Free The Home Front by Margaret Vandenburg Page A

alone. To be safe.
    Belts pose the only real threat. Daddy keeps messing them up, hanging short ones next to long ones. There are five hooks and nine belts. Ten counting the one Daddy wears to work. Sometimes three hang together, crowding one hook and leaving another one empty. Two belts per hook are fine, as long as they’re both the same color and the same length. He sorts them out before climbing onto his shelf. Black with black and brown with brown. He gives the widest belt its own hook.
    He’s taking a chance. Daddy keeps track of things and might notice. But sitting in a closet with belts hanging every which way is unthinkable. No better than the living room or even his bedroom, ever since they dismantled the lock. Someone is always barging in. Something is always out of place. Out of control. He takes comfort where he can find it. Daddy’s closet is safe.

~ III ~
    E verything was business as usual after the civilian casualty episode. Captain Frick carried out Colonel Trumble’s order to commend Brown for following orders. Otherwise, nobody ever mentioned it again. Day in and day out, the most serious threat in the trailer was boredom. The US Air Force had developed an arsenal of amphetamines to fend off battle fatigue. Since Chair Force drone pilots weren’t technically on combat duty, they had to rely on caffeine. Todd was the only coffee drinker. According to his calculations, this said a lot about the demographics of the squad. The drug of choice was Mountain Dew. The recycling bin was overflowing with cans by noon, especially on Mondays. Weekend warriors one and all. Presumably their bins at home were just as jammed with beer bottles.
    Business as usual meant everybody was in surveillance mode. A flick of a switch could catapult any one of the drones into kill mode. This simple fact convinced bad guys thousands of miles away to lay low for weeks at a time. What the Pentagon called the Panopticon Effect supposedly saved lives and money. A single Predator drone could paralyze an entire region with paranoia, even in North Waziristan. That was the good news. The bad news was that it made war boring as hell. No wonder guys had itchy trigger fingers. Anything to break the monotony.
    Every pilot had his own SO, a sensor operator tasked with tracking targets with the drone’s million dollar eye in the sky. The sensor was always in motion, rotating and swiveling and zooming its way into the secret recesses of enemy territory. Even though pilots actually pulled the trigger in combat mode, they had to rely on their sidekicks to steer laser-guided bombs home to mama. They worked as a team, surrounded by more than a dozen monitors transmitting electro-optical digital images, radar scans, full-motion video streams, and 3-D terrain mapping. The sheer volume of information at their fingertips was mind-numbing. In the spirit of professional multitaskers, they alleviated the anaesthetizing effects of overstimulation with yet more stimulation, inventing interactive games to play with each other, the more juvenile the better. Their favorite was an unmanned aerial vehicle version of Slug Bug.
    “Read ’em and weep, fellas,” Brown said. “A bona fide Volkswagen.”
    “A bug?”
    “A Jedi.”
    “You mean Jetta,” said Gomez.
    Gomez wasn’t really correcting Brown. They were thinking together, as usual. He had actually spotted the VW even before Brown did, smack in the middle of one of their shared screens. But good SOs never stole their pilot’s thunder. Batman and Robin. The Lone Ranger and Tonto. Brown and Gomez.
    “Jedi. Jetta. Good for a point, one way or the other.”
    “Hold your horses,” Kucher said. The senior member of the squad, he resented the fact that Brown was so cocky. “Sedans don’t count.”
    “It’s red.”
    “Red as a fairy’s cherry.”
    “Big deal.”
    “Green and red are wild cards.”
    “Since when?”
    “Last week.”
    “Says who?”
    “Ask Franklin.”
    “Fair ball,” said