by Lee Child
More guns fired. One after the other. A ragged salvo. There were no explosions. But the brutal calamitous physical noise was maybe worse. It was some kind of primeval clamor. The air hissed. There was deep brainless thudding as dead shells hit the earth. There were shuddering bass peals of metal against metal, like ancient giants clashing with swords. Huge chunks of wreckage from the Sheridan cartwheeled away and clanged and shivered and skidded on the sand. There was dust and dirt everywhere in the air. I was choking on it. Marshall was still in the hut. I stayed down in a low crouch and kept my Beretta aimed at the open ground. Waited. Forced my hand to keep still. Stared at the empty space. Just stared at it, desperately. I didn’t understand. Marshall had to know he couldn’t wait much longer. He had called down a hailstorm of metal. We were being attacked by Abrams tanks. My Humvee was going to get hit any second. His only avenue of escape was going to vanish right before his eyes. It was going to flip up in the air and come down on its roof. The law of averages guaranteed it. Or else the hut would get hit and collapse all around him first. He would be buried in the rubble. One thing or the other would happen. For sure. It had to. So why the hell was he waiting?
Then I got up on my knees and stared at the hut.
Because I knew why.
Suicide.
I had offered him suicide by cop but he had already chosen suicide by tank. He had seen me coming and he had guessed who I was. Like Vassell and Coomer he had been sitting numb day after day just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And finally there it was, at last, the other shoe, coming straight at him through the desert dust in a Humvee. He had thought and he had decided and he had gotten on the radio.
He was going down, and he was taking me with him.
I could hear the tanks pretty close now. Not more than eight or nine hundred yards. I could hear the squeal and clatter of their tracks. They were still moving fast. They would be fanning out, like it said in the field manual. They would be pitching and rolling. They would be kicking up rooster tails of dust. They would be forming a loose mobile semicircle with their big guns pointing inward like the spokes of a wheel.
I crawled back and looked at my Humvee. But if I went for it Marshall would shoot me down from the safety of the hut. No question about that. The twenty-five yards of open ground must have looked as good to him as they looked to me.
I waited.
I heard the boom of a gun and the whump of a shell and I stood up and ran the other way. I heard another boom and another whump and the first shell slammed into the Sheridan and bowled it all the way over and then the second hit Marshall’s Humvee and demolished it completely. I threw myself behind the north corner of the hut and rolled tight against the base of the wall and listened to shards of metal rattling against the cinder blocks and the screeching as the old Sheridan’s armor finally came apart.
The tanks were very close now. I could hear their engine notes rising and falling as they breasted rises and crashed through dips. I could hear their tracks slapping against their skirts. I could hear their hydraulics whining as they traversed their guns.
I got to my feet. Stood up straight. Wiped dust out of my eyes. Stepped over to the iron door. Saw the bright crater my gun had made. I knew Marshall had to be either standing in the south window looking for me running or standing in the west window looking for me dead behind the wreckage. I knew he was tall and I knew he was right-handed. I fixed an abstract target in my mind. Moved my left hand and put it on the doorknob. Waited.
The next shells were fired so close that I heard boom whump boom whump with no pause in between. I pulled the door and stepped inside. Marshall was right there in front of me. He was facing away, looking south, framed by the brightness of the window. I aimed at his right shoulder blade and pulled the trigger and a shell took the roof off the hut. The room was instantly full of dust and I was hit by falling beams and corrugated sheets and stung by fragments of flying concrete. I went down on my knees. Then I collapsed on my front. I was pinned. I couldn’t see Marshall. I heaved myself back up on my knees and flailed my arms to fight off the debris. The dust was sucking upward in a ragged spiral and I could see bright blue sky above me. I could hear tank tracks all around me. Then I heard another boom whump and the front corner of the hut blew away. It was there, and then it wasn’t. It was solid, and then it was a spray of gray dust coming toward me at the speed of sound. A gale of dusty air whipped after it and knocked me off my feet again.
