“Officially. But Rangers were on the ground to help the Iraqis, who fought bravely, though not always competently.” He looked at Brodie. “We were aware of the bitter irony, being back there after all that you and yours had sacrificed. We told ourselves, maybe this time the peace would last.”
“Maybe it will.”
Miller scanned the desert horizon. “When I was briefed on this mission, on what we’d be doing here, I was hopeful. I thought, maybe with enough time, enough technology, there would come a day when we could fight a war without so many flag-draped coffins coming down the ramps of the C-130s. But then I came to understand.”
Taylor asked, “Understand what, Sergeant?”
Miller kept his eyes on the horizon. “Hardly any civilians had managed to escape Fallujah before our assault. ISIS wouldn’t let them leave. So we were fighting to take a city of women and children, shops andshopkeepers, schools, hospitals. That changed how we fought. Made us go slower than we would have liked, changed our tactics and priorities. A lot of Iraqi soldiers died because of that. But that was their duty, and they performed it honorably. They gave their lives to spare the lives of civilians.”
He turned and looked into the mock village of cinderblock buildings and destroyed cars. “There’s no life here. Not even a simulation of life. Nothing fragile you have to try to not break. The tin men don’t know the meaning of a life you have to protect, not take. They’re programmed to kill everything with a heat signature. So, what are we training for? What aretheytraining for?”
Brodie looked out at the gray village and the ruined cars, the streets lined with rows of faceless buildings—a shell of a place, a discarded exoskeleton. A necropolis.
Sergeant Miller turned to look at Brodie and Taylor. Something had changed in his eyes. They were less weary, more alert and intentioned. “Agents, I don’t know what happened to Major Ames. That’s the truth. But I do know what has happened to my men. And I do know what would happen if these goddamned things were ever unleashed upon the world. They must be destroyed.”
CHAPTER 21
CAMP HAYDEN’S ADMINISTRATIVE BUILDING WASa small, two-story brick structure near the parade grounds. A Ranger armed with an M4 rifle—with real bullets, not an EMP attachment—stood outside the entrance and saluted Brodie and Taylor as they approached. They returned the salute, and Brodie said to the Ranger, PFC Vargas, “Good morning, Private. We’re here to see Captain Pickman.”
“Yes, sir. The captain informed me. He’s down the hall, the last room on the right.”
They thanked the man and entered the building. A small anteroom led to a fluorescent-lit hallway lined with doors, all ajar and all leading to darkened offices. The administrative building, like everywhere else on base, was shut down until further notice.
Brodie and Taylor had used the satellite phone in Sergeant Miller’s Land Rover to call Captain Pickman’s house. He’d been home, and he’d told them that he had already been instructed by Major Klasky to show the CID agents Camp Hayden’s after-action review system. They figured they’d kill two birds with one stone—review the after-action recordings and see if Captain Pickman was as big a tool as Sergeant Miller made him out to be.
They entered the last room on the right. The lights were on but dimmed. In the middle of the large room was a sizable table containing a precise model of the training village—every road, every building, every car, even the sand berm and the surrounding man-made hills for the machine gun nests.
Standing next to the table was a trim thirty-year-old man indesert camo with close-cropped red hair, blue eyes, and an impressively square jaw. Actually, his whole head was kind of block-shaped, and he strode toward the two agents with a weird gait, like he was trying to cover more distance with each step than his legs would allow. He extended his hand and flashed an awkward grin. “Captain Ben Pickman. Pleasure to meet you.”
Brodie, who suspected the captain was a fugitive shapeshifter from Area 51 still figuring out how to act human, shook his hand and said, “Good to meet you, Captain. Thank you for arranging this on short notice.”
Pickman nodded. “Your investigation is the only thing going at Camp Hayden. I was waiting for your call.” He dropped his smile and said, “May-bell. The agents can’t see you in the dark.”
Brodie now noticed another person standing in the room near a bank of mounted flat-screen monitors. The figure stepped into the light, revealing a slight woman of about twenty in desert camo with short brown hair. She wore the eagle insignia of a specialist, and her name tape read “Christiansen Blair.” She said in a slight southern accent, “Sir, ma’am. SPC Christiansen Blair. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Taylor, who appeared delighted to see another woman from below the Mason-Dixon, smiled warmly at her. “You as well, Specialist.”
Captain Pickman said, “May-bell operates our augmented-reality review system. She is one of only two specialists at the camp who aren’t Rangers or MPs. Isn’t that right, May-bell?”
“That is correct, sir,” replied the SPC.
Brodie looked at Captain Pickman as the man stared at the young specialist. There were two reasons a commissioned officer might repeatedly refer to an enlisted soldier by their first name—as an expression of informality and friendship, or as a power move. He was pretty sure he knew which one the captain was employing. The junior officers were oftentimes the senior assholes.
Pickman said to Christiansen Blair, “Explain to Mr. Brodie and Ms. Taylor what this system is and how it works.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned to the CID agents. “This room houses our augmented-reality after-action review system. As you can see, we have a one-hundredth-scale model of our training village. Our SIMRES system uses cellular and GPS signals to record the precise geolocation of each exercise participant—Rangers and D-17s—every half second, as well as when and where they fire their weapons. This information is fed into a computer program that generates a three-dimensional render of every moment of every exercise, and those renders are projected onto our model here by our integrated visual augmentation system, which is a fancy word for VR goggles.” She smiled.
Brodie decided her accent was more Appalachian than southern, which meant she and Magnolia Taylor were at least second cousins. Brodie said to her, “That sounds impressive, Specialist.”
Pickman said to the SPC, “Tell them about the capabilities the system has with obstructing objects.”
Christiansen Blair nodded. “Dynamic occlusion, sir. Essentially, if you’re projecting a virtual image onto a real space, how do you make it so that a real physical object—in this case, say, a model of a building—dynamically blocks your view of a virtual object when it ought to be obstructed, like a virtual soldier taking cover behind the building? This tech is being developed by the military for use in the field and therefore on the fly, so it’s all done in real time, not based on any pre-render. It’s in beta, but so far has been working quite well.”
Scott Brodie was getting about half of this at most, which was probably enough. The tech stuff could be as much of a distraction as an aid, even on a case like this.
Captain Pickman added, “This is state-of-the-art stuff.”
“So’s killer robots,” said Brodie.
