Their bunker was three stories below ground level in what was, before the war, a downtown car park. When people drove to their cars to their jobs and then to their kids’ soccer practice; when there was a normal.
The windowless space was half a football field long and tightly packed with rows of IKEA desks, lines of laptops, joy sticks in various shapes and sizes, spare electronic components, small pliers and screwdrivers, green motherboards half dismantled, headphones, and tangles of cables. Dim blue light from the dozens of digital screens covering each wall numbed the place.
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“Rascal” was on a fifteen minute break from his shift – his fifth 12-hour stretch this week. He sat down on a plastic picnic chair in the kitchenette that was strewn with dried-up tea bags and crushed paper cups filled with cigarette butts. He pulled out his iPhone and checked their unit’s app. He saw he was still stuck in second place on the scoring ladder and around $12 million behind “Hitman” in his total sum. It struck him that the war – and its rate of destruction – was measured in American dollars.
He looked up. At his desk, behind a plastic picket fence of empty Coke bottles, Hitman’s toothy smile was visible below the FPV goggles. They fully masked his eyes and most of his forehead, and made his fellow soldier’s head looked like it belonged to a huge robotic insect. But Hitman’s humanity was given away by the uncorrected overbite of a guy from a farming village in the east of the country. A village now occupied by a foreign force.
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It looked like Hitman – a nom de guerre like each of them had – was having a productive shift and adding to his growing tally of destroyed enemy assets. Every time he successfully used a kamikaze drone to take out an armored personnel carrier (worth $500,000) or a Grad rocket launcher (even more), Hitman happily squeezed the bicycle horn he’d attached to his monitors.
Just then, Hitman reached for the horn and let it rip. It’s circus clown sound didn’t fit in with the drone team’s determined digital deadliness, Rascal thought to himself. Earlier in his war, the antic would have made him laugh together with the others in the unit, lately, things were irritating Rascal.
Things like the disorganized detritus of the dump where they were basically giving away their youth; the rank body odor that separated these gamers-cum-warriors from civilians; the boastful YouTube clips featuring Death Metal music they circulated of enemy soldiers slaughtered as they ran from burning tanks.
Most of the unit’s members had gone from being IT nerds and “incels” on the dark web to now being top-secret assets and military heroes. Their dreams had come true when their video games transformed into real war; they went from having isolated and meaningless lives to having isolated and lauded lives.
They were God-like; from above, they could see everything that moved and they could choose to end it at will.
Rascal flicked through to Instagram and brought up his favorite feeds. @TheAlmondCafe – a lady in Australia who hand fed raucous sulfur-crested cockatoos. @kitten._.point which showed baby cats playfully wrestling with each other. A chap in Mexico who marched through the streets with a Mariachi band of his trained chihuahuas. Rascal more than loved all the animal videos that he could watch; they were what had kept him sane up until now, he reckoned.
Rascal had, over many missions, convinced himself that there was no drama to death. It was as binary as flipping a light switch. On. Off. Alive. Dead. Breathing. Not breathing.
When he was first recruited to the strategic drone command out of a frontline infantry brigade, the new missions and their purpose hyped him up. Big targets at long range for big returns of enemy dead. For the first few months, he just followed the structure and the process.
Available kills – BTR-80s with an infantry squad on-board or a crewed self-propelled howitzer – in a key sector popped up in green on the dual monitors in front of him; it was first come first serve. He would click on the icon to choose his target, put on his goggles, and activate an available rotorcraft drone for the hunt. The color-coding would switch to amber as he flew the drone into position and closed on its prey. Finally, after fixing on the target, releasing its explosive payload, and blowing up the tank or supply truck, the icon on his screens would go red. Mission accomplished; tally added to; place on leader ladder enhanced.
About two months in, he was at his station when a green icon for an enemy mortar crew popped up in the sector he was covering that shift. Rascal could see the target was hot – the crew of three was peppering his side’s trench about a kilometer away. He engaged and flew very low to the ground to avoid detection by either the human eye or by GPS spoofing.
As he made his final approach, using his joystick, Rascal weaved in between trees until he came within five meters of the crew who he could now see in his goggles. He slightly ascended to hover above them; in that moment, they heard the mosquito-like whirr of the drone’s plastic rotor blades and two of them looked up. Just as he saw their eyes, Rascal released the drone’s first charge. There was a thud as it exploded and smashed a metal mist of steel ball-bearings into their target.