I struggled back up and crawled forward. Just butted my way through fallen beams and lumps of broken concrete. I threw twisted sheets of roofing iron aside. I was like a plow. Like a bulldozer, grinding forward, piling debris to the left and right of me. There was too much dust to see anything except the sunlight. It was right there in front of me. Brightness ahead, darkness behind. I kept on going.
I found the Mag-10. Its barrel was crushed. I threw it aside and plowed on. Found Marshall on the floor. He wasn’t moving. I pulled stuff off him and grabbed his collar and hauled him up into a sitting position. Dragged him forward until I came to the front wall. I put my back against it and slid upright until I felt the window aperture. I was choking and spitting dust. It was in my eyes. I dragged him upward and hauled him over the windowsill and dumped him out. Then I fell out after him. Got up on my hands and knees and grabbed his collar again and dragged him away. Outside the hut the dust was clearing. I could see tanks, maybe three hundred yards to the left and right of us. Lots of tanks. Hot metal in the harsh sunlight. They had outflanked us. They were holding in a perfect circle, engines idling, guns flat, aiming over open sights. I heard boom whump again and saw a bright muzzle flash from one of them and saw it pitch backward from the recoil. I saw its shell pass right over us. I saw it in the air. Heard it break the sound barrier with a crack like a neck snapping. Heard it smash into the remains of the hut. Felt more dust and concrete shower down on my back. I went down on my face and lay still, trapped in no-man’s-land.
Then another tank fired. I saw it jerk backward from the recoil. Seventy tons, smashed back so hard its front end came right up in the air. Its shell screamed overhead. I started moving again. I dragged Marshall behind me and crawled through the dirt like I was swimming. I had no idea what he had said on the radio. No idea what his orders had been. He had to have told them he was moving out. Maybe he had told them to disregard the Humvees. Maybe that explained their Say again? Maybe he had told them the Humvees were fair game. Maybe that was what they had found hard to believe.
But I knew they wouldn’t stop firing now. Because they couldn’t see us. Dust was drifting like smoke and the view out of a buttoned-up Abrams wasn’t great to begin with. It was like looking lengthwise through a grocery bag with a small square hole cut out of the bottom. I paused and batted dust out of the way and coughed and peered forward. We were close to my Humvee.
It looked straight and level.
It looked intact.
So far.
I stood up and raced the last ten feet and hauled Marshall around to the passenger side and opened the door and crammed him into the front. Then I climbed right in over him and dumped myself into the driver’s seat. Hit that big red button and fired it up. Shoved it into gear and stamped on the gas so hard the acceleration slammed the door shut. Then I turned the lights full on and put my foot to the floor and charged. Summer would have been proud of me. I drove straight for the line of tanks. Two hundred yards. One hundred yards. I picked my spot and aimed carefully and burst through the gap between two main battle tanks doing more than eighty miles an hour.
I slowed down after a mile. After another mile, I stopped. Marshall was alive. But he was unconscious and he was bleeding all over the place. My aim had been good. His shoulder had a big messy nine-millimeter broken-bone through-and-through gunshot wound in it and he had plenty of other cuts from the hut’s collapse. His blood was all mixed with cement dust like a maroon paste. I got him arranged on the seat and strapped him in tight with the harness. Then I broke out the fi
rst-aid kit and put pressure bandages on both sides of his shoulder and jabbed him with morphine. I wrote M on his forehead with a grease pencil like you were supposed to in the field. That way the medics wouldn’t overdose him when he got to the hospital.
Then I walked around in the fresh air for a spell. Just walked up and down the track, aimlessly. I coughed and spat and dusted myself down as well as I could. I was bruised and sore from being pelted with concrete fragments. Two miles behind me I could still hear tanks firing. I guessed they were waiting for a cease-fire order. I guessed they were likely to run out of rounds before they got one.
