No way was Willard about to authorize any foreign expeditions so I walked over to the Provost Marshal's office and took a stack of travel vouchers out of the company clerk's desk. I carried them back to my own office and signed them all with my name on the CO lines and respectable forgeries of Leon Garber's signature on the Authorized by lines.
"We're breaking the law," Summer said.
"This is the Battle of Kursk," I said. "We can't stop now."
She hesitated.
"Your choice," I said. "In or out, no pressure from me."
She said nothing.
"These vouchers won't come back for a month or two," I said. "By then either Willard will be gone, or we will. We've got nothing to lose."
"OK," she said.
"Go pack," I said. "Three days."
She left and I asked my sergeant to figure out who was next in line for acting CO. She came back with a name I recognized as the female captain I had seen in the O Club dining room. The one with the busted arm. I wrote her a note explaining I would be out for three days. I told her she was in charge. Then I picked up the phone and called Joe.
"I'm going to Germany," I said.
"OK," he said. "Enjoy. Have a safe trip."
"I can't go to Germany without stopping by Paris on the way back. You know, under the circumstances."
He paused.
"No," he said. "I guess you can't."
"Wouldn't be right not to," I said. "But she shouldn't think I care more than you do. That wouldn't be right either. So you should come over too."
"When?"
"Take the overnight flight two days from now. I'll meet you at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. Then we'll go see her together."
Summer met me on the sidewalk outside my quarters and we carried our bags to the Chevy. We were both in BDUs because we figured our best shot was a night transport out of Andrews Air Force Base. We were too late for a civilian red-eye and we didn't want to wait all night for the breakfast flights. We got in the car and logged out at the gate. Summer was driving, of course. She accelerated hard and then dropped into a smooth rhythm that was about ten miles an hour faster than the other cars heading our way.
I sat back and watched the road. Watched the shoulders, and the strip malls, and the traffic. We drove north thirty miles and passed by Kramer's motel. Hit the cloverleaf and jogged east to I-95. Headed north. We passed the rest area. Passed the spot a mile later where the briefcase had been found. I closed my eyes.
I slept all the way to Andrews. We got there well after midnight. We parked in a restricted lot and swapped two of our travel vouchers for two places on a Transportation Corps C-130 that was leaving for Frankfurt at three in the morning. We waited in a lounge that had fluorescent lighting and vinyl benches and was filled with the usual ragtag bunch of transients. The military is always on the move. There are always people going somewhere, any time of the night or day. Nobody talked. Nobody ever did. We all just sat there, stiff and tired and uncomfortable.
The loadmaster came to get us thirty minutes before takeoff. We filed out onto the tarmac and walked up the ramp into the belly of the plane. There was a long line of cargo pallets in the center bay. We sat on webbing jump seats with our backs to the fuselage wall. On the whole I figured I preferred the first-class section on Air France. The Transportation Corps doesn't have stewardesses and it doesn't brew in-flight coffee.
We took off a little late, heading west into the wind. Then we turned a slow one-eighty over D.C. and struck out east. I felt the movement. There were no windows, but I knew we were above the city. Joe was down there somewhere, sleeping.
The fuselage wall was very cold at altitude so we all leaned forward with our elbows on our knees. It was too noisy to talk. I stared at a pallet of tank ammunition until my vision blurred and I fell back to sleep. It wasn't comfortable, but one thing you learn in the army is how to sleep anywhere. I woke up maybe ten times and spent most of the trip in a state of suspended animation. The roar of the engines and the rush of the slipstream helped induce it. It was relatively restful. It was about sixty percent as good as being in bed.
We were in the air nearly eight hours before we started our initial descent. There was no intercom. No cheery message from the pilot. Just a change in the engine note and a downward lurching movement and a sharp sensation in the ears. All around me people were standing up and stretching. Summer had her back flat against an ammunition crate, rubbing like a cat. She looked pretty good. Her hair was too short to get messy and her eyes were bright. She looked determined, like she knew she was heading for doom or glory and was resigned to not knowing which.
We all sat down again and held tight to the webbing for the landing. The wheels touched down and the reverse thrust howled and the brakes jammed on tight. The pallets jerked forward against their straps. Then the engines cut back and we taxied a long way and stopped. The ramp came down and a dim dusk sky showed through the hole. It was five o'clock in the afternoon in Germany, six hours ahead of the East Coast, one hour ahead of Zulu time. I was starving. I had eaten nothing since the burger in Sperryville the previous day. Summer and I stood up and grabbed our bags and got in line. Shuffled down the ramp with the others and out onto the tarmac. The weather was cold. It felt pretty much the same as North Carolina.
