Dirt Bikes, Drones, and Other Ways to Fly Page 3

  TunzaFunza is crowded today. Uncle Sal stands behind the counter driving the espresso machine, all five hands flying. Behind him hangs a poster-size photo of his plane, the Hi-O Silver, complete with missing door and other skydiving features. I know that plane well.

  “Hey there, Arlo!” he booms as I walk up. “How’s my favorite diamond in the rough today?”

  “Dude,” I say. “That was a sweet one this morning.”

  He blasts the steam wand into a pitcher of milk. “Sweet one? What are you talking about?”

  “You know, White Sands, war games—all that.”

  Uncle Sal rattles his head. “Arlo, you mystify me.”

  A freebie Americano skates across the counter into my hand.

  “Now get outta here,” he says. “I’m a busy man.”

  I doubt that I mystify him, but he is a busy man.

  I take my Americano and lunch over to the game corner. A senior named Rafe Rudolpi is in my seat. He’s playing something called Mob War 2080, a futuristic look at the dark alleys of crime. You pick the city, the warrior, and the weapon.

  Rafe’s a football player, defensive end. Steroid mustache. Ugly, even by Clay standards. But he poses like next week’s Sports Illustrated cover. Unless you play football, you do not exist to Rafe. He does, however, make an exception for gamers, but only if you play at least at his level.

  He senses me watching and immediately his ego fires up. Now he’s playing for an audience. Always a mistake. When you’re conscious of others, even semi, you lose focus. Focus is everything. And true focus is the doorway to intuitive transcendence. It finds impossible targets, saves your life, and lifts you thousands of notches higher on the leaderboard.

  It explodes my mind to think what the world would be like if all seven billion of us found true focus.

  I hover there, sipping my Americano, munching my fries, and trying not to let my pity show. But Rafe’s weaknesses are so glaring: he’s slow to fire at the hovercraft; he forgets to look behind him in the alleys; he doesn’t know how to see in the dark, instinctively, as any warrior must.

  In the end, he survives. He kills a midlevel mob leader, pulverizing him, raining brain matter over half of Hong Kong, including the roof of a Chinese pagoda, where seagulls flock down and eat it. But he also kills 232 civilians.

  Rafe seems pleased with himself. Maybe it’s an above-average score for Clay Allison, but on a world scale, it sucks. He doesn’t even rank in the top thousand.

  He glances up, hoping to bask in some admiration. Then he sees it’s me. He grabs his root beer from the cup holder and makes way.

  “Show me how it’s done, junior,” he says.

  “Happy to,” I say, sliding into the seat.

  I punch in my coins and log on. Download my game, Drone Pilot.

  Select my UAV—unmanned aerial vehicle. Lots of designs to choose from: flying wing, rotorcraft, missile, hawk. On and on. Some drones are the size of a commercial jet; some are as small as a hummingbird.

  Yesterday, my big day against Sergei, I shot into the sky as an MQ-9 Reaper, a pure hunter-killer, with a sixty-six-foot wingspan and a maximum speed of three hundred miles per hour, which I pushed to well over four hundred.

  Today, I choose a MQ-3 Rapier, a twelve-foot-long missile-shaped drone designed for maximum expendable destruction. I want to challenge myself—to push to greater speeds. I’ll be harder to hit and harder to detect. But flying with rudimentary wings—“wingstubs,” as they’re called—will make it much harder to maneuver. So it’s a tradeoff. There’s always a tradeoff.

  The default design sucks, so I start to tinker. Most gamers are in such a hurry to play that they don’t bother with this step—the customizing—and that’s a major reason why they don’t win.

  Gaming has taught me this: that the more you individualize and tailor the game to you, and not somebody else’s default idea of you, the higher-farther-faster you can go.

  When you individualize and personalize, you play the real game. Just a few people out there truly get this.

  I start to redraw my drone. I modify the carbon-fiber skin from one-half inch thick to one-quarter inch. This shaves exactly 162 pounds from my total weight—it will give me more time in the air, more precious seconds. On the downside, a thinner skin means I’m more vulnerable to attack—to the inevitable tracers and popping flak.

  “Dude, what’re you doing?”

  It’s Rafe, the human mosquito.