Rascal had, over many missions, convinced himself that there was no drama to death. It was as binary as flipping a light switch. On. Off. Alive. Dead. Breathing. Not breathing. There was even something uncomfortably peaceful, he sometimes thought, in the stillness of the corpses. This time, though, one of the enemy crew wasn’t still; his helmet had been blown off and he was bleeding from his skull, but he was trying to crawl into undergrowth.
Rascal pushed the left joystick backwards and throttled the drone down; the enemy soldier suddenly flipped over and clumsily swatted his arm at the device. Rascal hit yaw and avoided the swing; the soldier was now on his back looking directly down the camera.
He’d said what the others did: “Nothing. Just getting it done. It’s kill or be killed.” It wasn’t true, and the psychologist knew it too, but the truth was too complicated, especially because of what had been lately creeping up on him.
“Blyat. Fuck,” Rascal said, as he hit the payload release button on the controller. As the charge detonated into the torso of the soldier, static and distortion charged across Rascal’s screen. He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed forward on the joystick to ascend. The mission was worth only a few thousand on their app.
That night, sleeping on the stinky barracks bed he shift-shared with another drone operator, Rascal dreamed of animals. It was like being on safari in the Serengeti, or the best jungle documentary he had ever seen on National Geographic’s YouTube channel. Before him, an oasis of creatures: gazelles, hippos, elephants, hyenas, lions and more. Tiny details came crisply to him: a sparrow-like bird catching flies on the back of a muddied elephant; a rhino with a chipped horn; two snacking chimpanzees using a piece of straw to pluck ants out of their mound.
Rascal didn’t consider himself superstitious or spiritual. He laughed at the grandmother who raised him when she used a yellow bee’s wax candle to burn smudgy crosses above the doorways in the small flat he grew up in. He told himself that it was just practical to adjust his thinking.
When flew op’s, Rascal visualized animals. At the moment of execution, at the precise point of killing, at the meeting point of life and death, he manifested images of an uncle’s German Shepherds that he’d loved or the street cats he’d fed when he was in Egypt on holiday after finishing university. A favorite image in his mind was fluoro-vested volunteers rescuing a pet rabbit from the rubble of a bombed out building and giving it back to the little girl who owned it.
It was easier to care for animals than it was for people, Rascal believed. One night, while eating two-minute noodles, he searched the Internet for rural properties for sale in the mountain region. What would it be like, he fantasized, to establish an animal rescue center. After the war. To do something positive. To save life not take it.
When the psychologist who occasionally visited the unit asked him what he thought about when undertaking a mission, he’d said what the others did: “Nothing. Just getting it done. It’s kill or be killed.” It wasn’t true, and the psychologist knew it too, but the truth was too complicated, especially because of what had been lately creeping up on him.
His break was over. Rascal turned off his iPhone and, walking past the dozen other operators, he went back to his workstation. It didn’t take long for available green icons to pop up on his monitors, and he made ready to make war. As he activated an available one-way drone, he hoped it wouldn’t happen again.
It would take six minutes to fly to the mission. He would land the drone in tall grass and wait for two approaching Ural trucks that had been spotted by a satellite in space on a Ukrainian dirt road. It was probably carrying resupplies – everything from toilet paper to rocket-propelled grenades – to the enemy’s forward positions. Probably three or four crew in each one. When the convoy would pull level, Rascal would ambush the lead vehicle with the kamikaze drone. He pressed the auto-pilot device for the in-flight and tried to open his mental catalogue of creatures.
But every picture he conjured was corrupted and contorted. Him running over a trail of ducklings with a lawn mower. Him shooting a lame, gentle horse between its brown eyes with his service pistol. Him injecting a baboon with a cocktail of bleach and acid. Every time, he tried to change the horrific pattern, another violent vignette hit his head. He wasn’t having thoughts; they were having him, he realized, as he touched the drone down and ensured it was hidden from view. He check that the explosive charge was ready.
On the right monitor on his desk, Rascal watched the grainy satellite image of the two trucks coming up the road and leaving dust behind them. He slipped the goggles over his forehead, which was slimy now with sweat. They were at three hundred meters to the drone’s roadside hiding place. Rascal reached for the joystick and felt a river rat’s teeth rip into the meat of his palm.
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