Unleashed

  *****

  Sergeant Mikey chased his coffee with a huge lump of chewing tobacco and looked over the remote control unit for the drone. It was no bigger than a laptop — a serious improvement over the current UAVs they’d been using lately. It could take three suitcases of gear to keep them up in the air. He’d had plenty of experience seeking Taliban with what they called the direct approach, delivered by way of the Raven, a fixed-wing, mini UAV, usually hand-launched and propeller-driven.

  The thing about the Raven was that they were easy to fly, and easy to crash; and when they went down, field repair was near to impossible. His team couldn’t be expected to carry four-foot replacement wings or a main fuselage, and swapping out broken or defective components was a bitch. But he came to despise the Raven for another reason. While airborne and on course towards an objective it would sometimes just keep flying until beyond signal range out into desolate Taliban countryside. He’d have to take his men on dangerous, unplanned drone-hunting expeditions to track down and retrieve the lost equipment before the classified apparatus fell into enemy hands. On a good day, they’d find the downed UAV surrounded by Taliban soldiers, forming an easy target for the AC-130 gunship flying ten thousand feet overhead. Any reason was a good reason to rid them of the Raven, but simultaneously killing some Taliban was icing on the cake.