He reached under his seat for another of the burner phones and powered it up. He punched in Grale’s number but didn’t have a signal. He dropped the phone on the seat and made the long drop back down to the highway and went north on 95. Grale had said don’t run. He remembered Laura’s skin against his and her saying, “Do not forget who you are.”
He swept past Creech Air Force Base and Indian Wells. A senator from Utah had told Fox News that Beatty should be held until there was more information. Jailed until there was evidence. Maybe that’s what the cop back up there in Red Rock was thinking. Was this even America anymore?
When he’d joined the United States Air Force, it was easily the proudest moment of his life. He loved flying drones and learned everything he could about remote split operations. He learned on the MQ-1 Predator and flew the RQ-1, which was about the size of a small plane. Press the button and it went and stayed up, cruising near dry mountains in Afghanistan for twenty-four hours, reading everything through the ball, one camera for day, one for night. It read through smoke and dust with synthetic aperture radar, and targeted with lasers, and dropped Hellfire missiles. He made good friends among the pilots in the flight trailers and everyone kept track of their kills.
But they didn’t talk about the collateral dead very often. There were fewer civilian deaths using drones, so it was better than before. But there were times when you watched a house long enough, and you knew who lived there. You saw the kids run around and play. He had started to envy the old-school pilots with the bomb bays and drive-by bombings. They never saw what they did.
Up the highway he doubled back and took the road to the airfield, crossed through the wash, and climbed into the narrowing valley. He tried the gate combination and when it still worked, he drove through, relocked it, and climbed the rock hills. He was sure the security dudes would come charging, but no one did and he continued down and took the old prospector track, breaking right toward the Ghost Mountains.
He had plenty of water. He had food, beer, and a bottle of whiskey. Maybe this was a good place to hole up and think for a few days. If the security dudes intercepted him, he’d turn around and find another place to disappear. No one stopped him, and from this distance it didn’t look like anything was happening at the airfield. Even if they saw him, who was going to follow him up this forgotten road? Soon he disappeared into the dry mountains.
He switched into four-wheel drive as the road climbed, and he recognized the big band of red iron ore across the gray rock as the road rose along a rock face. Another quarter mile up brought him to a cave-like overhang of rock. He parked and checked it out. It looked really good, then not that great, pretty small and hard to back into. But it had shade and a view of the airfield in the valley below. He spent ten minutes backing the truck into the cave, during which the left front tire came dangerously close to the edge.
Now he was under a rock roof where no sunlight would reflect off the truck and give him away. He had food and water. He could deal with the heat, and no state troopers would ever be up this mountain. He doubted anyone ever came out here. He got out one of the little coolers with food and sat on a flat rock.
He opened the cooler and checked the sandwiches and beer. Both were still cool, not cold anymore, but still pretty good. He pulled out one of the beers and, even though it was morning, twisted off the top and drank and thought about the cop rousting him and what the other cop said. He thought about Laura and how he lost her, the hard things he’d said to her way back then. He never wanted to hurt anyone that way ever again, and in some way couldn’t even understand her reaching out to him the way she had.
He checked his phone, saw he had a signal and called Grale. When it rolled to voice mail, he left a message that he was where he could watch the airfield. A drone was on the runway. With binoculars he saw two people standing nearby. He couldn’t make out their faces, but one stood like the Saudi who’d trained on fighter jets. The first question the Saudi had asked him was what he flew before drones. What he’d flown was a PlayStation 4, but he didn’t tell the Saudi pilot that. Instead, he’d ignored the question.
He shifted the binoculars again and watched a guy who must be the new flight instructor turn and look this way.
“Weird that,” Beatty said. “But you’re right on, buddy, I’m out here and I’m watching you.”
His phone rang, and when he saw it was Grale he put the binos down and reached for the phone. But something stopped him. He let it ring. He let it go to voice mail. No one knows where you are, he thought. For now, leave it that way.
43
Beatty left me a disjointed message I couldn’t deal with yet. I looked over at the San Diego County deputy who’d ride into Cargoland with me, a young guy who looked at home on a mountain bike, so at least that part was right.
“Ready to roll?” I asked.