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  Driscoll looked back and forth between the captain and the silenced soldiers, his blackened finger dropping to his side.

  “Aryans, eh?” he mused. “And still wet?” He smiled. “Well, you must keep your own counsel, Captain—I can respect that in an intelligence officer. But I still need to record a quick piece to camera. Damn it, though. I’ve forgotten to bring my tripod!”

  Captain Smith reached a smooth hand for the camera. “Not to worry, Doctor,” he said. “I can hold the camera for you if you like. It wouldn’t be my first time.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Joseph West, facedown on an old sofa on the roof of his office building, was woken by a generator spattering to life on the balcony below. Artillery grumbled to the north, somewhere around Hilltown. To the east, beyond the windowless towers, a pale sun dissolved into dishwater overcast. He unwrapped his dew-soaked blanket and checked the front of his fleece for the holes left by burning seeds. Finding no new ones, he stood, stretched, scratched himself, then crossed the roof to the parapet overlooking the street, picking his way through satellite dishes and broadcast antennas and drifts of empty whiskey bottles. Six stories below, the street was deserted apart from a few early carts on their way to a food distribution. The full complement of white armored jeeps was parked along the curb, each marked “TV” in black gaffer tape. Things must be quiet this morning. Perhaps there’d be time for some breakfast.

  Someone coughed behind him, and Joseph turned and saw an anxious young face in the stairwell, hovering above the top step. Tony had formed the habit of climbing the last few steps to a roof on all fours, which people thought eccentric until he showed them where a sniper had shot half his ear away.

  “I’ve turned on the generator,” Tony said, and pushed his bangs from his eyes. He had grown his hair out to hide his ear, and it did not suit him. He was otherwise neat, with the doomed, eager look of a young substitute teacher.

  “So I hear,” said Joseph, rubbing his jaw. He should probably shave today. He would do it in the office toilet, using the mirror fixed to the cabinet over the sink: the cabinet in which he kept his headache pills. He would not allow himself to take any of the pills until he had shaved, he told himself. That was the way to get things done.

  Tony was nodding quickly to himself, which Joseph recognized as a distress signal. “Er . . . did you fall asleep up here again?” Tony asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “It’s just that there’s a lot of messages for you on your cell phone, down in the office. From the world desk in London.” Tony shrank back against the wall to let Joseph pass down the stairs. “I’ll put on some coffee,” he said.

  Joseph found his phone lying on an edit suite that was gray with cigarette ash and sticky from spilled whiskey and sugary tea. The edit suite was seldom used these days: nobody wanted cut packages anymore, just scraps of raw footage or—on those increasingly rare occasions when 24/7 sent in a staff reporter—one-minute two-ways, live from the Embargoed Zone!

  He sat in a swivel chair and put his elbows on the edit suite, scratching his head. A couple of hairs alighted on the console. When did they start turning gray? His phone told him he had missed eight calls. It began to ring again just as he reached for it.

  “What,” said Joseph, and the phone exploded in his ear.

  “Joseph! Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for an hour now! New York is going apeshit about this pig-fuck story that you’ve got running there and I can’t even get you on your cell phone? What the fuck are you doing to me?”

  Joseph massaged his temples. “Please calm down, Felicity. What story are you talking about?”

  “What story? Jesus, fuck! There’s been a major terrorist attack right on your doorstep and you don’t even know about it? What the fuck are we paying you for, you local-hire shitbag?”

  Joseph took the phone over to the window and looked down into the street again. There were more people out now, shuffling close to the walls, but all the Land Rovers were still at the curb.

  “Well, whatever your story is, it’s definitely not a pig-fuck,” he told her. “None of the competition is out covering it.”

  “Fuck the competition!” Felicity spit. “Do me a favor: get online and take a look at blow-back.net. Once again we’re being screwed up the freckle by a one-horsefucking website! Take a good fucking look and then call me right back.” She hung up.

