Deep Strike

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“High value target. That’s all you need to know.”

It was already ninety degrees at Creech Air Force Base, the morning sun burning down on several dozen trailers neatly arranged in four rows. Captain Mike Berger, seated inside one of the dimly lit, cramped, and chilly trailers, kept his right hand on the joystick and his left on the throttle as his eyes scanned one of the fourteen displays built into the two-person control station. Beside him and sharing a center console was First Lieutenant Dee Ardis, likewise studying her screens.

Berger and Ardis were seated inside an MQ-9 Ground Control Station controlling a Reaper drone, with Berger piloting the aircraft while Ardis operated its sensors. For the last twelve hours, the Reaper had been circling high above Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a Pakistani province bordering Afghanistan. This section of the province was mainly no-man’s-land, a disputed area sparsely populated with villages containing only a dozen or so families each, a region where the Pakistani government had ceded authority to tribal warlords. In the center of Berger’s visual display was a single dwelling at the end of a long dirt road, if you could call it that — more like a trail worn into the rugged terrain, snaking through the wilderness.

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