I've come to hate noise. Our apartment's always noisy. Marteen likes the TV and radio on, not to mention her laptop. Even the tsh tikka tsh tikka tsh escaping from the earbuds of her ipod grates. In any case there's a 24-hour gas station opposite, frequented by noisy kids with revving engines and squealing tyres. A neon sign flashes through the flimsy blinds. Even with the windows closed, the air stinks of exhausts and fast food. We're here because the bank took our house in the plush suburbs. OK, we were overextended and we'd lied a bit on our self-certified mortgage, but folks were falling over themselves to lend us money. The value of our house just kept rising, letting us borrow more and more. Then in 2008 the bubble burst. The bank took our house. I'll be paying them off till the day I die. The head of the mortgage company, having helped to crash the global economy, got a 6.3 million dollar bonus the next year.

I'm getting fat sitting down all day. All that coffee and doughnuts. Not to mention the downtime beer. All I want to do is sleep.

2.

We used to be that smart, cool young couple, thought Marteen wistfully. Being married to a fighter pilot was so exciting. And Charlie looked real handsome in his uniform. There were quite a few envious looks at my college reunion. Jenny Jacobs looked like she wanted to drag him into the bushes, flashing her tits like that. Morals of an alley cat. I hear she's on her third husband. Most of my old classmates are on Facebook but I can't bear to look at it nowadays. What happened to all the great screenwriters and journalists we English majors were going to become? Instead of poets or novelists we turned into academics and teachers and middle-managers. Advertising copywriters. Baristas. I work in the local library, putting books on shelves. I'm training to be a librarian, but it's a shrinking field. Our demographic is aging. Kids think they can get everything online but they don't know how to look. Facts are not knowledge. Often they're not even facts. Search engines are targeted to reinforce your prejudices. If you like this you'll love the even grosser that. Huge whirlpools of ignorance spinning in lazy isolation…

Phone. Mute the TV. Zapper? Oh, there.

'Hello?'

'Hi Marteen. It's Bruce.'

Library business. 'Hi Bruce.' She affected a tone of tolerant weariness. 'What can I do for you?'

'I was wondering if you'd mind swapping shifts with Ada on Friday?'

'Shouldn't be a problem. Hang on, I'll just check.' She glanced at the wall-calendar. Friday was pure as the driven snow. 'Yup, that's fine.' She hoped Charlie didn't go bald like Bruce.

'Thanks, Marteen, you're an angel. It's just that Ada's got her dental appointment moved forward. She's got an impacted wisdom tooth, poor thing. It has to come out. It's a horrible procedure…'

'No, no, Bruce. TMI.' Marteen remembered her last extraction, the nurse holding her head as the dentist wrenched the broken roots from her jaw. That awful crunching, the bone-deep agony when the anaesthetic wore off. Her eye was drawn to a flashing ad for JayZee Furniture's sofa sale. She switched back to Bruce's concerned clucking over Ada's plight.

'I've said she can have a week off so there may be some extra hours if you want them.'

'Thanks, Bruce.' Sweet of the old boy. He knows we need the cash. Say what you like about gays, but they do think of others. 'I'm always up for more work.'

'Fine. I'll see you Friday, then.'

'See ya. Byee.'

Back to a half watched Columbo. He sure liked his toys. Here he was showing a chuckleheaded fascination with an answering machine. What would he make of a drone, with its night-vision cameras? Charlie had told her it was possible to see people fucking on their rooftops in the dark. He couldn't bear to watch but lots of his coworkers did. Particularly juicy items quickly found their way online. Spying. Her own interest in libraries had been kindled by their brave refusal to hand over their users' records in defiance of Dubya's Patriot Act. A futile gesture, it turned out. They'd been watching us all along. As Charlie says, if something can be done it will be done. Trouble is the unexpected consequences. Remember when those electric fly zappers came in? So much safer and more hygienic than all those nasty chemicals. Turned out that zapping flies just made them explode and spattered dead fly all over the kitchen.