  Tony came out of the kitchen with two cups of coffee. Joseph grunted and sat at a computer. The regular news wires made no mention of any major incident in the Embargoed Zone, but when Joseph clicked on blow-back.net, the headlines jumped out at him: “Fresh terror attack in the EZ—exclusive to blow-back.net. Award-winning author, security analyst, and war correspondent Dr. Flint Driscoll, reporting live from the front line.”

  Joseph read the first few paragraphs of the accompanying piece, then clicked on the video link. A bony face appeared on the screen, beneath a matte-black helmet with “Driscoll: blow-back.net” stenciled on its brim in rough military-style lettering. In the background the tower blocks of Hilltown gushed columns of smoke. He must be embedded with the army, Joseph thought, just this side of the wall. The face mouthed excitedly for several seconds before Joseph remembered to switch off the mute control.

  “. . . thwarted at the last minute by the vigilance of the soldiers guarding the antiterror barrier,” boomed a gravelly voice from the speaker. “And blow-back.net understands that this time the terrorists may have employed a secret new technology to carry out this attack—more on that later. Reporting live, on the ground, from inside the Embargoed Zone, this is Flint—”

  Joseph turned the sound off, swiveled his chair away from the screen, and sighed.

  “Oh, dear,” he said. He picked up the office phone, pressed a preset, and held the receiver away from his ear until the initial torrent of profanity had passed. Then he looked across the room at Tony, who sat, leg jiggling nervously, on the edge of a desk, and switched the phone to speaker.

  “Felicity,” he wheedled, “here’s the thing—that story is bullshit. This kind of thing happens all the time here. No one else in the building is even bothering to cover it.”

  “What the fuck do you mean, ‘it’s bullshit’?” Felicity screamed. Across the room, Tony flinched. “Flint Driscoll has just been involved in a real-live terror attack! By midmorning he’ll be all over FOX like shit on a sheep’s tail, and by lunchtime the other networks will be running the story too, whether they want to or not. So don’t tell me there’s no story there!”

  Joseph lit his first cigarette of the day. “Here’s the thing,” he said again. “Even if the story is as big as you say it is, Tony and I still can’t shoot it. If you want to shoot a story that close to the wall, you need to get a camera crew from the other side to do it, embedded with the army, which is presumably how this Driscoll guy is doing it.”

  “You think I don’t know how to do my fucking job? I’ve been trying all morning to get permission for one of our crews from the other side to shoot the story, but the army won’t allow it. This bastard Driscoll has got friends in high places, and he’s using them to protect his exclusive. Which means you’ll just have to get the footage.”

  Joseph took another drag and smiled thinly at Tony, who was looking even more unhappy than usual.

  “Felicity,” Joseph said conversationally, “you do know that if I or anyone else from the Embargoed Zone—man, woman, or child—goes anywhere near that wall, we will be blown to bubbles by the army? It’s the main reason why I’m still in this shithole.”

  There was a long pause, and then Felicity spoke again.

  “I don’t think I like your attitude,” she said quietly.

  “What attitude? Not wanting to get killed trying to stand up a bullshit story by some blogger who’s embedded himself up the army’s ass?”

  Felicity gave a light little laugh. “I’m not interested in nitpicking, Joseph. At 24/7 we need people with a can-do attitud
e. That’s not what I’m hearing right now.”

  “So what are you going to do, fire me?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  “Who else are you going to get to shoot for you in the Easy?”

  “Oh, Joseph,” she tinkled. “With the technology we have now, we could train a monkey to shoot for us. Don’t fucking tempt me.”

  “What do you think Bob Reilly would have to say if I got fired? Last time he came here, he was still thanking me for saving his life back in Kinshasa all those years ago.”

  “Fuck Bob!” Felicity was screeching again. “Bob’s retiring next year! He’s taking the fucking package like all the other old relics around here!”

  Joseph took another pull on his cigarette. “And what about you, Felicity? Will you be taking a package before Bob does?”

  There was another pause before she spoke again.

