Short Century Read Free Page A

driver’s fate.
    â€œWait a minute.” Sheila now looked serious, and put a finger to her ear. She muttered some technical language I didn’t understand, and then she locked a target on the truck.
    â€œIt turns out these guys are terrorists,” she said.
    â€œWhat tells you that?”
    She didn’t turn around, but I could feel her pitying smile. “What tells us that? We can’t tell you that.”
    She pushed the button, and within seconds the truck was just so much smoke.
    â€œBug splat!” she said, and pumped her arm.
    Without moving her eyes from the screen, she reached behind her so that I could give her a high five. When I didn’t do so, she let her arm fall and she sniffed in a way I hadn’t heard before.
    â€œArthur,” she said, still without turning her eyes from the screen. “You are cool, right? We let you in here because you’re cool.”
    The word has never sat right in my mouth in any context, but I said it anyway. “I’m cool.”
    â€œGood.” Then she relaxed her shoulders a bit. At no point did she stop looking at the screen.
    My anger at her rebuke subsided when I reminded myself that I was not the one putting my life on the line. Granted, neither was she, but she probably had put her life on the line at one point. She refused to say anything about whether she had gone to Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else, maybe due to harrowing experiences.
    An honor, I needed to remind myself, to be allowed into this room at all. I had had actual dreams about witnessing the end of Big Brother, and for something this close to one’s dreams to come true is the most that any adult can ask for.
    Granted, it was also humiliating.
    There is always something humiliating in being trusted—a suggestion that you’re too dull to spring any surprises. I had been selected only because I could be trusted to write an article that would make the CIA look like heroes. There would be nothing unexpected, or at least nothing unwelcome, in an article by Arthur Hunt. Easy to imagine Reaper’s response: “Arthur Hunt Gives Assassination Two Thumbs Up.”
    But I would write a glowing article for a reason. My government was about to slay a monster, and praising heroes who slay monsters is a writer’s most ancient task.
    Maybe witnessing the operation had started my blood, but as the drone glided above more parched farmland I had difficulty watching Sheila without imagining having sex with her. There was something incredibly erotic about her focus and intensity and competence and the immense history that all these things held inside her, about what might be called her ten-thousand-hourness. Not only were her deceptively delicate hands and clear brown eyes wholly given over to the task of guiding the joystick; so was her alert rabbit’s nose, and so, somehow, were her modest but substantive breasts. The very model of the modern moral warrior, every inch of her. I imagined lifting her up on to her control panel, spreading her legs, and pushing her clit into the button before impaling her on the joystick, all while I readied my sleepy dick.
    As it turned out, thinking this way had given me an actual erection, of the inconvenient rather than labored-for kind I thought had left me behind years ago. I held my notebook in front of my crotch and worried that she would notice, but fortunately she kept her eyes on the first cement hints of the city.
    The aerial view of the city went straight to my heart. When my sister was little, she and I had spent countless hours looking at picture-book drawings of the sprawling palace at the city’s center. (I’m sure that some people would call me racist for romanticizing this country, but I do not apologize for loving REDACTED . Nor will I ever apologize for saying and writing the word, even though the word is always snatched away between my hard drive and publication. If what I am writing serves no