I feel like chicken tonight, chicken tonight…

The letterplate clacked. Letters could wait. The lottery numbers were coming up. 5, 17, 29… Nary a one. Hopes to ashes again. Maybe she should change the numbers. But it seemed somehow fated that as she and Charlie not only shared the same birthday but had been born at exactly the same time too that such numbers must hold a certain magic. And worse, what if she changed them and the very next week the old numbers came up? Charlie liked the story of how Richard Feynman would burst excitedly into class and say he'd just seen the most amazing thing. A car with the licence plate ARW357. I mean, what were the chances that of all the millions of cars out there he'd seen that particular one at that particular time?

She looked at the letters on the mat. Pizza flyer and two final demands. They couldn't even afford to run the aircon most of the time. Just gone 10 and it was already unbearable.

Marteen opened the windows and let the hot wind through. Oh, to be skiing in the mountains above Lake Tahoe. A cold white world. The delicious slide and swoop. Freedom. Till that last time at the resort when suddenly none of our credit cards worked. All maxed out. Angela Wolsey was standing right there. I nearly died. Luckily Charlie's old colonel vouched for him. The next week the bank foreclosed and we lost the house. Bruce said that in ancient Greece all debts were forgiven every seven years. That'd be nice. As it is we'll probably end up on food stamps.

Times like this I'm glad we never had kids.

News. Drought. Worst in 500 years. Farmers selling off their stock, not even bothering to plant seeds. At least the drones kept flying. Charlie says civilian applications are the next big thing. I wish he'd get a job looking out for forest fires or search and rescue. Or even peeking through a seventh-floor window at a congressman fucking a goat.

Check emails I suppose. God, I'm lonely stuck in this shithole. Those whores on the corner are screaming at each other again. Whoopee! Sin City! People falling over themselves to get ripped off.

OK. TV off. Let the radio run on in the kitchen. Emails. One from Dulcie. Hey, Evie's had a baby. Girl. Jerry says she had a bad time. Bit prem. Elderly primigravida. Hell, she's younger than me! Reply. Evie Darling… Send.

Dulcie forwarded a link from Inez she hoped her old friends would like.

Click. Wait while the wheel turns. Ah, here we go.

Website for the Prophets of Loss. Three guys. A pudgy Jew, a goodlooking Latino and a bearded Middle-Eastern type. The Latino spoke: Hi, folks. We're Jesus, Moses and Mohammed, also known as the Prophets of Loss to our many fans. We met up at UCLA and nominative determinism demanded we form a band. Our full names are Jesus (he pronounced it Hayzooth) de Santiago, that's me, Moses Weiler and Mohammed Jonah Aziz. We are all both atheists and computer programmers. Form an orderly queue, ladies. Code decryption is my bag which means I hack into mostly low-grade stuff for the CIA. Patriotism. I could get at least double the pay in commercial intelligence. We collect everything all the time, as Edward Snowden has helpfully pointed out. The question is how to monetise it? How much of our spying is straightforward bugging of business meetings and patent theft? Just asking. Dewey said politics is the shadow cast on society by big business. My pals here are both in the private sector and are living high on the hog.'

'Yeah, right.' Mohammed spoke up. 'Call me Hami. The CIA didn't want me. Something to do with my name, perhaps. Mohammed. Sounds like some sort of a mooslim. Even worse, I'm an Iranian-American - one of the hyphenated folk. Who needs Farsi speakers, even if they were born and raised in Denver, Colorado? Is a despiser of religion likely to be a terrorist? This doesn't mean I don't feel the anger, pain and humiliation of Muslims everywhere at the hands of bigots and warmongers. It's a relief when atrocities are committed by rightwing white men for a change although even then mass shootings don't seem to count as terrorism. Being a Muslim makes you touchy. The letters MUS leap out of context at you. I feel like a shit if I say I'm not a Muslim and a fraud if I say I am. So I wear a beard and eat pork. If Al Qaeda planted a bomb in my neighbourhood I'd be quite likely to be lynched, or I might even be targeted by the boneheaded fundamentalists of my alleged religion.'