  “Shut it, man,” I say.

  What I’m doing is this: I’m mounting a machine gun—borrowing ideas from an F-15E fighter—and welding it onto my nose. To pare my weight even more, I delete one whole barrel. The default is for one thousand shells. I cut this to two hundred. On second thought, I make it one hundred.

  “Dude! You’re crazy!”

  Rafe’s voice is getting punier.

  Now I’m light—and fast. I can defend, but mostly I can offend.

  I dump fuel, siphoning off a third of my load. I’m as light as can be. This will be a fast game—“surgically swift,” as they say in the promotional docs.

  In drone flying, the law of opposites applies: less is more. Never attack with more firepower than you need. Heavy guns and big shells are for amateurs. Your aircraft needs to be at least as fast as your instincts. Plus—and this is so obvious you’d think every gamer would know it, but few do—all it takes to kill an enemy is one well-aimed shell, even a little one, a tiny bullet. A fight can be won with one move. You just gotta know how, and when, to make it.

  Now I’m Sir Lancelot riding to battle without armor—and carrying just a dagger. I’m very vulnerable, but I’m also way faster than any other knight out there. I can truly rack up a genius score.

  It’s a tradeoff, and today I have traded everything for speed.

  Of course, speed is a sensation. To say it tingles up and down my spine and glows in my fingertips is an understatement.

  While I’m gearing up, Rafe sees my user name—ClayMadSwooper—on the leaderboard.

  He leans close and studies the numbers. More than two million people have played this version of Drone Pilot, and exactly three thousand are ranked. The top ten are listed on the screen by user name, and the top three are listed in bold lights: IpanemaGirl is number three. SergeiTashkent is now number two. ClayMadSwooper—that’s me—is number one.

  Rafe looks shocked. “Dude, when did this happen?”

  “Last night.”

  “Is that ranking local?”

  “Hey, don’t insult me.”

  He gapes. “I’m profoundly speechless.”

  “Keep it that way,” I say.

  It’s a crass thing to say to a senior and a defensive end on the football team, but Rafe really does need to shut up.

  I choose a war zone. The game is extremely biased—every zone is a Muslim country:

  Afghanistan

  Iran

  Iraq

  Libya

  Pakistan

  I choose Pakistan, the North-West Frontier—the region around the Swat Valley. It’s my favorite place to fly because it feels like home. When you fly drone or ride dirt, you get to know country. The orchards and groves, and farther up the spiny canyons, following the narrow washes and dry riverbeds that always lead to something.

  Pakistan’s Swat Valley looks and feels like Orphan County’s canyon country. Loamy green bottomland rolling up to craggy granite palisades. Far-off snowy mountains. You can practically smell the river trout. And the sudden shadows. Oh my God, those shadows.

  Yea, though I fly through the valley of the shadow of death . . .

  Some guy with a kick-ass bass voice—in a tone half warning, half prayer—opens the game with these words. I could skip them, but I never do.

  . . . I will fear no evil.

  I fire up my engines. Count down. Blast off. Pull into the blue.

  The soundtrack soars along with me. Subdued yet symphonic. Layered with a slow Hawaiian steel guitar to introduce all that death.
It’s both frightening and beautiful.

  I’m up, up—gone.

  I’m cruising at three thousand feet, homing on the Swat, when three enemy aircraft pop up at eleven o’clock—a sweet pod of death.

  These craft are some duck-brained designer’s idea of terrifying. They’ve got the wings of an F-22 Raptor and the aft fuselage of the Millennial Falcon—in other words, wide-assed but extremely fast.

  One banks, dives, and blasts away. Red tracers carve up the sky.

  Here’s the problem: I can fly high and evasively or swoop and lose him in the canyons, but that’ll cost fuel.

  Since I don’t have the fuel to mess with, I turn on the enemy plane and become the attacker.

  In air combat, this is the moment of “shift.”

  When you shift, and defense becomes offense, you confuse the enemy, if only for a moment—and that’s all it takes. Confusion is opportunity.

  I fire a burst of shells. At least three hit the belly of the plane. One penetrates the fuel tank. Smoke pours out. At first, it’s just a thin stream. Then he catches fire. The plane explodes, disintegrating into raining fireballs.