We were way out in the restricted military corner of the Frankfurt airport. We took a personnel bus to the public terminal. After that we were on our own. Some of the other guys had transport waiting, but we didn't. We joined a bunch of civilians in the taxi line. Shuffled up, one by one. When our turn came we gave the driver a travel voucher and told him to drive us east to XII Corps. He was happy enough to comply. He could swap the voucher for hard currency at any U.S. post and I was certain he would pick up a couple of XII Corps guys going out into Frankfurt for a night on the town. No deadheading. No empty running. He was making a living off of the U.S. Army, just like plenty of Germans had for four and a half decades. He was driving a Mercedes-Benz.
The trip took thirty minutes. We drove east through suburbs. They looked like a lot of West German places. There were vast tracts of pale honey buildings built back in the fifties. The new neighborhoods ran west to east in random curving shapes, following the routes the bombers had followed. No nation ever lost a war the way Germany lost. Like everyone, I had seen the pictures taken in 1945. Defeat was not a big enough word. Armageddon would be better. The whole country had been smashed to powdered rubble by a juggernaut. The evidence would be there for all time, written in the architecture. And under the architecture. Every time the phone company dug a trench for a cable, they found skulls and bones and teacups and shells and rusted-out Panzerfausts. Every time ground was broken for a new foundation, a priest was standing by before the steam shovels took their first bite. I was born in Berlin, surrounded by Americans, surrounded by whole square miles of patched-up devastation. They started it, we used to say.
The suburban streets were neat and clean. There were discreet stores with apartments above them. The store windows were full of shiny items. Street signs were black-on-white, written in an archaic script that made them hard to read. There were small U.S. Army road signs here and there too. You couldn't go very far without seeing one. We followed the XII Corps arrows, getting closer all the time. We left the built-up area and drove through a couple of kilometers of farmland. It felt like a moat. Like insulation. The eastern sky ahead of us was dark.
XII Corps was based in a typical glory-days installation. Some Nazi industrialist had built a thousand-acre factory site out in the fields, back in the 1930s. It had featured an impressive home office building and ranks of low metal sheds stretching hundreds of meters behind it. The sheds had been bombed to twisted shards, over and over again. The home office building had been only partially damaged. Some weary U.S. Army armored division had set up camp in it in 1945. Thin Frankfurt women in headscarves and faded print dresses had been brought in to pile the rubble, in exchange for food. They worked with wheelbarrows and shovels. Then the Army Corps of Engineers had fixed up the office building and bulldozed the piles of rubble away. Successive huge waves of Pentagon spending had rolled in. By 1953 the place was a flagship installation. There was cleaned brick and shining white paint and a strong perimeter fence. There were flagpoles and sentry boxes and guard shacks. There were mess halls and a medical clinic and a PX. There were barracks and workshops and warehouses. Above all there were a thousand acres of flat land and by 1953 it was covered with American tanks. They were all lined up, facing east, ready to roll out and fight for the Fulda Gap.
When we got there thirty-seven years later it was too dark to see much. But I knew that nothing fundamental would have changed. The tanks would be different, but that would be all. The M4 Shermans that had won World War Two were long gone, except for two fine examples standing preserved outside the main gate, one on each side, like symbols. They were placed halfway up landscaped concrete ramps, noses high, tails low, like they were still in motion, breasting a rise. They were lit up theatrically. They were beautifully painted, glossy green, with bright white stars on their sides. They looked much better than they had originally. Behind them was a long driveway with white-painted curbs and the floodlit front of the office building, which was now the post headquarters. Behind that would be the tank lagers, with M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks lined up shoulder to shoulder, hundreds of them, at nearly four million bucks apiece.
We got out of the taxi and crossed the sidewalk and headed for the main gate guard shack. My special unit badge got us past it. It would get us past any U.S. Army checkpoint anywhere except the inner ring of the Pentagon. We carried our bags down the driveway.
"Been here before?" Summer asked me.
I shook my head as I walked.
"I've been in Heidelberg with the infantry," I said. "Many times."
"Is that near?"
"Not far," I said.
