The Drone Wars

Strike

The valley was narrow with tenacious plants clinging precariously to steep rocky sides.  In the middle, the river ran along through thick vegetation.  The plants farther from the river were wilting away from the drought.

Pig missed Patrick more than he had ever dreamed possible for someone he'd known for such a short period of time.  When he was a boy, he had always wanted a brother to be his playmate and friend.  Patrick was the brother he always wanted, a bond forged in the crucible of Army basic training.  Patrick liked Pig for what he was, laughed at his jokes and was a genuinely good human being.

There was a path leading to the village far ahead and the drones were widening it.  Even so, it was way too narrow to get vehicles through, those had been left on the other side of the river.  Whirling blades powered by diesel engines, camera eyes saw the scene and decided exactly which branches to chop all the while looking out for humans that strayed near enough to trigger an automatic shutdown for safety's sake.  Still no sign of the missing squad.

Pig was sweating like his namesake animal and wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve.  He looked up at the hot, unyielding, tropical sun to see something tiny streaking through the sky. "Incoming!" he yelled, having been taught that it was unlikely he would ever see something like this.  Given that he had seen it, he responded to his training with the proper warning cry.

Not that it did any good.  It was less than a second later that the explosion knocked him off his feet and left his ears ringing.  The missile had hit near at the front of the column.  He had been near the end of the trail of materiel and personnel with the pack drones behind him.  At its head were the brush clearing drones and more soldiers.  He ran forward to help.  Their trail was visible from the cloud of military spy satellites, of that there could be no doubt, it just seemed strange that an expensive enemy missile was spent on them.

All in all, three men had died, an officer and two new recruits, one of whom was the very young looking man who had reported to Lieutenant Clairvaux.  A female officer had also died.  And lastly, the brush clearing drones had been destroyed.  With no way to radio for help, the shortest way out of the valley was forward.

They spent the rest of that day making their campsite around the crater left by the explosion and slept there with a blazing fire burning in the middle of it, enough light to keep dangerous animals at bay. 

The next morning, they were ordered to ship out and Pig found himself at the forefront of the column, hacking at the brush with a machete along with over two dozen other survivors.  If marching through the jungle in the heat of the day was hard, hacking through it was even harder.

"Rest break!" yelled Clairvaux.  Pig went back and got some water from a pack drone and then found a rock to sit down on.  All the troops were gathered in the same area, but not clearly visible.  The commander usually let them rest for nearly an hour.  Boy did he need it.  He was exhausted and his arms were screaming with fatigue.  No one sat next to him.  And no wonder, he made himself sick with the stink of his sweat.

Mitch came over and sat down on a rock nearby.  They both faced the jungle, since they were trained to be vigilant.  "Paris, I just wanted to say that I'm sorry about your friend.  Patrick was a good man and and good soldier."  Pig planed a response but then stopped.  He could almost imagine he heard a faint buzzing sound coming from the trees in front of them.  Was it a bumble bee nearby or something worse?  Mitch stiffened and raised her gun, she must have heard it too.  The buzzing grew louder and both lifted their weapons and pointed them towards the sound.  Pig saw nothing.  "It's got to be a drone," he said.

"Can't be," she replied as she stood up, "no radio means they wouldn't be able to control it."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something.  He stood up too.  Better to face them standing than sitting on a rock.  Perhaps it was a bird, that almost imagined shape moving amongst the trees.  A terrible place for a delicate drone.  And it looked small too.

Then the sound faded into the background noise of birds chirping, monkeys howling in the trees.  "Couldn't be a drone," he said, still on edge.

"Couldn't be," she responded as she stood next to him.

He grabbed her hand instinctively, he was left handed and she was right.  It was a liberty he took unconsciously.  He felt her hand tense up at first, perhaps to withdraw, then it relaxed.

After a second pause, she pulled her hand away.  "You're sweet, Paris," she said, apparently she'd decided better of it.  "But I'm a professional.  And professionals don't hold hands."

"You're right," Pig said, embarrassed by her rejection.  She was right, those kinds of liberties were inappropriate, and just because she was a woman, didn't mean that she needed comfort from an inferior man.  "Sorry about that."

"Paris, where do you live? After this war, I want to look you up."

Pig smiled. "Los Angeles. East part of the San Fernando valley."

"Sounds like a glamorous place."

"Fire. Drought. Nothing glamorous about that," he replied.

"I grew up in south Texas. Town of Laredo. Lot of crime."

"Nowhere's perfect," he shrugged his shoulders.

They reported the sound to Clairvaux but he dismissed the idea of an unaccompanied drone out of hand as preposterous.  After the requisite hour break, of which only forty minutes remained, Pig was back at the machete work.  There were several men farther ahead of him, his job was basically just to clean up what they had left behind so that the trail would have a width of at least twelve feet, enough to easily accommodate two pack drones walking side by side.

"I found something!" yelled one of the men another hour along.  The others stopped and went to look.  Overseeing the work was Sergeant Park who immediately went over to investigate, pushing the others aside.  Pig went too and looked at a respectful distance.

There were two men lying in the dirt alongside the road, natives by the looks of them, dressed in tattered pants and grimy t-shirts.  Each had their eye shot out with blood oozing from the wound.  "They're still warm," said someone, apparently with some medical training who felt for a pulse in their necks, "but dead.  Definitely dead."

A few minutes later, the rest of the platoon, at least those not way back guarding the vehicles caught up.  About thirty people bunched up around the sides of the trail while Clairvaux consulted with the other squad leaders about next steps.  The cause must be the same as the deaths of Patrick and Obasanjo.  Should someone take the bodies back for examination?  Should they be returned to the village?

While the VIPs decided on the details Pig and the rest sat around.  That seemed to be what being in the army was often about.