Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  “You remember Mister Peretz? The guy who was in here for a week on his Reserve duty?”

  “Yeah, he got the hots for you, too. Nice guy.”

  “He asked a lot of questions. He got transferred out of here after one of his two weeks.” She looked up. Their eyes met.

  Valdez grinned. “Do I begin to see a pattern here?” he said. “Like, former US Navy Lieutenant-Commander Suter called somebody and got him transferred?”

  “Last week, Peretz was beaten up on the street.”

  “You told me. Too bad, but—what’s the connection?”

  “Think about it.”

  “Kind of a long time since he was here asking questions.”

  “Maybe a long time since he was here, Valdez, but he was still asking questions just before he got beaten up. He called me four or five days before and asked me a lot of stuff about Peacemaker. And Suter.”

  Again, their eyes met. She said, blushing, “I told Suter about it.”

  “Oh, man—!” Valdez threw his arms out in a big gesture, as if he were asking a crowd to witness how idiotic this woman could be. “Why didn’t you tell me? The guy’s asking questions about Suter and you go and tell Suter? In the very best possible interpretation, Suter is a two-faced asshole, and you tell him stuff all the time! You got the hots for him or something?” He brushed his hair back, blew out his breath. “Jeez, now you got blood on your hands.”

  “Oh, God, Valdez—!”

  “Hey, hey, hey—! I didn’t mean it; it’s just a way of talking. The guy, Peretz, he’s gonna be okay, right? Right?”

  “He had surgery last night; they say he’ll make it, but it’ll take a long time.”

  “Well, then. But my God, that’s kind of heavy, beating on a guy because he asked questions.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Well, I don’t know that lions eat Latinos, either, but I don’t climb into the lion cage at the zoo. Hey, listen: what’s really on your mind? What’s the playing with the paper balls about? I never seen you like this.”

  She rolled the paper around and around in her fingers, then rolled it between her palms. “I wonder what it is we’re not supposed to ask about Peacemaker. All of a sudden—it’s late, I know it’s late, Valdez; I’ve like been in denial—I didn’t want to hear anything, you know—distracting—Now I’m worried.”

  “You so worried you gonna bail out?”

  She tossed the paper ball into the center of the wastebasket. “Not on your life.” She stood. “I’m in for the long haul. Tomorrow, you and I are going to do our last dry run on the launch and then we’re heading out to Naples to meet the Philadelphia. But first I’m going to talk to Ray Suter—and you’re coming along as a witness.” She didn’t say, And I’m going to stop being snowed by the guy’s b.s. because his attention flatters me, but that was what she was thinking.

  Suter was in, and he was happy to make time for LCDR Craik, his receptionist said. Rose marched through the IVI corridors like a woman with a mission, Valdez scurrying to keep up. They were an odd but familiar pair—she slender, lithe, head-turningly pretty; he squat, muscular, bullish. Neither had an expression that would encourage other people to mess with them.

  Rose went into Suter’s office first, and Suter came around his desk and was already raising his arms to embrace her—capitalizing on her weakness at the time of Peretz’s beating—when Valdez came through the door.

  “Wait outside and close the door,” Suter snapped.

  “Stay here, Valdez.” Rose sidestepped Suter’s advance. “But maybe it’s a good idea to close the door.”

  She stood near the big window that looked out over the rolling industrial campus, where Maryland’s weak imitation of winter was taking hold. Valdez, arms folded, stood apart from the two but apparently ready to step in.

  “Okay, Ray,” she said, “let’s cut the bullshit. You’ve been feeding me a line since I got here; now I want the truth. Who hit Abe Peretz?”

  Suter hesitated the millisecond that showed his shock at the question, and then he tried to take the high road. “Rose, what the hell? Peretz—who’s Peretz?”

  “The Reserve officer you got transferred because I told you he was asking questions about Peacemaker and targeting data. Come on, Ray—what’s your problem with questions?”

  “Has your boy here been telling you more stories about the data stream, or what? I thought we settled that.”

  “You settled that, I didn’t—and don’t use the word ‘boy.’” She compressed her lips, and for a moment it seemed she might soften. “Ray, I liked you. I liked the fact you were attracted to me. But you took advantage of that.”