There were broad stone steps leading up to the doors. The whole place looked like a capitol building in some small state back home. It was immaculately maintained. We went up the steps and inside. There was a soldier at a desk just behind the doors. Not an MP. Just a XII Corps office grunt. We showed him our IDs.
"Your VOQ got space for us?" I asked.
"Sir, no problem," he said.
"Two rooms," I said. "One night."
"I'll call ahead," he said. "Just follow the signs."
He pointed to the back of the hallway. There were more doors there that would lead out into the complex. I checked my watch. It said noon exactly. It was still set to East Coast time. Six in the evening, in West Germany. Already dark.
"I need to see your MP XO," I said. "Is he still in his office?"
The guy used his phone and got an answer. Pointed us up a broad staircase to the second floor.
"On your right," he said.
We went up the stairs and turned right. There was a long corridor with offices on both sides. They had hardwood doors with reeded glass windows. We found the one we wanted and went in. It was an outer chamber with a sergeant in it. It was pretty much identical to the one back at Bird. Same paint, same floor, same furniture, same temperature, same smell. Same coffee, in the same standard-issue machine. The sergeant was like plenty I had seen before too. Calm, efficient, stoic, ready to believe he ran the place all by himself, which he probably did. He was behind his desk and he looked up at us as we came in. Spent half a second deciding who we were and what we wanted.
"I guess you need the major," he said.
I nodded. He picked up his phone and buzzed through to the inner office.
"Go straight through," he said.
We went in through the inner door and I saw a desk with a guy called Swan behind it. I knew Swan pretty well. Last time I had seen him was in the Philippines, three months earlier, when he was starting a tour of duty that was scheduled to last a year.
"Don't tell me," I said. "You got here December twenty-ninth."
"Froze my ass off," he said. "All I had was Pacific gear. Took XII Corps three days to find me a winter uniform."
I wasn't surprised. Swan was short, and wide. Almost cubic. He probably owned a percentile all his own, on the quartermasters' charts.
"Your Provost Marshal here?" I said.
He shook his head. "Temporarily reassigned."
"Garber signed your orders?"
"Allegedly."
"Figured it out yet?"
"Not even close."
"Me either," I said.
He shrugged, like he was saying, Hey, the army, what can you do?
"This is Lieutenant Summer," I said.
"Special unit?" Swan said.
Summer shook her head.
"But she's cool," I said.
Swan stretched a short arm over his desk and they shook hands.
"I need to see a guy called Marshall," I said. "A major. Some kind of a XII Corps staffer."
"Is he in trouble?"
"Someone is. I'm hoping Marshall will help me figure out who. You know him?"
"Never heard of him," Swan said. "I only just got here."
"I know," I said. "December twenty-ninth."
He smiled and gave me the What can you do? shrug again and picked up his phone. I heard him ask his sergeant to find Marshall and tell him I wanted to see him at his convenience. I looked around while we waited for the response. Swan's office looked borrowed and temporary, just like mine did back in North Carolina. It had the same kind of clock on the wall. Electric, no second hand. No tick. It said ten minutes past six.
"Anything happening here?" I said.
"Not much," Swan said. "Some helicopter guy went shopping in Heidelberg and got run over. And Kramer died, of course. That's shaken things up some."
"Who's next in line?"
"Vassell, I guess."
"I met him," I said. "Wasn't impressed."
"It's a poisoned chalice. Things are changing. You should hear these guys talk. They're real gloomy."
"The status quo is not an option," I said. "That's what I'm hearing."
His phone rang. He listened for a minute and put it down.
"Marshall's not on-post," he said. "He's out on a night exercise in the countryside. Back in the morning."
Summer glanced at me. I shrugged.
"Have dinner with me," Swan said. "I'm lonely here with all these cavalry types. The O Club in an hour?"
We carried our bags over to the Visiting Officers' Quarters and found our rooms. Mine looked pretty much the same as the one Kramer had died in, except it was cleaner. It was a standard American motel layout. Presumably some hotel chain had bid for the government contract, way back when. Then they had airfreighted all the fixtures and fittings, right down to the sinks and the towel rails and the toilet bowls.
I shaved and took a shower and dressed in clean BDUs. Knocked on Summer's door fifty-five minutes into Swan's hour. She opened up. She looked clean and fresh. Behind her the room looked the same as mine, except it already smelled like a woman's. There was some kind of nice eau de toilette in the air.