I kept the 2-40 A/C going all the way back. Halfway there, Marshall woke up. I saw his chin come up off his chest. Saw him glance ahead, and then at me to his left. He was full of morphine and his right arm was useless, but I was still cautious. If he grabbed the wheel with his left he might force us off the track. He might run us over some unexploded debris. Or a tortoise. So I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse-punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anesthetic. He stayed out all the way back to the post.
I drove him straight to the base hospital. Called Franz from the nurses’ station and ordered up a guard squad. I waited for them to arrive and promised rank and medals for anyone who helped ensure Marshall saw the inside of a courtroom. I told them to read him his rights as soon as he woke up. And I told them to mount a suicide watch. Then I left them to it and drove back to Franz’s office. My BDUs were torn up and stiff with dust and I guessed my face and hands and hair didn’t look any better because Franz laughed as soon as he saw me.
“I guess it’s tough taking desk jockeys down,” he said.
“Where’s Summer?” I said.
“Telexing JAG Corps,” he said. “Talking to people on the phone.”
“I lost your Beretta,” I said.
“Where?”
“Somewhere it’s going to take a bunch of archaeologists a hundred years to find.”
“Is my Humvee OK?”
“Better than Marshall’s,” I said.
I found my bag and an empty VOQ room and took a long hot shower. Then I transferred all my pocket stuff to a new set of BDUs and trashed the damaged ones. I figured any quartermaster would agree they were deteriorated beyond reasonable future use. I sat on the bed for a while. Just breathed in, breathed out. Then I walked back to Franz’s place. I found Summer there. She was looking radiant. She was holding a new file folder that already had a lot of pages in it.
“We’re on track,” she said. “JAG Corps says the arrests were righteous.”
“Did you lay out the case?”
“They say they’ll need confessions.”
I said nothing.
“We have to meet with the prosecutors tomorrow,” she said. “In D.C.”
“You’ll have to do it,” I said. “I won’t be around.”
“Why not?”
I didn’t answer.
“You OK?”
“Are Vassell and Coomer talking?”
She shook her head. “They haven’t said a word. JAG Corps is flying them to Washington tonight. They’ve been assigned lawyers.”
“There’s something wrong,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s been way too easy.”
I thought for a moment.
“We need to get back to Bird,” I said. “Right now.”
Franz lent me fifty bucks and gave me two blank travel vouchers. I signed them and Leon Garber countersigned them even though he was thousands of miles away in Korea. Then Franz drove us back to LAX. He used a staff car because his Humvee was full of Marshall’s blood. Traffic was light and it was a fast trip. We went in and I swapped the vouchers for seats on the first flight to D.C. I checked my bag. I didn’t want to carry it this time. We took off at three o’clock in the afternoon. We had been in California eight hours exactly.
twenty-four
Flying east the time zones stole back the hours we had gained going west. It was eleven o’clock at night at Washington National when we landed. I reclaimed my duffel from the carousel and we took the shuttle to the long-term lot. The Chevy was waiting there right where we left it. I used some of Franz’s fifty bucks and we filled the tank. Then Summer drove us back to Bird. She went as fast as always and took the same old route, down I-95. Past the State Police barracks, the place where the briefcase was found, the rest area, the cloverleaf, the motel, the lounge bar. We were timed in through Fort Bird’s main gate at three in the morning. The post was quiet. There was a night mist clamped down all over it. Nothing was stirring.
“Where to?” Summer said.
“The Delta station,” I said.
She drove us around to the old prison gates and the sentry let us in. We parked in their main lot. I could see Trifonov’s red Corvette in the darkness. It was all on its own, near the wall with the water hose. It looked very clean.
“Why are we here?” Summer said.