  Suter glanced aside at Valdez, started to protest.

  “You lied to me,” she said. “You lied to me.”

  “You have no need to know certain things about Peacemaker.”

  “I’m the launch officer! I’ve got a top-secret clearance! I do need to know!”

  “That’s not your decision and it’s not mine. You’re a military officer. You accept these things.”

  “Is that why you got out, because you accepted these things?”

  “My experience is not relevant.”

  “Your experience is key! Goddamit, Ray, I told you what Abe Peretz was finding out on his own about Peacemaker, and four days later he got beaten so bad he almost died. Tell me the truth!”

  “Rose, God, look—let’s talk this out somewhere without—” He glanced again at Valdez.

  “He stays. Ray—you told people about Peretz and he got beaten. Who did you tell? Who did you tell?”

  Suter seemed to debate his choices, and real anguish showed on his face as he seemed to understand that his feelings for Rose were being ignored, perhaps crushed. He cleared his throat. “It was a security matter. I’m sure I told Security. Otherwise, I, uh—I don’t know—”

  “Did you tell George Shreed?”

  Suter’s face suffered a spasm, something like pain, perhaps suffering—or it may merely have been the anguish of being found out. It caused Valdez to mutter “Yeah!” and grin, and Rose made a motion to him to shut up. She crossed her own arms now. She was in charge. “What’s your relationship with George Shreed?” she demanded.

  “I’m not going to answer these questions. These improper questions.”

  “Is it because you and Shreed both hate my husband? Ray, George Shreed is bad news—what the hell are you doing, working with him?”

  “I don’t work with him! I don’t even know who he is. Where are you getting all this? This is wild guess-work, Rose, it’s crazy—I’m not going to dignify this any further with my participation. I think you’d better leave. Both better leave. I’m very disappointed in you, Rose.”

  She shook her head. “George Shreed will chew you up and spit out the pieces and never even blink. Ray, Shreed is exactly the kind of man who’d do what was done to Abe Peretz—or who would have it done by somebody else, because he gets other people to do his dirty work for him. The way he got you to work on me. And on IVI, if I read it right. Now—what’s going on with Peacemaker?”

  Suter swallowed, then went back and sat behind his desk. “This interview is over. If you have any further questions, please address them to General Touhey directly. That’s final.”

  She stared at him. It was the end of the interview—and of what he had hoped would become a relationship, and both knew it. “Okay,” she said, “I will.”

  And she marched herself and Valdez down to Touhey’s office, but by the time they got there, Suter had already talked to Touhey, and the receptionist told her that the general would give her two minutes and that Valdez was not welcome. In the general’s office, Rose was made to stand, was reminded that she was a military officer subject to the rules of security and classification, and she was told by Touhey that if there was any aspect of Peacemaker that made it impossible for her to perform her duties, she should resign them now and let the Standby Launch Officer assume them.

  That would b
e the end of her career. And the Standby was Ray Suter.

  “I wish to ask one question, sir,” she said.

  “Ask.”

  Her voice was crisp, official. “Are all orders to be given to me about the launch and Peacemaker legal orders as that term is understood in the Uniform Code of Military Justice?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, sir. Thank you for your time.”

  Outside, she pulled Valdez into her wake and started for her office.

  “So?” Valdez said as he hurried to keep up. “So what do we do?”

  “We go to Naples day after tomorrow, we meet the ship, we go down to the Gulf of Sidra and do our job.”

  “Just like nothing happened?”

  Her jaw set in a line that Alan would have recognized and been wary of. “That’s what doing our job means.”

  32

  December 2

  Zaire.

  They had made it across a small dirt track and down a wide trail that had once known wheeled travel to the edge of a small lake. Two thatched lodges were falling down at the west end of the water. It was an old white hunter’s camp, still kept going by a couple of ancient Luo poachers. They would have guns.

  Alan moved warily onto the open ground where once trucks had parked and called softly for the M’zee. After a little, an old man came out of the closer lodge, holding a single-shot, 20-gauge shotgun. The barrel was pointed at his gut, although the old man’s eyes were nearly white with cataracts. He understood Alan’s pidgin Bemba/Swahili well enough, although he pretended not to. He understood the color of the gold coins much better. The old man agreed to feed them.

