Short Century (2 page)

“That
is
good,” I said.

“It gets better. You're going to watch.”

“Seriously?”

The CIA kept its drone strike program a technical secret, despite its constant discussion in the media, but “some people who decide these things” thought that an article detailing a strike that took out a genocidal and pedophilic monster would benefit the agency's image. My source had hinted at all of this, and at the possibility that I would be the one to do the reporting, but I hadn't believed it would actually happen.

“I can't wait.”

Hard to imagine a better scoop—it was a life's scoop. Within a few seconds I had a blue button-down over my undershirt. I was just about to undo an unsatisfactory knot when my phone started playing a song that took me several rings to identify as “Enjoy the Silence.”

“Sydney? Are you all right? Where are you?”

“I'm very confused,” she said.

“Of course you are. Listen, there's something I have to tell you about your mother.”

“I know. I just heard. I'm going to do my best to get back to New York as soon as I can.”

“Good.”

“I shouldn't have come here. I shouldn't have left New York.”

“Just come home,” I said. I probably shouldn't have added, but couldn't stop myself from adding: “Listen, I've got great news. We're about to take out…”

“Big Brother?”

“Not quite. Little Brother. But I'm going to be there to write about it.” A boast, okay. And a fairly stupid thing to say over the phone. Still—couldn't help myself.

“That's amazing,” she said. “That makes me so happy.”

“You have to get on a plane, Sydney,” I said. We said goodbye and we felt such pride in each other that at that moment I could have died with my life's mission complete. But death wasn't kind enough to stop for me right then.

f

Within a few hours
I was standing in the back of a room, watching a movie.

What I was actually watching was a monitor, on which was playing, in a manner of speaking, OPERATION TAHOE—so named because we were essentially killing Fredo. The drone's-eye view: a cluster of small buildings, outside of which milled a handful of women in burqas. Sheila, whose name is not actually Sheila, gripped the joystick and leaned in as the drone barreled on. Dressed in an impressively serious and therefore weirdly arousing suit, Sheila could have pressed the button atop the joystick and turned these three women into curls of dust. The monitor wasn't very large but I really did feel like I was watching a movie, standing in the back of the theater, in the days when movies were still strange and scary—it was like that famous and probably apocryphal screening wherein audiences ducked from the oncoming train, except that the train was real and we were onboard rather than in the way.

True we weren't actually onboard, but the basic principles apply, more or less.

“Poor clitless fucks,” Sheila said.

The way that Sheila's red hair settled on her powerful shoulders—along, of course, with everything else about her—made me suspect that she was the woman who tracked and killed Osama bin Laden, the woman on whom several upcoming Hollywood projects were based. She looked too young to be that woman, but it's wrong to judge a woman based on her looks. The anonymous source for a half-dozen of my most-linked-to articles, she was a woman of the utmost seriousness, and even more importantly, she was a woman. The murderous misogynist Little Brother would only truly be getting what was coming to him if he got it from a woman, and apparently he would. This would have been even better if Sheila were black, or a Muslim, since it was by and large black Muslim women whom we were saving from Little Brother, but such justice as the world offers is never quite perfect.

We left the women behind and passed over what passed for a highway. For a long time the highway repeated and repeated. Dry, cracked land stretched out as though the world were breaking from the effort of covering itself.

Finally, a truck came into view. A black arm hung out the window, holding a handgun, or maybe a rifle. A rebel, a soldier: who could tell except for Sheila? I steeled myself for her to bomb the truck, and from the way she stroked the joystick with her thumb, she appeared to steel herself for the same thing. But I looked again at the gun and it was just a cigar. Okay, we were looking at civilians. Civilians whom, over the next several weeks, we would liberate. Maybe the driver harbored a dream of sending his daughter to school to become a doctor, a dream that could become a reality after an American intervention. And maybe one day, twenty or twenty-five years from now, his daughter would be my oncologist, and she would save me, or at least bring me some last light comfort.

But what was really happening was more impressive than this fantasy. What was really happening was another kind of fantasy. For most intents and purposes I was actually flying over this truck, actually guiding the driver's fate.

“Wait a minute.” Sheila now looked serious, and put a finger to her ear. She muttered some technical language I didn't understand, and then she locked a target on the truck.

“It turns out these guys are terrorists,” she said.

“What tells you that?”

She didn't turn around, but I could feel her pitying smile. “What tells us that? We can't tell you that.”

She pushed the button, and within seconds the truck was just so much smoke.

“Bug splat!” she said, and pumped her arm.

Without moving her eyes from the screen, she reached behind her so that I could give her a high five. When I didn't do so, she let her arm fall and she sniffed in a way I hadn't heard before.

“Arthur,” she said, still without turning her eyes from the screen. “You
are
cool, right? We let you in here because you're cool.”

The word has never sat right in my mouth in any context, but I said it anyway. “I'm cool.”

“Good.” Then she relaxed her shoulders a bit. At no point did she stop looking at the screen.

My anger at her rebuke subsided when I reminded myself that I was not the one putting my life on the line. Granted, neither was she, but she probably had put her life on the line at one point. She refused to say anything about whether she had gone to Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else, maybe due to harrowing experiences.

An honor, I needed to remind myself, to be allowed into this room at all. I had had actual dreams about witnessing the end of Big Brother, and for something this close to one's dreams to come true is the most that any adult can ask for.

Granted, it was also humiliating.

There is always something humiliating in being trusted—a suggestion that you're too dull to spring any surprises. I had been selected only because I could be trusted to write an article that would make the CIA look like heroes. There would be nothing unexpected, or at least nothing unwelcome, in an article by Arthur Hunt. Easy to imagine Reaper's response: “Arthur Hunt Gives Assassination Two Thumbs Up.”

