The Kill Room

which was more like Captain Kirk’s in Star Trek than a seat in a jet’s cockpit. Before him was a three-foot-by-eighteen-inch tabletop metal control board, bristling with dozens of knobs and buttons, switches and readouts, as well as two joysticks. He was not touching them at the moment. The autopilot was flying UAV N-397.
    The computer’s being in charge was standard procedure at this point in a Special Task Order operation, which involved just getting the bird in the general area of the target. Shales didn’t mind being copilot for the moment. He was having trouble concentrating today. He kept thinking about his prior assignment.
    The one NIOS had gotten so wrong.
    He recalled the intel about the chemicals for Moreno’s IED—the nitromethane, the diesel fuel, the fertilizer—that were going to reduce the oil company’s headquarters in Miami to a smoking crater. The intel about Moreno’s vicious attacks on America, calling for violent assaults on citizens. The intel about the activist’s reconnaissance of the embassies in Mexico and Costa Rica, planning to blow them to kingdom come too.
    They’d been so sure…
    And they’d been so wrong.
    Wrong about avoiding collateral damage too. De la Rua and the guard.
    The primary point of the Long-Range Rifle program at NIOS was to minimize, ideally eliminate, collateral, which was impossible to do when you fired missiles.
    And the first time it had been tried in an actual mission, what had happened?
    Innocents dead.
    Shales had hovered the UAV craft perfectly over the waters of Clifton Bay in the Bahamas, sighted through the leaves of a tree outside with a clear infrared and radar vision of Moreno, double-confirmed it was he, compensated for wind and elevation and fired shots only when the task was standing alone in front of the window.
    Shales knew in his heart that only Moreno would die.
    But there was that one little matter that had never occurred to him, to anyone: the window.
    Who could have thought that the glass would be so lethal?
    Wasn’t his fault…But if he believed that, if he believed he was innocent of any wrongdoing, then why had he been in the john last night puking?
    Just a bit of the flu, honey…No, no, I’m okay.
    And why was he having more and more trouble sleeping?
    Why was he more and more preoccupied, agitated, heartsick?
    Curiously, while drone operators are perhaps the safest of all combat troops physically, they have among the highest rates of depression and post-traumatic stress in the military and national security services. Sitting at a video console in Colorado or New York City, killing someone six thousand miles away and then collecting the kids at gymnastics or football practice, having dinner and sitting down to watch Dancing with the Stars in your suburban den was disorienting beyond belief.
    Especially when your fellow soldiers were hunkered down in the desert or getting blown to pieces by IEDs.
    All right, Airman, he told himself, as he’d been doing lately, concentrate. You’re on a mission. An STO mission.
    He scanned the five computer monitors before him. The one in front, black background filled with green lines, boxes and type, was a composite of typical aircraft controls: artificial horizon, airspeed, ground speed, heading, nav-com, GPS, fuel and engine status. Above that was a traditional terrain map, like a Rand McNally. An information monitor—weather, messages and other communications reports—was to the upper left.
    Below that was a screen that he could switch from regular to synthetic aperture radar. To the right, at eye level, was a high-definition video view of whatever the camera in the drone was seeing, presently daylight, though night vision was, of course, an option.
    The view now was dun-colored desert passing underneath.
    Though slowly. Drones are not F-16s.
    A separate metal panel, below the monitors, was weapons control. It did not have any fancy screens but was black and functional and scuffed.
    In many drone missions around the world, especially combat zones, the crew consists of a pilot and a sensor operator. But at NIOS the UAVs were flown solo. This was Metzger’s idea; no one knew exactly what was behind it. Some thought it was to limit the number of people who knew about the STO program and therefore minimize the risk of security leaks.
    Shales believed, however, the reason was this: The NIOS director appreciated the emotional toll that these missions took and wanted to subject as few