The Dragon Mines

“Dad.

-I still can’t understand.”

Daughter steals a momentary look up at me. Then her eyes returned to the gentle movement of the river in front of us, as if the water itself gave minor solace to her soul. A small, winding, nameless tributary feeding into the Mississippi River.

“Whats up, kiddo?”

“Always remember you taking me on the base. It was the most exciting place ever. All I ever wanted, was to be just like mom.”

“-Hey; you really are” as a sat down next to her, bringing myself almost to eye height but she’s an inch above me.

My nine-year-old daughters’ eyes were shining like those of a doll coated in high gloss lacquer, and yes, so did mine. I clenched my teeth a little, against the pain, it never lessons or dies, and waited for what I sensed, an imminent outpouring of words.

“A memory of being in the middle of a crowd. Everyone was so tall, and you lifted me up, put me on your shoulders, and I was so scared because of the noise. I was screaming as the jets flew past. I had my hands on my ears. I remember your hands gripping my legs so hard so I wouldn’t fall off. I remember this, because I was so frightened. You held me in your arms and pointed up at the sky, shouting for me to hear. And you told me the most unbelievable thing. The pilot in the jet up there is my mom. I thought you were playing one of your silly little games with me.

Wasn’t sure. After a bit, the jet landed, and you carried me over to where it parked. We couldn’t get close because of the big security guards preventing anyone getting near the Raptor, but I remember laughing when the pilot waved to us from the cockpit. I can see her coming over to us with those weird green cloths and the helmet under her arm.”

“Yes. The G suit. Hey, your mum might have worn… a hessian sack, and she would have still looked totally amazing.”

“You passed me just over a small fence. I can smell the rubber hose on her chest, the heat rising off the concrete. I remember it all because first I was frightened, but then so alive.”

Silence now, because I behold the memory of a beautiful, toothy grin. A smile like a flash of light before my eyes in a darkened room, a light echo persisting long after it is gone. I catch a stray tear running down my right cheek but my daughter’s eyes remain glued to the little waves and ripples on the muddy river. It really always was the greatest privilege to have a wife so damn smart and pretty. Some memorable Saturday afternoon, almost ten years ago when against the odds or sensible precautions we’d made, she pulled her chair around to my side of the kitchen table and whispered she was pregnant. I was astonished she proceeded with the pregnancy, more amazed again at how she got back to flying. Improbable. Unbelievable. She managed to have her cake and eat it too. There was never any stopping her or changing her mind about anything. I can still hear her soft words and sense her warm breath in my ear.

A little girl, now the custodian of my wife’s eyes, staring at me.

My bottom lip trembling, but I regained my words, along with my composure despite a tide of emotion.

“Abi. I don’t have this book anymore. Theirs no books because we had to leave too quickly, but I once had this old Bible, my father had given to me when I started Sunday School. There were these words… either in ‘Psalms’ or ‘Proverbs’. I always enjoyed the writings of Solomon and David. Sounded something like- “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to them all.”

Looking left I see my wife’s eyes, trying so hard to understand.

“So, what this means is, you may be the biggest or indeed the strongest, but, unbelievably, lose the race or the fight.”

At that moment, a dragon fly alighted on the bull rushes not three yards from where we were sitting. Now a irresistible sensation. I know it’s time to reveal the truth of the world we are living in. No matter how harsh the truth may be. A father can hold he’s daughter in the middle of the night and shield her from the monsters that live in the dark. But now, there are monsters that dwell in the daylight, even in the branches of the trees in the forests.

To finally grow up in this world, is to fully accept this reality.

“See the Dragon fly over there?”

“It’s kinda hard not to? The greenish-blue on its body.”

“If you completely understand how that insect works, you’ll understand nearly everything else around you.”

My daughter, either completely confused or mystified or both.

“The Dragon Fly is the perfect insect predator with no rivals. It is incredibly fast and incredibly manoeuvrable. So if you can make an aircraft move like it, you have an incredibly potent weapon. Look. There it goes.”

Abi is clearly mesmerized by the way the dragonfly virtually teleports from one position in the air to the other.

“An airplane or a helicopter?”

“No. Not quite. If that were the case, we might have had a chance. Against our enemies, I mean.”

“Smaller? Than an airplane?”

“Yes.

-About the size of a hawk.”

“Why have I seen nothing like this?”

“You can’t.

-but; they can see us.”

I continue.

