Unmanned

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On the video display, Captain Darwin Cole watches black crosshairs quiver on a mud rooftop. He doesn’t budge the stick and rudder. No piloting needed now. All that matters is the missile, which Airman Zach Lewis guides by laser from a seat to Cole’s immediate right.

Ten seconds pass while Cole wiggles his toes, numb from the air-conditioning. No one speaks into their headsets. Even the chatter screen is calm, as if everyone in their viewing audience was holding his breath. It is 3:50 a.m., and Cole’s sense of detachment is so profound that he has to remind himself this is not a game, not a drill. It is death in motion, as real as it gets, and for the moment he is reality’s instrument of choice, the one whose name will go on the dotted line now and forevermore. His kill.

A sobering thought anytime, but especially when you’re sitting in a trailer on the floor of the Nevada desert, drowsy from breathing air that smells like warm electronics. Cole is a grounded fighter jock, as wingless as a plucked housefly, yet here he is about to zap a roomful of bad guys on the other side of the world. The upholstery creaks as he shifts in his seat. Nearly four hours in the saddle. Numb butt, numb toes, numb brain. Zach begins the countdown in a voice edgy with youthful eagerness.

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