The O Club occupied half of one of the ground floor wings of the main building. It was a grand space, with high ceilings and intricate plaster moldings. There was a lounge, and a bar, and a dining room. We found Swan in the bar. He was with a lieutenant colonel who was wearing Class As with a combat infantryman's badge on the coat. It was an odd thing to see, on an Armored post. His nameplate said: Simon. He introduced himself to us. I got the feeling he was going to join us for dinner. He told us he was a liaison officer, working on behalf of the infantry. He told us there was an Armored guy down in Heidelberg, doing the same job in reverse.
"Been here long?" I asked him.
"Two years," he said, which I was glad about. I needed some background, and Swan didn't have it, any more than I knew anything about Fort Bird. Then I realized it was no accident that Simon was joining the party. Swan must have figured out what I wanted and set about providing it without being asked. Swan was that kind of guy.
"Pleased to meet you, Colonel," I said, and then I nodded to Swan, like I was saying thanks. We drank cold American beers from tall frosted glasses and then we went through to the dining room. Swan had made a reservation. The steward put us at a table in the corner. I sat where I could watch the whole room at once. I didn't see anyone I knew. Vassell wasn't around. Nor was Coomer.
The menu was absolutely standard. We could have been in any O Club in the world. O Clubs aren't there to introduce you to local cuisine. They're there to make you feel at home, somewhere deep inside the army's own interpretation of America. There was a choice of fish or steak. The fish was probably European, but the steak would have been flown in across the Atlantic. Some politician in one of the ranch states would have leveraged a sweet deal with the Pentagon.
We small-talked for a spell. We bitched about pay and benefits. Talked about people we knew. We mentioned Just Cause in Panama. Lieutenant Colonel Simon told us he had been to Berlin two days previously and had gotten himself a chip of concrete from the Wall. Told us he planned to have it encased in a plastic cube. Planned to hand it on down the generations, like an heirloom.
"Do you know Major Marshall?" I asked him.
"Fairly well," he said.
"Who is he exactly?" I asked.
"Is this official?"
"Not really," I said.
"He's a planner. A strategist, basically. Long-term kind of guy. General Kramer seemed to like him. Always kept him close by, made him his intelligence officer."
"Does he have an intelligence background?"
"Not formally. But he'll have done rotations, I'm sure."
"So is he a part of the inner team? I heard Kramer and Vassell and Coomer mentioned all in the same breath, but not Marshall."
"He's on the team," Simon said. "That's for sure. But you know what flag officers are like. They need a guy, but they aren't about to admit it. So they abuse him a little. He fetches and carries and drives them around, but when push comes to shove they ask his opinion."
"Is he going to move up now Kramer's gone? Maybe into Coomer's slot?"
Simon made a face. "He should. He's an Armor fanatic to the core, like the rest of them. But nobody really knows what the hell is going to happen. Kramer dying couldn't have come at a worse time for them."
"The world is changing," I said.
"And what a world it was," Simon said. "Kramer's world, basically, beginning to end. He graduated the Point in Fifty-two, and places like this one were all buttoned up by Fifty-three, and they've been the center of the universe for almost forty years. These places are so dug in, you wouldn't believe it. You know who has done the most in this country?"
"Who?"
"Not Armored. Not the infantry. This theater is all about the Army Corps of Engineers. Sherman tanks way back weighed thirty-eight tons and were nine feet wide. Now we're all the way up to the M1A1 Abrams, which weighs seventy tons and is eleven feet wide. Every step of the way for forty years the Corps of Engineers has had work to do. They've widened roads, hundreds of miles of them, all over West Germany. They've strengthened bridges. Hell, they've built roads and bridges. Dozens of them. You want a stream of seventy-ton tanks rolling east to battle, you better make damn sure the roads and bridges can take it."
"OK," I said.
"Billions of dollars," Simon said. "And of course, they knew which roads and bridges to look at. They knew where we were starting, and they knew where we were going. They talked to the war-gamers, they looked at the maps, and they got busy with the concrete and the rebar. Then they built way stations everywhere we needed them. Permanent hardened fuel stores, ammunition dumps, repair shops, hundreds of them, all along strictly predetermined routes. So we're embedded here, literally. We're dug in, literally. The Cold War battlefields are literally set in stone, Reacher."
"People are going to say we invested and we won."
Simon nodded. "And they'd be correct. But what comes next?"
"More investment," I said.
