without his refinements. Some time ago he taped a few lines from Wordsworth to the wall: Listen! The mighty Being is awake/And doth with his eternal motions make/A sound like thunder. Noel enjoys poetry, especially Wordsworth, who offers consolations and reassurances—fits of joy, the charm of visionary things. And golf. Noel plays whenever he can. On summer evenings, he’ll often stop at East Potomac Park and get in nine holes on his way home.
“We’ve got work to do,” Cowper says, seating himself. He picks up a pencil, drums it on the table. Noel rarely sees him flustered. Cowper is one of the pioneers of drone air reconnaissance and came to the DIAC from the navy after the war in Yugoslavia. He is tanned and ruddy, a broad-chested Californian with a full head of silver hair, ten years older than Noel—though his good looks and easy humor often lead people to mistake him for the junior colleague. He has a thirty-two-foot Beneteau 323 sailboat that he keeps docked in Annapolis. He and his Texan wife, Ann, spend weekends sailing around the Chesapeake Bay. They are outdoorsy enjoyers of life and have no children.
“A little late, isn’t it?” Noel mutters.
“You’re goddamn right it’s late.” Cowper frowns, looks at his watch.
“I mean it’s a little late for excuses.”
“I’m not going argue with you.” Cowper slides from the stool. “We gave the clear to engage. We need to have some answers ready before they’ve thought of the questions.”
Answers before questions? Noel’s impulse is to laugh. Typical Cowper: if not actually on top of things, then satisfied by his instinct to get himself there. The ever-prepared Boy Scout. Noel is not a Boy Scout. He prefers to wear his insignificance as camouflage rather than camouflage his insignificance. A message enters his in-box with an urgent ding. He knows all too well what it contains. It takes surprisingly little time for things to drift down to these lower depths. The bigger the catastrophe, the more leadenly it falls as the larger vertebrates swimming overhead voraciously consume responsibility while spitting out little pebbles of blame.
“We’re not leaving here until it’s done,” Cowper says flatly.
They cue up the gun-tape footage and the audio feed and watch it over and over. Grayscale infrared picture fringed with instrument readouts. In the target hairs, a complex of square structures inside a walled compound, vehicles, and people—little infrared white grubs—moving between them. It’s hard to look at, harder still to look away. A floating aerial camera view, circling steadily, keeping focus, command voices patched in, steady, circling, steady, then flash, white screen shock-wave shudder filtered zoom showing exploded bodies and slow-motion debris falling back to charred earth.
They craft the memo, couched in enough classified material to guard against its being released while leaving the requisite chutes and ladders open for the downward transference of blame. One of the reasons Cowper has survived for so long in the tense red-cell environment is the skill he brings to parsing and compartmentalizing the team’s duties and after-action reports. His deftness in after-action jujitsu is an aspect of his athletic and competitive personality. He enjoys his victories and considers himself, in the office and out, to be a winner. Noel’s pleasure is less gladiatorial. He thinks of it more like the action of bark-stripping porcupines, or of beavers on forests and wetlands: action from below with broad, far-reaching consequences.
After they send the carefully crafted memo into the chute, they linger in the office for a few minutes. The high-res feed runs in a soundless loop on the monitor. There are certain people, and Cowper is one, whose facial furniture gets completely rearranged when they begin to think. Frowns, creases, darkened looks are signs of deepest thought, which, like duty goods, must be declared upon arrival. He pulls his chair up to the edge of Noel’s desk, slides his folded palms between his knees. Their eyes meet for a moment, then simultaneously avert. “Shit happens,” Cowper says.
Noel understands his obligation is to be resigned to the mysterious engines that serve politics and fate. The other day, he overheard someone say, The more that die, the sooner they’re forgotten. What a shock to hear Lenin paraphrased in the DIAC cafeteria. But it’s the truth. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. Nobody would openly admit it. In the world of full disclosure, certain things must not be seen, shown, or said. The same decorum that attends the arrival of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Base attends those patriotic TV and newspaper-photo memorials to the fallen soldiers—desperate efforts to deny that the ego vanishes in history.
Snow has been falling all afternoon. He was hoping for a big storm, likes the idea of driving through it with snow swirling all around, sticking to the road, the grass and trees. He takes the South Capitol Street bridge, passes the new ballpark, and gets on the Southwest freeway. The Lincoln Navigator was made for just these conditions. It is late, and because of the snow emergency, the roads are nearly empty. He crosses the Fourteenth Street bridge, gets on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. After Arlington Cemetery, the parkway begins a steady ascent along the Potomac gorge. The river narrows here, and the banks on either side become suddenly darker. Noel is sure he is not alone in imagining, from time to time, plumes and towers of smoke rising from the city behind him, or, thinking forward, seeing cows and sheep grazing once again on the Mall. Why should the equalizing force of time that has made quaint archaeological sites of other great capitals spare Washington, D.C.?
He eases up on the gas and pulls into the scenic overlook at the top of Spout Run. He is intimate with the physiogeography of the area. The river gorge runs along the fall zone between the Piedmont Plateau and the Atlantic Coastal Plain. At Great Falls, the river drops seventy-six feet in less than a mile. How many Sundays has he spent climbing the rocks along Billy Goat Trail? Where he is now, on the very edge of the fall zone, the exposed terraces form steep bluffs that run along both sides of the river, which widens quickly just below Georgetown.
Noel steps into the chill air. Snow is coming down in great white sheets, is sticking to the trees. An airplane passes overhead, making its final descent into Reagan National. They come in low here, following the river. There has always seemed something magical to him about airplanes, the charm effect of kites and strings and flying arrows and other boyhood fantasies of projected power. Lately, he’s begun to see a fuller connection between these fantasy forms of projection and what he calls “disembodied purpose.” The gun-tape footage is lodged in his thoughts. He can’t get rid of it. The sticking point is not the engineering of remote agency—which is just another fancy way of describing disembodiment—but the much larger question of purpose.
He opens the back hatch of the Navigator and takes a club from the golf bag he keeps there. Big Bertha. He fumbles in the pocket, grabs a handful of balls and a tee. A low stone wall runs the length of the parking lot, the WPA, National Park Service style of masonry that conjures visions of Buicks and Packards motoring along with all the time in the world. He steps over the wall and walks a few paces down the grass slope to where it drops steeply off. Through the swirling snow, he can just barely make out the black surface of the river below. With his foot he clears a small patch of grass in the snow, then, leaning on the club for balance, stoops and gently presses the ball and tee into the ground.
Another passing airplane distracts him, and he tops the first drive. The ball drops through the trees. He places a second ball on the tee, feeling a pleasant adrenaline flush, a foretaste of the perfect swing. He connects with a satisfying THWICK, sending the ball high and straight out over the gorge and filling his soul with deep, tranquilizing power.
He sets another ball onto the tee.
THWICK.
And another.
THWICK.
“Step back!”
A beam of light pierces the night.
“Step back!”
He turns into a milky blindness. A moment passes. The sound of a crackling radio sets his heart racing. Little white grubs skitter and pop in all the surplus light. Was milkiness the last thing they saw? He plucks ball and tee from the ground, then, with all the cheerful insouciance he can summon, strides toward the policeman, swinging Big Bertha like a walking stick. “Good evening, Officer.”
“Drop