Unbeknownst to Owens, he and the Lieutenant Colonel were not as different as it might seem. He had shared the same upbringing. The same comprehensive schools. The Lieutenant Colonel’s father would make him fight with his brothers in order to toughen him up. Being the youngest, he never came out of it well. He had evened out his accent by now, but he knew it was still there, at gala dinners, in the exclusion from certain clubs, in the way he envied others’ social ease. And in the bad drafts to isolated outposts, like this one. When General Reeves had first suggested he oversee the testing, he had emphasized how sensitive the site was and how grateful he’d be if the Lieutenant Colonel would consider it. Flattered, he had accepted, but as the years rolled by, he had come to realize that it was in all senses an outpost. A grinding, thankless task. He had done his time in the backwaters and with the end of the testing came the prospect of a new appointment. His wife, steadfast in her support of him over the years, was eager to leave too. She could bear the bland Chief Officer’s house, with its beige walls and serving hatch, much better when there were more distractions near by. A town of some sort, a city even. When the children were small, she had been preoccupied with them, but they had gone their own ways now, and her patience had begun to wear thin. The exchanges between them had always been layered, him never saying what he meant, the military euphemisms woven into the fabric of their marriage. But she had finally said, recently, that she wasn’t happy. And he could feel it in her silences, her distracted tone, her listlessness.

There had been other challenges. One drone was lost at sea, another came down near a school, but it was nothing that some newly donated equipment couldn’t fix. The drones were unmanned, but that didn’t mean that they were unpiloted. Guided by men prone to human error. They had tried to minimize the ‘humanity’ of the operation, studying data, creating algorithms, but people had a natural propensity for the chaotic, the unpredictable, which made their calculations difficult. Human error was inevitable, the occasional mistake, but there was something entirely different about the behaviour of this soldier Owens, a wilfulness that he found singularly unappealing. The silent vehemence that seeped from him.

They wouldn’t ‘host’ prisoners often, having neither the facilities nor the capacity, but they would occasionally pass through on the request of General Reeves. It was often about delay tactics. The keeping and moving of a prisoner over a period of time could bury the problem. Make those who cared forget. The Lieutenant Colonel had assured Reeves a few days ago that the prisoner’s body, when found, would disappear. That the matter was all in hand.