"Exactly," he said. "Like in the Navy, when the big battleships were superseded by aircraft carriers. The end of one era, the beginning of the next. The Abrams tanks are like battleships. They're magnificent, but they're out-of-date. About the only way we can use them is down custom-built roads in directions we've already planned to go."
"They're mobile," Summer said. "Like any tank."
"Not very mobile," Simon said. "Where is the next fight going to be?"
I shrugged. I wished Joe was there. He was good at all the geopolitical stuff.
"The Middle East?" I said. "Iran or Iraq, maybe. They've both gotten their breath back, they'll be looking for the next thing to do."
"Or the Balkans," Swan said. "When the Soviets finally collapse, there's a forty-five-year-old pressure cooker waiting for the lid to come off."
"OK," Simon said. "Look at the Balkans, for instance. Yugoslavia, maybe. That'll be the first place anything happens, for sure. Right now they're just waiting for the starting gun. What do we do?"
"Send in the Airborne," Swan said.
"OK," Simon said again. "We send in the 82nd and the 101st. Lightly armed, we might get three battalions there inside a week. But what do we do after we get there? We're speed bumps, that's all, nothing more. We have to wait for the heavy units. And that's the first problem. An Abrams tank weighs seventy tons. Can't airlift it. Got to put it on a train, and then put it on a ship. And that's the good news. Because you don't just ship the tank. For every ton of tank, you have to ship four tons of fuel and other equipment. These suckers get a half-mile to the gallon. And you need spare engines, ammunition, huge maintenance crews. The logistics tail is a mile long. Like moving an iron mountain. To ship enough tank brigades to make a worthwhile difference, you're looking at a six-month buildup, minimum, and that's working right around the clock."
"During which time the Airborne troops are deep in the shit," I said.
"Tell me about it," Simon said. "And those are my boys, and I worry about them. Lightly armed paratroops against any kind of foreign armor, we'd get slaughtered. It would be a very, very anxious six months. And it gets worse. Because what happens when the heavy brigades eventually get there? What happens is, they roll off the ships and they get bogged down two blocks later. Roads aren't wide enough, bridges aren't strong enough, they never make it out of the port area. They sit there stuck in the mud and watch the infantry getting killed far away in the distance."
Nobody spoke.
"Or take the Middle East," Simon said. "We all know Iraq wants Kuwait back. Suppose they go there? Long term, it's an easy win for us, because the open desert is pretty much the same for tanks as the steppes in Europe, except it's a little hotter and dustier. But the war plans we've got will work out just fine. But do we even get that far? We've got the infantry sitting there like tiny little speed bumps for six whole months. Who says the Iraqis won't roll right over them in the first two weeks?"
"Air power," Summer said. "Attack helicopters."
"I wish," Simon said. "Planes and whirlybirds are sexy as hell, but they don't win anything on their own. Never have, never will. Boots on the ground is what wins things."
I smiled. Part of that was a combat infantryman's standard-issue pride. But part of it was true too.
"So what's going to happen?" I asked.
"Same thing as happened with the Navy in 1941," Simon said. "Overnight, battleships were history and carriers were the new thing. So for us, now, we need to integrate. We need to understand that our light units are too vulnerable and our heavy units are too slow. We need to ditch the whole light-heavy split. We need integrated rapid-response brigades with armored vehicles lighter than twenty tons and small enough to fit in the belly of a C-130. We need to get places faster and fight smarter. No more planning for set-piece battles between herds of dinosaurs."
Then he smiled.
"Basically we'll have to put the infantry in charge," he said.
"You ever talk to people like Marshall about this kind of stuff?"
"Their planners? No way."
"What do they think about the future?"
"I have no idea. And I don't care. The future belongs to the infantry."
Dessert was apple pie, and then we had coffee. It was the usual excellent brew. We slid back from the future into present-day small talk. The stewards moved around, silently. Just another evening, in an Officers' Club four thousand miles from the last one.
"Marshall will be back at dawn," Swan told me. "Look for a scout car at the rear of the first incoming column."
I nodded. Figured dawn in January in Frankfurt would be about 0700 hours. I set my mental alarm for six. Lieutenant Colonel Simon said good night and wandered off. Summer pushed her chair back and sprawled in it, as much as a tiny person can sprawl. Swan sat forward with his elbows on the table.
"You think they get much dope on this post?" I asked him.
"You want some?" he said.
"Brown heroin," I said. "Not for my personal use."
Swan nodded. "Guys here say there are Turkish guest workers in Germany who could get you some. One of the speed dealers could supply it, I'm sure."