“We had a very weak case,” I said. “You made that point yourself. And you were right. It was very weak. The forensics with the staff car helped, but we never really got beyond purely circumstantial stuff. We can’t actually put Vassell and Coomer and Marshall at any of the scenes. Not definitively. We can’t prove Marshall ever actually touched the crowbar. We can’t prove he didn’t actually eat the yogurt for a snack. And we certainly can’t prove that Vassell and Coomer ever actually ordered him to do anything. If push came to shove, they could claim Marshall was an out-of-control lone wolf.”
“So?”
“We walked in and confronted two senior officers who were doubly insulated from a very weak and circumstantial case. What should have happened?”
“They should have fought it.”
I nodded. “They should have scoffed at it. They should have laughed it off. They should have gotten offended. They should have threatened and blustered. They should have thrown us out on our asses. But they didn’t do any of that. They just sat still for it. And their silence kind of pled themselves guilty. That was my impression. That’s how I took it.”
“Me too,” Summer said. “Certainly.”
“So why didn’t they fight?”
She was quiet for a spell.
“Guilty consciences?” she said.
I shook my head. “Spare me.”
She was quiet a moment longer.
“Shit,” she said. “Maybe they’re just waiting. Maybe they’re going to collapse the case in full view of everybody. In D.C., tomorrow, when they’ve got their lawyers there. To ruin our careers. To put us in our place. Maybe it’s a vindictive thing.”
I shook my head again. “What did I charge them with?”
“Conspiracy to commit homicide.”
I nodded. “I think they misunderstood me.”
“It was plain English.”
“They understood the words. But not the context. I was talking about one thing, and they thought I was talking about a different thing. They thought I was talking about something else entirely. They pled guilty to the wrong conspiracy, Summer. They pled guilty to something they know can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.”
She said nothing.
“The agenda,” I said. “It’s still out there. They never got it back. Carbone double-crossed them. They opened the briefcase up there on I-95, and the agenda wasn’t in it. It was already gone.”
“So where is it?”
“I’ll show you where,” I said. “That’s why we came back. So you can use it tomorrow. Up in D.C. Use it to leverage all the other stuff. The things we’re weak on.”
We slid out of the car into the cold. Walked across the lot to the cell block door. Stepped inside. I could hear the sounds of sleeping men. I could taste the sour dormitory air. We walked through corridors and turned corners in the dark until we came to Carbone’s billet. It was empty and undisturbed. We stepped in and I snapped the light on. Stepped over to the bed. Reached up to the s
helf. Ran my fingers along the spines of the books. Pulled out the tall thin Rolling Stones souvenir. Held it. Shook it.
A four-page conference agenda fell out on the bed.
We stared at it.
“Brubaker told him to hide it,” I said.
I picked it up and handed it to Summer. Turned the light back off and stepped out into the corridor. Came face-to-face with the young Delta sergeant with the beard and the tan. He was in skivvies and a T-shirt. He was barefoot. He had been drinking beer about four hours ago, according to the way he smelled.
“Well, well,” he said. “Look who we have here.”
I said nothing.
“You woke me up talking,” he said. “And flashing lights on and off.”
I said nothing.
He glanced into Carbone’s cell. “Revisiting the scene of the crime?”
“This isn’t where he died.”
“You know what I mean.”
Then he smiled and I saw his hands bunch into fists. I slammed him back against the wall with my left forearm. His skull hit the concrete and his eyes glazed for a second. I kept my arm hard and level across his chest. Got the point of my elbow on his right bicep and spread my open fingers across his left bicep. Pinned him to the wall. Leaned on him with all my weight. Kept on leaning until he was having trouble breathing.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Read the newspaper every day this week.”
Then I fumbled in my jacket pocket with my free hand and found the bullet. The one he had delivered. The one with my name on it. I held it with my finger and thumb right down at the base. It shone gold in the faint night light.
“Watch this,” I said.
I showed him the bullet. Then I shoved it up his nose.
My sergeant was at her desk. The one with the baby son. She had coffee going. I poured two mugs and carried them into my office. Summer carried the agenda, like a trophy. She took the staple out of the paper and laid the four sheets side by side on my desk.
