Air Force Captain and F-16 fighter pilot Darwin Cole lives alone in a trailer in the desert outside of Las Vegas. See, he got drummed out of the Air Force and his wife took their two kids back to her home in Saginaw, MI. A mission went bad and the resulting fallout stuck him in the desert boonies where the most common livings thing he'd seen in months were coyotes.
Cole was a good pilot; perfect for an up and coming program outside of Vegas - drone pilot. And the job was one part boring and all parts weird, peeking over shoulders a world away before firing a missile into some hut before heading home for dinner with the family.
Intelligence in Afghanistan had a high value target in a home in the middle of nowheresville Sander Khosh. He drives the drone, his spotter finds the target. Ground contact says go. Cole fires the missile. 55s to target. At about 45s, Cole sees 3 kids run out of the house to play. Too late to divert the missile. It obliterates the house, kills the 2 boys, and the girl survives, albeit with 1 less arm.
Cole goes off the deep end. Good-bye war. Hello coyotes.
Keira and Steven find Cole and drive up for a chat. Both are reporters (recent victims of old school newspaper purges) who are on a story about a rogue contractor who was fighting the war using his own rules. And the contractor they are looking into was Cole's on-the-ground contact during the fateful missile strike. So they think maybe Cole can provide some details.
Cole reluctantly joins the pair, and their third, Barb. He travels to their place in Baltimore by bus to avoid cameras, credit cards, and security posts. The unlikely quartet works the story talking with sources, defrocked 'agency' types, and drone engineers not only about the who, but the fact that the genie has been released from the bottle.
The technology is advancing at light speed. And contracting companies are competing with and against each other and will manipulate, buy, and steal their way to bigger more lucrative contracts. Even to the point of buying off local Afghan informants from a competitor. Cole ended up in the middle of an inter-contractor battle that a little girl paid for with an arm.
This is 6th Fesperman book reviewed here at MRB so obviously we must like his work. A number of his other books were centered in an around the former Yugoslavia. The only connection to that conflict is that Cole flew F-16s there and was credited with the only air-to-air kill since Vietnam. While those earlier books explored the brutality and the darkest depths of human hatred, Unmanned veers into a psychological thriller about the people, the technology, and the lengths that people will go to harness what drones can do not only in war, but also the promising and lucrative domestic market of the future. We hear about drones almost daily and Fesperman adroitly parts the curtain for the uninitiated to see just what drone technology is capable of.
So it you hear what sounds like a distant weed whacker, I'd suggest you keep an eye on the skies while I check back in with Fesperman to see the next thing he wants us to watch for.
available at Amazon.com
East Coast Don
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