But I would write a glowing article for a reason. My government was about to slay a monster, and praising heroes who slay monsters is a writer's most ancient task.

Maybe witnessing the operation had started my blood, but as the drone glided above more parched farmland I had difficulty watching Sheila without imagining having sex with her. There was something incredibly erotic about her focus and intensity and competence and the immense history that all these things held inside her, about what might be called her ten-thousand-hourness. Not only were her deceptively delicate hands and clear brown eyes wholly given over to the task of guiding the joystick; so was her alert rabbit's nose, and so, somehow, were her modest but substantive breasts. The very model of the modern moral warrior, every inch of her. I imagined lifting her up on to her control panel, spreading her legs, and pushing her clit into the button before impaling her on the joystick, all while I readied my sleepy dick.

As it turned out, thinking this way had given me an actual erection, of the inconvenient rather than labored-for kind I thought had left me behind years ago. I held my notebook in front of my crotch and worried that she would notice, but fortunately she kept her eyes on the first cement hints of the city.

The aerial view of the city went straight to my heart. When my sister was little, she and I had spent countless hours looking at picture-book drawings of the sprawling palace at the city's center. (I'm sure that some people would call me racist for romanticizing this country, but I do not apologize for loving
REDACTED
. Nor will I ever apologize for saying and writing the word, even though the word is always snatched away between my hard drive and publication. If what I am writing serves no other purpose, at least I know it belongs to me alone and will never be smeared with that horrible word “Redacted.” I savor the bend and curve of the syllables of the country I am fighting for, and I shout them out loud as I type:
REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED
.
2
)

That palace, I suppose I should note, existed only in my sister's picture books. The buildings that actually populated the city back when the picture books were written have long since been destroyed and replaced. The buildings now on display belonged in every sense to Big Brother. Like many dictators, a failed artist, Big Brother briefly studied architecture at Harvard before flunking out and trying his hand at torture, rape, and the assiduous abasement of language. Like a stockbroker coloring canvasses on the weekends, Little Brother designed all the buildings in the capital, although for the metaphor to be perfect, that stockbroker would have to level the Louvre to make way for his own museum.

For some reason Little Brother had a fondness for cylinders, and thus many of the buildings looked like someone had poured concrete onto a top hat. One of these buildings, a solitary structure separated from the city by an enormous empty lot, had been identified as Little Brother's residence. Near the roof was a balcony.

And there he was, standing at the window and gazing out at the balcony. Grainy and partially obstructed by a window and orange trees and apple trees offering more food than most
REDACTED
citizens ate in a month, but there he was, with that pitted face I had seen in so many magazines that he outlived. Little Brother, about to join
Life
magazine in the land of the dead.

We waited for what seemed like forty-five minutes—probably closer to forty-five seconds—for confirmation that the man we were looking at was in fact the man who had once chopped off the hands of the infant daughter of a rival. For a moment I thought of my own older brother, the cruel and tyrannical Paul, and I wondered where Paul would be right now had he survived his twenties. Here in the arena, even if only as an observer? No. He would be on a sofa somewhere, a retired high school gym teacher yelling at a screen full of people he would never meet.

When authorization finally came, Sheila looked up at me with a smile that was flirtatious or perhaps filial, but in either case full of affection. “Would you like to press it?” she asked.

Would I like to press it? Pressing it was a line I had never crossed and had never expected to cross. My role was that of the dog who sniffs out injustice, not of the hunter who actually pulls the trigger.

“I shouldn't.”

She ran her finger down the joystick. “I'll press it at the same time. It's okay. Think of all the things this guy has done.”

This guy routinely ordered the hanging of women who had committed the crime of being raped. This guy had ordered the torture and murder of the relatives of a man who had been overheard in a bar saying, “I know a great joke about Little Brother, but I'm not going to tell it since he would torture and murder all my relatives.” This guy terrorized, in ways too embedded in daily life to reckon, every citizen of the city on which he was gazing. Not only gazing, but smiling. This man was standing at his window and grinning.

No, not grinning. Picking at his teeth. An elderly murderer contentedly grooming himself.

I put my notebook down, wrapped my fingers around the joystick, and put my thumb on the button. The plastic felt cold and good in my hand. Sheila put two fingers on top of my thumbnail.

To obliterate any transgressor with a bolt from the sky—the dream of this power is so fundamental to our species that we invented gods to wield it. The dream of this power united all mankind, and now it—the power, not the dream—was actually in my hands.

Sheila nodded and we pressed the button.

To repurpose a line from John Updike about a Ted Williams home run, the missile was in the books while it was still in the sky. In a moment it was in Little Brother's living room. Nothing but shards of glass and crumbling cement and thick smoke, and I worried that he must have escaped somehow. Not until a human-shaped fiery figure writhed around in cosmically merited agony did I know that I had, in fact, gotten him.

This time I was the one who reached for a high five. In form the corpse closely resembled those of the many brave political protesters who have set themselves on fire to protest this evil regime and many others, but the resemblance ended with form. Here was the man, or one of the men, who had made all that burning necessary in the first place.

Then the balcony started to creak, and it broke apart and fell. We were silent for a moment and then the camera zoomed down to the street below. We saw rubble and black cloth and a few smoldering flames.

“We don't know where the black cloth is from,” I said. But a little more zooming revealed a cinder block smashed into what was clearly a severed head encased in a burqa's face-net.

“Shit,” Sheila said.

I had killed a woman.

“I thought there were no civilians in the area!” I said.

She shrugged. “One civilian for this operation is actually pretty good. At least she's the last civilian Little Brother will ever kill.”