  The ground sloped gently toward the lake, with the two large bandas standing at either end of what had once been a beach and was now a small, even reed bed. Across the lake, two great hills rose from the plain, each showing a rocky outcrop like giant teeth against the dark green of the forest. In the foreground, flowers grew in an outrageous burst of color between the lodges and the water’s edge, gaudy in the rain; after more than a week of the sameness of the forest, the riot of color in the light of day was as loud as a gunshot. At the foot of the lake to his left were two brilliant red flowers that looked like hollyhocks. He cut one blossom and pressed it in the day book from his helmet bag for Rose. Because it was so strange.

  Harry and Djalik emerged into the clearing between the two rickety bandas. Alan helped them get their packs off, and the three of them sat in a thatched ruin that had once been the bar. There were still actual chairs. Djalik sat down and fell asleep.

  They ate wild impala until their hands and scraggly beards were covered in grease. The impala had been alive an hour before, he thought, shot—illegally—to feed them. It was, right then, the most delicious thing he had ever eaten. He and Harry washed themselves in the lake, making jokes about bilharzia and dinky, but in fact the lake water was icy cold, far too cold for either organism.

  Harry tried his Tutsi on the women who cooked the meat and failed. He told Alan later that these people were “honorary” Banye Melenge. They didn’t speak any language he or Alan knew, except enough Bemba and Swahili and Creole to bargain with Alan. They were not in the least afraid, either; he saw other figures on the far side of the lake, young men with rifles, and he thought that these people were accustomed to having things their own way here.

  Harry found Alan in the last rays of the sunset, casting his hand line into the lake from an ancient concrete dam at its head. The afternoon rain had ended, and the air was misty now, golden. As Harry approached, Alan’s bobber disappeared in a splash and Alan began to haul in the fish. Harry laughed as he helped Alan land it. They were both soaked, but the women had taken their clothes to dry and they were wearing pieces of old cloth, like sarongs. Alan whacked the fish on the head with his knife hilt until it stopped moving.

  “That’s a trout!” Harry said.

  Alan shrugged and smiled. Whatever it was, it bore some resemblance to a trout.

  “How’s Djalik?”

  “Asleep again.” Harry hesitated. “I think he’s running a fever. It’s the hand.”

  The old man and a boy built a big fire of downed wood, saying it was “the way things used to be done.” They were able to spread out for the first time in a week. The wilderness they had lived in always seemed cramped, full of refugees, or enemies. The Zairian forest was either desert dry or damp, and there was rarely a flat spot to lie down, much less spread out. Fallen trees, bog, undergrowth, puddles were everywhere. Just seeing an opening in the woods, seeing the fire and the reflection in the lake cheered them.

  While they sat, Alan cut up a length of old canvas that had once been a tent. He was making bandages to wrap his bare legs as high as the knee. He made a set for Djalik, as well. They drank tea from old Coke bottles and stared at the fire.

  That was the time to give them the bad news. Alan laid the map on the drier dirt near the fire pit and moved a kerosene lamp near it so that the paper was lit from both sides. “The old man says that the second pickup point is being used by the FAZ. He as much as said that it’s the field where he used to move illegal stuff like rhino horn. The FAZ are using it the same way now—stuff they’ve looted, weapons, foreign-aid goodies. That makes it unsafe for us.”

  “So we give it a bye,” Harry said.

  “Right.”

  “How much farther?”

  “He thinks three days to the third of the airfields, but I don’t think he’s ever been there. When he says three days, that means at his pace. The way we’re going, four—maybe five.” Alan tapped the map. “My idea is we lie over here another day and a night and then go for it.”

  “Negative that.” It was Djalik. His face was contorted by the firelight. He knew that he was the one who was supposed to rest.

  “You’re worn out, Dave.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that, Commander.”

  Alan bit back the reply he had started to make. At least Djalik hadn’t said “no problem.” In fact, he hadn’t said it for some days.