“-To have a piece of equipment that can do what a Dragon fly does won’t tip the balance in a conflict though. You’ll need a few more things up your sleeve. Ok, so you remember when we had mobile phones? Yes? Do you remember everyone taking pictures of themselves? Yeah? When you were five, oh, you clever little girl, you took your mother’s lipstick from her bag. Then you smeared it round your lips like a circus clown, then drew a long red line down the hallway carpet. But before your mother took the lipstick away, you took a picture with your mother’s phone camera. You actually figured out how to take a selfie. You remember that?”

“Yes I do, I remember feeling frightened.”

The daughter and I share a long laugh, something rare we hadn’t done in a very long time. Finally, some tears of happiness.

“So you might remember that before you could get the phone into selfie mode, often the camera set the other way. The phones had two cameras.”

“Yes; I think I remember.”

“So the phone was nothing but a big screen with a tiny frame. Such a tiny frame that if you held a mobile phone over a kitchen bench, you discovered something amazing. Because the phone had a camera on the bottom and a big screen on the top, it becomes something else inadvertently…

-A cloaking device.

-A machine that can hide in plain sight. If you squinted, it was as if the phone wasn’t even there, just a kitchen bench. If you looked at such a device from ten or twenty yards away, it’d be almost totally invisible.”

Forging ahead.

“So within the average phone was about fifty rare earth elements. These materials are in special abundance in a place called China. China also happens to be the manufacturer of the phones, and then eventually these other devices we now call ‘dragon mines.’ They had all the necessary materials in abundance. We didn’t. I mean we had similar sorts of ideas but nothing of comparable ability or that cheap or numerous. Even just like a real dragon fly, they could eliminate all of our drones on the fly, or better still, while they were taking off or landing.”

“A mobile phone, but with wings?”

“Yes, pretty much. A camera, that can network or talk with swarms of other cameras. Alight on telegraph poles, trees or cliff faces, maybe overlooking a narrow pass or even attached high up on the walls of buildings in a city. With that much real time spying/ surveillance the US military would have had its hands completely full except there was one extra important feature.”

“Yes, Dad?”

“As shown by their name-sake, they have a small explosive. Comparable to a 30mm cannon shell. A small shaped charge powerful enough to punch through reasonably thick armour. One moment the same drones that had been silently, tirelessly, viewing an air base or a road or a troop concentration for hours or days or even weeks, because they recharge themselves from the sun, suddenly became armed. They fell like leaves upon the roofs of armored vehicles, attached themselves to soldiers, or even parked aircraft.”

And I realized I’d said too much.

The little girl could not look away:

“Dad; how did mom die?”

“I have told you.”

“Yes, I know, you’ve always told me she died in the war, stationed in Taiwan. So how?”

I’d long imagined this conversation, and now it was upon me.

“Like I said in the beginning “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.” -Your mother was one of the best pilots in the best aircraft in the most powerful military in the world's history. I only know this because the man who introduced me to her happened to be within sight of the hanger as she was getting into her plane. He assured me it was over in an instant.”

“How?”

“He recalled it being like a subtle shimmering, like foil falling from the ceiling of the hanger. The mines had been hanging from the roof of the hanger and they merely fell, or dropped from the ceiling at the appointed time. This happened everywhere across the world at the same time. There were other weapons, but the dragon mines did the most damage. For the few aircraft that even made it down the runway, the mines would leap off the ground or even get sucked into the engines. Unfortunately for your mother, if she’d been taking off she may have had some hope of ejecting. Unlucky, I suppose.”

I’d said it all. I always imagined it would be so much harder.

The little girl sitting cross-legged next to me notices abruptly the appearance of another Dragonfly alight upon the bullrushes, and without looking away, she murmurs quietly, very seriously:

“We’re being watched now, aren’t we? They are watching us?”

“Yes Abi...

-They always will.”

I embraced the daydream of seeing water drift by, and in doing so, released myself, let go of the world around me.

Then after a moment:

“The day I passed you over the fence to your mother at the airshow. I took a photo of you in your mother’s arms. I still have the photo. I wanted to give this to you when you become a woman. A powerful woman, like your mother, but now; I understand, that is what you are.”

Huddling up to Abi as she opened the gold heart-shaped locket in her palm. And now my eyes, soothed by the passing of water, rested so longingly, achingly upon my wife’s smile. The flow of water and the wind on the reeds granted me the catharsis, feeling toward the acceptance, enabling me to face the passing of a wife and the passing of the world I used to know. I finally realized the strength from the peace, the sense, that there is indeed a calm, still, place between my ears that the greatest tyrannies will never ever reach. Or, ever discover.