  Rafe is freaking out in my ear: “Dude-dude-dude! Way to go!”

  I block him out.

  The two other planes come at me like rottweilers. I can’t aim at one without showing my ass to the other, so I swoop low, flush against the ground.

  Even little changes in land surface—a knoll, a boulder, a mesquite shrub—will end it all. So I slide into the trough of a dry riverbed pissed smooth by time.

  When you’re flying at the speed of blur, everything is surreal. You’re never more than a millisecond from obliteration. It’s pure, adrenalized, instinct flying—and it’s the gateway to the Drone Zone.

  One of these dogs can’t handle my low-flying moves. He tries to pull out, clips a wing, pinwheels, and slams into the canyon wall. I shoot into the blue, straight up, with the last enemy jet sniffing my ass. Pop a loop and now I’m on his ass.

  I feel the chill of death rush up his spine. Before he can twitch, I’ve fixed him in my sights and plowed the last of my shells into his carbureted guts.

  As I split off, he explodes, raining molten steel over the Swat Valley.

  Now I’m free—but I’m also out of ammo. Plus, I’m extremely low on fuel—just a needle’s width from empty. Some drones can stay aloft forever powered by a single hydrogen cell, but when you operate on jet fuel or batteries, you can burn out fast.

  The rule is, always—Always!—know your fuel level. Get so you can sense it down to the last lickable drop.

  How you use fuel is the greatest challenge in drone flying. That’s why I lighten my load, befriend the wind, glide the thermal, and lick the tank dry. I would lie, cheat, and steal from my grandmother to gain a few more seconds in the air.

  Fuel is gold. Ammo is silver. All else is crap.

  I close on my target, a biological weapons plant located in the village of Quaziristan. Ground guns open up. Flak pops all over. I’m getting scarred and nicked, but nothing penetrates my quarter-inch-thick skin. Not yet, anyway.

  I brush the rooftops of the village. The thing about Pakistani villages is, almost all the structures are just one or two stories. If they were multiple heights, it would be death. But they are basically the same height, thank God.

  Before she can even hear me, I blast over the head of a black-veiled woman hanging clothes on a rooftop. I can’t actually see it, but I know I’ve just shredded every last robe and T-shirt on the line. I just hope my sonic smack hasn’t knocked her off her feet.

  Thirty seconds to an empty tank . . . twenty-nine . . . twenty-eight . . .

  Now I’m in the heart of the Zone. A place of peace and calm. Instinct and prayer. A whisper from death, yet more alive than ever. Part of something bigger.

  At fifteen seconds, I shoot into the sky, get my first naked-eye look at the weapons plant. The ground guns blast away. I can barely see through the flak. I’m nicked . . . nicked . . . nicked. But my skin holds.

  Twelve . . . eleven . . . ten . . .

  I fix a laser on my target. I’m going to rack up an extremely high score, cement my number one position on the leaderboard. Put more distance between me and the great Sergei.

  My thumb slides to “Activate.”

  Just one little push of a button.

  “Five . . . four . . . three . . .”

  A bell rings, and children swarm out of the building next to the weapons plant.

  My thumb twitches, leaps left. I hit Self-Destruct.

  My drone pulverizes, showering down as molten particulate. Many little children are cut and burned. All are covered with soot and dust. The last image on the screen is of a cluster of saucer-eyed kids.

  Trembling.

  MISSION OVER. GAME OVER. POWER DOWN.

  My score rolls up:

  PILOTING: AWESOME.

  MARKSMANSHIP: AWESOME.

  STRATEGY: UNKNOWN.

  CHECKLIST: INSUFFICIENT FUEL, INSUFFICIENT ARMOR, INSUFFICIENT AMMUNITION.

  MISSION OUTCOME: ABORTED TO SAVE LIVES.

  I get a good score—some would say great—but it’s a long ways from my best. Six months ago, I would’ve been happy with it. Now I’m disappointed, because I’ve raised my performance level to the upper reaches of the game’s exosphere.

  Still, I’m pretty sure I’ve held the lead. When the leaderboard reconfigures, sure enough, there I am on top: ClayMadSwooper.