"You ever met a guy called Willard?" I asked him.
"The new boss?" he said. "I got the memo. Never met him. But some of the guys here know him. He was an intelligence wonk, something to do with Armor."
"He wrote algorithms," I said.
"For what?"
"Soviet T-80 fuel consumption, I think. Told us what kind of training they were doing."
"And now he's running the 110th?"
I nodded.
"I know," I said. "Bizarre."
"How did he do that?"
"Obviously someone liked him."
"We should find out who. Start sending hate mail."
I nodded again. Nearly a million men in the army, hundreds of billions of dollars, and it all came down to who liked who. Hey, what can you do?
"I'm going to bed," I said.
My VOQ room was so generic I lost track of where I was within a minute of closing my door. I hung my uniform in the closet and washed up and crawled between the sheets. They smelled of the same detergent the army uses everywhere. I thought of my mother in Paris and Joe in D.C. My mother was already in bed, probably. Joe would still be working, at whatever it was he did. I said six A.M. to myself and closed my eyes.
Dawn broke at 0650, by which time I was standing next to Summer at XII Corps' east road gate. We had mugs of coffee in our hands. The ground was frozen and there was mist in the air. The sky was gray and the landscape was a shade of pastel green. It was low and undulating and unexciting, like a lot of Europe. There were stands of small neat trees here and there. Dormant winter earth, giving off cold organic smells. It was very quiet.
The road ran through the gate and then turned and headed east and a little north, into the fog, toward Russia. It was wide and straight, made from reinforced concrete. The curbstones were nicked here and there by tank tracks. Big wedge-shaped chunks had been knocked out of them. A tank is a difficult thing to steer.
We waited. Still quiet.
Then we heard them.
What is the twentieth century's signature sound? You could have a debate about it. Some might say the slow drone of an aero engine. Maybe from a lone fighter crawling across an azure 1940s sky. Or the scream of a fast jet passing low overhead, shaking the ground. Or the whup whup whup of a helicopter. Or the roar of a laden 747 lifting off. Or the crump of bombs falling on a city. All of those would qualify. They're all uniquely twentieth-century noises. They were never heard before. Never, in all of history. Some crazy optimists might lobby for a Beatles song. A yeah, yeah, yeah chorus fading under the screams of their audience. I would have sympathy for that choice. But a song and screaming could never qualify. Music and desire have been around since the dawn of time. They weren't invented after 1900.
No, the twentieth century's signature sound is the squeal and clatter of tank tracks on a paved street. That sound was heard in Warsaw, and Rotterdam, and Stalingrad, and Berlin. Then it was heard again in Budapest and Prague, and Seoul and Saigon. It's a brutal sound. It's the sound of fear. It speaks of a massive overwhelming advantage in power. And it speaks of remote, impersonal indifference. Tank treads squeal and clatter and the very noise they make tells you they can't be stopped. It tells you you're weak and powerless against the machine. Then one track stops and the other keeps on going and the tank wheels around and lurches straight toward you, roaring and squealing. That's the real twentieth-century sound.
We heard the XII Corps' Abrams column a long time before we saw it. The noise came at us through the fog. We heard the tracks, and the whine of the turbines. We heard the grind of the drive gear and felt fastpattering bass shudders through the soles of our feet as each new tread plate came off the cogs and thumped down into position. We heard grit and stone crushed under their weight.
Then we saw them. The lead tank loomed at us through the mist. It was moving fast, pitching a little, staying flat, its engine roaring. Behind it was another, and another. They were all in line, single file, like an armada from hell. It was a magnificent sight. The M1A1 Abrams is like a shark, evolved to a point of absolute perfection. It is the undisputed king of the jungle. No other tank on earth can even begin to damage it. It is wrapped in armor made out of a depleted uranium core sandwiched between rolled steel plate. The armor is dense and impregnable. Battlefield shells and rockets and kinetic devices bounce right off it. But its main trick is to stand off so far that no battlefield shell or rocket or kinetic device can even reach it. It sits there and watches enemy rounds fall short in the dirt. Then it traverses its mighty gun and fires and a second later and a mile and a half in the distance its assailant blows up and burns. It is the ultimate unfair advantage.