'Nu, boychick, now you know what we Jews feel like,' Moses broke in. 'As Joe Heller says: If you ever forget you're a Jew, a Gentile will remind you. That said, right now it's better to be a Jew than a Muslim even if you're strictly neither. Me, I'm not prejudiced. I'll shtup your sister anytime.'

'In your dreams, buddy. What say we gang up on Jesus?'

'Hey, hey. I'm a Latino Roman Catholic atheist. It's the WASPS we want.'

'I must remind you that some of my best customers are WASPS. Also Sprach Moses Weiler.'

'Mo, as his friends call him, is a statistical analyst for the casinos,' said Jesus. 'He works the odds to pick up patterns of peculation and the like. He also owns a block of shares in this legalised theft. He was the prime mover of our little band which is the raison d'etre of this preamble.

'Now, for your listening pleasure, we'd like to present our latest song. We call it: The Neocon Blues.'

Three geeks in huge sombreros and huger moustaches crowded onto a tiny stage and launched into a species of Mariachi blues thusly:

Well I tell you ladies, Bernie Madoff with my dough

And the banks said nada though you’d a thought they would know

As they bundled bad loans in the bubble of CDO

And the money gushed up to the rich from the poor down below.

Lemme tell you, Baby, I got them neocon blues…

Marteen smiled. Aside from the witty lyrics, these boys knew how to play. The catchy tune was buoyed up on some subtle harmonies and a blistering trumpet solo. The music ended and there was a plug for the CD as well as a list of upcoming gigs on the band's statewide tour. There was also a link to Hami's blog. She clicked on it. No, she didn't want a romantic weekend for two or life insurance or a new Toyota. So much for targeted advertising. Were advertisers getting their money's worth out of Google? The idea that the government could be monitoring all her searches and emails did have a chilling effect. Even typing in the word 'Mohammed' started a small worm of fear gnawing… Morons.

Round and round and round it goes, when it downloads no-one knows. Payday loans? Online roulette? Ah, at last.

Another day, another death threat, Hami had written. Seems that if a Muslim blasphemes the Prophet he must die. That'll teach me to make jokes about putting the ham in Mohammed. For the record, it was a pun involving my own clumsy acting and my Christian name. Whoops. As for the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) I have no feelings one way or the other. As there is no such thing as Allah, what difference does it make what some seventh-century mystic said about him? In any case, didn't Mohammed himself say there should be no compulsion in religion?

Besides, I haven't lost my faith (another excuse to kill me) – I never had any to begin with. My folks were lukewarm Muslims. The mosque was for occasional socialising and networking, although most of the congregation was working class while my father was a professor of geology and my mother ran what is nowadays called an artisan bakery. They hired an Imam to give me a grounding in the basics (we're nominally Iranian Shiites). He was a disapproving, grumpy and stupid old man who taught that unquestioning submission to the will of Allah was all. And Shiites are supposedly the more philosophical sect! My great grandfather was a Persian scholar in the second half of the nineteenth century who wanted to bring Islam to an accommodation with science. There was some movement until the 1920s when a conservative backlash crushed the progressives and doomed Muslims to ignorance and superstition. My religious education included memorising chunks of the Koran in Arabic, a language which I did not then and do not now speak. I can still spout screeds of gibberish in that sweet tongue which sounds like a fishbone stuck in the throat. No, that's unfair. It has its own strange music. But at no time did I consider the idea of an all-seeing god even a remote possibility.

I also had lessons in Farsi and soon my folks could no longer have secret conversations in front of us kids. Dad used to read to us from the English version of the Rubaiyat of Hafiz while explaining that wine was a symbol for religious joy. Yeh, right.

Enough. Marteen clicked on YouTube.

3.