  “Hoo-woosh!” somebody says.

  “Daaaamn!” somebody else says.

  I become aware of everybody around me—Cam, Lobo, Michelle, Latoya, Rafe. Even a few stray wranglers, holding their little cappuccino cups. Everybody’s been watching.

  “Dude, that was a helluva game,” Rafe says. “But why’d you self-destruct? You coulda taken out that plant. You coulda scored off the charts.”

  It’s pointless to point out the obvious to some people.

  Cam claps my shoulder. “You made the right call, man. You saved that school. You saved those little kids.”

  “Quite a show, hombre,” one of the wranglers says. “I’d say you’ve played this one before.”

  “It’s just a game,” I say. “No big deal.”

  Chapter 5

  A SHINY BLACK FORD CROWN Victoria LX is parked in front of our house. Two men are talking to Dad. I brake outside the front gate and ponder the scene.

  One of the dudes has on a crisp uniform—the dark blue of the United States Air Force. He looks like a recruiting poster: tall, cropped, and ripped. The other dude is older, bulkier, not quite so tall. He’s dressed in chinos and a brown leather jacket. No military decals or insignias. He’s bald, but “good bald”—bone shaved.

  Dad’s quite the contrast to these two. He’s thin, unbuff, and a bit slouched. His jeans ride low. Not butt-crack low. Just don’t-give-a-damn-anymore low. His hair, which he’s taken to cutting himself, has the look of burnt range grass, with a little ash mixed in.

  Dad’s let go in stages. Stage one was May, when Mom died. He started holding himself differently, slouchier. He started dressing . . . not like a bum, but like a bum a week before he becomes a bum. Stage two was July, when the newspaper folded. He stopped doing the everyday stuff—doing it right, at least.

  For the first sixteen and a half years of my life, Dad was a somebody in northeast New Mexico. Editor in chief of the Orphan County Gunslinger—“The Straightest-Shooting Newspaper in the Southwest, founded in 1887.”

  The Gunslinger died the way every business in Clay Allison dies—it dried up. As Dad’s always telling me, you can’t squeeze lime juice out of limestone.

  Dad got offered media jobs in Albuquerque and Denver, but he didn’t want to leave Clay. Didn’t want to go far from Burro Mesa.

  Now he owns and operates the Snack Shack down at Rio Loco Field. On football Fridays, I’m right there beside him, tonging hot dogs, pouring coffee, juggling Skittles.

  Some weeks, this adds up to less than a
hundred bucks. Even for Orphan County, New Mexico, that’s slim, especially because of Siouxsie and all her needs.

  What’s saved us are the mares—Queen Zenobia, Blue Dancer, and I Love Cornflakes. These pregnant, snorting ladies wander between the barn and corral, getting fatter by the day. You’d never know they were once sleek, Kentucky-bred racers, or that Queen Zenobia came in fourth at the Preakness.

  I take care of them. In exchange, Mr. Wasserman, of Gunnison, Colorado, takes care of our mortgage. But the deal lasts only until they drop their foals, which is going to happen in twelve to fourteen weeks—or sometime in January or early February. That’s the point; they will be winter babies, and it’s warmer here than in the Gunnison Valley. We’ll hold on to those babies until spring.

  After that, God only knows.

  I sputter toward the military dudes. Dad walks out to meet me, slices a finger across his throat. I kill the motor.

  “You know anything about this, Arlo?” he says, glancing back at the dudes.

  “’Bout what?”

  He plants his hands on his hips. “Don’t mess with me. These guys seem to know all about you.”

  I pull off my helmet. Peer over my shades. “Nah, never seen ’em before.”

  “What’s all this about some shootout down at White Sands?”

  I check out the dudes again. “You serious?”

  “Mmm-hm,” Dad says. “I thought so.”

  A gust of wind blasts into us. It darts across the field and hops the fence. A black curtain hangs over Eagle Tail Mesa.

  “Looks like it’s gonna drop and slop,” Dad says. “C’mon, we better hear them out.”

  I lean my Yam 250 against the side of the house, under the eaves. We go over to the dudes.

  “Hello, Arlo,” the man in uniform says. “I’m Major Keith Anderson. We spoke this morning.”