The lead tank rolled past us. Eleven feet wide, twenty-six feet long, nine and a half feet tall. Seventy tons. Its engine bellowed and its weight shook the ground. Its tracks squealed and clattered and slid on the concrete. Then the second tank rolled by. And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. The noise was deafening. The huge bulk of exotic metal buffeted the air. The gun barrels dipped and swayed and bounced. Exhaust fumes swirled all around.
There were altogether twenty tanks in the formation. They drove in through the gate and their noise and vibration faded behind us and then there was a short gap and a scout car came out of the mist straight toward us. It was a shoot-and-scoot Humvee armed with a TOW-2 antitank missile launcher. Two guys in it. I stepped into its path and raised my hand. Paused. I didn't know Marshall and I had only ever seen him once, in the dark interior of the Grand Marquis outside Fort Bird's post headquarters. But even so, I was pretty sure that neither of the guys in the Humvee was him. I remembered Marshall as large and dark and these guys were small, which is much more usual for Armored people. One thing there isn't a lot of inside an Abrams is room.
The Humvee came to a stop right in front of me and I tracked around to the driver's window. Summer took up station on the passenger side, standing easy. The driver rolled his glass down. Stared out at me.
"I'm looking for Major Marshall," I said.
The driver was a captain and his passenger was a captain too. They were both dressed in Nomex tank suits, with balaclavas and Kevlar helmets with built-in headphones. The passenger had sleeve pockets full of pens. He had clipboards strapped to both thighs. They were all covered with notes. Some kind of score sheets.
"Marshall's not here," the driver said.
"So where is he?"
"Who's asking?"
"You can read," I said. I was wearing last night's BDUs. They had oak leaves on the collar and Reacher on the stencil.
"Unit?" the guy said.
"You don't want to know."
"Marshall went to California," he said. "Emergency deployment to Fort Irwin."
"When?"
"I'm not sure."
"Try to be."
"Last night sometime."
"That's not very specific."
"I'm honestly not sure."
"What kind of an emergency have they got at Irwin?"
"I'm not sure about that either."
I nodded. Stepped back.
"Drive on," I said.
Their Humvee moved out from the space between us, and Summer joined me in the middle of the road. The air smelled of diesel and gas turbine exhaust and the concrete was scored fresh white by the passage of the tank tracks.
"Wasted trip," Summer said.
"Maybe not," I said. "Depends exactly when Marshall left. If it was after Swan's phone call, that tells us something."
We were shunted between three different offices, trying to find out exactly what time Marshall left XII Corps. We ended up in a second-story suite that housed General Vassell's operation. Vassell himself wasn't there. We spoke to yet another captain. He seemed to be in charge of an administrative company.
"Major Marshall took a civilian flight at 2300," he said. "Frankfurt to Dulles. Seven-hour layover and on to LAX from National. I issued the vouchers myself."
"When?"
"As he was leaving."
"Which was when?"
"He left here three hours before his flight."
"Eight o'clock?"
The captain nodded. "On the dot."
"I was told he was scheduled for night maneuvers."
"He was. That plan changed."
"Why?"
"I'm not sure."
I'm not sure seemed to be XII Corps' standard-issue answer for everything.
"What's the panic at Irwin?" I said.
"I'm not sure."
I smiled, briefly. "When were Marshall's orders issued?"
"At seven o'clock."
"Written?"
"Verbal."
"By?"
"General Vassell."
"Did Vassell countersign the travel vouchers himself?"
The captain nodded.
"Yes," he said. "He did."
"I need to speak to him," I said.
"He went to London."
"London?" I said.
"For a short-notice meeting with the British Ministry of Defense."
"When did he leave?"
"He traveled to the airport with Major Marshall."
"Where's Colonel Coomer?"
"Berlin," the guy said. "Souvenir hunting."
"Don't tell me," I said. "He went to the airport with Vassell and Marshall."
"No," the captain said. "He took the train."
"Terrific," I said.
Summer and I went to the O Club for breakfast. We got the same corner table we had used the night before. We sat side by side, backs to the wall, watching the room.
"OK," I said. "Swan's office called for Marshall's whereabouts at 1810 and fifty minutes later he had orders for Irwin. An hour after that he was off the post."
"And Vassell lit out for London," Summer said. "And Coomer jumped on a train for Berlin."
"A night train," I said. "Who goes on a night train just for the fun of it?"
"Everybody's got something to hide," she said.
"Except me and my monkey."
"What?"
"The Beatles," I said. "One of the sounds of the century."
She just looked at me.
"What are they hiding?" she said.