Back at Creech Air Base Dr. Ruth Pepper ran through some video footage of Charlie at work. His body language suggested unease. He squirmed in his seat, drummed his fingers, yawned, put his head in his hands. Dr. Pepper sighed, typed a note into her computer and brought up another patient's file. In the seat next to Charlie, Bobo Franks was a study in stolidity. He was, kinda illegally, flying a drone over a tribal region of Pakistan. There'd been talk of Al Qaeda activity in one of the villages. Bobo had been in on some of the initial surveillance of Osama bin Laden and he was proud of his small part in the murder of America's most evil foe. Between reading the magazine on his lap and chewing gum he kept up a laconic commentary for the boys out there on the ground. Why did the phrase 'stalled ox' pop into Dr. Pepper's head?

Across the world, Charlie's Predator drone circled over a convoy of GIs. He'd scanned the route for what the boys called 'the eye of Sauron', that telltale ring in the asphalt where a tyre had been burnt to soften the tar so as to bury an IED. The road passed through a rocky gorge which would have been perfect for an ambush but seemed to be all clear. The trucks moved off. The drawdown continued. A sense of futility washed over Charlie. What had we accomplished in thirteen years? Al Qaeda was weakened but there was no shortage of terrorist groups to take its place. In fact there had been an explosion in explosions. If the best defence against terrorism is a contented population, then we'd provided the finest nurseries for extremism ever seen. Meanwhile, the wind had come up and the drone was bucking around in a patch of turbulence. A sudden dust-storm had enveloped the convoy and Charlie could see nothing. He turned on the thermal imaging and a string of glow-worms crept slowly along the ravine. There were some hot spots off to the right, probably animals, and a brighter spot some way off that might have been a kiln or an oven or a forge. The ammo truck was right in the middle of the convoy – it was the only one with unheated contents. It would only take a guy with night-sight binoculars and a bazooka to blow the whole company to bejesus. When mayhem was so easy why were attacks so infrequent? Perhaps, even among the fanatical, suicide bombers were in short supply. As for the techniques of terror, what could be easier than mowing down crowds with a truck? Kill many Kafirs. Become a martyr. But there was something spectacular about bombs. Charlie remembered footage of the family of a Palestinian who'd been 'martyred'. Yes, the parents were very proud of their son. Then the bomber's plump and pretty teenage sister suddenly burst into violent, gulping sobs and rushed from the room. One human note in the whole charade.

A voice spoke in Charlie's headpiece. How were things going?

'I can't see much to be honest, sir. Flying conditions are atrocious. Also, I'm worried about dust in the engine. We're talking twenty million dollars of aircraft here.'

'I appreciate that Charlie. Do the best you can. The storm's coming from behind you. Maybe you can outrun it.'

'Yessir. That's what I reckon too. And I'll try and climb above it.'

Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon… Less dusty but more gusty. At least there's more time to react up here.

Four and a half clammy-handed hours later the convoy had reached its destination and the drone was safely back at base. Charlie felt wrung out and there was that spacy feeling of an incipient migraine. He gulped down a couple of yellow pills and headed for home.

4.

Dr. Pepper was worried about Charlie. He'd been seeing her about his growing anxiety. At his last session he'd talked about suicide.

'The thing about suicide,' he'd told her, 'is that people think of it as overwhelming despair when the balance of your mind's disturbed but to me it seems more like plain old common sense. It's like I may as well be dead, I'm doing no-one any good hanging around. I should kill myself, but I can't be bothered.'

'I don't think you're suicidal, Charlie. Sounds to me more like mild clinical depression. I remember one of my patients drawing up a list of reasons to die versus reasons to live which led him to the logical conclusion that he had to kill himself at once. Thing is, when he wasn't depressed, his reasons to die seemed, on the contrary, reasons to live.'

'And did he kill himself?'

'No. He's now a happily married man with three little daughters. Of course, the Lithium helps. But I think we'll steer clear of drugs for the moment and focus on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. The truth is you've got a lot going for you. You've got a beautiful and loving wife and a responsible job which is helping your country. It needs only a tiny shift of perspective to see it. I know it's been hard for you lately, but believe me, it will pass.'

'Well my medical plan is good for another five sessions so let's see how it goes. Thanks, Doc. See you next week.'

'I'll look forward to that. In the meantime try and take it easy. In the unlikely event of a crisis you have my number.'