  “Okay. Get some sleep. We’re off at first light.”

  Naples, Italy. December 3.

  The streets of Naples were shiny with rain, and the few people out were running for cover as Rose’s taxi moved down a main thoroughfare toward her hotel. Along one stretch from the airport, the sun had been shining even as the rain fell, and she had wondered which—rain or sun—was the omen for her mission. She had thought she would be meeting Alan here, but his ship was still in the Atlantic, and she hadn’t had a word from him in weeks.

  Beside her, Valdez was quiet. It was their third trip to Naples.

  “Third time’s the charm,” she said. It sounded stupid to her as she said it.

  “Where do we meet these marines?” Valdez, a solid presence that she depended on, was in no mood for chitchat.

  “If Suter didn’t interfere at the last moment and if the Navy didn’t tie itself up in red tape, they should be on the beach before we are.”

  “I wanta see them. Seeing is believing.”

  She agreed, but she didn’t want to confess her own anxiety. Many things could go wrong with the launch—the ship, the missile, the weather, the unexpected—but it was the marines she wanted, as if their presence would guarantee success. She had got a medal a few years before for flying a bunch of marines into hostile territory to lift out three Americans (one of them her husband), but she knew that all the heroism had been theirs. Now, she wanted that with her.

  And, thank God, there was a message at her hotel. She called the phone number, got another hotel a few blocks away, and was put through to Gunnery Sergeant LaFond.

  “Good morning, sir, LaFond speaking.”

  The voice was even, low. It projected competence, no-nonsense performance.

  “Gunny, Lieutenant-Commander Siciliano.”

  The faintest hesitation—had he not known she was a woman? “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I just got in. Everything go?”

&
nbsp; “Ready to board, ma’am. I got three of the best, we’re here checking out our, um, emergency gear.” Weapons, he meant. She felt a lurch of excitement and thought, It’s going to be okay. “I’ll be right over,” she said.

  “Uh, ma’am, the boys are, uh—”

  “You tell the boys I’m not there to conduct an inspection, but I’m coming over!”

  She took a taxi, even though their hotel was close, she was so eager to see them. When she got into Gunny LaFond’s room, she laughed out loud. The four marines had spread combat gear over every available surface, and the place looked like a small-arms depot with a view of Vesuvius out the window. The marines were in T-shirts and jeans, and she thought, They’re so young—so goddam young. But she had thought that about the ones who fought before, and they had always come through.

  “The management know about this?” she said to LaFond. He was a thin, short man with sandy hair and the kind of hard face that gets cast as a redneck rounder’s.

  “We don’t want to get thrown out, ma’am. Or arrested.”

  She saw night-vision goggles, Kevlar battle armor, six handguns, of which only two were issue Berettas, a number of knives, two axes, and what looked like an old-fashioned cutlass. She picked it up and looked at LaFond with raised eyebrows.

  “For luck,” he said. “I got it in a junk store here in Nap. To repel boarders.” He gave her a grin and a look, and she saw that LaFond could be a problem but was trying not to be. Cajun, she thought. He was looking at her with eyes that saw women in a particular way, and it wasn’t a way that gave them command. But he was fighting it.

  He reported quickly on the gear that had been sent direct to the Philadelphia: two Mark 19s with belts of HE, APHE, and frag; their four issue M16A2s; grenades; and six Claymores, which, LaFond said apologetically, he couldn’t see much use for, but they were all he could get in the explosives line. “I thought maybe I could glom on to something on the black market here in Napoli.”

  “Belay that; we don’t have time, and I don’t want you guys in trouble with the local cops. That’s all I need, to have you guys in the brig when I’m down in the Gulf of Sidra. Anyway, we sound good to go with the stuff I have on the ship.” She told him that all she’d been able to get Touhey to sign off on was an LAW (Light Anti-tank Weapon), which would have been okay against the light tanks of the 1960s, if they should meet any at sea, but probably not much use against anything that floated. On her own, she’d moonlight-req’d two 12-gauge streetsweepers for the ship’s company and four Steyr AUGs, one in submachine-gun mode that she had marked for herself. “You guys ever fire a LAW?” she said.