Free The Home Front by Margaret Vandenburg Page B

Franklin. “Chalk one up for Brown.”
    Captain Franklin was the scorekeeper. The rules were so complicated, he used a spreadsheet to tally up points. He also acted as referee when sightings were disputed, almost always by Kucher. Franklin inherited a kind of gravitas from his father, a Seattle judge who still couldn’t believe his son had joined the air force. The odds were certainly against it from a socioeconomic point of view. Franklin was the only white collar son in the trailer.
    “Who’s winning?” Poindexter asked. He knew perfectly well that Brown was in the lead, but he couldn’t resist the chance to rub Kucher’s face in it. Everyone was sick and tired of hearing the old guy bitch and moan. Almost inconceivably, Kucher was born before Pac-Man was invented, when kids still played foosball. Anyone over thirty was considered obsolete in the digital age.
    With the exception of Todd and Captain Frick, who had both trained at the academy, Kucher was the only member of the squad who wished they were flying F-15s and 16s rather than Reapers and Predators. Back in the day, there was reason to believe that exceptional drone operators might eventually qualify for redeployment as traditional combat pilots. A decade later, guys like him were more trouble than they were worth. What the air force really needed was recruits accustomed to spending every waking hour staring at handheld devices and computer screens. They never pined for actual combat duty because simulation felt more real than the real thing.
    “Don’t be such a sore loser,” Poindexter said.
    “Not so fast,” Kucher said. “Ring me up. Five big ones.”
    “An SUV?”
    “A jackal.”
    Half the time, they cruised over regions too remote or too poor to offer much in the way of cars, let alone SUVs. Locals were more apt to ride donkeys or yaks. So they developed an elaborate system of equivalencies. American cars, which were relatively rare in Afghanistan, were worth ten points. So were wild goats and ibex, which had been hunted almost to extinction. Grey wolves and striped hyenas were worth nine points, along with limousines and high-end sports cars. They usually played to 100, which could take either hours or days, depending on flight patterns. There had only been one sighting of the ever elusive Beetle, an automatic game winner. Judging from the ensuing ruckus, Todd thought they’d spotted Osama bin Laden himself barreling down the Karakoram Highway. The entire trailer went bananas.
    When they got tired of Slug Bug, they played Scavenger Hunt or Burqa Bingo. The same kind of squabbles broke out, no matter what game they played. They sounded more like kids in backseats than pilots in cockpits. Todd felt like the grumpy dad, always on the verge of telling them to knock it off. But he knew better than to feed into this dynamic. It was a losing battle. Discipline for the sake of discipline, the bread and butter of the old air force, was counterproductive with this new breed of pilots. Every time he intervened, the whole squad lapsed into sullen silence. Besides, they actually performed better when they were horsing around. The camaraderie of troops in the field was sadly lacking among drone pilots, who bunked in bachelor pads rather than with each other. Slug Bug did wonders for their morale.
    Lieutenant Farley was the only spoilsport. He was way too focused to indulge in fun and games. At first Todd chalked it up to maturity. Then he realized something wasn’t quite right upstairs. Farley’s attention span was preternatural. For hours at a time, his eyes never strayed from his monitors. He executed his maneuvers with robotic precision, as though he himself were a drone. It got to the point where Todd actually wished he would start farting around, if only to prove he was still human. There was a point beyond which detachment was a liability rather than an asset. Todd notified Colonel Trumble, requesting a medical evaluation that resulted in a clean bill