Yeah, right. At five bucks a minute. Samaritans are free. Another scheme to hoover up cash? No. She seems to like me. To want to help. A stern but loving mother. Grey braids coiled round her head like an aging milkmaid. Big black framed glasses. Sad brown eyes.

On his way out Charlie saw a guy from his old unit in the waiting room. Jim was too intent on the toes of his boots to meet his eye. Mental illness still carried a huge stigma in the military. Or perhaps he'd simply heard that Charlie was a busted flush and feared his bad luck might rub off.

The radio in Charlie's old Jeep Cherokee was playing vintage rock 'n roll. Buddy Holly. That'll be the day. Died in a light-plane crash aged 22. February of 59.

'That'll be the da-ha-hay that I die.'

Charlie killed the radio and the CD player cut in at once lest there be a lacuna in one's enchantment. He switched off the lot. At least the aircon was working but that patch on the muffler had gone again and there was a new rumble which could mean a wheel bearing was on its way out.

Charlie's shift had started at six which meant a four-thirty start. Now, at 14:17 he was finally on his way home. The Jeep had been parked in the broiling sun and was only now cooling down. Charlie stopped steering with two fingers and tentatively grasped the rim. A nightmare had come to him last night. He was driving down a busy street but he'd forgotten he was blind. He couldn't stop, his foot flat on the gas. The car hurtled on, caroming from side to side, killing and maiming as it went. Charlie was jolted awake just as the alarm began its rising stridency. It seemed half a lifetime away. God, he was tired.

Marteen would want to go out somewhere, do something. Why were women so keen to be doing? He saw his car from above, like in that dream, driving down this strip of asphalt through the dry land. There were, he knew, training drones up there – unmanned, unseen, unheard. Notionally unarmed but their dummy bombs and missiles could be swapped for the real thing at any time. As a terrorist he'd be a sitting duck. A single Hellfire missile could, with a change of metaphor, cook his goose. And, right at the moment, the road was clear in both directions.

Three fighter-planes shot by, low on the horizon, the roar of shredded air rolling over like thunder.

Some 80% of Nevada was owned by the government. The military was a big employer but lots of folks were out of work. Vegas ran on sleaze. Crime was high, worst in the nation. We had, Marteen was fond of pointing out, the highest rate of women killed by men.

Prostitution was legal. Gambling was legal. Divorce was a formality. The right to bear arms was guaranteed by the Constitution. What could go wrong?

Charlie thought about money. He had a quick mind and was good at reckoning. He knew all too well that the odds were stacked against him but he could certainly see the appeal of the casinos. One big win and their troubles would be over. He could even see the masochistic lure of losing: the humiliation, the remorse. Dostoevsky knew all about that. Marteen had pressed The Gambler onto him. He hadn't understood it all but it was a powerful and disturbing read. But to bet the farm on red or black and lose would finish him. Marteen took a weekly lottery ticket despite Charlie's recital of the astronomical odds against her winning. She said that to live without hope, no matter how slight, was more than she could bear. She was a good kid. Charlie misted up. Perhaps they could afford enough gas for a trip up into the mountains to their own private spot where a spring gushed out of the rock into a freezing pool below. He could get in a little fly-fishing. It seemed years since he'd hauled that big cutthroat out of Pyramid Lake. The lake, they said, was shrinking and had been fished out. Course 'their' spring might have dried up in this drought, but it was still a lovely spot. Take a few beers, a coupla steaks. They could sleep in the back of the Jeep and wake up to a new morning in the mountains. He drove on towards a Vegas shimmying in the heat.

5.

Jesus de Santiago crossed another password off his list. 'P.A.Sword'. So droll. Jesus had been given a dozen computers to hack as well as a list of 27 possible passwords. 'Password' was always worth trying as was the second most popular: 'Monkey'. Five of the computers came from a district in LA known for rich Latinos, Russian Oligarchs and a sprinkling of movie stars. Pity they couldn't simply ask Google for all those passwords they'd 'accidentally' captured