  “Okay, Joseph,” she said wearily. “Let’s agree to this: I’ll cover for you being too chicken to go to the wall today, but you have to get me something else instead. Something good. The Embargoed Zone is back in the news for once thanks to this Driscoll cunt, so we need to show New York that you’re still on the job.”

  Joseph winked at Tony. “We’ve run out of cigarettes and whiskey again.”

  “Fine. I’ll send you some more booze and smokes.”

  “And what about my ticket out of here?”

  “I keep telling you. The army says you’re a confirmed terror threat—you and your whole extended family. They won’t say why.”

  Joseph studied the tip of his cigarette, held point upward in his hand.

  “So what are you going to do for me today?” insisted Felicity.

  Tony spoke up. “There’s another tank incursion this morning, Felicity. Near Hilltown. Routine, but we can probably use a long lens to get some smoke and explosions and stuff.”

  Felicity sighed. “Fine, Anthony. That’ll have to do, then. Just go out and do your jobs, yeah? While we all still have one.” The phone went dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After he failed flight school, Gordie Moon was reassigned to a unit that appeared on the order of battle for reasons of secrecy as the Third Signals Logistics Battalion. Its members and those few outsiders allowed to know of its existence called it the Slob.

  The Slob was an unacknowledged bastard of army and air force, banished at birth to its own lonely compound in the Easy Division’s main depot, out near the perimeter fence, where the coastal scrub and sand dunes gave way to vast bleak fields of industrial wheat and barley.

  Moon hated it there. By night, mosquitoes swarmed from drains and leaking irrigation lines. By day, crop-dusting planes used the Slob’s billet lines as aiming points for their strafing runs across the fields, providing close air support for the drills of genetically modified cereals that marched across the croplands. Their engines whined like migraines, and the spray from their overruns shrouded the Slob in a sickly-sweet mist lit with herbicide rainbows, spoiling all attempts by the radar girls to prettify the post with flowers.

  It was always the new girls who did the planting, in the first few weeks after they arrived from their specialist training at the electronic warfare school. Moon had watched four cohorts of these girls come and three cohorts go. He knew how it worked by now. For their first few weeks the girls would be self-conscious and giggly, eager to learn the unit’s folklore and in-jokes. If you smuggled in some dope or some booze, they might even come to your billet at night. But the older girls, who bullied the newcomers at first, would slowly warm to them during long hours hunched together over ground radar screens and tactical displays. With their patronage, the new recruits would be introduced one by one to the glamorous parts of the base that lay beyond the tank park, near the wall that sealed off the Embargoed Zone. There, along the beach, were the infantry units, the paratroop base, the armor and engineering depots, and—holy of holies—the little square of sandbagged tents that housed the reconnaissance commandos. Once the new girls found their way across the tank park, they were lost to the boys of the Slob.

  The wind caught Moon a wet slap in the face as he stepped from his billet that morning. Shivering, he turned up the collar of his tan air force jacket, then set off to work through lines of peeling wooden huts. The path had once been duckboarded, but the planks had long since been prized up and burned to heat chilly huts at night or to give a semblance of romance to couplings in the sand dunes. Moon, heavy and clumsy, sank with each step into the loose sand, his breath wheezing in his ears.

  Clear of the huts, the path twisted up through clumps of shrub and thistle into a range of grassy dunes. The control room for unmanned aerial vehicles, where Moon worked, was housed in a bunker buried deep underneath them. High above, a winking red light topped a thicket of aerials to warn off the crop dusters, yet the bunker’s entrance was hidden, in a ritual nod to secrecy, behind a stand of stunted pines. Guarding the iron steps was a sentry from the paratroop brigade who cradled his carbine meaningfully while flirting with an off-duty radar girl. Moon pulled back his jacket to show the ID card clipped to his shirt, and the girl frowned and looked away from him. The paratrooper curled a lip and said nothing, and Moon, who outranked them both, scurried sadly down into his hole.