"You tell me."
She put her hands on the table, palms down. Took a breath.
"I can see part of it," she said.
"Me too."
"The agenda," she said. "It was the other side of the coin from what Colonel Simon was talking about last night. Simon was salivating about the infantry taking Armored down a peg or two. Kramer must have seen all of that coming. Two-star generals aren't stupid. So the Irwin conference on New Year's Day was about fighting the opposite corner. It was about resistance, I guess. They don't want to give up what they've got."
"Hell of a thing to give up," I said.
"Believe it," she said. "Like battleship captains, way back."
"So what was in the agenda?"
"Part defense, part offense," she said. "That's the obvious way to do it. Arguments against integrated units, ridicule of lightweight armored vehicles, advocacy for their own specialized expertise."
"I agree," I said. "But it's not enough. The Pentagon is going to be neck-deep in position papers full of shit like that, starting any day now. For, against, if, but and however, we're going to be bored to death with it. But there was something else in that agenda that made them totally desperate to get Kramer's copy back. What was it?"
"I don't know."
"Me either," I said.
"And why did they run last night?" Summer asked. "By now they must have destroyed Kramer's copy and every other copy. So they could have lied through their teeth about what was in it, to put your mind at rest. They could even have given you a phony document. They could have said, Here you go, this was it, check it out."
"They ran because of Mrs. Kramer," I said.
She nodded. "I still think Vassell and Coomer killed her. Kramer croaks, the ball is in their court, in the circumstances they know it's their responsibility to go out and round up all the loose paperwork. Mrs. Kramer goes down as collateral damage."
"That would make perfect sense," I said. "Except that neither one of them looked particularly tall and strong to me."
"They're both a lot taller and stronger than Mrs. Kramer was. Plus, you know, heat of the moment, pumped up with panic, we could be seeing ambiguous forensic results. And we don't know how good the Green Valley people are anyway. Could be some family doctor doing a two-year term as coroner, and what the hell would he know?"
"Maybe," I said. "But I still don't see how it could have happened. Take out the drive time from D.C., take out ten minutes to find that store and steal the crowbar, they had ten minutes to react. And they didn't have a car, and they didn't call for one."
"They could have taken a taxi. Or a town car. Direct from the hotel lobby. And we'd never trace it. New Year's Eve, it was the busiest night of the year."
"It would have been a long ride," I said. "Big fare. It might stand out in some driver's memory."
"New Year's Eve," she said again. "D.C. taxis and town cars are all over three states. All kinds of weird destinations. It's a possibility."
"I don't think so," I said. "You don't take a taxi on a trip where you break into a hardware store and a house."
"No reason for the driver to have seen anything. Vassell or Coomer or both could have walked into that alley in Sperryville on foot. Come back five minutes later with the crowbar under their coat. Same thing with Mrs. Kramer's house. The cab could have stopped on the driveway. All the action was around the back."
"Too big of a risk. A D.C. cabdriver reads the papers same as anyone else. Maybe more than anyone else, with all that traffic. He sees the story from Green Valley, he remembers his two passengers."
"They didn't see it as a risk. They weren't anticipating a story. Because they thought Mrs. Kramer wasn't going to be home. They thought she would be at the hospital. And they figured no way would a couple of trivial burglaries in Sperryville and Green Valley make it into the D.C. papers."
I nodded. Thought back to something Detective Clark had said, days ago. I had people up and down the street, canvassing. There were some cars around.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe we should check taxis."
"Worst night of the year," Summer said. "Like for alibis."
"It would be a hell of a thing," I said. "Wouldn't it? Taking a cab to do a thing like that?"
"Nerves of steel."
"If they've got nerves of steel, why did they run away last night?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"That really doesn't make any sense," she said. "Because they can't run forever. They must know that. They must know that sooner or later they're going to have to turn around and bite back."
"I agree. And they should have done it right here. Right now. This is their turf. I don't understand why they didn't."
"It will be a hell of a bite. Their whole professional lives are on the line. You should be very careful."
"You too," I said. "Not just me."
"Offense is the best defense."
"Agreed," I said.
"So are we going after them?"
"You bet your ass."
"Which one first?"
"Marshall," I said. "He's the one I want."
"Why?"
"Rule of thumb," I said. "Chase the one they sent farthest away, because they see him as the weakest link."
"Now?" she said.
I shook my head.
"We're going to Paris next," I said. "I have to see my mom."