  Safe in the darkness, he allowed his pace to slow as he descended to the dim corridor below. Rows of gunmetal-gray doors with blinking slots for electronic swipe cards controlled access to the mysteries beyond them: the UAV control room, the radar girls’ operations center, the intelligence liaison bureaus, and the workshops and offices of the private aerospace corporations that designed, built, and exported the killer drones and missiles that were field-tested by the Slob.

  Moon used his own card to enter the drone control room. It was a narrow windowless rectangle lit mainly by the banks of screens that lined the farther wall. Inside the door, a trestle table bore an electric kettle and paper cups and bowls stocked with instant coffee and sugar and powdered milk. The room was warm, smelling of statically charged nylon carpet and adolescent sweat.

  Moon’s assistant, Gerald, had already logged on for the shift and sat waiting at their usual workstation, checking the readouts from a cruising drone. His frizzy red hair almost concealed his headset. Moon made himself a coffee and then shrugged off his jacket and took his place beside Gerald.

  “Anything doing?” he asked, putting on his own headphones.

  Gerald pursed his lips and considered. “There was another donkey bomb early this morning and some rocket launches. Valkyrie almost got one of the launch teams in an orchard in Easy Four. And there’s a routine up-tit operation under way to the east of Hilltown, which we’re flying top cover for.”

  Moon stirred his coffee with his finger, watching the video feed from the cruising drone. Buildings, streets, and cratered wasteland scrolled down the screen in front of him. There were figures too, men and women, walking close to the walls, hunched away from the wind and the daylight, their faces invisible, turned to the ground. Actual terrorists, Moon told himself again: How many other people of his age and noncombat designation had ever actually seen one? How many combat soldiers ever saw them this clearly, come to that? Every now and then an exposed face jumped into shocking focus, staring up into the camera, one hand reaching up as if beseeching mercy of the sky: children out flying their kites.

  Valkyrie and her assistant bade Moon and Gerald a sleepy good-bye as they clumped past on their way to the door. The two young women wore tan air force fatigues that, like Moon’s, were frayed and crumpled, with no insignia apart from their lieutenant’s bars. Gerald was the only pilot in the Slob who actually wore his unit flash and his drone wings—his mother had proudly sewn them on for him—but it was clearly some time now since the shirt had been ironed. He waited until the other crew had left the room and then used his index finger to push his glasses back up his nose.

  “I don’t think that Valkyrie will catch up with you, Trollhunter,” he confided. “She is still eight kills be
hind you, and you both have only one month to go.” He had forgotten to sniff, and a transparent tendril crept out of his nostril and across his pursed lips.

  “Don’t call me Trollhunter, Gerald. I’ve already told you: call me Gordie, or Gordon, or Moon—anything but my call sign.”

  Round-shouldered, Moon hunched forward to study the computerized map. His face resumed the anxious expression that it always wore when he forgot that people might be watching. Little blue icons were stippled across the screen: transponder contacts relaying the exact real-time positions of all the friendly tanks and armored vehicles then operating inside the Embargoed Zone. Half a dozen flashing wings indicated the drones that were already circling over the area or en route to and from the airfield twenty miles to the rear where ground crews armed and serviced them.

  Gerald snuffled again, running his left finger along his upper lip. It came away glistening. He wiped it on the underside of the console.

  “Trollhunter,” he declared without preamble. “I have decided to volunteer for the potential captain’s course.”

  Moon wasn’t used to surprises from Gerald. “Why would you want to do that? It means voluntarily extending your service and your reserve obligations.”

  “I’d like to learn to fly a real plane.”

  Moon turned. He removed his headphones. “You really think that if you sign up for the captains’ course, the air force will put you on the flight line?”

  “No,” said Gerald, “I do not.” Then a voice crackled in his earphones. “Roger,” he told his chin mike, and then punched several keys in front of him. A little red question mark appeared on their map, blinking slowly. “One of the tanks says it has found a possible target on the western edge of Hilltown,” he told Moon, “but for some reason the crew can’t register it on the computer themselves. They think it’s a terrorist rocket cell. Shall I send a drone to take a look?”